Is Rapid Fat Loss Right For You?
It’s taken almost as a matter of faith in the fitness world that slower rates of weight loss are superior to faster rates, that diets generating faster weight loss always cause faster rates of regain and poorer long-term results. As I’ll mention below, there is certainly some data to support that.
What Does Body Composition Mean?
However, this is all too commonly leading to confusion as people ask “What does body composition mean?”. They know that it’s important but aren’t quite sure why it’s important or what the concept is about. I want to help take some of the confusion out of the topic here.
10 Tips to Deal with Holiday Weight Gain
For the body obsessed or even normal dieters, the holiday period from around October through to January can be a true minefield. Between the specific holidays of Halloween (mercifully passed), Thanksgiving and Christmas, along with endless goody baskets and parties, folks can run into problems maintaining the habits they strive to follow the rest of the year.
Why is Stubborn Fat Stubborn?
In general there are clear gender differences that show up at puberty, suggesting that sex hormones play a role in how fat cells develop. And there is much truth to this. It turns out that if you take a fat cell from a man’s thigh and a woman’s thigh, they are functionally identical and essentially indistinguishable physiologically. Even though the man generally has extremely low levels of estrogen.
All Diets Work: The Importance of Calories
In the article All Diets Work: A Qualification I made a quick qualification regarding my original statement that ‘all diets work’; today I want to expand a bit on something I mentioned on in that article. That something is the importance of calories.
What is Body Fat?
The more technical term for body fat is adipose tissue, with individual cells being called adipocytes (adipo = fat ; cyte = cell). In humans, the primary type of fat cell is called white adipose tissue, or WAT, so named because of its color (it’s actually sort of a milky yellow). While there is another type of fat, called brown adipose tissue or BAT (which is actually reddish/orangeish), it’s generally been thought that humans didn’t have much BAT and hence it could be ignored. As I’ll discuss later, this has been brought into question by recent research. I’ll come back to BAT in the next chapter.
All Diets Work: Qualification
Fundamentally, any diet that is restricted in calories will cause weight loss. Of course, dieters, ideally, shouldn’t only be concerned with the scale. The composition of what is lost is important too and, generally speaking, dieters want to lose fat not muscle (or just shift water around).
An Introduction to the Psychology and Physiology of Dieting
Frankly, in a lot of ways, I think addressing the psychological aspects of dieting is far far more important than the physiology or nutrient metabolism or what have you. Simply put, at this point, with 40+ years of dedicated nutritional research, I think we have a pretty good idea of what is required for a diet to generate weight or fat loss.
How Detail Oriented Do You Need to Be?
If the internet has accomplished one thing, it’s making people extremely obsessive compulsive about the most minute details of their training program and diet. Arguments and flame wars erupt over the absolutely least consequential of things. How many minutes should pass between sets, how long after workout before you drink your liquid beef aminos with waxy maize starch, stuff like that.
Is a Calorie a Calorie?
Simply put, the debate comes down to this: all that matters is caloric balance (calories in versus calories out) or do the source of those calories matter? The short and simple answer, of course, is ‘No’. The longer answer is what this article is about.
