Certainly larger amounts of exercise can approach significance (and as folks become fitter, they can burn more calories with activity) but the idea that a little bit of exercise is going to have a massive impact on anything is fairly misguided.  However, there are more ways that exercise might positively impact on weight/fat loss (especially when combined with changes in diet) and that’s what I want to look at today.   I’d mention that readers should check out PJ Striet’s comments in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1 for some other potential benefits of exercise outside of weight and fat loss per se.

Quality of Weight Lost

In Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1 I sort of confusingly jumped back and forth between weight and fat loss (mainly using fat loss as a way of estimating how much exercise might actually impact on things); for the most part the big meta-analyses and a lot of studies have focused more on total weight lost in response to exercise with most of them finding, at best, a small impact.

However, anyone who hasn’t had their head under a rock for the past couple of decades, or who has read anything on this website, knows that there is more to the overall equation than just weight loss.  As I discuss in some detail in What Does Body Composition Mean? the body is made of a number of different components including muscle mass, organs, water, connective tissues, minerals, fat, etc.

Just looking at changes in body weight can be misleading; it’s more important to look at what’s happening to body composition; that is, under most circumstances, folks want to lose fat while minimizing or eliminating the loss of lean body mass (especially muscle mass).

Does exercise help with that? That is, does the addition of exercise to a diet change the proportion of what’s lost; that is does it change the quality of weight lost (ideally shifting the loss towards more fat and less muscle mass).  And when you look at the studies the answer is a big old it depends.  A lot of which has to do with the specifics of the diet (especially the amount of protein provided) and the type of exercise done.

For the most part, exercise is found to have a protein sparing effect of some sort; that is less muscle and more fat is lost in response to the same caloric deficit.  It’s not universal with not all studies finding an impact (depending on the, type, frequency, duration and intensity of activity) but certainly the trend is for that.

And here is a place where there does seem to be a difference in what type of activity being done with studies (and practical experience) finding that resistance training (especially coupled with adequate protein intake) being superior to aerobic activity (or a low protein intake) for limiting lean body mass loss and, thus increasing fat loss in response to a diet.  And while more mixed, there is some suggestion that this helps to limit the normal drop in metabolic rate that tends to occur with weight loss.

Put differently, as I phrased it in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, if there’s a single type of exercise to do while dieting, it’s proper resistance training.  Coupled with an adequate protein intake, that alone tends to limit (or eliminate) lean body mass losses such that the weight which is lost (in response to the caloric deficit) comes predominantly from fat mass.

So this is a place where even if exercise doesn’t increase the quantity of total weight loss per se (i.e. how much the scale actually changes), it can impact on the quality of weight lost; with proper exercise causing more fat and less muscle loss than would otherwise occur.  Here again, proper resistance exercise, especially coupled with adequate protein, seems to be superior to aerobic activity or diets with insufficient protein.  You can read more about proper resistance training in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 and Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 2.

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Accountability/Adherence

Perhaps one of the most potentially beneficial places that exercise can play a role during weight loss is with adherence.  I’ve mentioned this in articles before but, for many people, the simple fact of doing some sort of exercise on a given day makes it more likely for them to stick to their diet.  The underlying logic seems to be along the lines of “I worked out today, why would I blow my diet?”

In a lot of ways, this may actually be one of the single most important aspects of successful weight loss attempts, long-term adherence to the plan. I’ve ‘joked’ about this before, saying that the best diet is the one that you can stick to and there is much truth to this joke; at the end of the day after you work through all of the potential benefits of one diet versus another or what have you, the best one for a given individual is the one that they can stick to in the long-term.  If regular daily activity of some sort helps an individual adhere to their dietary plan, that benefit alone may be more important than any actual metabolic effects of the exercise bout itself.

Basically, for some people there seems to be a psychological coupling of exercise with good dietary habits on a day to day basis and clearly that can be of benefit.  Of course, there is a potential negative that needs to be considered: when/if people stop exercising often their dietary habits fall off just as quickly.

In fact, one odd study years ago looked at this issue comparing diet, exercise and diet+exercise for both short- and long-term results.  It found that the diet+exercise group ran into problems such that, when subjects stopped exercising, their diet habits fell apart too.

There is another potential place that this can backfire which I’m going to look at next.

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Exercise and Hunger/Appetite

The impact of exercise on hunger and/or appetite is, to put it mildly, complicated.  This is because human hunger/appetite (I’m not going to bother making the distinction between the two here) is exceedingly complex being an interplay of biology, psychology and environment.  These are often separated out for convenience but they all interact.

Looking solely at biology, overall exercise seems to have a beneficial overall impact on acute hunger, showing a decrease at least in the short-term (other work has shown that the overall hunger/appetite regulation system works more effectively when regular activity is performed).

This seems to be related to increased levels of various gut hormones involved in signalling fullness, as well exercise can increase leptin transport into the brain (other studies suggest that long-term aerobic activity may improve leptin sensitivity which is good given that obesity is generally associated with leptin resistance in the brain).    There may still be as of yet undiscovered mechanisms for exercise to impact on hunger/appetite.

Other work suggests that even if exercise can increase hunger, any increase in food intake tends to be less than the energy burnt during the activity itself; that is exercise still has an overall benefit.   It’s worth mentioning that even here there tends to be a large degree of individuality, some people compensate for the energy expenditure of activity better than others and this may be part of what contributes to individual differences in results.

One thing I noticed years ago (and forgot to mention in the Training the Obese Beginner series) is that beginners often seem to get a slight increase in hunger following activity, at least in the first few weeks of training.  I suspect this is due to their general over-reliance on glucose for fuel (falling blood glucose being one of many stimuli for hunger).   At about the week 4 mark, as their bodies started to get the first adaptation to training and started to use more fat for fuel; this effect generally went away.

It’s worth noting that emerging research suggests that there may be gender differences in this effect (along with many others) with women, as usual, getting the short end of the stick when it comes to exercise and hunger regulation.  And this is consistent with earlier studies showing that, under uncontrolled eating conditions, women are less likely to lose weight in response to exercise than men.

Of course, the above tends to interact massively with the psychology of the individual and whether or not they are consciously controlling their food intake.  That second issue is a major confound in a lot of studies that people tend to forget about when they compared different studies.

However, this isn’t always the case and one trap that many exercisers often fall into is assuming that their exercise bout has burned far more calories than it has (you’ll hear folks figuring they must have burned at least 1000 calories in an hour of moderate activity when the reality is probably closer to 400-500) and figuring that they’ve ‘earned’ that big post-exercise junk-food meal.

As I mentioned in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1 it’s usually quite trivial to overcome all but the most massive exercise related energy expenditures.  You can put down 1000+ calories in a big post-workout meal with ease, more than compensating for the energy burn of the activity.

But as much as anything I feel that this comes down to an issue of misinformation and education; people need to be realistic about the number of calories they are burning during activity.  It’s simply almost never as high as they think and realizing this is a first step to avoiding habits that will tend to not only offset but actually reverse any beneficial impact of activity.

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Weight Loss Maintenance

As a final topic, I want to look at an issue that is perhaps more important in the big scheme of things than actual weight loss per se.  The rather simple fact that needs to be recognized is that weight/fat loss per se isn’t really the hard part; people consistently do and can lose fat/weight all the time.

The issue is with keeping it off.  That is to say, although people successfully lose weight/fat all the time, they usually end up gaining it back. Frankly, I am of the opinion that strategies to lose fat/weight are no longer the important issue, rather research and practice needs to find out what makes people so poor at long-term adherence to dietary changes (or behavioral changes of all types) and find solutions to that.  Is it biological, psychological, is the distinction even meaningful?  And how do we fix it?

But beyond that issue, this is one place where exercise has routinely shown to have a benefit with regards to overall body weight/body fat reduction programs.  That is, while most studies have not found a massive impact of exercise on weight/fat loss per se, the impact on weight loss maintenance seems to be much much larger.

Both epidemiological and intervention studies have found that maintenance of regular activity following weight loss is associated with better long-term weight maintenance (I’d note that keeping protein intake high also has benefits) but with one major caveat: it takes quite a bit of activity (I’d note that this seems to assume that the diet is relatively uncontrolled after the active weight loss period).

Various lines of research suggest that a weekly exercise energy expenditure of 2500-2800 calories per week is required to maintain the lowered body weight.  If we assume an average of 5-10 cal/min for low to moderate intensity activity, this works out to between 280-500 minutes of exercise per week or somewhere between 40-70 minutes of activity (depending on intensity and frequency) per day.

Again, the above seems to assume that the diet is relatively more uncontrolled following the actual weight-loss intervention which isn’t automatically a good assumption.  But it does put into perspective what may be required in terms of daily activity to maintain weight loss.

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Summing Up

So that’s a (for me anyhow) fairly brief look at the potential impact of exercise on weight/fat loss.  As I discussed in some detail in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1, the unfortunate reality is that all but the most extensive exercise programs are unlikely to have much of an overall impact on the absolute quantity of weight lost, especially in the absence of dietary changes.

The average beginner/overweight individual simply can’t burn enough calories in realistic amounts of exercise to have much of an impact.  Reducing caloric intake through various means (discussed in detail in other articles on the site) will almost always have a larger impact on overall energy balance.

However, that doesn’t make exercise useless and there are other ways that activity can positively (and negatively) impact on the overall goal of weight/fat loss.  The first of those is in shifting the quality of weight lost; even if exercise doesn’t affect the total magnitude of scale change, proper activity (with resistance training coupled with sufficient protein intake being superior to aerobic work/low protein) can decrease the loss of lean body mass and increase the total loss of fat.

There are also potential benefits to adherence/accountability with some people essentially coupling daily activity with adhering to their diet.  Anything that makes someone stick to their diet in the long-term can only be beneficial. As noted, this can sometimes backfire, where the person then loses all good dietary habits if their exercise program is interrupted for whatever reason.

In terms of hunger and appetite, exercise seems to have an overall beneficial impact but interactions with the individual psychology of the dieter can affect this greatly; some people will rationalize the consumption of food based on a misunderstanding of their actual calorie burn.  This can completely overcome any benefit of the exercise in terms of energy expenditure.

Finally, exercise appears to have the greatest potential benefit in terms of long-term weight loss maintenance; here studies have shown that regular exercise improves long-term weight loss maintenance.  However, it takes quite a bit with upwards of an hour or more of daily activity required to completely offset post-diet weight gains.

I suppose the issue isn’t really one of the realities of exercise and fat/weight loss but rather how the message was misinterpreted.  Many have held up exercise as some sort of panacea for all things, health, fitness and of course what everyone is really interested in: losing weight/fat and I suspect the message got a bit garbled as it so often does: people figured that they could do a bit of easy exercise and the pounds would just melt right off.

The realities, unfortunately, are often quite a bit different and in this series of articles (which I’ll hopefully keep to a mere two parts), I want to look at the possible ways that exercise might impact on one’s overall body recomposition goals.  You’ll notice that I used the word ways plural in that sentence; while most focus on the direct role of exercise on fat loss (via direct calorie and/or fat burning) it turns out that there are more ways than just that for exercise to impact on things.

For the most part, I’m going to sort of cluster all exercise in one big grouping for the sake of simplicity.  Clearly resistance training and aerobic training aren’t the same and have differential effects; when needed I’ll make distinctions between them.  It’s important to realize that most research on exercise and fat loss have used obese individuals (researchers by and large not being interested in lean folks trying to get leaner) and that has potentially other impacts on a lot of this.  Again, as needed, I’ll make note of this.

Today, since it will take the most verbiage, I’m only going to look at the primary way that exercise can (or can not) impact on body recomposition goals and that is in terms of its impact on total weight loss; that is the quantity of weight lost.  I’ll note ahead of time that I am going to confusingly jump back and forth between fat and weight although they are not the same thing.  This will make more sense in Part 2 when I attempt to cover all of the other ways that exercise may potentially impact on things.

Quantity of Weight Loss

Most commonly, exercise is held up as a way of either directly causing weight/fat loss or for increasing the amount of weight/fat lost when added to a diet with the focus primarily on the direct effects of exercise on calorie/fat burning either during the exercise bout or afterwards.   As noted above since it will take the longest, that’s the only issue I’m going to look at today.  Basically, I’m going to give a reality check on the impact of realistic amounts of exercise in terms of its impact on body weight/body fat.  It’s not a reality many are happy with.

In previous articles as well as in my books, most recently in the Training the Obese Beginner series, I’ve made the comment that, generally speaking, the only people who can burn a tremendous number of calories during exercise are trained athletes; and they aren’t the ones that usually need it.  That statement appears to have confused some people but the point I was trying to make is that the number of calories that can be burned with realistic amounts of exercise in beginners is usually fairly low.

In my first book The Ketogenic Diet, I cited some paper or another indicating that most untrained folks can burn perhaps 5-10 cal/minute in exercise if you’re talking about sustainable intensities; this might hit 15 cal/minute but that would be for high intensity interval-type training.

However, the duration of that activity tends to be exceedingly limited and the total average calorie burn for the activity will be lower due to the rest intervals.  As well, this isn’t an intensity of training that can be done frequently.   Even achieving 10 cal/minute would be fairly challenging for an relatively untrained/low-trained individual.

Of course, as training status goes up, folks can burn proportionally more calories.  A moderately trained individual might be able to burn 10 cal/minute fairly easily and hit 15 cal/minute for extended periods if they are willing to work a bit.  20 cal/minute might be achievable for short periods but, again, the total burned during activity would be balanced out by the low intensity nature of the rest intervals.

As I discussed in Steady State vs. Intervals and EPOC: Practical Application, when I have compared interval sessions of varying types to steady state training with a Powermeter, the total caloric expenditure is usually about identical because of how the rest intervals affect the average intensity.  The steady state sessions are far easier to complete and can be done more frequently as well.

A very highly trained athlete might be able to burn 15 cal/minute as a matter of course, 20 cal/minute if they are willing to work and hit even higher values for high intensity training.  Certainly these athletes sometimes need to drop fat (usually to improve power to weight ratio) and they have the advantage of being able to burn a tremendous number of calories with even low intensity activity.   Simply tacking on an ‘easy’ 30-45 minutes to their normal training can burn a pretty large number of calories making fat loss relatively easy without much change in diet.  But that last group is not who we are realistically talking about here.

I’d note that the above values are for cardiovascular activities.  People always ask about calorie burn during weight training and it’s harder to pin down values.  It also depends staggeringly on the type of activities done (e.g. whole body vs. isolation exercises), rest intervals, rep ranges, etc.    Clearly repetition clean and jerk will burn a lot more calories than barbell curls.

On average, studies have found a calorie burn of 7-9 cal/minute seems to be about right (again with huge variability) but that only holds for the actual work time and a lot of time in the weight room is usually spent resting.  When we have tracked calorie burn for various types of weight training (ranging from Olympic lifting to isolation machine work) with tools such as the Bodybugg/GoWearFit or Polar heart rate monitors, a calorie burn of 300-400 cal/hour is about the average.

