During the winter months I wrote up some research I had done into different carbohydrate sources, highlighting the need to select your sources carefully.   Part of this was a discussion of fructose, so I decided that it was time I pulled together some recent articles about fructose to help you make your own decision about the benefits and problems of fructose.

• Suspend your complaints for a moment.  Fructose is the same structure sugar as is found in high fructose corn syrup (‘HFCS’), although whether the levels of fructose found in a bowl of fresh fruit is as bad as in a standard “helping” of HFCS in a processed meal is not something I know the exact numbers for.  Having got that up front, NephroPal has outlined some studies which connected excessive fructose consumption with scarring of the kidneys.   I would imagine that excessive consumption is easier to do with HFCS, but that doesn’t mean that those of us with a taste for fresh fruit shouldn’t also be wary.
• Dr Briffa has written up a study looking at the possible cause of fatty liver in those where alcohol is not the obvious cause (a condition known as NASH – non-alcoholic steatohepatitis).  It seems that, in mice at least (yes, I know we are not mice), extreme fructose intake may be a cause (though not necessarily the only cause) of this condition.  Another strike against fructose.
• NephroPal finds and highlights some interesting news and studies, and the link for this point sends you to all sorts of interesting information.  Top of the list though was a study which has concluded that people who took in 74grams of fructose a day or more (about 2.5 sugary drinks, thanks to HFCS) had a 28% risk of increased blood pressure and a 77% higher risk of extreme high blood pressure.  Nutrition Horizon also wrote about this.
• Seasonality is, of course, a key element of the fructose debate.  In the wild it is pretty difficult to lay your hands on fructose outside the summer months so, if you subscribe to the primal theories, we potentially shouldn’t be consuming fructose in the winter months.  Mark Sisson has done a well-written and thorough article about this issue of fructose and seasonality which I recommend anyone reads.

So it seems from this that we need to be pretty careful about how much fructose we ingest.  Stripping out processed foods with their HFCS is a good start but it seems that there is also a strong argument to avoid fruits outside season while making the most of the summer berry opportunities.  So, on that note, I’m going to delve in the fridge a refill my bowl of strawberries which has run low while I’ve pulled this together.

Let me know if you see anything else of interest in relation to fructose – I’d love to know if there are some positives for fructose!

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: low carb diets
2. Blog-watch: pregnancy diet and exercise
3. Blog-watch: saturated fat

Misconception number one is that carbs are a necessity.  Methuslah tried a 7 day virtually zero carb experiment a while ago and coped absolutely fine with no noticeable problems.

Misconception number two is that I have no carbs in my diet.  I challenge people by asking them what they think vegetables are.  In response I generally get a blank look.  People seem to think that vegetables and fruit are a macronutrient category of their own and don’t contain carbs.

These common misconceptions concern me so I’ve pulled together some links to articles and posts from the last few months covering the issues related to carbohydrates.

Should we be making more effort to avoid carbs for the sake of our health?

• A study published in March noted that junk food creates compulsive eating, sharing a similar biomechanism with cocaine and heroin.  NephroPal has taken this a step further, looking at the content of junk food and specifically the addictiveness of sugars, starches, grains and other high carb foods.  I’ve written about experiencing this addictiveness last Christmas when I tested being non-Paleo.
• Fats were given a reprieve when a meta-analysis in March comparing the food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease suggested that processed carbohydrates rather than saturated fat may be the problem.  Another study of the diets of over 35,000 Italians was comparable to this, showing a potential link between high glycemic load foods and the risk of coronary heart disease.  This news even made it into the general press (both CNN and the BBC as a start), though how long people will remember it before they go back to their low-fat whole-grain diets is difficult to predict.  If the science in the articles is a bit too confusing, try the more readable explanation by Helen Kollias on Precision Nutrition.
• I’ve written about fermented and sprouted grains and foods before so I was pleased to see a detailed article on Whole Health Source which went through the detail relating to grain fibres and heart problems, especially pre-existing heart problems.  It’s well worth a read, even for those Paleo buffs who wouldn’t be seen going anywhere near a grain, since this is crucial understanding for conversing with those who don’t understand the Paleo diet.
• For a couple of really helpful summaries about what carbs do to the body (and what happens when you strip them out), try the articles on the Heart Scan Blog about “Slash Carbs … What happens?” and “Glucophobia: The Novel”.  They are really good quick-read summaries.  If you want a real-life experience of what a low-carb lifestyle can do to your body, Dr Davis also posted up the story of one of his patients.
• If you are wondering about doing resistance training and a low carb diet as a woman, an experiment done on overweight women suggested that a low carb ketogenic diet in combination with resistance training reduced body fat without significantly changing lean body mass.  This suggests that if you are overweight then a low carb ketogenic diet combined with resistance training would work well.  However, this doesn’t help any of us who are not overweight when we start out.
• I’ve done a good job of being rude about grains and I flagged up at the beginning that fruit and veg are also carbs.  However, there are some excellent benefits to eating your fruit as well.  Brian St Pierre wrote about fruit outperforming vegetables in helping to prevent macular degeneration.  This is an important lesson for all of us.  Even those of us on a low carb diet still need to consider the benefits of some of the carbs we are avoiding and consume them in appropriate quantities to obtain some of these benefits.
• For women it seems that there may also be a connection between carbs and infertility.  Or rather, Dr Michael Fox has found that putting women who are having fertility problems onto a low-carb diet often gives fantastic results.
• Finally, if people still don’t believe that reducing carbs would be a good idea then try suggesting they jump on the celebrity bandwagon.  After all, Ellen DeGeneres claims that her secret to staying in tip-top shape is due to a low-carb, grain-free, sugar-free diet.  Does this sound like a familiar diet to anyone?
• For those who are now convinced that you should at least give up the grains to reduce the high GI carbs, Mark Sisson has provided some tips on giving up grains.  He’s also posted up some thoughts on “low carb flu”, a name for that brain fogginess that accompanies the first few days or weeks hwile you convert to a lower carb lifestyle.

