All Diets Work: The Importance of Calories
In the article All Diets Work: A Qualification 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 in that article. That something is the importance of calories.
What is Body Fat?
The more technical term for body fat is adipose tissue, with individual cells being called adipocytes (adipo = fat ; cyte = cell). In humans, the primary type of fat cell is called white adipose tissue, or WAT, so named because of its color (it’s actually sort of a milky yellow). While there is another type of fat, called brown adipose tissue or BAT (which is actually reddish/orangeish), it’s generally been thought that humans didn’t have much BAT and hence it could be ignored. As I’ll discuss later, this has been brought into question by recent research. I’ll come back to BAT in the next chapter.
All Diets Work: Qualification
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).
Alan Aragon Research Review – Product Review
Alan Aragon may be one of the least well known yet smartest guys in the industry, mainly because he sucks royally at marketing himself.
And while he and I certainly disagree on certain things (which is fine), in general we agree about more than we don’t agree about and out disagreements are usually minor in the first place.
Homeostatic and Non-Homeostatic Pathways Involved in the Control of Food Intake and Energy Balance.
The homeostatic system has to do with the idea that the body tries to maintain some specific ‘set point’ in terms of bodyweight or body fat. Basically this system takes incoming signal (from hormones like leptin, insulin, blood glucose, ghrelin, peptide YY and a host of other stuff) and makes adjustments in appetite, hormones, metabolic rate and activity to compensate.
An Introduction to the Psychology and Physiology 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.
Steady State vs. Tempo Training and Fat Loss – Q&A
I’ve been reading your blogs about steady state vs. interval training and they have been quite eye opening. In your article, “pole vault your way to a hot body” you talked a lot about tempo work in 400m runners.
