Lose 65 Pounds Eating Twice as Many Calories!
At first blush, this sounds like some hardcore internet hucksterism. But if your name is Mokolo or Bebac this would be an accurate claim. Do these names sound funny? Well yeah, they are gorillas in captivity. Recently they were switched from a diet with a substantial amount of high-calorie density refined food as part of a low-calorie diet to a very high-calorie diet revolving around 100% whole foods with a much lower calorie density and pleasure index…
Science Daily reports…
“Gone is the bucketful of vitamin-rich, high-sugar and high-starch foods that zoos used for decades to ensure gorillas received enough nutrients.
Instead, Cleveland’s Mokolo and Bebac receive a wheelbarrow of romaine lettuce, dandelion greens and endive they gently tear and bite, alfalfa hay they nimbly pick through, young tree branches they strip of succulent bark and leaves, green beans, a handful of flax seeds, and three Centrum Silver multivitamins tucked inside half a smashed banana.
Instead of spending about a quarter of their day eating the old diet, the pair now spends 50 to 60 percent of each day feeding and foraging, about the same amount of time wild gorillas forage.
Although they take in twice as many calories on the new diet, after a year, the big boys of the primate house have dropped nearly 65 pounds each and weigh in the range of their wild relatives.”
Of course this is all very reminiscent of some things discussed in 180 Degree Metabolism. I think of Jon Gabriel’s incorporation of a lot more raw foods into his diet, and eating everything with a big salad. It makes me think even more about Joel Fuhrman’s dietary recommendations, in which all of his patients are instructed to add 2 pounds of green, leafy vegetables to their daily diet – not quite 10 pounds like Mokolo and Bebac, but the same concept. And it certainly reminds me of raw foodists that graze on fruits and greens all day long – yet still lose weight often to the point of emaciation.
“You may already know that the conventional ‘solution’ to being overweight – low-calorie dieting – doesn’t work. But you may not know why. It is for this simple yet much overlooked reason: for the vast majority of people, being overweight is not caused by how much they eat but by what they eat. The idea that people get heavy because they consume a high volume of food is a myth. Eating large amounts of the right food is your key to success…”
-Joel Fuhrman; Eat to Live
What’s really going on here? There are many ways to scrutinize it, all of them delicious brain candy.
For starters, as THIS REPORT on gorilla nutrition claims, “browse” like leafy greens and such are only 50% metabolizable. Doubling calories but only absorbing half the calories wouldn’t yield a big increase in actual calories now would it? It reminds me of a friend that came across my overfeeding ideas and then later complained to me that he had put on a ton of weight and was having some other issues despite noting improvements in sex drive and some other things. Then I went to visit him and he was fasting until 2pm, nibbling throughout the day, and then getting in most of his calories by eating chocolate cake washed down with half and half at about 1 in the morning. Not exactly what I’m advocating (although it was really tasty!).
Also, in the same report, it’s mentioned that 57% of zoos feed gorillas peanuts and 79% feed them sunflower seeds. Plus, commercial food that they are given is often very similar to Purina dog food which contains lots of PUFA-rich grain and often vegetable oil as well. One could hardly put all the blame on refined sugar and starch alone if the gorillas are being fed a bunch of fats that make them hypometabolic and hyperinflammatory.
This could be particularly significant as it pertains to gorillas because gorillas have a more ruminant-like physiology than humans or other primates, with large, protuberant abdomen and wide body cavity that acts like a big fermenting chamber. In this fermenting chamber the massive quantities of plant fiber in their natural, wild diet are converted into short-chain saturated fatty acids – butyric acid, propionic acid, and acetic acid. Although these fats may not comprise as large of a proportion of dietary calories as a true ruminant (sheep obtain 65-80% of their calories from SCFA’s), they still can be substantial. This is very important though, as propionic acid is an important insulin sensitizer and butyric acid facilitates the transport of thyroid hormones into the mitochondrion where it stimulates metabolism and energy production (the fats in peanuts and sunflower seeds do the opposite).
Feeding gorillas a low-fiber (it’s estimated that most gorilla diets in the wild contain 2 to 5 times as much fiber as they receive in captivity), high-PUFA diet (polyunsaturated fat is pretty scarce in the tropics where gorillas live) could create a huge reversal of the natural balance of saturated to unsaturated fats in the gorilla’s tissues. Of course, most estimates of the typical pre-industrial human diet revealed fiber intakes from 70-200 grams daily, which, in humans, would yield fewer absorbed calories from those eaten, lower pleasure response, and a huge increase in the production of the most metabolically-stimulating and insulin-sensitizing fats known – the short-chain saturated fats produced in the gut from fermenting all the indigestible material found in unrefined plant foods.
Anyway, this is all fascinating stuff. I could actually go off on a couple more related tangents, but I’ll stop here. It’s Friday for crying out loud. But let’s just say this is purely written for the stimulation of good thoughts and conversation. In real life a zookeeper does not control your food intake, you do. And the bottom line is that most people who try the Mokolo and Bebac diet (MABD) lose weight, get hungry, have other practical matters to attend to besides eating 8 hours a day, have family and social meals to prepare and attend to, and get bored then binge and get fatter than they were to begin with. That’s what happened to me when I tried Furhman’s diet for example.
But this is still very much in line with what is written in 180 Degree Metabolism - that by switching from refined to whole foods and eating as much as you want – maybe even more than you normally do, can still trigger tremendous weight loss.