So with the above values in hand, let’s look at realistically what we might expect in terms of weight loss using the values for a typical untrained/low fitness level individual assuming a calorie burn of 5-10 cal/minute and various durations and frequencies.   I’m going to compare 30 vs. 60 minutes and 3 vs. 6 days/week to estimate total caloric expenditure.

And here’s where the confusing bit comes in, to put in this in real world terms I’m going to move from weight loss to fat loss with the assumed value of a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound of fat; of course this assumes that 100% fat is being lost which is not always a safe assumption.  I’d note that total weight lost will be higher if a larger proportion of muscle is lost, an issue I discussed in The Energy Balance Equation.

I want to note up front that there is a HUGE assumption built into the following calculations: that nothing else is changing.  Not diet, not activity at other times during the day (some studies find that people compensate for exercise based energy expenditure by moving less later in the day), nothing.  The only change we’re making here is by adding exercise to an otherwise static situation.  For reasons far beyond the scope of what I want to talk about right now, this is not a good assumption.  It simply makes the math easier.

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Frankly, the results are pretty dismal; you don’t even get to a one pound fat loss per week until you reach 6 days/week of an hour of fairly challenging exercise every day.  Certainly the folks who think that brisk walking for 30 minutes a few times per week is going to have a major impact on much of anything without a complete overhaul in diet are incorrect; the impact is simply negligible.

It’s also worth mentioning that the above caloric expenditure is actually somewhat of an overestimation since it includes the calories that would be burned by simply sitting around doing nothing.  That is, if you did nothing during that hour, you’d burn perhaps 60-100 calories/hour or so depending on that activity.  The above values include that resting expenditure so the actual impact on energy expenditure above and beyond normal are going to be slightly lower.

But it’s fairly easy based on the above values (which again represent a massive number of assumptions in the first place) to see how many people have concluded that exercise is worthless for fat loss.  And certainly a majority of studies (including most of the big meta-analyses) have reached that conclusion: compared to dieting alone, exercise tends to add very little to the quantity of weight lost.  Even added to a diet, exercise tends to impact on the total weight loss marginally at most; the diet is doing most of the work in terms of the actual quantity of weight lost (here I’m switching back to talking just about weight).

And this is simple mathematics, removing 1000 calories/day from the diet can be achieved with relatively more or less ease (depending on how bad the diet is to start with); the average beginner simply can’t burn that many calories with any realistic amount of exercise.  At a low intensity and a calorie burn of 5 cal/min, that would require 200 minutes of activity per day, over 3 hours.  At a challenging 10 cal/min, you’re looking at 100 minutes, an hour and forty minutes.  This is simply beyond what most people can, are willing, or have time to do.

This is also why I mentioned the huge assumption that diet is unchanging in the above estimations; another conclusion often reached is that exercise is worthless as the amount of calories that can be burned can be offset by even a small increase in food intake.  An average bagel may contain 250 calories (or more if they are the big ones), you can overcome the deficit generated by the lower amounts of activity with a small increase in food intake.

I’d mention that the only impact of exercise on weight/fat loss tends to be due to the deficit created; studies where the calories from activity are replaced by increasing food intake show no changes in anything.  That is to say, if you compensate for the activity by eating more (an issue I’ll talk about later), nothing really happens.

In this vein, most of the exercise and diet studies have used fairly low-moderate amounts of activity (in line with the above chart) and few have progressed anything over the course of the study, volume or intensity; most show neglible effects on much of anything (even the much vaunted interval studies only show maybe a 1-2 lbs fat loss over 12 weeks compared to steady state training).

The latter is a problem to me since no good fitness program would be so static without some progression in frequency, duration, intensity or all three as folks got fitter and were able to handle more or harder training.  As I mentioned in the Training the Obese Beginner series, one consequence of regular fitness training is an improvement in fitness, allowing folks to train at higher levels (both driving fitness higher as well as burning more calories).

So while realistic amounts of exercise may not be able to play a major role initially in weight loss, over time it not only adds up (albeit in depressingly small amounts) but can end up contributing further down the road as fitness improves.   That’s in addition to some other indirect ways that exercise may help that I’ll talk about shortly.  Finally, there turns out to be a huge area where exercise has been shown to play a role that I’ll talk about when I wrap up the series.

I’d note before moving on that some studies using fairly large amounts of activity (one that comes to mind had subjects cycle 2 hours/day 6 days/week) have shown a greater impact on weight and fat losses.  But these amounts of activities are usually considered to be fairly unrealistic for most people.  I’m simply making the point that for people who can do a lot of activity (one person on my forum actually got into the habit of doing 8 hours of low intensity cycling during the day believe it or not) there can be an impact.

But the simple fact is that, for the average untrained individual, realistic amounts of activity are unlikely to have massive direct impacts on either body weight or body fat; the caloric expenditure simply isn’t significant enough to impact on anything.  As well, changes in diet have the potential to make a much greater contribution to the creation of a caloric deficit; removing 500 or even 1000 calories per day from the diet can usually be achieved much more readily than adding the same amount of activity.  At least in certain populations.

But as noted in the introduction, there are several other ways that exercise can positively impact on weight/fat loss goals. Those will be the topic of Part 2 on Friday.

Read Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 2

A little while back, in trying to fix my own ignorance about swimming, I read what is often considered a classic in the field of training literature which is the book “The Science of Swimming” by James ‘Doc’ Counsilman.  Written in 1968, the book represented one of the first attempts to apply much in the way of science to the technique of swimming.  Suffice to say that swimming is very strange and, so far as I can tell even in 2010, nobody is exactly sure how swimming ‘works’.  That is, in terms of what’s going on mechanically in the water.

But this is not an article about swimming, rather there is a particular quote in the book that really resonated with me (especially after some of the silliness I had been seeing on the support forum) and that prompted this article.  In discussing technique considerations and stroke mechanics, Counsilman writes:

Do not subordinate fundamental principles to minor details.

It’s quotes like these, ones that are so to the point and clear that really stand out for me.  It’s also the sign of a truly knowledgeable person: people who know their field can express complicated ideas in simple language.  People who use complex language to confuse you don’t really know what they are talking about.  But that’s a different topic for a different day.

In this specific case, Counsilman was talking about worrying about details of stroke mechanics (or trying to fix or alter them) without paying attention to the fundamentals of proper stroke mechanics.  Because the fundamental principles outweigh the minor details by miles.  But it applies equally well to the issues of diet and training.

As I’ve written about in a previous article How Detail Oriented Do You Need to Be, with the advent of the Internet (along with other forms of constantly running media) people are absolutely overwhelmed with information, much of it dealing with what can only be termed completely irrelevant details.  That is, stuff that just isn’t likely to make an iota of difference to anything in the real world.  I think the reason for this trend is that writing about the basics and the fundamentals all the time isn’t sexy or interesting. It certainly doesn’t sell magazines.

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Let’s Get the Big Exception Out of the Way

Certainly, there is a time and a place where details can matter.    As discussed in How Detail Oriented Do You Need to Be usually it’s people who are at the very extreme high level of performance or leanness looking for that next level up.  Yeah, fine, if I’m trying to diet a male down to 5% body fat without muscle loss, the details may start to matter (though amusingly some can do it without ever moving past the most basic of approaches).  An elite athlete looking for that last bit of performance is in that position where all of the esoteric stuff, the insane details, start to matter.

But those tend to represent such a tiny percentage of the training or dieting population as to be almost irrelevant.  They may be the more interesting subgroup  (because coaches like getting up their own butts with this stuff too) but they aren’t the largest percentage of the training or dieting population.

And while everyone on the Internet thinks that they are advanced, the simple fact is that most are not; most would be served by simplifying more than complexifying.  As well, the individuals in the situations above have spent years working on the fundamentals to the point that they are so well entrenched that they needn’t be worried about.  At that point the details can matter.

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So Let’s Talk about Everybody Else

As I mentioned, by  the definition of the word ‘most’, most people training or altering their diet are not in the above situations, looking for that last bit of a percentage point gain where details may start to matter.  Which unfortunately, doesn’t stop them from all too often focusing on the minor details to such a degree that one of two damaging things happens which are:

1. They never actually get started on their plan.
2. They manage to completely forget about the fundamental principles.

Both are clearly a problem and I want to talk about both in some detail.

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Just Do Something

One of the primary end results of the unnecessary focus on details is that people often spend weeks (or months) looking for the perfect program, the perfect diet.  And invariably they are focusing on the minor, minor, minor details that separate different successful programs.  So one program has such and such a set and rep scheme, another slightly different.   One training program might be more frequency based, another more intensity based (as discussed in A Quick Look at Some Popular Hypertrophy Programs).

I see people do it all the time: asking for a compare and contrast of one training program vs. another.  Is one ‘better’ than the other?  What about this third one? What about this one?  What about that one?

The same holds for diet.  One uses carb-cycling of some form or fashion on a daily basis, another uses big-carb refeeds less frequently (most of my plans), a third does something else entirely.   And every approach seems to work stunningly (at least for some people) or not at all (in others).  But that gets into the issue of context more than anything else; what is right (or potentially ideal) for one person or one situation is not right for another.  Context matters.

Of more relevance, what often happens is that people get so overwhelmed at focusing on the details that they never act.  They spend weeks looking for the perfect diet or training program (which doesn’t really exist in the first place, at best all programs have pros and cons and are, at most, best under a given set of circumstances) and lose time when they should simply be doing something.

Because, at the end of the day, assuming the training or diet isn’t completely and utterly moronic (and make no mistake, there are plenty of those out there) actually doing something is always better than talking about it for weeks on end.

Yet it’s that latter pattern I see altogether too many falling into: people spend days and weeks and longer asking about this plan versus the other plan, this program versus the other.  Time that would be more productively spent actually starting any one of the myriad programs that they’ve asked about.

And this is especially true at the beginner stage (less so at the intermediate stage although the same principles still hold).  When you’re starting out in training or diet, the ‘nice’ thing is that everything works.  One set, three sets, it all works; for the most part any non-idiotic diet will be effective to some degree for generating weight or fat loss.

Hell, some of the idiotic stuff usually works at this level simply because it’s better than what the person was doing beforehand. It’s not that the new approach is better so much as what was left behind was awful. But at this point, the details just don’t matter.  What matters is actually doing something.  You usually won’t find out if something is right for you ahead of time unless you just hunker down and try it.  So stop worrying and start hunkering.

Once again, as folks get more advanced, the details can start to matter.  Basically, you often have to worry more and more about less and less as you try to get to higher levels of performance or leanness or muscularity.   But by the time someone truly reaches that stage, they usually know enough about how their body responds, on top of having years of fundamentals under their belt, that they either know what to do next or how to proceed.  As mentioned above, while everyone wants to think that they are advanced, the reality is that they are not.

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Forgetting Fundamental Principles

Make no mistake, I often get rather focused on details, and many articles on this site reflect that.  Of course, I try my best to balance those out with articles looking fundamental concepts; that is, the basics that are important and should underlie all intelligently set up approaches.  That’s why I write the primers on various topics and try to look at fundamental principles instead of just getting up my own butt with complicated details (that fascinate me but are often not globally very relevant).

It’s worth noting that most of my own complicated approaches to things are aimed at the advanced people in the first place.  The Ultimate Diet 2.0 is an advance diet for advanced dieters; it’s aimed at people for whom the details matter.  Even there, while the overall structure of the diet is a bit complicated, any given day actually isn’t.

The information in The Stubborn Fat Solution is equally detail oriented.  But again, it’s aimed at folks looking at the last little bits of fat, the stuff that doesn’t come off easily without an attention to such details.   For everyone else, such details are not needed: that training and dieting gets done is more important than how it gets done exactly.

But the fundamental principles must always be adhered to, even in the advanced/complicated programs.  It’s simply that the details are less relevant for the non-advanced.  So, for example, as I looked at in The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 1 and The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 2, there are a set of fundamental principles of fat loss diets that I consider crucial to success, first and foremost among them the creation of a suitable caloric deficit.

And, frankly, any approach that meets those principles in one form or fashion will be a ‘good’ program.  So while I have my approach and Alan Aragon has his and someone like Borge Fagerli (Blade) has another, and Martin Berkhan has his intermittent fasting approach; if you looked at all those plans in terms of the fundamental principles, you’d see that they  all met them.  They may differ slightly in details and approach but the fundamentals are always present.

A similar article could be written (and I will eventually write it) regarding training principles for growth or strength gains.  There are fundamental principles (revolving around intensity, frequency, volume, etc.) that all intelligent programs must meet.  How they are met is less relevant than that they are met in some form or fashion.  And while people will argue endlessly about the (apparent) differences in application; when you get down to the fundamentals most programs are not as different as you think.  Not the good ones anyhow.

The problem comes in when people start focusing on details (that may or may not be relevant) to the exception of those fundamental principles.  So people want some magic combination of foods or whatever to get around the necessity to create a caloric deficit; they hope that they can avoid the fundamental principle of fat loss (an imbalance between energy intake and output) with some minor detail.  That’s when the problems start.

I can’t count the number of times someone has come on the support forum with a question about “Why am I stalling/why am I not losing weight?” and they can’t even answer the basic questions of “How many calories are you eating per day?  How much protein?  How many total carbs?  How much total dietary fat?”  They can tell you just about everything about their diet except the relevant stuff: how much.

So they are worrying about the glycemic index of one food versus another and one protein source versus another and whether 12.7% of one nutrient is better or worse than 17.2% of the same nutrient and one supplement versus another and…..  And they haven’t even figured out how much they are currently eating per day, or their total macronutrient intake or anything else that actually matters.  On and on it goes and I’m sure readers can see this for themselves across the Internet.

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Making My Point

Make no mistake, worrying about minor details can have value in certain circumstances and don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here.  For some it’s a true physiological need; those advanced people who need to worry about the details because they are at a level that matters.  But, as I noted above, those folks have already spent so much time on the fundamentals that they are in a position where it may matter.

For others, there is often a psychological need to worry about details.  There is a type of dieter I once saw Dan Duchaine describe as ‘wanting all the plumbing’ who tends to follow diet and training programs better when they have an insane amount of details to worry about.   They may not need them in the sense of a true physiological need but they want them and will only be happy if they have them present.

And, to a degree, a lot of what is written in the athletic and bodybuilding literature (those subcultures being towards the obsessive end of things) is geared towards that; giving people a lot of details that are often irrelevant to worry about and obsess about.  Certainly psychological needs are important and have to be taken into account but those details must be placed on top of a basic of fundamentals.  Many of those folks often learn over time that the details aren’t really that relevant anyhow.  But starting out they often need/want those details to be happy or to follow their program.

Because what you usually find is this: once you get the fundamental principles in order, most of the minor details don’t matter very much.  At the very least, they don’t add nearly to the results that most people hope for.  And until you get the fundamental principles in place, the minor details don’t matter at all.  That’s on top of the situation where obsessing about those details prevent someone from ever actually acting in the first place.

