Like I said, trolling or stupid as hell; it doesn’t matter which and often the line between the two is very very thin.  You can imagine what responses he got from me regarding his criticism of my dog articles was (hint: it wasn’t appropriate for mixed company) but I’m getting off track.

But it brings me to a point/slightly ranty piece about another common mistake trainees and dieters make.  It’s something I talked a bit about before in Fundamental Principles vs. Minor Details.  That piece was more about folks who get so wrapped up in the minor (and generally irrelevant) details of their training or diet that they miss the big picture.  What I want to talk about today is similar.

What my troll/idiot above is doing, and what many do is this: they keep flailing about for that perfect program, the secret program, the magic program.  They continually look for that new and ideal program; and in doing so they never ever get around to acting.  Or if they do act, they do it in such a haphazard/half-assed way that nothing good comes out of it anyhow.

Basically, they are focusing on information rather than application.  Case in point, there are over 300+ articles on this website.  Let’s assume that 1/3rd of them are dedicated to losing body fat.  Keep in mind that at least one series is called Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 1 and Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 2 which lays out the real basics of what any fat loss diet should be about.  With that series alone, anybody should be able to get started on their fat loss goals.

And even while training isn’t quite as well laid out on the site (mainly because I haven’t written the articles yet), a similar case exists.  There are endless programs available which are time tested and have been proven to work.  I talked about three of them in A Look at Some Popular Hypertrophy Programs.  And that just scratches the surface.

My point being this: there is absolutely no lack of information regarding programs that have been shown to work.  Yet what do so many people do: feel the need to accumulate more information and more information before they ever get around to actually acting.  Which isn’t helped by the fact that so many programs seem to contradict one anther, at least superficially.  They don’t mind you, all programs that work share commonalities, they differ in irrelevant details.

As well, there is a continuous barrage of new information coming out in literature, etc.  Make no mistake, I keep up with it, that’s why I do regular research reviews and such.  But most of it at this point is minutiae, details that just don’t matter outside of a small percentage of the population if they matter at all.  The fundamental principle of what someone needs to do to generate fat loss or get bigger have been out there for years.  All that’s changing is minor details that are simply irrelevant to most people.

But that doesn’t stop people from spending days, weeks, months thinking that if they just get a little bit more information that they can finally reach their goals.  With the New Year’s Resolution time coming around, it’s going to get even worse, people will cast about for the magic program, the magic diet, the magic training and wonder why, by December 2011, they still haven’t gotten anywhere.  They will have spent the entirety of 2011 doing the same thing they did in 2010: continually absorbing new information without ever getting around to actually applying it in any consistent or meaningful fashion.

This is pointless and self-defeating.  What these people need is not information, they need to actually apply what they do know.  In a lot of ways it was simpler before the information overload of the Internet.   When you only know about one or two programs, you either do one of those two or you don’t do anything.  Now people can literally waste a career of training and dieting doing nothing but reading about the next magic program.

Yet somehow just reading about it fails to produce results.  What these people need is application; they need to take the information they already have, almost regardless of what it is and actually figure out how to apply it.  Don’t get me wrong, there are better or worse dietary or training choices for a given situation.   I’ve discussed this in various contexts such as the Comparing the Diets series.

But that doesn’t change the basic point I’m trying to make: most people don’t need more information, they need to apply the information that they have.  If this hasn’t made sense yet, I’ll follow up with a quote from strength coach Steven Plisk, written years ago in Hardgainer magazine (if my memory serves).

He said something to the effect of this:

We’ve tried every periodization scheme known to god and man with our athletes. What we found is that hard work on a mediocre program works better than half-assing it on the ‘perfect’ program.

Essentially he’s getting at what I’m trying to say a bit differently: application to the ‘non-perfect’ program is better than either trying to find the perfect program or finding it and then not working hard at it.

So this next year, if you’re wondering where 2010 went without you getting closer to your goals, look at what you did.  Did you continually look for more information, or did you actually focus on the application of what you already know works?

But between writing about my own training in Methods of Endurance Training: Results Part 5 and Methods of Endurance Training: Results Part 6 before the series on Volunteering at the Austin Humane Shelter, it seems like utterly forever since I’ve written about anything related to fat loss.  And since I always gotta move that product, that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

And since I’m a bit emotionally exhausted from the last week and a half of updates about the dogs, I’m actually going to try to keep this a bit short.  The question I want to address today is this: Does the diet determine the training or does the training determine the diet?  This isn’t really a direct question that comes up anywhere, but it is ultimately an issue that needs addressing as I hope you’ll soon see.

This is a situation that I usually refer to as square peg/round hole problems.  And by ‘I refer’ I mean this: I stole this concept from someone years ago and want to sound impressive by making it sound like I invented it.  Anyhow.  The basic issue is when you try to force an, err, issue.  That is, when you try to ‘make’ something work in a situation that it’s not suited for.  There are lots of these but here I’m focusing on diet.
.

When Does the Training Determine the Diet?

Many readers are familiar with my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 (UD2).  It’s a very specific, meticulously laid out diet incorporating three types of training (depletion, tension, power as discussed in Categories of Weight Training) and which is synched with three types of eating (low carb, very high carb, moderate carb).

And it works.  But it only really works when you follow it as laid out (I did give some variations for endurance types or powerlifters).  And invariably someone comes along who is involved with a specific sport (not bodybuilding or pure physique stuff) who tries to shoehorn their training (which is usually being set by a coach) into the UD2 structure.

At an even more vague level are folks who want to do UD2 but who’s schedule won’t allow it.  They can’t follow the ideal Mon/Tue/Thu/Sat schedule (which can be modded to Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri) or can’t consistently get one of the workouts in.  And it fails to work since it only works as laid out.

Another example is that of my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook (RFL) which, due to its extreme nature, requires that training be severely curtailed.  It allows for two to three short weight workouts and, at most, a small amount of low intensity cardio. And invariably, again, athletes or folks who need/want to do more weight work and/or high intensity conditioning work want to follow it.

And when they come to the support forum and ask me how to mod either diet to fit their situation they invariably get the same answer from me: pick a different diet.

Because what they are doing is trying to make an approach (either UD2 or RFL) fit into a situation that it’s not set up for.   They are trying to put a square peg into a round hole.  Either they have to do certain types of training (which makes UD2 unworkable) or they have to do high-intensity or high-volume conditioning (which RFL can’t support).

I’d note that usually in these situations the volumes and/intensities of training being done in the first place not only require fairly moderate dietary deficits but a goodly amount of carbohydrate intake; folks doing that much training shouldn’t need any heroic approaches to losing fat unless they got way out of shape in their off-season.  Trying to use any extreme approach is a mistake under these circumstances; much less ones as specific or brutal as UD2 and RFL respectively.

In that situation, the training has to determine the diet. Either the training that they have to do, or want to do, or simply can do.  Diets that specify training be done in certain ways on certain days simply don’t fit (they are a square peg/round hole issue).

So I now only tell them to pick another diet but point them to one of the more flexible approaches that are described on the diet.  Either what’s laid out in Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets (for non-athletes) or Fat Loss for Athletes (err, for athletes).

In situations like this, the training determines the diet.  You simply can’t shoehorn the wrong diet approach (or often a tremendously specific diet approach) into the training structure. Well you can try but it always backfires.

.

When Does the Diet Determine the Training?

And basically if you reverse the above situation, you can understand the heading of this section.  As noted, UD2 is a specific diet with specific training and eating on specific days.  And it’s set up so as to be an integrated system.  Not only does the training set up the diet, the diet mandates the training.  I often see people who want to use one without the other and it just doesn’t work that way.

RFL is actually a better example of this situation.  The nature of RFL is that it can’t support lots of training (the work is done through the caloric deficit) of any type.  As noted above, 2-3 short weight workouts are mandatory (to avoid muscle loss) but cardio can only be used in small amounts; quite in fact, large amounts of cardio tend to hamper results as I discussed in Why Big Caloric Deficits and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss.

In fact, and this is a rant I’m going to save for another article entirely, the biggest mistake people make with RFL is not listening to my mandate not to do too much cardio. They do it anyhow and screw it up and then bitch that my diet didn’t work. Again, another rant for another day.

But the point is this, the extremeness (is too a word) of RFL very much determines the types of training that can or should be done. UD2 is like this in a slightly different way but hopefully you got my point.

Even approaches like Martin’s Leangains, to some degree, mandate the type (or at least global approach to training).  In his baseline setup, with alternating higher and lower calorie days, you end up with a situation where you ideally lift three times per week (on alternate days).  Someone who must or who simply wants to train differently can run into problems trying to apply his specific approach.

Update: I’d note that, in other situations, a lifting frequency of twice/week or four/times per week might be used; I don’t want people to think I said that his training is set in stone at three days/week.  But my point still basically holds, if the diet approach mandates a certain frequency of training and not the other way around.

In a more general sense, as I discussed in Comparing the Diets, low-carbohydrate diets tend to do a poor job of supporting high-intensity training.  There are modifications like TKD’s and CKD’s that can be used but the standard low-carb diet is a bad fit.  The diet determines what training can and can’t be done.

Basically, in these (and other situations) the diet determines the training.  That is, the specific nature of the diet determines what types of training is and is not allowed or workable.

.

Summing Up

And that’s really all there is to today’s article.  There are certain circumstances, those where training is either specific or set and can’t be changed, or where someone wants (or needs) to do certain things that can’t be supported by (usually specific) dieting approaches.  The training has to determine the diet and you can’t shoehorn the training into a diet that won’t work.

