Last week I looked at an analysis of adherence to a strength training intervention in adult women.  At the time I was looking at a study that was based on research done for a separate study, so I felt that it would only be right to complete the set by looking at that original study.  I don’t think anyone reading this blog will be surprised by the results, but it is helpful to sometimes go back to basics and look at the things that we all know, inherently, to be true about our strength training work.  A reminder that there really is a purpose to it, beyond how it makes us feel.

*****

Strength training and adiposity in premenopausal women: Strong, Healthy, and Empowered study

Schmitz K H, Hannan P J, Stovitz S D, Bryan C J, Warren M, Jensen M D, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2007; 86(3):566-572.  (Free copy of the study here.)

The study

The purpose behind this study was to “assess the efficacy of twice-weekly strength training to prevent increases in percentage body fat and intraabdominal body fat compared with a standard care comparison group among women.”  I have to say that they did a pretty good job of this.

On a separate note they also expressed an interest in finding out if the women also gained more confidence with physical activities in other areas of their life, such as recreation, household activities and transportation. (This last one confused me, but Chris told me that they probably mean carrying things about, like shopping.  This hadn’t even crossed my mind – a clear sign that I’ve been doing weight training for too long now!)

While they expressed interest in finding out about this, no further mention is made about it in this study and I suspect that data considered through interviews and discussions with participants throughout the study is discussed and considered in a separate paper: Barriers and motivators for strength training among women of color and Caucasian women.  O’Dougherty M, Dallman A, Turcotte L, Patterson J, Napolitano M A, Schmitz K H.  Women Health 2008;47(2):41-62.  Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a free copy of this available on the internet so if anyone can get hold of a copy to send to me I’d really appreciate it.  I think it might contain the answers to questions raised by several readers of last week’s paper too – how the study actually made the women feel.

The participants

It’s worth lingering for a moment on the criteria for inclusion and exclusion in this study as they advertised widely for participants and ended up with 1,721 women to screen for it.  Of these 164 participants made it through all the criteria and were still participating by the time they were ready to start the study.  I learned from last week’s study that several women gave the free two-year membership to a gym as one of the key reasons they were motivated to apply to join the study at the start and a test group of 164 women is a really large study when you compare it to most strength and conditioning research studies looking solely at women where the test group is more often about 20 women.

In order to be included in the study the women had to meet the following criteria (as a well as a few others I’ve excluded for brevity):

• Age 25-44 years
• BMI 25-35
• A stable bodyweight with less than 10% change in the previous year
• Premenopausal
• Have a sedentary lifestyle or, at most, three weekly sessions of moderate aerobic activity
• Non-smokers
• Not be participating in a weight-loss programme
• Not have any physician-diagnosed menstrual irregularities
• Not have any significant gynecologic conditions
• Not have any positive responses to the Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire
• Not have participated in any strength training in the previous six months
• Not currently be or have recently been pregnant or lactating
• Not be taking one of a number of listed medication types (essentially knocking out women with certain conditions)
• Not have any plans to be away for more than three consecutive weeks during the two-year study period (I bet that condition made a lot of women suddenly have an urge for a really long holiday, simply because they couldn’t take one, even if they’d never done such a long holiday before).

It’s a long list of conditions but the purpose is clear.  It drove the number of participants down from a huge number to a much smaller number of women who were, overweight or obese, largely sedentary, but otherwise in good health.

These participants were then split into two equal groups – the first undertook strength training, the second were left alone as a control group.  The control group were not given any advice other than being mailed standard American Heart Association (‘AHA’) brochures recommending thirty minutes of moderate activity each day (such as walking).  The results provide an interesting insight in itself about either the effectiveness of this advice or of how much notice is taken of this advice (although it isn’t entirely clear which is the more deficient).

The training

I’m not going to go into huge detail about the training programme as I gave a lot of information about it last week.  As a brief reminder, the participants were given a training programme involving two sessions a week – the first 16 weeks were supervised by personal trainers and then training continued unsupervised with a top-up group training session every 12 weeks to adjust the exercises that were being done. Having started these sedentary, previously untrained women on resistance machine exercises, free-weights exercises were apparently introduced over time, although the specific exercises used are not detailed, only the muscle groups they were targetting.

