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

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

.What is it/How Does it Work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is It Accurate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Should You Care?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What’s the Catch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summing Up

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

I realize that there are no hard and fast rules here, but do you have a figure kicking around that brain of yours that articulates what is the maximum amount of fat loss per week while maintaining a decent  fat/muscle loss ratio once someone has approached single digit body fat? I’m guessing it’s no where near 2 pounds at that point.

I’m at about 9% and I’m regularly hitting a 7,000 calorie deficit (Bodybugg) and I’m starting to see my strength levels go down regularly for the first time. It looks like I’m starting to lose a little muscle too but I’m not skilled enough with the calipers to know for sure. Obviously I need to cut back on the deficit and see how things go but it made this question pop in my head. Hope you can use it on your site sometime. Thanks for all your hard work and great info.

Answer: The short-answer, as always, is that it depends.  Now here’s the long answer.

First, the idea that 2 lbs/week is the maximum amount of weight/fat loss that should be achieved has been around for years but nobody seems to know where it comes from.  Certainly there’s no physiological reason for this to be a maximum and much larger rates of true weight/fat loss can be achieved with extreme deficits.

Anyone who has watched The Biggest Loser knows this to be true and even without that level of asininity, very large folks following a protein-sparing modified fast as per my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook have been measured at 1/2-2/3 pounds of fat loss PER DAY.  Which is 3.5+ pounds of fat per week.  Clearly 2 lbs/week is a bogus value in a physiological sense.

So where did 2 pounds come from?  I suspect it was mostly a behavioral/reality issue.  Assuming a value of 3,500 calories per pound fat loss (and I’d note that this value has some issues inherent to it discussed in The Energy Balance Equation), to lose even 2 pounds per week means a net deficit of 7,000 calories per week or 1,000 calories per day.

Which means either a lot of activity (a minimum of 2 hours for someone relatively untrained) or fairly large-scale caloric restriction.  Now, certainly this can be achieved with extreme diets but my guess is that the practicality of the 2 lb/week rule came out of this idea: for most people, a larger daily deficit isn’t realistic.  At the time it was also assumed that faster weight loss was associated with poorer long-term results but, as discussed in Is Rapid Fat Loss Right For You?,  depending on the specifics, the truth is actually exactly the opposite of that idea.

Of course, weight loss isn’t fat loss and the issue of muscle loss is a concern, I discuss this in detail in What Does Body Composition Mean? as well as elsewhere on the site.  Another issue regarding the 2 pound per week rule is muscle loss while dieting; this is (or at least should be) a concern and, certainly early studies found that bigger deficits caused greater muscle/lean body mass lost.  But there were at least two problems with this:

1. The caloric intake was stupid low.
2. There was no exercise, especially weight training, done.

Number 2 is of course important, while all types of activity will spare some muscle in beginners on a diet, weight training is probably the best overall approach.  And it simply wasn’t a part of mainstream weight loss approaches or research when most of the work was being done.

Even there, number 1 is probably the bigger issue here.  Even very obese individuals need a certain amount of dietary protein to prevent muscle loss and when you only feed someone 300 calories/day, even if 100% of it is protein (and most very low calories aren’t because they are set up stupidly), that’s a maximum of 80 grams of protein.  Which is usually too little.  And is also is why I set up the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook diet by protein intake and not by calories.

You have to meet protein requirements on any diet to limit muscle loss; when researchers started giving obese folks a minimum of 1.5 g/kg lean body mass of protein on a PSMF approach, muscle loss stopped.    For a 300 pound individual with 40% body fat, that’s a daily protein intake of 122 grams per day or a minimum of 500 calories.  With tagalong carbs and fats, total daily caloric intake will be higher. Simply, setting calories at 300/day won’t allow sufficient protein; yet many of the data points came from exactly those studies.

