Year: 2010

An odd situation that some people often experience is one where combining very low calories and too much exercise can actually harm rather than help fat loss.  Though I’ve addressed this issue elsewhere on the site, I wanted to look at it again for the following reason.

An Interesting Case Study

This week, several people have brought a recent case-study to my attention and asked me for comment.  In it, a 51 year old female began marathon training along with a (self-reported) low calorie diet and either appears to have gained weight or not lost weight (she also showed a very depressed metabolic rate, nearly 30% below predicted).

By raising her calories gradually, her body fat (as measured by BIA) came down and her metabolic rate increased.  Now, without more details, it’s hard to really comment on this and the link to the case study is the total amount of information available.… Keep Reading

The idea that the body can undergo metabolic damage from dieting has been around for many years.   The most recent incarnation came from Layne Norton.  He claimed, based on hundreds of emails, that he had clients that were either not losing fat or weight on 1200 calories or, better yet, gaining weight.

The fact that 50 years of research contradicts this was irrelevant to him.  As a self-proclaimed anti-guru, Layne engaged in every guru game to dismiss the facts.  Why?  Because money was on the line.  Science only matters to him (and others) when it doesn’t hurt the bottom line.

But the fact is that literally every piece of data over 5 decade suggests that his claims are false.  The truth of the matter is that people claiming to be gaining weight on low calories are not eating low calories.  Rather, they are mis-estimating their calorie intakes.  We all told Layne this. … Keep Reading

I think it was last year some time that Time magazine ran an article to the effect of “Exercise will make you fit but it won’t make you thin.” I remember someone asking me about this (it might have been my mom) and I wasn’t really sure what the issue was.  I had written back in my first book The Ketogenic Diet about some of the realities of exercise weight and fat loss.  Most of my other books have at least dealt with the issue to some degree.

I suppose the issue isn’t really one of the realities of exercise and fat/weight loss but rather how the message was misinterpreted.  Many have held up exercise as some sort of panacea for all things, health, fitness and of course what everyone is really interested in: losing weight/fat and I suspect the message got a bit garbled as it so often does: people figured that they could do a bit of easy exercise and the pounds would just melt right off.… Keep Reading

In that I am a bit obsessive compulsive about my field of interest, I have a driving desire to read anything and everything related to it.  I also happen to particular enjoy reading older books.  They often contain forgotten gems of wisdom.  More often they show that the brand spanking new idea you thought you came up with is 30 years old.

Trying to Figure Out Swimming

A little while back, in trying to fix my own ignorance about swimming, I read what is often considered a classic in the field of training literature which is the book “The Science of Swimming” by James ‘Doc’ Counsilman.  Written in 1968, the book represented one of the first attempts to apply much in the way of science to the technique of swimming.

Suffice to say that swimming is very strange and, so far as I can tell even in 2010, nobody is exactly sure how swimming “works”.   … Keep Reading