For the first year the training session lasted 60-90 minutes and involved nine common strength training exercises completed for three sets of eight to ten reps on each exercise, always lifting the heaviest weight possible.  In year two participants were allowed, if they wanted, to drop down to two sets of each exercise.  This is estimated as having reduced the length of the workout to 45 minutes.  Essentially year two reflected a more maintenance-style programme.

I find it interesting that participants in this group were also asked to maintain throughout the study period whatever amount of aerobic activity they had been doing before the started the study entry.  If they were already doing three lots of aerobic activity a week (the maximum possible under the criteria for participants) this would have meant quite a significant activity load once two strength training sessions were added to it.

Data collected

Unsurprisingly, with a study of this size they wanted to maximise what they learned.  Data was collected at the start as well as at the end of year one and the end of year two and they collected all sorts of data that may not have necessary seemed relevant at the time – this is why it has been possible to do so many other studies using the data collected during this study.

Clearly the main interest for this study was the body composition and, in particular the location of the fat, so the following information was collected:

• Body weight
• Body height
• Body composition, using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA)
• Estimates of abdominal fat areas (total, subcutaneous and intraabdominal) using a single-slice computed tomography (CT) scan
• Muscle strength through a max effort bench press and leg press.  This was tested twice at each data collection point, with a two week break between each test, so that the best possible effort could be measured and the best effort of the two was then used.
• Physical activity levels through a complex method of measuring threshold activity level through a treadmill test and then using an accelerometer for two weekdays and two weekend days to measure activity that was above this threshold “sedentary” level.
• Adherence to the strength training regime
• A diet history questionnaire (a food-frequency questionnaire), although it should be noted that participants were “asked not to make any changes in their diets that might result in weight or fat gain or loss. Seasonal variations in their diets were expected and allowed.”
• Interviewer-administered surveys for the demographical divisions and at which other information was also gathered about how the women were feeling and their thoughts on the study.

Results

For this post I’m going to focus on two sets of results – the body composition and the strength gains.  Interestingly all the data is given in terms of absolutes at the start of the study and then the amount of change seen in relation to this baseline.  I looked at adherence last week and you might want to revisit that to remind yourself at how sharply adherence declined in year two, since it has some reflection in the results here.

Firstly, let’s look at the strength gains.  Unsurprisingly the control group saw a decrease in upper body strength over the two years and this is at a fairly constant rate, however it is interesting that the control group also gained leg strength during the first year (before then losing half of it again in year two).  I have no idea what caused this and the authors don’t seem inclined to consider it either.  However, when this is compared to the gains in strength for the leg press in the training group there is a huge difference.  The trained group saw a relatively huge increase in leg strength and a fairly large increase in upper body strength.  Noticeably the strength measures for the trained group also drop off in year two.  The authors sensibly put this down to a reduction in adherence to the programme in year two (adherence had dropped to 40-50% in many cases) and the fact that the programme had also moved from a strength gain programme to a maintenance programme.  Of course, if someone was only attending half the sessions and was following a maintenance programme it seems logical that they might see a decline in strength, and I think that the reasoning for the strength declines put forward by the authors are reasonable, but it is pleasing to see that this drop-off in strength is not particularly marked in the lower body.

In fact, I think it is also worth noting the fact that while they seem able to retain a lot of the leg strength despite an apparent decline in training, the upper body strength declines much more rapidly.  This is very much in line with what I saw in the gym, especially during my first few years of training when I was still a relative novice.  Upper body strength just doesn’t seem to stick as well as lower body strength.  Is this something that other women have noticed and is it specific to women or have other men noticed a more immediate decline in upper body strength when compared to lower body strength if they take a break from training?

Body composition measures are even more interesting and I’ll briefly discuss most of them in turn.

To start us off, body mass is fairly non-descript (though I’m not even going to touch BMI since I consider it a pointless measure).  As is to be expected the body mass of the training group increases steadily, but the build up of new muscle tissue will have contributed to weight gain as well as any fat that they might have put on.  A reminder to all new trainees that gaining weight doesn’t necessarily mean that the training isn’t working (after all, I now weigh 6kg more than I did a few years ago yet I definitely look and feel a lot better).  It is perhaps interesting that the control group put on the weight much more abruptly in the second year, although the reasons for this are unclear.