Of course, all of the above really applies mainly to overweight individuals; for what should be obvious reasons obesity researchers tend to not care about fat loss in lean individuals.   However, there was work done on changes in body composition, usually during starvation (and most of this was by Gilbert Forbes who literally spent 30 years writing about the topic) showing that one of the primary predictors of what was gained or lost during over- or under-feeding was initial body fat percentage (discussed in detail in Initial Body Fat and Body Composition Changes).

And, as per that article, as folks get leaner, for reasons discussed in detail in Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2, muscle loss tends to increase.   Some early work suggested that, when you were lean, you’d lose roughly 1 pound of muscle for every 3 pounds total weight lost.  That is, up to 33% of your total weight loss might be muscle.

And with the idea that faster weight loss made muscle loss worse, suggestions to limit weekly weight loss to one pound per week when you got lean often were made.  Duchaine echoed this in the seminal Bodyopus and for a long time I suggested 1-1.5 lbs/week as the ’sweet spot’ for weekly weight loss for leaner individuals.  It’s still not a bad value for moderate deficit diets, mind you, and I use that as the sweet-spot value in Adjusting the Diet.

But the 1-1.5 lb/week value isn’t an absolute, some can lose faster than this as lean people using my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook have shown.  True fat losses of 2-3 lbs/week in lean individuals is possible at least for short periods of time (one limitation of the RFL approach for lean people is that it should only be used for about 2 weeks straight before something less extreme is done).

So clearly it is possible to lose more than the stock-standard 1-1.5 lbs/week of true fat without muscle loss.  And understanding why and how means understanding why muscle loss tends to occur on a diet in the first place.

Arguably the biggest reason (and the one we have only limited ability to control) is  shifting hormones: falling leptin and testosterone, increases in cortisol, and a whole bunch of other (bad) stuff happen during dieting and most of these things become more pronounced the leaner you get.   Cyclical diets (like the Ultimate Diet 2.0) and strategies such as The Full Diet Break go a long way towards helping with those issues since the periods of high-caloric intake help to restore hormone levels back towards normal (they can’t ever restore them completely).

Of course, as noted in those articles, a big reason bodybuilders use so many drugs is to fix problems while dieting. With enough testosterone, thyroid meds, thermogenics, anti-cortisol compounds, appetite suppressants, etc. they can basically replace everything that the body isn’t making anymore.

An additional factor is that people’s ability to train intensely often goes down on a diet and maintaining the appropriate tension stimulus to keep muscle is key to avoiding muscle loss.  This is one of the reasons I find the whole idea of increasing volume and frequency of training on a diet half-assed; as discussed in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 and Weight Training for Fat Loss part 2, people do better when they cut volume and frequency and focus on maintaining intensity.

Diets such as the Ultimate Diet 2.0 get around this by having the heaviest workout after carb-loading (so you can go heavy) and even basic cyclical ketogenic diets help with this.  Refeeds refill muscle glycogen and that allows people to go heavier in the weight room; strength isn’t a perfect proxy but if you’re keeping your weights up in the gym, you’re probably not losing muscle.

I actually think that training poorly is part of why guys like Dan Duchaine found that more than 1 lb/week fat loss was too much without props.  Training in the 80’s and even early 90’s while dieting was often done in a rather stupid fashion.  People trained too many days with too much volume and often dropped intensity too much because of it.  That alone allows muscle loss to occur.

Coaches who use lower volume and/or lower frequency but higher intensity training on a diet don’t see that level of muscle loss on a diet (if they see any at all). As noted, people on the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook diet don’t report muscle loss so long as they do the training (low volume/low frequency/high-intensity) in the book.

Excessive amounts of cardio contribute to this as well.  When you have drugs to spare muscle loss, 2-3 hours/day of cardio is fine and lets you eat more.  For naturals, while it’s sometimes necessary to go to 2 hours/day at the end of a diet (to offset a cratering metabolism), too much cardio just causes the muscles to fall off on a diet.  Especially when combined with a big deficit and inadequate protein.  But people did (and still do) nutty shit when they diet to get lean; excessive cardio is part of that.