And in other cases, specific dietary approaches, for whatever reason (the degree of deficit, the layout of the diet, the macronutrient composition) mandate what types of training should or even can be done.  In those cases, the diets determine the training.  And trying to deviate from what the diet can support or require leads to problems.

So before you start trying to follow any diet, you need to figure out which situation you’re in and answer the question for yourself: Does my current training determine what diet I can/should do, or does the diet I want to follow determine the training I can or cannot do?  Start from there and stop trying to put a square peg into a round hole.  It works better.

I would be surprised if most on the Internet or who were involved in training and nutrition weren’t familiar with the name Tom Venuto.   I’ve known Tom (via email correspondence anyhow) for over a decade and he’s always been one of the good guys in the field.  I may not always agree with him, but I’ll always listen to what he has to say.

For those who have been living under a rock and have managed to avoid hearing about him, Tom is not only a successful natural bodybuilder, he is the author of perhaps one of the best books ever written about fat loss which is Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

In a field where most of the information ranges from bad to downright awful, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle stands out as being filled with excellent information on the how-to’s of shedding fat.

From diet to training to everything in-between, it’s all covered and all quality information (even if a few bits of the information are a bit out of date/incorrect; such as the old saw that eating many small meals stokes the metabolism).

Tom is also the author of a book that I’ve been meaning to review for months called The Body Fat Solution which deals more with behavioral issues related to losing fat and keeping it off.  Also, a highly recommended read.

But today I want to talk about Tom’s new product/project which he’s given the (somewhat gag inducing) title of The Holy Grail Body Transformation Program. By ‘holy grail’, as you can see in the subtitle on the cover graphic above, Tom is referring to that commonly desired goal of gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time.

This is a goal that many seek and few attain; usually trying to do both things at once tends to lead most people to spin their wheels.  But as much as anything, this has to do with how they approach the goal.  There are also some issues involved with expectations about what is realistic.  I’ve discussed this issue in some detail in Adding Muscle While Losing Fat – Q&A and won’t rehash that here.  On to the review.

Beginning first with science and theory, Tom looks at some of the basic issues surrounding the topic of gaining muscle while losing fat and why, in a fundamental sort of way, the two goals are antithetical (Tom also examines exceptions, pretty much the same ones I’ve talked about before).  Anyone who has read my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 or the articles Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2 here on the site will be familiar with this information.  Tom doesn’t spend endless time on this information but covers it thoroughly enough to be clear.

The meat of the book is of course the diet approach and if you’ve already guessed that it’s a cyclical dieting program, you guessed right.  Because fundamentally, outside of the exceptions such as overweight beginners or folks returning from a layoff (or drugs), alternating caloric deficits and surpluses is really the only meaningful way to achieve the goal of simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain since they require distinct nutritional, hormonal and physiological states.

Tom looks at the issue from a rather large scale (e.g. yearly alternation of longer term bulking and dieting phases) to weekly to daily variations in caloric intake; I imagine that well-read, err, readers of my site will be familiar with many of the concepts he’s talking about.

Tom does a thorough job of examining a variety of different strategies (both in terms of the number of dieting days and number of feeding days) ranging from 3:2-3 (3 days dieting, 2-3 days overfeeding) to 3:1 to floating carb days.  As well, daily variation in carb/caloric intake is examined based on the time training is performed.  Essentially what Tom has done is to gather a variety of different strategies (depending on the specifics of the goal) that have been used and looked at them all at once.  I’d note that primarily carbohydrate intake is being modified here so, in essence, the caloric cycling ideas are really carb cycling ideas.

I would note one thing here: the topic of intermittent fasting (IF’ing) is NOT discussed.  I guess we’ll have to keep waiting for Martin Berkhan’s long-awaited book to see this treated in the way it deserved to be.  Neither is the concept of Every Other Day (EOD) refeeds that gets talked about on the support forum from time to time.

Next Tom moves to the discussion of training with, as you might imagine, most of the focus on resistance training (since this is the key to a lot of good things that are desired when the goal is body recomposition).  He doesn’t go into a tremendous number of details here and there are no sample workouts in the main part of the book.

I’d note that one of the appendices does have a sample workout under the name of The New Bodybuilding, basically a 3-4 day/week combination of heavy strength and hypertrophy work; the focus is primarily on more or less general guidelines for proper resistance training.  Tom also addresses the issue of metabolic work and gives different guidelines (primarily for lower intensity cardio) in terms of frequency and duration depending on the specific goal.

Which brings me to my biggest criticism of Tom’s book: there is little attention given to how to ideally integrate the training ideas with the dietary strategies that are outlined (outside of one short comment in the diet section on floating carb days and placing them around important workouts).  Simply, achieving the ‘holy grail’ goal works better when training and diet are integrated properly.

The book rounds itself out with a brief section on lifestyle factors and several appendices that include meal plans, a primer on determining energy requirements and a food database.  I should mention that there is a throwaway ‘bonus’ on the topic of within-day energy balance; essentially an interview with sports nutritionist Dr. Dan Bernadot espousing the idea that large scale swings in caloric intake during the day have negative impacts on body composition.

I say throwaway because it doesn’t say much; as well I think the ideas presented have been amply disproven by the success of people following IF’ing type approaches where very large scale swings in caloric intake are having, if anything, positive benefits when integrated properly with training.

Summing Up: Is The Holy Grail Body Transformation Program great?  I’d have to say no.  It certainly doesn’t live up to the standard set by Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and the lack of integration of the training and diet may leave some people confused about how best to approach their goal.  But it does provide a reasonably comprehensive examination of how to cycle calories and carbs to try to achieve the ultimate goal of body recomposition.  Until Martin finally finishes his IF’ing book, Tom’s new book certainly provides a decent look at the topic.  Finally, at $29, the price is certainly reasonable (as such things go).

Since people are going to continue pestering me for the details of that on the forum until I write it up, but since I don’t have time to do it today, this Biggest Loser Feedback, sent to me by a guy who was on the show is a bridge article in the sense that it gives some indication of what the Biggest Loser contestants go through during the show.  If nothing else, I hope it provides a look at how I don’t think the obese beginner sholud be trained but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Wait until Friday (and probably next Tuesday if I don’t miss my guess).

And with that said, here are some comments sent to me by a guy who was on the Biggest Loser show along with my comments thrown in throughout.  I think what he sent me is interesting for at least two reasons:

1. What can be accomplished in a short period when you put your mind to it.
2. How unrealistic some of the changes on the show actually are relative to normal people.

BL: I know that obese people are not your target audience but for anyon who cares, we worked out 4 hours per day 6 days per week. That started on day 2. Day 1 we worked out 2.5 hours. That is from sedentary to 2.5 hours.

We did 1 hour cardio in the morning and 1 in the evening by ourselves and the trainer came in every afternoon for two hours to put us through a circuit resistance based routine for an hour and sometimes her own crazy cardio routine for an hour or we did that third cardio hour on our own also. We never worked out intensely for more than 2 hours at a time.

My comments: As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter (and brought up in at least one of my books), research in general has not supported exercise having a humongous impact on bodyweight. However, a lot of studies have used fairly moderate amounts of exercise in this regards. In contrast, large volumes of exercise, and the above can only be considered a ‘large volume’, especially coming from essentially a sedentary life, can have a fairly large impact.

BL: Our goal was to lose 1lb per day (3500 calories). Our particular trainers philosophy was that she was going to BURN it off you in the gym and if you had a poor day in the gym the VERY first question that was asked was “Did you eat”. It had to be pounded into us that we had to eat. It seemed counter-intuitive for many of us in a weight loss contest but it proved itself out when a teammate of mine upped his workouts to 6 hours per day and shrank his food to 500 calories per day (on his own) and only lost 3 pounds in 7 days while everyone else averaged 7-10.

My comments: This is an interesting idea as it’s something I noted years ago and have commented on previously. The combination of lots of exercise with big caloric deficits tends to work extremely poorly and seem to slow instead of hasten fat loss for some reason. This is part of why I strongly recommended against lots of exercise in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook; the deficit inherent to the diet is already large enough to the point that adding a bunch of training seems to cause more harm than good.

I don’t know if the issue is simply metabolic slowdown or if there’s something else going on (this my current new project now that the protein book is finally done) but I’ve seen it happen time and time again: excessive caloric deficits plus excessive amounts of exercise seem to do more harm than good. If you are burning a lot of calories through exercise, you have to eat. If you want to cut calories hard, you have to reduce activity.

BL: So that was a 75-25% Cardio to resistance training mix. Man what the body can do when it has the right trainer to push it. This years contestants work out even more (I went back to the show and worked out with them for 3.5 hours on an off camera day and they still had an evening workout to go). Of course your secluded, no phone, no newspapers, no internet – just you and other fatties so what else you going to do except the hated TV stuff, interviews challenges etc.?

My comments: I think that last point is a good one, another reason why some of what can be done on the show is unrealistic to normal people. Between the huge motivation to win (big money, fame) and basically being locked up where all there is to do is exercise, putting in huge amounts of training is much easier. Especially compared to the average person who is dealing with work, home, family, etc. and probably doesn’t have 4 hours per day to exercise.

I also think it’s interesting that the main focus is on cardio training especially with the recent tendency towards weight training based fat loss approaches. No matter how you cut it, 3 hours of cardio per day burns far far far more calories than 45 minutes of weight training, regardless of the type (or any small calorie burn afterwards).

I’d also add that, for extremly overweight individuals (who typically gain LBM as they get fat), weight training wouldn’t seem to have much of a huge benefit. Possibly if it’s done with higher reps/circuit style (to burn more calories, deplete muscle glycogen, etc.). But fatter individuals don’t usually have to worry so much about muscle loss in the first place, pounding them with low rep heavy work just doesn’t make much sense.

