Month: September 2008

Note: This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 from my book The Stubborn Fat Solution.

So you’re now nearly 50 pages into this book and still wondering why stubborn fat is stubborn. Perhaps you’ve picked up some of the reasons by inference but finally, in this chapter I can put everything together.

Fat Cell Overview/Review

In the past 6 chapters, you’ve learned a ton about fat cells and fat cell metabolism. One of the points I’ve tried to get across is that fat cells are not the same, different depots have different functional characteristics in terms of how easily they store fat, how easily they give up that fat, etc.

In general there are clear gender differences that show up at puberty, suggesting that sex hormones play a role in how fat cells develop. And there is much truth to this. It turns out that if you take a fat cell from a man’s thigh and a woman’s thigh, they are functionally identical and essentially indistinguishable physiologically.… Keep Reading

Over the years, bodybuilding nutrition has divided itself into three fairly distinct categories (I’m going to leave out the ones I consider voodoo nonsense) which are high-carb/low-fat, moderate carb/moderate fat, and low-carbohydrate. Low carb-diets can be further subdivided into high or low fat as well as cyclical or non-cyclical. I discuss each in more detail in Comparing the Diets.

In theory, you can make arguments for or against any of these approaches in terms of superiority. In the real world, it’s not quite that simple. You can always find folks (and this is true whether they are bodybuilders or just general dieters) who either succeeded staggeringly well or failed miserably on one or another approaches.

Setting Parameters for the Discussion

Before going on, I want to mention that protein recommendations tend not to vary that significantly between diets and most of the arguments tend to revolve around the varying proportions of carbohydrate and fats in the diet and that’s what I’ll be focusing on here.… Keep Reading