If you believe that weight loss is dependent solely on your caloric balance, then you would have lauded the latest study by George Bray, et. al., fresh off the presses at JAMA – get it while you can!: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/307/1/47.full (PDF here)

Most mainstream media outlets are taking this study as confirmation of the “calories in/calories out” theory – that weight gain/loss is totally dependent on the difference between the calories you eat and the calories you expend each day – and it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t.  Let’s take a quick look at the parameters of the study:

• 25 people were overfed for 8 weeks to the tune of roughly 40% over their baseline consumption.  Meaning, they ate an extra 954 calories each day.
• There were 3 groups: A 6% (low) protein group; a 15% (normal) protein group; and a 25% (high) protein group.
• All groups gained different amounts of weight, but similar amounts of body fat (about 7.7lbs in each group).

Seems pretty cut and dried – despite the amount of protein the groups ate, they ended up gaining the same amount of weight.  Let’s pack up for home, right?  Wrong. Let’s take a closer look at the data.

One necessary aside: The subjects were overfed for 8 weeks in a metabolic ward (Warning: PDF), which is about as a controlled, lab-rat environment that you can put people participating in a nutrition study in.  For those of you unaware of what metabolic ward testing entails, it’s like sleep-a-way camp: There are organized times for data collection and feeding; all you can eat is what the research facility provides; and you get to enjoy all the fun of being cooped up in a “controlled environment“.  What this implies is that we can assume the data in this study is legit.  No misreporting, no sneaking in a Snickers bar after lights out, no bad food surveys or faulty recall (”What did I have for breakfast yesterday?”) – all their food was measured and prepared in the metabolic unit kitchen.

I’ll save you a whole lot of reading and reprint the Table from the study:

As reported, all three groups had nearly the same amount of gain in Fat Mass (3.66kg, 3.45kg, and 3.44kg) at the end of the study.  But look at the differences between groups.  The low-protein group lost Lean Mass (read: muscle) and correspondingly impaired their metabolisms, but not by much (see Resting Energy Expenditure, -86.1 kJ/day, which is about 21 calories, if you’re keeping score) whereas the normal and high-protein groups both raised their lean body mass (2.87kg and 3.16kg; 6.3lbs and 7lbs respectively).   So even though all groups were consistently overfed by about 1000 calories a day, very different outcomes resulted (and personally I wouldn’t be too happy if I were in the low-protein arm.  Gaining fat, losing muscle, and lowering my metabolism are not high priorities on my health watch-list).  Since all groups were overeating by the same amount (roughly 954 calories), then according to the calories in/calories out model, shouldn’t they have gained the same amount of weight?  If all the surplus calories they ate went to fat storage, then where the heck did all that new muscle come from in the normal and high protein groups?

But wait, there’s more!  Check out line item Non-Resting Energy Expenditure.  The normal protein nearly doubled their expenditure from a baseline level of 1979 kJ/day (that’s 473 cal/day) to 3275 kJ/day (1979+1296; that’s 782 cal/day).  The high protein group also increased their expenditure, by 181 cal/day.  The low protein group decided it would be better to kick back a little, raising expenditure by a paltry 59 cal/day (maybe they were tired from the loss of muscle).  Now, one wonders what could possibly account for such wild variance.  Well, the table has an answer for you: Physical Activity.  Although the lead researcher has stated that there was no formalized exercise during the 10-12 week trial, it’s well established that energy expenditure can increase significantly through NEAT (warning: PDF). If the calories in/calories out model held true, wouldn’t the normal and high protein groups have gained less fat than the low protein group, since all 3 groups were eating roughly the same amount of calories, but were burning significantly different amounts of calories?

Is there any way to reconcile the fact that all of the groups gained roughly the same amount of fat? Aside from calories, was there anything else held constant in all three groups?  Quoted from the study:

Absolute carbohydrate intake was kept constant throughout the study.

