For your listening (and reading) enjoyment

From new-ish podcast Reality-based fitness, an interview with Lyle McDonald. This is full of great information. Really interesting stuff. It’s probably obvious by the way I link to his site constantly, but I think Lyle McDonald is just about the best source of information on fitness and fat loss. I haven’t listened to the other episodes yet, but I did download the interview with Brad Pilon.

If you haven’t subscribed to Ask Leigh yet, then do so. She’s fun and informative and she may answer a question you’ve been wondering about. Plus, you can submit your own questions to be answered in a later episode.

The Fit Cast’s interview with Alan Aragon is one of my favorites from that particular podcast. Aragon knows his stuff, but is very accessible to just about anyone. Also, let me say that Alan Aragon’s research review is made of pure awesome and is completely worth the price. Check out the free issue.

Enjoy.

Why I don’t care about your results pt 2

I really must learn not to give any kind of timeline in terms of when I’ll likely post things. Life always interferes.

So I’m not totally happy with this entry yet. This is the third incarnation of this particular post. The first was too emo. The second, too snarky. This one manages to be neither and I’m not sure if it says exactly what I want it too. But I have other things I want to post and this has been nagging at me, so here ya go. It may get edited to clarify what the hell I’m talking about.

As I said at the end of my last post, whatever your goals and whatever your methods, if you’re approaching things in a healthy way (as in not starving yourself or training your body into the ground) and getting to where you want to be, good for you. And if everyone just went about their business and if weight, fitness and health weren’t public and common topics, then there wouldn’t be any issues.

But it’s never as simple as that, of course. Remember during the height of the low-carb craze when everyone and their mom had lost 10+ lbs in those first couple of weeks on atkins/south beach? So much weight and so fast! Amazing! I know that, despite feeling skeptical at first, I couldn’t, after so many of my friends and family had dropped all this weight so quickly, help but pick up a copy of South Beach and give it a try. Really, how many of my readers either did the same or know multiple people who did? These things pick up momentum based on the stories of the people who try them, not because everyone sits down one day, considers the evidence and thinks “Carb Intake is probably what’s actually behind obesity.”

Of course, losing lots of weight in the first couple of weeks on a low-carb diet isn’t proof that the scientific claims behind low-carb are true, it’s water loss caused by the body using up some of its glycogen stores. Not nearly as miraculous, but no one said “Oh yeah, the scale showed a big drop, but most of it’ll come back as soon as I eat some pasta and bread.”

And that’s what lies at the heart of my tendency to jump into conversations about X miracle diet and do my best Buzz Killington impression.

Allow me to puncture the bubble of your enthusiasm.

Because if people don’t understand why their diet is working, then they’re much more likely to blame themselves when/if it eventually fails. And let’s face it, the odds are pretty high that it will especially if you don’t understand the basics of weight-loss in the first place.

Why I don’t care about your results pt 1

That title may be a bit harsh.

So my new BFF has handed me a handy dandy way to illustrate a problem I see all the time in the dieting and fitness communities. Namely, the holding up of results as the refutation of any argument against a particular trainer/diet/idea. To illustrate:

Person A: You low carb people are ridiculous. There is no big metabolic advantage with low carb diets that would enable you to eat twice as much as you would on a high-carb diet and still lose weight.

Person B: HEY! I lost a bazillion pounds doing low-carb so why don’t you shut up!

Person B needs a ticket for the logic train.

Let me break this down using small words: Whether or not a particular diet/guru worked for you does not have any actual bearing on whether or not the claims that are used to back up the diet are true.

Tracy Anderson’s bullshit about hot rooms, fattening spices and teeny tiny weights have probably not a shred of evidence behind them (I say probably because someone can always find one single study that ‘proves’ their point all the while ignoring the mountain of evidence on the other side.) That doesn’t mean her plan doesn’t “work.” It just doesn’t work for any special non-spicy reason. It works, like every single other fucking diet on the planet, by creating an energy deficit that makes it so your body has to go to its stored energy to keep you going.

I know what many of you are thinking: “Attrice, if a particular way of doing things is what helps me feel better and achieve my fitness goals, then does it matter why it works?”

