Eating less of anything causes weight loss

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A study published in the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of Nutrition (1) compared 4 weight loss diets for the affects on fat and muscle.

The diets:

• 25% and 15% protein
• 40% and 20% fat
• Combined with 4 different carbohydrate amounts (35% to 65%)

The total calories of each diet were identical.  Does it matter what you eat to lose fat?  Or do you simply need to eat less?

At six months study subjects had lost an average of 4.2 kg (9.3 lbs.) of fat and 2.1 kg (4.6 lbs.) of lean muscle mass.  Using DEXA, a special kind of X-Ray, researchers wanted to see if the diets had an influence on where fat mass was lost; subcutaneous (under the skin), or visceral fat (fat in and around internal organs).

There was no difference between diets for where fat loss occurred although woman in this study lost slightly more visceral fat than men.

At 2 years participants had regained 40% of their initial weight loss, which was equal amongst the four diets.  The regain of weight was through the study subjects not staying within the total calories prescribed and gradually returning to overeating.

Conclusions?

No matter what you eat less of, if you have a caloric deficit you will lose weight.  No matter what you eat more of, if you eat more calories than you burn off, you will gain fat. Fat loss and gain is solely determined by calories in - calories out.  Doesn't matter if you're a meat eater, vegetarian, vegan, or breathairian; if you overeat you gain fat, if you have a caloric deficit, you'll lose fat.

In case you're really curious, "breatharians" believe that food and water are not needed to stay alive, and as the quaint same suggests, you can get everything you want at Alice's Restaurant so long as you order air, with a side order of light. Reports of breatharians dying from starvation are not exaggerated.

Humanity is capable of believing some questionable ideas, like breatharianism, and that something other than overeating causes body fat gain, or that a special combination of foods is required to lose weight.

However studies like this one have shown for decades that the singular cause of fat gain is eating too much, and the singular cause of fat loss is eating less.

Other studies (2,3,4) have shown that loss of lean muscle can be reduced or halted by including strength training and/ or cardio training while reducing calories to lose weight.

Another study demonstrated that long term success was better for fat loss when moderate reductions in calories were combined with regular exercise compared to a large decrease in calories without exercise (6).

What about hormonal changes and metabolism?  Aren't these the real culprits behind overeating?  Haven't you written about hormones and appetite before?

Yes, go here Live Healthy: Fat Loss Pill With Leptin- A New Reality?

And here  Live Healthy: Anyone Can Lose Fat

Or use the "search this blog" bar at the top of this page type in "weight loss"

Hormones, implicated for sure, but the sole cause of weight gain, even without overeating?  It can't be. Only overeating causes weight gain.  We have to introduce the extra calories to the body to be stored as fat.  No extra calories means nothing extra to store. The disconnect is that while it is definitely true that changes in hormones that regulate hunger cause us to feel hungry when we're not actually hungry, many have been lead to believe that the hormonal changes alone cause weight gain. Under these conditions of increased ghrelin and leptin most people don't contemplate what they are eating or why, they simply follow their hunger stimulus and.. eat more food, but rationalize that they are not overeating and that it must be their hormones or metabolism causing weight gain.

So whatever our motivation to eat more may be; habitual, hormonal changes, addiction, in the end these variables influence us to choose to eat more.  So yes, simply eating less without addressing the underlying motivation or physiological variables that drive us to overeat is asking for the standard failure in weight loss.

The two most important steps in losing weight are the combination of eating less and exercising more, along with making the emotional and psychological changes necessary to change how we perceive reward from eating and exercise.

BTW.. my whimsical line at the begging of this article, "look and feel better in a matter of hours".. is true, I just didn't say how many hours..  Turns out to be, according to research, at least 90 minutes each week of moderate to vigorous exercise. Get started with working up to 10,000 to 12,000 steps per day (buy a pedometer or download a pedometer app to your smartphone).

Eat less, exercise more; get healthy and feel great.  It's all about feeling good.


1) Effects of 4 weight-loss diets differing in fat, protein, and carbohydrate on fat mass, lean mass, visceral adipose tissue, and hepatic fat: results from the POUNDS LOST trial

2) Moderate exercise attenuates t... [J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2009] - PubMed - NCBI

3) A systematic review of the separate and combined ef... [Nutr Rev. 2010] - PubMed - NCBI

4) Changes in fat-free mass during significan... [Int J Obes (Lond). 2007] - PubMed - NCBI

6) Effect of dietary adherence with or ... [J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2009] - PubMed - NCBI

Save yourself, quit smoking

It's national quit smoking week again.

I smoked most of the major brands, filtered and non-filtered.  Tried menthol, didn't really like those but I'd smoke one if I was desperate enough. Did the roll your own thing.  I could roll a smoke with one hand. I also had one of those mini automatic cigarette makers where you load a blank tube into one side and the soft, sweet smelling luxurious tobacco into the other. In a satisfying shick shick mechanical motion, not unlike cocking a gun, I would make myself my very own dart of death, and cheap too.

I had a pipe for a while.  A pipe is the ultimate portrayal of the educated smoker who has advanced their carbon monoxide connoisseurship beyond that of the pedestrian inhaler.  

Quitting smoking was one of the best things I've ever done, but it wasn't without challenge.

Rather than re-write my quit smoking experience, here are links to two posts where I relate what I went through..

Non-smoking week 

No safe level of cigarette smoke

Fake data behind red wine benefit claims, experts allege | CTV News

Fake data behind red wine benefit claims, experts allege | CTV News

The old red wine argument.. I've never found good quality research that demonstrated any truly significant advantage to consuming red wine for any health purpose that was more effective than the standard of eating healthy, exercising regularly, keeping weight down, and consistently getting good sleep.

You think you read about research that proves cardiovascular benefits of red wine consumption? Maybe not.. Dipak Das, a researcher known for his work demonstrating heart health benefits from red wine has been exposed as a faker, falsifying data more than 100 times.

I did a simple pubmed search using "das red wine" as the search criteria and found 39 studies where this Das was an author or was cited.  Searching for abstracts that included this authors name alone results in 619 studies.  Disheartening that many of these studies were spoiled by falsified data regarding red wine and resveratrol, an important antioxidant found in dark coloured grapes, cranberries, cranberry juice, purple grape juice, and red wine, with the highest concentrations in red grapes, cranberries, and the juice of these.

I won't throw the baby out with the bathwater, there is ongoing research done by other researchers finding possible benefits of resveratrol.

Much to the chagrin of many, I have steadfastly maintained that there isn't really any good health related reason to drink red wine. You want a glass of red wine? It won't hurt, but more than 1.5 or 2 glasses per day may be harmful (woman, men). For sure overconsumption of booze is undeniably harmful in many ways physically and psychologically.

What I really believe is that many will use the "it's healthy" excuse to justify daily wine drinking. Get over it, because it isn't.

We'll have to wait and see if someone does discover some truly significant health benefit from wine drinking. For now, wine can't compete with a healthy diet, exercise, keeping weight down, and getting a good nights sleep.

The experts say that if you don't drink now, don't start, as the possible health benefits are not great enough to justify starting to drink.

There is no harm in infrequent light drinking so don't worry about that.