As Doc said so clearly and succinctly: Do not subordinate fundamental principles to minor details.

What’s the best car for someone to buy?

Now, unless you’re particularly thick, or just haven’t had enough coffee this morning, you’re probably thinking to yourself something along the lines of “Good grief, what an utterly stupid question.”  Which it would be.

Hopefully the thought process would run towards something like “There’s no answer to that question, it’s going to depend on what the person is using it for, where they live, what kind of terrain they are driving on, how much money they have and a whole host of other questions.”

That is, you’d look at the context of the person and their situation before you gave anything approximating a suggestion.  To give a recommendation without considering those issues would simply be silly.

Put a bit differently, if you went to a car forum and posted the above question, would you expect to get a single answer?  Or would you expect the majority of people to ask you a bunch of followup questions to try and determine your specific needs, and use those needs to give recommendations on what might be best in that context.

Since I’m a fan of repetition, let me put it a third way just in case I’m not clear.  Consider the following two situations shown in the table below where I’ve described two individuals based on a handful of different categories.

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Essentially I’ve described two diametrically opposed situations.  The first is what would normally be called a soccer mom.  Mid 30’s mother of two, needs a safe an reliable vehicle to ferry the kids around, go to store, etc.  The second is a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis, trying to get himself a nice 22 year old girlfriend to make up for the fact that his penis isn’t working so well anymore.

Could you possibly give the same car recommendation to both individuals?  Of course not.  The context determines what is ideal, best or can or should be recommended.  For the first case, it might be a typical mini-van type vehicle. Lots of room, reliable, safe, etc.  For the second, a sports car or whatever vehicle is currently being used to overcompensate for a non-working penis.

Clearly recommending the first car to the second person or vice versa would be completely idiotic.  The sports car would be completely inappropriate for the soccer mom and, generally speaking, mini-vans are not chick magnets.  Well, maybe if you’re trying to pick up a soccer mom.  But for the specific target (20 something hot chick), it would not be the right choice.

You could easily draw up as many other specific situations where different vehicles might or might not be the best option.  Off-roading would require a different choice than someone who wants to drive really, really fast.  On and on it goes but my point is this : the specific context would determine the ideal (or range of ideal) recommendations. There might very well be more than one appropriate recommendation for a given situation, but there certainly would be no single recommendation appropriate for ALL situations.

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I Think You Can See Where I’m Going with This

So why is it in the field of nutrition and training that the majority seem to think in absolutes where the context of the situation is never taken into consideration?  Because as often as not, it isn’t.   Rather, individuals will state in absolute terms, regardless of context that such and such is good, or bad, or best, or worst.   Squats are good, squats are bad, carbs are good, carbs are bad, saturated fats are good, saturated fats are bad.  Pick a topic and you’ll find extremist, absolutist viewpoints on all sides.

No matter what the topic, invariably someone will come along and feel that there is an absolute answer regarding that topic, regardless of the context.  You can see this running through the comments sections of many of my articles.  Because, when I write, I generally spend a lot of time trying to address the different contexts, places where something might be good (or best) in one situation and bad (or not best) in another.  That’s a big part of why they are so long.

And without fail someone will come along and throw down an absolute statement about the topic.  Or accuse me of being anti- (or pro-) whatever it is that they are absolutely pro- (or anti-) about.   I can almost set my watch by it: that no matter how clearly I write, or how many times I repeat the same basic idea, that at least one person will manage to take issue with it because I didn’t repeat the single answer that they know is right for all situations and all context.

Put differently, folks like that have a rather simple rulebook that they live by.  X is good for everything and everyone.   Y is bad for everything and everyone.  Everything is phrased in simple black and white with no shades of any other color.  To any even remotely related question, the simple rulebook answer comes out.  Regardless of context.  And anyone who doesn’t see the world in that same black and white is defined as criticizing their belief.

It’s a simple belief system and certainly doesn’t require much thought.  Unfortunately, it’s almost always wrong.

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Example 1: Are Saturated Fats Good or Bad for Health?

A stunning example of this can be found in the comments of the article Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies Part 1 and Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies Part 2.  In that article, one thing I looked at was the issue regarding saturated fats and health where there currently exist two rather extremist viewpoints.  The mainstream view point is that saturated fats are always bad, always hurtful, always negative; the alternative viewpoint is that they are healthy with zero detrimental effects.

The truth as usual lies in the middle.  For example, consider the following two situations:

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The first could describe any athlete.  Or possibly the ‘average’ paleo hunter type (who was lean, active, etc.) that the ’saturated fat is good people’ are basing their beliefs on.  The second is the majority of people in the world: overweight, inactive, lots of stress, poor overall food intake, etc.

In the first context, a high saturated fat intake (or high fat intake in general) might be completely neutral to health and, in fact, the studies show that that is the case.  In one study, for example, in trained cyclists, neither a high-fat diet or a high saturated-fat intake had negative effects on anything. Presumably the cyclists burned off the fats for energy before they could do any harm anywhere.  In that context, saturated fats are irrelevant as is total fat intake.

And in the second, as about 30 years of literature demonstrates, saturated fats are detrimental to health.  They cause inflammation, insulin resistance and an excessive intake, especially in the context of the rest of the modern lifestyle, is one of several risk factors for heart disease.  When people are carrying excess body fat, inactive, consuming too many total calories and refined carbohydrates, and gaining weight you simply can’t deny the negative impact of saturated fats.  No matter how hard people try.

But the pro-saturated fat people seem unable to make or understand this distinction.  In their minds, saturated fats are ‘good’ regardless of the context.  The anti-saturated fat people, usually involved in making food policy, tend to be less concerned about the exceptions and are focused on the majority in the first place.  Even if they acknowledge that high-fat/saturated-fat diets are neutral for those exceptions, that isn’t the group that they are targeting with their recommendations.

Is this sinking in at all yet?

It’s all about the context.  In a given context, something may be the best thing ever; in another it may be the worst.  There are no absolutes, only context specific situations and context specific right- or wrongs.

Yet, go check the comments section, one individual left something to the effect of “You seem to be siding with the anti-saturated fat people and saying that they are negative.”  Basically, since I didn’t repeat the black and white dogma that he believes, I must disagree with him.

Because, apparently the Internet, among all else that it has accomplished, has made people illiterate.

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Example 2: Squats vs. Leg Press for Leg Size

Another good example can be found in the article Squats vs. Leg Press for Big Legs.  In that article, I discussed specific contexts where the leg press might be better than the back squat for the specific (and singular) goal of lower body hypertrophy (e.g. leg growth).  Yet check the comments section.

People talking about squats being better for whole body strength (a completely different context, requiring a different ‘best’ answer), or ignoring the differences in mechanics (e.g. femur and torso length affect a lot) between people or a whole host of other things that completely missed the context of what I was talking about.

Said context being:

1. Developing leg size (not necessarily leg strength and not full-body strength)
2. Specific situations (e.g. usually mechanics related) where leg press is a better choice than back squats

For example, for trainees with certain body mechanics, often very long femurs or a long torso, back squatting for the legs tends to be an exercise in frustration.  The low back gives out far before the legs and it becomes an ineffective exercise.  Under that specific situation, taking the low back out of the picture with a leg press movement works better.

But, as predicted, since it was a topic where people tend to have absolutist, non-context dependent views (which usually project what works for them personally, with no recognition that they don’t represent the entirety of humanity), any suggestion of a context specific answer was met with absolutist responses.  Because these people know that squats are good and leg presses are bad.  The context is irrelevant to them, it’s just that simple.  It’s also wrong.

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Summing Up

If someone told you that “A Jeep Wrangler is the best car to buy.” without considering the context of the specific situation, you’d think they were an idiot.  And they would be.  Yet most seem to have no trouble making similarly absolute statements, with no consideration of the context, in the arena of training and nutrition.

I often annoy individuals who ask me questions because most of the time my answer is “It depends.”   There are a handful of exceptions but, for the most part, I can’t give a good answer to a question without knowing the specifics, without knowing the context.  When you read articles on this site, you might notice that I tend to spend a lot of time looking at pros and cons of different things.

As well, folks will often get confused when two of my recommendations may seem to contradict one another.  What they are missing is that what I might suggest in one specific context won’t apply in a different specific context.  And what I would tend to suggest in that second specific context may not apply to the first.  There is no contradiction, simply different suggestions based on the context of the recommendation being sought.

A good example of this recently came up on the forum.  Someone was confused about my differing recommendations regarding stacking ephedrine with tyrosine.  Because in one context (general dieting), this can be a good combination.  But in another (specifically the protocols outlined in the Stubborn Fat Solution protocols), I say not to do take the combination.  No contradiction, just context-specific recommendations.

Because what might be perfect for a given situation could be the absolute worst choice for another situation.    Whenever someone starts speaking in absolutes, it’s clear that they aren’t thinking about the situation, they’ve ignored the context. In their mind, there’s only one answer (usually what works for them or whatever propaganda they’ve absorbed to the point of repeating it without thought) and the context be damned.

Unfortunately, things are never that simple.

Questions such as:

How many carbohydrates do you need?
Should you use a small, moderate or large dietary deficit?
Is Rapid Fat Loss right for you?

and many others are all questions that are context dependent.  And the ‘right’ answer depends on that context, the situation, and the person in question.

Is the person large or small, insulin sensitive or not, doing a lot of training or very little, whats’ the intensity of that training, what are their goals, how much time do they have to train, can they change their training schedule to fit a specific diet, what genetic issues might there be, individual preferences are all specifics that affect what might or might not be the best.

But even if you find an answer for that one given situation, it’s critical to realize that it still isn’t the best answer in absolute terms.

It’s only best in that context.

So if there’s a point to this article, it’s this: when you see someone proclaiming that something is best, or worst or ideal or not, it’s important to consider the context of the situation.  Both theirs and yours.  Because it’s entirely possible that they’ve found the right solution for their context.  But that doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for yours.

I’d finish by saying that trying to force-fit a solution that is perfectly appropriate for one context into a context where it doesn’t fit is usually a recipe for disaster.   It becomes what I call a round-peg, square-hole problem; you’re trying to make something fit that simply doesn’t fit that context (it would be like the soccer mom trying to make the sports car work for her situation, I guess the kids go in the trunk).

One example is my own Ultimate Diet 2.0. It’s an involved cyclical diet and certain things with regards to training and diet have to be done at certain times for it to work.  Basically it requires certain scheduling in terms of when you can train and what kind of training you have to do on certain days.  What often happens is that people with no control over their training (e.g. college athletes who have to train on the schedule set by their coach) want to do it.  And I tell them to pick something else.  Without the ability to control their training to the degree required by UD2, it can’t be worked.  It’s the wrong choice for that context and I’ll generally point them to the Fat Loss for Athletes series on the site.

The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook is another example.  It too has certain requirements regarding training and what should or even can be done with training needing to be cut back to extremely minimal levels.  People unable to cut back training ot the degree required by the book (by choice or requirements) do poorly on it.  It’s the wrong choice for their specific context and they have to do something else.

In that article, I listed the following 4 topics that make up the ‘base’ of a fat loss diet, again in order of importance:

1. Create an appropriate caloric deficit/set caloric intake appropriately
2. Set protein intake
3. Set dietary fat intake
4. Everything else depends

In Part 1, I looked at the issue of calorie balance and setting calories appropriately.  As I stated there, despite claims to the contrary on various places on the Internet, without the creation of a caloric deficit (either through manipulation of energy intake OR energy expenditure), no fat loss can occur.

In Part 1, I also provided a rough starting point for caloric intake of 10-12 calories per pound of total body weight.  As noted in that article, this is only a starting point and, depending on the specific, relatively higher or lower caloric intakes may be more appropriate.

While much of this variability is due to differences in daily activity level and/or individual physiology, there are also various pros and cons to using larger or smaller deficits, a topic I discuss in Setting the Deficit – Small, Moderate or Large.

Today I want to look at the other three components listed above, protein intake, dietary fat intake and then the everything else depends catetgory which is where the individual variability comes in.

Set Protein Intake

After total calories, the single most important aspect of a fat loss diet, as any readers of my books know, is total protein intake.  There are a number of reasons for this not the least of which is this: one major concern during fat loss is the loss of lean body mass (which includes but is not limited to skeletal muscle as discussed in What Does Body Composition Mean).

Now, in the early days of nutritional science, researchers did a lot of work trying to determine things like whether or not carbohydrates or dietary fats were more protein sparing (e.g. did their intake prevent the loss of protein) but eventually someone had the bright idea to just test eating more dietary protein.  In what should not have been a surprise, the most protein sparing nutrient turned out to be…dietary protein.  That is, providing sufficient dietary protein on a diet was truly the key to limiting (or preventing) the loss of body protein during fat loss.

There are, mind you, many other reasons to eat more dietary protein on a fat loss diet.  Another huge benefit is that, of all three macronutrient (protein, carbohydrates, dietary fats), protein is the most filling.   That is, it tends to blunt appetite/hunger (the distinction is not important here) the most. This was actually such an important role for dietary protein that I made it #1 on the list of 9 Ways to Deal with Hunger on a Diet.

Additionally, research (primarily by a researcher named Layman) has shown that, in contrast to carbohydrate, increasing dietary protein tends to keep blood glucose more stable while dieting.  This is important as falling blood sugar can trigger hunger and specifically carbohydrate cravings.

So, as mentioned above, providing sufficient amounts of dietary protein on a diet is key, that’s why it’s the second most important factor I look at in terms of setting up a basic fat loss diet.  But how much do you ask?

Now, researchers have an annoying tendency of putting protein and other dietary requirements in terms of percentages but, as I discuss in Diet Percentages there are many problems with this.  That’s why, in all of my books, you will find protein requirements set relative to body, weight in terms of grams/pound or grams/kilogram.

I’d note that, in general, it’s better to use lean body mass to set protein intake, rather than total body weight.  I’d also note that, for lean individuals (e.g. a male at 10-12% body fat), the difference is relatively negligible.  However, for individuals carrying a lot of body fat, the difference in total and lean body mass makes it important to take the difference into account.  This is discussed in more detail in The Protein Book.

That actually depends.  A variety of factors go into protein requirements while dieting, the two major ones being initial body fat percentage and activity level. In general, fatter individuals tend to lose less lean body mass than leaner individuals and this means that they don’t need as much dietary protein to spare lean body mass.   This is discussed in more detail in Initial Body Fat and Body Composition Changes

Which doesn’t mean that they may still not benefit from higher protein intakes (in terms of appetite or blood glucose control) but, strictly speaking, it may not be required from the standpoint of sparing lean body mass loss.  As folks get leaner, protein requirements go up and I find that many nutritionists do not take this factor into account; they give the same protein intake requirements for lean as for overweight individuals.