Is Obesity Genetic? Omega 6 Polyunsaturated Fat and Obesity
As discussed in 180 Degree Metabolism, of all the leading suspects in the investigation for what is truly the root cause of obesity specifically, the refined carbohydrate is certainly on the top 5 list – with refined sugar heading up that list due to the massive cumulative nutrient deficit incurred when it comprises a significant portion of the diet, the effects of fructose on the liver, and it’s addictive nature which I strongly suspect is capable of drowning out the normal homeostatic body weight feedback mechanisms due to the escalating nature of addiction. Chemical flavor enhancers, alcohol, and other substances with an addictive quality are also top suspects for the very same reason.
But there’s no question, especially when examining the endocrinology of obesity, that omega 6 polyunsaturated fat is a leading suspect as well. This certainly pertains to any discussion of root causes.
Frequent www.180degreehealth.blogspot.com commenter Jannis has in the past provided some studies showing a direct comparison between the saturated and polyunsaturated fats in the diet in terms of their long-term impact on body weight in rodents. Sure enough, just as clear as day, the ratio of saturated fats to vegetable oil – the primary source of omega 6 polyunsaturated fat, determines the adult body fat levels of rodents, especially when compounded over generations showing that the ratio impacts heredity as well in a “poly pileup” fashion. “Saturated fat” should be renamed “saturated thin.”
This makes perfect sense in light of vegetable oil’s impact on basic physiology. Omega 6 polyunsaturated fat impairs thyroid function as well as the ability of thyroid hormones to connect with their receptor sites and stimulate the mitochondria at the cellular level. Omega 6 is highly inflammatory – the more of it you eat the more overtly inflammatory molecules you produce, such as Interleukin-6, and we know that there is a very tight correlation between not only obesity and inflammation in general, but with leptin resistance and substances the body secretes in response to Interleukin-6 (SOCS-3 and cortisol). You can read much more about polyunsaturated fat and leptin resistance in 180 Degree Metabolism.
Stephan Guyenet, in THIS POST, has also presented some fascinating data on the tendency of polyunsaturated fat to accumulate in the tissues and cause a transgenerational fattening effect. This couldn’t be more on topic with what we recently discussed on the 180D blog in terms of breastfeeding. It appears, indeed, as you’ll see in the 2nd graph below, that the incorporation of obscene amounts of vegetable oil at the turn of the 20th century has altered human breast milk completely – both in terms of total polyunsaturated fat content and the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 which we know to be a prime determinant of inflammation levels. Of course, our tissues reflect this massive dietary shift as well as you can see in the first of Guyenet’s graphs…
And the graph showing changes in omega 6 and omega 3 in human milk 
On the topic of the role of transgenerational inheritance in obesity, Guyenet writes…
“In 2009, Dr. Ingeborg Hanbauer published a paper showing that when mice are fed a diet with a poor omega-6:3 balance (77:1), after three generations they develop adult obesity (5). Mice fed the same diet with a better omega-6:3 balance (9.5:1) did not develop obesity, and remained smaller overall. This shows that PUFA imbalance can cause multi-generational effects resulting in obesity and excessive tissue growth.”
Overall, I personally suspect that the balance between omega 6 to 3 is just part of the story. The sheer quantity and presence of such high levels of linoleic acid as well as Arachidonic acid (found in greatest abundance in pork and poultry fed a diet high in linoleic acid) has an overtly inflammatory and thyroid-suppressive effect, both strongly implicated in not just obesity, but nearly every health problem ever investigated.
This is yet again a hereditary factor that strongly disposes a person to storing excess fat. Note, once more, this is not “genetic” even though it is inherited, and there is something that can be done about it. The solution, although it takes years to come to fruition, is quite simple in fact…
- Displace liquid vegetable oil and margarine with coconut oil, dairy fat, and fat from ruminant animals (cows, sheep, goats)
- Eat macadamia nuts and nut butter instead of other nuts, seeds, and nut butters
And if you want to get even more picky…
- Eat more red meat, fish, shellfish, milk, and cheese instead of pork, poultry, and eggs (particularly commercial versions of those)
- Eat more root vegetables and legumes (excluding soybeans) and fewer grains
More, including a full chart of the omega 6 content of nearly 100 common foods, can be found in 180 Degree Metabolism.
Geneen Roth
I spent the weekend reading a few books by Geneen Roth. While I wouldn’t call it a totally productive use of my time – there were 10 pages of fluff for every useful sentence, I didn’t want this time spent to be totally in vain. So we interrupt our “Is Obesity Genetic?” series to acknowledge one of the world’s most vocal and successful non-dieters. I wish that one of the books of hers I read was her latest – Women, Food, and God, as it sounds the most interesting from a food-relationship standpoint. Anyway, for the purposes of transcending the diet for health and weight loss paradigm, Geneen Roth has some great ideas and decades of useful real-world experience. For more about the counterproductivity of trying to diet your way thin and healthy, listen to THIS PROGRAM.
“My friend Clara told me a story about a client of hers, an eight-year-old child who had been on a diet for two years and had gained fourteen ponds in the process. In desperation, her mother consulted Clara; Clara asked what her daughter’s favorite food was. ‘M&Ms,’ the mother replied.
‘Good, I want you to leave here and buy enough M&Ms to fill a pillowcase. After you’ve done that, give the filled pillowcase to your daughter and let her eat the candy whenever she wants. As soon as the supply is diminished, refill it. Make sure she always has a full pillowcase of M&Ms. Take her off the diet, let her eat whatever she wants when she is hungry, and call me in a week.’
After shrieking with horror and telling Clara that if her daughter gained fifty pounds, she was going to send her to live at Clara’s house, the mother crept out of Clara’s office, into a supermarket, and then home to her linen closet.
