Sarah Lindsay and The Foundry working with Men’s Health Magazine

January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We kicked off kicking off 2012 with a request for one of our trainers to work with ectomorph, Men’s Health UK journalist Ed Reeves for the next 12 weeks.

The Foundry Personal Training

 

Edward Reeves as of 9 Jan ’12

(Measurements were not taken by The Foundry)

Height 6ft 4in
Weight 79kg
Body fat 22.5%
Chest 38.5in (surprised, thought I was 36)
Waist 37 (and 39 around my belly button – ouch)
Upper arm 13in
Thigh 22in
Calf 16in

Working with skinny guys with poor lifestyles is an area we’ve had considerable success over the last few years (hence why Men’s Health came calling). You can see some of our previous results: here, here and here

sarah lindsay personal trainerAfter a bit of head scratching we decided there could be no one better for Ed’s gentle introduction to the world of strength training and body composition than 3 x Olympian Sarah Lindsay.

You can see Ed’s first 4 blog article charting his progression here:

  1. Ed introducing himself and the ‘mission’ ahead http://www.menshealth.co.uk/building-muscle/get-big/taller-skinny-mans-guide-to-bulking
  2. Ed gets his measurments and ‘before’ picture taken http://www.menshealth.co.uk/fitness/challenges/taller-skinny-mans-guide-to-bulking-2
  3. Ed reveals his meaty nutritional mission: http://www.menshealth.co.uk/fitness/challenges/the-taller-skinny-mans-bulking-blog-3
  4. Ed runs through his pills and potions: http://www.menshealth.co.uk/fitness/challenges/the-taller-skinny-mans-bulking-blog-4

We’ll obviously keep you up to date on his progress.

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Evelyn Stevenson: ‘My Day on a Plate’ in The Telegraph

January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My Day on a Plate: Evelyn Stevenson

Foundry Personal Trainer Evelyn Stevenson, the current British powerlifting and English weightlifting champion in her class, reveals her daily diet in The Telegraph:

Evelyn Stevenson Personal Trainer

Foundry Personal Trainer Evelyn Stevenson

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/dietandfitness/8960987/My-Day-on-a-Plate-Evelyn-Stevenson.html

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Guest article: Why nutrition is like religion by Zack Cahill

November 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s blog article is from Zack Cahill, Director of Aegis Training Aegis Training, whose passion for the health and fitness industry and the standards to which it should hold itself are extremely high.

Looking specifically at nutrition and supplementation, he discusses the unregulated nature of these industries and why this systematically undermines the science used to underpin the advice provided by health and fitness professionals to the general public.

 

nutrition and religion

Holy Guacamole...or toast

There will be a slew of “don’t get fat at Christmas” articles doing the rounds and I suppose if I wanted to stay topical and get some google hits I should come up with one too. But to be honest I don’t find it very interesting. If you’ve worked hard on your training and nutrition this year, eat whatever the hell you want and then get back on track when it’s done.

That wouldn’t make a very good article though , so maybe I’ll try and come up with something half decent for next week. In the mean time though, I’ve opted to massively offend large sections of both my profession and the population at large.

Here goes…I believe that “nutritionism” has more in common with religion than it does with science, and I don’t believe that this is a good thing. I don’t feel that this engenders reasoned and rational debate and if you give me five minutes I’ll explain why, then if you still disagree you can come to Shoreditch and burn me at the stake.

“Nutritionism” here refers to the largely unregulated industry that has developed around telling us what to eat in order to lose weight, allegedly rid yourself of diseases including cancer , and achieve everything in between.

I believe there are many well meaning people in this industry who do good work and provide value, I also believe there are some dangerous charlatans. Obviously part of my job involves advising clients on nutrition (though I believe in keeping things as simple as possible and focus more on changing behaviours than arguing about how much selenium something contains or trying to diagnose endocrine dysfunctions with a callipers ). My goal is not to malign any one person but to point out some flawed thinking that seems to be very common in the nutrition world and maybe get a few people thinking.

I’m also not trying to upset religious people or argue them out of their position. I just believe there are some interesting parallels between the religious mindset and that of devotees to particular nutritional practices.
1- Reliance On Faith Over Evidence- Religious claims can not be scientifically proven,which is inconvenient if your goal is to convince the world of your point of view. So, if the evidence won’t work for you, one method is to attack the need for evidence itself. Religion does this by using faith as an integral part of religious practice. The act of believing really hard in something in the face of a total lack of evidence is in itself seen as virtuous.

