For the body obsessed or even normal dieters, the holiday period from around October through to January can be a true minefield. Between the specific holidays of Halloween (mercifully passed), Thanksgiving and Christmas, along with endless goody baskets and parties, folks can run into problems maintaining the habits they strive to follow the rest of the year.

A lot of strategies exist to deal with this time, especially among the body obsessed, although I’d consider few of them particularly healthy from a mental or psychological standpoint.  One is to become a social pariah. Can’t control your food at parties? Simply skip all of them. While this might avoid food issues, it’s also a way to make your friends and co-workers think you’re an anti-social asshole.  Which is fine, I guess, if you are an anti-social asshole.  But it won’t do much for your inter-work relationships.

Another common one is to take the needed meal or food (e.g. turkey, broccoli, plain sweet potato) with you in a Tupperware bowl. I’ve heard of folks doing this at Thanksgiving dinner, usually so that they can sit and look down upon their family members with an air of superiority. “Oh, I can’t believe you’d eat that, that’s why you’re fat.” Newsflash folks, not only are we talking about a borderline eating disorder at this point (see also: orthorexia/Chris Shugart), that kind of insanity just makes your family uncomfortable. So don’t do it.  Better to stay home than be an asshole.

Of course, at the other extreme are the dis-inhibited eaters who just go completely crazy and eat everything in sight, gaining a considerable amount of weight and fat in the three months of holidays. It can happen and I’m not saying that it can’t. Of course, if you’re a bodybuilder or powerlifter, you can just say “I’m bulking” as you shovel down the third piece of cake but I’ll assume that you actually want to keep a lid on weight/fat gains during this time period. Balance please.

As always, being a middle of the road kind of guy that I am, I’m going to suggest some strategies that, while not quite as disturbed as taking broccoli with you to Thanksgiving, also doesn’t put you in the trap of gorging on fudge. In no real particular order of importance, here are 10 Tips to Deal with Holiday Weight Gain from getting out of hand over the holidays.

1. Make Better Bad Choices

I forget who I stole this idea from offhand but it’s nothing new. The simple fact, and I’ll come back to this in point 10, is that many people fall into the trap of “If I’m going to eat junk, I might as well jam as much of the worst stuff I can down my food hole.” That’s silly.

Instead, try to make better bad choices. Limit portions (you know that you don’t really NEED three pieces of cake to be satisfied). Pick the lower calorie or lower fat/high-carb stuff at the dessert table. People training hard can handle an influx of carbs acutely better than fat so pick that stuff.  Maybe have a little bit of two or three different desserts, just get a taste and move on. You get the idea.

2. Take a Lowered Fat/Calorie Dessert or Dish to the Party

Whether a work party or holiday dinner, it’s not uncommon for people to bring their own thing to add to the food table. So make something that you’ve de-fatted or lowered in calories, there are zillions of recipes out there. And, please, I’m not talking about black bean ‘cake’ that you think tastes like the real thing.

Find a happy medium between the high-sugar/high-fat stuff and clean eating. Most American desserts have about twice the sugar and butter that they usually need and, who knows, you might even convert someone into realizing that they can eat sweets without it having to be 1000 calories per piece.

3. Train with a Bit Higher Volume Prior to the Event

One of the best ways to increase the ‘sink’ for incoming calories is to deplete muscle glycogen. When you do that by using a higher volume (more sets, higher reps) of training, not only do you increase fat oxidation, you give incoming carbs somewhere to go for storage instead of being used for energy.

You can simply bump up your volume a bit in the days before a specific event where you know there will be junk. Even a heavy training session on the day of the party can be beneficial here. And, bonus, you’ll be pumped at the party.  Great for pulling that hot co-worker so you can both be really uncomfortable the next day at the water cooler.

Train in a nice hypertrophy zone (get about 40 reps per muscle group) and you’ll increase protein synthesis so that incoming calories will support growth. Training also tends to acutely blunt hunger so if you train right before the party, you’ll be less likely to overeat. Well, unless you’re a typically dis-inhibited eater who falls into the trap of “I trained, I deserve 10 pieces of fudge.”

4. Start with Lots of Lean Protein and Vegetables Before Hitting the Dessert Table

This one is for the body obsessed and dieters alike. Lean protein has the highest short-term satiating power (this means it keeps you full) and the high-bulk of vegetables helps to fill your stomach which also sends a fullness signal. I’ve yet to be at a holiday party that didn’t have a vegetable plate (limit the high-fat dip) or plate of cold cuts. Load up on that to get some fullness going before you hit the desserts.  You won’t be as hungry and, assuming you don’t like eating yourself sick, this alone will do damage control.

5. Have a High-Protein Snack with some Vegetables or Fruit about 30′ Beforehand

If you’re in a situation where Number 4 won’t work or won’t be available, have a small snack before the party or dinner. Some lean protein, veggies and fruit about 30 minutes will give you a feeling of fullness and help to limit overconsumption of ‘junk’ at the party.