BL: We typically worked out at 75-90% of our max. heart rate based on the 220 formula WITH our trainer and 65-85% of our max. when on our own. The quality of the ‘on our own’ workouts usually had to do with external factors like music and fatigue from filming etc. We physically could have done 75-90% on our own but it gets AWFULLY boring!

My comments: One or two studies have found that results are superior with exercise with a trainer; one even found that simply having the trainer stand nearby (without actually doing anything) improved results. This is one very potential benefit of having a regular trainer (or a good training partner), motivation to work harder may mean better and/or faster results.

BL: We cooked all our own food based on the nutrition advice of the trainer (so again individual expertise varies).  Here are my vital stats:

* Equivalent to 2 months in the real world (his comment, not mine).

P.S. My values are still there 2 years afterwards.

My comments: Frankly this is hard to even believe. Given how much medication is used to treat such things as high blood pressure and insulin resistance, clearly activity and weight loss can have absolutely massive effects. What surprises me the most is the time frame that these changes occurred in.

BL: It is also interesting that the work on the ranch really breaks down to the exact numbers that people see in real life. IE The ‘national’ average for someone who watches what they eat and works out 6 days per week is approx. 8-10 lb. of weight loss per month(6 days x 4 weeks = 24 hours per month). This same math works out on the ranch 6 days per week x 4 hours per day = 24 hours per WEEK = 8-10 lb. per WEEK. We just condensed a months worth of workouts into a weeks time.

My comments: Frankly, looking at a lot of studies of exercise or diet, many would be thrilled to be getting 8-10 lb/month of weight or fat loss. But I agree generally with the sentiment above, given that attention to diet, a loss of 8-10 lb./month for someone who isn’t already very lean is probably attainable. That that amount of weight is compressed into 1/4th the time tends to support that the results on the Biggest Loser are extremely atypical.

BL: For reference – While a TV episode is 7 days in length that is not the case behind the scenes. So some ‘weeks’ the numbers are larger because some weeks we had 14 days between weigh ins. My season if you lasted until the final day you would be on the ranch 101 days (I got voted off on episode 7 and lost 83 pounds in 62 days) This season is it like 121 days start to finish. And all that gets condensed into a 12-14 weeks show airing schedule.

My comments: This is a bit deceptive on the part of the show in my opinion since it’s made to appear that these massive weight losses are occurring every 7 days which clearly they are not.

BL: By the way – Losing and Maintaining are TWO ENTIRELY different problems. My goal now is to keep my cardiovascular system in shape (I love to run) AND build muscle while watching what I eat. So I have had to experiment with tons of exercise routines and programs and play with my diet to no end to learn myself. Oh and I teach on some this stuff so I read a lot.

My comments: This is an exceptionally important point that is often lost. What is done during active weight loss neither has to be nor should it be the same as what’s done during weight maintenance. As I point out in both the Rapid Fat Loss handbook and the Guide to Flexible dieting, most research has found that exercise (and quite a bit of it) is actually more important for weight maintenance than loss. Of course, sticking in the long-term with dietary changes is critical as well.

BL: Today – I take in approx. 2500 calories per day and when I am on-point I eat more proteins and fats then carbs. When I ‘fall off the wagon’ I still stay within my calorie range but I will have more carbs and salt and carbs require 2.7 grams of water for every 1 gram of carbs and salt makes you retain water blah blah blah.

People are still amazed that I can drop 10 pounds in a week (I call it ‘fake’ weight loss) and they don’t understand that it comes by simply cutting out the extra carbs and salt while drinking a gallon of water per day and that sheds all the extra water in your body. But I realize that I HAVE to track what I eat or eat the same thing every day which is boring. I teach others what I have learned and I quote some smart guy about those who estimate calories underestimate by 25-50% so keep a food diary/log!

In the interest of full disclosure: We do what boxers and wrestlers do and people gain the weight back after the show because they do not STAY in learning mode.

My comments: Anybody who’s played around with lowcarb diets (especially of the cyclical kind) is probably aware of the kinds of water shifts that can occur with such diets. What I think is lost on some people is the sheer magnitude of water that can be gained or lost, especially in larger individuals. The article I linked at the start of the newsletter refers to this and this seasons show had a good example, where one contestant deliberately gained 17 lb. (by drinking 2 gallons of water) so that he could then lose a massive 33 lb. at the next weigh in.

Answer: This is probably one of the most commonly asked questions which is why it’s worth addressing. It’s worth keeping in mind that this idea usually comes out of the bodybuilding subculture, usually contest bodybuilders who, assuming their diet is working properly, are getting towards the low-end of body fat levels.  And the short-answer to your question is that the body fat of the person is going to be the main determinant of whether doing cardio fasted in the morning is important or not.

To understand that, I need to cover a bit of background physiology, I’d mention that this is discussed in much more detail in both my Ultimate Diet 2.0 and The Stubborn Fat Solution for anybody who is truly interested in the topic.  But simply, there are three primary steps involved in ‘losing’ fat, they are:

1. Mobilization
2. Transport
3. Oxidation (burning)

Mobilization refers to actually getting stored fat (specifically fatty acids) out of the fat cell; this process is under the primary control of insulin and the catecholamines although hormones such as growth hormone, cortisol and others play secondary or tertiary roles.  Transport refers to the actual transport of fatty acids (bound to albumin) within the bloodstream; this step can be an issue when folks are dealing with stubborn body fat (such as lower ab/low back fat in men and hip/thigh fat in women); blood flow is impaired in those areas.  Finally is oxidation which is the actual burning of fatty acids within tissues such as skeletal muscle, liver and heart.

Now, in lean individuals (where lean is around 12-15% body fat for men and about 19-22% for women), fat mobilization becomes a problem; blood flow is often an issue as well.  As folks get leaner, the body undergoes a series of adaptations that occur to make getting fat out of the fat cells more difficult.  For the most part, oxidation isn’t so much of a problem although there are strategies (such as skeletal muscle glycogen depletion) that can enhance the process; read my Ultimate Diet 2.0 for more details.

At the other extreme, that is in the very obese (here I’m talking about perhaps 35%+ body fat for men and 40%+ for women), the reverse problem is present.  There are tons of fatty acids floating around in the bloodstream, but for a variety of reasons, oxidation has become impaired.  To fully discuss this issue (along with approaches of fixing it) would require a full article an I won’t say much more about this group here.

And between those two extremes (so from about 15-35% body fat in men and ~20-40% body fat in women), there are really no issues.  Mobilization is usually not a problem since the body hasn’t started to fight back, transport isn’t an issue since stubborn fat isn’t being targeted, and oxidation is rarely a problem since the defects which show up at the extremes of obesity generally aren’t present.

And that provides the answer:

For the lean trying to get very lean (15% body fat or less for men, 22% or less for women), various strategies, including fasted cardio are probably going to be required to offset the mobization and blood flow defects.  That’s why that specific group found decades ago that fasted morning cardio worked best.  And why I wrote The Stubborn Fat Solution since it deals with how to overcome all of the problems.

But for folks who aren’t that lean yet, the folks in the middle range of body fat levels, it really doesn’t matter.  The best time to do cardio will be whenever it will most consistently get done.  If that’s first thing in the morning, fantastic.  If not, also fantastic.  It’s more important in this situation that it gets done than when it gets done.

Again, for the extremely obese, different strategies entirely are required but, again that would take a full article to address so I won’t talk about it here.

And today I want to look at something that, while not exactly ‘new’ (it’s been around for a few years at least) certainly has a lot of interest and questions about it.  And that is the Bodybugg/GoWearFit.  Now strictly speaking, both of these devices are different, but they are both made by the same company.  And are essentially the same device.  So far as I can tell the biggest difference is that the GoWearFit (hereafter GWF) uses slightly different software than the Bodybugg but, for all practical purposes, I’m going to consider them the same device.  This is what it looks like.

.

.

The device is worn on the left arm, around the middle of the triceps with the bit shown above facing backwards.   If you can’t picture that, I’m sure you can Google an image up.

.What is it/How Does it Work?

The GWF is actually one of several different recent devices the purports to measure caloric expenditure.  While things like heart rate monitors have claimed to this for a while based on heart rate, the GWF type devices got a bit further including 5 different sensors which measure acceleration, temperature, steps, galvanic skin response and heat flux.  It plugs all of those into an algorithm and calculates how many calories you’re burning on a minute to minute basis.  Some of that algorithm is based on your height, weight, age, gender, etc. that you plug into the system after you sign up.

The device is then plugged into a computer and the data uploaded to a piece of software that interprets it and shows your caloric expenditure over the course of hours or days or whatever.  I’d note that there is also an additional watch that can be purchased that will show you a more or less real-time (it’s actually averaging every 6 minutes) measure of caloric expenditure.  This can be useful if you’re tracking workouts to a ‘Burn XXX total calories’ goal.  But for measuring daily expenditure, you’ll generally use the online tracking software (which also stores previous days which can be nice).

From a technical standpoint, the GWF uses a standard USB cable and charges off of the computer itself (I think this was one big difference than the Bodybugg which used AA Batteries).  It lets you know what the battery status is and holds a charge pretty well.  If you get in the habit of hooking it up while you’re in the shower, it will stay charged for quite some time.