Adequate protein is also a big issue.  For years I went with the stock standard 1 g/lb but on a diet this is probably insufficient.  As I discuss in detail in The Protein Book, 1.5 g/lb should probably be the minimum while dieting (certainly some people get away with less but this is highly individual).  On extreme approaches, more than that (2 g/lb) may be needed.

So bascially if you look at old-school dieting for lean individuals, it had some major flaws including

1. Often (not always) inadequate protein.
2. Stupid training.
3. No use of refeeds or full diet breaks to reset hormones and allow better training to be done.

And while certainly many make the above work, just as many (if not more) have issues with strength and performance loss.

So what’s the answer to your question after all of that?  Well it depends.  If you insist on doing things badly, training too much, excessive cardio, inadequate protein, too stubborn to use refeeds and diet breaks, the old value of 1 lb/week may be exactly right with 1.5 lbs/week maybe being achievable.

Do things in what I consider the ‘right’ way (proper training, adequate protein, refeeds/full diet breaks used) and you can get faster fat loss per week without performance or muscle loss.  1.5 lbs/week is usually achievable for most and, for short periods, with extreme diets, more than that can be achieved without muscle loss.

Of course, there is still individuality in all of this probably relating to genetics and hormone levels.  Some people lose muscle more than others, they have to go with slower rates of fat loss even if they do everything ‘right’.  And others are lucky, they lose fat more easily (some of the reasons are discussed in The Stubborn Fat Solution).  But they tend not to be in the majority of trainees (they are usually in the majority of folks who get on stage).

Now, I have a bit more clue what’s going on, or at least what I think is going on so I’m going to share one of these with you (I’ll address others in future articles).  Today I want to talk about something that I like to call the LTDFLE,  an acronym that I genuinely hope you will use at every possible chance on forums to confuse people, and which will make sense shortly.

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The LTDFLE

Anyone who has had the headache-inducing misfortune of reading (or trying to read) Supertraining by Mel Siff and Yuri Verkoshansky may have a clue where I’m going with this section heading.  In that book, one topic that is discussed rather endlessly is the long-term delayed training effect (LTDTE), a phenomenon whereby strength/performance gains often show up considerably (e.g. 2-4 weeks) after the heavy training has been done.  This can actually be explained fairly simply through a two-model fitness/fatigue theory of adaptation but I’m getting way off track.

LTDFLE stands for Long-Term Delayed Fat Loss Effect (I’d note that I have also seen a LTDGE which is a Long-Term Delayed Growth Effect but that’s another topic for another article).  Basically, this is the phenomenon whereby fat loss continues to occur even after the diet has been ended and/or calories have been raised back towards/to maintenance or even above.  In the same way that fitness sometimes continues to increase after the period of heavy loading, it’s almost as if there is some type of fat loss inertia whereby the diet continues working even after the person ends it.

Now, I talked about a similar phenomenon in the article Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat, a situation where, usually after the diet is broken (for a meal or a day), folks often wake up lighter and leaner.  But that’s more of an acute thing that I think can clearly be related to water retention/the release of such that happens when people break their diets (deliberately or otherwise).

The LTDFLE is a bit different and can last from 4-7 days (on average).  During that time, and note that this only happens after fairly prolonged dieting, as calories are brought up, people continue to get visibly and measurably leaner.  Skinfolds continue to drop, other measurements will continue to change in the direction of a decreased body fat.

I’ve observed the LTDFLE in myself, in trainees/clients and it’s something that a lot of bodybuilders (depending on how nuts they go) experience in the first few days after a show.  After all that work, after all that effort, they end up looking their best 2-3 days after the post-contest binge has started.

In fact, there’s actually even a weird study from back in the late-90’s that saw this although the researchers had no clue what was actually going on (because nutrition researchers don’t read enough basic science/endocrinology).  In it, folks were dieted hard for 4 weeks and then progressively refed (raising calories over the 5th week towards maintenance).  Body weight kept going down in Week 5 despite the gradually increasing calories (as I recall, they didn’t measure body composition).