6. Consider Intermittent Fasting on the Day of the Event

Intermittent Fasting (IF’ing) is a recent dietary approach that involves not eating for 14-18 hours per day and then either having an ‘eat period’ of roughly 4-6 hour or even a single meal. There’s some interesting research on it and I’ll discuss it at a later date on the site. But it’s one good way to deal with holiday parties.

Know that you’ve got a 7pm dinner party where there will be lots of yummy food? Try IF’ing (or only have small meals of lean protein and veggies) most of the day. Unless you go completely berserk, you’ll be unlikely to exceed your entirely daily caloric requirement in the one meal. If you can train beforehand, even better.

7. Consider a Short Mini-Diet in the Days Before the Event

Let’s say you have an event or two coming up on the weekend and you know that there will be lots of food and you may have control issues. Well, consider doing a short, possibly hardcore diet in the days before. My Rapid Fat Loss Handbook would be perfect, 4 days of it can actually reduce body fat by 1-4 pounds (depending on your size) and you can schedule the free meal and/or refeed for your events. Call it pro-active damage control.

8. Ok, I Was Actually Kidding in the Introduction About the Tupperware

Let’s face it, you know that nothing tastes as good as lean feels, you know how good discipline feels, you know that you’re better than all of those weak willed candy and dessert eaters; you read Chris Shugart’s insane ramblings and actually take his bullshit seriously.  You know the truth. You know you’re better than them and 50 years from now when you’re old and decrepit, you’ll know that it was worth it, sticking to your diet 365 days a year and never actually enjoying a moment of life.

So you go ahead and take your Tupperware with chicken breast, broccoli and sweet potato and eat it while everyone else around you actually gets some joy out of life and you feel miserable, alone, deprived and isolated.  Know deep down that you’re not only physically superior but also morally superior.

No, really, I’m seriously kidding about this, don’t do it. If you do, I hope someone pins you to the ground and force feeds you fudge until you throw up.  Just because you’re an asshole.

9. Stay Off the Damn Scale

No matter what happens, folks often see the scale spike up after a big party; this is especially true after Thanksgiving. The typical carb-depleted trainee is especially prone to this; the high-carb intake of your typical holiday event along with extra sodium both can jack up scale weight a bit. But you know deep down it’s not really fat. The simple fact is that, unless you go nuts, you can’t eat enough in a single meal to put on appreciable fat. It’s only water and it’ll come right back off in a few days.

But stay off the scale anyhow.

10. Don’t Be Your Own Worst Enemy

This goes back to what I alluded to in point 1, a lot of people fall into a dreadful trap over the holidays, figuring that if they’ve eaten a little bit of junk food, clearly they’ve blown it and might as well retire to the corner with the entire tray of fudge and eat themselves sick.

I’m going to quote from the foreword of my own A Guide to Flexible Dieting here:

Then the problem hits. Maybe it’s something small, a slight deviation or dalliance. There’s a bag
of cookies and you have one or you’re at the mini mart and just can’t resist a little something that’s not on your diet. Or maybe it’s something a little bit bigger, a party or special event comes up and you know you won’t be able to stick with your diet. Or, at the very extreme, maybe a vacation comes up, a few days out of town or even something longer, a week or two. What do you do?

 

Now, if you’re in the majority, here’s what happens: You eat the cookie and figure that you’ve blown your diet and might as well eat the entire bag. Clearly you were weak willed and pathetic for having that cookie, the guilt sets in and you might as well just start eating and eating and eating.

 

Or since the special event is going to blow your diet, you might as well eat as much as you can and give up, right? The diet is obviously blown by that single event so might as well chuck it all in the garbage.

 

Sound familiar? Yeah I thought it might. The above is amazingly prevalent and exceedingly destructive. Extremely rigid dieters fall into a trap where they let events such as the holidays become a problem because of their own psychology. They figure that one piece of dessert has ruined all of their hard efforts so they might as well eat ALL the dessert. Which is, of course, nonsense. Say that piece of dessert has a few hundred calories, or say 500 calories. In the context of a weekly plan that is calorie controlled with training, that’s nothing.

Unless the person lets it become something. They figure 500 calories is the end of the world and eat an additional 5000 calories. Instead of just taking it in stride and realizing that it’s not big deal, they make it a big deal with their own reaction.

Simply, don’t do that. Realize that there is only so much damage you can do in the short-term. Apply the other strategies in this article and realize, at the end of the day, what you did for one meal that week simply doesn’t matter if the rest of the week was fine. Not unless you make it.

And that’s that, 10 strategies I hope will help you to enjoy the holidays. Eat a piece of cake for me.

Two questions please:
1. Is this OK?
2. Is there anyway to eliminate the smell?