No, it really doesn’t. On a personal level. So why do I care so much?

I’ll explain in part two. Hopefully tomorrow.

Estimating intake: everyone’s bad at it

When it comes to the whole calories in/calories out model, by far the more ‘controversial’ half of the equation is intake. Most people I come across have no problem believing that they’re not that great at estimating how much energy they’re using in a day. At the gym, it has become holy writ that the estimates on treadmills and ellipticals is not to be trusted. People I work with cheerfully admit to having no clue to how many calories they might use doing their job.

Now most people I think have a tendency to way underestimate how much energy they use doing day-to-day stuff while overestimating calories burned during purposeful exercise or sports.

Here’s the thing though, telling someone who’s 30 years old, has an active job and goes running several times a week that there’s pretty much no way, short of a diagnosable condition, that they’re only burning 1200 calories/day* won’t get any argument.

However, telling that same person that there’s no way they’re only eating 1200 calories/day if they’re weight-stable will very quickly escalate. Am I calling them a liar? Am I saying that they don’t know what they’re eating and they’re just stuffing their face all the time? WHO THE HELL DO I THINK I AM???

People hate to think that they don’t really know how much they’re eating. It makes sense. Our society is filled to the brim with puritanical judgement about the consumption and enjoyment of food. That you even grab a mint oreo cookie on your way through the kitchen is bad enough, but that you might not realize you’re doing it five times a day is even worse.

But, no one is great at estimating their intake. One of my favorite studies on this is this one comparing the estimated intake and actual intake of dietitians and non-dietitians. Now, the conclusions of the study, which I don’t disagree with, were that dietitians were better than average people at estimating intake. However, they still underestimated by an average of 223 calories/day. And this wasn’t just a food recall survey, the participants were told that they needed to be as accurate as possible and were trained on how to do this.

Now there have been some studies suggesting fat people tend to underreport their intake by a larger margin, but other studies have found little difference:

Importantly, however, the rates of underreporting were similar between tertiles of adiposity. Most (68%), but not all, underreporters were found in the lowest tertile for reported EI. CONCLUSIONS: A low reported EI and greater BMI may help identify energy underreporters. However, whilst underreporters may more frequently be ‘bigger’ (by BMI), they are not necessarily fatter (using direct measures of body fat). As underreporting was present among all tertiles of BMI and adiposity, these results emphasise the importance of following past recommendations to identify and exclude energy underreporters in nutritional studies

Basically, yes, fat people in general underestimate their intake, but so does everyone else.

More interesting to me is why this is so. I suspect it’s a cultural phenomenon born of the fact that 1)Food is completely demonized and 2) People are fairly ignorant of what a ‘normal’ energy expenditure is with many women especially believing that they only burn 1500 calories/day.

In at least one study I found, there was a small correlation between a history of dieting and fear of “negative evaluation” and underreporting of energy intake. Again, in a culture saturated with dieting and fear of being seen as ‘fat’ (where ‘fat’ is anyone not apologizing for enjoying food, honestly) the fact that nobody wants to say “yeah, I eat 3,000 calories every day!” is not surprising.

*This is hypothetical. I do not go around arguing with people about how much they eat or how much energy they use. That would be weird.

Quick group e-hug!

Despite my claim that I didn’t want reassurances, it was still really nice to find all those lovely comments this morning. I have to leave for work in just a minute so I don’t have time for more personal replies at this minute.

After thinking about it a bit last night, I’ve decided it boils down to 1) Feeling a little blah in general and 2) complexity is hard. I do envy those blogs where the writer(s) has decided exactly what the answers are and there is no reason to look any further because it’s….carbs, fat, animal products, lazy fat people, all anti-fat b.s. etc… There’s a bit of envy for how much easier it must be to navigate these topics when you have a handy-dandy narrative set up to answer every last question. In general though, I also think those answers are full of crap.

Which is my way of saying I’ll continue trying to do the best I can to be fair and to acknowledge the complexities of all these issues even if sometimes it makes my writing sound all milquetoasty.