An additional factor is activity as this is known to affect protein requirements as well. Contrary to what most think, some early research actually suggests that regular activity reduces protein requirements (by improving the body’s utilization of what is being consumed) but I’d say the majority suggests that regular activity increases protein requirements and I tend to err on the side of too much rather than too little in this regards.   I’d also note, and this is a topic for another day, that aerobic activity and weight training have somewhat different effects on both protein requirements (and lean body mass sparing during a diet).

So how much?  Bodybuilders have long used a protein recommendation of 1 g/lb body weight (2.2 g/kg) while dieting and this certainly a decent starting point.  As noted above, I tend to err on the side of too much than too little and for lean athletes dieting, a protein intake of 1.5 g/lb (3.3 g/kg) may be a better starting place.

Again, there is some individual variability in this; some people seem to get by with less protein than others.  But for lean individuals a protein intake of 1-1.5 g/lb (2.2-3.3 g/kg) is usually about right. I’d note that in extreme situations, such as my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook diet, even higher intakes may be required.  But, once again, this article is about the most generic diet I can set up.

For very overweight individuals, less protein than this is probably required on a strict physiological basis.  Assuming no activity, as little as 0.7 g/lb (~1.5 g/kg) may be sufficient.  If weight training or other activity is added this can go up.  Frankly, the old bodybuilder value of 1 g/lb (2.2 g/kg) of lean weight may be perfectly sufficient.

Again, individuals carrying a lot of body fat should use lean mass to determine protein intake values not total weight.  This means having some way of estimating body fat percentage and the amount of lean mass can be calculated using the equations in Body Composition Calculations.

Set Dietary Fat Intake

After calories and protein are set, the next issue I look at in terms of fat loss diet is the dietary fat intake.  Again, there are multiple reasons for this.  At the very least, there is a small but important daily requirement for the essential fatty acids.  This topic is discussed in A Primer on Dietary Fats and all of my books but I’ll recap briefly here.

In short, there are two essential fatty acids, that is fats that must be consumed on a daily basis for optimal health and function. Those two fatty acids, in this case are the w-3 and w-6 fatty acids (strictly speaking, those terms refer to a class of different fatty acids but that’s more complexity than I want to get into).  The parent fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid and linoleic acid respectively and these are metabolized extensively to other fatty acids.

In the case of alpha-linolenic acid (w-3), the main metabolites we are concerned with are EPA and DHA which are more commonly known as the fish oils. They do a staggering number of things in the body and, honestly, if I saw a list of claimed benefits and had not read the research, I’d think someone were selling me a bill of goods.

But they do have all of those benefits and more: they decrease inflammation, may enhance fat loss, inhibit fat storage, and may impact positively on appetite.  The w-3 fatty acids are also the ones in the shortest supply in the modern diet unless folks eat a lot of high-fat fish on a consistent basis.  I’d note that simply consuming things like flax oil and such (sources of ALA) are not ideal; the conversion to EPA/DHA is tiny and, in general, I recommend explicit supplementation of the fish oils while dieting.

In the case of linoleic acid (w-6) there are a number of products including arachidonic acid and others.  In general, obtaining w-6 fatty acids are not a problem, they are plentiful in the diet.  And while they don’t appear to have the massive health negatives that are often claimed for them (see A Primer on Dietary Fats Part 2 for a bit more about this), they aren’t usually a problem to obtain in the modern diet.  If someone is eating just about any dietary fat, they will fulfill the requirements for the w-6’s.

However the requirement for the above fatty acids is quite small, a few grams per day at most.  Even the maximum fish oil intake I recommend is only 6-10 standard 1 gram capsules and most folks will get sufficient w-6 from the fat intake in the other foods they are eating.   That’s not much fat.

But that’s also not the only reason to consume dietary fat on a standard generic fat loss diet and I actually tend to start with a higher amount than this.  Why?  There are really two primary reasons and both speak to dietary adherence.  This is actually far more important than I think many people realize: any diet, no matter how wonderful, isn’t any good if people can’t stick with it.

As people found out the hard way in the 80’s, extremely low-fat diets tend to be bland, boring and leave people feeling really hungry all the time.  Research has even supported this, moderate fat diets tend to generate better dietary adherence in the long-term than very low-fat diets.  Allowing moderate dietary fat intakes means more potential variety in dietary intake (when you’re limited to near zero fat foods, the list of what you can eat can become very small) and dietary fat provides mouth feel, a sensory issue that makes food taste better.  Simply: people don’t stick with diets that taste like shit for long.

An additional factor, and one I’ve mentioned in several of my books is that moderate amounts of dietary fat tend to blunt hunger in the long-term (e.g. between meals). Now, this is actually more complicated than I’m making it sound but I’m not getting into the details here.  Basically, while dietary fat doesn’t blunt hunger in the short-term (e.g. in the course of a single meal), it tends to keep people fuller between meals.   This occurs for a few reasons.

The first is that dietary fat tends to slow how quickly meals empty from the stomach (this is called gastric emptying).  Very low-fat meals tend to digest quickly, people often get hungrier sooner which makes diet adherence a problem.  I’m sure all readers are familiar with the concept of a meal that ’sticks to their ribs’ and this is the genesis of this aphorism: meals with even moderate dietary fat sit in the gut longer, keeping the person fuller.

Additionally, research has shown that moderate fat (as opposed to low- or high-fat meals) keep blood glucose more stable, presumably much of this is mediated by a slowing of gastric emptying.  Moderate in this case is about 10-14 grams total fat per meal.

So, in my ‘most generic diet’, I tend to set dietary fat levels at a nice moderate level; enough to get the benefits above without crowding out the rest of the calories.  Now, despite my comments about percentages above, most dietary fat research has only used percentages and I tend to default to that here, suggesting 20-25% dietary fat as as starting place for the generic fat loss diet.

On 10-12 cal/lb this works out to a range of 0.22-0.33 g/lb (0.48-0.72 g/kg).  For a 200 lb. (90kg) dieter, this would equate to 44-66 grams of fat per day.  Which, across 4-6 meals per day is right about 10-14 grams of fat per meal.  Isn’t math fun?

But this amount will allow not only easy intake of the essential fatty acids but allow for some other foods and dietary fat to be included in the meal to make the diet more palatable; it also fits the research with blood glucose stability and hunger blunting between meals.

Now, as with other aspects of the diet, there may be times when less or more dietary fat is appropriate, at the risk of repeating myself again and again, the above is simply for the most generic fat loss diet there is.

A Quick Summary

Ok, let me recap the first three components of the diet.  I’m going to assume a 200 lb (90 kg) dieter with 15% body fat (so he has 30 pounds body fat and 170 pounds lean body mass).  His super generic basic fat loss diet would be the following

1. Calories: 200 lb * 12 cal/lb = 2400 calories/day
2. Protein: 170 lbs * 1.5 g/lb = 255 grams/day (1020 calories/day)
3. Fat: 200 lbs * 0.33 g/lb = 66 grams/day (594 calories/day)

You might note that his total protein and fat don’t add up to the daily total.  Rather, he’s only fulfilled 1600 calories per day with those. That leaves 800 calories which would be generically assigned to carbohydrate.  That’s 200 grams or 1 g/lb total weight, another common value often used for basic diet set up.

And that might be a great generic fat loss diet for this person but that brings us finally to:

Everything Else Depends

Essentially in setting up the generic diet, I set calories, set protein and set fat.  Those are the three aspects of the diet that I consider most important.  You can think of them as the ‘essential’ aspects of the fat loss diet. Everything else, as you can imagine depends.

In the quick summary above, I went ahead and calculated out what a typical dieters overall diet would be assuming that the remaining calories of the day went into carbohydrates. But this isn’t an automatic assumption.  That’s where it gets complicated.   Issues such as activity level, insulin sensitivity and the specifics of the diet all go into how I would determine what, if any modifications would be made to the generic template.

I addressed these in some detail in the 4-part article series Comparing the Diets.  And while I can’t look at those all in detail in this article (and I tried to put my general ’scheme’ for how I work this stuff out in A Guide to Flexible Dieting) I do want to look at a couple of examples where the ‘it depends’ bit might get modified for their individual needs.

Clearly daily activity is one of those factors and impacts on many issues I’ve discussed not the least of which is caloric intakes.  As I mentioned in The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 1, while 10-12 cal/lb tends to be a good starting point for caloric levels, it can vary.  Individuals with very high daily activities (usually athletes in training) will tend to find that those values are too low.  By the same token, individuals with very low daily activities (e.g. you ride a desk) may have to go lower than that to effectively lose fat.  I’ve seen sedentary folks need to go as low as 8 cal/lb (and that’s with an hour of exercise per day) to effectively lose fat.

Activity also impacts on carbohydrate requirements.  As discussed in How Many Carbohyrates Do You Need, activity levels can drastically affect carbohydrate (and of course calorie) requirements.  Individuals involved in large amounts of activity will not only find that they need more than the generic 12 cal/lb for dieting but might find that the above 1 g/lb carb intake is insufficient for training and recovery.  In contrast, someone with limited or no activity during the day might find that reducing carbohydrate (and replacing those carbs with dietary fat) might be a more appropriate choice.  That would be in addition to possibly needing to reduce caloric intake in total.

In a related vein, insulin sensitivity seems to impact on whether or not individuals do better or worse with higher carbohydrate or higher fat diets, as I discuss in Insulin Sensitivity and Fat Loss.  Now, in general, with increasing body fat, insulin sensitivity tends to decrease (note that this is absolutely NOT universal; overweight individuals can be insulin sensitive and lean folks can be insulin resistant).  As well, individuals carrying more weight often can not or simply don’t engage in regular activity.  The combination of those two factors interact to mean that lower carbohydrates and higher dietary fat intakes are often more appropriate.

There are others, of course.  Individual variance, food preferences, etc. all go into modifications of the generic diet template.  I don’t have space to address them all here but hopefully have given people a starting point.  The generic diet template is exactly that, it’s a summary of what I consider the three most important factors to any fat loss diet: caloric intake, protein intake, dietary fat intake.  Those three tend to be relatively unchanging in my diet plans (although there are exceptions, The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook is very low in fat but it’s also meant to be short-term).  Everything else depends on the those factors that they depend on.

And that’s a Primer on Fat Loss Diets.

This is actually a very good question and, while I can generally answer it in about 4 sentences, I’m going to do my best to stretch it out into a full length article by overexplaining everything and giving at least some of my rationale for the different recommendations. In many places, I’ll be linking out to other articles on the site that go into individual topics in more detail.

Since this is going to get long, I’m actually going to divide the article into two parts. Today I’m going to focus on what is probably the most contentious area of diet set up, on Tuesday next week, I’ll cover the other factors that I use to set up a basic fat loss diet.

Complexity vs. the Fundamentals

It’s quite common, and this is true in all aspects of, well, everything, for people to want to get into really involved interpretations before they have the fundamentals down.  I see it in training and I see it in diet; of course the industry tends to pander to that by providing unbelivably complicated training and diet programs that, for most people, simply aren’t necessary.

People always want advanced training programs long before they have the basics down; and they tend to be drawn to overly complicated diet plans when they don’t even have the basics down.  I have probably contributed to this to some degree as I do tend to write complicated dieting approaches from time to time (e.g. The Ultimate Diet 2.0).

Of course, there are times, usually for very lean folks dealing with all of the myriad issues involved in getting very lean that necessitate such complex approaches.  The UD2, for example, is an advanced diet for advanced dieters; it’s assumed in that book that the folks reading it have spent a couple of years getting the fundamentals in place.  That’s why I didn’t spend any time discussing those fundamentals in that book; if you don’t already have the basics of eating and nutrition down, you aren’t ready for it.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from trying from time to time.

But at the end of the day, and again this is true in training and in diet, the fundamentals are the most important.  Until you have those in place, none of the advanced stuff makes a difference.  And, generally speaking, you find that once you have the fundamentals in place, the advanced stuff doesn’t add that much.  Again, in specific situations, worrying about the details matters (e.g. very lean natural bodybuilders trying to get super lean); for most people it doesn’t.

I’d note, semi-tangentially, that there tend to be individual personality differences in how people approach these kinds of topics.  Some people are, shall we say, a bit obsessive compulsive (I’m one of them) about things like nutrition and training.  They are the ones who, as Dan Duchaine once phrased it, want nutrition with ‘all the plumbing’.   They want diets to be set out in terms of how many seconds to wait between sets, protein and amino acid recommendations must be set to the milligram, etc.  Amusingly, these folks want all of the details whether they are necessary or not in the first place (usually they are not).

At the other extreme are people who get overwhelmed by that type of information, they want easy generalities and lots of detail puts them off.  Many people are somewhere in between the two, they want enough details to get the job done well but not so much that they get paralyzed by it.  But I’m getting off topic.

The Fundamentals of Fat Loss

Ok, before I talk details, let me spell out how I would set up the most basic fat loss diet on the planet.  These criteria are in order of importance, by the way and are:

1. Create an appropriate caloric deficit/set caloric intake appropriately
2. Set protein intake
3. Set dietary fat intake
4. Everything else depends

Anyone who has read any of my books may recognize this to some degree since I tend to focus on the first 3 and leave 4 up to the specifics of the situation.  Now, I’m actually going to spend a bit of time on #1 and for that reason will discuss #2-4 next Tuesday so that this doesn’t get too long to read.

Create an Appropriate Caloric Deficit/Set Calories

Ok, this is probably the one that will cause the most controversy which is why I’m going to spend the most time on it.  A constant and never-ending cry, and one that has recently come back to life due to some popular but misguided books, is that calories don’t count, or thermodynamics doesn’t apply to humans or other nonsense.  In that vein, a current meme (look it up) is that the energy balance equation is incorrect for various reasons; I addressed this in some detail a little while back in the article The Energy Balance Equation.

In case you can’t take the time to go read it in full, I’ll only say that the people saying that calories in vs. calories out don’t understand the energy balance equation; in fact I saw some hysterical examples of this in a recent thread on a fitness forum, people tossing out examples that they thought disproved the energy balance equation but which only showed that they really had no idea what they were talking about.  Again, the problem isn’t with the equation, the problem is with people who don’t understand what it represents.  Read the article for more.

But the simple fact is this, the ONLY way to force the body to call on stored energy (e.g. body fat) is to create an imbalance between energy intake (from food) and energy expenditure (this side of the equation comprises a number of factors discussed in detail in Metabolic Rate Overview).   That’s why this is the primary criterion in how I set up fat loss diets.  I don’t give a damn what else you do, if you haven’t created an imbalance between intake and expenditure (and you’ll see that there are different ways of achieving this goal), nothing else will matter.

Creating the Deficit: Different Paths to the Same Goal

Now, there are many different ways to create this imbalance and I think that also lends itself to confusion.  Each of the below can work to some degree and makes it look like it’s not just calories in vs. calories out.  But it still is.

For example, a traditional way is to simply reduce total food intake, that is reduce the quantity of food such that less calories are being eaten.  Certainly this works because, by definition, eating less means you’re taking in less calories than when you were eating more.