Answer: This is a fairly common report on very low-carbohydrate/ketogenic diet (defined, once again, as any diet containing less than 100 grams of carbohydrate per day), a report of a fairly strong ammonia smell in the sweat during exercise.  As I discuss in detail in my first book The Ketogenic Diet this ammonia is produced due to the ultimate breakdown of ATP to ADP to AMP and ammonia.  

This appears to occur more readily when muscle glycogen is depleted (as occurs with the combination of of a very low-carbohydrate intake along with training) and may be part of the increased protein requirements that have been known to occur with endurance training (this is discussed in detail in The Protein Book).  I would mention that it appears that this ‘protein breakdown’ is not actually coming from the breakdown of skeletal muscle itself; rather it’s from the breakdown of BCAA (branched-chain amino acids) within the free amino acid pool.

So is this ok?  So long as dietary protein intake is sufficient, I don’t see this as being any real problem.  The effect is slight in terms of the absolute amount of protein being broken down (in terms of grams) and so long as protein intake is sufficient, there shouldn’t be any detrimental effect other than the smell.

And how do you get rid of the smell?  Well, either wear strong deodorant or raise your carbohydrate intake above the ~100 g/day cutoff point so that you’re not in ketosis.  That’s really all I’ve got solution wise since it’s just one of those biochemical processes that is going to occur during long-duration workouts on a ketogenic diet.  All the best!

However, I’m significantly overweight (6′ 220; ~35% body fat by a cheap scale) which is obviously a contributor to the diastasis. You can see why the idea of rapid fat loss is attractive.  The thing is, for the first 6 weeks on the diastasis program, strength
training is out of the picture.  I’m doing my cardio on a VersaClimber, which at least works my legs fairly well.

Would the rapid fat loss protocol work OK under these conditions? It sounds as though to try it I would need to put in more time on the climber and skip the intervals for the duration.

Answer: The short answer is that, at your current body fat percentage, yes, the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook program can be done without weight training.  This is an issue that I discuss in the book as well as in the article Initial Body Fat and Body Composition Changes but, simply, the higher your initial body fat percentage, the less muscle you are likely to lose under any circumstances (and by extension the leaner you are the more muscle you tend to lose, although this depends on a host of variables).   The primary function of resistance training on any diet is to maintain muscle mass (as discussed in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 and Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 2) but when the risk of muscle mass loss is reduced, the importance of weight training is lessened.

An additional factor, also discussed in the book is that there is often an increase in lean body mass (and this represents both muscle mass and connective tissue) when people gain body fat.  From the standpoint of obtaining a ‘normal’ body weight (whatever ‘normal’ means here) losing that ‘extra’ LBM is thought to be beneficial or necessary by some obesity experts.

Finally, at least in relative beginners, even cardiovascular exercise (and the Versaclimber is one of the rare machines that has both an upper and lower body component) has some effect on sparing muscle mass loss.  So the inclusion of that (although with volumes cut back to match the recommendations in the book) should be sufficient until you abdominal issue has healed and you can begin resistance training.

Hope that helps and good luck!

Isn’t to some extent, exactly what The Biggest Loser folks do? Restrictive diet in the 1k-1.5K calorie range, and then extremely high volume, low-medium intensity cardio for hours and hours? Essentially burn 2K or so cals in 4-5 hours of various stupid cardio activities and be 2K or so under Sedentary maintenance calories with their diet? Trying to make a 3.5k+ deficit every day?

Now, I’ve written a bit about the Biggest Loser previously when I ran Biggest Loser Feedback; that piece was a segue into a brutally long series on Training the Obese Beginner.  However, I didn’t really address the question that Dan asked above which is why the Biggest Loser contestants certainly don’t seem to have problems losing massive amounts of weight and fat very quickly.  This is relevant as I’ve written previously about Why Big Caloric Deficits and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss.  So what’s going on?

Of Initial Body Fat Levels, Leptin, and Metabolic Slowdown

I’ve written previously about the impact of Initial Body Fat and Body Composition Changes; the precis on that article is that fatter individuals tend to lose more fat (and less lean body mass) while leaner individuals tend to lose less fat and more lean body mass.  However, initial body fat levels impact far more than just the proportion of fat and lean body mass lost.  And this, I believe, ties into one issue with the Biggest Loser issue.

As anybody who has read one of my books is aware, the hormone leptin is very much related to body fat levels (caloric intake also plays a role as does the type of body fat but that’s more detail than I want to cover here).  Simply, the more body fat you carry, the higher your leptin levels and vice versa.  So why is this important?

Seemingly irrelevantly, there has been a long-held argument in the research literature regarding the presence or absence of an ‘adaptive component’ to metabolic rate slowdown.  In short, when people lose weight, their metabolic rate goes down.  But sometimes it goes down more than you would predict based on the degree of fat/weight loss.  This increase in metabolic rate drop above and beyond what you’d expect is the adaptive component.

And the argument stems over the fact that while about half of the research studies find an adaptive component during weight loss, the other half does not.   Often this causes people to throw their hands up in despair and just throw science out the window but this isn’t the right approach.  Rather, you have to look at the details.