Body fat movements tie neatly with the strength gains, fat mass and lean mass measurement.  Those in the control group kept body fat appear to have swapped some body fat for lean mass in year one, since their body weight stayed the same but with a reduction in fat mass and gain in lean mass and reduction in body fat.  Again, the reason for this isn’t clear, although perhaps some of them took some notice of that AHA brochure sent to them at the start of the study that advised them to do more moderate intensity exercise.  However, in year two they put back on almost double the amount of fat mass that they lost in year one, so whatever they had done to lose it, this stopped working (or they stopped doing it) in year two.  I’m intrigued that the lean mass doesn’t drop again though.

Moving over to the training group there is a much bigger reduction in body fat percentage with almost double the lean mass gains seen by the control group and a statistically significant reduction in fat mass when compared to the control group.  Despite the adherence drop-off in training during year two that was so evident in the strength measurements, the lean mass mostly remained with the trainees, although body fat started to return in year two.  Despite this, the body fat did return at a slower rate than the control group were putting it on, perhaps thanks to the additional muscle the trainees were carrying in year two.

Finally, looking at the composition of that fat, I was disappointed to see that after a promising start losing some of the intraabdominal fat, the trainee group gained a large amount of this in year two while gaining a lot less subcutaneous abdominal fat.  This could be seen as a failure for strength training to work its magic until you compare it to both the adherence (poor in year two – if you want this to work you need to keep doing it) and to the control group.  The control group’s intraabdominal fat levels sky-rocket in year two and this has ennabled the authors to reach their conclusion that there is a “potential for strength training to provide sustained obesity prevention benefits over time. These findings suggest that strength training is an efficacious mode of physical activity to expand the repertory of approaches available to women for the purpose of obesity prevention.”

Potential issues with the study

With a study of this size and complexity there are always going to be confounders.  The study participants are humans and they cannot be closely monitored every minute of every day for two years.  In particular diet was only loosely monitored.

While a dietary health questionnaire was completed at each test point, which showed that participants were seeing no significant change to their total calorific intake, there is no further detail in the study about whether the macronutrient composition of those calories of the timing of those calories changed over the two years.  This is acknowledged but the authors and I feel it is only fair to let them express the problem with this in their own words:

“… the 2 most important potential confounders (diet and physical activity) did not show differences at any measurement time point. The measurement of physical activity by objective monitoring avoided the potential for desirability bias from self-report that may occur in intervention studies. No such objective monitoring of dietary changes was possible. Further, food-frequency questionnaires such as the DHQ may not be sensitive enough to capture changes in dietary pattern. The possibility that significant changes in dietary intake influenced the body composition results reported cannot be ruled out.”

A concluding thought

So there you have it, from the authors themselves.  Some of the changes in the study could be due to dietary changes rather than due to the training.  However, despite this I am inclined to the opinion that this study does provide some support for the belief that strength training on a fairly minor scale not only aids in supporting fat loss (when adhered to) but can also help prevent the natural abdominal fat gain that seems to occur over time in sedentary premenopausal women.

Overall I think it’s a helpful study.  I really would like to get my hands on the article that looks at the women’s interviews and what they were really thinking as I believe it would make a huge difference to understanding the overall changes to the women and their adherence to the training programme over the two years.  But even without that, I hope you’ve all found something to take away from the two studies I’ve looked at based on this data.

Next week I’ll see if I can find something about non-sedentary women and strength training!

Related posts:

1. Adherence to a strength training intervention in adult women
2. Influence of moderately intense strength training on flexibility in sedentary young women
3. Blog-watch: interviews with strong women

I hope all my reader’s have had a break over the Festive period and are feeling enthused for a fresh start on 2012, just as I am.  2011 was a tough year for me.  I knew that I would be giving up my full-time job at the end of the year moving to a more mixed role of full-time musician to bring in the money that I need with the aim of a five-day “weekend” from Monday to Friday to take me away from the desk, give me more time to be active and mobile, leave me with time to train, and remove as much stress as possible from my life.

