Good Reads - Page 7

Steve · #91 (**permalink**) July 1st, 2008, 01:02 PM

Sorry for the assumption....

Are you sure you're not pulling or straining your neck when you crunch up?

sensa516 · #92 (**permalink**) July 1st, 2008, 01:13 PM

I make an effort not to and thought over time it would go away but still there

Steve · #93 (**permalink**) July 1st, 2008, 01:19 PM

Where are your hands when you are doing this?

sensa516 · #94 (**permalink**) July 1st, 2008, 01:24 PM

I've tried with hands at the back of my head side of my head elbows tucked and hands off to the side not touching anything

Steve · #95 (**permalink**) July 1st, 2008, 03:52 PM

I would probably try reverse crunches at this point.

Steve · #96 (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 06:39 AM

You can always check out his blog at Lyle McDonald Speaks but I'll copy and paste the series here for everyone:

Quote:

Stuff about dieting: introduction

As mentioned in a previous blog post, I wanted to talk a little bit about the psychology of dieting

Frankly, in a lot of ways, I think addressing the psychological aspects of dieting is far far more important than the physiology or nutrient metabolism or what have you. Simply put, at this point, with 40+ years of dedicated nutritional research, I think we have a pretty good idea of what is required for a diet to generate weight or fat loss.

Yes, we can always quibble about the details of what the ‘perfect’ fat loss diet should or shouldn’t be but when you start looking, you start to realize that there is no single perfect diet.

Issues of genetics, insulin resistance, food preference, how much and what kind of training, etc. all factor in to determine what diet might be best for any given individual. A relatively lean individual involved in high intensity training daily will have a different requirement for an ‘ideal’ diet than someone at 40% bodyfat who isn’t exercising.

There is also the additional factor that, when you get right down to it, any diet that adheres to some very basic principles should ‘work’ to at least some degree or another.

If you don’t believe me, go pick up any half a dozen different diet books. Odds are they will all have wildly differing recommendations, at least at first glance. But they will all be able to trot out case studies of someone who did amazingly well on it. How can that be?

When you start breaking it down to fundamental principles, anything that works to any degree will invariably share the same principles. This isn’t much different than how it works with training mind you, if you focus more on the principles of a given training system and don’t get hung up over the details, you generally find that all successful programs adhere to the same basic principles. The details almost cease to matter as long as those basics are right.

To put this in perspective, I vividly remember reading this review paper a bunch of years ago addressing the issue of the optimal diet for obesity. I’d note that this is a paper essentially reviewing 30 years of research data to the tune of lord knows how many millions of dollars.

Their conclusion was something to the effect of “While we may not know the ideal diet for the treatment of obesity, it will probably be based around plenty of lean protein and vegetables, moderate amounts of carbohydrates and fat.”

I call this the “My grandmother knew that” approach to dieting and I’m surprised someone hasn’t written “The Grandmother Diet” since everybody knows that their grandmother knows everything about everything.

In any case, fundamentally, this isn’t a bad soundbite. The problem in modern society is both

a. Getting people to eat that way in the first place

b. Getting them to keep eating that way in the long-term.

And, in a lot of ways, ‘b’ is probably the more important of the two. Everybody knows that all diets will work in the short-term. Where dieting invariably fails for most people is in long-term adherence. People fall off the bandwagon for a variety of reasons.

This is what I’m going to discuss over the next series of blog posts.

Stay tuned

Steve · #97 (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 06:40 AM

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Quote:

Dieting: All diets work qualification

In the introductory post to this series, I made a statement that I imagine many will take some issue with; that statement was, in effect, that all diets work. At least to some degree.

I want to qualify that a little bit. Fundamentally, any diet that is restricted in calories will cause weight loss. Of course, dieters, ideally, shouldn’t only be concerned with the scale. The composition of what is lost is important too and, generally speaking, dieters want to lose fat not muscle (or just shift water around).

I want to point out that for the extremely overweight, lean body mass (LBM) loss isn’t considered as huge of an issue among dieting researchers. When becoming obese, roughly 25% of the total weight gained is lean body mass. Some of this is actual muscle tissue (check out the calves and thighs on fat people) but some of it is just connective tissue to support the extra fat mass.

Some researches are now delineating between essential lean body mass (skeletal muscle, organs) and inessential lean body mass (connective tissue). Losing the second may be required for an individual to get even close to an ‘ideal’ body weight, whatever that is.

However, when you’re talking about relatively lean individuals, where there isn’t a lot of inessential LBM to lose, the focus does tend to shift on avoiding any LBM loss. I’d note here that glycogen, water and minerals show up as LBM loss.

