Month: August 2008

For decades there has been a lot of debate over the idea that bodyweight is regulated.   Decades of research suggests that there is a biological setpoint although others feel that a bodyweight settling point is a more accurate description of the system.  Likely both play a role.

An additional question is whether it is bodyweight or body fat that is being regulated.  Likely both play some sort of a role.  However, inasmuch as body fat levels tend to be the most impacted by a diet, it makes sense that a primary signal to the brain of what was going on would reside in the body fat.  The question then became what it was or even might be.

It would be decades later that the answer, or at least a partial answer would become apparent.  That answer was leptin.

The Eventual Discovery of Leptin

With early research (I’m talking the 1950’s) having established the existence of some type of setpoint (again, primarily in animal models), early researchers had to sort of guess what might be going on in terms of regulating body fat levels.… Keep Reading

Having explained why the separation of psychology and physiology is a false separation in Dieting Psychology vs. Dieting Physiology, I want to discuss quickly some of the physiology behind diet failures. This is a topic that I discuss in detail in nearly all of my recent books and I’m not going to spend endless time on it here (trying to eventually get back to the psychological factors behind diet failures).

A long standing debate in the world of obesity research revolves around the idea that bodyweight (or perhaps body fat) is regulated. What does that mean exactly?

Bodyweight Regulation

Think about your thermostat (yes, this is the example I always use): you set it to keep the house at 80 degrees and it continually senses the temperature (via a thermometer). If the temperature goes above 80 degrees, the air conditioning comes on; if it drops below 80, the heat comes on.… Keep Reading

Losing body fat is often an issue for athletes and there are various and sundry (yes, sundry) reasons that they either want or need to do this. Clearly for the physique sports (bodybuilding, fitness, figure), it’s an issue of appearance. For performance sports (everything else), losing fat or weight can often improve performance. Either the athlete can get into a lower weight class (if their sport has such) or they can improve their strength or power to weight ratio, improving performance.

I’d note, and this would be a topic for an entirely separate article, that leaner is not always better. Most sports end up having an ideal level of leanness where higher and lower levels aren’t consistent with optimal performance. Many athletes will over train or lose muscle mass and performance in the quest to get as lean as possible and this often does more harm than good.

Unfortunately, athletes often approach the goal of fat loss in an absolutely awful way.… Keep Reading