To prepare I spent most of 2011 doing a seven-day working week as I put more effort into my music, setting myself up with a reliable income stream from it before I handed in my notice from the desk job.  Unsurprisingly I finished off 2011 incredibly ill.  There was an unpleasant bug going round the UK and both Chris and I succumbed to it before Christmas without any hesitation, leaving us both bed-bound for a couple of days and without an ability to eat much of anything for over a week.

After a break over the Christmas period I thought I would share some of the things I have planned for 2012.  This is my statement of intent for the year that this blog is going to be spruced up a bit!

Workout plan for 2012

While I would like to report on my training for the end of 2011 I didn’t actually do anything for the last two weeks, since I was far too sick to leave my bed, let alone get into the gym for the week before Christmas and was then away on a six day walking trip after Christmas.  As expected after such a long break (12 December to 3 January plus 6 days of strenuous walking) I’ve knocked back my numbers quite horribly.  The figures below compare my final December workouts to the figures I got in my workouts last week.

• Back squat: 80kg 3×3, 5×2 down to 75kg 1×3, 7×2
• RDL: 95kg 8×3 down to 90kg 8×3
• Partial overhead press: 20kg 8×3 to 25kg 8×2 (so no loss here, but it was a new exercise in December)
• Hip thrust: 145kg 2×3, 4×2 down to 120kg 8×3 (I’m not so surprised about this – when I put the weight up to 145kg I struggled to get full extension so I stopped my warm up when I hit a weight I felt I was working hard with this time – I expect this to increase reasonably quickly).

Farewell ye great and mighty hip thrust

In 2012 I would like to finally get a handle on my bench press.  I’m going to increase to 3 workouts a week but also cut the size of the workouts slightly.  Part of the reason for this is that I have gained an allotment at the start of 2012 and anticipate doing some pretty hard digging a few times each week – I don’t want to burn out.

In a few weeks time this should be taking the following format:

1. Back squat then superset partial overhead press with chins
2. Superset Bench press with a row and then hip thrusts
3. RDLs and Hip thrusts

Until I get my squat back I’ll be doing workouts 1, 3 then 1 again each week.

I’ve no doubt this will change as I progress through the year and get used to not sitting at a desk all week but I really do want to crack the bench press this year and see if I can get to competition shape by Christmas.

Figure improvements in 2012

I let myself go a bit towards the end of 2011.  I’d made a conscious decision not to strictly diet at any point in 2011 as I was aware of an unhealthy relationship with food that developed through my 3 months of really hard dieting at the end of 2010.  I wanted time to heal that ticking psychological time-bomb.  I was also aware that there would be no free meals out with clients in 2012 and this year would be naturally easier to diet (for starters, no endless supplies of cake on the cabinets at work for birthdays and successful target achievement and competitions and… you get the drift).

No more cake lying about on a daily basis to tempt me

• 15 January to 15 February 2012 – I intend doing a 30 day Paleo Challenge at the start of the year.  It’s pretty much underway now, I didn’t really make a note of exactly when it started since there was much rubbish to cut out of my diet anyway, but there might be something inappropriate on Chris’s birthday this week, so it officially starts on 15 January after the partying finishes.  I know the dates above aren’t really 30 days but as 15 February is my birthday, it seems an appropriate date to stop the challenge.
• January – March 2012 – I will also be getting some of the excess fat off my hips and glutes.  This is one of my experiments for this year though.  I’ve done enough cutting diets in the last few years to know that the only way I could previously get results was an incredibly strict and repetitive food regime, fewer than 950 calories each day, and various cardio strategies over the years.  Despite looking “almost awesome” in December 2010 at the end of my last dieting phase I could never get rid of the handles of fat on the tops of my hips.  They got smaller but never went.  Through monitoring and measuring this year I want to see if the following appear to be true:
  • The fact that stress hinders fat loss is documented in several books on our shelves, hopefully I will find that I finally can shift those lumps of fat that sit at the top of each hip.
  • Reading any bodybuilding article or book by the old school bodybuilders, there is very little “cardio” mentioned.  However, they don’t sit around doing nothing either.  I’m going to see if I can lose weight without a complete starvation diet simply through the fact that I am more mobile each day and therefore using more calories.
  • Being based at home most days should also enable me to try something else too – eating when hungry.  I will always have foods that are appropriate to hand and so I intend eating food when I feel hungry and, where possible, stopping when full.  I will also eat something that appeals and not count the calories of it.  Again, this should hopefully have a positive affect on my figure and it will be interesting to see if I am able to lose weight this way without the psychological issues that come from a regimented calorie-restricted diet.  It will also be interesting to see how much I end up ingesting each day, what foods I tend to favour and what the macronutrient ratio looks like.