Her daughter carried the pillowcase of M&Ms around with her for eight days. She slept with it, she set it beside the tub when she took a bath, she put it in a chair when she watched television. And, of course, she helped herself to M&Ms whenever she wanted them. Which, the first few days, was very often. In fact, after her mother bought three more pounds of M&Ms on the third day of this sugar-coated experience, she was ready to sue Clara. In a hysterical phone call, she told her that her child was eating more candy than ever before and how the hell was she supposed to lose weight doing this? Clara reassured her that her daughter was reacting to the years of deprivation and that when she believed, really believed, that she could eat whatever she wanted and that her mother was not waiting to snatch her pillowcase away, she would relax and begin eating from stomach hunger.
On the ninth day, the pillowcase stayed in the bedroom. By the end of five weeks, her daughter had forgotten the M&Ms and had lost six pounds.”
Here’s another insightful quote by Roth. My own personal experience with this is 100% congruent, and it was the refusal to attach guilt to the experience of eating previously forbidden foods that finally broke the cycle for me…
“When I stopped dieting, I was terrified. Since I had spent every single day for seventeen years on either a diet or a binge, I was certain that given the permission to eat as much ice cream as I wanted, I would devour the entire gallon. But after the initial glee of releasing myself from diet jail, I discovered that it was the forbiddenness itself that made certain foods so attractive; I wanted what I couldn’t have. When I gave myself permission to eat a gallon of ice cream without feeling as if I were having a secret affair with a married man, I didn’t want it anymore. (Okay, I confess. It took two rounds of eating the whole gallon without guilt before I realized that being sick to my stomach was not the way I wanted to spend the evening.) I began to understand that the only reason I had previously wanted the whole thing was because I wouldn’t let myself eat even a teaspoonful without guilt. When I took the forbiddenness away, I also took away the need to rebel. When I stopped dieting, I stopped bingeing.”
For more on filing divorce with your diet, read 180 Degree Metabolism.
Is Obesity Genetic? Part II: Perinatal Influences
Once again, we are sort of making a fool of the lame term “genetic.” As discussed in 180 Degree Metabolism, many of the things we inherit are not much more “genetic” than the ridiculous hand-me-down Osh Kosh overalls we were forced to wear during that phase of life where we really didn’t know any better. Interestingly, at age 6 when I did know better I convinced my mom to let me get a Mohawk haircut complete with one of those little rat tails in the back and run around wearing mostly camo clothing, but that’s another story. Judge my character if you like, maybe even go so far as to call me a suburban redneck, but I’m just going to blame it all on what my mom ate before I was born and baby formula anyway, so you might as well not bother.
Speaking of which, we’ve known since before the dawn of the science of genetics that the nutrition of parents has a huge influence over the health of the upcoming offspring. Animal breeding makes this abundantly clear for starters. But humans have understood how this impacts human breeding probably for millenia. When health “explorer” Weston A. Price circumnavigated the globe in search of the fundamentals of health he repeatedly came across “primitive” tribes of people that had developed special feeding customs for married couples prior to conception. These customs were of course to provide them with the most nutrient and calorie-dense foods available and lots of them. A period of six months or so of nutritional superabundance prior to intended conception was very common.
While we could talk all day about how the dental structure, bone structure, and so forth are all influenced by the nutrition of the parents, the focus on this is of course body weight and metabolism.
When it comes to obesity, mom’s lack of adequate calories is a huge predictor of the weight of the kids. With famine it is very clear. As Ellen Ruppel Shell documents, discussing the famous Dutch Hunger newborns…
“They made the rather startling discovery that adult children of mothers exposed to famine during the first two trimesters of their pregnancy were 80 percent more likely to be obese as adults… From this, the researchers theorized that deprivation in the first two trimesters primed these famine victims for a life of scarcity. When food became plentiful after the war, this ‘thrifty fetus’ effect backfired, with obesity as the consequence. Later, scientists would also note higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic disease and even mental illness…”
As I’ve pointed out in the past including in 180 Degree Metabolism, I also found it to be an extremely pertinent detail in the development of the astronomical rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in Pima Indians that they had an extended famine immediately prior to the introduction of all-you-can-eat Western fare. Other work supports this general obesity priming effect that takes place when there is caloric, and potentially nutrient deprivation, or both prior to and during pregnancy as well as during the developmental years. More from Shell…
“Tufts University Professor Susan Roberts and other have studied children in shantytowns of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and concluded that stunting by malnutrition early in life predicts obesity in adults. Deborah Crooks, an anthropologist at the University of Kentucky, found similar effects in poor children living in a rural eastern region of her state. Children stunted from birth by poor maternal nutrition were more likely to be obese, and Crooks writes, face the same evolutionary nutritional pressures as do children in newly developing countries, like Kosrae. This may help explain why Hispanic and Asian American teenagers born to poor families but brought up in the food-rich environment of the United States are more than twice as likely as their parents to be dangerously overweight.”
And of course, all of this “priming” conditions them for a sub-normal metabolism. And with a below-normal metabolic rate adjusted for height, age, gender, lean body mass, and physical activity, you are bound to see the health consequences aside from just the weight itself as a falling metabolism is highly involved in the development of cardiovascular disease, cancer, glucose metabolism disorders, and so on…
“With the help of the national Health Service Registry, the researchers located over a thousand Herefordshire babies born between 1920 and 1930, who were by then between sixty and seventy years old. Comparing the infant and adult records, Barker noticed that adults born underweight for their length, or who weighed eighteen pounds or less at age one, were more likely to develop coronary heart disease and stroke than were other infants. It seemed that these people had been marked from birth.”
