Dr. Jonny Bowden

Tag: weight loss

  • So who IS “The Biggest Loser”?

    So who IS “The Biggest Loser”?

    As I watched the first ever episode of “The Biggest Loser” back in 2004, I remember one question popping immediately into my head:

    Who’s going to turn out to be the real biggest loser here … the contestants?  Or the audience?

    Well, it’s 12 years later and the answer is clear:  It’s both.

    Let me explain.

    Weight loss as a spectator sport is a bad idea. It sets up expectations that are wholly divorced from reality. (“Man I only lost three pounds in two weeks and this dude on TV lost 17 pounds in one week!”) Not only is this “result” neither possible nor desirable in any realistic scenario, but it’s positively unhealthy and—as we shall soon see—utterly counterproductive.

    Weight loss as entertainment relies on techniques—the boot camp exercise, the hours of running, the starvation diets– that are abominably, horrifically, fundamentally stupid,  backed by not a shred of science, and are completely unsustainable. Yet watching people do this shit is entertaining enough to make you forget how dangerous it is. (Kind of like Donald Trump—but I digress.)

    So now, away from the teary, staged-for-television finales, and the “inspiring” stories of the winners, we have some actual numbers, some real science. Researchers followed “Biggest Loser” contestants for six years after their win , and for the first time, we have actual data on what happens to folks after losing a ton of weight through intensive dieting and exercise.

    It’s not a pretty picture.

    Thirteen of the fourteen contestants studied regained weight during the six years after the show. Four of them are heavier now than before they went on “The Biggest Loser”.

    But that’s not the bad part.

    The bad part is that nearly all of them have measurably slower metabolisms than they did six years earlier. That means they burn fewer calories than would be predicted for a person of their weight (more on that in a moment).

    Only one of the contestants—Erinn Egbert—weighs less today than six years ago. And she requires 552 fewer calories a day to maintain that weight than she would have required if she had never gained and lost all that weight in the first place.

    In other words, her metabolism slowed down.

    Yes, that dreaded “slow metabolism” that people constantly complain about to personal trainers (often incorrectly) is a real, measurable phenomenon. It’s something that people in the weight loss field have been observing clinically for a long time, but that the “Biggest Loser” study demonstrates for the first time with hard data:  A large amount of weight loss—especially when it’s done quickly– slows the metabolism. Folks require fewer calories to maintain their new, post TV-show, weight than someone who was that weight to begin with.

    Sorry. Don’t kill the messenger.

    Let’s use round, even numbers that in no way are accurate, but will make the point clearly. Let’s say you’re a healthy, never-overweight 150 pound person and you need 2000 calories to maintain that weight on a daily basis. At 2000 you won’t lose, you won’t gain, everything is hunky-dory.

    Now, over the years, you somehow balloon up to 325 and you go on the Biggest Loser and, miracle of miracles, you get your weight back down to your ideal, college weight of 150.

    So, you logically figure, you can go back to eating “normally”, which, for you, means that 2000 calorie a day diet that kept you where you wanted to be.

    Not so fast. To maintain that 150, you no longer need 2000 calories a day.

    You now need only 1500.

    And if you eat the 2000 that kept you perfectly healthy and fit pre-obesity, you will get fat again, even though you’re only eating what you used to eat before you became obese.

    For a real-life example, take Pastor Sean Algaier. His starting weight on  season 8 of the Biggest Loser was 444, and he dropped 155 pounds on the show. Now, six years later, he’s up to 450, 6 pounds higher than when he started. More importantly, he now needs a staggering 458 calories less to maintain that weight than he did before he went on the show.

    And yes, that’s supremely unfair. But there it is.

    A symphony of hormones—leptin, ghrelin, insulin, cortisol, adiponectin, and others—work fervently to get your body back to the weight it “thinks” you should be. That hormonal army is a powerful adversary—willpower doesn’t have a chance, at least not in the long run.

    Not only that, but new research on the microbiome shows clearly that the non-human microbes in your gut (which outnumber human cells by 3-10x) have a profound and dramatic effect on what happens to the calories you ingest.

    You know how there are folks who can eat anything and never gain an ounce, but you just look at Cherry Garcia and your hips grow an inch? The microbiome may be partly to blame.

    One class of microbes called firmicutes will stash practically every molecule of food you eat into the fat cells; another class of microbes called bacteroidetes has the opposite effect, burning up those calories almost as fast as you can ingest them.

    And we’re only now beginning to realize the effect of pesticides, environmental toxins, hormones, endocrine disrupters and… don’t get me started… GMO foods, on obesity.