All groups consumed 41% of their calories from carbs – that’s about about 250 grams of carbs per day.  And they were exactly the kinds of carbs you’d expect; foods that drive up insulin and promote fat storage:

The eating plans that Bray and his colleagues used included food you’d find in the typical American diet: eggs, bacon, biscuits or cereal for breakfast, for instance; tuna salad, turkey sandwiches and chips for lunch; pasta, rice, pork chops or casserole for dinner, accompanied by salads and fruit; and plenty of baked goods, candy and other processed sweets for snacks and dessert.

So, mystery solved: You could posit that the reason the three groups all gained the same amount of fat is that they were all eating enough carbohydrate to cause high levels of insulin, which would promote fat storage, particularly if you were, say, eating an extra thousand calories a day (which all three groups were).  This would neatly explain why the higher protein groups gained muscle while the low protein group lost muscle (and slowed down their metabolisms in the process) and would explain the thorny issue of different energy expenditure (and consequently, different caloric balances) between the three groups.

So we arrive at three conclusions based on Bray’s research:

1) Low intake of protein while overeating seems to have compound negative effects.  It slows metabolism and results in loss of lean tissue.  So despite what your latest cleanse guru told you, there is a minimum amount of protein intake necessary to “run the ship”, and that minimum is probably higher than the official government recommendations.

2) It’s unlikely that caloric balance was responsible for the similar fat gain between the low, normal, and high protein groups, since the three groups exhibited big differences in expenditure.  In other words, the math doesn’t work out.  What’s more likely is that similarities in the diet composition (the carb intake, in other words) caused the fat gains to be equal across the groups.

and

3) Always check the data.  It’ll tell you what the real story is.

It’s probably old news to you by now, but Time Magazine recently ran an article that ruffled the feathers of most of my fitness industry brethren.

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.

Of course, with a title like that, it’s understandable why fitness folks would be up in arms.  It’s akin to saying, “Why Bankers Steal Your Money” or some similar pejorative.  That there was a huge backlash from the fitness community is unsurprising.  What I find unexpected, however, is the willful ignorance of those so-called fitness “professionals.”  From ad homenim to straw man arguments to overwhelming stupidity, the reaction to Mr. Cloud’s article is flat out embarrassing.  And yet, I’ve read some rebuttals that are sensible and well-presented (wrong, but sensible and well-written nonetheless).

I even had one of my colleagues say, “Thanks, TIME Magazine, for making the job of the fitness professional even more difficult.”  Give me a break.

Look, the honest truth is Cloud is a terrible journalist who makes amateurish mistakes (turning fat into muscle?) and weak arguments, but that doesn’t make his central theme – that exercise does next to nothing for fat loss if you don’t modify your eating – wrong.

By avoiding discussion of this central theme, most fitness professionals are making themselves look shady and evasive.  After all, if exercise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for weight loss, then why tell clients to jump on a treadmill for 30 minutes “to burn fat”?  If exercising for fat loss doesn’t work, and your livelihood is dependent on prescribing exercise for just that purpose, what does that make you look like?

Here is the brutal reality: Exercise for fat loss without dietary modification is an exercise in futility.  Working out feverishly, only to end up losing no weight is so cliche, it’s part of our cultural consciousness.

Americans are fatter than ever, despite exercising more than ever.  WHY?  If you make your living telling people to hop on a treadmill every day or teaching jumps in a Spinning class, I think you have an obligation to answer.

Often I’m asked why I disagree that fat loss is “merely a game of calories in vs. calories out” and maintain that it’s a function of hormonal tone.  Gary Taubes makes an interesting analogy:

If you owned a restaurant and hired me as a consultant to help you figure out why business is down, and I came back and told you, “Oh, it’s because you have fewer people going into your restaurant than going out of your restaurant”, you’d probably slug me.  Of course you’ve got fewer people going in than coming out; that’s not the point.  The question you need to look at is:  Why?

Why indeed.  What’s implied by the statement “you’re fat because you eat too many calories” is that it’s all your fault, you dreadful pig.  There are starving children in rural China; how dare you.  I would argue that they are compelled to eat by virtue of what they eat.

Now this isn’t to absolve the overweight of personal responsibility.  ‘Tis true, no one held a gun to your head and forced you to eat all the wrong things.  But what it does do is to help you identify what those wrong things are, so you can stop eating them.