The take home messages here are pretty simple…
1) If your kid wants a Mohawk, let him/her do it and get it out of the system early so that he/she doesn’t do ridiculous things to try to get attention later in life. Hell, I don’t even have any tattoos.
2) If you are highly obese or overweight, odds are that part of the reason why stems from events that took place before you born, while your mother was pregnant, and poor nutrition during your developmental years (don’t even get me started on baby formula).
3) If you are a woman (or a man) hoping to have kids someday, more kids at some point, or you are already pregnant – don’t restrict calories in an attempt to lose weight, but instead bombard yourself with the most nutritious, unadulterated, unprocessed food that you can get your hands on with a minimum of restrictions (no vegan diets, no low-carb diets, etc.) like it’s your job. This becomes even more important within six months of conception, during pregnancy, and when you are breastfeeding.
4) Your young kids should never be told to diet, have their food restricted in any way (unless there is a VERY pressing medical reason to do so) other than you providing nutritious foods at home, or otherwise be deprived. Deprivation before and during childhood in today’s society is a perfect recipe for weight gain, eating disorders, and health issues related to metabolic syndrome later in life. Kids need to be constantly reinforced to understand that their hunger is not an enemy, and that food is a friend to be appreciated, honored, and enjoyed.
Is Obesity Genetic? Part I – Twins and Adoptees
Although genetics and inheritance are two entirely different topics in my view as I discuss in 180 Degree Metabolism (many things we inherit are not genetic and basically anything that our parents thought, did, or ingested has a transgenerational effect that impacts our DNA and metabolism) – there’s no doubt that by far the strongest correlation to obesity is a straight line pinpointing to heredity as the chief factor.
One type of study that has been done showing this the best is the type of study where they have taken Angelina Jolie wannabes (people who adopt kids), and shown how body fat levels in the kids correlate much more closely with the body fat levels of their birth parents than of their adopting parents.
This is very true as it pertains to a couple I know who adopted an Asian kid. The two of them weigh nearly 700 pounds put together. Their natural daughter is a highly overweight kid. The Asian adopted kid is tiny and lean as can be – yet they all live in the identical junk food environment. Somehow I kinda doubt it’s due to the amazing willpower the Asian kid developed prior to the age of one and held onto through her developing years in the face of Grimace’s brainwashing.
Identical twins provide even stronger correlations, and twins that have been separated at birth provide an excellent vista into how much of a role heredity plays vs. psychology, parental conditioning, activity levels, and subtle dietary differences. Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of the totally decent book The Hungry Gene, writes…
“Identical twins tend to have remarkably similar body mass indexes, far more similar than do siblings or even fraternal twins. This is true even for identical twins separated at birth and raised far apart in different adoptive families. The BMI of adopted children usually correlates nicely with that of their biological parents, but not with that of their adoptive parents. This strongly suggests that genetics or congenital effects, not ‘psychology,’ play the larger role in human obesity.”
Robert Pool in Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic reports…
“In the case of BMI, studies of identical twins reared apart imply a heritability of about 70 percent. That is, on average, about 70 percent of the difference in BMI from one person to the next is caused by genetic differences.”
Ha! He said “reared!”
Not only do twins tend to gain the same amount of weight over the course of a lifetime, but they tend to store the fat in the exact same places as well. Of course, all of this is hormonal, and all fat storage is hormonal. In studies of twins that didn’t weigh the same (discordant obesity), visceral fat was scrutinized and it was found that those with the highest cortisol output had more belly fat – leading the study authors to believe that psychosocial stress was the primary difference between the two.
Anyway, the point of this is not to say that all obesity is “genetic.” The very word genetic sends shivers up and down my spine because it is such a misused term. There have been no drastic changes in the human genome – yet there have been many changes in the expression of that genome that can equally be called “hereditary.” The human being doesn’t just spit out the same replicated copies over and over again. Genetic interaction with environmental, social, lifestyle, and dietary factors in the preconceptual and peri-natal environment has a huge influence over genetic expression in the future generation. We have and are seeing a huge degradation of our genes over the past century.
A good example of this is to simply look at teeth. The human genome is coded for producing 32 straight teeth in perfect alignment. But interactions with the modern world that take place prior to conception make it so that kids come into the world today and do not have 32 straight teeth – at least not very often. Our genes are being tainted, and there are some things we can do about it and some things we can’t do about it. I don’t ever expect to have the 20-20 vision the human genome is coded for to give an example.
Clearly the battle is about stopping the factors that impair our ability to self-regulate things such as weight, and understanding how someone metabolically programmed through heredity to have a “thrifty metabolism” can shut that down and reverse it. Factors such as dieting obviously strengthen that tendency. I also just showed by highlighting Al Sears’s PACE program that two twins could radically change their formerly-identical body compositions through one simple difference in the type of exercise they engaged in. More in the next post in this series about what I’ve been led to believe are some of those primary factors.
For some good reading until then, check out my e-buddy Ryan Koch’s article on Epigenetics, and his series on the hereditary influences of obesity…
http://ryan-koch.blogspot.com/2010/04/obesity-heredity-part-4-epigenetics.html
Body By Design Review
I was recently sent a copy to review of Kris Gethin, Editor in Chief of Bodybuilding Magazine’s new book – Body By Design. Although the book was the same old same old lift weights and do cardio on your off days while eating 2 pounds of low-fat meat per day spread out over 5-6 meals, the book was not without its hidden gems (ha ha, I wrote the work “gyms” instead of gems the first time through). Instead of trying to break down everything that was said in the book, I’ll highlight those gems.