Many nutrition gurus employs the same tricks. Like religious ideas, many of their very specific claims have never been proven scientifically. Instead there is a reliance on testimonials over data, “well all I know is it works for me and my clients” is a common refrain. Highly emotive and personal stories of “triumph” over illness or obesity are highly persuasive, we are wired to respond to them far more than dry statistics. But they are no basis to make an informed decision wether an intervention works or not.

There is also a trend toward portraying science and statistics as incapable of testing certain alternative approaches, and to claim that “anything can be proven”. Evidence that contradicts your claims is dismissed as propaganda from evil pharmaceutical companies. Its not that these companies never use dirty tricks, but this phrase is usually used to shut down debate rather than engage in it, and comes from a position of intellectual laziness.

In the fundamentalist Christian worldview, evolution is portrayed as “merely a theory” (the use of the word “merely” in this instance demonstrating a misunderstanding of the word “theory”) and creationism as a “competing theory”, when it lacks a single shred of evidence to support it.

So this anti-scientific trend is prevalent in both the religious and nutrition worlds, at least when the evidence is not in their favour.

The approach in a nutshell; “science does not support my worldview, so rather than seeking to prove my theory or accepting the evidence and changing my mind, I will seek to undermine science itself”

The need for evidence for the existence of a higher power is possibly another philosophical debate altogether, I realise there is an argument that this question lies beyond the remit of science (I don’t actually agree with that argument, but anyway). But if you are going to make scientific claims, wether they be “the universe is 3000 years old” or “protein will destroy your kidneys” you must back them up with scientific evidence, not blind faith.

2- Overly Defensive Response To Criticism. Science is about coming up with an idea and then trying to disprove it.

Then, if you haven’t been able to disprove it yourself you throw it out there for your peers to rip apart and see if they can disprove it. If they can’t prove you wrong, you may just have something.

Religion and the wackier areas of nutrition and alternative medicine use the exact opposite technique. It is about coming up with an idea, looking for (or making up) evidence to support it, ignoring evidence that contradicts it and reacting defensively to any who challenge your idea.

Religion has been very successful about portraying itself as somehow above debate. We can have a spirited argument about anything from our favourite food or football team to politics but once religion enters the frame its “this is my faith so you’re not allowed to criticise it”. The mantra “everyones entitled to their opinion” is chanted and the subject changed. Why? Are these ideas so fragile that they can’t be questioned?

This attitude exists in the nutrition world also. It is incredible how often I’ve witnessed proponents of one particular school of nutritional dogma become angry to the point of throwing insults simply because I don’t hold with their beliefs. Ive said this before but if you’re getting angry because I disagree with you rather than engaging in a reasoned and rational debate, perhaps you’re simply not that confident in your own beliefs.

An even more common technique is to attempt to label the critic as “closed minded” for not agreeing with the alternative view. I always thought being open minded meant looking at the available evidence and making an informed decision. It seems in the alternative nutrition and religious worlds, closed minded simply means “having views that differ from ours”

Anger, slurs and ad hominem attacks are all indicators that the person arguing has run out of facts.

Is any of this important?

I don’t care if people want believe in God. I don’t even really care if they want to waste their money on supplements that don’t work (which isn’t all of them) or with nutritionists who talk crap (which isn’t all of them).  I’m happy to see these things as a self selecting tax on people who don’t understand statistics.

But I do care about the systematic undermining of science within our little health and fitness bubble and to the general public. Because as it turns out , at the extreme what starts with some wasted money on supplements can end with the death of thousands

I care about holding the personal training and nutrition world to a higher standard of critical thinking.

If you still want to burn me at the stake I can be found at B@1 Spitalfields most Saturdays. Alternatively if you enjoyed this ramble, mines an espresso martini.

Originally written for http://blog.aegistraining.co.uk/2011/11/why-nutrition-is-like-religion-let-hate.html

Filed Under: Blog, Health, Nutrition, Nutrition Books Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

London’s premier corporate health & fitness seminars

November 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“Exercise Delusions & Diet Confusions”

The Foundry Health and Fitness

Graeme Marsh at a previous corporate seminar

Drawing upon our slightly geeky passion for health and fitness research (Graeme Marsh and Dave Thomas), our unparallelled sporting excellence (Sarah Lindsay, Evelyn Stevenson, Fiona Pocock & Richard Thompson) and our experience of years working in the corporate environment (Helen Thomas) The Foundry has become renowned for the health and fitness presentations we give to businesses across London.