I hope you’ve found these links interesting and useful.  Are you someone who thrives on a low carb diet or are you more carb tolerant than I am?

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: low-carbohydrate diets
2. Low carbohydrate diets
3. Lessons learned: low-carb diet for endurance exercise

This is the eighth part in a series about weight loss including diet, exercise, measuring your success and keeping the weight off when you stop.

This is the final post of three about exercise for weight loss, wrapping up a couple of final thoughts, ideas and studies before we move onto some of the more practical aspects of weight loss. 

Program choices

As a go-to resource for Figure Athlete advice (and subsequently female-specific weight loss advice) I often have a browse on Terry Stokes’s blog.  Terry is a Figure Athlete coach and as such has plenty of experience of what works and what doesn’t work.

Terry wrote part one of a series about Figure Competitor Training on how changes to training can improve fat loss.  In particular, one of the biggest errors he sees people make is using machines for most of their workout or doing most of their exercises in a seated position. 

What he is getting at here is that you want to use as many muscles as possible for each exercise.  From Terry’s perspective, more muscle involvement equals higher calorie burn which in turn equals greater fat loss.  Machines or seated variations tend to take a lot of the stabilising muscles out of the equation and therefore reduce the amount of effort needed by the body.

Exercise re-educating the body to metabolise food differently

Exercise alone is not a great tool for weigh loss.  It is certainly a necessary part of the equation but it isn’t going to get you to your goals on its own.  However, Brian St. Pierre did a brilliant article about how exercise can help change your metabolism so that, once you lose the weight you can maintain your lower weight better.

The study that he refers to took some rats that had an inbred propensity to gain weight.  They were made as rotund as possible through a high-fat diet and no exercise.  The rats were then put on a calorie-controlled low-fat diet so that they shed about 14% of the fat before being put on a weight maintenance diet.

At the same time as going onto the weight maintenance diet the rats were divided into two test groups.  One group were made to run on a treadmill for 30 minutes each day (the things we force rats to do in the name of science…) while the other half remained sedentary.  After eight weeks of this, and after maintaining the weight of the rats at this lower body weight for the eight weeks, the rats were let off the leash.  They were allowed to eat as much food as they liked.

Those rats who had been sedentary quickly regained the lost weight and added more.  Meanwhile the rats who had spent eight weeks doing enforced exercise metabolised their food differently.  They started burning the fat immediately after meals (the sedentary rats were burning the carbohydrates and sending the fat in the high-fat diets off to storage cells).  The exercised rats also ate less, suggesting that their bodies were able to send messages that they were full sooner, perhaps because they were able to utilise the fat in their food better.

Not only is this a good example of fat-adaption at work, but it is also a test case in how exercise, when used alongside diet, can be an effective tool in weight management as well as weight loss.

This is an excellent place for me to stop today as this study brings us into the topic of weight maintenance, how to measure your success and the other related wrap up issues on weight loss.  I’ll save those for a final post next week.  In the meantime, if there is anything that you would like me to cover but which seems to be missing from this series please let me know.

Related posts:

1. Weight loss progress and ongoing success
2. Weight loss
3. Resistance training for weight loss

Exercise on the holiday

The holiday involved a significant amount of cycling each day.  The truth is that we were actually only moving the pedals for 4-6 hours over the course of 8 or 9 hours each day – this was no Tour de France – but with a bike that is heavier than my usual racing bike and additionally weighed down with touring gear this was a significant effort output for my legs.

Cycle touring - no Tour de France but still requiring muscle adaptations

By the end of the fourth day I was beginning to get a sore knee caused by knots that were starting to form in my right quad muscles.  I made a concerted effort to massage the knots by hand overnight which reduced the soreness for the fifth and final day.  A follow up rolling effort once we’d returned to the car (where we’d stowed a foam roller) and made it to our hotel for the night made a real difference to the knots and by the next morning a brief rolling session showed that the knots were mostly cleared.