For starters, on the inside cover of the book is Furious Pete! He’s pretty much my hero, and he got a full spread in the book itself about his transformation from 120 pounds and on the verge of death by anorexia to a massive beast and successful competitive eater (although Kobayashi gave this kid a serious “eat down” from what I understand).
What I actually really did appreciate about the book was Gethin’s attempt to let the psychological element dominate the book itself rather than put all the emphasis on exactly how you should work out and what to eat. His main point seemed to be that undergoing a physical transformation cannot be something you do out of self-loathing. It can’t be something you do with a fixed, finite goal in mind. Rather, it has to be something you do because you really want to treat your body well, get fit to support your life and make it more rewarding and fulfilling, and do it just because you are ready to change your life and habits that you know are dragging your health and happiness down the same bumpy road.
I couldn’t agree more. Try to exercise and eat healthy food because you “should” or to “work off some pounds” is an almost guaranteed recipe for failure. Rather, it has to come from a place of interconnectedness – that feeling of dying to treat yourself better, get beyond the addictive grip of unwholesome junk food, and to experience how downright fun and purifying it is to move the body with physical exercise. To demonstrate this concept, Gethin writes:
“One study tested a related theory by having two separate groups of college students play a puzzle game similar to Tetris. Researchers told one group that they would be paid for each puzzle they solved; the other was simply given the game to play. What happened was surprising – the paid individuals quit playing immediately once the experiment session ended, but those who weren’t getting paid continued to play the game beyond the timed experiment, simply for the sake of enjoyment. The monetary reward eclipsed the fun for the first group, and they lost their connection to the internal motivation to just play.”
The book is filled with several people’s own personal transformations as well, many of which are fascinating – and you can tell that the before and after photos are not just of people who have dieted down and are ready to balloon up again, and how magnificent some of the physiques are is inconsequential, but that these people really went after the life they wanted and seized it. Many went from 400-something pound junk food addicts that never left the house and became living superheroes. The woman to the left once weighed 490 pounds!
Some of the insights these people shared were very valuable too I thought…
“When you start eating nutrient-dense foods, unhealthy foods just don’t taste as good. And the funny thing is, you might think you’re going to be hungrier when you’re eating well, but I actually have to remind myself now that it’s time to eat.”
-Antonio Wright
“As I increased my intensity and frequency in the gym, I began to look at food as fuel; I was eating with a purpose and not absentmindedly… I was excited by the changes in my body and wanted to see more. I ate to improve the quality of my training, and ultimately my life!”
-Kassandre Harper-Cotton
Anyway, the book is far from being a must-read or a comprehensive manual for a physical transformation. I think Gethin probably wanted to be a lot more inspiring in his writing than he really was. But like I said, it had its hidden gems no doubt.
And it made me think a lot about how people really need to custom fit their exercise and diets to themselves, not try to fit themselves into some diet and lifestyle. For example, if I don’t eat lots of fat at home, I end up eating more sweets and restaurant food and am less healthy overall. Gethin is an advocate of a zero added fat diet. For me, this would make me a binge-eating, fat-storing machine. Like I discuss in 180 Degree Metabolism, I tried to eat a rabbit food, healthy, no junk food, nutrient-dense diet with a heavy exercise load for a full decade. It never worked. When I try eating a rich, decadent, soul-satisfying healthy, no junk food, nutrient-dense diet it happens automatically. Instead I drink a few ounces of half and half straight out of the carton and thus don’t even notice the ice cream when I walk down that aisle. If I did notice it, I’d crush an entire pint or more and be ready to do it again the next day.
Same with exercise. It’s far better to do slightly too little than slightly too much. If you want to maintain any exercise program for more than a few months, and take advantage of the real benefits of exercise which are long-term and cumulative, there’s no question that underachieving and keeping yourself hungry to exercise instead of wearing yourself out is a much better strategy.
So make all this fit you. Don’t try to fit into the mold of a 6-day a week gym rat that eats 6 daily meals of chicken breast, steamed broccoli, and brown rice with fish oil capsules for dessert. That’s what it might take to be a fitness competitor, but you don’t want to be a fitness competitor. You just want to feel better and live a better life.
Customize all this stuff to support your life and personal preferences instead of casting your life aside to become a health fanatic. If you cast the things in life that you want to be doing and focused on aside, no matter how ripped you get, you lose. Unless you are a model or aspire to be one, a professional athlete or aspire to be one, or a health and fitness professional or aspire to be one – anything related to diet and exercise should play a supporting role in your life, not a leading one. Stop trying to be someone you aren’t. Be MORE you.
PACE by Al Sears
In the last post on the 180 Degree Health Blog, I promised to put up a quick video and some stats from a clinical study performed by Al Sears comparing the body composition differences in two female identical twins exposed to two different types of exercise… that just so happens to more or less disprove all of these commonly held beliefs:
1) You can’t build muscle and burn fat at the same time
2) You must lift weights to gain substantial amounts of muscle
3) Women can’t gain muscle easily
4) Women can’t achieve 10% body fat levels without counting calories
5) You must overeat to gain substantial amounts of muscle
6) You must restrict calories to lose substantial amounts of body fat
7) You must exercise more than 30 minutes per week to burn substantial amounts of body fat
Neither were instructed in any way to change their diets, and both report not changing their diets from what they considered to be regular.
They started out running 1 mile each 3 times per week. One twin gradually increased intensity and shortened the duration of the exercise until, by the end, she was doing 6 sets of 50-meter sprints – less than a quarter mile workout with less than one minute of total exertion – or 3 minutes per week that is. The other built up to running 10 miles per day 3 times per week. This study sets up a perfect comparison on how short-duration exercise effects body composition compared to long-duration exercise.