When you raise insulin levels (particularly easy to do if you overconsume refined carbohydrates), you do two things:

1.  You shift your cells from energy utilization to energy storage.  In other words, you turn on the ‘fat storage’ switch.

2.  You increase hunger.  There’s a reason “Betcha can’t eat just one” is the slogan for Lay’s Potato Chips and not Land O’ Lakes Butter.

Here’s an intellectual exercise:

Get together 8000 Calories’ worth of sweet potatoes, avocados, chicken, eggs, and leafy greens. Put it in a big pile in front of you, set a timer to 24 hours, and make that pile disappear before the timer goes off.  Good luck.

Now, put 8000 Calories’ worth of soda, pasta, pizza, and chips in front of you.  Set timer to 24 hours.  Go to town.  Again, best of luck.

I don’t think you’ll disagree with me that completing the task in scenario two (carbs) is far, far, far, far more feasible than completing scenario one.  But you don’t need to take it from me.  Just ask Michael Phelps how he managed to keep his dietary intake at 8000-10000 Calories/day while training for the Beijing Olympics:

I’m eating a lot of pasta and pizza. I’m eating a lot of carbs.

To repeat:  Eating carbs makes you store fat.  And it makes you hungry.

</end rant>

No, I’m not referring to April Fool’s (although it is April Fool’s Day).  April 1st is generally the unofficial first “Sleeves Day” – the first day warm enough to wear short-sleeved tops (although it’s 47 degrees and threatening to rain here in NYC).

Are you ready?  If not, why not?

Perhaps you haven’t been as diligent with your exercise as you should have been.  That’s ok – just get started now.  One neat-o way is to focus on one exercise (make it a great one, like the squat, row, press, etc.) and do just that one exercise every day.  At least for the next 30 days.

Does this run counter to the laws of sufficient recovery?  Yes – and no.  If you’re not currently exercising, your work capacity is low.  Consequently, you won’t be able to tire yourself as effectively as someone who is fitter than you.  So your body will recover faster than the oft-quoted 48-hour window of muscle recovery.  And at this stage of the game, it’s more important to instill the habit of exercising than to make sure your routine is perfect.  Besides, use this opportunity to perfect your technique on your chosen exercise.

Don’t do this with crunches, please.

Maybe proper nutrition has eluded you.  So here’s your 30-day homework:

Take the first 5 days to document your eating.  In other words, keep a food journal.

Day 6 – Go through your journal and identify the 5 biggest offenders (the foods/foodstuffs you know you shouldn’t be eating).  Over the course of the next 24 days, eliminate these 5 foods from your diet completely.  If one of these 3 foods is not on your list, add them: Grains (of all kinds), flour and flour products, calorie-containing beverages (except your post-workout shake, if you use them).

It (apocryphally, likely) takes 21 days to instill a habit.  Let’s overshoot and do it for 30 days.  And, just so you know, “Beach Day” just happens to be 30 days away.

…when you change up your program.  There’s a simple reason for this:  The most common reason for changing a routine is lack of results.

As an example, say you stop losing fat on a weight loss program, and you change your feeding schedule, your diet composition, your workout frequency, and your training partner.  Assume fat loss resumes.  What caused the change?  Was it because you eat less when you eat 6 meals a day vs. 3 meals?  Was your previous training partner letting you slack off during your leg workouts?  Is the extra (albeit minor) caloric expenditure the thing that tipped the scales in favor of weight loss?

When you change everything, you can’t identify what specifically caused the change (this is the problem with most studies, by the way).  And if you can’t identify what specifically caused the change, you’ll just be guessing when you’re faced with that problem again.

Change just one variable, on the other hand,  and you’ll know whether it works or not.  You can systematically eliminate factors that make no noticeable difference, freeing you up to concentrate on those things that give you the biggest bang for your buck.  And while the process might require a little more time (if you guess wrong the first time), it’s valuable in the long-term, since you won’t have to guess every single time.

There’s one exception to this rule, of course.  Change everything when you’re burned out and you’re ready to give up on exercise forever.

(Thanks to Ankur for sharing this interesting Jedi Mind Trick with me).