I’d mention that the device is pretty sturdy and you can sleep with it.  One of it’s more interesting features, which I’ll mention below is that it gives you an estimate of sleep efficiency, effectively the percentage of time that you’re actually asleep while you’re laying down.  I have no clue how it does this but it seems to be accurate (e.g. it’ll catch if you wake up and roll around or get up to pee or whatever); I honestly suspect a pact with Satan is somehow involved.

The online software is actually fairly good, even if their server seems to have issues with access more often than it should.  It will access the armband via a standard USB port and give you a lot of different data including caloric expenditure, sleep efficiency and others.   It also has some basic calculators for things like energy expenditure for different activities (e.g. enter that you ran 60 minutes at 6.5 mph and it will spit out calories. You can also get weekly average reports and such.

One thing I want to mention that the GWF does NOT do but some people think it does. On the site, they mention that they will let you track caloric intake.  And you can but you do it manually, by entering food records.  The device in no way actually measures what you ate in a day. And while a new device worn on the arm claims to do just that, apparently it’s only accurate to plus or minus 500 calories per day which is useless as hell.  But the GWF does not measure caloric intake, you can enter your food online manually and that’s it.

I would mention that their interface only works with selected Browsers and this can get irritating; the last time I looked for example, Safari 4 was not supported and neither was the higher build of Firefox for Mac.  When I updated my browser I lost the ability to access the online software.

.

Is It Accurate?

A limited amount of validation data has been done on the GWF but has found that it is at least reasonably accurate. Certainly nothing is 100% and the GWF isn’t either.  It seems to mis-estimate certain situations more than others but, overall, seems about 90% consistent or so with other, more accurate measurements. Which is pretty good for the most part.

Speaking empirically, I’d note that I’ve played with the GWF in myself and one of my trainees and compared the values it spits out to other measures.  For example there are standard calculations for resting energy expenditure based on body surface area, the GWF hits them pretty much exactly.

I’ve also compared it to things like a heart rate monitor measurement of exercise energy expenditure, as well as the number that the machines spit out themselves.  The numbers are never exactly the same but they are always within shooting distance of one another.  Certainly the difference is never massive (and since these are all estimations, this is no surprise).

Since I’ve mentioned my Powermeter bike on the site before, you may be wondering if I’ve compared GWF values to the kilojoule numbers the bike produces.  And the answer is no.  One place where the GWF completely craps out is in estimating cycling energy expenditure.  Since one of it’s major determinants is the accelerometer, and that only works if the left arm is moving, the GWF does a horrible job with things like cycling (their site even acknowledges this).  I’ve seen it suggested to wear it on the calf while cycling but never tested this out to see if it gave better numbers.

I’d note in that respect that it is possible, in activities where the left arm is being moved vigorously for the GWF to produce absolutely insanely high caloric expenditure values. Just impossible values.  I’ll let the more dirty-minded readers do with that statement what they will.  Moving on.

I’d note that the daily caloric expenditures that the GWF spits out come awfully close to some of the standard estimations that I’ve thrown out on the site.  Which actually raises the question of what the GWF does that the method described in How to Estimate Mainteanance Calories – Q&A doesn’t do for free.  Which is a good question.

I’d also note, and this based purely on forum feedback, that the GWF seems to just be horrible at putting out good values for a small percentage of people.  I’m not sure why this is the case but a generality that seems to be showing up is that folks with thyroid issues don’t get a good measurement off the GWF, it seems to overestimate.

I’d note that this conclusion is being based on people looking at weight changes relative to what the GWF is saying their expenditure is and what the ysay their caloric intake is. This introduces a number of possible problems (not the least of which being thyroid mediated water retention that masks fat loss or problems with actual caloric expenditure).

But for the most part, I’ve found that the GWF not only correlates well with both standard equations and other measurements of energy expenditure, it can pick up changes in activity very reliably.  Get up and walk around for a few minutes, and the GWF will pick it up; go watch a movie and you’ll get a value that is not dissimilar from sleeping for the entire time.  It’s not perfect but it’s damn good.

.

Why Should You Care?

Even with standard estimate equations like the ones I constantly talk about on the site, there can still be some real questions about total daily energy expenditure.  If nothing else, the GWF at least takes a decent stab at actually measuring it.  For people with either very high or very low activity (or simply activity that changes a lot on a day-to-day basis), having an actual number to put with that activity can be helpful.

So, in terms of who the GWF can be good for, one of those is the typical dieting obsessive compulsive.  For those people who just have to have a better value than what estimate equations provide, the GWF is worth considering.

As well, for people who have varying activity levels, whether in terms of work or exercise training, the GWF can help to get values on the different workouts.  Days off or very easy days may end up having very different energy expenditures than heavy training days. Athletes or dieters trying to really match intake to output can get data on those different days to better set their nutrition.

The GWF can also have a couple of other less obvious uses.  One of them is this: many people find themselves subconsciously trying to move more when they start using the GWF.  The graphs are kind of exciting and people start moving more to watch the numbers go up (one trainee who used it had a goal of hitting a 4000 cal expenditure day for example). It’s like when you make people start writing down their food and they start eating less spontaneously.  Something about knowing that the device is measuring energy expenditure makes people want to move more.

In that vein, one of the more intriguing things that the GWF shows is how much small bits of activity throughout the day really add up.  That is, the difference between someone who literally sits for 8 hours per day and one who gets up even a few times during the hour to move around can add up to a fair few hundred calories.  Over the course of a week or a month or a year this makes a massive contribution to energy output.

Related to that, many people are actually quite disappointed to learn that activities of daily movement often burn far more calories than formal exercise.  One trainee was distraught when she found that 3 hours of yardwork burned TONS more calories than 3 hours in the weight room.

A final effect (more than a use) of the GWF is that it’s done a good job of getting people who ‘swear they only burn 1200 calories a day and have to starve to maintain weight’ to realize that their daily energy expenditure is actually much higher than that.  Many people on forums have found that they can raise calories a lot higher than they had been eating without weight or fat gain. Basically, it ends the “Slow metabolic rate/low energy expenditure” claim because it gives objective data on what’s really going on.  Of course, people determined to believe that they are special will just ignore the data.

But in terms of actually getting a good estimate on what different days of the week or different activities burn on a day to day basis or what have you, the GWF is a step above using an estimation equation or trusting the caloric expenditure reading on the treadmill.

I should mention sleep efficiency.  As I discussed in Obesity and Inactivity: The Relevance of Reconsidering the Notion of Sedentariness sleep deficiency is not only fairly widespread in modern life but a real problem in terms of health and propensity to weight gain.  One thing the GWF does is give a measure of sleep efficiency, a simple percentage indicating how much of the time laying down was spent sleeping.

This gives users the ability to track how lifestyle changes (e.g. sleep hygeine, sleep supplements) are impacting their sleep so they can try to raise the total amount of sleep they are getting.  You can test different dinner meals or when you train or whatever and see what gets you higher efficiency numbers (my limited googling suggests that 85%+ is a good value, nobody gets 100%).  For people with sleep issues, the GWF might be useful just for that.

.

What’s the Catch?

So the above section is sort of the pros of the GWF.  Let’s you get a more accurate picture of what you’re doing on a day to day or workout to workout basis, etc.  What are the cons?

The first of course is price.  The unit is not cheap (it’s not absurdly expensive), Amazon currently lists it at $179.00.  However, for reasons I’ll come to, you can usually pick up one on Ebay.  Unfortunately, that’s not the only cost involved.  To get the data off the thing you have to have a monthly account with Bodymedia to access the data.  And no you can’t use the watch to get around this, it will eventually fill up and you can only clear it out by accessing the website.

Admittedly the website isn’t expensive, like $12.95 per month or something (I can’t actually find the value on their site at the moment).  I’d note, and they go out of their way to avoid admitting this is the case, but you can transfer accounts.  So if you chose to buy a unit off of Ebay you can take over their account and change the user data and it will work just fine.

Also, the GWF can’t be purchased outside of the United States; I have no idea why but anybody who isn’t in the US will have to have a friend buy it and ship it over.

And that brings me to possibly the biggest issue with the GWF.  For most people, day to day and week to week activity doesn’t change massively.  You probably work Monday through Friday, weekends off, train certain days and you’re training is unlikely to change massively over time (this may be different for athletes whose training changes a lot during the year).

What this means is that after you’ve gathered data with the GWF for maybe 2 weeks, it becomes fairly useless. Unless you’re in that situation where your activity is highly variable, you’ll have every thing you need from the device after that short time span.  And that’s a fairly large investment for 2 weeks of use.

There are options around that.  One is to buy one used off of Ebay.  And then sell it again when you’re done with it.  As I mentioned, you can change the user data and transfer accounts even if GWF says you can’t.  Another option is to get together with a few like-minded fitness obsessives and buy it in a group. Split across 4-6 people, it’s fairly cheap and you can just rotate it through every 2 weeks as people use it and get the data that they need.

.

Summing Up

So the GWF, is it worth getting?  Overall I say yes. It’s one of the more accurate devices and for people trying to optimize their overall nutrition and body recomposition can provide some rather invaluable data on what’s actually going on.  The problem being that, once you have those 2 weeks of data, it’s fairly useless.  You can keep using it, and if your training changes or increases drastically, it may have use beyond that.  It’s not super-cheap and the monthly fee to use the website is annoying but that can be gotten around with creative sharing or Ebaying.

Answer: The issue, as always, comes down to a matter of context.  The original epilepsy ketogenic diet was developed, as you note to control seizures.  And for whatever reason, at least one aspect of that was developing very, very deep degrees of ketosis.  For this reason, a very high dietary fat content and lowish protein intake is necessary.  This is for reasons discussed in Ketosis and the Ketogenic Ratio – Q&A.  Protein has about a half anti-ketogenic effect and too much dietary protein can inhibit ketosis.  Which makes the epilepsy diet not work.  So in that context, the diet had to be set up with very high fat and low protein.