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What’s Going On?

Now, it seems fairly obvious that at least some of the LTDFLE is due to water retention and water balances, just like the acute whooshes discussed in  Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat.  Although there is a great deal of variance, people often retain water (both under the skin and possibly within fat cells) when they are dieting hard and restricting calories and much of this is related to increases in the hormone cortisol (please note that water retention is profoundly more complicated than this).  Raising calories/carbohydrates and/or reducing training tends to shut down cortisol release.    Suddenly the body stops freaking out and water is dropped.  But I wouldn’t expect water loss to explain a full week of visual changes.  A day, maybe two, sure.  But not the 4-7 days that the LTDFLE typically runs.

An additional factor that is certainly involved, and especially with folks on low-carbohydrate diets who are doing a lot of training, is replenishing muscle glycogen.  As carbs are raised, the body starts sucking up carbs (this has an additional effect of pulling water into muscle which probably also accounts for water shifts), they fill out and start to look better.  This is assuredly a big part of why bodybuilders often look better 2 days after their show; instead of looking stringy and flat on stage, they get full and pumped.  If water is being dropped from the body at the same time, all the better from a visible standpoint.  Please note that muscle glycogen is only increased if the caloric increase comes from carbohdyrates; pigging out on high-fat fare won’t get it done.

Of course, the increase in glycogen/water mediated lean body mass will have a small effect on actual body fat percentage but, as discussed in Reducing Bodyfat by Gaining Muscle – Q&A, the effect is not large.  It doesn’t hurt, of course, but it certainly doesn’t explain all of it.

But even with that, it does seem that actual fat is still being lost, skinfolds get measurably smaller and people look leaner (and depending on what’s done next, often the skinfolds stay down suggesting that it’s more than just a transient water shift magic trick).  So beyond the above explanations, what’s really going on.   I suspect that at least some of it is related to leptin kinetics.  If you’re not familiar with leptin and what it does, I’d suggest you take the time to read the 6-part series on Bodyweight Regulation: Leptin. I’ll wait.

As I’ve discussed in my various books and in the article The Full Diet Break, leptin starts to increase fairly quickly when calories and carbohydrates are raised, even 5 hours of over-eating carbs can raise leptin.  With even a few days of eating more calories/carbs, leptin will go up.  And while many of the effects of leptin aren’t immediate (which is part of why I recommend 10-14 days for a full diet break), some of them might be.

Leptin is part of what regulates cortisol levels for example (leptin inhibits cortisol release) so at the very least, increasing leptin would help to reduce water retention. But some work has also shown a direct effect of leptin on fat cells in terms of lipolysis; leptin also promotes fat oxidation in skeletal muscle and elsewhere, perhaps the increase in leptin is directly stimulating actual fat loss.  Of course, that explanation is predicated on leptin going up/having a greater impact on things than the excess of calories coming in has on fat gain.

Related to that are thyroid hormone kinetics.  On a diet, conversion of the relatively inactive T4 to the more active T3 goes down in the liver and this rebounds fairly quickly when calories (and especially carbohydrates) are raised.  Tangentially, this is why I recommend a minimum of 100-150 grams of carbohydrates per day during a The Full Diet Break; that’s what is required to normalize T3 production in the liver. As well, leptin is involved in the control of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) so increasing leptin may also be driving thyroid output.

Now, T3 has both short-term and long-term effects on metabolism with most of the long-term effects being related to changes in gene expression; those take time to maximally occur (at least 14 days).  But T3 can also be degraded to T2 which has immediate metabolic effects on energy expenditure and it seems possible that increases in T3 and subsequent breakdown to T2 might be raising metabolic rate enough to not only offset the increased calories but also to generate extra fat loss.  That might explain part of the LTDFLE as well.