    So the real victims in this story are the contestants—who lost a bunch of weight but gained it back with a slower metabolism to boot—and the audience—who learned a bunch of really stupid lessons about weight loss.

    Weight loss—despite what every health organization from the terrible American Dietetic Association to the American Medical Association tells us—is not– repeat NOT– just about exercise and diet. Obese people aren’t unmotivated, slovenly, gluttony people with no discipline. They suffer from a hugely complex metabolic dysregulation. Continuing to pretend that weight loss is as simple as cutting calories and going for a walk is the public health policy equivalent of medical malpractice.

    So does this mean we should all just throw up our hands and give up on weight loss? Hell, no.

    But an enemy better understood is an enemy more likely to be defeated. If obesity is our enemy, we better stop telling ourselves a bunch of lies about how easy weight loss is.

    And…

    … it wouldn’t hurt if we also thought a bit about why we want to lose weight in the first place.

    Most of us want to lose weight so we can be more:
    happy
    attractive
    healthy
    energetic
    sexy

    But if I’ve learned one thing in 25 years of doing this, it’s that we don’t really have to have the perfect body to have every one of the things on that list.

    See, I don’t believe everyone on earth can be thin.

    And most important, I don’t think it matters.

    Gorgeous, sexy, inspiring, energetic people come in every conceivable size. And while I don’t believe a six-pack is within reach of everyone, I do believe that everyone— at any weight— can be a better, more energetic, more sexy version of who they are now.

    And that while we’re figuring out this obesity thing—and believe me, we’re not even close to fully understanding it—it might be a good idea to work on having the things RIGHT NOW that you think you can only have “someday, once I’ve lost the weight”.

    Because there are a lot of benefits in cutting carbs, eating healthy fat, and exercising intelligently—and most of those benefits have very little to do with your waistline.

    And maybe if we stopped making it be “all about the weight”, and instead started looking at metrics like energy, sexuality, sleep, performance, attitude, optimism and well-being, we’d be a whole lot better off.

    No matter what size we happen to be.

  • Hormones and Weight Loss

    Hormones and Weight Loss

    The following is a guest article from my friend Glen Depke of Depke Wellness. Glen is a traditional naturopath, specializing in adrenal function.

     

    When we think about weight loss, we typically think about diet and exercise. Far too often the issue that is staring us back in the face is that the diet and exercise haven’t helped us achieve our weight loss goals.

    How can that be?

    After all, we’ve been told for years that if we are carrying too much weight and fat, we simply need to exercise more or eat less. Not so fast!

    Many of you reading this article have been watching your diet for years, and killing yourself at the gym, with what results? Perhaps minimal weight and fat loss if any.

    When I lived in the Chicago area, I used to work out at a specific gym and almost every time I went to the gym, regardless of the day, I saw this one particular young woman. We’ll call her Jane (obviously this was not her name.) Jane was actually going to college to become a dietician, so she was learning mainstream nutritional ideals, such as calories in/ calories out, cut back on sugar and eat more lean meat and less fat. Based on her studies she was also very aware that she had to burn more calories, so she simply had to work out harder. I would watch Jane every day go from the StairMaster, to the treadmill and sometimes back to the StairMaster for more. She would put a towel on the machines because she would simply be dripping with perspiration. Honestly, I have never seen somebody work so hard, yet never seem to budge with her weight and the same level of fat around her midsection and hips. Actually, it was disheartening to watch.

    So what was Jane’s problem?

    Was she not paying attention to her diet? Was she lazy with her workouts? Of course the answer to both of these questions was absolutely not!

    While I never had the pleasure of working with Jane to help her discover the core of her fat and weight loss challenges, I would bet the house that she had some significant hormonal imbalances.

    So that’s the simple answer, right? Hormone imbalance is the weight loss issue?

    Well, not so fast again. What hormones and from where? Are we talking about the thyroid and T3 and T4, are we talking about the ovaries and female hormones, perhaps for men the testes and testosterone, or maybe the pancreas and insulin. While all of these are of course playing a role, what we are really talking about here is adrenal function. Understand that your adrenal function will directly affect the pancreas, thyroid and ovaries. So while regulating thyroid hormones will assist your body’s metabolism and help with weight loss, the insulin produced in your pancreas will affect weight loss, and the female hormones produced in the ovaries will assist with weight loss. The common denominator affecting all of this is your adrenal function.