Our clients this year have included Whistles, Weil Gotshal Manges,  RBS, UBS and Innocent Drinks for the seminars “Building the Executive Athlete” and “Exercise Delusions & Diet Confusions”

UBS Liverpool StreetToday Fitness Industry ‘Statesman’ Graeme Marsh returned to the Liverpool Street offices of UBS, taking England Rugby player Fiona Pocock  with him to help dispel the many confusions and delusions about diet and exercise.

The event was attended by over 90 executives and the feedback so far has been excellent:

Hi Graeme,

I was present at the UBS talk today and just wanted to say thank you very much for the excellent talk.  It was really refreshing to hear someone debunking the corporate and media spin that this country suffers from to such a large extent.

A common theme at all these talks is bewilderment, as evidenced today by the huge number of questions directed at Graeme. The public at large are being bombarded with ever increasing volumes of nutrition and fitness dogma, often from those who lack the understanding (or what Ben Goldacre would call ‘intellectual horsepower’) to interpret evidence correctly.  Even more worrying are those who knowingly ignore, twist, cherry pick, or simply falsify ‘evidence’ in an attempt to sell a catchy concept, product, course, or pill to the end user.

If you are interested in The Foundry coming to your company to cut through the confusion please email Graeme directly at Graeme@foundryfit.com

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Should your grandma be worried about cholesterol?

November 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Cholesterol and heart disease is becoming somewhat of an obsession for me. With a big talk coming up in the next week at a major investment bank I know questions on the topic will be popular, particularly given the evidence and opinions I present.  I can often hear the intakes of breath and see eyebrows raising when I suggest why you shouldn’t be so worried about saturated fat or indeed your cholesterol being ‘slightly elevated’ and why you should be concerned if your doctor suggests a statin as a solution.

So, I was interested to hear that my grandmother was worries after her GP had recently expressed concern to see her cholesterol elevated. While I don’t have time for a diatribe on the whole diet/heart hypothesis and the complexity of the evidence surrounding heart disease, it is worth just exploring why the doctor would be worried.

I can understand why the public at large still believes cholesterol to be nothing more than an indicator of impending death.  It is drummed into us both directly and indirectly by products that line the shelves claiming to lower it (despite a stunning lack of evidence to show that consuming these products will actually have any impact on your life expectancy).  These products are often aimed at women, who seem more concerned about this issue despite the fact that there is very little reason for most women to be worried about their cholesterol level (heart disease is after all only one cause of death and doesn’t become the leading cause of death in women until after 85 years old).

Very few people realise that far from being a dangerous risk to health, such as cigarette smoke or air pollution that have both been shown to increase a woman’s risk of death, cholesterol is essential for a healthy life.  Without it we couldn’t manufacture vitamin D or bile acids, and it is critical for a range of functions; from nerve transmission to cell structure and formation. It is so important that if we don’t eat enough of it our body manufactures it to compensate. It’s worth mentioning that it is also an essential component of breast milk, which would seem strange if it were such a noxious disease-forming substance. Nature is rarely so errant.

Unfortunately, or indeed perhaps fortunately, it really isn’t as simple as a raised cholesterol level indicating impending doom. Firstly, we have to realise that heart disease (which is after all what all the fuss is about when it comes to cholesterol) should not be considered in the same context for men and women. Death rates are wildly skewed with women in the UK suffering a third of the amount of deaths from heart disease as men. It gets even more confusing when you consider that in study after study results have actually shown higher cholesterol to be linked to living longer in women and that a higher level may actually be healthier than a lower one. So, hold back on the Benecol and the Flora Pro-Active ladies, you may just find that eating butter isn’t so bad after all.

A study from the Lancet is one of many to conclude that older women with a lower cholesterol level may be at a greater risk of death. They found that those with a level of 4.0mmol had a death rate five times that of those with the highest levels of 7.0mmol.  Although this study was on a relatively small population group it’s not the only one that has failed to show that there is any real evidence for older women to worry about their cholesterol levels. The Framingham Heart study, which is the longest running study to look at heart disease, concluded that low cholesterol significantly increased risk of death in people over the age of 50 from all causes, while studies from Italy and Austria both concurred, finding that high cholesterol was actually associated with greater longevity and less cardiac events in older women. Disturbingly the Austrian study found lower cholesterol to be linked with increased death rates from cancer, liver disease, depression, and mental illness.