The subsequent problems

After returning home I spent the whole afternoon standing up doing the washing, ironing and tidying up.  We’re doing a bit of a rearrangement of the house so I spent several hours standing in front of a bookcase reorganising books – I’m a bit obsessive about having books organised into alphabetical order.  As the afternoon wore on my legs started to stiffen up.  I thought it was the knots coming back but a rolling session didn’t reveal any knots.

A special treat post-holiday pizza and cheesecake evening (yes, I know – distinctly not paleo) followed and I went to bed stuffed full, satisfied but a little sore.

The next morning I woke up and I can only describe the way my legs felt as “puffy”.  It was similar to the sensation that you get when you suffer from a severe insect bite or sprain where the swelling is so extreme that it starts to be constrained by the skin.  It’s incredibly uncomfortable.  I was still able to walk but the legs of my shorts were tight on my thighs and kneeling down or standing still for too long created additional discomfort.

Call me excessive but it almost felt like my skin was going to split to release the pressure at any moment.

What I think happened

I hadn’t done much cycling before the tour, having only managed to fit in one or two rides of two hours each in the weekends leading up to the holiday.  The sudden increase of cycling effort was therefore a shock to my quads.  They may have been strong from the squatting I’ve been doing, but squatting and cycling are very different activities.

To handle the cycling it is likely that my muscles rapidly developed additional capillaries to enable my body to supply my muscles with blood to help wash toxins away from them and to provide the muscles with plenty of oxygen.

By spending the afternoon after we got home standing up rather than moving about the blood will have filled up all the capillaries, thanks to gravity, and the additional blood would have swollen up the capillaries.  The intake of significant amounts of carbs that evening would then have contributed to the swelling in my legs by replenishing glycogen stores in my muscles.  So my legs really were swollen.  The combination of additional blood and filled glycogen stores will have made my legs larger than ever before and my skin wasn’t prepared for the increased girth.

That’s my theory and if it’s right then it’s a real warning about the possible side effects of significant changes to exercise patterns and subsequent rapid changes to muscle composition.  Do you think I’ve hit on the right reason for the puffy sensation in my legs?

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: regular physical assessment
2. Lessons learned: office survival
3. Lessons learned: the benefits of being fat-adapted

This is the fourth part in a series about weight loss including diet, exercise, measuring your success and keeping the weight off when you stop.

So far we’ve looked at the principles of calorie deficits and some specific foods that should ideally be avoided in order to improve weight loss, however I saved you all from an excessively long post by leaving out carbohydrates which I’m covering today.

I’m not going to go into all of the fine details about low carb diets for weight loss – it’s a topic covered in plenty of detail elsewhere on the internet.  However, it is still important enough to deserve a post of its own.

Where are you starting from?

It’s important to establish where people are starting from when we talk about going “low carb” for weight loss.  Do they eat a standard western diet or do they already follow a form of paleo diet?

People who are not on a paleo diet and who have a significant intake of sugar, cereals, rice, potatoes, pasta, bread and oats, are likely to see great results just by stripping these carbs out of their diet.  The secret is in the total calories in these foods.

The starchy “Neolithic” foods are all very high calorie in relation to the amount you can easily eat in a single sitting, especially sugar.  If you tried to eat the same amount of calories in paleo foods, especially the lean foods like chicken, you would be full before you ever finished the plateful.

Cutting out rice, pasta and potatoes is an easy start

Example – reducing calories by removing “carbs”

Imagine you are eating a chicken sandwich: two slices of multigrain bread; half a chicken breast; lettuce; tomato; and a spoonful of mayonnaise.  This could analyse out as follows:

Calories: 381
Fat: 11.2g
Carbohydrate: 36.4g
Protein: 34.5g

Now imagine that we replace the bread with the other half of the chicken breast (which is a larger meal).  The analysis would still be:

Calories: 361
Fat: 11.8g
Carbohydrate: 6.7g
Protein: 54.6g

That’s only a reduction of 20 calories, so not huge, but the meal would feel much bigger.  Similarly, a “portion” of spaghetti with your Bolognese could be 150 calories but you would probably feel as full with plenty of vegetables instead of spaghetti.  150 calories is a lot of veg!

Those extra 20 calories here and 50 calories there add up over the course of a day.  Also, foods like sugar, pasta and bread often create insulin spikes and hunger pangs so you may snack more often too.

However, it is possible to have a high carb paleo diet (fruits, nuts, seeds and dried fruit in particular are high carb) so don’t get drawn into believing that a paleo diet equates to a low carb diet – it is perfectly possible to retain and even gain weight while following a paleo diet if you have the stomach to eat enough.

How carbs create fat

Carbs are used by the body as an energy source in the form of glycogen or glucose.  The muscles store and utilise glycogen as energy and the liver acts as a store of glucose for release into the blood stream when it is needed to restore blood sugar levels and glycogen stores if no fresh carbs are provided after the body uses some of the existing supply.

Unfortunately there is a limit to how much the body can store in the muscles and liver.  Any surplus carbs are therefore converted to fat so that they can be easily stored for later use.  A simple and understandable explanation of this was provided in a recent article by Dr Clay. 