Another is to change the quality of food but this tends to introduce a subtle confound that most people seem to forget (and that I discuss in detail in Is a Calorie a Calorie): some foods are relatively harder to overeat than others.    Or, put differently, some food are easier to overeat than others.

If changing the quality of food eaten causes people to eat less, and that causes weight/fat to be lost, it’s easy to confuse the quality of the food with the total caloric expenditure.  But it’s not the quality of the food per se that is causing the weight/fat loss or gain; it’s the change in total caloric intake due to the change in food quality.

I would mention that changing the macronutrient content of the diet can have a small impact in this regards.  For the most part, switching out carbs and fat doesn’t do much despite what many claim. The difference in the thermic effect of food for carbs vs. fat is about 3% so for every 100 calories you switch out one for the other, you might see a 3 calorie difference in energy expenditure.

I’d note that carbs have a the advantage here with a thermic effect of 6% compared to 3% for fat.  But the effect tends to be so small as to be irrelevant unless you are looking at whole scale changes to diet.  Again, if you replace 100 calories of fat with carbs, you burn 3 more calories per day.  If you replace 1000 calories of fat with carbs, you burn 30 calories more per day; you’ll lose an extra pound of fat every 116 days.  Whoop de doo.

And while I know someone is going to bring up the issue of gluconeogenesis on ketogenic diets in the comments, I’ll only point out that the impact of this is small and disappears after about 2-3 weeks (when the body shifts to using ketones for fuel).  As well, any increase in expenditure from this pathway is balanced against a loss of the thermic effect of carbs.

As well, direct research (by Brehm) shows that there is no difference in resting metabolic rate for ketogenic vs. carb-based diets; the thermic effect of food was higher in the high-carb condition.  If there were a true metabolic advantage in terms of energy expenditure for ketogenic diets, someone would have been able to measure it by now.  They haven’t and they aren’t going to and all of the theorizing about it doesn’t change the fact that direct research hasn’t supported the concept.

Now, protein has the biggest impact in terms of the thermic effect of food, switching out carbs or fat with protein tends to increase the energy out side of the equation but you have to make pretty large scale changes for it to be particularly significant.   I’d note that protein also tends to be the most filling of all the nutrients and studies show that increasing dietary protein intake tends to cause people to eat less calories.   Which is another huge confound; if increasing protein makes folks spontaneously eat less, it looks like it was adding the protein per se that did the magic.  But it wasn’t, it was the effect of increasing protein on total energy intake that caused the fat loss. Like I said, a subtle confound that people tend to miss a lot.

Another way of course is to use activity to increase energy expenditure.  That increases the energy out side of the energy balance equation.  I’ll do a full article on the role of activity in weight/fat loss (and it’s more complicated than I’m making it sound here since I don’t have space to cover it in full) but this is one valid way to do it.  Activity not only increases energy expenditure but also impacts on the quality of weight loss (e.g. fat vs. muscle) and can impact on appetite (both positively or negatively depending on the specifics).  Again, I don’t have space to cover it here but will in a future article.

The problem for most is that the amount of calories that can be expended by most people in exercise is not large.  An irony that I”ve mentioned before is that the only people who can usually burn a ton of calories in activity are trained athletes; and they usually don’t need to lose fat.  But the reality is that an hour of activity for most people will not burn a staggering number of calories.  Usually caloric restriction per se or a combination of cutting calories and increasing activity is going to be more realistic.

And before you start typing out comments about how all of the above is flawed and thermodynamics doesn’t hold for humans or all of that other nonsense, consider the following realities:

1. The number of people who have lost fat by making excuses about thermodynamics and other nonsense: zero.
2. The number of people who have lost fat by creating a deficit in one of the ways I’ve mentioned: all of them.

End of discussion.

Of course, someone will point to someone who did lose fat without ‘counting calories’ but invariably they did something dietarily that I described above: made a wholesale change to the types of food that they were eating that caused them to spontaneously eat less food.  Which still makes me right; they created an imbalance between intake and expenditure, they just did it in a way that looked ‘different’ than simply counting calories.  But it still had the same end result.  They still created a caloric deficit, it was simply ‘hidden’ by what looked like something else.

And make no mistake, I would love it to be different, I would love to be able to tell you how to magically lose fat without some change in your eating or activity or creating an imbalance in the energy balance equation; I want magic to be real too.  And when I figure that magic out, I’ll be a billionaire.  And until that happens, the reality is that to lose fat you must create some imbalance between intake and expenditure.  It may not be what you want to hear but it is the truth.

Setting Calories

Ok, with that introduction out of the way, how do you set calories for a basic fat loss diet?  A value that has been used for absolutely years is 10-12 cal/lb, and I explain where that value comes from to some degree in How to Estimate Maintenance Calories.  Essentially it’s a 20% reduction from a rough maintenance estimate of ‘About 15 cal/lb or so’.

I’d note that this is your basic moderate deficit diet, as I discuss in Setting the Deficit – Small, Moderate or Large there can be various pros and cons to using smaller or larger deficits.  But, once again, here I’m focusing on simplicity and the basics and trying to avoid any source of complication.

In general, 10-12 cal/lb tends to be a decent starting point for fat loss diets.  Please note that this is only a starting point and will always have to be adjusted based on real-world changes.   Some people with high activity levels may need higher calories than that, and folks with lower daily activity levels may need less.

In the modern world, with daily activity levels going down (especially if you work in a sedentary job), lower caloric intakes are altogether too often required. I have known many people who had to go to 8 cal/lb with an hour per day of low to moderate intensity cardio to lose fat effectively.  I was one of them back when my daily activity entailed sitting in front of the computer all day and doing an hour or so of weight training a few times per week.  Now that I train about 18 hours per week, I can diet with higher calories if needed.

I’d note that, for various reasons discussed in Lean Mass or Total Weight to Set Calorie Levels, I tend to use total weight to set starting caloric intake levels.  As noted in the paragraph above, you always have to make adjustments based on real-world changes in body composition and it’s simply faster and easier to use total weight; it avoids issues with trying to get a good estimate of body fat percentage and saves people the trouble of all that pesky math.  In my books I often use a more complicated approach but this article is about simplicity so use total weight.

And that ends Part 1 of the article.  In Part 2, which I’ll post next Tuesday, I’ll address points 2-4 from the section above: protein requirements, fat intake, and the ‘it depends’ part of the diet.  See you then.

Read A Primer on Fat Loss Diets Part 2.

This is usually used as a lead in to the idea that the “Calorie theory of weight gain and weight loss” is incorrect or what have you.  This leads to even more abjectly stupid ideas that I’m not getting into here.

Today, I’m going to do my best to clear things up about what the energy balance equation does and doesn’t mean and why people, who don’t really have a clue what they’re talking about, don’t understand it.  Hopefully by the time you’ve gotten to the end of this, you’ll understand it.

What is the Energy Balance Equation?

In its simplest form, the energy balance equation is meant to represent what does (or at least should) happen to the body by looking at the difference between energy intake (from food) and energy output.

In it’s exceedingly simplest form, the energy balance equation is this:

Energy in = Energy out + Change in Body Stores

This is essentially just a restatement of basic thermodynamics, since energy can’t be created or destroyed, it all has to be accounted for in some form or fashion.  In this case, differences between intake and output show up as changes in the energy stores of the body.

Now, in the case of the human body, changes in energy stores will show up as changes in the amount of different tissues in the body.  Excess energy is converted or stored via conversion into body tissue (e.g. body fat, muscle tissue, etc.).  Since excess energy is stored in the body as tissues that contain mass, I will (marginally incorrectly) refer to changes in body mass throughout this article.

I’m doing this as people tend to fixate on changes in mass/weight rather than on energy per se (we can measure changes in weight on the scale, or changes in fat or muscle mass; you can’t readily measure changes in energy stores of the body).  As you’ll see below, this confusion about the energy value of different tissues is a big part of the confusion and claims regarding the equation itself.

By the same token, if energy intake is less than output, the body will pull on stored energy within the body and there will be some loss of tissue (e.g. fat, muscle, etc.).  Again, I’ll refer to changes in mass in this article, just realize that, for technical accuracy, the real changes is in the energy store of the body.

Now, the above is a very simplified version of the energy balance equation and this is part of where folks get into problems.

But we have three basic bits of the equation: Energy In, Energy Out and Change in Body Stores.  I want to look at each including some of the places that people make some really flawed arguments and draw some really flawed conclusions based on their misunderstanding of what’s going on.

A More Detailed Look at the Equation: Energy In

Now, energy in is actually the simplest aspect of all of this, this represents the number of calories that you ingest each day from the nutrients protein, carbs, fat, fiber and alcohol.

Of course, even that is not so simple.  First and foremost, not all foods are digested with identical efficiency.  On average, high quality animal-source proteins are digested with roughly 90-95% efficiency with vegetable source proteins coming in lower than that (80-85%), fats digest with about 97% efficiency and carbs can be as low as 80% depending on fiber content.

There can be some variance between different sources of the same nutrient as well.  For example, a recently developed carbohydrate called resistant starch (it resists digestion) is absorbed with poor efficiency, more calories are lost in the stool compared to other carbs; some sugar alcohols share this effect (although they can just as readily cause massive stomach upset and diarrhea because of it).  You don’t generally see massive differences in proteins or fats although there can be slight differences.

Put differently, some energy is lost prior to digestion (and shows up in the feces), never to be absorbed by the body.  But strictly speaking you can make an adjustment on the energy in side of the equation to take digestibility into account with a correction factor (which would vary depending on the nutrient in question)

But I think you get the idea: the point is that the calorie in value can vary a bit depending on the specific nutrient and source of that nutrient.  The amount of calories listed on the side of the food you’re eating may not be exactly the number of calories that make it through digestion and into the body.   If anything, the value will be slightly less.

High-fiber diets tend to have this effect generally, as soluble fiber binds a small amount of protein and fat in the stomach carrying it out without digestion.  So if you jack up soluble fiber intake, you end up absorbing less of the calories that went into your mouth; more are lost in your poop.

There is also some evidence that based on differences in the bacteria in the gut, there may be small differences in how well or poorly people extract energy from food during digestion, the most recent paper I’ve seen suggests that this can vary by roughly 100 calories per day.  So that’s another place where the equation might be modified for any given individual.

I’d mention that, currently, no-one knows how to modify this in any useful fashion (although weight loss per se appears to cause the gut bacteria to shift to a different type) but that technology (through the use of pre- or pro-biotics) will likely come through in a few years.

Please note: This doesn’t deny the validity of the energy balance equation, it just means that it’s more complicated than people realize.

A More Detailed Look at the Equation: Energy Out

The energy out part of the equation is more complicated than people understand and I’d recommend my article Metabolic Rate Overview for a detailed look at the different components of the out part of the equation and their determinants.

Summing up, there are 4 primary aspects of the energy out part of the equation which are Resting/Basal Metabolic Rate (RMR/BMR), the Thermic effect of food (TEF), the Thermic Effect of Activity (TEA) and a more recent addition which is Spontaneous Physical Activity/Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (SPA/NEAT).  Essentially TEA refers to calories burned through formal exercise/activity, SPA/NEAT is more subconscious and represents daily movement, going from seated to standing, fidgeting and a host of other stuff that isn’t conscious voluntary exercise.

I’m going to come back to this below but something that is VERY important to remember is that none of the above is static: it all changes based on what the person is doing and their diet, activity, environment, etc.

A Mid-Article Review

So I’ve looked at some of the factors that can modify both the energy in and energy out part of the equation.  Now we can rewrite the equation a bit more usefully as:

Energy In (corrected for digestion) = (BMR/RMR + TEF + TEA + SPA/NEAT) + Change in Body Stores

Even that’s not complete and there are other things that can go on the energy out side of it, various inefficiencies in biochemical pathways (that basically waste calories through heat) and such things.  I’d note that most of these don’t appear to contribute terribly significantly to the energy out side of things but they are worth noting since they modify the overall equation.

I’d also note that people often make comments about the above equation which shows just how utterly clueless they are about it.  For example, people will point out that replacing carbs with protein leads to greater weight loss although they have the same calories; ergo the equation is wrong.  What they fail to realize is that protein has a higher thermogenic effect and this modifies the TEF value of the equation; the energy OUT side of the equation changes if you replace carbs with protein.  But they seem to try to treat the sides of the equation independently in this case; which is wrong.

Now, even with the above, a commonly made argument that the energy balance equation is wrong is that, invariably, changes in either intake or expenditure don’t seem to scale with predicted or expected changes in body mass.  That is, armed with the above, if you know intake and output, you should be able to know exactly how much body mass will change, right?

Put differently, it’s commonly stated that if you reduce food intake by 500 calories/day you will lose one pound per week. Yet when people do that very thing, this never happens in the real world.  Or if you add 500 calories/day of food, you should gain a pound, and that pretty much never happens either in the real world.

Hence the equation is invalid, right?  Wrong.

There are three different reasons why the expectations of most people in terms of changes in the energy balance are incorrect and, again, it’s based on their own simplistic understanding of what’s going on.  Those three reasons are

1. Water balance
2. Muscle and fat are not identical
3. The fact that the energy balance equation is not static

Let’s look at each.

Water Balance

This is the easiest to explain so I’ll tackle it first.  First note that water contains zero energy and zero calories.  I can add a billion gallons of water to either side of the equation and it doesn’t affect the equation itself (quick note: some work suggested that ingestion of water, or cold water, could increase energy expenditure so that is an indirect way that water might impact on the equation, but this is not what I’m talking about).

However, water balance issues completely screw up expectations about changes in body mass.  Every woman reading this knows that she can swing some amount of body weight (could be a couple pounds, could be 10 pounds) across a menstrual cycle and carbohydrate intake has a massive impact on water balance.  But those changes don’t mean anything in terms of the energy balance equation.

Early studies of very-low carb diets (all discussed in detail in my first book The Ketogenic Diet) reported water loss ranging from like 1-15 pounds in the first few days.  I’m fairly little and I can drop 7 lbs of water in 3 days of carbohydrate restriction (it comes right back with carb-loading).

Similarly, if you add a bunch of sodium to someone’s diet after a period of low-sodium intake, they will gain several pounds of water.  But it doesn’t affect the energy balance equation in any way because water has no caloric/energy value.

I’ve talked about this on the site in various contexts, in the article Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat, I talk about how water retention can mask true fat loss in some people. The deficit is there, the activity is there and nothing is happening.  Then boom, overnight, 5 pounds drops off.  It’s not a thermodynamic miracle, nor does it defy the energy balance equation, water shifts just screw things up.

I discussed this in a different context in the article Not Losing Fat at a 20% Deficit, What Should I Do?, some people seem prone to retaining water (they tend to be a little bit ‘tightly wound’ mentally in my experience), they overproduce cortisol (which shows cross-reactivity with the mineralocorticoid receptor) and this causes water retention, especially when they diet and train too hard.  They maintain a nice deficit, etc. but nothing is happening.  Energy balance equation is wrong, right?  Nope, it’s just water.