    And reason why is adrenal function the focal point when we have so many other glands in the endocrine system playing a role? The answer is simple. Your adrenal function will be a direct response to stress in your life, whether your stress is mental/emotional, inflammatory, infection, injury, chemical, environmental or even spiritual/vibrational. And who in our culture is not dealing with at least one if not many more of these stress levels? The adrenal gland function is most often the first to go, thus dragging down all the other glands and ultimately driving up your weight too!

    But that’s not all. Your adrenal function will actually play many roles in weight loss, beyond their affect on the above endocrine glands. Your adrenals will also affect your mucosal integrity and metabolism of fat and protein, thus hindering your body’s ability to regulate body weight and fat. The mucosal lining will impact digestion overall, as this lines the interior of your small intestines, which in turn will have a direct affect on your body’s ability to absorb and assimilate nutrients. In the end, this can leave you craving more food, and overweight. The poor metabolism of protein and fat will also have you sitting at the dinner table longer and more often because your body will be looking for more protein to convert to the amino acids, which are simply the building blocks of life, and more fat to fuel your body and enhance your brain function. After all, your brain is made up of fat and cholesterol. So please understand that poor adrenal function will simply lead to craving more food, more often.

    Another area of concern with weight loss as tied into your adrenal function is centered around inflammation. While most are under the impression that the weight you are carrying is fat, you might be surprised how much of your extra weight is actually due to inflammation. You may ask, what the heck does inflammation have to do with adrenal function? More than you may think! Actually, your adrenal function plays a direct role in both pro and anti-inflammatory states. So often I see clients that create inflammation as a part of a healthy immune response, only to be “stuck” in chronic inflammation because their adrenal function is so depleted that they cannot produce the needed cortisone, which is your body’s natural anti-inflammatory hormone.

    We can then take this one step further. The chronic inflammatory state leads to an increase in fat cell production, which leads to insulin resistance, which then creates insulin surges, and lastly creates more inflammation. Yikes! Right?

    This is an ugly cycle that so many people get into. But why can’t they get out? You guessed it, poor adrenal function.

    Beyond this, your adrenal function will also play a role in blood sugar balance, cellular energy (who doesn’t want more energy these days?), your quality of sleep and neural connectivity, all of which play a role in weight loss.

    So if you want to reach our fat and weight loss goals, do NOT forget your adrenal function. If you do, you are likely going to miss the weight loss boat. I wish I could have told Jane this years ago!

    If you question your adrenal function, you are welcome to take the Depke Wellness complimentary adrenal stress profile assessment.

     

    Glen Depke has made his Adrenal Assessment available to the  Jonny Bowden community for free. You can access it by clicking here.

     

  • Video – Bad Weight Loss Advice

    Video – Bad Weight Loss Advice

    Want to know the single biggest lie told by every diet book author on the planet? (Hint: it’s probably not what you think.)

    Watch this short video and I’ll explain!

     

  • Delicious Ways to Enjoy Vegetable Juicing for Weight Loss

    Delicious Ways to Enjoy Vegetable Juicing for Weight Loss

    The following is from Jonny Bowden’s New You In 22.

    Delicious Ways to Enjoy Vegetable Juicing for Weight Loss

     

    Many heath experts, myself included,  are advocates of vegetable juicing for weight loss, and will easily recommend vegetable juices as part of an effective weight loss plan.

    The thing is most people are not fond of vegetables. If you are one of these people, here are delicious ways to enjoy vegetable juices and benefit from their weight loss abilities.

    Gourmet Green Drink

    Contrary to common belief, green drinks are actually delicious. You can choose from any or a combination of the following for your green drink recipe:

    • Wheatgrass
    • Barley grass
    • Magma
    • Broccoli
    • Spinach
    • Kale
    • Parsley
    • Other green leafy vegetables

    Drinking your greens make vegetable consumption more palatable for fussy eaters or for those who are not fond of veggies. This is one delicious way to meet your recommended vegetable servings for weight loss.

    Some of the remarkable benefits you can get from your green drink are the following:

    1. Excellent source of nutrients that will allow you to stay healthy while dropping the pounds fast.
    2. Purifies your blood and removes the toxins from your body. Toxic substances interfere with the functions of your body systems resulting in poor health condition including excessive weight.
    3. Promotes overall health condition, and increases your energy levels to do all the activities you plan to do throughout the day.