Problems from a western diet

What many people don’t realise is that the body can also use fat as fuel for certain types of exercise.  In particular steady state cardio and NEPA (non-exercise physical activity, like walking up the stairs).  Common sense therefore suggests that if we can make our bodies do this we should see some weight loss.

The problem with our western diet is that we have usually had such high levels of carbs as we have developed (and these carbs have been present in every meal, so stores are replenished as quickly as they are depleted) that most people find that their bodies don’t understand how to do this.  There is an element of (re-)education needed for the body. 

Teaching the body that it is capable of burning fat as a fuel source can be unpleasant for the first few weeks and often leaves the person who is doing it feeling lethargic and tired, but it pays dividends in the long run.  Not only are there weight loss benefits from being able to quickly strip fat by restricting dietary carbohydrate and fat intake (thus leaving the body with no choice but to burn the fat it is already carrying), but the requirement for fuel when out exercising is reduced.  As a great example, Chris and I can now get by each eating 150g nuts and 100g dark chocolate during a strenuous 8 hour walk, without having any breakfast first, and we are still going well at the other end of the day.

The right level of carbs

What is the right level of carbs for a successful low carb diet?

I have no idea – it is very much a case of experimentation.  If you are starting from a western diet with lots of starchy carbs then the calorie reduction from removing these foods may be enough and, on analysis, you may find that the carb intake is still quite high.

Personally I’ve found that I am so well adapted to burning fat for fuel that if I want to lose weight I now get best results cutting my net carbs (total carbs less fibre) to below 30g per day.  This may seem incredibly low, but the key is in the netting element.  I can fill out my diet with foods like broccoli and cabbage and this doesn’t add much to calorie or net carb figures.  The reality total carbs, before netting, is probably closer to about 70g and this excludes my pre-workout fuel.

That’s it for this week.  Next week, I’ll finish off the diet issues with a return to intermittent fasting.  If there is anything in particular you would like me to explore as I work through this series, please let me know and I’ll build it into my research.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: low-carbohydrate diets
2. Calorie deficit
3. Blog-watch: low carb diets

Fat adaption - giving me the power to keep going for longer

What is fat adaption?

Popular belief is that the human body requires carbohydrates as fuel.  This is true, since carbohydrates provide glycogen that is stored and used by the muscles as energy.  However, it is often overlooked that the body can also burn fat as a fuel source.

I believe that this is most often overlooked because of our carbohydrate-rich western diet that we have from early childhood.  Pasta, rice, bread and potatoes are the staple bulking foods for every meal.  Since the body finds it easier to use glycogen than fat as energy and carbohydrates have always been readily available with stores replenished every time we eat, our bodies have learned to use carbs to fuel everything, from extreme efforts in the gym through to a gentle stroll in the park.

You don't need starchy carbs for energy

In reality, the glycogen in our muscles should be preserved for extreme and sudden efforts.  As fat can be so easily stored in large quantities by the body and a little fat goes a long way as an energy source, fat is a much more efficient fuel to use for general day-to-day and endurance activities.

How to convert

Never fear.  It’s not too late to teach your body how to use fat instead of carbohydrates as a fuel source.  But you do need to be prepared for a little bit of hell while you get there.

The best way to get there is to completely remove the carbohydrates from your life until your body finally resorts to using fat instead.  I don’t mean taking out the breads and pastas and fruit (which is very high carb), but really taking out everything.  Carrots and other root vegetables join the ranks of banned foods for a few weeks.

I used Fitday to establish the total carbs and the fibre content of all the food I was eating.  My body still required some fibre to process waste and keep my gut lining clean, so I worked with a net carbs figure of total carbs less total fibre and kept this under 30g each day.  The vegetables that I found I could eat plenty of were mostly restricted to broccoli, spinach, cabbage and brussel sprouts.  It’s important to ensure you aren’t restricting your calories.  Instead pile plenty of fat sources onto your plate that don’t add too much in the way of carbs –fatty meats and eggs for example.

After a couple of weeks, by which time my glycogen stores were completely depleted, I started to take in some additional carbs directly before a workout.  This taught my body that for extreme efforts it was allowed to use glycogen stores.  However, it was a couple of months before I started to allow the odd higher carb item back into my diet when I wasn’t working out.

The unpleasant bit

For a few weeks I felt dreadful.  My body was convinced that it had nothing to use for energy.  I felt tired, limp and irritable. 

You can probably imagine that in a household where both of us were undergoing this conversion at the same time there were plenty of arguments and cross words exchanged since we both felt lousy.  But in calmer moments we were able to rationalise why we were behaving like that.

By staying strong and focussed through this barrier and by supporting each other as best we could we soon started to feel better.  After only a couple of weeks in fact. 

Speeding up fat adaption

We actually made the process faster but probably more unpleasant by going straight into it, from a fuller carb diet to a completely stripped down diet, without slowly removing the carbs from each meal.  We also continued to exercise as hard as possible. 

Gym workouts were a bit of a flop – you need to accept that your performance in the gym is unlikely to improve and may well decline a little while your body adapts.  This is not the time to be aiming for those elusive lifting goals.  If you’re prepared to put those goals on hold for a month or two, the longer-term benefits of fat adaption make it worth every moment of delay.