And while such a diet may make people lose WEIGHT quickly, simply losing WEIGHT is not necessarily the goal.  Rather, the goal is (or should be) to lose FAT while maintaining MUSCLE mass.  I discussed this difference in some detail in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook itself (as well as in every other of my books) or you can read the article What Does Body Composition Mean?

That is, people who want to change body composition aren’t just interested in weight loss per se, they want to maximize fat loss while (generally speaking) minimizing the loss of lean body mass.  And the simple fact is that a 90% fat ketogenic diet, due to the low protein content won’t do that.  Rather, dietary protein has to be set at a certain level to avoid lean body mass losses.

And since the explicit goal of the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook diet is to maximize fat loss (again while minimizing lean body mass loss) that also means cutting calories to the bone.  That means reducing dietary fat to minimal levels (only essential fatty acids).  And, mind you, such a diet would be wholly inappropriate (it wouldn’t work) for epilepsy treatment.

And that’s your answer.  If the goal were epilepsy treatment, the high-fat ketogenic diet would be the appropriate choice (I’d point anyone interested in this topic to The Ketogenic Diet: A Treatment for Epilepsy, 3rd Edition (Paperback) by Freeman, Freeman and Kelly).  But assuming the goal is maximal fat loss with no muscle loss (e.g. the goal of most who read my site), a higher protein intake is required and the very high-fat version of the ketogenic diet would be wholly inappropriate.

And, in the context of Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, given the explicit goals of that diet, that means keeping fat intake very low (limited only to essential fatty acids and the tagalongs that are unavoidable with whole foods).   Of course, more moderate ketogenic diets with sufficient dietary protein and higher dietary fat intakes can also be set up as described in my first book The Ketogenic Diet.  The rate of fat loss will simply be slower on such a diet due to the higher caloric intake.  But that may be a reasonable compromise for reasons discussed in Setting the Deficit – Small, Moderate, or Large.

Hope that clears it up and thanks for the question.

Today I want to talk about how I do that adjustment, note that if you’ve read either The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook or A Guide to Flexible Dieting, this is the same information in the last chapter where I talk about setting up moderate deficit diets and how to adjust them.   I’d only note that the same basic information can be used when either small or larger deficit are used as discussed in Setting the Deficit-Small, Medium or Large.

.A Quick Note about Water Balance

Before I get into the meat of the article, there is one topic I want to bring up first.  Many people have an expectation of fat loss being this nice weekly linear thing that occurs in a predictable fashion.  And certainly, for some people this can be the case.   However, for an equally large number of people (and I’d probably tend to argue that these folks are in the majority), fat loss does not occur in a predictable linear fashion.

Rather, there are often stops and starts or, as it’s often referred to on the Internets, stalls and whooshes.  I discussed this topic in some seriousness in The Stubborn Fat Solution and excerpted that bit in the article Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat.  The main culprit here is almost always water retention which can mask fat true fat loss and make it look as if a diet that is otherwise set up perfectly (and working just fine) actually isn’t.

People vary in how predisposed they are to this occurring.  Some folks seem to retain water like crazy, especially if they try to combine hard deficits with excessive and or too intensive of activity.  Women of course have an additional factor of shifts in water balance throughout the menstrual cycle.  Even that is massively variable, some women gain little to no water weight throughout the month, others can hold an extra 5-10 pounds (2.5-5kg or so) easily.

Coupled with a generally slower rate of fat loss in the first place, women can go nuts trying to figure out if their diet is working or not.  Put differently, let’s say a woman is on a moderate deficit diet and should be losing right around 1 pound of fat per week.  If she is holding an extra 5-10 pounds of water, it could take 5-10 weeks before she actually sees that her diet is working.

Of course, if the water retention is related to menstrual cycle stuff, what she should see if times of the month when her weight/fat is down (below where she started) and other times when it’s not.  Plotting weight or some attempt to measure body composition on a monthly basis to see what the overall trend is is probably going to be more beneficial than looking at it on a week to week basis.

My point in bringing this up is actually not just to depress people.  Rather, I’m pointing out that what I’m going to discuss in this article in terms of adjusting the diet can be done too often.  For folks who have issues with water retention (who may see big drops every couple of weeks rather than smaller drops weekly), trying to gauge true weekly fat loss and adjust the diet is usually a losing proposition.

Rather, those folks may have to only look at what’s happening every 2 weeks to decide when and if to adjust their diet.  Women with major menstrual cycle swings  may even have to chart their monthly trends to see what’s happening and only make adjustments every 4 weeks.

Yes, I know this is a pain but at this point there’s really no solution for it.  All of the methods that we have to measure body composition are too inaccurate to get around this and the point I want everybody to really take home is that expecting predictable weekly fat loss may not be realistic depending on individual propensity to hold water or not.

.

Back to the Point

Accepting the above, that water balance can throw off expectations on a week to week (or even month to month) basis in terms of fat loss, the first necessary data point is what the predicted or expected fat loss actually is.  I gave some examples of this in Setting the Deficit-Small, Medium or Large and clearly the expected fat loss will depend on two things: the size of the dieter and the size of the deficit.  Bigger dieters and/or bigger deficits mean faster expected fat loss and vice versa.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to use a relatively ‘average sized’ dieter and a moderate deficit with a weekly expectation of approximately 1-1.5 pounds per week of true fat loss.  This would be a reasonable degree of fat loss for a relatively ‘average sized’ male using a moderate deficit (20-25% below maintenance); again the numbers would be different for smaller/larger dieters and/or smaller/larger deficits.

Based on that, the chart below is how I’d adjust calories (either by reducing food intake or increasing activity, again a topic I’ll address another day in terms of which may be better or worse) based on measured weekly (or bi-weekly) fat loss.

.

.

Frankly, there’s nothing that exciting in the chart and it should be fairly self-explanatory.  If your predicted fat loss is 1-1.5 lbs/week (and you’re not messing up your calories somehow, through mis-measurement or what have you) and you’re not achieving that, you need to reduce calories further (or increase activity to burn the extra).

Clearly, if you’re hitting your goal numbers right on the spot, don’t change anything.

Of course, there are times when the actual weekly weight loss ends up being larger than expected.  Some of this can be water or what have you but not always.  And that leads me to an explanation of the middle column.

As I discussed in Weight Training for Fat Loss, one of the primary metrics that should be used while dieting (for non-athletes) is the maintenance of poundages in the gym.  Now, it’s not always possible to maintain 100% of strength (and this tends to be a bigger issue as folks get to lower and lower body fat levels) but if major dropoffs are being seen and training is correct, that usually indicates that muscle is being lost.  In that situation, the deficit must be reduced, either food intake should be increased or some of the extra activity (usually excessive cardio) should be reduced.

Of course, the same would go for athletes who are trying to reduce body fat levels, if some useful metric of their performance (e.g. run time, cycling power output, whatever) is worsening, then the deficit is too aggressive and calories should be increased (with any ‘junk’ or extra activity being reduced if necessary).

I’d note that, strictly speaking, I could have included the performance loss column for any of the weekly fat losses.  Some people even doing everything ‘right’ simply can’t achieve optimal fat loss results without performance loss.  They will need to use less agressive deficits (again either reducing food intake or increasing activity) to avoid major performance falloffs.

.

Summing Up

And that’s how I adjust diets.  Honestly, there’s nothing too majorly complicated to it and there are basically three steps.

First off you need to have some idea of what the expected or possible fat loss for a given deficit is.  I’d note that people always want fat loss to be faster than it is no matter what they do.  If they are losing 1 pound per week, they want 2 pounds per week.  If they are losing 2 pounds per week, they want 4 pounds per week.  If they are losing 5 pounds per week, they will want 10 pounds per week.  This is just human nature but it’s not always realistic.

Certainly there are ways to do this (usually involving monster daily deficits as discussed in Setting the Deficit-Small, Medium or Large) but even there there is going to be some expected degree of fat loss based on the deficit that is created.  You need to know what is realistic based on the deficit that is being created.

Second there needs to be some awareness of the issues related to whooshes, stalls and water balance.   This basically relates to how frequently you are going to decide whether your current activity level and deficit need to be examined and/or adjusted in the first place.   Folks vary in how much of an effect this has.

Women, on average, have bigger issues but some men also deal with it.  If you know that you take 2 weeks before you see a drop, clearly using a single week of measurement to make a decision is a mistake.  If you’re a woman with major monthly swings, you may have to only examine true fat loss on a 4 week cycle, using what happens weekly (or daily as is sometimes the case) will not only drive you nuts but be inaccurate.

And then you simply compare the expected fat loss to the actual fat loss.  If what happened is less than what’s predicted (and you’re not mis-measuring food or something), then you need to increase the deficit slightly.  If you’re right in the sweet spot, losing what you’d predict, don’t change anything.  And if you’re losing more than predicted, you may need to increase calories (or decrease activity).

I usually use small adjustements here, 10% is usually fine for increases or decreases.  Then stay there for whatever time period is appropriate for you individually and adjust again.  Eventually you’ll nail it down to exactly where you need to be.

Since I imagine someone will ask about this in the comments, I’d note that, as people lose weight/fat, and maintenance requirements fall (both as a function of body mass loss along with the adaptive adjustments), often caloric intake has to be reduced further (or activity increased) to maintain the same degree of weight/fat loss.  This is something I’ll address in more detail in a later article.

