craschworks

Study Zeroes In on Calories, Not Diet, for Loss

“…For people who are trying to lose weight, it does not matter if they are counting carbohydrates, protein or fat. All that matters is that they are counting something.

That is the finding of the largest-ever controlled study of weight-loss methods published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. More than 800 overweight adults in Boston and Baton Rouge, La., were assigned to one of four diets that reduced calories through different combinations of fat, carbohydrates and protein. Each plan cut about 750 calories from a participant’s normal diet, but no one ate fewer than 1,200 calories a day.

While the diets were not named, the eating plans were all loosely based on the principles of popular diets like Atkins, which emphasizes low carbohydrates; Dean Ornish, which is low-fat; or the Mediterranean diet, with less animal protein. All participants also received group or individual counseling.

After two years, every diet group had lost — and regained — about the same amount of weight regardless of what diet had been assigned. Participants lost an average of 13 pounds at six months and had maintained about 9 pounds of weight loss and a two-inch drop in waist size after two years. While the average weight loss was modest, about 15 percent of dieters lost more than 10 percent of their weight by the end of the study. Still, after about a year many returned to at least some of their usual eating habits.

The lesson, researchers say, is that people lose weight if they lower calories, but it does not matter how.”

Note, however, that the low carb diet may not have been, in fact, low-carb.

1. You may be interested in my experiences with the Blackmail diet, on which I lost 20 lbs.

2. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but Once a month cooking seems like a good way to have ready meals available, without spending a huge amount of time in the kitchen.

3. The book Self-directed Behavior is a great resource for designing behavior modification programs.

4. How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, is the best general book on cooking I’ve found so far.

On February 1st, 2008, I weighed 198.6 lbs. I had a 40 inch waist.

As of yesterday, I weighed 180.0 lbs. I now have a 36.5 inch waist.

Which means, that I met the target for my blackmail diet!

Here’s some pictures I took today:

Many thanks to evillinn for agreeing to monitor my progress! And also thanks to Saul Jimenez, proprietor of Peninsula Crossfit, for provide a superb training environment and regimen. And thanks to gentlemaitresse for providing some early support and encouragement.

Some thoughts:

The first few weeks of the diet, I kept a detailed calorie count. However, I eventually slacked off. Nor did I post pictures to my blog as I had planned.

I also did not eat as uniformly as I had planned. I found that too often I wanted to eat out for social reasons, and the scheduled meal was not available at the restaurant of choice. Instead, I ate more variety, but tried to keep to a mostly paleo plan–lots of fruits and vegetables with a generous serving of meat (chicken, fish, beef).

Also, rather than eating less every day, I found it easier to fast one day a week. My typical eating habits were as follows:

Mon – Thurs — lunch plus dinner (with most of the calories at dinner). Lunch consisted typically of a marinated chicken pita from Daphne’s. Dinner would typically be a takeout meal from Whole Foods (teriyaki chicken plus grilled vegetables and asparagus or broccoli). Occasionally, I would splurge, and buy a cookie, or a piece of pie.

Fri – On Fridays and Saturdays, I would fast from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon. Then I would eat more calories than normal on Saturday evening and Sunday during the day. This timing coincided with many of my social activities, so it worked out well.

As for exercise, on Wednesday’s and Saturday’s I would go to an hour long self-defense class. On Tuesday’s and Friday’s, I went to an hour long Crossfit class.

As you might expect, I would often bonk during my Friday Crossfit classes, due to the fasting. But I knew I would be eating heavily on the weekends, so consistent with the Premack principle, I wanted to “do the hard thing first”, then reward myself on the weekend. In the future, I still plan to fast on Friday, but will schedule my time better so that I do Crossfit earlier in the week.

So what next?

As you can see, I’m still carrying a fair amount of flab. I think if I lose another 15 lbs, I’ll be close to as lean as I want to be. So, after a week’s break, I’m going to start another round.

In retrospect, a 1.5 lb/week calorie loss was ambitious. If I had to do it over again, I’d pick a 1 lb/week schedule. So this time, I’ll set the target to be 165 lbs. That’s 18 lbs over 18 weeks, about a 1 lb/week. ( I expect to gain a pound or three during my break. :> ). At that point, I’ll re-evaluate and see if I want to focus on losing more weight, or if I want to emphasize more muscle growth.

Thanks everyone, for all of your advice and encouragement!