Our main exercise, aside from the dreadful gym workouts, was a gentle two hour fasted bike ride every week.  The fasted ride combined the carb-depleted state with a fast to force our bodies to learn that it was capable of using body fat to undertake gentle endurance activities.  I believe that it is these fasted rides that made the difference to the speed with which we adapted to burn fat.

The freedom of a fat adapted life

Exactly a year ago, in May 2009, Chris and I went on a cycle tour in Yorkshire.  The difference between the cycle tour in Yorkshire and our trip last week in Scotland was that a year ago neither of us were fat adapted.

We faced similar problems with shops being closed early and food being unavailable in Yorkshire, but we were also unable to carry sufficient food in carbohydrate form to power our cycling output.  Calories in didn’t just equal calories out – we required those calories to be almost entirely carbohydrate in order to get the benefits.

I still have strong and unpleasant memories of trying to cycle along the flat in Yorkshire (the rare moments when we weren’t battling the massive hills), maintaining a measly 5mph in comparison to a normal touring speed of 10-12mph and crying with the effort.  I felt horrendous.

As a comparison, in Scotland last week we were able to carry a 300g bag of mixed nuts and a 100g bar of 85% cocoa chocolate to share each day, plus some additional protein bars for Chris.  Amazingly, half a bag of nuts and half a bar of chocolate provided us with about 1,300 base calories which, while still a deficit for a full day of cycling, gave us sufficient carbohydrates to replenish any glycogen that had been used for bigger efforts (eg. big hills) and some fat to start to replace any body fat stores that had been used.

The luxury of knowing we can now go anywhere and keep going, even without food, has made out outdoor trips better.  We don’t need to worry about where the next village will be or whether it has a shop.  We can go where we like, when we like and not worry about whether we’ll find food that day.

I hope I’ve convinced a few people to convert to burning fat as their main fuel source.  I consider it to be one of the best things I ever did.  Perhaps you will too.

Related posts:

1. Low carbohydrate diets
2. Lessons learned: low-carb diet for endurance exercise
3. Lessons learned: the benefits of variety

This is the third part in a series about weight loss including diet, exercise, measuring your success and keeping the weight off when you stop.

Last week we looked at the idea of creating a calorie deficit, the laws of thermodynamics and touched on the idea that, despite the simple physics, we still need to consider what combination of foods make up our calorie intake.

Today I will cover some of the specific foods that people are advised to avoid to help in their war against the flab.

Martin Berkhan – a starting point

Martin Berkhan, a guru of fat loss who has learned the art of maintaining an incredibly low body fat percentage all year round (and still indulging in his favourite treats every so often), wrote a superb guest post for Fitness Black Book highlighting the foods (and meals) that he recommends you skip to get the best fat loss benefits.  In particular he focuses his black-list comments on:

• nuts;
• protein bars;
• dried fruit;
• liquid foods (including shakes, fruit juices, milks and yoghurt); and
• breakfast. 

Nuts, seeds and dried fruit - significant calories in a small snack

I was fascinated to read that he is an advocate of using daily morning fasting to raise his metabolism.  When I am on a fat loss diet I find breakfast to be the most awkward and ridiculous meal of the day, clocking in with two egg whites and a bit of broccoli.  When I don’t get round to it at the weekend I find that I cope fine, so perhaps the answer is a bit of minor daily fasting. 

I’ll go into a bit more detail on fasting in another post since it is a whole approach to weight loss in itself.

Liquid foods

I find that liquid foods are particularly important to avoid.  With liquids it is incredibly easy to put a huge number of calories in during a short space of time.  Often people don’t realise how many calories there are in their shake, smoothie or soup and your body is unlikely to register that it has had a proper meal. 

There are diets that utilise a liquid food program, such as the Velocity Diet, and people have seen excellent results on these.  However, it is important to note that in those diets the total calorific intake is carefully measured before people begin and it is difficult to believe that those on fluid-based diets don’t suffer from hunger. 

I tried to use high calorie shakes to get round a tough cycle tour holiday once because I couldn’t guarantee food availability and wanted to ensure good nutrient intake.  I was getting in more than enough calories each day but still suffered horribly from hunger cramps because my body wasn’t convinced that it was being fed enough.

The point I return to all the time is the fact that those on weight gain diets rely heavily on shakes, smoothies, soups and stews.  I’ve also seen the best improvements to my weight loss diets since I swapped most of my protein sources to very dense chicken that requires plenty of chewing.  There’s an element of placebo effect here.  Plenty of chewing to convince your body that its been fed so that it doesn’t torment you with messages that it is hungry.

The Monster Shake - more than 600 calories in a glass

High-fructose corn syrup – an evil ingredient

Adding some extra foodstuffs to the list above from Martin, I can’t recommend strongly enough avoiding high-fructose corn syrup.  I’m a strong believer that it should be avoided at any time, but a study carried out in rats and reported by both Dr Briffa and on Lifehacker showed that the rats fed the high-fructose corn syrup diet instead of a sucrose (table sugar) solution gained significantly more weight.  This was despite the high-fructose corn syrup group consuming fewer calories than the sucrose solution group. 