Finally, another consideration is performance loss.  If you’re a general weight trainer or physique athlete, poundages in the gym are the usual metric.  If they are cratering you are probably losing muscle; regardless of the weekly fat loss, you need to reduce the size of the deficit.   You need to either increase calories or reduce volume (usually cardio).  For performance athletes, there should be some performance metric that you’re tracking to judge if your diet is doing more harm than good.  If that metric is going down, you need to reduce the size of the deficit.

Finally, in this article, I want to give some concrete recommendations on how to put this information to use, with some specific recommendations about measuring and tracking body composition.  First off I want to discuss one last potential problem with body composition measurements; then I’ll make some specific recommendations about which methods to use, when to measure body composition and how best to make use of the information I’ve presented.

Lean Body Mass/Fat Mass Problems

As I’ve at least mentioned in earlier articles in this series, all lean body mass and all fat mass aren’t identical and this provides another place where body composition measurements can be a problem.   For example, there are at least three primary types of body fat (in The Stubborn Fat Solution I describe five different types but that’s more detail than we need here) which are

1. Visceral fat (deep, around the gut)
2. Subcutaneous fat (under the skin, the stuff we can see)
3. Essential fat

And depending on which method of measuring body composition you’re using, loss of one vs. the other is difficult to track (e.g. calipers only measure subcutaneous fat).  Now, the essential fat issue isn’t a big one since you won’t generally be losing that and, if you are, you’re probably starving to death and about to die.

But an inability to measure losses of visceral fat by some methods causes problems because measurements that don’t measure it will show visceral fat loss as a loss of lean body mass (which leads people to think that they are losing muscle mass).  Calipers are a prime example, since you can’t pinch visceral fat with them, a loss of visceral fat on a diet will show up as LBM loss by those calculations.

As I discussed in What Does Body Composition Mean?, lean body mass (LBM) actually constitutes a lot of different things including muscle mass, glycogen, water, minerals, organs and a few others. For this reason, some researchers have started to differentiate between essential LBM (muscle and organ mass) and inessential LBM (connective tissue).

In general, inessential LBM tends to be lost first and essential LBM later.  However, depending on the setup of the diet (primarily protein intake and whether or not the person is exercising), there can be essential LBM loss early in a fat loss diet.  Just looking at LBM loss can’t differentiate between the two.

Now, the LBM issue can be avoided to some degree if someone is performing resistance training (which everyone should be while dieting).  What’s happening to strength in the weight room tends to act as a rough metric for what’s happening to muscle mass; if someone is more or less maintaining their strength levels, odds are that muscle mass isn’t being lost.  If strength is dropping like a rock, muscle is probably being lost.

It’s worth nothing that rank beginners can’t even use that method because beginners can gain strength (through neurological adaptations) even if they are losing muscle mass.

Which isn’t to say that I think body composition monitoring is useless; if that were the case I wouldn’t have written 6 articles about it.  I’m just trying to make the point that it’s not perfect.

Mass Gaining

Although I’ve focused primarily on fat loss in this series (simply because, statistically more people are trying to lose fat), the same comments and issues apply equally when someone is trying to gain mass or strength.  Athletes and bodybuilders want to know the composition of the weight that they are gaining, how much muscle mass they are gaining versus how much fat.

And the same issues that I’ve discussed crop up.  Many methods of measuring body composition can’t measure changes in glycogen and water (and certain diets and supplements will use this to their advantage, causing the body to hold more glycogen and water to make the lifter think that they are gaining radical amounts of lean body mass).

So What do I Recommend?

Ok, enough of that, let’s look at what I actually recommend folks use to track changes in body composition, starting from the least to the most complex.  Normally, I suggest a combination of methods rather than just one since that tends to help avoid problems inherent to any single method.  These recommendations apply to both fat loss and muscle gain plans.

The simplest method, of course is the mirror which I imagine nearly everyone has.  You can get naked if you want to (put them on the Internet and you might make some good money) or wear a bathing suit.  As I noted in Measuring Body Composition Part 1, if you can be honest with yourself, the mirror may tell you all you need to know.  Unfortunately, it’s difficult for most to be honest.  As well, things like lighting, water retention can impact visual appearance and few folks can be truly objective with what they are seeing.

The other problem with the mirror that i noted was that small daily or weekly changes can be tough to see and people may get depressed when it doesn’t appear that anything seems to be happening. Enter pictures.  Taken 4-6 weeks apart, these will often provide much more visual indication of what’s going on since the contrast will tend to be greater.  It’s the same phenomenon by which you don’t think anything is physically happening but then you run into someone you haven’t seen for a couple of months and they go “My god, you look totally different.”  Again, make sure to wear the same outfit, put the camera the same distance away, use the same lighting, etc. to make the pictures as comparable as possible.

Next up would be the standard bathroom scale.  I think I covered this one pretty thoroughly already.  For individuals carrying a lot of fat, the scale can actually work pretty well by itself since weight loss will pretty much be identical to fat loss. As individuals get leaner (perhaps 15% for males and about 22% for females), this is no longer the case and weight changes by themselves can be misleading.  Females have the additional issue that changes in water balance can screw everything up. I’ll come back to this when I talk about when and how often to measure.

I should mention that tracking weight changes along with performance in the weight room can often be most of all that’s needed during a fat loss diet.  If weight is dropping but strength in the weight room is staying consistent (and the person isn’t a beginner), that indicates that what is being lost is not muscle mass; by extension it should be fat.

The next addition would be the tape measure, which can at least give you some indication of where the weight (hopefully fat) is coming off. For fat loss purposes, it’s often useful enough to measure one or two indicator areas.  For men, changes typically occur around the midsection: when the waist is going down, fat is being lost, if it’s going up, fat is being gained.  Women might use thigh.

Of course, if someone is trying to gain muscle mass, measuring the target muscle groups would be logical; along with changes in strength in the weight room, this can tell you what’s going on (e.g. is the target muscle group growing or not).

A related method to the tape measure is to use clothing as a gauge. You might have a standard pair of pants or dress or whatever that you try on every so often.  If it’s fitting more loosely, you’re losing weight and/or fat.  If it’s tighter, well…..

Related to this, it’s worth noting that studies of successful weight losers have been found to monitor their weight more regularly (and a piece of clothing that you wear regularly is a quick way to do this); contrast that to people who wear nothing but elastic band clothing and one day ‘wake up fat’ without ever noticing what’s happening.

It’s worth commenting again, that that tape measure can be misleading as well. A drop in tape measure measurement might suggest muscle loss but actually be due to glycogen and water depletion. A loss of 1/2″ or more on the arms isn’t uncommon with complete glycogen depletion (as occurs in my Ultimate Diet 2.0 plan).  Bodybuilders tend to hate carbohydrate depletion for this reason: they feel flat and small and can’t get a pump in the gym.

As I mentioned other methods such as the Body Mass Index can be used to track changes and, for untrained individuals, can actually be used to get a rough estimate of body composition (I use this method in both The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook and A Guide to Flexible Dieting).  Waist/hip ratio can tell you a little bit about what’s going on too.

I should note again that there are reasonably accurate equations that use the tape measure to estimate actual body fat percentage and they can be used in that fashion in addition to just tracking changes in girth.  The links to the equations can be found in Measuring Body Composition Part 2.  For individuals without access to one of the other true body composition methods, this is a workable compromise.

Although the Tanita scales are very popular, my concerns with most people’s inability to adequately standardize hydration status leads me to not recommend them widely.  I suppose if you always measure at the same time of the week and day, they can be at least workable.  And they do avoid a lot of the issues with proper caliper technique.

Which brings me to calipers which I still tend to recommend the most widely. Once folks get decent at measuring themselves, they can track changes fairly reasonably.  Even if the actual equations aren’t used, like the tape measure, certain key sites can be tracked to measure changes in body fat.  Males will typically use abdominal or the iliac crest (the love handle) and females can measure the thigh.  Often that one measurement alone tells you everything you need to know even if you can’t actually estimate true body fat percentage from it.

The higher tech methods such as underwater weighing, DEXA or the BodPod might be used if you can get access to them relatively cheaply (or free); I’m told that BodPod readings can be had fairly cheaply if you can actually find a place that has a one.  DEXA is also useful for females to keep tabs on bone density to save them problems down the road (when they get older).

As I mentioned in a previous article, something that may be worth doing it calibrating one of the lower tech methods with the higher-tech method.  So get a caliper reading done along with underwater weighing or DEXA or what have you to see how closely they match up.  Then just use the cheaper methods going forwards.

My Ideal

If I had to pick a single combination of methods for most applications, it would probably be the scale, a tape measure, and calipers.  And probably throw in the mirror and pictures for good measure.  The mirror/picture will give you an idea of what’s happening visually and between changes in weight, selected tape measure measurements and caliper readings, you should be able to keep pretty good track of what’s changing (or not) physically with either a diet or muscle mass gain program.

As I mentioned above, for the exceedingly low-tech out there, simply looking at scale weight and strength levels in the gym will tell most of what’s going on.  If fat loss is the goal, you want a drop in weight with little to no change in strength in the weight room.  If that’s happening, most of what you’re losing is fat (or at least it’s not muscle mass).  For muscle gain it’s a bit more difficult but as long as you keep weight gain per week reasonable (0.5-1 lb per week or so), if you’re getting stronger in a medium repetition range, odds are most of what you’re gaining should be muscle mass.

Again, I know a lot of folks like BIA scales and, as long as you control hydration state, they can work ok.  I’m personally still biased to calipers since, once you learn to use them, I think they work better.  And they are cheaper if nothing else.