Being idential twins, they came into the study with more or less identical body composition and body fat percentages around 24%.
By the end of the study one of the girls had a body fat percentage at 10%, the other at 19.5%. Can you guess which one?
By the end of the study, one girl had gained 9 pounds of lean body mass. Keep in mind this is a woman, and this is without overfeeding OR weight training, none of which anyone in the mainstream believes is possible. The other lost 2 pounds of lean body mass. Can you guess which one?
For more on this type of exercise and why it is so promising and practical all at the same time, read the brand new material just added to 180 Degree Metabolism that starts on page 147.
The Metabolism Truth
In the last post we talked about the myths surrounding metabolism. One myth is that overweight people have a slower metabolism and burn fewer calories on average than lean people do. Nope, it’s the opposite in fact. The more you weigh, generally the more calories you burn. It’s thought that this elevation in total energy consumption might be responsible for what is commonly seen in obese individuals such as very high resting pulse rates and hypertension (when body weight is low, such as in starvation or in endurance athletes, low resting pulse rates and hypotension are generally the rule).
But the real story, the “truth” behind the size of your behind, really does correlate very tightly with metabolism (just as I allude to in my book 180 Degree Metabolism), calorie burning, and total energy expenditure (TEE) when adjustments are made to put those yardsticks into relative terms. In one of my favorite books on the topic of obesity, an obscure gem written by Robert Pool titled Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic, Pool describes such a study in which adjustments were made for key factors…
“They found that a subject’s total energy expenditure, adjusted for body composition, age, and sex, predicted quite well which of the subjects would gain weight. When Ravussin focused on two subsets of his patients – high-energy sorts, whose 24-hour energy expenditures were at least 200 calories greater than expected, and low-energy types, who burned off at least 200 calories less than expected – he found that the low-energy type subjects were four times as likely to gain at least 18 pounds over the next two years as the high-energy group.”
The key in this passage is “greater than expected,” and “less than expected” with an emphasis on EXPECTED.
When you look at all the factors such as weight, body fat to muscle mass ratios, gender, age, physical activity levels, etc. you can easily come up with what one SHOULD be burning per day on an individual basis according to what is normal. And this study did indeed find that those burning a surprisingly low amount of calories with all factors taken into consideration were precisely those with a “thrifty” metabolism and a tendency to store fat. The hypermetabolic people adjusted for all those factors did not.
Too bad more studies like this aren’t done to show all the connections between this low metabolic state and not only fat gain, but heart disease, most cancers, autoimmune disease, allergies, asthma, type 2 diabetes, susceptibility to infection, infertility, early puberty, and pretty much anything you care to link it to.
For example, being an energy conserver reduces the rate at which you convert LDL (“bad” cholesterol) to hormones like testosterone and progesterone. Convert a lot, and you are likely to have low levels of LDL in your blood and be muscular, lean, highly fertile, have a high sex drive, age well, have no autoimmune disease, and have a tremendous resistance against cancer – many of which are thought by researchers like Ray Peat for example, to be linked to an excess of estrogen without enough of the opposing hormones like testosterone and progesterone.
Being an energy conserver is much more likely to lead to a reduced rate of fat oxidation and an increased rate of conversion of carbohydrate to fat in a process called “lipogenesis.” The result is that you manufacture more fatty acids and burn fewer fatty acids and have an accumulation of triglycerides in your blood (known to be one of the primary causes of insulin resistance, as this elevation in fat interferes with proper glucose clearance).
Even more unfortunate is how easily one can assess whether or not his or her body is conserving energy or using it at the optimal rate. A $4 thermometer is all the diagnostic equipment required.
Of course the modern doctor takes your body temperature in an act of obligatory routine, ignores it (unless it’s normal, then the nurse says, and I quote, “98.6, wow, don’t see that too often!”), and then busily goes about weighing you, testing your blood for triglycerides and elevated LDL cholesterol, and, if anything is amiss, telling you to eat less and do lots of steady-state cardio (which lowers your body temperature and makes it conserve more energy), telling you to cut out saturated fat and eat more “healthy fats” like canola oil (which lowers your body temperature and makes it conserve more energy), and when all that fails (miserably) prescribes you medication with side effects that include an astronomically higher risk of cancer and hasn’t been shown to increase lifespan.
Profound wisdom doc. Profound wisdom. Don’t quit ya day job.
“One of my recurring objects of thought has been the slowness with which raw knowledge is assimilated. For example, I have been thinking about Broda Barnes’s work on the prevention of heart disease with thyroid extract. He did solve much of ‘the riddle of heart attacks,’ but recent statements by the Heart Association show that the dominant forces in the health business haven’t learned anything at all from his work, which he began 50 years ago. His work is clearly presented, not hard to understand, and it is scientifically so sound that no one challenges it, at least not on the scientific level. It is ignored, rejected by people who choose not to be bothered to read it. How many people have died from heart disease, since his work first became available? (And how many more from cancer, tuberculosis, and other diseases he showed occur mainly among hypothyroid people?)”
-Ray Peat
The Basal Metabolic Rate Myth
In the popular dieting world, you hear tons about metabolism, metabolism, metabolism! Gain muscle and your metabolism will skyrocket! Burn calories while you sleep! Turn your body into a calorie burning furnace!
And the research community, which often stands in complete opposition to the dieting status quo, presumed for a long time that fat people became fat because they just didn’t burn as many calories. They had “thrifty” or “sluggish” metabolisms.