    Smoothie Your Greens

    One of the more effective ways to lose weight healthily is to drink protein shakes for breakfast. You can create your own drink by juicing your green vegetables. For variety, you can create succulent green smoothies that will give you the following benefits:

    • Your body receives plant-based protein. In many ways, plant-based protein is healthier than animal-based protein. Veggies contain chlorophyll rich in alkaline.This will restore the good balance between alkaline-acid in your body, considering that the American diet today is highly acidic. The good balance of acid-alkaline is essential in weight management.
    • Vegetables are an excellent source of fiber. WebMD, in fact, recommends the consumption of fiber-rich food for weight loss. Health experts say that dietary fiber has that power to fill your stomach without the risks of storing unnecessary fats in the body.In a study that monitors the big weight losers, most of these individuals are habitual breakfast eaters with fiber-rich food as part of their staple meals.
    • Juicing your veggies makes it easier for your body to absorb the nutrients. As soon as the smoothie touches your mouth, digestion and abruption of nutrients begin.

    Vegetable juicing for weight loss will turn green veggies into an appetizing beverage that adults and kids will both love. According to Dr. Jonny Bowden, juicing is at its best when you use green vegetables as ingredients.

    Easy Recipes

    Here are three vegetable juice recipes that are easy to prepare and will deliver weight loss benefits to your body:

    Raw Chlorophyll Juice – Just combine all the ingredients below into your juicer:

    • Spinach
      Dandelion greens
      Parsley

    You may want to add the following fruits for flavor: apples and grapes.

    Easy Green Juice – extract the juice from the following ingredients:

    • 3 stalks of celery
    • About 10 pieces of lettuce leaves
    • 1 ½ green apple

    Kale Cool Aid Juice – juice the following ingredients and combine the extract together. Serve with ice.

    • About 5 pieces of kale leaves
    • 2 large cucumbers
    • 1 piece green apple
    • 1 piece of lemon, peeled
    • Thumb-sized ginger, peeled
    • 2 ribs of celery

    Tips for Juicing Your Veggies

    There is no doubt to the health power of vegetables. Using veggies as your ingredients to create weight loss juices can be as refreshing and as delicious as natural fruit juices by following these tips:

    1. Add apples or carrots to your recipes, as they are natural sweeteners. These two are also able to break the bitter taste of some vegetables.
    2. Prefer to juice fresh vegetables (also fruits), and as much as possible choose organic. Fresh organic veggies are superior in nutritional and health value.
    3. Your choice of juicer also matters. If you wish to maximize the weight loss and other health benefits of juicing your veggies, choose a good quality juicer.
    4. Mix and match your veggies, and include some fruits to your recipes. The trick is to create varied delicious-tasting recipes. The web has all the resources you need to help you.

    Start to benefit from your vegetable juice right now and enjoy the healthy results!

     

  • Mediterranean Diet…The Best Diet Ever? Not So Fast!

    Mediterranean Diet…The Best Diet Ever? Not So Fast!

    Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study which, according to the fawning mainstream press, proved “conclusively” that the best diet in the world was the Mediterranean diet, that it protected everyone from heart disease and stroke, and that everyone in the world should be on it.

    Except the study showed no such thing.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of the concept of Mediterranean eating, even though I’ve never seen anyone definitively define what “The Mediterranean Diet” actually is. (Check the definitions: most are squishy and vague with phrases like “higher in vegetables” or “lower in dairy”.) We do know that in all styles of Mediterranean eating there is way less sugar. And there’s lots of olive oil, nuts and other good stuff.

    We also know that Mediterranean folks eat their big meal of the day in the middle of afternoon. And that they take naps. And that the men talk about their feelings. (A lot.) And they get lots of sun. And that all of these things have a great deal of impact, though that’s not what gets mentioned when the press talks about “The Mediterranean Diet”.

    But I digress.

    Back to the study. What the researchers actually did was create three groups of people. Group one ate what is generally thought of as a Mediterranean-type diet, but supplemented with lots of extra-virgin olive oil. Group two ate the same diet, but supplemented with lots of nuts. And group three ate the standard, American, low-fat high-carb diet that the diet dictocrats have been pushing on us for decades. The one recommended by such groups as the American Heart Association and the god-awful moribund American Dietetic Association (or whatever it is they’re calling themselves these days to try to reinvent themselves as contemporary. Good luck with that.)

    Here’s what the results showed with laser-sharp clarity: The low-fat diet is a complete and utter failure.

    Both “Mediterranean diet” groups did well on measures of cardiovascular health, and there wasn’t much difference between the two groups. But the low-fat group did horribly. In fact, they did so badly that in the middle of the study, the researchers intervened, and tried to give the low-fat group more instruction and attention to bring them up to speed. Didn’t matter. They bombed anyway.

    Side note that was missed in all the media reporting: The researchers clearly state that they believe the excellent results achieved by both “Mediterranean” groups were largely driven by the supplemental nuts and the supplemental extra-virgin olive oil. Not necessarily the “diet” itself.