The same thing works in the other direction, early studies (invariably lasting 4-7 days) on very low carb diets found greater WEIGHT loss for the lowcarb vs. high-carb diets.  Aha, there’s a metabolic advantage. Nope, it’s just water loss (due to a variety of mechanisms) and water doesn’t have calories on either end of the equation.   So this doesn’t disprove the energy balance equation because water has no calories.

So that’s reason one while the expected change in body mass often doesn’t scale with the deficit or expectations: water loss throws everything off.  This doesn’t invalidate the energy balance equation though, because water doesn’t have energy on either side.

Muscle and Fat are Not Identical

The next wrench that throws people into confusion about the energy balance equation has to do with the difference in gaining or losing fat and muscle.  We’ve all heard for decades that if you create a 3,500 cal/week deficit, you will lose one pound and this is what people expect to happen exactly without fail, and if it doesn’t, clearly the energy balance equation is invalid.

Did you ever wonder where that value of 3,500 cal per pound comes from?

Quoting from The Stubborn Fat Solution:

WAT in humans is composed primarily (anywhere from 80 to 95%) of lipid. By lipid, I
mean stored triglycerides (TG) which are simply a glycerol molecule bound to three free
fatty acid (FFA) chains. The remaining part of the fat cell is comprised of a little bit of
water as well as all of the cellular machinery needed to produce the various enzymes,
proteins, and products that fat cells need to do their duty. As it’s turning out, fat cells
produce quite a bit of stuff, some good, some bad, that affects your overall metabolism.

For the record, one pound of fat is 454 grams and let’s assume 90% lipid on average. So
about 400 or so grams are actual stored TG. When burned by the body, one gram of fat
provides 9 calories so 400 grams of fat contains about 3600 calories of stored energy. Now
you know where the old axiom of ~3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat comes from.

Note: WAT = white adipose tissue, the primary type of fat in the human body.

So there ya’ go, create a 3,500 cal/week deficit and you should lose one pound of fat, right?  Again, wrong.

There is a built in assumption in the above that turns out to not be necessarily correct but also throws a wrench into expectations about the energy balance equation.  That assumption is that 100% fat is being lost when a deficit is created.  Now, if you diet correctly (e.g. the way I describe in my books), this is a pretty good assumption but it’s not universally true.  Often people also lose muscle and connective tissue on a diet.

And the issue is that muscle and connective tissue doesn’t provide as much energy to the body as a pound of fat.  Rather than 3,500 calories to break down a pound of fat, a pound of muscle provides about 600 calories to the body when it’s broken down for energy.

Let me put this in mathematical terms, to show you how the identical 3,500 calorie/day deficit can yield drastically different changes in body mass depending on what percentage of tissue you’re losing.  I’m going to use the extremes of 100% fat, 50/50 fat and muscle, and 100% muscle.

See what’s going on?  The assumption of one pound per week (3,500 cal/week deficit) is only valid for the condition where you lose 100% fat.  If you lose 50% fat and 50% muscle, you will lose 1.7 pounds in a week for the same 3,500 calorie deficit.  Lose 100% muscle (this never happens, mind you, it’s just for illustration) and you lose 5.8 pounds per week.

I’d note that I suspect this is why many rapid weight loss centers advise against exercise: exercise limits muscle loss on a diet and the simple fact is that you will lose MORE TOTAL WEIGHT faster if you lose muscle.

Finally, I’d note that most obesity researchers assume a loss for obese individuals of roughly 25% lean body mass and 75% fat which would put the true expected weight loss somewhere between the 1 lb/week and 1.7 pounds per week.  But I don’t feel like doing the math.

I should note that the above numbers aren’t the same as for weight gain but there are differences in the amount of energy required to store one pound of muscle vs. one pound of fat.  So there are still differences and this means that the predicted weight gain and actual weigh gain won’t be identical; the math just isn’t quite the same as what I presented above.

But the critics say, it still never works out that way.  Even if you account for water and the above, the math still never works out. The calorie hypothesis is still incorrect.

But they always seem to steadfastly ignore the final factor.

The Energy Balance Equation Isn’t Static

This is the real biggie which is why I saved it for last. As noted above, the energy balance equation can be written a bit more complexly as:

Energy In (corrected for digestion) = (BMR/RMR + TEF + TEA + SPA/NEAT) + Change in Body Stores

Here’s what I want to talk about now: every factor on the right hand side, BMR/RMR, TEF, TEA and SPA/NEAT can change based on environment.   Please read that sentence again a couple of times.

People have this weird tendency to assume that if their maintenance caloric intake is exactly 2500 calories (at calorie balance); therefore if they start eating 2000 calories (or increase activity to burn 500 calories/day) they should lose exactly 1 pound of fat per week.  Or that that 2,500 calorie/day maintenance will not change.

Ignoring the water balance and muscle vs. fat thing, this is still incorrect and here’s why: the equation isn’t static.  It changes.  Sometimes considerably.  And this makes predicted and actual changes in body mass different.

Some examples:

When you lose weight, BMR/RMR goes down.  Some of this is simply due to reduced body weight (a smaller body burns less calories) but there is also an adaptive component due to changes in hormones like leptin, insulin, nervous system output and thyroid hormones (this topic is discussed in detail in both The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook and A Guide to Flexible Dieting).  This lessens the actual deficit that is being created because the previously estimated maintenance value is no longer correct (to keep losing fat at anywhere near the same rate, calories have to be reduced further to take this reduction into account).

The Thermic effect of food is related directly to the amount of food that you’re eating.  Now, TEF is usually rough-estimated at 10% of total food intake (this is just an average value for average diets).  But that means that if you reduce food intake by 500 cal/day, you will be burning 50 cal/day less via TEF.  Your previous maintenance of 2500 has already been reduced to 2450 cal/day.  So the assumption of a static 2500 cal/day maintenance is already made invalid simply by the act of reducing food intake (albeit slightly).

Ok, you say, what if I add exercise instead?  Well, some research has found that (and this usually happens in older people) excessive amounts of activity burned during exercise causes people to move around less later in the day.  For example, say you put yourself through 500 calories of hard activity but, due to fatigue, you sit on the couch more later that night, burning 300 calories less than you expended before training.  The supposed 500 calorie deficit you’re creating is really only 200 calories because your SPA/NEAT has adjusted itself.    You might expect one pound per week fat loss but the deficit is actually less than half of that (200 cal/day * 7 days = 1,400 calories = 0.4 pounds fat per week).

As well, people often get lethargic on a diet, they move around less.  The 2500 cal/day maintenance level goes down because SPA/NEAT goes down because they have less energy.  The amount of daily movement that occurred at caloric balance (or surplus) drops.  So the expected deficit (and hence change in body mass) is no longer accurate since parts of the energy out equation have changed.

I’d note that all of this goes for weight gain and overeating as well.  All of the components can change, sometimes considerably. So the predicted or expected weight gain in response to a given change in energy intake is rarely exactly what is seen.  That’s in addition to water balance issues and the difference in caloric value of muscle and fat.

BMR/RMR goes up a bit when people overeat, of course gaining weight raises RMR/BMR because a larger body burns more calories.  Since TEF is directly related to energy intake, if you increase food intake, TEF goes up slightly (and this depends on the nutrient in question with protein having the largest effect).

Changes in SPA/NEAT can vary hugely and explain most of the discrepancies in expected vs. actual weight gain.  In the earliest study, when overfed nearly 1000 calories/day weight/fat gain varied almost 10 fold but this was explained by massive variance in NEAT; some people increased their spontaneous movement by 700 cal/day (making the true surplus 300 cal/day) while one poor person (a woman) had her NEAT go down a little bit (she gained the most fat).    This is mostly genetic, unfortunately.

The point of all of this is this: When people say that the energy balance equation is invalid, this is simply not the case.  The equation is completely valid, what is invalid are the assumptions that people are making about what the equation means or says.

Summing Up

I think when you read articles decrying the energy balance equation as invalid or incorrect, you’ll find that they ignore (or simply are unaware) of all of the above.  The equation is perfectly valid and humans are as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as anything else in the universe.   Physics is not just a good idea, kids, it’s the law.

Most claims that the energy balance equation is invalid are due to people simply not knowing what they are talking about. The equation is valid, it has to be, what’s invalid are people’s assumptions about how things should work.

Final note, I’m turning off comments on this article for reasons I think people will find obvious.

On that note, don’t try to sneak in comments (good or bad) in the comments section of other articles, they will be deleted.  And that goes for both positive AND negative comments.  I just deleted one positive comment because it would be intellectually dishonest of me to allow positive ones to get through and delete negative ones.  None of them are getting through on this piece.

Also, if you want a quick review on the topic, I’d suggest the following paper:

Schoeller DA. The energy balance equation: looking back and looking forward are two very different views.  Nutr Rev. 2009 May;67(5):249-54.

I’m also going to assume, and realize that this is more for simplicity than anything else that whether you create the deficit via diet or activity, the end result is basically the same.  Note that this is absolutely not a correct assumption.  But to save space and keep things less confusing, I’m going to work from that basic assumption; at some later date I’ll address that particular issue in more detail.

What I want to look at is the various pros and cons of using small, moderate and large caloric deficits when setting up a fat loss diet.  As is usually the case you can find people arguing adamantly that only one or the other is appropriate; as usual I take a little bit different view: each approach can be relatively more or less appropriate for a given situation.

For the sake of this argument, I’m going to define the deficits as follows:

• Small: 10-15% below maintenance
• Moderate: 20-25% below maintenance
• Large: anything bigger than 25% below maintenance

Note, I’m not saying that these definitions are the exactly right ones, they are simply how I define the terms.

As I examine each, simply for the sake of putting some real world numbers to what I’m talking about, I’m going to use two sample dieters. The first is a relatively ‘average’ female who weighs 130 lbs and has a maintenance caloric expenditure of 1950 calories per day (15 cal/lb or 33 cal/kg, let’s just call it 2000).  Our male weighs 180 lbs with a maintenance caloric expenditure of 2700 calories/day.  I’ve discussed why and how I came up with the value of 15 cal/lb in the article How to Estimate Maintenance Calories.

Finally, I’m going to estimate weekly fat loss for each of the deficits as I go through.  I’ll use the standard estimate of a 3500 calorie deficit equaling one pound of fat loss.  I’ll only note that real-world fat loss will never actually achieve the estimated value, it’s always a little bit lower.  I’ll explain why this is the case in a future article, for now simply accept that that’s the way things work.

And on with the show.

Small Deficits: 10-15% Below Maintenance

It’s not unheard of to hear of athletes or bodybuilders using very small caloric deficits to generate fat loss with a 10-15% deficit below maintenance being used.  As well, some diet experts tend to recommend small deficits for even the general dieting public.  Before looking at the pros and cons, let’s look at how this deficit will end up impacting on caloric intake as well as estimated weekly fat loss.

Notice that the male, by simple dint of having a larger maintenance requirement will end up with a larger caloric deficit than the female and a larger predicted fat loss.  This was actually one of the reasons that I argue for using percentage based deficits in my first book The Ketogenic Diet, they take into account the individual needs of the diet.  That’s compared to either giving people absolute caloric recommendations or telling people to reduce their calories by some fixed amount.

First, some of the pros of this approach.  Clearly the deficit is fairly small and can be achieved relatively easily.  A small food restriction will usually accomplish it and often times, the deficit can be achieved by making simple qualitative changes in the diet (e.g. replacing 2% milk with fat free milk may save 40 calories and across three meals that’s 120 calories).

Even if absolute food intake has to be restricted, the difference is relatively small compared to normal eating patterns. For some people, this is beneficial behaviorally since they tend to do better with small non-intrusive changes.

It’s also often argued that this type of tiny deficit will have less of an impact on some of the counter-regulatory responses, the metabolic slowdown and such that can occur.  There is arguably some truth to this although the compromise for this is much slower fat loss (discussed next).

Finally, related to the fact that the adjustments are often small, it is often argued that long-term adherence may be better than more extreme diets; since there is less overall restriction involved in the first place, the odds of the person slipping or losing control is lower.  Again, there is some truth to this.

Finally, for performance type athletes, since there is never much extreme dietary restriction, the odds of hurting training or performance are lowered.  Big deficits can destroy training or at least require that it be modified to avoid the person crashing hard.  Small deficits generally avoid that.

But what about the cons?  The biggest issue with this approach is that the fat loss is so exceedingly slow.  Typically when I have seen people use this approach it is with folks who are relatively lean and don’t have much fat to lose in the first place.

A contest dieter (bodybuilder or figure person) who is starting close to their goal may only need to drop 10 pounds of fat to get into shape.  Of course, for our female, that still may require 20 weeks of straight dieting.  But for some people, and this is usually with folks who really know their bodies, this may work better.

For larger individuals, even with the relatively faster rates of fat loss, the slow rate of loss may be discouraging and frustrating.  As I discussed in another context in The Full Diet Break, individuals who have 50-100 or more pounds to lose often have a great deal of psychological struggle to overcome; losing a mere 1-2 pounds per week can make the diet take forever and that can lead to failure.

The final con with this approach is this: it’s real easy to screw up.  The small deficit makes it possible for even tiny mis-measurement of true food intake to obliterate the deficit.  I discussed this idea in a different context in the Q&A on Not Losing Fat in a 20% Deficit but it is potential problem.

Again, in my experience the people who make this approach work are absolutely meticulous with their diet, they measure everything to the gram.  Otherwise, it’s altogether too easy for what you though was a 300 cal/day deficit to be nothing but a 100 cal/day deficit.

For the most part, I think the small deficit approach is best for the type of dieter I’ve described a couple times above: advanced dieters and/or athletes with relatively less fat to lose who are obsessively meticulous with their calories. For others, a moderate or large deficit will probably be a better choice.

Moderate Deficit Dieting: 20-25% Below Maintenance

Next let’s look at moderate deficit dieting which is probably the most commonly advocated approach especially in the bodybuilding and athletic subculture.  As noted, I’ll be defining this as anywhere between 20-25% below maintenance calories.  Again, let’s look at what this makes the deficit and what the estimated weekly fat loss will be for our two sample dieters.

Now we’re getting into more standard fat loss diets with recommendations of 1-1.5 pounds fat loss per week being a common recommendation.  Of course, the drawback is that a larger deficit must be created to get that level of fat loss.

Generally speaking moderate deficit diets tend to use a combination of food restriction and activity to accomplish the full deficit; I know I said I wouldn’t really talk about this in this article but it’s worth mentioning.  250-300 calories/day of activity with a 250-300 calorie/day food restriction is still pretty manageable and requires neither massive amounts of exercise or massive amounts of food restriction.  It is entirely possible to do the full deficit through food restriction of course.

This tends to allow much of the food flexibility and such that small deficit diets have as one of their pros; the diet only has to be changed minimally to achieve the necessary deficit.  Even there, moderate deficit dieting does feel like more of a diet than small deficit dieting, the individual will feel more restricted overall (unless they create the entire deficit through activity).