Meta Blah

I’m wondering why I keep writing this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very interested in the topics I blog about and I’m still losing weight and probably will be for a while.

It’s just that when I started this blog back up I did so in order to try a be a voice of moderation, reason and body-positivity in the diet world. These days I feel mostly filled with negativity. I feel like people don’t want reason, they want magic. They want ‘easy’ answers (it’s funny because a lot of the ideas people follow are much much harder than maintaining a mild deficit and staying active.) In my more cynical moments, I wonder if people just love the drama of constantly riding the dieting/fitness rollercoaster.

I just wonder what good this blog can possibly do. It has very few regular readers. My most popular post so far is the one I wrote on Tracy Anderson and most people who read it end up clicking over to her diet advice. I had hoped to be a kind of meeting place where science, self-respect and a smidge of the personal could hopefully help others who, like me, weren’t interested in self-flagellation or starvation diets.

I’m not looking for reassurance here. This is just where I am with this blog. Before I restarted this blog I started one called evidence-based weight loss that I intended to be a sort of even mix of personal weight-loss blog and straight up blogging on the science of weight loss. I decided it wasn’t what I wanted. I was too angry when I started it. I had just ‘left’ fat acceptance and the pendulum had swung in the other direction in a big way. I’m not happy with the harshness of some of the tone of the blog, but I do want more of that kind of directness.

Eh, I don’t know. I just know that if I’m going to have an unpopular blog, I at least want to write posts that interest me.

Enough navel-gazing, I’m off to dinner (Mexican. Yum!)

N.E.A.T-O

My bodybugg is enjoying a new home for the next week or so. I do think it could be a really useful long-term tool for fat loss especially as people drop weight and their metabolism changes, but I also think taking regular breaks is a good idea. It’s kind of like calorie counting: Very useful, but not something I want to pay attention to all the time.

The biggest change in my behavior due to the bugg has been a new-found respect for N.E.A.T. Now for those who couldn’t be bothered to click the link I gave in my last bodybugg post, NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis and is basically any activity you do that isn’t specifically exercise/sports.

So, a quick introduction to metabolism. It’s composed basically of 3 parts: BMR (basal metabolic rate) is how much energy your body uses just keeping you alive. For someone who is mostly sedentary, this is going to be by far the biggest chunk in terms of energy usage. (To give you some idea, on a day when I’m basically sedentary, I’ll burn around 2200 – my bmr is around 1800 calories/day – therefore BMR accounts for about 82% of the energy I use. On a day when I work a seven hour shift and go to the gym, I can burn up to 4800 calories – in this instance BMR accounts for around 38% of the energy I use.)

The second part is the Thermal Effect of Food (TEF) which is the energy you use consuming, digesting, storing and absorbing nutrients. This takes a fair amount of energy and can account for 10% or more of the total energy you use in a day.

The third part is sometimes called the Thermic Effect of Physical Activity (TEPA) or just activity thermogenesis. This is any activity you engage in from getting up to turn a light off or running a marathon. As you can imagine, its impact varies greatly from person to person.

If you want to put into a handy equation: BMR + TEF + TEPA = TEE (Total Energy Expenditure)

So when we look at the components of metabolism, we can see that we have pretty much no effect on the first two (yeah, yeah, metabolic advantage, protein…blah blah blah..bullshit.) Physical activity then is the place where we have the most control in terms of increasing our TEE.

For many people, this would be a good incentive to really crank up the exercise. The only problem is that unless someone is training like a professional athlete would, they’re not really burning all that many calories relative to what they’re burning and consuming each day. This is where NEAT comes in.

You can read all about it here, here and here, but the summary is they’ve found that some people are genetically inclined to move more than others. And by move, I mean fidget, get up, change positions while seated etc… not that they’re naturally inclined to run 4 miles everyday. Over the course of a day, these little movements add up considerably. This is why you will sometimes find advice telling people to learn how to fidget more. This advice is, imnsho, stupid and a bit like telling a person to try and develop a tic on purpose. I have to think about fidgeting to fidget. As soon as I forget, the movement stops. But if little movements like that can add up, so can little movements we do consciously.