In fact, there is a surprising amount of evidence that runs contrary to what most of us believe, which is that even the most modest of increases in cholesterol levels is harmful and that we should all seek to obtain lower levels in order to improve our health. Despite this fact, cholesterol still remains the arch villain of heart health perhaps due in no small part to the ability of the pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs that are able to modify this apparent ‘risk factor’ so effectively (again with little efficacy in older women without existing heart disease).

So, at the tender age of 87, what does my grandmother have to fear about having an elevated cholesterol level? From the evidence it would seem not much and more to the point, how much harm can you do by telling someone that they should be worried about their health when in fact they may have no reason to be concerned at all? While we would all do well to reduce our risk of ill health, we cannot afford to look at these issues in such simplistic fashion. Risk factors are many and varied and the data is complex and often confusing. So, many people trust their doctors to be guided on what is and what isn’t ‘healthy’.

With cholesterol-lowering statin sales in the tens of billions of pounds per year worldwide and doctors bombarded by the PR from drug companies, it is perhaps no wonder that so much of this evidence goes unnoticed by the general population. Lets hope our health professionals speak from the evidence in the literature and not just from the propaganda that the statin manufacturers circulate.

If you are interested to know more about this topic you can find the links of the aforementioned studies below and an entertaining and thorough dissection of this topic in the books The Great Cholesterol Con By Dr Malcolm Kendrick and Trick and Treat by Barry Groves.

  • Tikhonoff V et al, “Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and mortality in older people,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 2005; 53:2159-2164.
  • Forette et al Cholesterol as a Risk Factor for Mortality in Elderly Women. The Lancet Volume 333, Issue 8643, 22 April 1989, Pages 868-870
  • Ulmer H, Kelleher C, Diem G et al. Why Eve is not Adam: Prospective follow-up in 149,650 women and men of cholesterol and other risk factors related to cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Journal of Women’s Health. 2004; 13(1):41-53.
  • Albert CM, Chae CU, Grodstein F et al. Prospective study of sudden cardiac death among women in the United States. Circulation. 2003; 107:2096-2101.
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Why politicians can save us from obesity, drugs, alcohol, smoking, crime and the energy crisis

October 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s insight into popular exercise literature and culture comes courtesy of that bastion of health, wellbeing, and physical par excellence that is the House of Lords. Tory Peer Lord Macoll of Dulwich was able to single-handedly provide us with a solution for the growing obesity in our country. His insight? Simply for us all to eat less.

The path to weight loss enlightenment??

There you have it, although heaven knows how they will fill the remaining years of a dietetic degree now that has been revealed. Not content with enlightening us all as to the real reason so many people are overweight, he went on to say that politicians are in fact misleading you all by stressing that exercise is the solution.

I am sure Lord Macoll means well, indeed he has served a long and very distinguished career so this is in no way an ad hominem pop at him. I do though take a few issues with this rather facile and trite mantra, which is perhaps a little disappointing coming from someone who must understand the complex issues behind the challenge of tackling obesity. We must get to grips with why people get overweight rather than just how if we are to find a solution to this problem. Simply telling people to eat less will not work and in this short post I’ll try to explain why.

Tobacco adverts before the health warnings

Let’s take smoking as an example, which has been absolutely and positively linked to causing lung cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer also states it can cause cancers of the pancreas, liver, kidney, bladder; in fact stick a pin in an anatomy chart and there is a good chance smoking can be linked to developing cancer there. If you smoke you’re also twice as likely to have a heart attack.

Cigarettes are widely recognised as being bad for your health. They have for years carried many explicit and evocative health warnings on their packaging to that effect and have been the target of multiple media campaigns to target both adult and child smokers. Tobacco companies have been banned from advertising or sponsoring sports and been liable to increasingly higher rates of taxation. Even social media is being used to try and combat smoking as a socially undesirable risk to health.

Yet, despite all this, around 1 in 5 adults in the UK smoke, which is only marginally less than the amount of adults who are obese (gender differences for smoking are now virtually non-existent while 2% more women are obese according to BMI). Despite all the evidence, death, illness, and proven risks that smoking carries, the advice to ‘smoke less’ or ‘stop smoking’ still goes unheeded by the same amount of people who are currently obese.

nutrition fat loss london

Supersized for the 2012 Olympics

Perhaps the futility of these strategies combined with a fear of a ‘nanny state’ is why we have so far not seen levies on junk food or health warnings on crisp packets? It may help explain in part why the world’s biggest* McDonald’s will be opening on the site of the London 2012 Olympic games as well? Commercial interests of major food retailers will make legislating against less healthy food very difficult, a topic often written about by the excellent Felicity Lawrence.