If you want to pick holes in this, I’ll accept that the study wasn’t done on humans.  The problem with doing diet or exercise studies on humans is that it is difficult for researchers to ensure 100% compliance with the set diet or exercise plan.  Unless you allocated one researcher to each test subject and the researcher cooked the meals and spent every waking hour with the test subject, they just can’t just fully control the study.  It has also been noted that when you put individuals on a perceived “healthy” diet they tend to adjust other areas of their life, becoming more active and doing other things that are perceived as healthy.  You would also need to take into account the placebo effect.

So instead researchers use rats or mice for controlled studies for their initial results.  They might later roll out something similar to humans but the fall-back results will be those gathered from the studies on the rats and mice.

Carbohydrates

Low carbohydrate diets for weight loss is such a big topic that I’m not even going to start trying to cover it here.  Instead I’ll treat it to a short post of its own next week! 

If there is anything in particular you would like me to explore as I work through this series, please let me know and I’ll build it into my research.

Related posts:

1. Calorie deficit
2. Top ten tips for writing a weight loss diet
3. Exercise for weight loss – other considerations

I’m also going to be following a short weight loss cycle to keep him company.  Since we do our workouts together and also eat similar meals it is convenient for me to follow a weight loss regime with chris.  However, I won’t be taking it as hard as I did in January.  I’ll hopefully be doing just enough to get rid of the pub dinners from our walking trip in the Lakes last week!

While I will be following the diet I used to such great effect in January, we have had to start from scratch with Chris’s diet, learning from mistakes we made last autumn and lessons learned from my January cycle.

I thought it might help to outline the top ten things I do when I am writing a new weight loss diet for someone.

1. Decide on your goals: Before starting, decide what you want to achieve.  Do you want to reach a particular body fat percentage?  Have you decided how many kilos you want to drop of inches you want to lose from your waist/hips/bottom etc?  How long will your weight loss period last?  If you aren’t sure how much you want to lose or how long you have then you will struggle to pitch your diet at the right level.
   

   Have a goal you can measure and work towards

2. Sign up for a free FitDay account: FitDay is a superb tool and a free account gives you all the functionality you need to get a good grasp on what you are eating and what you are planning to eat.  I don’t tend to take much notice of the RDA analysis of vitamins and minerals but it provides a useful guideline for how many calories you are eating and how they divide up between fat, protein and carbohydrate.
3. Analyse what you eat at the moment: Put a standard menu into FitDay.  Chris and I are probably a bit unusual, since we eat the same meals every week and menus for each day are almost identical.  It makes doing this step very easy for us.  However, if your daily menu varies widely in content or you are starting from a completely blank canvas then take the time to put a few days (or even a full week) of data into FitDay.  This information will give you a good idea of where your problems calories are at the moment.
4.  Invest the time to record custom foods for brands that you eat regularly: FitDay is good, but the fat/protein/carbohydrate breakdown and total calories of some of their foods certainly don’t resemble the brands I buy.  If you eat a particular brand of cottage cheese or yoghurt every day, or you intend to put it into your new diet, then there is no substitute for creating a custom food.  For us this became time worth investing when we found that swapping to custom foods reduced the overall calories in Chris’s diet by about 500 calories.  At the time, I was trying to put additional calories into his diet!
5. Do some careful research: Nothing beats detailed research and the internet is loaded with good advice to help you get started if you are prepared to invest the time.  The initial information you want to find out is the total calories you should be aiming for (depending on your current weight or lean body mass and what your goals are).  Next up, you want to get comfortable with how you want that to split out between carbohydrate, protein and fat.  Finally, you may find there are other things that matter to you – for me acid-base balance and keeping net carbohydrates low are of most importance.  It would be impossible for me to list here all the sources that I recommend, but for starters, I suggest articles on Testosterone Nation (although women should take some of the numbers with a pinch of salt, they are often targeted at male physiques) and the archives at Figure Athlete for women-specific advice (in particular the articles by Chad Waterbury).  In addition, there is plenty of really good diet and nutrition advice to be found from Robb Wolf, Brian St Pierre and John Berardi.  And of course, I’ve done quite a few detailed posts over the last few months on weight loss and fat loss diets.
6. Create a replica of your current diet in FitDay to amend (using the “view my recent foods” function): I’ve tried building diets from scratch and it is incredibly difficult.  It is much easier to start with what you’ve got and improve it.  This serves two important purposes: (i) you aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel; (ii) you will find it easier to stick to your diet if it doesn’t represent a radical change.  Better to make a few changes, let those settle, then make some more changes.
7. Check you’ve got all your oil-based supplements included in your analysis: Fish oil is known to assist with fat burning and Chad Waterbury provides a recommendation on how much to take when following a female physique diet which may work out at quite a high quantity.  Unfortunately it’s fatty nature also means that it provides a surprising number of calories.  The quantity that I take during a fat loss diet provides me with 117 of my 1,000 calories!  It is therefore crucial that you remember to include your supplements in your analysis to account for these easily forgotten calories.
8. Get your calories to within 150 calories of the right number: This may take some effort.  Start by running your eye down the calories column in FitDay.  Where are the obvious big-ticket items?  Do you need to eat them?  If they serve a good nutritional purpose (eg. they are high protein content, like beef) then is there something equally nutritious but with fewer calories that you can substitute (eg. chicken), or should you reduce the quanitity?  I recommend scanning down this column alongside the carbohydrate column.  Nearly all cutting diets benefit from being low-carbohydrate and if you are eating any potatoes, pasta, rice or processed carbohydrates they will add huge numbers of calories for minimal nutritional benefit.
   