When to Measure

As I discussed in Problems with Measuring Body Composition, although all methods of measuring body composition can have issues with true accuracy, arguably we are more concerned with consistency.  That is, we want to be able to compare measurements over time to one another to see what the changes are.

And one aspect of consistency is actually taking the measurements under the same conditions.  Now, there are a couple of weird exceptions where you would deliberately take measurements under different conditions (e.g. to determine if a carb-load worked or not) but, under most circumstances, taking any measurements under identical conditions is important to be able to know what’s going on.

So, depending on preference, you might take 10 minutes every Monday morning to take a quick set of measurements.  So first thing, after going to the bathroom (but before eating), hop on the scale, throw a tape measure around a couple of key sites (again, usually waist for men and thigh for women) and do a couple of quick caliper measurements.  Write it down and then get on with your day.  This will give you measurements that you can compare week to week to see what’s happening.  Of course, if you’re doing pictures, you may need to pick a different time of day so that you have time to do it without rushing.  My point is simply that you need to keep everything consistent.

What won’t work is measuring at drastically different times since this won’t make the measurement comparable.  Doing a set of measurements on a Friday afternoon after you’ve eaten several meals and been running around all day to first thing Monday morning after you wake up won’t give values that are meaningful.

And while people do this all the time, you can’t compare measurements taken immediately after a workout to those taken before it (we’ve all seen people get on the scale before and after training, to see how much weight they ‘lost’ I imagine).  Sweat and water redistribution to the skin will throw everything off.   So pick one time to measure and keep it consistent.

Oh yeah, if you’re using tape measure measurements to check changes in muscle size, a question that often comes up is whether or not to take the measurement flexed or unflexed.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, make your choice and keep it consistent.  That’s all that matters, the consistency so that you can compare measurements.

Regarding calipers, if you’re not going to do your own measurements (and some of the spots are impossible to get at unless you’re a contortionist), it’s best to have the same person do them every time since individual technique can vary a bit.  This is a problem as most commercial gyms have a lot of employee turnover and the same person who took you measurements initially may not even be working there now.  In that case, consider teaching your significant other to do it.  Or your kids; make them useful for something other than pooping and leaving their toys on the floor.

Finally, there’s women who, as always, have the most interesting issues.  Changes over the menstrual cycle, especially with water balance, can make tracking real changes in body composition a real pain in the ass.  As well, there is just huge variation in this; some women gain little water and others will swing 10 pounds in a week. This will not only throw off the scale (and of course BIA) but also tape measure and calipers.

For women, it may be best to stay away from weekly measurements and just measure once a month and compare those values.  Or, if weekly measurements are made, only compare the same weeks of the month.  So compare week 1 to week 1 (of hte next month )and week 2 to week 2.  If you try to compare week 1 (when you’re not holding water) to week 2 (when you are), you are likely to go crazy becuase of the changes.

How often to Measure

Let’s face it, most people measure themselves too often.. As I mentioned, we’ve all seen people get on the scale before and after a workout, presumably to see how much weight they lost during the workout.  I’ve seen guys trying to get big do the same, I guess they want to see how much muscle they built (ha ha).  At home, dieters will get on the scale before and after they poop just to watch the numbers drop.  I’ve done it and you have too.

Clearly this isn’t effective as changes can’t happen that quickly and, in general, I see little reason to measure more than weekly.  And sometimes, or in specific situations, even that can be misleading.  Between shifts in water weight (that happen to everyone), women’s menstrual cycles, etc. weekly measurements may indicate that nothing is actually happening when it is.

One solution to this is to take a rolling average of changes and plot them on a spreadsheet.  As long as they are showing a trend downwards over time, that’s most of what matters.  If you don’t know how to do this, get one of your nerd friends to set it up for you in Xcel.

Add to this an odd phenomenon that is often referred to as the “whoosh” (a topic I discussed seriously in The Stubborn Fat Solution).  What sometime happens, and this is assuredly related to issues related to water balance, is that someone will be dieting for a few weeks with no changes.  Suddenly, almost overnight, there is the “whoosh”; they wake up several pounds lighter and visibly leaner.  Suddenly the diet that wasn’t working” for 3 weeks just generated a massive change.  My point being that this can make weekly tracking annoying and misleading from time to time.

At the same time, it’s also possible to track things far too infrequently.  As I mentioned above, studies of successful dieters show that regular tracking of weight and body composition is one way that they avoid weight regain; basically by keeping tabs on what’s happening, they know when they are starting to slip off the wagon and can tighten up their diet or exercise program.  This is probably a good strategy for folks who have to really fight to keep from falling back into old dietary and non-exercise habits.

What doesn’t work is avoiding the scale or mirror or tape measure for months on end and then ‘waking’ up with the same 42 inch waist you started with.  Measuring at least semi-regularly during weight maintenance, perhaps every 2-4 weeks, is a good way to keep yourself honest.  If the numbers start to go the wrong direction, it’s time to get a little more diligent about your diet and training.

In general, body composition doesn’t change that drastically week to week although there are exceptions.  On extreme diets, such as The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, often there are visible and measurable changes week to week.  But on more moderate diets, usually changes week to week are not much more than background noise to the measurements.

And in that situation measuring too often can lead people to think that things aren’t working and make them start doing goofy things (like drastically increasing activity, cutting calories severely, or abandoning the diet outright).  Measuring every 2-4 weeks is probably better and it is worth commenting that if you haven’t seen any visible or measurable changes in 4 weeks, your diet and training probably should be modified becuase it’s not working very well.

One odd exception that I’ve seen is that beginners (and usually females more than men) often won’t see any changes in the first 4 weeks of their new fat loss program. This can be frustrating and cause a lot of drop outs.  So they’ll be plugging along with the exercise and diet program and nothing is changing.  But then they invariably get the “whoosh” about week 4 or perhaps a little bit later; it always happened by week 8 in any case.  Almost overnight, they drop 4-5 pounds and look visibly different.  Patience is a virtue here and I highly recommend that folks just starting out show a little patience when they start trying to lose fat (or gain muscle).

Another exception to the above is folks who are very lean and this usually means contest bodybuilders or athletes.  When body fat levels are already very low it’s not uncommon to see changes occurring much faster and tracking every 1-2 weeks may be necessary to keep tabs on what’s going on (there is often a time constraint here so it’s critical to keep tabs on the changes).   Measuring weekly with calipers, etc. may be necessary to make sure they are coming in on time.

Of course, those athletes aren’t immune to the “whoosh” either and often 2 weeks of apparently no changes will be met with a massive change almost overnight.  This seems to be very individuals, folks who are prone to water retention see “stalls” and “whooshes” and those who don’t usually don’t.

If you’re wondering why the huge discrepancy between the very lean and folks carrying a lot of fat in terms of changes, I think it’s actually pretty simple math.  When someone is carrying 30-60 pounds of fat, a 1 pound loss per week isn’t very much (3% or less of the total) and that’s less than what the best body composition method can actually pick up.  In contrast, when someone is very lean and down to the last few pounds of fat, even a small fat loss may represent a massive percentage of what’s left; it’s not unheard of for bodybuilders to change visually day to day at the end of their diets.

Summing it all Up

Whew, so that’s that.  Pretty much everything I have to offer about measuring body composition. I’ve explained What Does Body Composition Mean?, showed you how to do Body Composition Calculations, and taken a look at Body Composition Numbers.

In Measuring Body Composition Part 1 and Measuring Body Composition Part 2, I looked at different methods that, even if they don’t measure body composition exactly, will at least allow tracking of progress of some sort.  Finally. I discussed some of the Problems with Measuring Body Composition.

In this article, I’ve given my specific recommendations (and ideal combination of methods) that I think will let people best track changes in body composition to see if their diet and exercise program is working.  No single method is perfect by itself but using a combination can give a pretty good indication of what’s actually going on.

I strongly belive that folks who are dieting (or trying to gain muscle mass) should be tracking some aspect of body composition changes.  What method is used may ultimately be less important than some method is used.

As a strength coach buddy of mine likes to say “If you’re not assessing, you’re guessing” and that applies here.  If you’re not tracking some aspect of what’s changing about your body, you can’t know if what you’re doing is effective.

With that said, keep in mind that none of the methods currently available are perfect.  Use them intelligently but don’t live and die by them.

What is Hunger?

To say that human hunger is complicated is a vast understatement.  To cover it in detail would require a series of articles or perhaps an entire book.  Research continues to uncover numerous interacting and overlapping hormones (such as leptin, ghrelin, peptide YY, GLP-1 and others) that monitor how much and what someone is eating (along with their body weight) and those all send a signal to the brain that drives a number of processes, not the least of which is hunger.

Now, it would be truly simple if that’s all there was to it but humans also eat/get hungry for non-physiological reasons.  We get hungry out of boredom, because we are at a party and it’s expected that we eat, because we just saw a commercial for some food we like and many others.

Simplistically, we might differentiate these different drivers of hunger into physiological and psychological factors although, as I discussed in the article Dieting Psychology vs. Dieting Physiology, the distinction between the two is not only false but increasingly fuzzy.  Physiological drives can manifest themselves as ‘psychological’ hunger and psychological factors can affect physiology.

However, even though the distinction is a false one, it is often useful practically to make that division and I”ll be doing so through the rest of that article.

Sufficed to say that human hunger is exceedingly complicated and finding out ways to deal with hunger while dieting is a huge first step in making diets more effective.  And with that said, in no particular order of importance, here are 9 Ways to Deal with Hunger on a Diet.