I mentioned gene expression above, this is just a nerd term referring to changes in which genes are turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ (simplistically speaking) in various cells.  And gene expression changes in response to dieting, caloric intake, activity, etc.  While some changes happen pretty quickly others take longer; it’s not an instantaneous process.  Many have observed that often a diet takes a solid week or so to start ‘working’ and this may be related to slower changes in gene expression when someone moves from an above maintenance caloric intake to a below maintenance caloric intake.

And the same may be working in reverse, the body is still effectively in a ‘fat burning mode’ for some period of time after calories are raised.  Along with any direct effects of leptin and/or thyroid on lipolysis/fat oxidation/metabolic rate and the shifts in water balance, the situation is still simply this: people often keep getting leaner in the first week off their diet (again, this assumes that they don’t go totally nuts with food intake).

I’d note in this regards that my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 actually takes advantage of this to get a short-term sidestep of the energy balance equation: for about 24 hours following the 4 hard days of dieting/glycogen depletion, even in the face of massive carbohydrate intake, the body preferentially stores the incoming carbs as glycogen while using fatty acids for fuel (part of why fat intake has to be kept low during the carb-load).  Folks may be at literally double maintenance caloric intake and still be losing fat.  Magic?  No, just good science.  Ok, maybe a little magic.

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Summing Up

And that’s the oddity that is the LTDFLE: that magic period where, despite raising calories, you keep leaning out and losing fat.  It’s only about 7 days at the longest and can be shorter if people go really nuts with their food intake.  This is especially true if a lot of high-fat foods are consumed for extended periods.  Empirically, making the LTDFLE work the best seems to involve raising carbohydrate intake moreso than dietary fat.  In that vein, in the short-term 2-3 days), leptin levels are only responsive to increasing dietary carbohydrate intake, not fat.

So that’s the LTDFLE, an oddity of fat loss that tends to occur after fairly prolonged dieting when calories are raised.  It’s not universal and doesn’t always happen but when it does, enjoy it. Before I finish, let me make one thing very clear which is that the LTDFLE only occurs after fairly prolonged actual dieting (which can still contain free meals and refeeds as discussed in A Guide to Flexible Dieting).  Don’t think that you’re going to get the magic effect of the LTDFLE by half-assing it for a couple of weeks and then raising calories and voila.

In a future article, I’ll look at another specific oddity of fat loss, the situation where combining a large caloric deficit with too much activity can actually hurt rather than help weight/fat loss.  But that’s for another day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope that clears it up and thanks for the question.

Answer: I’m willing to argue that if there is a single question (or related set of questions) that comes up perennially in the field of training and nutrition, it’s something akin to the above.  The idea of ‘gaining muscle while losing fat’ in general or, better yet ‘replacing every pound of fat lost with muscle’ is sort of the holy grail of training and nutrition and a great deal of approaches that are supposed to generate that very thing have been thrown out over the years.

In essence, this is the basis of bodyrecomposition, you train and eat in such a way as to end up with more muscle and less fat than you had before.  People on forums either want to know how to accomplish the above or make statements such as “I want to gain muscle without gaining weight.” implying that they are replacing every pound of lost fat with the exact same pound of muscle.   Others will hide it in the math of the situation, wanting to move from one weight/body fat percentage to another without recognizing what that implies for the numerical changes that they are seeking.

Now, when I was younger and only thought I knew what I was talking about, I would often say that the above was impossible to accomplish.  In hindsight, impossible was a bit too strong of a term; clearly it’s not impossible as it does happen.  But it can sure be difficult depending on the situation.

There are a handful of situations where the combination of muscle gain and fat loss occur relatively readily.  The first of those is in overfat beginners.  I want to really stress the term overfat in the above sentence.  This phenomenon doesn’t happen in lean beginners for reasons I’m going to explain in a second.

A second situation where this phenomenon occurs readily is folks returning from a layoff.  Folks who are previously lean and muscular but who get out of shape (whether deliberately or not) often find that they get back into shape much faster than they did initially: they seem to magically replace fat with muscle.  In fact, with the advent of before/after transformation pictures for supplements, this has become a growth industry: people who are already in great shape will deliberately get out of great shape so that they can quickly reattain their previous shape in a short period.  Apparently there is huge money in selling such before/after pictures to help move supplements.