Take 2 sheets of paper.  Label the first thusly:

My Top 5 Fitness Goals (July 2009)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Proceed to fill in the blanks.  Don’t worry if you don’t have 5; it’s okay to leave some blank.  What’s important is that you think about what you want to achieve, and that you write it down with as much detail as possible.

(Example: My Top 5 Fitness Goals July 2009

1. Lift something 1.15 times my own bodyweight over my head.

2. Improve work output in 6 minute Jiujitsu matches by 25%.

3. Close that darned #2 – and grind it, for teasing me all these years:(

4.

5.)

Repeat the process with the second sheet, labeling it:

My Top 5 Fitness Goals (December 2009)

and filling in the corresponding answers.  Remember, you’ve got another 6 months here, so goal-set accordingly.

Here’s the voodoo part:  Put them each in an envelope, labeled with their due dates (July 2009 and December 2009, respectively).  Then put them somewhere prominent, so that they’re visible, but don’t look at the goal sheets themselves.

So the exercise goes, your unconscious goes to work helping you to achieve your goals (even if you don’t consciously remember them) – conscious implantation of unconscious motivation, as it were.

(Am I skeptical?  Of the concept – very.  But could it be helpful?  Yes.  There is research to show the efficacy of goal-setting in helping you achieve your goals and any exercise in goal-setting acts as an opportunity to sit down with yourself, quiet the noise, and uncover what you really want.  And it is this thinking about what you really want that acts as the catalyst for other thought to occur – “Now, how would I go about doing that?  How many times a week would I need to do that for?” – and so on.)

Open the envelopes when they become due (i.e., open the July 2009 envelope on July 1st).  And (huzzah!) behold!

(Incidentally, if you just can’t bring yourself to get started with an exercise program, this is the most pain-free way I know how).

1. Eat Food, not “foodstuffs” (food rots, foodstuffs don’t).

2. Clarification of #1: Food = meat, leaves, berries (low-sugar fruit), nuts, and seeds.  Food ≠ grains, starches, and (concentrated forms of) sugar, except – sparingly – honey, and the aforementioned fruit.

3. If you don’t want to eat it (or aren’t supposed to eat it), don’t keep it in your house.  If it’s already in your house, get rid of it.

4. Drink water.

5. Lift something heavy every once in a while, but regularly.

Got it?  Good – now go do it.

Your body is not 100% efficient.  At doing anything.

This implies:

Not all of the energy you apply to an exercise will be used in moving the weights.  This is why technique is so critical.

Not all the weight you lose on a fat-burning program is fat.  This is why you should lift heavy things while eating for fat loss (so that your body jettisons as little muscle as possible).

(You could alternatively call this post, “How NOT to do a low carb diet.” I’d like to thank Dr. Barry Groves for introducing me to these concepts and Gary Taubes for the keys that finally unlocked my dormant intellect.)

There are tons of misconceptions out there about controlled-carbohydrate diets, most of them fueled by the Atkins controversy of the late 90s (and its dramatic juxtaposition with what most medical authorities propose as healthful). Of the myriad things misunderstood about low-carb, what I’m going to focus today is the following concept:

By definition, a low-carb diet is a high fat diet.

For regular readers of this blog, you know this is ok (even – gasp – healthy). Fat is not your enemy, and eating fat won’t make you fat (more on this later).

Continuing our discussion, if the above is true, then:

By definition, a low-fat diet is a high carb diet.

Ok, now the actual discussion:

First, who cares? Why does it matter that you understand low-carb means high fat?

A: Because most people who you tell to eat low-carb will say, “But that leaves me nothing to eat!” When pressed, they’ll respond with something like, “I can’t live on cottage cheese, tuna, chicken breast, and salad.”

To paraphrase Clara Peller, “Where’s the fat?”

Most people have been brainwashed to think that fat is bad, so they will almost automatically omit foods high in fat from their consciousness. That means no butter, no (or minimal) eggs, no beef or dark meat chicken, minimal seafood (too high in cholesterol, ya’ know!), etc.

This is all wrong. No wonder people have a tough time staying on low carb diets for the long run.