The shampoo experiment

I’ve always had trouble with my hair.  It’s thin, limp and hangs in rat-tails unless it’s within half a week since I visited the hairdresser.  It also gets greasy incredibly fast – I’ve never been able to contemplate leaving it unwashed even for one day as I wake up each morning with greasy-looking hair, even if it was washed the evening before.

This first month away from work without clients and internal meetings and a strict “business-acceptable” dress code finally gives me the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to try the shampoo-free experiment.  I can wear headscarves as much as I want and nobody needs to know what my hair looks like.  Everyone’s blog-posts I’ve read about trying this has agreed that it starts to look good after the first month, so I started this experiment on 27 December, when we left for the walking trip.  I’ll be blogging about my progress with photo evidence.

Technical research

Those of you who have been reading my blog for some time will have noticed that the quantity and quality of my technical research posts went sharply downhill towards the end of last year as I had less and less time to read up on topics.

Back to a bit of technical research

This year there are no excuses and areas I want to learn about include:

• Endometriosis – several of my friends have struggled with this and I think it is surprisingly common.  I’d like to understand more about it, both what it is like as someone with endometriosis and also what the known and suspected causes and potential solutions (if any) may be.
• Palaeolithic female figures – this is a much longer term project that could take more than just this year, but I’d like to see what I can learn about the figures of early females through skeletal structure and imagery.  It’s going to be delving back into my degree as an archaeologist.
• Women and bench press – for obvious reasons I’d like to learn more about whether it really is true that women struggle more with the upper body than the lower body when it comes to strength and, if so, why.
• Ketogenic diets – I promised someone at the end of 2010 that I would look into this and I never did.  This year I’m going to learn more about them.
• Metabolic Type diet – again, this has been mentioned to me and I am very skeptical but I shouldn’t be skeptical when I know almost nothing about them, so I’m going to at least read a couple of books and understand it better.

As I learn about these I will write about them on the blog.  However, I’m keen to research areas that other people would also like to learn more about, so please do leave a comment or send me an email through the contact form if you have other topics you would be interested to learn more about from me.

I hope you have all got similarly ambitious plans and intentions for 2012, whether in your personal life, in the gym or at work.  Please do let me know if you miss anything from the articles I used to write or if there is something you’d like me to be writing about but which you aren’t seeing.

Best of luck to you all for a happy and fulfilled year!

Related posts:

1. Why do women start weight training?
2. Setting New Year resolutions
3. Iron Lady: interview with Laura Trimble (part 1)

• Stephan supports the hypothesis that obesity is caused by the palatability of food – if I’ve understood it correctly people eat more food if it is more palatable and therefore they become obese which in today’s age, when a huge number of foods are carefully processed and chemically enhanced to be appealing to people’s tastes, is why we have such a problem with obesity.
• Gary believes that the problem lies with carbohydrates and our consumption of certain types of carbohydrates in particular.

I am absolutely not going to get onto this bandwagon of debate.  Debate is what drives scientific and non-scientific discovery.  If we didn’t have people disagreeing with hypotheses and developing their own hypothesis before then carrying out research to see if their hypothesis is correct we would never progress and increase our understanding of how things really work.

In this case I think there is merit to both hypotheses and I suppose for me the issue is really one of where the obesity problem originates – which of these two issues is the initial driver of obesity?  However, it is a fascinating debate so I’ve pulled together this blog-watch of the debate so far for those who would like to follow it.

The hypotheses

For those who don’t know Gary’s theory here are three videos together making up an interview with Gary in which he explains his hypothesis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR3FVvEJ-Nk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myyOD1W1DPg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HxLeGvFVsM

For those who don’t know Stephan’s viewpoint you could do worse than start with his eight part series on Food Reward which you can find at the following links: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.  The last article contains links to plenty of further reading on this hypothesis of food reward and palatability.