And when you look at the data set as a whole, and start to group the studies into the ones showing an adaptive component versus those that don’t a pattern starts to emerge: the studies of fatter individuals are the ones that don’t find an adaptive component while the ones in leaner (relatively speaking) folks do.  Basically, once you’re beyond a certain level of fatness, the body doesn’t fight back as hard.

In a related vein, one of the early leptin studies was looking at the impact of leptin levels on hunger during a diet.  They dieted folks and looked at how and whether or not hunger increased.  And what they found is part of the puzzle: so long as leptin was above a certain level (about 20-25 of whatever units leptin is measured in) there was no increase in hunger.  Below that level, hunger started to increase.

And the reason that all of this appears to be happening is that the leptin system in the brain can become saturated; that is, leptin levels above a certain point send no further signal.  And that saturation point seems to be around the 20-25 whatevers level.  And when you track that against body fat level, the level of fatness that equates to that leptin level is something like 20% body fat in men and around 30% in women (my memory may be failing me here, I haven’t looked at number in a while so don’t swear me to these numbers).

Basically so long as folks are above that body fat level, a lot of the metabolic perturbations that can occur in leaner folks just aren’t much of an issue.  I think that’s part 1 of why the Biggest Loser folks get away with a lot of what they get away with: some of the contestants are starting in the 40-50% body fat ranges.  Far far above where the leptin system saturates.

In contrast, most of the folks for whom I hear of problems with lots of activity and big deficits occurring is in leaner (again, relatively) folks.  Exactly the group you’d expect there to be a bigger problem.

.

The Sheer Volume of Activity

The second issue I think is playing a role in the Biggest Loser situation is the sheer volume of activity.  As Dan points out, many of the contestants are being put through literally hours of fairly high intensity (at least judging by what’s shown on the show itself) on a daily basis.  Four to five hours per day (who knows, maybe more) is not uncommon.  It’s stupid but not uncommon.

And I think that’s the second piece of this puzzle.  Judging by some of the data, there seems to be a limit to how much the body can adapt to even the largest and most extreme deficits.  For example, in the now classic Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study, the study which found the largest drop in metabolic rate ever measured, the total drop was only about 40% (of which 25% was due to weight loss and the other 15% was the adaptive component).  Certainly this is large.

However, it can still be overwhelmed by a sheer metric ton of activity such that even the metabolic problems caused by the combination of large deficits and high amounts of activity can be overcome.  However, again we’re working at the extremes.  Usually the folks reporting problems with the combination of lots of activity and big deficits are doing a couple of hours of hard exercise per day (or a lot of low intensity stuff).  That’s in addition to starting out leaner.

But that’s far different than the situation in the Biggest Loser contestants where, come hell or high water, they are doing hours and hours of pretty hard training every day without fail.  In this vein, some studies of military folks, often combining sleep deprivation, hours of forced activity, and pretty hard caloric restriction find that body fat levels drop rapidly to the lower limits of survival.  But again this is a situation far removed from the average exerciser doing a couple of hours activity per day.

.

The Exception that Proves the Rule?

Although this is somewhat unrelated to the two points above, I think it’s still interesting.  Clearly the Biggest Loser contestants are ‘getting away’ with something that would seem to be, on paper at least, bad.  Or at least in other less extreme populations (leaner folks doing far less activity) that causes problems.  But does that mean that the BL contestants are still doing things optimally?  That is, would a less extreme approach lead to even better results?

In the history of the Biggest Loser show, I can think of at least one or two situations where one of the contestants, usually for medical reasons, was limited to either very small amounts or very low intensity activities.  I’m thinking of one specific situation, might have been Biggest Loser Australia, where an older gentleman was put on medical restrictions.  It was either a cardiac issue or maybe an embolism.

And while everyone else on the show was just getting punished with these hours and hours of high-intensity activity and huge caloric restriction, he was limited to pretty low intensity stuff.  He also had one of the largest weight/fat losses on the show that year.  Might have won it all, I don’t recall.

In other situations, the folks who got sent home early, and who invariably did far less activity and/or used far less extreme deficits came back at the end of the show having far outstripped the contestants who were subjected to the abject stupidity of Bob and Jillian.  Those home-trained folks, the ones combining sane amounts of activity with larger caloric intakes got better results than the folks getting hammered at the extremes.

Does this prove anything?  Of course not.  But there just might be a lesson in there.

.

Summing Up

And I think those are the issues worth considering.  In extremely overfat folks doing just massive amounts of activity, not only do you have a situation where the metabolic perturbations aren’t as big of an issue (at least not until a certain degree of body fat loss has occurred) but you also have a situation where the sheer amount of activity can overcome any metabolic slowdown that does occur.