Depending on the measurement method used, even visceral fat loss can show up as LBM loss. Lean folks often panic when various body composition measurements show that they are losing LBM but they are just dehydrated, glycogen depleted, etc.

And there’s little doubt that here, all diets are not equivalent in terms of how well they spare LBM.

So my statement that ‘all diets work’ isn’t entirely true once you start concerning yourself with the composition of the weight that is lost.

Without going into massive detail (which is sort of a tangent from what I want this series of articles to be about), the primary determinants of LBM loss on a diet tend to be protein intake (which must be sufficient) and proper resistance training (which sends a ’signal’ to maintain muscle). Other issues such as essential fatty acid intake, etc. are also relevant but protein and training are the big ones.

But assuming that a diet sets protein at sufficient levels, provides essential fatty acids and includes the proper kind of training, frankly, they all pretty much work assuming that the person actually follows the diet.

There is, however, one other major requirement for that statement to be true and that’s the existence of a caloric deficit (e.g. caloric intake must be less than caloric expenditure).

But, you say, so many diet books comment that caloric restriction doesn’t work or that calories don’t count or some other silly shit like that. That’s the topic for the next post to stay tuned.

Steve · #98 (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 06:41 AM

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Quote:

All diets work: The importance of calories

On Monday, I made a quick qualification regarding my original statement that ‘all diets work’; today I want to expand a bit on something I mentioned on Monday. That something is the importance of calories.

Now, I have read a LOT of diet books; too many frankly. Most follow a fairly standard organization (the first chapter always explaining that YOUR FAT IS NOT YOUR FAULT) and, with very very few exceptions, most will tell you that ‘calorie restricted diets don’t work for weight loss’ and that whatever magic they are selling is the key to quick, easy (and of course permanent) weight loss.

Whether it’s insulin, dietary fat, the protein:carbohydrate or insulin:glucagon ratio, partitioning or whatever other bullshit, they will make it sound like caloric intake is not the key aspect in whether or not someone gains weight.

In almost all cases, the idea that food intake must be restricted in any fashion is dismissed; if it is mentioned it is generally as a short aside late in the book that nobody pays any attention to.

This is purely a psychological ploy; it sucks to have to consciously restrict food intake and this causes mental stress. Simply knowing that you can’t eat what you want when you want it blows; I hate it as much as the next person. Many people will feel hungrier simply because they know that they can’t eat what they want when they want it.

Yet the fundamental fact is that the body will NOT have any need to tap into stored body fat unless the individual is burning more calories than they are taking in. Of course this means that either energy expenditure has to go up, caloric intake has to go down, or both have to occur.

So how can these books make this claim? It’s simple: they all hide basic caloric restriction in whatever they happen to be proposing. Basically, this is Lyle’s Rule #1 of Diet books:

All diet books tell you that you won’t have to restrict calories, and then trick you into doing it anyway.

One of my favorite examples is Enter the Zone by Barry Sears. After prattling on about insulin:glucagon and partitioning and how caloric restriction doesn’t work and all the standard hot buttons, he then sets up a diet that will put everyone on about 900-1200 calories/day. But it’s not the caloric restriction causing the weight loss, of course, it’s the magic protein:carb ratio.

All of the rules, the food combining, the elimination of carbs, the elimination of fat, don’t eat XXX at all (where XXX is something that contributes a lot of calories to the diet), don’t eat YYY after 6pm (where YYY is something people tend to overeat in the evenings), etc. are all just ways of tricking people into eating less without having to think about it.

Now, in one sense, I have no problem with this, anything that gets people to eat less without having to think too hard about it is usually a good thing since it avoids some of the psychological stress that occurs with dieting. And, at least to some degree for some time it can work effectively. I remember a specific client years ago, wanted to lose weight and I saw that he was drinking like 4 regular sodas per day. I told him to switch to diet, he cut several hundred calories per day by doing so and lost about a pound a week for quite some time. Without having to consciously feel restricted.

But there’s often a HUGE problem that comes with this type of approach and telling people that calories don’t matter often goes horribly wrong (not to mention being intellectually disingenuous) becuase of a simple factor and that factor is human beings and how their brains work.

Left to their own devices, most people will find ways to take ‘You can eat as much as you like as long as you do/don’t do XXX’ and fuck it up completely.

Take for example the original low-fat mania of the late 80’s. Having realized that dietary fat was most calorically dense than carbohydrate, studies found that when you reduce fat intake, people tended to eat less calories and lose weight. MAGIC!

Except that somewhere the messsage got garbled and people heard that ‘As long as you don’t eat fat, that’s all that matters’.

