Category: Fat loss

Among others idea that I “formalized” in my Guide to Flexible Dieting was the idea of taking a break of 7-14 days during a diet where calories were brought to maintenance.   I didn’t invent the idea by any stretch, Dan Duchaine had been advocating that a decade before me.  But I like to think that I brought the idea to the mainstream.  That is an idea I call the full diet break.

What is A Full Diet Break?

Whenever I bring up this topic, I tend to get sort of confused looks from people.  What do you mean I’m supposed to take a break from my diet?

As I opined on the podcast, I have no idea if this is just an idea endemic to America (where we suffer from a long-history of a Puritan work ethic) or is just common to dieters but most people who are trying to lose weight or fat seem to feel that the key to success is to be as miserable as possible for as long as possible.… Keep Reading

While I’ve written numerous articles on the topic of body composition I should probably address a more fundamental question which is this: why do people want to change body composition at all?   That is, what reasons (good or bad) might people have for wanting to gain (or even lose) muscle or lose (or even gain) fat.    As there are four potential goals that someone might have, there will be four potential reasons for them to change body composition.

Reason 1: Why Lose Fat?

At any given time, some ludicrous percentage of the population is trying to lose weight and/or fat.  If you’re not clear on the distinction, I’d point you to my article on what body composition means.    As so often is the case, context is key and different populations usually have different reasons for seeking this goal.

Bodybuilders and Physique Athletes

It’s probably safe to say that bodybuilders and other physique athletes are the ones who are at least the most visible in terms of their extreme levels of fat loss. … Keep Reading

In various places, a comment I’ve made is that water retention often seems to “mask” fat loss and make it appear that a diet is not working.  In fact, in The Stubborn Fat Solution, I wrote (with a straight face no less) about the topic of whooshes and squishy fat.  In fact, here’s the chapter section from the book on that very topic.

Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat

Before you freak out and think you’ve entered some weird Internet forum where people talk about stalls and whooshes, please bear with me; there’s actually some physiological rationale to what I’m going to discuss.

Many people have noted that fat loss is often discontinuous, that is it often happens in stops and starts.  So you’ll be dieting and dieting and doing everything correctly with nothing to show for it.  Then, boom, almost overnight, you drop 4 pounds and look leaner.

What’s going on? … Keep Reading

Diets fail for a lot of reasons but one of the primary ones is simply hunger.   During a diet, hunger invariably goes up. Some of this is for purely physiological reasons, some of it is for psychological reasons.  Not that there is really a difference in the two.  And along with all of the other difficulties, this can derail the diet.    So let’s look at hunger.  What it is, what it represents.  And more importantly let me provide 9 ways to handle hunger on a diet.

What is Hunger?

To say that human hunger is complicated is a vast understatement.  To cover it in detail would require a series of articles or perhaps an entire book.  Research continues to uncover numerous interacting and overlapping hormones (such as leptin, ghrelin, peptide YY, GLP-1 and others) that monitor how much and what someone is eating (along with their body weight) and those all send a signal to the brain that drives a number of processes, not the least of which is hunger.… Keep Reading

It’s taken almost as a matter of faith in the fitness world that slower rates of weight loss are superior to faster rates and that rapid fat loss always cause faster rates of regain and poorer long-term results.   And while there is certainly data to support that, we might ask if it is always the case.  You can probably guess by the title of this article that it’s not.

Note: Most research studies still tend to focus on weight loss despite the fact that fat loss and changes in body composition is a far greater metric of change.  For that reason I will be switching back and forth from fat and weight loss throughout the article.

Slow vs. Rapid fat Loss

While it’s taken as axiomatic that rapid fat loss is always inferior, there is a far amount of data that actually suggests the opposite.  That it, studies routinely show that a FASTER or GREATER initial weight loss is associated with BETTER long-term weight maintenance rather than worse.… Keep Reading