The fact is that many overweight and obese people are very aware that they eat too much, but the reasons why they do this are far more complicated and, in truth, are still not really clear. They are also aware that the food they eat is not conducive to reducing bodyweight. It is hardly news that pizza, chips, and sugary drinks make you fat after all. Eloquent writers such as Gary Taubes will argue that calories are almost an irrelevance and that the over-consumption of fattening carbohydrates is the issue, while the dieticians will continue to promulgate the calories in/calories out theory, which they cling to despite it clearly being far too simplistic to explain why obesity is rising or how to fix it. It is likely that this debate will continue to clog up numerous blogs and websites for many moons to come. What is clear is that simply telling people to eat less is about as effective for treating obesity as telling an alcoholic they should drink less.

I don’t have a lot of room to comment on the exercise aspect, which is where Taubes got it wrong in my mind and where Macoll follows suit, dismissing exercise as an almost pointless endeavour despite astonishing amounts of data to the contrary. It is though both proven and pertinent to say that those who combine exercise with a weight loss nutritional strategy achieve the following:

  • Greater success in maintaining weight lost**
  • Better retention of muscle mass and increased amounts of fat lost
  • Improvements in many markers of disease risk whether or not any weight was actually lost

These reasons alone are powerful arguments for the inclusion of some form of exercise as part of any intervention aimed at reducing obesity.

So, there you have it. Next time you are at a dinner party debating the complex reasons behind the London riots and how they could have been prevented, take a similar approach and you will be able to succinctly end any debate with the advice that people should simply riot less. Alternatively you could try advising an alcoholic that they should drink less or a gambler that they should bet less. Good luck with that.

Of course, the debate in the House of Lords went on to point out that we also eat too much saturated fat (another nutritional pariah still vilified despite the considerable weight of evidence against the flimsy data presented many decades previous), too much salt (despite the Cochrane Collaborations conclusions that reducing salt intake wasn’t worth the effort), and too much sugar (the elephant in the room perhaps?). You may well also contend that it really isn’t the role of politicians to try and tell us how to eat. Indeed many of them could take a look at their own health before advising others. Instead the advice on nutrition and health should come from an independent body free from lobbying by food suppliers or political interests, and garnered from a group of people who have an understanding of the complexity of the issue and the evidence around it.

 

* Overtaking the McDonalds in Orlando, Florida. It seems we have finally out-supersized America.

** Many fitness and nutrition writers continue to declare exercise (in particular the use of aerobic or ‘cardio’ work) redundant for obesity, choosing to cherry pick evidence that supports their product, certification, or personal training beliefs. The evidence however tells a different and entirely more complex story. As with nutrition, the responses to exercise are individually widely variable. Many authors blithely disregard the many health benefits, which seem consistent irrespective of actual weight loss, and look at only mean results for weight loss where the individual variations are lost in data. Despite this the Cochrane Collaboration certainly support the inclusion of exercise as part of any weight loss/health improvement strategy. http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab003817.html

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The Truth About Calorie Deficits

September 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

An article popped up on BBC Health this week that caught our eye at The Foundry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14882832

It seems that those in the world of dietetics are finally realising that some of their advice may not be all it is cracked up to be. This is interesting given the amount of criticism ‘nutritionists’ have come in for over recent years for recommending such ‘radical’ approaches as reducing carbohydrate intake for weight loss or the suggestion that dietary fat may not actually be responsible for heart disease. The fact is that little in this article is of news to those of us who have been working on transforming body composition for many years now.

personal training city of london fat weight loss nutrition liverpool street

Is it really as simple as that?

For a long time now those in the seats of nutritional policy power have reinforced that to lose weight you simply have to create a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day and bingo, weight falls off, in a rather conveniently measurable 3500 calories (or the amount of energy in a pound of fat) a week.

Well of course, the real world tells us that it isn’t quite that simple and it seems that the British Dietetic Association may be starting to agree. Amusingly the article quotes Helen Bond from the BDA who says that “we recommend it, it’s what we are taught. But I don’t know what the scientific evidence for it is”. Well, score one for nutritionists vs. dieticians there. I can’t help but think that Ms Bond will cringe when she sees that quote in print, although I applaud her candid response. It seems that experience and instinct can precede scientific guidance after all. However, I cannot help but wonder how many more ‘established scientific guidelines’ currently trumpeted are as thinly supported by any actual evidence?

personal training city of london liverpool street weight loss

Do I need to include the chocolate brownie? I know I shouldn't have but it was my boss's birthday...