    So what have we learned, class?

    We’ve learned that the American, low-fat diet stinks. And that nuts and olive oil are extremely healthy foods.

    As far as the Mediterranean diet being the “best” diet ever, that’s still up for grabs. This study certainly didn’t show that, as it didn’t pit the “Mediterranean diet” against any other diet but the low-fat one; there was no group doing a “paleo” diet, or a “high-protein” diet or a “raw foods” diet.

    And we still don’t have a good definition of the Mediterranean diet. (As my mentor, the great Robert Crayhon once quipped, “People think the “Mediterranean Diet” means adding a bunch of olive oil to your corn flakes”.) And we still don’t know which aspects of the so-called Mediterranean lifestyle are the ones that really produce the results. Is it the olive oil? The nuts? The vegetables? The low level of red meat? The fact that they eat slowly and in the middle of the day? Maybe it’s all of those things, maybe it’s just some of them… this study certainly didn’t address that question, so we can’t say for sure.

    What we can say is this: No diet, ever, in the history of the world, has been higher in sugar and processed carbohydrate junk foods than the one that most people in America consume on a daily basis.

    And no diet is better designed to produce the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease we are currently witnessing.

    My own personal opinion is you could design a dozen diet studies showing the superiority of a dozen different diets (from Atkins to Ornish to Zone) as long as you compare each of them to the crap we’re eating now.

    With a bar that low, almost any diet is going to look like a superstar.

  • Diet + Exercise = Weight Loss? Not So Fast!

    Diet + Exercise = Weight Loss? Not So Fast!

    A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine claims those battle-tested ways to lose weight usually work and allow people to meet their goals.

    You know the drill: eat less, watch your calories, exercise more, and reduce your fat intake… that sort of thing.

    Researchers here gathered information from over 4,000 obese individuals based on the 2001-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. One year prior to completing this survey, these adults had a body mass index (BMI) of at least 30.

    Many participants reportedly did lose weight in that year’s time. More specifically, about 40% lost 5% or their weight or more, and another 20% lost 10% or more.

    Impressive, huh?

    Researchers tidily summarized their results. “Those who exercised more and ate less fat were significantly more likely to lose weight,” they said. Structured programs – weight loss meetings, for instance – also helped some people meet their goals.

    I find these kinds of studies frustrating. For one, surveys aren’t the most accurate or consistent way to learn how people lose weight.  They usually provide very generalized, quantitative, sometimes-biased or confusing questions.

    I could go on, but here’s the deal. Some people lose weight just fine cutting their calories and stepping up gym time.

    These are the same people who brag they can eat anything they want in moderation and burn off that pancake and mimosa breakfast at the gym.

    Their underlying message is that if you can’t do those things, you must be eating too much or not exercising enough or just being lazy.

    You may be one of those people who tried reduced-calorie or low-fat diets on countless programs and spent hours on useless exercise equipment to burn fat.

    Hopefully, you eventually conclude it’s not your fault you keep regaining weight or can’t lose it to begin with. At some point you probably decide these are lousy ways to lose weight.

    Listen, I’m a huge fan of exercise for its zillion benefits, but unfortunately weight loss is probably not going to be one of those benefits.

    As experts like Gary Taubes point out, people who exercise often eat more because, well, exercise makes you hungry.

    People who exercise for weight loss are also more likely to overestimate how many calories they burn. You see these people at the gym huffing away on an elliptical machine while watching The View and keeping one eye on the calorie counter.

    So you’ve done an hour on the treadmill, which promises you’ve burned 500 calories, and you’re famished. You feel like you deserve a reward for your hard work. And there’s a Starbucks around the corner.

    I’ll let you predict that outcome.

    Exercise and counting calories do matter to a degree, but they’re hardly the whole story for fat loss.

    When you eat what nature intended – lean protein, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds – your body recognizes these foods. Your hormones send your body the right messages.

    Your hormone CCK, for instance, tells your brain when it’s full. You also don’t raise your blood sugar, which means you keep steady insulin levels so your body uses, not stores, fat.

    Combine these foods with the right kind of exercise (High Intensity Interval Training which takes minutes, not hours, a day)…

     

    … and you’ll burn fat, maintain muscle, and boost your metabolism.

    You don’t need to count anything or spend hours exercising. You’re getting optimal nutrients. And you’re never hungry. It’s a win-win for weight loss.

  • Want to Burn More Fat? Spend More Time in Bed!

    Want to Burn More Fat? Spend More Time in Bed!