But that’s not really what the question was asking which had more to do with this idea: can the body use calories stored in fat cells to support muscle growth, essentially shunting calories from fat to muscle and achieving the holy grail: fat loss with concomitant muscle gain.

And, as a generality, this tends to be difficult for reasons that I discussed in some detail in the Ultimate Diet 2.0 and Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2.

And this brings me back to my comment about overfat beginners as I think this explains some of the physiology involved.   Please note that I’ve never really seen this topic studied directly and much of what I’m going to write is based on either observation or other known aspects of physiology that I feel tie into the issue.

So consider an individual who is carrying quite a bit of fat and not very much muscle.  Your typical overfat beginner trainee.  Let’s look a bit at what’s going on physiologically for this person.

One consequence of the excess body fat is a systemic insulin resistance and this is especially true for fat cells.  Basically, when fat cells start to get full, they become more resistant to further caloric storage.  That is to say: insulin resistance actually develops as an adaptation to obesity and this is one reason that obesity is often associated with things like hyperglycemia, hypertriglyercidemia and hypercholesterolemia; the fat cells get so full that they stop accepting more calories.  So instead of being stored, glucose, triglycerides and cholesterol sit in the bloodstream.  In that vein, and quite contrary to popular belief, insulin resistance actually predicts weight loss and insulin sensitivity weight gain but that’s another topic for another day.

So we have a situation in overfat folks where fat cells are sort of trying to ‘push calories away’ from the fat cells.  That’s point #1.

The second thing to consider is the untrained state and the fact that when people start training, they always make gains in both strength and muscle mass faster.  That is, beginners have the potential to gain muscle at a much faster rate (and more easily in terms of the stimulus needed) than someone trained.  As well, keep in mind that regular training (both resistance training and cardio) improve muscular insulin sensitivity and nutrient uptake in that one specific tissue (training is probably the most powerful tool in our arsenal to improve nutrient uptake in that specific a fashion).  That’s point #2.

So consider the combination: we have a situation with overfat beginners where fat cells are very insulin resistant and essentially trying to push calories away.  Now we throw training on that, not only sending a muscle building stimulus via training but increasing nutrient uptake into skeletal muscle through effects on skeletal muscle nutrient uptake/insulin sensitivity.

And what happens under those circumstances is exactly what you’d expect: the body appears to take calories out of fat cells and use them to build muscle.  And this is effectively what is happening due to the combination of the above two factors. But the combination of the two is required.   A lean beginner won’t see the above because they don’t have the fat to lose/fat energy to shunt to the muscle.  And as they get more advanced, the rate of muscle gain slows way down.  Again, it’s the combination of overfat and beginner status that comes together here to let some magic occur.

And even there you’re not going to see the body replacing one pound of fat with one pound of muscle for very long.  The rates of the different processes are simply too different.  What you might see is an initial shift where muscle ‘replaces’ fat due to the calorie shunting effect but invariably it slows down and either muscle gain or (more frequently) fat loss becomes dominant.

Now, having looked at the specific situation of an overfat beginner, let’s look at what happens as one of two things (or both happen): the person becomes leaner and/or achieves a higher training status.

A known adaptation to fat loss is an improvement in insulin sensitivity especially in fat cells.  This is part of why fat loss becomes more difficult as folks get leaner as well as why the risk of weight/fat gain is higher at the end of the diet (you’re MORE insulin sensitive).  This means that the fat cells not only have less stored fat to give up but it becomes more difficult to get it out of there.

I discussed some of the reasons for this in detail in The Stubborn Fat Solution along with protocols to get around it.  But the point is made: as folks get leaner, getting fat out of fat cells becomes more difficult.  Some of the hormonal mechanisms involved are also discussed in Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2.

Furthermore, as folks become better trained, it becomes more difficult to gain muscle under any condition.  The training stimulus is higher and the impact of training is lessened.

