Bodyweight Regulation: Leptin Part 4
Basically, the body appears to be sensing ‘energy availability’ (defined as energy intake minus expenditure) and adjusting things based on that. I’d, of course, note that exercise still plays plenty of other crucial roles (including psychological, which I am getting back to slowly but surely) in terms of dieting and fat loss.
Bodyweight Regulation: Leptin Part 3
When it was originally discovered, leptin was originally conceived as an ‘anti-obesity’ hormone, it was thought that leptin should act to prevent weight gain. This led one researcher to quip (and I’m paraphrasing here) that “If leptin is meant to act as an anti-obesity hormone, it has to go down in history as the most ineffective hormone in the human body” or something roughly to that effect.
Bodyweight Regulation: Leptin Part 2
In the last post, I talked primarily about leptin (and a bit about insulin,and a very little bit about the other hormones) and its discovery and how it may be the (or at least one of the) long-sought after hormones involved in regulating bodyweight.
Bodyweight Regulation: Leptin Part 1
With early research (I’m talking the 1950′s) having established the existence of some type of setpoint (again, primarily in animal models), early researchers had to sort of guess what might be going on in terms of regulating body fat levels.
Set Points, Settling Points and Bodyweight Regulation Part 2
Recall from Part 1 that the set point idea basically says that the body will attempt to defend some body weight (or body fat) level (or perhaps range) by adjusting things such as metabolic rate, activity, hunger, etc. in response to changes in weight or fat.
Set points, Settling points, and Bodyweight Regulation Part 1
A long standing debate in the world of obesity research revolves around the idea that bodyweight (or perhaps body fat) is regulated. What does that mean exactly?
Dieting Psychology Versus Dieting Physiology
That is to say, psychology impacts on physiology and physiology impacts on psychology and the days of pretending the body and mind are separate non-interacting entities are long, long gone. Again, I’ll make the separation primarily for reasons of convenience, it will save me some needless complexity in the upcoming discussion. Just keep in mind that it’s an artificial and non-existent separation in reality.
All Diets Work: The Importance of Calories
In the article All Diets Work: A Qualification I made a quick qualification regarding my original statement that ‘all diets work’; today I want to expand a bit on something I mentioned on in that article. That something is the importance of calories.
All Diets Work: Qualification
Fundamentally, any diet that is restricted in calories will cause weight loss. Of course, dieters, ideally, shouldn’t only be concerned with the scale. The composition of what is lost is important too and, generally speaking, dieters want to lose fat not muscle (or just shift water around).
Stead State vs. Intervals: A Conclusion
Over the past month of articles, I’ve been talking about the current fascination with interval training (for either fat loss or performance) with the main focus being on what I see as a myopic ‘intervals are always superior’ mentality (usually based on poor arguments).