    A study in the journal Sleep found that getting adequate sleep could help you overcome a genetic predisposition towards being overweight.

    The study looked at 1,088 pairs of twins. Researchers learned those who slept less than seven hours a night had a higher body mass index (BMI), one measure of being overweight or obese.

    What’s more, genes influenced about 70% of that high BMI. (The other 30%, in case you were wondering, involved environment.)

    On the other hand, for twins who got more than nine hours’ sleep, genes contributed only about 32% to higher BMI.

    In other words, sleep determined how much genes influenced these twins being overweight.

    “The results suggest that shorter sleep provides a more permissive environment for the expression of obesity related genes,” said lead researcher Dr. Nathaniel Watson. “Or it may be that extended sleep is protective by suppressing expression of obesity genes.”

    If you keep up with science, you’ll know genetics are the next big thing for fat loss and ultimate health. You can now take tests, for instance, that look at your genetic DNA profile to determine your ideal diet, nutrient needs, and exercise regimen.

    But I think this study proves a valuable point beyond genetics: sleep matters for fat loss.

    Indeed, too many people coast by on five hours’ sleep and caffeinate themselves the next morning with a big vat of Starbucks. But as you’ll see, that’s a recipe for terrible health and gaining fat.

    That’s because too little sleep knocks your hormones out of whack. Let’s take a look at five hormones that sleep impacts:

    1. Ghrelin – this is your hunger hormone: it tells your brain to eat. When you get a crappy night’s sleep, you crank out more ghrelin. Couple that with lack of judgment from being so tired, and you can see why you’re mindlessly devouring a Starbucks Danish that you didn’t even want.
    2. Leptin – leptin tells you to stop eating. In other words, it has the opposite effect of ghrelin. When you don’t sleep well, you become more leptin resistant so your brain doesn’t get the message as effectively.
    3. Insulin – insulin is your ultimate fat-storing hormone. Chronically elevated insulin makes fat burning almost impossible. Guess what? A few nights of terrible sleep can make your cells insulin resistant, leading to higher insulin levels.
    4. Human growth hormone (GH) – this “youth” hormone prevents aging, builds muscle, and helps fat burning. Lack of sleep means you make less GH.
    5. Cortisol – cortisol is your stress hormone. Couple a crappy night’s sleep with rush-hour traffic and an irate boss, and you’ve got a recipe for chronically elevated cortisol levels.

    Get what I’m saying now about poor sleep adversely affecting your hormones? It all adds up to a dismal picture for fat burning and feeling your best.

    I know getting a good night’s sleep is easier said than done. I want to leave you with three tips to prepare for a good night’s sleep so it happens more often:

    1. Cut off the stimulation and power down. About an hour before your bedtime, turn off your laptop, TV, and other distractions. Take a hot bath, drink some chamomile tea, meditate, or do whatever works for you to unwind.
    2. Stop eating about three hours before bed. Those late-night Haagen-Dazs freezer raids aren’t doing anything for sleep or your waistline. Close the kitchen after dinner for better sleep and fat burning.
    3. Try a natural sleep aid. Everyone needs a little help falling asleep sometimes. If you suffer jet lag or are trying to adjust to a new time zone, melatonin could be your answer to fall and stay asleep.
  • Tip 281: Increase Fat Burning During Exercise

    Tip 281: Increase Fat Burning During Exercise

    The following is a guest article by my good friend and colleague, Charles Poliquin.

    Tip 281: Increase Fat Burning During Exercise with Strategic Nutrition to Get Lean

    by Charles Poliquin

    Increase your rate of fat burning while strength training with optimal pre-workout nutrition to get lean. By eating the right nutrients before working out, you can increase work capacity, performance, and speed recovery from intense exercise. Many misconceptions exist about the best way to burn the most fat during exercise but a review in the British Journal of Nutrition provides a guide to get leaner and stronger.

    Proven strategies to boost fat burning with pre-workout nutrition include the following:

    1. Eat low-glycemic carbs with protein before training
    2. Avoid fructose and milk
    3. Load l-carnitine in the muscles
    4. Drink caffeinated green tea
    5. Take fish oil

    Pre-workout nutrition may influence the rate of fat burning when exercising by as much as 66 percent. Burning fat rather than carbohydrates during strength training is best because it can lead to the best body composition. If you’re doing endurance or high-intensity interval training, burning fat will increase your performance and time to exhaustion because increasing the use of fat for fuel spares glycogen (fuel source from carbohydrates).