So the situation that was in place for the overfat beginner has reversed itself in someone who is leaner and/or better trained.  Fat cells are no longer insulin resistant and ‘pushing fat calories’ away; quite in fact they are ready to take up excess calories at any time. And since training has a lesser impact on muscle growth, the odds of getting the calorie shunting effect becomes lower and lower approaching nil.  Again, that’s on top of all of the hormonal stuff discussed in the above articles (e.g. fat loss and muscle gain requires different hormonal situations).

Which is why a lot of the approaches advocated for ‘gaining muscle while losing fat’ aren’t very effective.  In fact, I’d tend to argue that most people’s attempts to achieve the above results in them simply spinning their wheels, making no progress towards either goal.  Because invariably they set up a situation where neither training nor diet is optimized for either fat loss or muscle gain.  Calories are too high for fat loss and too low to support muscle gains and outside of that one overfat beginner situation, the physiology simply isn’t going to readily allow what they want to happen to happen.

But more specific approaches can be effective in achieving this goal.  The Ultimate Diet 2.0 has often generated muscle gains while people dieted to single digit body fat levels (I’d note that the gain in muscle never reaches equality with the fat loss) but it also alternates specific dieting and gaining phases during the week.

Many of the intermittent fasting (IF’ing) approaches do this more acutely and I’d suggest anybody interested go to Martin Berkhan’s Lean Gains site for more information about IF.  There are others, things like every other day refeeds (EOD refeeds) which are discussed in some detail in my The Bodyrecomposition Support Forums.  But all of those approaches are alternating dieting phases (lowered calories, a net ‘catabolic’ state) with gaining phases (increased calories, a net ‘anabolic’ state).

But none of those approaches generate a muscle gain to equal the fat loss, at best they generate a small muscle gain in the face of a much larger fat loss (e.g. someone might lose a lot of fat while gaining a pound or two of muscle or what have you).  But for the non-beginner/non-returning from a layoff trainee that’s about the best you’re going to get.  Potential rates of muscle gain are never going to approach the potential rate of fat loss once folks are past the beginner stage.  Even in the beginner stage, it’s generally always easier to lose fat much faster than you can gain muscle.

So the idea of replacing every pound of lost fat with exactly one pound of muscle will be essentially impossible for the intermediate/advanced trainee.  There’s simply not enough fat/the fat cells dont want to ‘give up their calories’ and the ability to stimulate rapid muscle gains isn’t there any more.

A followup question might be what about fatter but more advanced trainees.  Certainly in that situation, fat cell insulin sensitivity/etc. can approach what is occurring with the overfat beginner but there is still the issue of rate of muscle gain being drastically slowed.  It’s probably possible briefly at the start of the diet to get some caloric shunting but it’s never going to approach a 1:1 gain in muscle with fat loss; the potential rate of fat loss (1-2 lbs/week) to rates of muscle gain (0.5 lbs/week if you’re lucky) simply doesn’t exist.

As a final comment, I can say without hesitation that someone will post in the comments that they managed to achieve the above results in some form or fashion.  And while there are always going to be exceptions to any generality, that doesn’t tend to disprove the generality.  And generally speaking, the above is what happens in the real world.

Question: A common recommendation bandied about by trainers is to place any LISS cardio after “lactate training” or whatever they choose to call higher intensity work, and they say that if fat loss is the aim, this will milk every last bit of effectiveness out of the low intensity work (versus keeping it a separate session entirely). And they usually say that increased lactate leads to increased GH, leads to increased lipolysis, so that when the low intensity work comes after the much higher intensity work, you oxidize more of the fat they claim gets mobilized.  So does this pairing of LISS cardio after high(er)-intensity work still make it at least somewhat more effective (from a fat-loss standpoint) than when performed separately? And if so, is it more due to other things you mentioned (glycogen depletion, effect of the catecholamines, etc.), so that the intended effect is the same, it was just the purported reason for the effect that most of these trainers had wrong (namely implicating a GH-induced increase in lipolysis as the reason)?

