Category: Fat loss

For far too many decades, dieters and diet books focused only on bodyweight.  If it went down, that was good.  If it didn’t or went up, that was bad.  And while body weight is more useful than some think, it doesn’t tell the entire story.  Rather, body composition, and altering it, is where the real focus should lie.

In the following guide I will address a number of topics related to body composition.  First, to ensure everyone is starting on the same page, let me define what it actually is.

Body Composition Basics: What are you Made Of?

I’m not talking here about the scientifically proven fact that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice while boys are made of slugs, and snails and puppy dog tails; rather, I want to talk about what the human body is composed of in biological terms.

Let’s imagine that I could magically (and hopefully painlessly) separate your body into all of its different components and put them on a slab somewhere (putting you back together might be a problem).… Keep Reading

Insulin is a complicated hormone, complicated further by the amount of utter nonsense and gibberish that is written about it when it comes to dieting, fat loss and fat gain.  And one of the many questions that comes up is this:

If insulin goes up when we eat, storing nutrients and inhibiting fat mobilization, how do we actually lose fat during a calorie deficit?  Does insulin eventually just drop so fat burning can resume?  How does the glycemic index (GI) impact this?  Will eating a lower GI food make a difference compared to a higher GI food?

I think you get the idea.  So let me try to address each of this by looking at the impact of insulin on fat loss along with those other issues.

Insulin is a bit Schizophrenic

This is because, in a lot of ways, insulin is a schizophrenic hormone.  Depending on what folks read (e.g.… Keep Reading

With the holidays looming, and all of the food and candy that that entails, I wanted to write a quick article post about a topic that I consider very important. In fact, it’s so important to the goal of long-term body composition changes that I wrote an entire book (A Guide to Flexible Dieting) about it.

Rigid vs. Flexible Eaters

Over the years, I’ve seen a particular pattern that is pretty endemic among the body obsessed: that is what dietary behavior researchers would call rigid dieting patterns (restrained dieting might be a little more accurate here but I don’t want to get into the distinction that deeply).

Rigid dieters are the folks who are, to some degree or another, always controlling their overall food intake. They never relax, they never allow themselves to “cheat” (a term I dislike for various reasons I’ll explain below).   But sort of like the goal oriented athlete, this type of eater may very well see superior short-term results.… Keep Reading

Note: This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 from my book The Stubborn Fat Solution.

So you’re now nearly 50 pages into this book and still wondering why stubborn fat is stubborn. Perhaps you’ve picked up some of the reasons by inference but finally, in this chapter I can put everything together.

Fat Cell Overview/Review

In the past 6 chapters, you’ve learned a ton about fat cells and fat cell metabolism. One of the points I’ve tried to get across is that fat cells are not the same, different depots have different functional characteristics in terms of how easily they store fat, how easily they give up that fat, etc.

In general there are clear gender differences that show up at puberty, suggesting that sex hormones play a role in how fat cells develop. And there is much truth to this. It turns out that if you take a fat cell from a man’s thigh and a woman’s thigh, they are functionally identical and essentially indistinguishable physiologically.… Keep Reading