Contrast that to folks starting out leaner who aren’t doing 4-5 hours of hard exercise per day but rather 1-2 and trying to combine that with a big deficit.  Not only are their bodies more likely to undergo metabolic adaptation, the volume of activity just isn’t there to overcome it.  So things grind to a crawl.

Finally is the issue that even on the Biggest Loser itself, some of the more amazing transformation came from contestants who, for whatever reason (medical or being booted off the show and training at home) got better results than the folks still on the show who were being slammed with extreme amounts of activity and big caloric deficits.

Thanks for the comment Dan, you saved me having to think a feature article topic today.

Answer: I think you’re referring to the article I wrote on Why Big Caloric Deficits and and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss, although I may have addressed the issue in a Q&A as well (I can’t find it).  In any case, your question is one that comes up fairly frequently, especially in the context of the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook approach (where I am adamant that excessive activity/cardio can cause the diet to work far less well than expected).  People want to know what and how much of certain types of activities will or won’t cause problems.

The primary issue here is this: the body appears to be sensing what researchers are calling energy availability, basically energy in (from food) versus energy out (via energy expenditure as discussed in detail in Metabolic Rate Overview).  And if energy availability becomes too low, often bad things (in metabolic terms) happen.  For example, researcher Ann Louckes has shown that many of the issues that often occur in women in terms of hormones or menstrual cycle dysfunction occur at a threshold of energy availability (and aren’t actually related to body fat percentage as used to be thought).

In that sense, pretty much all activity can potentially be a problem if that activity results in an energy availability to the body that is too low.  Of course the activities you’re listing aren’t really big calorie burners, a walk with a stroller probably only burns a few hundred calories per hour.  But done for extended periods it will contribute.

A related issue, and one I focused on more in Why Big Caloric Deficits and and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss can be related to both intensity and volume.  In addition to hormonal issues, often the combination of big caloric deficits and excessive activity (either too much activity, too hard of activity, or the combination) can cause some real weirdness with water retention that masks fat loss.

I’d tend to say that this is more common with more formal ‘cardiovascular’ activities than just activities of daily living.  This is just due to the potential for increases in hormones like cortisol; this is especially an issue as the intensity of activity increases.  Clearly this isn’t an issue for a leisurely walk but it becomes more of one for more formal cardio activities.

This isn’t really stopping fat loss mind you, but it does drive people crazy because it makes it appear that the diet is not working.  I’d note that this isn’t an issue for everyone, certain physiologies (and especially psychologies) seem relatively more prone to problems with water retention than others.  This is why some people can get away with massive amounts of activity and not have issues and others can’t.

In any case, I hope that answers your question to at least some degree.

Basically, his method was to weigh himself everyday. If he was under his target weight, he’d eat two meals. If over, he’d just skip his last meal. He takes a protein shake w/ 100g whey and makes sure he hits at least 1g/lb of LBM everyday.  Will this work for recomposition?

Answer: While I have no clue what or who a wave_length is, here are my answers.  Short answer: no, this won’t work.

Long answer: This is stupid on so many levels I’m not sure where to start.

First and foremost, as I discussed in What Does Body Composition Mean? the whole point of using body composition methods is that body weight per se generally can’t tell you much of anything.  There are exceptions of course: in the extremely obese for example, most weight loss will be fat assuming a few criteria (basic weight training, protein) are met.   In that case, the scale is sufficient since weight losses will indicate fat losses.

But for lean and/or trained individuals, body weight changes alone tells you literally nothing because a change in weight might represent a change in any number of things: muscle, fat, water, glycogen, you took a big dump, you didn’t take a big dump, etc.  A change in weight doesn’t tell you anything meaningful.

I addressed this in some detail in Measuring Body Composition Part 1 and Measuring Body Composition Part 2.  In any case, this is problem one with this approach: scale weight is basically useless to track actual body composition changes under most circumstances.

Problem two is this: day-to-day changes in weight aren’t meaningful under the majority of circumstances.  Some examples to make this clear: if you’re on a low-sodium diet and you eat some pizza or something salty, your weight will spike the next morning.  But it’s all water weight.  Eat less vegetables on a given day and your weight will go down after you take a dump because you have less food residue in your colon.

Gorge on high-fiber, high-residue foods and your weight will go up because you have more waste moving through your colon.  Cut carbs a lot and you will drop water like a mad-man and weight will plummet.  Do a high-volume glycogen depleting workout and the same can happen.  Do the workout with low carbs and body-weight can drop by a number of kilos from water loss.  A coach/friend of mine uses this approach with athletes who need to make weight, he can drop 1-2.5 kg off of them in a matter of HOURS with the combination of lowered carbs and a hard glycogen-depleting workout.

All of these can acutely affect weight on a day to day basis but NONE of them are indicative of actual changes in muscle mass or fat mass (which happen on a longer time scale under most circumstance especially in the lean and/or trained).  Not to mention that the previous day’s adjustment is going to affect the next day’s scale weight measurement anyhow.  If you skip dinner on a day when your weight is up, you’re going to weigh less the next morning BECAUSE YOU SKIPPED DINNER and have less food in your gut.  But it’s got nothing to do with actual body composition changes.