The fact is that studying diets is in itself is very difficult and any research needs to be carefully considered before applying it to the entire population. Drop out rates tend to be extremely high, in fact often 50% or more, skewing results to show the diet in question to be far more favourable than is actually the case. However, these drop out rates should tell us something; that many people lack the ability to stick the course at a diet, for a multitude of reasons. Diet studies tend to also rely on a hefty amount of self-reporting and subject adherence, another major problem. Housing and feeding large cohorts for a meaningful period of time is simply not achievable and any study that is reliant on self-reported data needs to be taken with a hefty pinch of salt (which is another topic where advice and evidence aren’t always congruent). Participants clearly over-estimate their activity levels and underestimate (or simply lie) about their food intake.

Of course, similar problems have been encountered when studying the effects of exercise on weight loss. Food intake is rarely controlled, drop out rates are high and, even when they aren’t, the ability of subjects to complete or maintain a meaningful intervention often makes for dismal reading. This has lead to many drawing erroneous and misleading conclusions that aren’t actually supported by the research, such as “exercise will make you fat” or other similar headline grabbing, but incorrect, statements.

Professor John Blundell (a brilliant but seemingly unknown researcher to those fitness experts who would write these assertions) has clearly demonstrated that, as with nutrition, the response to and effectiveness of exercise is highly individual. For an in depth and highly comprehensive review of the science of this area I’d highly recommend this paper: http://www.portalsaudebrasil.com/artigospsb/obes051.pdf. Those who tritely state that exercise doesn’t work for weight loss as it makes you eat more food would do well to read this and prepare to reconsider your viewpoint. For those of you who like to write these sort of statements without actually reading any kind of evidence I will quote directly and even bold the good bit for you:

“Physical activity has the potential to modulate appetite control by improving the sensitivity of the physiological satiety signalling system, by adjusting macronutrient preferences or food choices and by altering the hedonic response to food. There is evidence for all these actions. Concerning the impact of physical activity on energy balance, there exists a belief that physical activity drives up hunger and increases food intake, thereby rendering it futile as a method of weight control. There is, however, no evidence for such an immediate or automatic effect. Short (1–2 d)-term and medium (7–16 d)-term studies demonstrate that men and women can tolerate substantial negative energy balances of  ≤ 4 MJ energy cost/d when performing physical activity programmes.”

The article continues to discuss a new computer model of predicting weight loss from a Dr Kevin Hall, who for a PhD gives a rather loose summary of the paper saying “we tested it on about 100 people and it gave a good fit. It was pretty accurate”. Well I don’t know about you but with such precise and specific evidence like that I’m convinced. Or maybe not, as the author infers from this that weight loss will be identical in the short-term regardless of whether you cut dietary fat or carbohydrates.

So, we are right back to square one it seems and it is just about the calories?

Well, not exactly, as the preponderance of evidence would certainly not suggest that weight loss is the same on a low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet, in particular if you are insulin resistant. In fact several studies have found significant differences in weight loss when considered in relation to insulin resistance and carbohydrate/fat intake. This is an aside to altering protein levels, which has also been shown to have significant impact on body composition change, with higher protein levels proving more effective for weight loss. Of course, as we have established everyone reacts differently to diets, but my advice remains the same for the obese individual:

1. Begin to reduce carbohydrate intake, in particular refined and processed carbs such as pasta, bread, juice etc.

2. Begin to raise protein intake, eating some with each meal.

3. Start to exercise at a level that is sustainable, enjoyable, and achievable. This allows for progression, which can be highly motivating.

4. Increase daily non-exercise activity (believe it or not, many will reduce this when they start exercising, thereby nullifying many of the beneficial effects).

For now though, take solace as in the words of beardy counsellor Robin Williams: “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault”. The powers that be have been lying to you.

Instead of focusing solely on managing your caloric intake you would do well to first work on managing your expectations of weight loss to avoid disappointment and despondency when things don’t happen quite as easily as many established ‘guidelines’ would have you believe. Hardened devotion to calories in vs. calories out seems the path to neurosis, obsessive behaviour patterns, and unrealistic expectations of weight loss and in turn a failure to maintain a successful diet approach.

As I have often said, the best diet is the one that you will actually keep to. While you are at it, most of you can stop worrying about your salt and your cholesterol too, but that really is another story.

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