Answer: There’s no doubt that growth hormone (GH) is involved in lipolysis although, compared to hormones such as insulin and the catecholamines (epinephrine/norepinephrine aka adrenaline/noradrenaline) it plays a distinctly secondary role.  There are other hormones of course, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, Interleukin-6 and a new player called atrial-natriurietic peptide (ANP) all play a role as well.  Here I’m only going to talk about GH.

First let me define a single term which is lipolysis.  This refers to the breakdown of stored fat (technically: triglycerides) in fat cells for release into the bloodstream.  While there are more steps involved in losing fat (and the specific pathways are all discussed in some detail in The Stubborn Fat Solution), clearly if you can’t get the fat out of the cell in the first place, little else matters.  Lipolysis simply refers to that process, whereby fatty acids stored within fat cells are broken down to be released into the bloodstream, hopefully to be burned elsewhere in the body (generally skeletal muscle or liver).

For example, while studies of injectable GH have generally crapped out in terms of muscle growth (there is an increase in lean body mass but it’s primarily water and connective tissue, not actual muscle mass), it has shown impact on fat loss.  As well, the nighttime GH pulse has been shown to be important for lipolysis the next day.  Finally, during periods of fasting or even low-carbohydrate diets, studies clearly show that blocking the normal GH response not only limits lipolysis, but this ends up increasing muscle loss (because the body doesn’t have fatty acids to burn).

So far so good right?

Add to that a host of studies done primarily during in the 80’s by William Kraemer and his group showing that certain training protocols (notably higher reps and short rest periods; 3X10 with 1′ rest was typically used) elevate GH and you can see where folks got the idea that training in this fashion would be good for fat loss.

I think the first place I saw this idea floated was Charles Poliquin’s original German Body Composition Training.  Claimed to be based on German research into the hormonal response to training, it was based arund multiple sets of high reps with short-rest, the premise of which being to raise GH (and lactate production during training seemed to be involved somehow) to increase fat loss.

More specifically to today’s question, many trainers will use that type of training (using various permutations of Metabolic Training, discussed in some detail in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 and Weight Training for Fat Loss part 2) to be followed up by low-intensity cardio.    The idea being that the GH response will promote lipolysis and the low-intensity cardio will then ‘burn off the fatty acids’.

And here’s we run into the problem with the idea:   the time course.  Because while GH is certainly involved in lipolysis, it’s effects are pretty slow to occur.  Cutting ot the chase, after a big GH pulse, you don’t really see a big increase in lipolysis or blood fatty acids until about the 2 hour mark.  Which means that a protocol based around the idea of elevating GH during the intense portion so that cardio done a few minutes after will burn off the fatty acids mobilized by the GH pulse is fundamentally incorrect from a physiological point of view.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.  Quite in fact, the premise is still fairly sound, this is just a place where I’m being picky about the mechanism.  As discussed in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 this type of training still has metabolic effects that can be conducive to fat loss (even acutely), they simply aren’t related to the GH pulse in any form or fashion.

Rather, increases in epinephrine/norepinhrine will have a much stronger acute effect on fat mobilization, and the glycogen depletion due to this type of training tends to enhance fat oxidation in skeletal muscle.    Quite in fact, the two advanced protocols in my Stubborn Fat Solution are at least superficially similar to this type of training, high-intensity work followed by low-intensity work.  But GH isn’t the mechanism behind it.

So bascially, what the person asking the question wrote in the second-half of his question.  The combination of high-intensity  followed by low-intensity work can still be effective for fat loss, it’s simply not for the mechanism stated.  The impact of GH on fat loss is simply too slow to be involved.  Rather, other mechanisms related to hormonal response, glycogen depletion, etc. are what are involved and responsible.  GH simply isn’t relevant to the process in that short of a term.

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.

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

.A Quick Note about Water Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Back to the Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summing Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 eveyr 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.