Which wouldn’t have been a problem had people stuck with unrefined naturally occurring low-fat foods (it’s nearly impossible to overeat plain baked potato). But when companies brought calorically dense but no-fat foods (Snackwell’s anybody) to market, people got screwed; a diet that should have naturally reduced food/caloric intake ended up not doing so and people either didn’t lose fat or gained it.

There was also the phenomenon whereby people would subsconsiously allow themselves to eat more food if they thought it was low-fat. The classic study gave people normal fat yogurt and either told them that it was or wasn’t low/no-fat. The group that thought the yogurt was no-fat ate more of it.

Tangentially, you can see similar things with stuff as innocuous as artificial sweeteners (which should help people reduce calories). On some subsconsious level, people compensate for the calories they think they are saving with the sweetener by allowing themselves other stuff with more calories. End result is no result.

I’d also note that the same can happen with activity, a topic I’ll come back to later. People tend to vastly overestimate how many calories they are burning with activity and you frequently see people following a logic along the lines of ‘I must have burned 1000 calories in that aerobics class, I deserve that cheeseburger and milkshake.’ Which given that they probably only burned a few hundred calories in the workout is a problem because they end up eating far more calories than they burned.

In any case, something similar to the low-carb debacle happened with low-carb diets as authors like Atkins told people that they could eat ‘as much as they liked’ and lose weight without caloric restriction. Given that carbohydrates typically make up 50% or more of the daily diet, when you tell people not to eat them, caloric intake falls.

Yes, I know people claim to be eating certain amounts but the few studies on the topic show that ad-lib ketogenic diets have people eating about 1700 calories. So they lose weight. MAGIC!

Except that the message that got heard ended up being ‘Calories don’t matter as long as you don’t eat carbs.’ By the time people figured out way to make fake food with no carbs but lots of calories (I saw lowcarb jelly beans at one point) it all went wrong. People ended up eating more total calories and despite eating ‘no carbs’, there are legions of people on the net who are ‘eating no carbs’ but not losing weight. But try to tell them that it’s their caloric intake and they won’t have any of it. Endless stall excuses are made but, at the end of the day, it’s still calories.

So tying this in with the last blog post, I basically want to make the following point, one that I sort of alluded to when I started this series. For a fat loss diet to have any chance of working, it needs to fulfill at least two primary criteria:

1. It must cause an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. Most diet books focus on the diet end of things but some use activity to increase expenditure. But if there is no caloric deficit, nothing will happen.

2. There must be adequate protein (as discussed on Monday)

Other stuff such as essential fatty acids are also critical but other aspects of the diet (carb intake, timing, meal frequency) is all debatable and arguable and depends on the specifics. I’d note, of course, that every diet (and book) I have written adheres to this on some level or another. Caloric intake is the key aspect, protein intake is the second crucial aspect (in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook I actually let protein intake set caloric intake in reverse), you get your EFA’s and then you worry about everything else.

Now, most effective weight loss diets will probably adhere to 1 and 2 on some level. Whether the caloric restriction is spelled out explicitly or not is irrelevant, as long as it occurs it’s fine on some level. Most diet books don’t recommend sufficient protein but this is changing in recent times.

So given that tons of diets still adhere to 1 and 2, why do most still fail. Finally, that’s what I can start talking about in the next post.

sensa516 · #99 (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 07:19 AM

what a nice way to start my morning....grabbing coffee then I'm off to the reading...

Steve · #**100** (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 07:20 AM

Have fun... it's nothing earth shattering for the most part... actually sounds a lot like me and my 'preachings' around the forum. Did you see my suggestion above about reverse crunches?

sensa516 · #**101** (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 07:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve

Have fun... it's nothing earth shattering for the most part... actually sounds a lot like me and my 'preachings' around the forum. Did you see my suggestion above about reverse crunches?

Good thing I'm a fan of your preachings. Reverse crunches are already in the routine so should I just nix the reg crunches or look for something else to substitute with?

Steve · #**102** (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 07:33 AM

I'd nix... no point in doing them if they hurt you and assuming your doing flexion (front to back and side to side), rotation, and stabilization.... it's all good. Mind you, not all of those movement patterns have to be worked in the same session. I usually pick one or two movements to perform each time I train the core.

sensa516 · #**103** (**permalink**) July 2nd, 2008, 07:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve

I'd nix... no point in doing them if they hurt you and assuming your doing flexion (front to back and side to side), rotation, and stabilization.... it's all good. Mind you, not all of those movement patterns have to be worked in the same session. I usually pick one or two movements to perform each time I train the core.

ah well good thing I'm starting pilates and yoga.....couldn't resist....