For athletes and performance types, this is a benefit since it tends to have a small impact on gym or sports training.  This is especially true if concepts such as the refeeds and full diet breaks discussed on the site and in my A Guide to Flexible Dieting are adhered to.

Of course, since the fat loss is faster, the diet tends to get finished quicker.  While some larger individuals with a lot of weight to lose may still find the prospect of dieting for a year to be overwhelming, at least things will be happening a lot more quickly than with small deficits.

In terms of screwing up, it certainly is possible to offset some of the deficit of a moderate fat loss diet with mis-measurement but it’s far harder to eliminate the deficit completely.  It can be done, make no mistake about it, but its relatively more difficult (what usually happens is that an expected 500 cal/day deficit ends up around 250-300 cal/day and people wonder why the fat loss is only half what it should be).

Metabolically, moderate deficit dieting does have an impact for reasons I’ve discussed endlessly on the site and in my books and won’t discuss again here. But between the rate of fat loss and impact of caloric restriction on hormones like leptin, etc. there’s no getting around the fact that the body will fight back to some degree with moderate deficit dieting (realistically: this will happen on any diet no matter what you do).

Frankly, outside of the fact that moderate deficit dieting may take really extended periods for very overfat individuals, I’d probably say it has the fewest overall cons relative to the potential pros.  Which is probably why it tends to be one of the most widely recommended and used approaches.

Of course, some people are still impatient and/or or have their own reasons for wanting or needing faster fat loss and the moderate fat loss of the moderate deficit can be both a pro and a con in that regard; it’s faster than small deficit dieting but under certain conditions may not be fast enough.

And that brings us to large deficit dieting.

Large Deficit Dieting: 25% Below Maintenance or Greater

While I’m going to define large deficit dieting as anything greater than 25% below maintenance, for the sake of this discussion, I’m actually going ot use a massive deficit: a full 50% below maintenance. Just to illustrate the point.

I actually advocated this size deficit in the first phase of my Ultimate Diet 2.0 but it’s also only for 4 days.  The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook actually revolves around protein intake rather than caloric intake per se but,on average, the deficit may end up at 50% below maintenance or even more.  So that’s why I’m going to use 50% for this illustration.

I’d note that for very large individuals, with high maintenance caloric expenditures, greater rates of fat loss are possible with one-half to two-thirds of fat loss per day being possible when calories are low enough.

Now, clearly the biggest pro (to some) of this approach is that the rate of fat loss is maximal.  Even our smaller woman is losing a significant amount of fat per week and the male is dropping fat at a pretty absurd rate.   As noted, for bigger people, the numbers go up further and fat losses of 4-5 pounds per week are not unheard of.

Of course, a pro of that is the diet ends much more quickly than it otherwise would.  A diet that might have taken 2-3 months may be compressed into a month. For some people, this is a huge pro, they can get back to serious training or what have you since the diet isn’t interrupting things for extended periods.

As well, in some situations (e.g. class reunion, wedding 2 weeks away), people may only have a limited time to lose the maximum weight/fat possible; that requires an extreme approach because there simply isn’t time to use anything slower.

As well, for people with a large amount of weight to lose, seeing a quick initial drop can provide some nice positive reinforcement to continue with the diet.  Again, someone with 50-100 pounds to lose will likely be disappointed to drop only a pound or two in the first week.  A large deficit diet may generate a scale drop (and some of this is water weight) of 7-10 pounds in the first week.

This can help with long-term adherence.  Even a 2-4 week period with a large deficit to get some quick initial weight/fat loss before moving into a more moderate deficit approach can be beneficial here.

And, assuming the diet is set up appropriately (adequate protein) with the right kind of training (heavy weight training as discussed in Weight Training for Fat Loss, muscle loss actually turns out to be minimal or zero.   I know this runs counter to the commonly held belief but it’s 100% true (as people following my The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook properly have demonstrated).

Certainly early research suggested that bigger deficits and very low caloric intakes led to more muscle loss but invariably they had inadequate protein and didn’t have weight training as part of the program.  When someone is on 300 cal/day and half of that is carbs, well, that’s only 40 grams of protein.  Of course muscle is lost, but not because calories are low per se; rather it’s because the diet is set up stupidly.

Which brings us to one of the cons: because of the massive deficit involved, most of it almost has to come from diet.  Most can’t spend the hours per day to expend the types of calories inherent to large deficit dieting so it comes down mostly to diet.

And since so few calories are being consumed, this allows for very little food flexibility.  My large deficit diets always end up being high-protein, low-carb and relatively low fat because that’s the only way to achieve the necessary deficits while providing sufficient protein.  There simply isn’t room for much else.

From a long-term adherence standpoint, that can be a problem.  Of course, my diets also always include free meals, refeeds and diet breaks to account for that but some can go crazy with such a limited number of foods available.  Then again, large deficit diets are rarely meant to be used in the long-term in the first place and often the short-period of extreme restriction seems to ‘reset’ some food issues for people.  They can lose their taste for a lot of the stuff that they used to over-eat previously and that can help in the long-term.

Which brings us to the issue of adherence.  Again, contrary to popular belief, as I discussed in Is Rapid Fat Loss Right For You? there is actually some data suggesting better long-term weight loss with faster initial weight/fat loss.

But this is predicated on the diet being set up in certain specific ways: the diet must change long-term food patterns (meaning it should revolve around whole foods, not protein shakes), it must include exercise, it must work on behavioral aspects of eating.  Not all large deficit diets are set up that way and the ones that aren’t are destined to fail.  Diets based around living on shakes or what have you may generate amazing fat loss but they do nothing to help in the long-term, nothing has been changed about long-term eating habits to help the person know what to eat when the diet ends.

Of course, with a deficit that massive, it’s nearly impossible to completely offset the deficit without some pretty major screw ups in terms of food choices.  Make no mistake, it can happen, people end up choosing high-protein foods that contain too many tagalong fats and carbs and this offsets the deficit.  But even with that, the deficit ends up being pretty damn big and fat loss is pretty quick.

On that note, the severe restriction can be too much for people although, interestingly, many report that hunger actually isn’t a huge issue.  Between the hunger blunting effect of massive amounts of protein and other issues, hunger often goes away.  Odd but true and this certainly isn’t universal.

As well, long-term adherence can be an issue and returning to maintenance caloric intakes is a problem for some. This is actually a big part of why large deficit diets are best set up around whole foods.  When the diet is based around protein shakes, the dieter has no idea how to ‘eat normally’ when the diet is over.

When the core of the diet is based around whole foods (e.g. lean protein, veggies, essential fats), the dieter simply adds other foods back to that core when the diet ends (or they choose to move to a more moderate deficit).  Even there, some people simply can’t make large deficit diets work, they end up yo-yoing back and forth and should consider something else.

Of course, metabolically, large deficit dieting can have the biggest impact on metabolic parameters.  But that’s the price to pay for faster rates of fat loss.  As I’m fond of saying, life she is full of these little compromises.  If you want to have a minimal impact on metabolic rate and such, use a smaller deficit; the price is simply slower fat loss and a longer diet.

Of course, properly scheduled refeeds and full diet breaks help to offset much of this so large deficit diets can still be made workable if you do it right.  Again, they still aren’t for everyone.

Finally, large deficit diets have the greatest impact on training and ability to train.  It actually turns out that too much activity with a large caloric deficit can cause more problems than it solves and, generally, training has to be massively curtailed during the diet.  For people who simply love training, or must train a lot for whatever reason, large deficit diets are unworkable.  They must do something else.

Then again, for some athletes, a 2 week block on a large deficit (with training severely cut back) can be used to let them get back to training and may have less of an impact on training than having to diet moderately for 10 straight week.  This simply depends on the specifics.

Summing Up

So that’s that, a look at three different approaches to setting up the caloric deficit for dieting and their pros and cons.  Clearly none of the three is inherently the best approach although, on the whole, moderate deficit dieting probably has the most pros with the least cons.  Even there, there are times when either a very small or large deficit diet may be appropriate.  Hopefully the above will help you decide which is right for you.

However, something I haven’t looked at may be a much more fundamental question which is this: why do people want to change their body composition?  That is, what reasons (good or bad) might people have for wanting to change their body composition in the first place.  That’s the topic of this piece.

While the overall goal of body recomposition typically means losing fat and/or gaining muscle there are some situations where gaining fat or losing muscle may also be desired.  I’ll look at each topic below.

Why Do People Want to Lose Fat?

At any given time, some ludicrous percentage of the population is trying to lose weight and/or fat.  I’d note that if you’re unclear on the distinction, you should really read What Does Body Composition Mean? before you go any further.  As I noted above, the motivations or reasons for this goal can vary significantly depending on the population you’re looking at.

It’s probably safe to say that bodybuilders and other physique athletes are the ones who are at least the most visible in terms of their extreme levels of fat loss; they are often the most successful as well.  While their goals are often also vanity driven, the simple fact is that reducing body fat to an appropriate level is required for competition purposes.  In the case of bodybuilding, this can often reducing body fat to what are unhealthy levels.

A male may reach 3-4% body fat on competition day, females have been measured in the single digits as well although few will maintain those levels for very long. This does some nasty things to hormones and women can do real damage to their health if they try to maintain that level for extended periods. As noted, most don’t but some try.

Figure and fitness has become more relaxed in recent years with higher body fat levels and ’softer’ looks being the goal.  But fat loss is usually a primary goal for these types of individuals (it’s not a stretch to say that they are professional dieters).

Even bodybuilders with no interest in stepping on stage typically wants to keep their body fat levels low enough to have some definition (to be ‘buff’) in the common parlance; this is often accompanied with a desire to gain muscle mass.  These folks don’t typically like to hear that body fat often has to increase to some degree to make optimal gains in muscle mass.

Female physique types, who are usually less interested in massive muscles in the first place (there are exceptions, females who want to be massive and/or beastly strong) and tend to be more concerned about just looking good.

Performance athletes frequently want to drop fat (or sometimes just weight) to either improve performance or simply make it into a specific weight class.  Clearly, in some cases, losing fat and/or weight helps performance by increasing the strength/power to weight ratio. Endurance athletes tend to benefit from being lighter because the less mass they have to move against gravity, the faster they go.  There are occasional exceptions (heavyweight rowers come to mind).

However, taken to extremes, dropping too much weight or fat can cause performance to plummet.  Whether this is due to the reduced weight/fat per se or simply the effort (excessive + dietary restriction) required to make it happen is difficult to determine and probably both contribute.

For sports performance, there is usually an optimal level of bodyfat but optimal isn’t the same as minimal.  Many athletes get confused about the distinction.

Many weight class athletes will dehydrate (sometimes severely) to make a lower weight class and there are some horror stories associated with this if it’s done incorrectly.  There have been some deaths associated with this practice and severe dehydration is no joking matter.  If nothing else, dehydration past about the 2% of total weight level tends to hurt performance.  Which won’t stop athletes in these sports from doing it if necessary.

Mild dehydration generally only requires a couple of days of low-carb, protein only diets and caffeine and is usually reasonably well-tolerated.  More extreme levels of dehydration can require prescription diuretics and near death experiences; what a lot of people don’t hear about is the IV fluids used to rehydrate these athletes after they get off the scale.

Returning to physique athletes, bodybuilders often dehydrate themselves to improve appearance, to look more ‘cut’; by reducing the water underneath the skin, muscle definition is improved.  Stories of problems with heavy-duty diuretics, ranging from cramping to passing out and death, are out there.

Of course, not everyone wants to lose fat for athletic, performance or bodybuilding reasons.  While many will pay at least lip service to the idea of losing weight or fat for health reasons, let’s face up to the facts: the grand majority of people who pursue fat loss do it for vanity driven reasons.  Put bluntly: they want to look better naked.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad goal, mind you, but let’s at least be honest about it.

Related to this, some people tie in their sense of self-confidence with their physique; when they’re lean they’re confident, when they’re not, they’re not. Others are doing it to meet some societally driven idea of ‘perfection’ or ‘beauty’.  I’ll leave argument over that to the sociologists.

It’s worth mentioning that while this used to apply primarily to women, there are an increasing number of men showing issues with eating disorders and other unhealthy eating and training habits (including a massive increase in elective plastic surgery for men).  At one point it was thought that eating disorders only occurred in men but this is clearly not the case.  Both anorexia and bulimia are potentially fatal.

Of course, some individuals want, have to or need to lose fat/weight for health reasons.  High blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, Syndrome X (aka Type II diabetes), arthritis, etc. are all often positively impacted by even moderate amounts of weight loss.  Research suggests that as little as a 10% weight loss (e.g. 20 lbs for a 200 lb person, 30 lbs for a 300 lb person) can drastically improve health parameters.

Why Do People Want to Gain Fat?

It’s interesting to note that in many non-modern cultures, fatness is not the social negative that it tends to be in the Western world.  Women are frequently moved into fattening tents prior to marriage, and one culture even has a ritual fattening period that signals a boy’s growth into a man.  I’d note that there’s no real trick to this: they accomplish this fattening by making the victims eat a lot and sit on their butts all day.

It’s probably fair to say that in most Western cultures, it’d be a little unusual for someone to specifically want to gain fat; there are always exceptions.   Here are a few.

For some athletes (especially female) increasing bodyfat may actually be healthier for them in the long-term.    Studies show that women’s hormones (and men’s for the record) can be severely disrupted under certain conditions (usually the combination of a low body fat and excessive caloric restriction) and this can cause bone loss and other problems at a very early age.  Studies of female gymnasts have found bone densities similar to that seen in severe osteoporosis in old women.  This is not a good thing.

For other athletes, such as a football lineman or a sumo wrestler, the quality of weight gained may not be as critical as just being a walking human wall.  Carrying extra fat may actually be beneficial since it can provide some protection against the other large men who are going to be running into you at high speeds with violence on their mind.

Of course, gaining fat for the sake of gaining fat is almost always a poor idea health-wise (and there has been an alarming increase in death at a young age among athletes in sports where the body weight requirements keep going up and up and up), unless someone was unhealthily lean in the first place.

But sports performance and optimal health aren’t always compatible.  If being 350-400 lbs (with 40% body fat) is required to be a pro football lineman and make the big bucks, so be it.  I’d note that taking the fat off after they retire is often a real problem for these types of athletes.  They tend to be so used to eating everything in sight that the idea of not doing so is a very rough change to make.

Finally, sometimes non-athletic individuals need to gain weight or fat as well. Although relatively more rare, some individuals are unhealthily underweight or underfat. I’m not talking about the anorexic eating disorder types (who need to be medically supervised during their weight gain) but folks who simply can’t seem to gain enough weight to be healthy, energetic and vigorous.  This tends to be a small percentage of the population but anybody who reads this site regularly knows that I’m all about completeness.

Why Do People Want to Gain Muscle?