And then you have good ol’ me going on and on about metabolism, metabolism, metabolism – but this is not a word I use to strictly describe how many calories you are burning, but your body temperature, which we’ll get to why that’s such a big difference in a sec…
But in actuality, a superficial look at basal metabolic rate – or how many calories you burn and oxygen you expend in any given day, is an irrelevant figure. This is because, drumroll please…
On average, the obese have much higher basal metabolic rates than lean people do.
It’s a head-scratcher at first glance. But it’s true. I mean sure, there are some obese people that don’t burn many calories compared to their lean counterparts, but as a general rule, the fatter you are, the higher your basal metabolic rate – the number of calories you burn at rest. The best way to increase your basal metabolic rate is to get as fat as you possibly can.
This is because, along with gaining fat, there is usually a substantial gain of lean mass as well – organs, bones, and skeletal muscle. While you may not feel like a Hulk under your bulk, there is a reason why the obese suffer from far less osteoporosis than the lean – the overweight have much greater bone density with much larger organs as well. “I’m not fat I’m big boned!” But there is often more muscle under there than you think.
But that’s not the only reason. With more fat you have a larger total surface area to keep warm. You still have to at least try to keep all that body mass warm, and that burns a tremendous amount of calories. In the extremely obese, basal metabolic rates of 4,000 and even 5,000 calories per day are not uncommon.
But one thing is for certain, the bodies of the highly overweight, in the process of becoming overweight, have done so because of being in a functional state of energy conservation. How many calories you burn each day, all things considered, is more or less irrelevant. If your body is conserving energy, which can be easily determined by monitoring your body temperature, you are much more likely to be in positive fat balance – putting more fat into fat cells than are drawn out.
And virtually all overweight people – and many lean people as well, particularly those with a long list of health problems, have a body temperature that is far below the standard 98.6 degrees F. While I’ve taken many overweight people back to normal body temperatures via getting them at or above their weight set point (ideally by making the weight set point fall, but this isn’t always the case and there are still a few that have gained some weight coming out of a highly dieted state in the first stage), I certainly haven’t run across any that had normal body temperatures, and if they did I would assume that they would be at their weight set point, eating whatever the heck they wanted and not gaining an ounce just like your typical teenager because their bodies are no longer conserving energy (even if they were already wearing a 100-pound “sweater”).
Anyway, the point of the post is simple. It’s not all about burning calories. It’s more about restructuring the metabolism – which is the sum total of all the hormonal and enzymatic interplay inside of our bodies, convincing it to no longer conserve energy or hoard it for times of perceived famine.
The good news is that overweight people, generally speaking, are not just metabolic cripples beyond a chance at repair. In fact, following the exact same advice, a thin young male tends to gain a lot more fat than an obese older man or woman when eating to appetite of whole, nutritious, unrefined, and unprocessed foods. No joke. The people who have lost the most weight eating to appetite and even beyond appetite of such foods thus far have been overweight middle-aged women. Surprisingly, the metabolic/physiological differences found between an obese person at his/her weight set point and a lean person at his/her weight set point are virtually nonexistent.
Another interesting tidbit is that when an obese person falls below weight set point by attempting “intentional” weight loss, typically via a combination of steady-state cardio exercise (boo!) and cutting back calories without much thought for food quality (boo!), metabolism slows down dramatically – way out of proportion to their change in weight or levels of lean body mass. Those who have lost 100 pounds or more in metabolic studies were found to have far lower basal metabolic rates than those that weighed as much as 100 pounds less than they did.
Measured in calories burned per square meter of body mass, the reduced obese are severely hypometabolic (one study showed a metabolism drop of 28% per square meter of body mass after substantial weight loss). And that, ladies and gents, is really what counts and is why the total number of calories burned per day – referred to as the basal metabolic rate, is indeed mythical, useless, and irrelevant to the obesity story.
The only pound lost that is likely to stay off is the one that comes off WITHOUT the disproportionate drop in metabolic rate that is typically observed in the standard diet approach. And the only ways I’ve found to achieve this with any kind of consistency are:
- Power/performance exercise (resistance/strength training or “metabolic” exercise).
- Switching to a nutrient-dense whole foods diet devoid of refined sweeteners, flavor enhancers, white flour, etc. – eaten to appetite.
- A combination of the two.
For more, read 180 Degree Metabolism: The Smart Strategy for Fat Loss
P.S. - A final tidbit I’ll add is that it’s another common myth that “exercise raises your metabolism.” While resistance exercise/strength training or what I call “metabolic exercise” in 180 Degree Metabolism may indeed raise the metabolic rate in some people, endurance exercise or steady-state cardio has a very powerful and substantial lowering effect on the basal metabolic rate. Burning calories raises what’s called “TEE” or Total Energy Expenditure, but that has nothing to do with your “metabolic rate.”
Fuel Partitioning
When we consume calories their fate is undetermined. The mainstream looks at calories in and calories out as if it is a simple equation, and those who gain fat simply lost track of their calorie checkbooks. Well hell, if that ain’t the most simple-minded aimless piece of flying monkey feces I don’t know what is! (make sure when reading the last sentence you are using a thick Southern accent in your mind… it helps).
Looking at calories in and calories out in such a manner is ridiculous. I mean, two people can consume totally different amounts of potassium and sodium for example, but the ratio in the bloodstream between two people can be identical. It is not merely a reflection of the diet itself, because the body has countless regulatory mechanisms that keep the “sodium in/sodium out” balance intact. Of course, oxygen in/oxygen out is an even more obvious example.
The way your body looks is a reflection, not of what you eat, but what your body does with what you eat. It can use the food you eat to build fat, build muscle, create heat, create energy – or it can simply be flushed down the drain just like what happens if your willpower breaks down and you “overdrink” on water.