Here’s why you MUST eat a higher proportion of calories from fat if you’re on a low-carb diet:

1. There is a natural ceiling to pure protein consumption. If you tried to eat all of your calories purely from protein, before too long you’d die. Why? Protein is a more complex molecule than carbohydrates or fat and has an amine group that must be dealt with. Normally, this isn’t a problem (your body gets rid of it as urea/urine), but if you eat nothing but protein, your liver can’t convert all the protein into glucose for energy fast enough, so your cells get insufficient nourishment (which gets worse over time). To add insult to injury, you also accumulate ammonia in your cells (since you the only way you have to excrete this ammonia is through urination, which also has its limits). To paraphrase Dr. Weston Price, “a nasty, brutish death.”

So there’s a physiological limit to the amount of protein you can eat.

Note to bodybuilders and fitness buffs who are saying, “That’s not true – all I eat is protein and I’m fine.” – You can eat high amounts of protein and be perfectly healthy, but you can’t eat only protein and get sufficient calories to operate your body. Incidentally, does your diet look like this? FYI, milk, oats, oil, rice cakes, pasta, rice, and vegetables = not protein.

Let me illustrate this in numbers so you understand the full picture.

Let’s take your average athlete, say a 165 lb MMA fighter. Let’s assume he’s a bright fellow and reads Dr. Jeff Volek’s research to find his protein requirements are roughly 1 gram per pound of bodyweight. Let’s also assume he’s like most athletes and overdoes it. By 100%.

165 lbs x 2 = 330 grams of protein.

Very impressive. That’s like 3 of these.

330 grams of protein supply roughly 1320 calories, which is insufficient calories for our athletic friend’s endeavors. For him to meet his daily energy requirements, he’d have to consume closer to 3100 calories (I used the Harris-Benedict equation), which is more like 775 grams of protein.

Or the equivalent of 20 of these. Each and every day.

Likely? Not really, unless your name is Flipper.

2. You must get your energy from somewhere. So if there’s a limit to the total percentage of calories you can get from protein, where does the rest of your energy come from (since you need to supply a certain amount of calories just to run all of your body’s daily functions)? Well, there’s only two choices left – fat or carbohydrate.

On a low carb diet, you restrict carbohydrates. So, logically, the majority of your calories must come from fat.

On a low fat diet, you restrict fat. So, logically, the majority of your calories must come from carbohydrates.

Hormonally, it doesn’t make sense to consume carbohydrates if you’re looking to optimize fat loss. High levels of carbohydrate result in high insulin levels, and high insulin levels equate to fat storage.

So fat it is. And a typical low carb regimen reflects this.

Joanne asks, “But what about fruit and vegetables? Aren’t they carbohydrates too?”

A: Technically yes, but we treat them differently because they are non-starchy carbohydrates. Per unit of food, the carbohydrate content is relatively low, particularly leafy greens and berries. So they’re ok.

Of course, it’s obvious why a combination low-carb, low-fat diet doesn’t work in the long run. You simply can’t eat 2000 calories worth of zucchini.

So, to summarize:

Many of your daily calories will come from fat when on a low carb diet. This is just how it should be; you won’t get fat, you won’t keel over from a coronary event, and you won’t suddenly wither as a result of grain deprivation.

A common question from new clients:

“Which do you think is better: The low-sugar soft drink or the organic kind that’s made with cane syrup instead of high-fructose corn syrup?”

The point that’s unfortunately lost on them – “better” in this case is misleading. It’s still soda.

Truth is, it doesn’t matter if your cookie is milled from the finest, most sustainable whole grains from Tibet, or if it contains the highest quality cacao nibs from the deepest reaches of the Amazon. It’s still a cookie. It still gets broken down into glucose. That glucose still has to be dealt with (pulled out of your bloodstream). And your body still only has one mechanism to do it with: Dump insulin into the bloodstream to shuttle all that glucose to its final destination (either as fuel for your cells or as fat in your fat cells – typically the latter, if insulin levels are high).

I happen to think it’s wonderful that you’re taking steps to make your health better and to achieve the body you want. Here’s the thing – it takes just as much energy and motivation to go from drinking regular soda to organic soda as it does to forgo soda completely.

Stop doing what’s better and start doing what’s best.