The debate

Here’s a video of the debate between Gary Taubes and Stephan Guyenet at the end of Stephan’s presentation during the Ancestral Health Symposium:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hzoFgwFeMQ

So here are some posts and articles about the debate kicked off during that Q&A at Stephan’s presentation at the Ancestral Health Symposium.

• I’m going to start with Stephan writing about the debate at the Ancestral Health Symposium.
• Following that debate at the Q&A session, Stephan seemed to decide that the best approach was to do a critical examination of the carbohydrate theory of obesity.  This is Gary’s hypothesis.
• To compare with this so that it can be balanced by Gary’s view of the food palatability and overeating hypothesis, having checked out Gary’s blog it looks like he was thinking about food reward and overeating long before this debate.  A post written in December 2010 addressed his view of overeating and why he felt it was a nonsensical explanation for why we get fat.
• Moving on from each of their considerations of the hypothesis supported by the other person, Stephan then did an interesting article about food palatability and how this links in with the concept of the body having a set point for its weight.  Soon after this he did an article outlining his understanding of the factors promoting obesity in humans.  As you can imagine, there isn’t just one.
• Gary Taubes has decided to do a series addressing the debate.  The first post in the series was long and it seems that even then he was anticipating not getting onto Stephan’s hypothesis until part three!  Initially Stephan did a response to this post and it caused a huge amount of hot air in the blog-world, but he has since decided to withdraw his response and wait until Gary has completed his series before responding.
• A challenge had been put out to Stephan to test the theory of food palatability.  Off the back of this challenge Stephan did design a food reward study and starting asking for volunteers before being challenged about it by the University of Washington where I understand he works.  As a result of this Stephan has decided to cancel the study.
• Of course, while all of this is going on (and we’ll be a while yet before this is over) a few other people have weighed in with their views.  In particular, Peter at Hyperlipid has done a very technical article looking at the debate.  You’ll need your technical thinking caps on to work through his article though!

I can see this going on for some time so for those who are interested in this I recommend that you bookmark both Stephan’s blog, Whole Health Source, and Gary’s blog and watch as the debate continues.

Related posts:

1. Raw food
2. 15 Ways to Survive a Desk Job – Part 1 (food and drink)
3. Real experiences compared to hypotheses about the menstrual cycle

Alli McKee

NJAMW:  Let’s move onto the nitty-gritty of being a Figure competitor.  You have often shared the belief that working towards a Figure competition makes you a career dieter, with the food you consume becoming nothing more than fuel.  As someone who has done some long fat loss periods (despite my love of food) I understand where you are coming from and I often rely on a weekly carb-up day to maintain my sanity.  I know that Figure Athletes tend to move away from any “cheats” in the last weeks before a competition and this time round you said you were going to go for a 100% compliant approach throughout the Arnold Classic preparation.  Did you manage it and, if so, do you have any tips for people on how to manage diet compliance?

AM:  To be honest, I managed the compliance quite well in this prep.  Carter, my coach, gave me three cheats during the prep (Thanksgiving, Christmas and NYE).  I had two other instances / meals where I strayed from the course but it wasn’t nearly a cheat that consisted of a bunch of crap. As the weeks got closer to the show, I became more and more strict.

I did “stray” one day within the final 4 weeks that I recall – I was hungry and mentally tired.  I decided I was going to allow myself to eat freely – no food measurements or food pairing limitations – so long as I stayed within my compliant food groups (fruit, veggies, healthy fats, gluten free starches, protein).  When I emailed Carter of the “damage” I thought I did he wasn’t worried and said he was planning on giving me a “refeed” day over the weekend and I beat him to it.  He said it wasn’t anything that would cause GI distress, just a matter of kcals.  We actually had another day closer to the show where he gave me a refeed again (on a Saturday) and followed it with a fast on Sunday to promote a metabolic and fat loss spike, not to mention the mental and physical benefits of the refeed.

As for managing dietary compliance, I think trial and error plays a role. Some of us thrive on different approaches (strict versus freedom), programs, macros, etc.  It’s important to find what works for your body and your mentality.