The bottom line is this: adjusting your diet daily based on scale weight changes is simply an idiotic way to do anything; all you’ll do is spin your wheels by adjusting calories up and down and up and down in a pointless fashion based on a meaningless measurement that is being affected by the wheel spinning caloric adjustements days to day.  A far better approach is what I describe in Adjusting the Diet.  Do that instead of following the nonsense above.

Story Time: A Return to Salt Lake City

To introduce what I want to talk about I want to tell a little story.  As detailed in the No Regrets series, in 2005 or thereabouts, I moved to Salt Lake City to pursue a long-held dream of getting involved ice speed skating (that developed back in college when I was involved in inline racing).  Having had a bad early experience with the club coaches, I initially chose to pursue it alone.  However, within about a month of being in Utah, I met a man who would become my coach and mentor in the sport.

Now, upon meeting him, my first task was to interview him.  As you might imagine, based on my own nearly 2 decades in this field, I have some rather strongly held beliefs about training and coaching.  In brief, he had spent nearly three decades dissecting speed skating in the way I dissect everything else about training, diet, etc.  Two or so hours of interrogation later, I had hired him.

Now, due to that same nearly 2 decades experience, and having worked with athletes ranging from powerlifters and bodybuilders to endurance athletes, most days I happen to think that I sort of know what I’m talking about.  And when my coach laid out his basic training program, there were places that I didn’t necessarily agree with him 100%.  This was especially true in the weight room but there were other slight differences of opinion in terms of conditioning and such.

Despite this, for the first year of training with him, I did everything he said exactly as he told me to do it.  He was the expert and regardless of what I thought I knew, I had hired him for a reason.   In fact, I didn’t even know enough about ice speed skating at that point to have an opinion.  As they put it in martial arts training, I shut the hell up and swept dojo.

Because no matter what I thought I did or didn’t know about training in general or skating in specific, he was the expert and it would be unbelievably arrogant of me to question his 30 years experience with my years of non-skate specific experience.

Certainly this changed over the years, he respected my knowledge and we worked as a team and as I learned the nuances of the sport from him, we modified my overall training.  But that came later and only after I’d wrapped my head around the oddities of that particularly odd sport.   Initially, I simply did his program exactly as he laid it out; anything else would have been absurd.

So now, you’re wondering, what in the hell is my point?

And my point is this: in the beginning stages, regardless of my preconceived notions, I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know.  That is, I didn’t even have enough of a knowledge base in the specific sport to know what was right or wasn’t.  He was the expert, I was hiring him, that meant doing his program exactly as laid out.

Which is a very long introduction to the point of today’s article.

.

Do What’s in the Book

On the support forum, there are often quite a few standard answers that I give including ‘Search the main site’, ‘Search the forum’ and ‘Do what’s in the book’.  It’s that last one I want to address.  Because constantly, and not just with my programs, I see posts along the lines of:

I want to do Rapid Fat Loss, but I want to change these 4 things about it.
I want to do Starting Strength, but I want to substitute out half the exercises.
I want to do The Ultimate Diet 2.0 but modify these 6 things.
And many many others.

I think you get the idea.  And invariably the above is introduced by folks who comment “I’ve tried a bunch of other programs and never gotten any results.  And I want to try [insert time tested program] but change these [insert some number between 1-6] things.”  And they never seem to see the problem.  Which is themselves; they are the problem.

And this usually about the time I start to get a bit annoyed and tell them that they need to just do what’s in the book.  Because, invariably, when folks start messing with programs, especially those that are set up in a specific way for a specific reason, they end up doing far more harm than good.  Also, invariably the ideas that they have in terms of the modifications that they want to make are the worst possible ones.

The primary one that comes to mind is this: in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, one of the counter-intuitive suggestions I make is not to do excessive cardio, for reasons I discussed in Why Big Caloric Deficits and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss that combination tends to slow or stop fat loss, not help it.  And invariably people want to think they know better, do a bunch of cardio, and then come complain when ‘my program’ didn’t work.

Basically the way I look at it is this: if the people who buy my books, or pick some other canned (but time tested) program out of the ether already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t need my book.  Rather, they should go write their own book.  So, going from the assumption that they don’t know what they are doing, and haven’t gotten the results that they wanted, maybe it would be in their best interest to just do the program.

If nothing else, you need at least some experience with the plan as laid out before you start mucking around with it.  Do it exactly as written for a few cycles and then, and only then, start messing with it.  Because if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do as written, you can’t ever know what your changes are doing (good or bad).

That’s what I did when I hired my coach.  I just did his program.  Even though I didn’t agree with it, I shut up and did it.  Folks would do themselves a lot more good doing that when they select a time tested program (whether one of mine or someone else’s) rather than thinking they know better.  Just do the program, that’s my advice.