    Eat low-glycemic carbs with protein at least an hour before training to maximize fat burning. Low-glycemic carbs include green vegetables, some fruits, and grains that have a glycemic-lowering nutrient added to them like rye bread with fenugreek. Low-glycemic carbs will produce a slow, gradual increase in blood sugar to support energy levels and fat burning because it will reduce pre-exercise muscle glycogen concentration and increase the availability of fat use for fuel. Basically, by eating this way, you’re telling your body what to burn and when to burn it to produce the most energy.

    Fructose is a sugar that is found in fruit and is everywhere in processed foods in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. Avoid it pre-workout. Limit fructose in your diet because it blunts fat burning but it also lowers the glycemic response of carbohydrates—just not in a favorable way for overall metabolism. Eating fructose actually inhibits fat burning during and after exercise to a greater extent than eating high-glycemic carbs with glucose like bread or cereal. Not only does fructose stop the use of fat for energy, it makes the cells more resistant to insulin, putting you at risk for diabetes. It also leads to higher blood lactate concentrations during exercise. Greater lactate production will impede performance and is counterproductive.

    Along with avoiding fructose, stay away from milk proteins because they are particularly “insulinotropic,” which means that they will cause persistently high insulin levels. This puts you at greater risk of insulin resistance and diabetes.

    On the flipside, regularly taking fish oil in your pre-workout meal will improve fat burning and insulin sensitivity. Fish oil improves gene activity that tells the body to use fat for energy within minutes of ingesting it. Fish oil also increases blood flow to fat tissue, which is considered a limiting factor in the use of fat for fuel during exercise. Basically, fish oil is a highly liquid and permeable fat and it helps everything to move more fluidly in the body (like a well-oiled machine).

    Together with the amino acid composite l-carnitine, fish oil increases the transport of fats into the cells to be used for energy in the body. By raising the level of muscle carnitine, you make the body more efficient at processing fuel so that it can burn more fat, spare glycogen, clear lactate and bump up anabolic hormone response. Ideally, you want to take carnitine regularly to “load” it into the muscles, but you can also take it with your pre-workout meal for best results.

    Carnitine availability is reduced when muscle glycogen content is elevated, making it all the more important to ensure you are moderating your glycemic load before training. Carnitine will boost performance for strength athletes, but it’s especially effective at increasing performance during endurance exercise. One study indicated a 55 percent reduction in muscle glycogen use after carnitine loading for six month. The glycogen sparing effect of burning more fat means endurance athletes will be able to “tap into” these glycogen stores at the later stages of a race or training run.

    Green tea with caffeine is an awesome addition to any athlete’s diet because the antioxidant content in the tea combined with the caffeine can increase fat burning by up to 15 percent. It has also been shown to elevate fat burning for 24 hours after ingestion. Caffeinated coffee can also boost performance and fat burning, but recent evidence suggests green tea may be better. Include caffeine from both sources for best results.

    References:

    Gonzalez, J., Stevenson, E. New Perspectives on Nutritional Interventions to Augment Lipid Utilization during Exercise. British Journal of Nutrition. 2012. 107, 339-349.

    Fernandez, J., Da Silva-Grigolettos, M. A Dose of Fructose Induces Oxidative Stress During Endurance and Strength Exercise. Journal of Sports Science. 2009. 27(12), 1323-1334.

    Charles Poliquin, M.Sc., is one of the top strength and conditioning experts in the world. He’s trained olympic medalists in 12 different sports and has written many books and over 500 columns. His site,  http://www.strengthsensei.com/charles-poliquin/, is a terrific resource for real, science-based information about physical fitness.

  • It’s Not Sexy… But It Works for Weight Loss!

    It’s Not Sexy… But It Works for Weight Loss!

    Mention fiber, and you might immediately recall those gigantic tubs of Metamucil your grandma stocked up on at warehouse stores. In other words: not sexy.

    I don’t need to remind you of fiber’s many benefits, which include reducing inflammation, triglycerides, and cholesterol. But I really get people’s attention when I say fiber is the number-one supplement for weight loss.

    Fiber helps you burn fat in several way:

    • delays stomach emptying
    • curbs ghrelin (your hunger hormone that tells your brain to eat)
    • buffers carbs so your blood sugar doesn’t spike so dramatically

    In short: nobody likes to talk about fiber, but it works.

    A decades-long study just published in the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition and Public Health concludes that our paltry-fiber modern diet contributes to diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

    No kidding.

    “Consuming adequate quantities of dietary fiber can lead to improvements in gastrointestinal health, and reduction in susceptibility to diseases such as diverticular disease, heart disease, colon cancer, and diabetes,” researchers concluded. “Increased consumption has also been associated with increased satiety and weight loss.”