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-07/gumc-sdk062607.php

In what they call a “stunning research advance,” investigators at Georgetown University Medical Center have been able to use simple, non-toxic chemical injections to add and remove fat in targeted areas on the bodies of laboratory animals. They say the discovery, published online in Nature Medicine on July 1, could revolutionize human cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery and treatment of diseases associated with human obesity.
…
In the paper, the Georgetown researchers describe a mechanism they found by which stress activates weight gain in mice, and they say this pathway − which they were able to manipulate − may explain why people who are chronically stressed gain more weight than they should based on the calories they consume.

This pathway involves two players − a neurotransmitter (neuropeptide Y, or NPY) and the receptor (neuropeptide Y2 receptor, or Y2R) it activates in two types of cells in the fat tissue: endothelial cells lining blood vessels and fat cells themselves. In order to add fat selectively to the mice they tested, researchers injected NPY into a specific area. The researchers found that both NPY and Y2R are activated during stress, leading to apple-shape obesity and metabolic syndrome. Both the weight gain and metabolic syndrome, however, were prevented by administration of Y2R blocker into the abdominal fat.

“We couldn’t believe such fat remodeling was possible, but the numerous different experiments conducted over four years demonstrated that it is, at least in mice; recent pilot data also suggest that a similar mechanism exist in monkeys as well,” said the study’s senior author, Zofia Zukowska, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Physiology & Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center.

Via futurepundit.

Via The New York Times:

1. Eat food. Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t
recognize as food. there are many foodlike items in the supermarket your
ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars?
Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid food products bearing health claims. Margarine, one of the first
industrial foods to claim that it was healthier than the traditional food it
replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast
about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have
become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food
makers for their endorsement.)

3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b)
unpronounceable, c) more than five in number – or that contain high-fructose
corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful, but all
are reliable markers of foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any
high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food
harvested long ago and far away. You will find fresh whole foods picked at
the peak of their nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your
great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more. Americans spend, on average, less than 10% of their income on
food, down from 24% in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation.
Better food often costs more, because it has been raised with more care,
without government subsidy and with less environmental impact. Those of us
who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good
soils will contribute not only to your health but also to the health of
those people who grow it and live downstream, and downwind, of the farms
where it is grown.

6. “Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all. But the scientific case
for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie
restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many
researchers believe it offers the strongest link between diet and cancer
prevention. Once one of the longest-lived people, the Okinawans practiced a
principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80% full. Quality
may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the
quality of food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied.

7. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. They’re really good for you. By
eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming fewer calories, since plant
foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things
you might eat. Vegetarians and near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are
healthier than carnivores. Thomas Jefferson advised treating meat more as a
flavoring than a food.

8. Let culture be your guide; Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or
the Italians. Or the Greeks. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a
healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. Pay
attention to how a culture eats, as well as what it eats. It may not be the
nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!)
so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking,
communal meals-and the serious pleasure taken in eating.

9. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate
processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the
values and culture of fast food: that food should be cheap and easy; that
food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, embodied in
those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet
and health than any nutrition journal.

10. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to
your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you
are to cover all your nutritional bases. Biodiversity in the diet means less
monoculture in the fields. The vast monocultures that now feed us require
tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Diversifying
those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants
and animals, and healthier people. Your health isn’t bordered by your body
and what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

John Stone took pictures of himself every day for 479 days from January 6, 2003 until April 28, 2004, then every month on the first of the month to the present. He says that his physique changed solely due to diet and exercise (no steroids). You can watch a video of his transformation here. (2.4 MB Quicktime)

Belly circumference:

108.5 cm
98.5 cm

09/14/2005 –

Weight: 189.7
Waist: 36.75

11:32 – Began drinking 250 cal sugar water.
14:42 – Finished drinking sugar water
15:30 – Ate peanut butter sandwich, yogurt
20:45 – Ate bowl of lentil soup w/yogurt
21:00 – Ate can of peaches

09/15/2005 -

Weight: 188.2
Waist: 36 5/8

11:30 Ate bowl of lentil soup
12:30 Ate Nature Valley Crunchy Granola Oats and Honey bar (180), Quaker Chewy Peanut Butter Chocolate crunch (120)
15:00 Began drinking 250 cal sugar water
17:00 Finished drinking

Diet log:

~11:00 a.m.

2 bananas
2 oatmeal cookies

12:54
1 banana
1 apple

15:25
Progresso vegetable soup, 1 can, 160 cal
tomatoes, roma, 3
tomatoe, sandwhich, 1

16:39
green pepper, 1

hotdog
chicken sandwich (flame broiled, w/tomato, lettuce, no mayo)
mini-watermelon
baked potato