1. Eat More Lean Protein

While dietitians continue to squabble over whether carbohydrates or fats are more filling in the short-term, the data is actually abundantly clear: protein beats them both out.  Increasing amounts of research has shown that both acutely and in the long-term, higher protein intakes help blunt hunger.  It also helps that, as long as you’re dealing with sources of lean protein (low-fat fish, skinless chicken, even low-fat red meat), it can be tough to get a lot of calories from protein in the first place.

I’d also note that there are many other reasons to consume sufficient amounts of lean protein on a weight loss diet including blood glucose stability and sparing of muscle mass loss.  It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of the benefits that are often attributed to ‘low-carbohydrate’ diets have more to do with the increased protein intake; the benefits occur because they are ‘high-protein’.

2. Eat Fruit

For odd reasons fruit has gotten a bad rap for dieting, at least in the athletic and bodybuilding subculture but little could be further from the truth.  One aspect of hunger has to do with the status of liver glycogen, when liver glycogen is emptied, a signal is sent to the brain that can stimulate hunger; the corollary is that replenishing liver glycogen tends to make people feel fuller.

The fructose component of fruit works to refill liver glycogen and folks who include a moderate amount of fruit in their weight loss diets often report feeling much less hungry.  That’s in addition to the other benefits of fruit (fiber, nutrients).  Oh yeah, eat whole fruit, stay away from fruit juice.

3. Eat More Fiber

No list of this sort would be complete without the mention of fiber.  Fiber can help with hunger in at least two ways.  The first is that the physical ‘stretching’ of the stomach is one of many signals about how much food has been eaten; when the stomach is physically stretched the brain thinks you’re full.  High-fiber/high-volume foods (e.g. foods that have a lot of volume for few calories) accomplish that most effectively.

Additionally, fiber slows gastric emptying, the rate at which food leave the stomach.  By keeping foods in the stomach longer, a high-fiber intake keeps folks full longer.  Basically, mom was right, eat your vegetables.

4. Eat (At-Least) Moderate Amounts of Dietary Fat

Ignoring the debate I mentioned above about carbs versus fat and hunger, the simple fact is that exceedingly low-fat diets tend to leave a lot of people hungry in both the short- and long-term.  Tying in with my comments about fiber in Number 3, dietary fat also slows gastric emptying (hence the aphorism that high-fat meals really stick to the ribs).  While dietary fat does little to blunt hunger in the short-term, moderate intakes tend to keep people fuller longer between meals since the meal sits in the stomach longer.

As well, exceedingly low-fat diets often taste like cardboard, tying into some of the comments I made initially about psychological effects of dieting; people won’t follow a diet that doesn’t taste good for very long.  Dietary fat gives food a certain mouth-feel and very low-fat diets remove that, leaving people dissatisfied.  The diet usually ends shortly after that.

Research has shown that moderate fat diets improve adherence to dieting and, with rare exceptions, I don’t suggest taking dietary fat much lower than 20-25% of total calories on a fat loss diet.  In some cases (such as very low-carbohydrate diets), it may be higher than this.

5. Exercise

I’m hesitant to mention exercise in this article simply because the response to it can vary drastically in terms of hunger control on a diet.  Doing the topic justice would take a complete article in and of itself but here I’m going to give a quick overview.

Basically, through myriad overlapping mechanisms, exercise has the potential to increase hunger, decrease hunger or have no effect.  Some of the effects are purely physiological.  On the one hand, exercise increases leptin transport into the brain which should help some of the other hunger signals work better.  On the other hand, some people can get a blood glucose crash with exercise (this is especially true in the early stages of a program) and this can stimulate hunger.  Most research suggests that exercise has, if anything, a net benefit in terms of hunger control but it’s even more complicated than that.

Whether or not exercise helps with hunger control ends up interacting with psychological factors that I’m not going to detail here. Some research suggests that people ‘couple’ exercise with their diet.  The underlying psychlogy seems to be along the lines of “I exercised today, why would I ruin that by blowing my diet.”  That’s good.

However, another category of people often use exercise as an excuse to eat more.  The underlying psychology seems to be “I must have burned at least 1000 calories in exercise, I earned that cheeseburger and milkshake.”  Of course, since people basically always over-estimate how many calories they burned with exercise, they end up doing more harm than good.

The short-version of this point is this: for some people, regular exercise (and it may not be anything more than a brisk walk) has a profound benefit on keeping them on their diet.  And for others it tends to backfire.

6. Consider Intermittent Fasting (IF’ing)

IF’ing is a current dietary trend that, while exact definitions vary, basically refers to a pattern where someone fasts for some portion of the day (perhaps 16-20 hours) and eats most of their food during a short ‘eating period’.  Various interpretations are out there but there is emerging research showing a variety of health benefits from this style of eating.

In the context of this article, IF’ing can be particularly valuable for smaller dieters who simply don’t get to eat a lot of food each day.  A small female trying to subsist on 1000-1200 calories per day and trying to eat 3-4 times per day is only getting a few small, relatively unsatisfying meals per day.

However, if that same dieter fasts most of the day (many find that hunger goes away after an initial spike in the morning), she can eat 1-2 significantly larger (and more satisfying) meals later in the day.

If you’re interested in IF’ing, I’d direct you to Martin Berkhan’s Leangains.com for the absolute best source of IF information on the net.  Martin is currently working on a book on IF’ing and I, for one, can’t wait to see it.

7. Use Appetite Suppressants

The history of diet drugs is a mixed bag but, for the most part, diet drugs have fallen into one of two major categories: metabolic enhancers and appetite suppressants.  Sometimes the drugs do both.  Now, used without changes in diet and activity, these drugs tend to only have small and transient effects.

But the simple fact is that they can help a diet.  The old Dexatrim (containing pseudoephedrine HCL) was actually very nice in that it blunted hunger without over-stimulating the person but it’s not available any more.  I’m personally a big fan of the ephedrine/caffeine stack.

Despite scare-mongering to the contrary, EC used properly (e.g. don’t take 3X the recommended dose) is actually quite safe and has both potent appetite suppressant effects along with boosting metabolic rate slightly.  Hell, I thought EC was important enough that I gave it an entire chapter in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook.

Which isn’t to say that I think every dieter should be using/abusing appetite suppressants from day 1.  At least try the non-drug strategies first; but when the hunger is clawing at you making you want to quit your diet, consider using one.

8. Be more Flexible Towards Your Dieting

This is another topic that really deserves a book to fully discuss.  I’d say that I need to write that book but the fact is that I already did, the topics I’m going to briefly look at here are discussed in detail in A Guide to Flexible Dieting.

Let me address this topic with a question “What would you do if I told you you could never have something again?”  Assume it’s something you like or want, how would you react?  Odds are you’d want it that much more, right.  It’s human nature, we want what we’re told we can’t have.

Guess what, that’s dieting.  Or at least how many dieters approach dieting.  Many diets are predicated on some food being bad, off-limits or what have you; dieters go into the diet thinking “I can’t ever eat XXX again in my life” which just makes them want XXX that much more.  This is one of the psychological aspects of hunger I mentioned in the introduction.

And, of course, the followup to this is that when dieters do eventually eat XXX (and they will), then they just feel guilty and miserable, figure the diet is blown and eat the entire bag or box of XXX and abandon the diet altogether.

It’s truly a damaging approach to dieting and research has clearly shown that the type of rigid dieter I’m describing above (who expects absolute perfection from their diet or it’s a failure) do worse than more flexible dieters.

The reality is that, within the context of a long-term diet, even small deviations don’t really do much harm (unless the person goes berserk and makes it harmful).  That is, say you’re on a diet and you eat a couple hundred calories of cookies because you really wanted them.  If you’ve dieted the past 6 days, that’s no big deal.  However, if you decide that you are a worthless piece of crap with no willpower and eat another 1000 calories of cookies; well you made it into a problem.  Understand?

I always recommend that dieters use strategies like free meals (non-diet meals, preferably eaten out of the house), refeeds (extended periods of deliberate high-carbohydrate over-consumption) and full diet breaks (periods of 10-14 days where the diet is abandoned for maintenance) when they diet.  It keeps people from falling into the rigid dieting trap that, invariably, backfires.  Again, all of the details can be found in A Guide to Flexible Dieting.

9. Suck it Up or Stay Fat

I want to make it clear that I’m not being facetious with the title of this one; and I’m only being slightly obnoxious.  Even if you do everything I talked about above, apply every strategy perfectly, the reality is that you will probably still have some hunger on a diet.

Well…too bad.  The simple fact is that losing weight requires eating less than you’re burning and this will, at some point, generate hunger.  Now, there are exceptions, extremely overweight individuals often find that they have no appetite in the initial stages of dieting but the reality is that eventually hunger will rear it’s ugly head.

At which point every dieter is faced with a fundamental choice which, put simply is this “What’s more important to me, losing weight, or eating this food?”   I’d note that this is also a reason I’m so adamant about the flexible dieting strategies, at least one way of dealing with food cravings is to include them in the diet in a controlled fashion.  That way the dieter is controlling the diet, instead of the other way around.

But even with that, hunger is a reality of dieting no matter what else you do.  Now, you can try to reframe it (Tom Venuto in his new book suggested telling yourself that “Hunger is fatness leaving the body.”) or you can simply accept it (yes, I know, very Zen) and move on.

But none of that makes the hunger away, it’s just you trying to trick yourself out of feeling bad about it.  When that point is reached, there are only two options that I’m going to put very bluntly.

You can suck it up or stay fat.

After you’ve gotten your protein and fruit and fiber and fat and appetite supressants and exercise and flexible dieting strategies down pat, when hunger rears its ugly head, those are the only two options left.