9. Get the protein levels right: Now you’ve got your calories near the goal, focus on the protein.  If you want to lose fat without stripping your body of all of its muscle then you need to maintain protein levels.  Protein sources also have the benefit of being very filling, so keeping your intake of protein very high can ensure that, even on reduced calories, you don’t feel hungry.  The easiest way to improve protein levels is to identify your current main sources of protein and improve these.  For a cutting diet, swapping to leaner meat sources like chicken and removing the yolks from eggs can help you keep protein levels high without pushing calories up due to the calorie-dense fats.
   

   Chicken is good for a weight loss diet

10. Get the carbohydrate levels right: As I mentioned before, low-carbohydrate diets have been shown to be beneficial for weight loss.  I tend to concentrate on “net carbs”, calculated as the total carbs less the dietary fibre carbs.  I do this on the basis that I still require fibre in my diet but it makes me concentrate on replacing carb sources with the most fibre-dense sources I can find, such as broccoli and cabbage.  My personal preference is to keep this net carb figure below 30g, but you may reach your own conclusions through your research. 

Once you’ve done all of this you may need to go back and insert a bit more food, or cut out some of the remaining fat-heavy foods to reach the right total calories, but otherwise you should find you have a decent menu to start you off.

I hope these tips have been a helpful starting point.  Let me know how it goes!

Related posts:

1. Alternative approaches to weight loss diets
2. Foods to avoid to lose weight
3. Improving nutrition for muscle gain

I’ve often mentioned that I follow a low-carbohydrate diet.  I find it helps me to control my figure and was, to a certain extent, a conscious decision to help me meet this aim.  However, my low-carbohydrate levels have also resulted in part from my move to a Paleolithic diet.  The processed and “Neolithic” carbohydrates and potatoes that I have taken out of my diet tend to have much higher carbohydrate levels than vegetables and fruit.

Chicken salad - living the low-carb lifestyle

Listed below are some links to interesting studies, articles and thoughts on low carbohydrate diets.

• Starting with a scientific line of questioning, a paper published last year looked at current research into low-carbohydrate diets and concluded that low-carbohydrate diets can be a viable option for weight loss (comparable to fat restricted diets).  There is also some evidence that low-carbohydrate diets can be beneficial for glycemic control, triglyceride levels and HDL cholesterol.
• Chris at Conditioning Research also put together a summary of some important low-carbohydrate diet information, including a link to some research by Chris Gardner which again showed that a low-carbohydrate diet gave better weight loss a blood test results than the Ornish, Zone and LEARN diets.
• Dr. Davis posted up the results of Gretchen’s experiment during which she followed a low-fat diet for a day followed by a low-carbohydrate diet for a day.  She measured both blood glucose and triglyceride levels throughout both days.  Dr Davis does draw some conclusions and the results of the experiment are interesting, however I would be hesitant to place too much weight on any conclusions, even those that are favourable to the low-carbohydrate diet.  One day is not really long enough to know the long-lasting effect for any diet.
• Next up is a viewpoint published on Kurt Harris’s PaNu site about why there are potentially problems with resting your arguments on ethnology.  I’m particularly interested in the point that relying on studies of tribes, like the Kitavans, who have a reasonably high-carbohydrate diet doesn’t necessarily mean we can apply the same diet approach to people with a different genetic make-up and expect the same results.  For a bit more background to this, I also suggest reading an article that Kurt posted up: “I’m so bored with the Kitavans”.
• An article on Iron Man Magazine summarises the many reasons why, even when you have a low-carbohydrate diet, you may still want to consider taking in a higher level of carbohydrates just before resistance training.  Some of the reasons here are the same reasons that I, and many other advocates of low-carbohydrate diets (such as Robb Wolf), still have a higher carbohydrate meal in advance of training.
• Moving slightly sideways from the low-carbohydrate theme, a recent study showed that reducing saturated fat in diet gives some favourable responses, but when it is replaced with refined carbohydrates then the atherogenic dyslipidemia associated with insulin resistance and obesity that includes increased triglycerides, small LDL particles, and reduced HDL cholesterol can be exacerbated.  So it seems that for better health you should be looking to limit your intake of refined carbohydrates.
• Two new studies seemed to show that low-carbohydrate diets raise LDL (bad) cholesterol and that high-fat diets can spike stroke risk in women.  However, Jimmy Moore, a supporter of low-carbohydrate diets devoted an entire post to obliterating the claims.
• Finally, here’s a video that shows that even back in the 1950s doctors were aware that low-carbohydrate diets are good for weight loss:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSRfan2dgw

I’d be interested to know your thoughts on whether you think these are persuasive reasons to convert to a low-carbohydrate diet.