The same individuals who typically want to reduce fat for either cosmetic or performance reasons frequently want to gain muscle mass for the very same reasons. Bodybuilders may need (or simply want) to gain muscle mass to improve their size and overall shape. This may be overall size increases or just increases in specific muscle groups for reasons of symmetry and balance.

Performance athletes may find that performance increases with more muscle and strength although how much of each depends strongly on the type of sport.  Many athletes (e.g. sprinters) have to balance out the requirement for strength and power with carrying too much body weight.  It is often a fine balance.  Other sports aren’t quite as demanding for that balance and if more muscle mass leads to more strength and power, performance often goes up.

For some athletes (especially endurance), too much muscle mass is a hindrance and will slow them down beyond a certain point.  Heavyweight rowers tend to be an odd exception since their weight is supported by the boat.  As with body fat, optimal levels of muscle mass, enough for efficient performance, but not so much that it slows the athlete down is the goal for these athletes.

There are also athletes who can’t gain too much muscle because of aesthetic requirements of their sport (i.e. gymnastics and figure skating).

Even the general public is often interested in some amount of muscle mass gain in this day and age.  Like fat loss, most of this tends to be driven by cosmetic reasons. Males want to ‘be buff’ and females are finding that even small amounts of muscle mass drastically improve their appearance.

Of course, there can also be health benefits to gaining muscle mass.  Massive amounts of research is focusing on the muscle loss that can occur with aging and finding ways to improve muscle mass (usually through training and nutritional intervention) in an increasingly aging population is key is important for both health and functional reasons (e.g. being able to carry your own groceries or get up out a chair without help).

Of course, in extreme situations such as wasting (cancer, AIDS, etc.) maintaining muscle mass is of equal health importance.  As it turns out, the loss of too much muscle mass will cause death and finding ways to slow or stop the loss of muscle that occurs is of huge importance.

Why Do People Want to Lose Muscle?

Possibly even more rare are the situations where someone wants to lose muscle.  Frequently these are ex-athletes who have no desire to maintain their muscle mass once their competitive days are over.

More commonly are athletes for whom losing muscle mass may actually improve performance.  Generally these tend to be endurance athletes who, for some reason, gained excessive amounts of muscle mass (either deliberately or through involvement in another sport) often in non-functional muscles.

A big upper body is typically a hindrance for an athlete such as a road cyclist since it’s just dead weight to be hauled around the course.  Losing it may improve performance.

In this vein, there is a story that is often told about Lance Armstrong who, after losing a large amount of weight (including some upper body muscle mass) due to his bout with cancer, was a much better cyclist because of it.  In this case, losing non-functional muscle could only improve his power to weight ratio.

Finally, as I noted in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1, extremely obese individuals often gain some lean body mass (some of which is muscle) in the process of becoming obese.  Most obesity experts expect, and don’t necessarily mind, that that ‘extra’ lean body mass is lost when weight is lost.  In fact, up to 25% of the total weight lost may come from lean body mass without anybody getting too concerned in that situation.

Today, I want to back up a bit and get a little more technical and look at some of the problems inherent to tracking body composition accurately.  This will lead me to finally round out this series by giving some specific recommendations on how to use the various methods to get the best measure of what’s going on.

While each of the methods that I discussed in the previous two articles have their own individual issues (some of which I discussed in those articles), the underlying issue with most methods of body composition measurement is that they have any number of inherent assumptions that, as often as not, are turning out to be false.

As well, calipers (which tend to be used most commonly for measuring body composition) have their own specific set of problems that I want to look at in some detail.

Assumptions about Body Density

As I mentioned in Measuring Body Composition Part 2, most of the methods that I’ve described don’t actually measure body fat percentage. Rather, they measure body density which is then used to estimate body fat percentage.  What does that mean?

Every tissue in your body (e.g. muscle vs. bone vs. fat cells) has a different density.  Taking you back to the horror of high-school science class, density is a measure of how much weight there is in a given volume of something.  Stuff that has more weight in a given volume has a higher density than something with less weight in that same volume.

Quick tangent: One of my major pet peeves is when folks say that muscle weighs more than fat; which doesn’t make any sense at all.  One pound of muscle weighs exactly the same as one pound of fat, the difference is that the fat is less dense and takes up more space on the body.  The graphic below shows one pound of muscle (the red stuff) versus one pound of fat (the yellow stuff).  As you can see, the fat takes up more space (it is less dense) but both weigh the same.  Ok, enough pedantry.

So every tissue in your body, muscle, fat, bone, organs has some density and the various body composition methods are actually making an estimate of body density.  That estimation goes into a second equation which then churns out the actual body fat percentage number.

So what’s the problem?

Well one of the key assumptions underlying most methods of body composition is about the specific densities of each of the different tissues and that that density is unchanging, and that it is identical from person to person.  All of which turn out to be more or less incorrect.

The original body density values were determined from a small sample of old white male cadavers way back when and, so far as I can tell, haven’t been updated.  To determine the values, first the cadavers were underwater weighed prior to dissection so that each tissue could be weighed and the true density determined.

The problem is that older sedentary white males are not going to have the same tissue density as a young male or female athlete but researchers have used the same values regardless.   As I mentioned in discussing underwater weighing, one of the problems there is the issue of blowing all of the air out of the lungs; this wasn’t an issue in dunking dead people.

As well, training often increases bone density and this can generate some really amusing results on body composition estimates (some equations will give negative values because of this).  There are also ethnic differences with blacks having, on average, denser bones than whites, and Asians having slightly less dense bones.  Tissue density can also change with age (e.g. bones often become less dense) and assumptions about these age related changes may be incorrect for individuals involved in heavy training.   This makes a set of assumed density values based on old white guys a little problematic.

It’s worth nothing that newer methods of body composition measurement such as DEXA allow for the tissue density values to be determined for an individual (DEXA is often used specifically to measure bone density) and avoids this particular problem.

Now, while there may not be absolutely massive differences in tissue densities between individuals or ethnic groups, my point is that the values aren’t identical or constant as many of the equations assume either.  As I noted, heavy training (especially weight training) tends to increase bone density and female bodybuilder I trained was found to have the bone density of a 20 year old despite being in her 40’s.  So the equations tended to give strange values for her.

Continuing in this vein, studies are showing that one type of lean body mass (called essential lean body mass) has a different density than another type (called inessential lean body mass). Researchers now delineate different types of subcutaneous body fat, which may have different densities as well. You’re probably starting to get the idea of the complexity of the situation and why assumptions about fixed unvarying densities for the different tissues can cause problems.

Now, as I noted above, with the exception of DEXA, pretty much all body composition share the above assumption and problems.  However, calipers, which I discussed in Measuring Body Composition Part 2 have their own individual set of problems that I want to discuss next.

Specific Caliper Problems

Despite giving values very close to that of hydrostatic weighing, calipers have their own set of problems on top of the body density issues I discussed above.

One of these is the assumption that skin thickness is the same among individuals and always constant.  While the differences tend to be small (a millimeter here or there), when you’re measuring a lot of sites, and dealing with someone who is pretty lean, a one millimeter difference can throw off the estimation.  Putting some values to it, a one millimeter difference over 10 sites turns out to be significant and can change the body fat estimate by about 1.5%.  While this is fairly irrelevant for fatter individuals, it can become relevant when folks get lean.

The next issue I sort of dealt with in the previous article and that has to do with where body fat is carried and the number of sites measured. As I mentioned in Measuring Body Composition Part 2, equations which use fewer sites (one common one is pec, abdominal, and thigh for men) can drastically under-estimate true body fat percentage if someone carries a lot of fat in an unmeasured site (upper back is a common place for males).

Often individuals are losing body fat in unmeasured places but this won’t show up with a 3 site measurement and it will look like the diet isn’t working.  As I noted in that article, taking more measurements can get around this but also requires a partner who knows what they are doing; as well, more sites gives them more chances to mess up.  So it’s always a trade-off.

Additionally, visceral fat (the stuff found in and around the gut) isn’t even measured by calipers, although methods such as DEXA (or even the waist to hip ratio) can track changes there.  By many methods, a loss of visceral fat will actually show up as a loss of lean body mass although it’s not.  Someone losing visceral fat early in a diet may think that their diet really isn’t working when it actually is.

And of course, there are also the other issues endemic to caliper technique that I mentioned in Measuring Body Composition Part 2; you need a trained operator, they have to know how to pull a proper consistent skinfold, etc.  One thing I didn’t mention is that large skinfolds (as are often seen in the female thigh) can be damn near impossible to measure accurately.

I’d note that if the BodyMextrix 2000 turns out to be a valid and accurate method, that might get around this set of problems entirely.  It won’t solve the other issues inherent to the method but at least will avoid issues related to caliper technique per se.

Problems with the Caliper Equations

In addition to the issues inherent to caliper measurements I discussed above (and if you wonder why I’m spending so much time on calipers, it’s because they tend to be the most commonly found and used method), there is another potentially bigger problem and that’s with the equations.

Essentially, there are a whole bunch (I’d imagine hundreds at this point) of caliper equations which take the measurements themselves and convert them into body fat percentage.  And the big issue here is that any single equation will only be truly valid (or even close to valid) for the group that it was originally developed in and/or for.  To understand this I have to tell you how they commonly develop the equations.

First off researchers pick the group that they want to measure.  This might be white college aged non-athlete female, or middle aged black women, or Hispanic high school girls or whatever.  I’m just picking these examples at random, don’t read anything into them.

Next the group in question will either be underwater weighted or DEXA’d and the value obtained here will be assumed to give the true body fat percentage.  Then the group will be calipered at however many sites that researchers want to look at (this can range from 3 to 10).  Then a computer is used to crank out an equation that will let the caliper measurements match up with the DEXA/underwater weighing value.

Now, the big issue comes in when you try to use an equation for one population in a different one.  So while an equation derived for the white college-aged non-athlete females may be fairly accurate in that group, it won’t be accurate at all applied to a different population.  Differences in tissue density, body fat distribution, etc. all throw a wrench into things.  Of course, this mainly just means getting ahold of the proper equation, assuming it exists.

One common way of getting around this is to develop generalized equations; basically they take a bunch of different estimation equations and mathematically put them together (don’t ask me for details) to develop a single generalized equation that gives decent average results.

Perhaps the most common set are the Jackson-Pollock generalized equations, of which there are 3, 4 and 7 site measurements.   These equations tend to show a decent correlation with ‘true’ body fat percentage for both men and women although the 3 and 4 site equations can still drastically underestimate if someone carries a lot of fat in a place that the calipers aren’t measuring.

A couple of final issues with caliper equations.  The first is that most are developed as a curve.  That is, when researchers work the math, usually you end up with something that is curved rather than being a straight line.  What that means in practice is that the equations tend to be fairly accurate in the middle range of body fats but can become very wrong very quickly at the extremes.  So once someone gets above 40% body fat (or so) or below 10%, the equations become progressively more wrong; fatter individuals will be overestimated and leaner individuals are typically underestimated.

A final comment has to do with age which is often included in the caliper equations. Many have found to their chagrin (yes, chagrin) that a birthday suddenly shows them as being fatter, even if the actual caliper measurements haven’t changed.  What’s going on?

The reason has to do with some of the assumptions about tissue density that are being made; it’s usually assumed that bone density is being lost with age, and that muscle is being lost.  Thus an identical caliper measurement (say that a three site measurement gives 45 millimeters total skinfolds) will give a different body fat estimation with increasing age.  The charts that often accompany calipers will show body fat percentage as a function of age and when you move to a higher category, often the values go up.

What’s the Solution?

In previous articles I’ve gone into some detail about different methods of measuring body composition and why I think it’s important; in this article I seem to be saying that all of the methods aren’t actually that accurate and have all kinds of problems.

First and foremost, that’s not exactly what I’m saying.  My only point with today’s article is to make some of the underlying issues with the method known.  Body composition measurements aren’t perfect but no method of measuring much of anything is; that doesn’t make them useless.

Just keep in mind that sometimes some very weird values (such as negative values in lean athletes) can come up; when values fail the reality check (e.g. someone is claiming to be 1.4% body fat based on calipers), it’s time to take a step back and reconsider what’s going on.

Beyond that, unless you’re doing clinical work where absolute accuracy is required in your measurements, it’s usually good enough that the measurements be at least consistent.  That is, for any given individual, it’s far more important to get consistent measurements even if those measurements aren’t exactly accurate.

What does that mean?  Hopefully the following example will make it clear.

Let’s say that someone weighs 150 pounds, let’s say that they get on two different scales and one puts them at 153 pounds and the other at 147 pounds.  Neither scale is accurate because they both give values that are different than the actual value.

Now let’s say this person loses 5 pounds so that they really weigh 145 pounds.  Now they get on the same two scales and get the following measurements.  The first scale, that originally said 147 pounds says the person weighs 142 pounds; that is it accurately measured the 5 pound loss.  But the second, which originally said 153 pounds says that the person weighs 150 pounds; the second did not accurately measure the 5 pound loss.

Neither scale was accurate, but the first was at least consistent (it was off by 3 pounds each time); it reflected the changes properly.  The second scale wasn’t accurate or consistent (it was off by 3 pounds initially and by 5 pounds the second time around).

For measuring body fat percentage, usually it’s more important to be consistent than accurate.  Now, there are places where you want an accurate measurement (e.g. to determine actual lean body mass or what have you) but the reality is that you’re not going to get 100% accuracy almost no matter what you do (DEXA might be the lone exception here).  You can get close (calipers are usually 3-5% off of true measures) but that’s about it.  So the best you can get is consistent.

And most of the issues I’ve discussed in this article are going to be consistent for any given individual. Your bone density is unlikely to change massively over the course of a diet, neither will skin thickness for the most part.  Unless you happen to have a birthday and move up in the body fat percentage chart, that’s a non-issue too.

So assuming that you use the same method, measure at the same time of the day under similar conditions (e.g. don’t compare carb-loaded to depleted), at the same time of the month (this is critical for females due to shifts in water balance and such over the menstrual cycle), etc. you can at least get consistently comparable measures to track changes.

You may not know the exactly accurate values (unless you can afford to get DEXA done a bunch of times) but you can measure changes.  You can tell if you’re losing fat, staying the same or gaining fat.  Of course, as I’ll detail in an upcoming article, standing in front of the mirror or taking pictures every 4 weeks would tell you as much.

Summing Up

Body composition measurements, like almost everything to do with the life sciences, has its set of problems.  Assumptions about tissue density is an inherent problem in most measurements of body composition (DEXA being one of the few exceptions).

Calipers, while common, have their own set of problems and assumptions both related to the method and the equations that are used to crank out the actual body fat percentage numbers.

However, outside of clinical practice, at least consistent and comparable measures can usually be made even if complete accuracy can’t be obtained.  For most applications, this tends to be sufficient.

In an upcoming article, I’ll give some concrete recommendations on how I think people can or should use the different methods of tracking body composition changes to make sure their training and eating programs are working the way that they want them to.