And to facilitate just doing the program, and to help everyone jump on that New Year’s bandwagon (yes, I know I’m a day early), I’m going to offer a discount on all of my products for the entire month of January.  Any order placed between the time this article goes up and January 31st will receive 10% off their entire order by entering the code ‘NEWYEARS’.  Please note that this can be combined with my standard discount of $10 off any two book order.  So buy two books and use the code and you get both discounts applied to your order.

So pick one of my programs and then actually Just Do the Program.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said something to the effect of this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Does the Training Determine the Diet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

When Does the Diet Determine the Training?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

Summing Up

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

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

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

By raising her calories gradually, her body fat (as measured by BIA) came down and her metabolic rate increased.  Now, without more details, it’s hard to really comment on this and the link to the case study is the total amount of information available.

But we’ve got an older (either post-menopausal or peri-menopausal) woman, undisclosed anti-depressant medication, self-reported food intake and a method of body fat measurement that is, at best, problematic (read Methods of Body Composition Measurement Part 2 for more details).  Odd things happen metabolically around menopause, some medications can cause issues, food reporting is notoriously inaccurate and BIA isn’t ideal to track changes.  Then again, the measured metabolic rate change is pretty interesting; something was going on.

That said, I’ve mentioned in previous articles that one oddity that I’ve seen (and personally experienced) over the years is one where the combination of very large caloric deficits and very large amounts of activity (especially higher-intensity activity) can cause problems for people either stalling or slowing fat loss.

Like my previous article on The LTDFLE, or Long-term Delayed Fat Loss Effect, this is one of those oddities that seems to crop up more often than you’d expect.  It’s also one where there’s not a ton of research but I will happily provide a good bit of speculation on what I think may be going on.

I’d also note that the combination of big caloric deficits and large amounts of activity clearly isn’t detrimental to everyone.  Some folks can get away with it but, for many, it tends to backfire more than anything else.

First, Some Background

Back in my early 20′s, I remember a very specific client I had.  She was a little bit, well, to be honest nuts.  She was older, I think she had gone through menopause but I wouldn’t swear to that.  In any case, she started working with me, determined to lose weight and immediately jumped into something like 2 hours of cardio per day and cut calories massively.  She claimed 600 calories per day and I won’t even try to describe her diet; it was insane (breakfast was supposedly one-half an egg and to this day I’m not entirely sure how you eat half an egg).

Now, I didn’t know much at that point but I had this general idea that too much activity and too few calories was a bad thing.  For weeks on end I entreated her to either cut her activity or raise her calories.  She adamantly refused; how could that possibly work?  I tried to point out that what she was doing wasn’t working either and she could hardly do worse by trying something different but that line of logic went nowhere.

In any event, at one point she went on a cruise or a vacation or something.  And what do you think she did?  Exercised less and ate more like everybody does on vacation.  And she came back something like 5 pounds lighter (some of which may very well have been The LTDFLE mind you).  “See, see.” I told her, “You ate more and exercised less and good things happened.”

And she immediately went back to a massive caloric deficit and over-exercising.  But that’s how it goes sometimes.

Later in my 20′s, mind you, I’d do the same thing during the now infamous Bodyopus experience (probably the singular experience that taught me what NOT to do during a fat loss diet).  Frustrated by stalled fat loss (I had dieted far too long at that point in the first place), I worked even harder, cutting calories further and adding more activity.  That coupled with some genuinely awful ‘carb-loads’ took fat loss to a standstill.

In addition to those case studies, this is a phenomenon that I’ve seen elsewhere including the support forum, I imagine readers run into it constantly: people (frequently but not always women) who try to combine excessive caloric deficits with massive amounts of activity (often with a lot of that activity being high-intensity activity) and nothing is happening.  And if you can get them to reduce activity (or just cut back the intensity to reasonable level) or increase calories, things invariably start to work better.

.

What’s Going On: Let’s Talk About Cortisol

Cortisol is one of those hormones that I imagine everyone reading this has heard about and about which a lot of misinformation exists.  Simply cortisol is a stress hormone, released by the body in response to nearly all kinds of stress.  In the fitness/bodybuilding world, cortisol has gotten an almost exclusively negative reputation (cortisol is ‘bad’ in the way that testosterone and thyroid are ‘good’) although this is simplistically incorrect.

Rather, whether cortisol does good things or bad things in the body depends on how it’s released.  Simply (and I’d simply, ha ha, refer folks to Robert Sapolsky’s amazing book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for a detailed look at this; I also talk about cortisol in The Stubborn Fat Solution), acute pulses of cortisol tend to do good things and be adaptive and chronic elevations in cortisol tend to be bad and be maladaptive.