    The study also argued that supplements are an easy way to get more fiber in your diet.

    Here’s a super-quick fiber lesson. There are two forms of dietary fiber: soluble and insoluble.

    • Soluble fiber forms a gel-like substance that, among its many duties, binds cholesterol and balances your blood sugar.
    • Insoluble fiber, on the other hand, absorbs water and keeps things moving along.

    In other words, you benefit from both types.

    The average American gets a sad 5 – 14 grams of fiber a day. Our lean, athletic Paleo ancestors put us to shame by getting a whopping 60 grams or more!

    I want you to eat as many fiber-rich foods you can every day. Nuts and seeds, leafy green vegetables, legumes, berries and other fruits like avocados are loaded with fiber.

    Now, granted, you can get enough fiber from food, but it takes a lot of planning and math. And even when you do load up on high-fiber foods, it’s not always easy to get 50 – 60 grams a day. Let’s face it: few of us are getting anywhere near that amount in our diet.

    There are lots of really great fiber supplements on the market. But PaleoFiber from Designs for Health is the Rolls Royce of them all.

    Each serving of PaleoFiber contains 8 grams of fiber from 12 sources including fruits, vegetables, roots, seeds, and tree extracts like apple pectin and prune fiber. The formulation mimics the diet our Paleo ancestors thrived on and the one you’re most likely to thrive on too.

    What’s more, PaleoFiber packs prebiotics from inulin, probiotics, and a powerful antioxidant punch. You’re not going to find those benefits in your drugstore run-of-the-mill fiber powder.

    I love to toss a scoop of PaleoFiber mixes in my morning protein smoothie to get a powerful fiber wallop. Unlike other fiber powders, PaleoFiber comes in a pleasant-tasting original or delicious berry that makes meeting your fiber quota quick and pleasant.

    So eat as many varieties of fibrous vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds as you can. And then ratchet it up a few notches with PaleoFiber to get therapeutic amounts of this nutrient that can benefit your health in numerous ways and help you get the lean, sexy body you want.

  • Green Tea Extract and Weight Loss

    Green Tea Extract and Weight Loss

    A fascinating new study adds to the growing body of literature showing that green tea can impact weight gain and be an important tool in the fight against obesity.

    In the current study, published in Obesity, obese mice that were fed a weight-gaining diet put on significantly less weight when they were supplemented with green tea extract.

    The mice were allowed to eat as much as they wanted anytime they wanted. Their diet consisted of unlimited amounts of the mice equivalent of McDonald’s, with everything on the menu supersized.

    In addition to this Vegas buffet of mice chow, one group of mice were fed EGCG (epigallocatechin-3-gallate), the polyphenol in green tea that has been found to have the most profound effect on metabolism and weight. The other group was not.

    The group getting the EGCG supplement gained weight at about 45% the rate of the non-supplemented mice.

    “There’s no difference in the amount of food the mice are eating”, Lambert told Science Daily. “The mice are essentially eating a milkshake, except one group is eating a milkshake with green tea”.

    Lambert estimates that a person would need to drink ten cups of green tea each day to match the amount of EGCG used in the study. But remember, most estimates of how much EGCG are in one cup of brewed tea range from 5-40 mg, so at that rate, sure, ten cups would give you anywhere from 50 to 400 mg of EGCG.

    One single capsule of EGCG (green tea extract (EGCG) provides 250 mg, the amount you’d get from 10 cups providing 25 mg each, or approximately 6 cups providing 40 each.

    The researchers in this study also noted that fecal fat excretion was 30% higher in the EGCG mice. The belief is that EGCG somehow reduces production in the pancreas of the fat-digesting enzyme lipase so that some of the fat you eat isn’t actually digested. (This is exactly how the weight loss pill ALLI works).

    “There seems to be two prongs to this”, said Lambert. “First, EGCG reduces the ability to absorb fat and, second, it enhances the ability to use fat”.

    The excellent thing about drinking green tea and taking green tea supplements is that even if they don’t help you lose weight—and there’s no reason they shouldn’t!—they do a million other good things for you.

    Green tea (and green tea extract, EGCG) have been shown to have preventive effects in obesity, insulin resistance, and hypertension. Green tea polyphenols like EGCG have been shown to have a role in cancer prevention. And green tea itself contains a nice relaxing compound called Theanine which is actually used as a drug in Japan for anxiety and which is available as a supplement.

    There aren’t too many supplements you can take that can positively impact your weight and have as “side effects” anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-insulin resistance, anti-hypertension and anti-cancer activity!