Related posts:

1. Low carbohydrate diets
2. Blog-watch: low carb diets
3. Selecting your carbohydrate source

The first was a question on one of my old posts from someone who wanted to know how I dealt with the problem of being glycogen starved while training in the context of having converted to a low-carb paleo diet.  The second was a high-carb v low-carb debate that I frequently have with a friend of mine who is a long-distance runner (regularly competing in marathons, half-marathons and 10km races).

My personal experience of converting

For a long time after I converted to a low-carb diet I continued to be high-carb for the purpose of my weekly long distance bike rides, because it was easier that way.  Eventually though, I decided that I couldn’t keep compromising my health.  I knew it was possible to be an endurance athlete on a low-carb diet having read various testimonies.  I’d also heard about Chris Carmichael, the professional cyclist and former coach to Lance Armstrong, who advocates a low-carb diet for athletes.

To convert, I found a period of a few weeks when I felt able to put my weekly long-ride on hold.  Instead of a long ride, I went slowly round a local 30 mile circuit in a completely fasted state before breakfast.  This taught my body to burn fat for fuel.

The first time I did it I felt horrid and ran out of energy about 10 miles from the end.  Fortunately on a bike you can change gear and spin the pedals with minimal effort – you don’t go very quickly but you can keep going enough to crawl home.  By the third or fourth week I could get round the full 30 miles and, although hungry, I had enough energy to work hard on the hill climbs.  The subsequent benefits to my long distance rides were worth the effort.

The benefits of being a low-carb endurance athlete

The key differences that I saw have been noticed by others too, such as a pig-hunter who commented on Mark Sisson’s blog.  I’ve listed below the biggest benefits to me.

• Not needing to eat as frequently – I can now survive on a snack every 3 or 4 hours when out cycling or walking, rather than needing to put in some food every hour.
• Not needing such large snacks – fat goes further than carbs, so I don’t need to eat as much when I do stop to eat.  A handful of nuts or a square of dark chocolate can be sufficient where I would have previously needed a whole flapjack or banana at each break.
• Being able to keep going when I run out of food – it’s not pleasant, but if I run out of food I can keep going when I used to be left exhausted, sat by my bike at the side of the road.  I will always carry some body fat, and I can burn that fat for energy in an emergency.

Feeling the benefits of a light-weight pack

Arguments in favour of staying high-carb as an endurance athlete

My friend, the long-distance runner, puts forward the following arguments in favour of staying high-carb which, from his perspective, are equally valid:

• When running it is difficult to digest most foods (due to the bouncing vibrations through your stomach) whereas a sugar glucose drink can go through the system with relative ease.
• There are psychological benefits from putting something sweet on your tongue, not just physical benefits.  My only argument against this is that these benefits have been seen even when gargling the sugary liquids, so you don’t need to ingest them to get the psychological benefits.
• An organised run usually includes regular feed stations where they provide energy drinks and other sugary substances.  With this in mind, why go through the unpleasant conversion process when you would then have to start carrying more of your own food?

The problem with advocating low-carb endurance training

Almost all of the success stories about being a low-carb endurance athlete are just that.  Personal accounts.  Most dedicated athletes play around with changing their diet but few will write about the change unless it was successful.  So while we know that being low-carb does work for some endurance athletes we can’t extrapolate that it works for everyone.

Turning to science, there have been studies comparing low-carb and high-carb diets but when you are addressing something as fundamental as long-term diet it is difficult to do a fully controlled trial. 

If you are comparing different groups of people (eg. comparison of a non-western tribe to a standard western population) there are too many other aspects that may skew the data, such as activity levels or genetic differences.  Meanwhile, scientists have noticed that if people are asked to convert their diet to something that is perceived as “healthy” for a scientific trial, they will often make changes to other areas of life too, such as activity levels, because they feel healthy.

Make your choice to suit your preferences

My friend and I are unlikely to ever agree. 

He has strong reasons for not converting.  He doesn’t have a problem with the potential health issues from the high-carb foods that he consumes, he is concerned about trying to digest anything that isn’t in liquid form while running and he doesn’t need to worry about being able to carry his food since he is competing in races with food stations.

Personally, I am more concerned about the long-term health issues that could compromise my biggest life-goal.  I also often have to carry any food that I want to consume and, when you are carrying 6 days of food on your back in a rucksack while crossing wilderness terrain, being able to carry less food is a benefit that outweighs everything for me.  It’s also good to know that if I run out of food several hours from a food source (as happened once in the Cairngorms), I can keep going on reserve fat.

The important thing is to make your own decision based on your specific facts and circumstances and addressing the things that are of most importance to you.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: the benefits of being fat-adapted
2. Lessons learned: exercise and the menstrual cycle
3. Blog-watch: low carb diets