For example, the morning cortisol pulse helps to promote fat mobilization.  In contrast, a chronic elevation of cortisol (especially in the face of high insulin levels) tend to promote visceral fat accumulation.  As a non-fitness related topic, acute pulses of cortisol tend to be good for memory (why we often remember stressful situations in such detail) while chronic elevations (as often seen in depression) make memory go down the toilet.  And there are endless other examples of where acute cortisol pulses are good and chronic elevations are bad; again see Sapolsky’s book for details.

In any case, dieting in general is a stress.  And of course training is a stress.  And the more extreme you do of each, the more of a stress occurs.  And I suspect that a lot of what is going on when folks try to combine excessive caloric deficits with massive amounts of activity is that cortisol just goes through the roof (there’s another issue I’ll come back to at the end that relates to this).  Simply, you get these massive chronic elevations in cortisol levels.

Tangentially, this is also one reason I suspect that various types of cyclical dieting help with some of this issue.  For at least brief periods, when calories are raised to maintenance or above, you break the diet/training induced elevations in cortisol.  This of course assumes that the person isn’t mentally stressed to the nines by raising calories like that but I’m getting ahead of myself.

.

So Why is This Bad?

As noted above, chronic elevations in cortisol can cause a lot of bad things to happen. One of them is simply water retention and I’ve mentioned in previous articles that water retention can mask fat loss, sometimes for extremely extended periods.  I talked about this in some detail in The LTDFLE and suspect that some of the ‘fat loss’ is actually just water loss when calories are raised and cortisol mediated water retention dissipates.  Reducing total training (volume, frequency, intensity or some combination) does the same thing.

But that’s probably not all of what’s going on.  Another effect of chronically elevated cortisol levels is leptin resistance in the brain.  I’m not going to talk about leptin endlessly here again, you can read the Bodyweight Regulation Series for more information.  When the normal leptin signal to the brain is blocked, a lot of things can go wrong metabolically and I suspect that this is part of the problem.

In this vein, although not necessarily related to cortisol per se, at least one study found that the addition of 6 hours per week of aerobic activity to a very low calorie diet (in this case a protein sparing modified fast) caused a larger decrement in metabolic rate than the diet alone.  The body appears to monitor caloric availability (simplistically caloric intake minus output) and if it gets too low, bad things can happen.

This is why I so strongly suggested AGAINST the inclusion of much cardio in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook; it causes more harm than good.  Invariably, the biggest source of failure on that plan is when people ignore my advice and try to do a bunch of cardio.  And fat loss stops.

In any case, there are several different plausible mechanisms by which the combination of excessive caloric deficits an large amounts of activity can cause problems.  Whether it’s simply cortisol related water retention, a drop in metabolic rate due to leptin resistance or something else, something is going on.  From a more practical standpoint, for a lot of people, the combination simply doesn’t work.  Mind you, some seem to get away with it but not all.

.

An Additional Variable

There is another variable that I have noticed over the years in looking at this issue.  As odd as it sounds, it has to do with personality.  In discussing this, for example, I’ve often noted that the people who seem to have the biggest issues with the whole lots of cardio/big caloric deficit tend to be a little bit ‘tightly wound’ (to put it politely).  A bit less politely they are stress cases.

You can almost ‘hear’ the stress in their typing.  Every post has lots of exclamation points and there is this undercurrent of “I MUST LOSE FAT NOW!!!!!!”  in their posts. When fat loss stalls for a day, they freak out and want to cut calories or go add another hour of cardio.  You can almost ‘see’ the tension in them as they sit hammering at the keyboard looking for solutions.

And this is an issue because these types of folks already over-secrete cortisol.  As a true oddity, there is the issue of amenorrhea (loss of menstrual cycle).  Typically it’s been thought to be related to body fat levels or caloric intake and this is a general cause.  But there is often a type of amenorrhea seen in women without any of the normal predisposing factors.  In this case, it’s all due to mental stress.

Basically, there is a subset of folks who are already high-level stress cases. They tend to be drawn to harder is better in the first place, tend to be resistant to change (like my client from my early 20′s) and their already high level of cortisol production is simply amplified by the combination of too much activity and too few calories.  And suggestions to raise calories and/or reduce activity are invariably met by resistance (again, like my client from ages ago).  What they really need is to just chill the hell out.

But invariably the approach that they are intuitively drawn to is the wrong one for them: moderate deficits and moderate activity always work better in those folks.  It’s getting them to do it that’s the hard part.

Tangentially, I suspect that the classic hardgainer is of a typical type but that’s another topic for another day.

.

Summing Up

So that’s that, a look at one of the oddities of fat loss, the situation where the combination of excessive caloric deficits and excessive amounts of activity seem to hurt rather than help fat loss, along with some gross speculation (and just enough research to make it sound like I know what I’m talking about) on what may be going on.

In a practical sense, of course, most of the background isn’t that relevant.  The simple facts for the majority of folks is this: you can either cut calories hard OR do large amounts of activity.  But you can’t do both.  Well you can do both, you just probably shouldn’t under most circumstances.