Hormones and enzymes determine precisely everything when it comes to energy regulation shy of starving yourself to a degree that your body can’t adjust to. And the quality of our diet, the composition of our diets, the quantity of our caloric intake, our stress levels or sleep levels or infections yada yada, and the type and duration of the exercise are just some of the factors involved.
But really, when it comes to increasing your ratio of lean mass to body fat, the fuel partitioning systems are what need to be targeted. The objective is to increase heat production, energy production, and the injection of ingested calories into muscle cells or “out the back door” in favor of thriftily hoarding everything in fat cells. When you are successful at doing this, the body fat set point drops, you lose fat automatically, and it becomes increasingly difficult to store fat no matter what you eat – the opposite of what happens when people pursue “intentional” weight loss.
To achieve this, all it takes is a prolonged and consistent period of doing everything in your power to discourage your body to want to store calories in fat tissue, and encourage the production of energy and muscle tissue.
To begin with, the most important thing you do is eat to appetite and potentially even a little bit beyond appetite, of mostly starch, meat, vegetables, and fruit in that general order. If you are coming out of a starved state somehow (where you were doing something to encourage your body to store fat for its own protection), this may cause some initial fat gain. But you will also notice a huge increase in stool moisture and volume (and a decrease in bowel transit time) as the body becomes less thrifty (it’s an almost foolproof cure for constipation). You will also see the highly coveted rise in body temperature – a signifier of a dramatic improvement in metabolic health synonymous with improved cellular respiration, healing, energy production, protein turnover, cancer and heart disease prevention, and so forth. It’s important because it’s the ultimate signifier that your body is no longer trying to conserve energy.
This is an important first step in a long-term approach to solving a lifelong tendency to store fat out of the food you eat.
Another fantastic help is doing the type of exercise that stimulates muscle growth and development. The muscles grow and get stronger in response to things that challenge their ability to generate power. The muscles adapt to get better at performing the task the next time you do it, and it creates a powerful stimulus to take the food you eat and partition it right into muscle cells for growth, repair, and strength increase – as well as energy which is another big help.
Metabolic exercise as described in 180 Degree Metabolism describes this type of exercise. One of the main keys is continued progress, meaning making the challenges ever greater over time. Doing the same workload in the same amount of time at the same intensity level every day does not encourage muscles to grow and perform better, but to stay the same and perform the same. So do what you can to introduce a variety of new challenges – either with new movements, tweaks/variations in the same old exercises you’ve been doing, doing the same amount of exercise but in an ever-decreasing amount of time, or adding more workload and achieving it in the same amount of time.
Of course, you should avoid exercise that encourages muscle catabolism (breaking down of muscle tissue) at all costs, as well as get in the habit of avoiding total sedentarism which can eventually cause muscles to atrophy as well. Endurance exercise is the type of exercise that causes the most muscle loss – more than sitting around watching television. And the slower the endurance exercise and longer the duration, the more the body uses fat as fuel to support the activity, which in turn encourages fat storage.
In the video below you can see that even just training for a 1-mile race is enough to evaporate muscle tissue, which is an adaptation that enables these athletes to run the distance at such great speed so effortlessly. Notice “coach,” who once ran a 4-minute mile and a 2:12 marathon has a huge ratio of body fat to lean muscle.
Imagine how counterproductive it would be to spend years engaged in a jogging-like exercise pattern if you were 100 pounds overweight and looking to reverse your body fat to muscle mass ratio tendencies. That’s a good way to turn the body under your fat into a hypometabolic, fat-storing stick figure!
Much more on the topic of fuel partitioning to come in the future. But for now just remember that discouraging the body from conserving energy and hoarding any excesses is best achieved by:
1) Meeting any signs of hunger with plenty of food in an unrestricted manner as it pertains to calories, carbohydrates, protein, and fat (keep in mind that in those with a tendency to store fat, processed foods with flavor enhancers, lots of sugar/sweeteners, excessive salt and fat and overall calorie density tricks the body into thinking it is starving due to how these things impact the pleasure centers in our brain – so we’re talking whole, unrefined, mostly homemade food here).
2) Doing exercise that encourages your body to divert energy into muscle cells for greater muscle development and energy production – this means anaerobic exercise, and generally the more quickly the muscle being challenged fatigues the better (just looking at running events shows pretty clearly the dividing line between muscle growth and power-enhancing exercise vs. catabolic exercise – muscles start dissolving after about 400 meters or 1-minute of continuous exercise in one burst, and sprinters who rarely run more than 10 seconds at one time generally have the highest lean to fat ratios).
3) Avoiding steady-state aerobic exercise. Walking, gardening, cooking, and other light activities are done at such a low level that no catabolic stress hormones are released, and these activities cause no muscle wasting and are fantastic for health (although unlikely to have a truly significant impact on body composition). Doing exercise that you can sustain for greater than several minutes in a single burst that still causes you to pant and your heart rate to become elevated can cause muscle wasting – especially if done for hours.
This video is so right on so many levels. Her Southern accent for starters is mind-boggingly thick. Then she bashes cardio and says she has done none for 2 years (she’s a world champion figure competitor and one of Scott Abel’s trainees, you can read about her and how her potential was being undermined by a low-carb diet and cardio exercise before she “MET” Scott in this highly-recommended article), and she is, of course, stupidly ripped. And then she goes on to put on one of the most impressive feats of human fitness and athleticism I’ve ever seen and is barely winded by the end. Yes, the right kind of exercise, complete avoidance of the wrong kind of exercise, all supported by sufficient carbohydrate intake from real food is a powerful thing.
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