Because NEAT isn’t just about those movements which seem to be under biological control, it’s also lots of other activities that alone don’t look like much work, but add up to quite a bit. Cooking, cleaning, getting up from your desk to deliver a message etc… basically all those annoying pieces of advice (just take the stairs!) that we’ve been hearing from health advocates for a while now.

I was, to be honest, more than a bit skeptical about the power of NEAT. Going up a single flight of stairs was the difference between my state of morbid fatitude and immortal thinness?

Well, no. Going up a single flight of stairs isn’t going to do much of anything at all in terms of TEE, but taking the stairs instead of the elevator, cooking a nice meal, doing some light cleaning, playing some Wii tennis and chasing dogs/kids around the yard actually do add up. Despite being a little bit skeptical, for the time I’ve been trying to lose weight, I’ve also tried to look at places in my life where I could move more. But not where it would be forced and or just become a chore – like “oh god, gotta keep my neat up, time to pace.” And I can tell you, my house and car are cleaner than they’ve ever been. I’ve become a regular at the library where I love to wander around reading “Science” and listening to my headphones and I’m pretty much ready to turn pro at Wii sports. These are all good things, but I didn’t know if they really made any big difference in how much energy I was using.

To use myself as an example again, being totally sedentary, I’ll burn about 2200 calories/day. On a day when I cooked breakfast, did some laundry and light cleaning, went clothes shopping, washed and vacuumed my car, played wii sports with my lil sis, threw a ball to the dogs for a while, and then went grocery shopping (with lots of watching tv and reading in my bed thrown in during the day) I burned 3400 calories. That’s a big difference and I never felt like I was exercising at all.

The take home lesson for me is that while I’ll never learn to be a fidgeter, I can continue to change my lifestyle in ways that encourages more little movements throughout the day and that can add up to a lot more than what I generally do at the gym. You know what I think that is?

Yup, it’s neat. :p

A note: The researcher behind N.E.A.T, James A. Levine, has a book out about using the principle of little movements to lose weight. I have not read the book, but I must admit to always being skeptical about people who believe their pet research is THE ANSWER that everyone didn’t know they were looking for. Personally, I’m all for learning from all kinds of ideas and using what works for me.

Dear PETA:

Fuck you.

no love,

attrice

What I have learned from my bodybugg.

(The Short Version)

I am not special. I do not have some kind of insanely slow metabolism. Nor do I have a very fast one. In fact, I fit right where the average of several of the equations for metabolic rate put me.

Cardio always beats strength training in terms of calories burned. Yes, even when I’m doing alternating sets with minimal (under 40 seconds) rest time between exercises. I knew this intellectually, but I kept thinking that weight training was hard and so I must be pushing it to the MAXXXXX!!! Alas, I’m pushing it to the moderate.

On days when I’m not working, N.E.A.T. can make as much as a thousand calorie difference in terms of what I’m burning in a day. (Not that it doesn’t also add to my total expenditure on days that I work, only that I burn so much at work that it doesn’t matter either way.)*

I use as much energy sleeping as I do sitting here at the computer. No wonder I put on weight when I had a desk job.

Hunger levels are all over the place and often don’t correlate strongly to my energy balance. IOW, I’m just as likely to feel very hungry at any particular moment whether I’m in a deficit of 50 calories or 1,000. I’m hoping this has to do with funky leptin levels that happen during weight loss. Cuz it makes me worried that my hunger’s broken.

*Although my job itself is just a lot of N.E.A.T. stuff. I work constantly, but it’s not physically hard stuff.

Bodybugg!

Note: Eat more.

This toy rules! My next day off (Sunday) should be interesting. I bet the amount of energy I use drops quite a bit. The most interesting things so far are looking at what I’m doing during sleep and how much I’m actually burning during exercise. I’m definitely going to start bringing some kind of easy snack to work.

I’m trying to figure out a way to grab that graph at the bottom and blow it up a bit so y’all can see it. Basically what you have today is me getting up around 5:30am, working from 7am – 1pm and then going to the gym for about 30 minutes. The rest of the day is going to be a lot less busy for me that’s for damn sure.