I was lucky to feel in sync with Carter’s program design.  He provided a strict program but with a lot of personal flexibility and responsibility.  Things were laid out very well – it was pretty black and white about what I could and couldn’t do, however I was never told to eat a specific food at a certain meal.  I was able to tailor my meals to what appealed to me at that time.  I also had to report to Carter every Sunday with a weekly log that included everything from measurements, training, dietary compliance and numerous Q&A to track how my body was feeling.  The accountability helped hold me in place.

I believe attitude makes a very big difference in dietary compliance as well.  I decided that the show was my job.  I was representing myself up there on stage and wasn’t going to do any less than my best efforts.  Each show, I believe, does get easier.  I understood the demands of my commitment and it’s was my choice so there is no reason to be unhappy with it.

Today, out of a show, despite the “freedom” to eat whatever I want, I still stay close to my prep parameters because I prefer feeling good on these foods and in my skin.  It’s a priority of mine to stay lean and walk the walk.  Do I have cravings from time to time for killer chocolate cake?  Sure.  However I am selective when I allow for it.  Over time, the “compliance” has become something I prioritize and expect of myself in order to care for my health and physique, just like I will always train for the same reasons.

As for tips for others, again, it’s a bit of trial and error to find what works for you.  Also, having support helps during tough moments.  Competition preps are no walk in the park.  They are down right hard at times.  Having someone you can share the challenges with when they sneak up – whether it be a coach, another competitor, etc – it does help.  Also finding tricks to curb the cravings – I like gum, coffee or tea.  I also rewarded myself with other things I found to be “treats” – for me it was a weekly massage and bi-weekly manicure. 

NJAMW:  I can’t imagine how you kept it up as you went through the holiday season, but I do know what you mean about it helping to have people around you who understand the challenges, who you are accountable to but who can also support you at the tough moments.  Still, it sounds tough.  Would you mind sharing what a typical week’s diet was looking like for you as you built up to the Arnold Classic and what it may have looked like during off season as a Figure competitor?

Alli McKee looking lean at the Arnold Classic earlier this year

AM:  The only difference between the majority of my diet leading up to the Arnold Prep and “now” is really only a treat meal or two per week.  I have some allowed flexibility in my diet, but my habits, choices and routines have not really changed. 

I don’t want to reveal too much of my dietary specifics because they are Carter’s intellectual property and are rather detailed over the course of the 16 week prep.  It would require an entire blog post to fully explain the system.  However, the gist was this:

Essentially, I had two different meal plans (sometimes three, but we’ll focus on two for the purpose of explaining):

A Resistance Training (RT) Day Meal Plan and a Non Resistance Training Day Meal Plan.

• RT Days (4 days per week) were often 5 meals.  Each meal consisted of a lean protein source, 2 servings of green vegetables, 2-3 servings of colored vegetables and either a serving of fruit, starch or healthy fat.
• My Non-RT days (3 days per week) were usually 3-4 meals which consisted of a lean protein source, 2 servings of green vegetables, 2-3 servings of colored vegetables and a serving of healthy fat.  I could split these meals up into smaller meals through the day as well if I chose.

Carter provided me with an extensive list of compliant food choices and the serving size (in quantity and grams) for each food group within my plan.  The following is not an exhaustive list, but were / are some of my preferred choices:

• Lean proteins:  Egg Whites / Omega 3 Eggs, Chicken, Turkey, Bison, Lean Ground Beef, Salmon, Tilapia, Shrimp and protein powder.
• Vegetables:  Spinach, Romain Lettuce, Broccoli, Green Beans, Asparagus, Cucumbers, Zucchini, Peppadews, Onions, Mushrooms, Tomatoes, Sun Dried Tomatoes, Carrots, Winter Squash, Yellow Squash, Eggplant and Canned Organic Pumpkin.
• Fruits:  Strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, grapefruits, oranges, apples, sweet cherries, bananas.
• Starches:  Oatbran, Sweet Potatoes, Brown Rice, Black Beans, Quinoa
• Healthy Fats:  Raw Almonds, Cashews, Natural Nut Butters, Avocado, Olive Oil, Oils, EFA’s

NJAMW:  I like the idea of being given portion sizes of different foods and a structure of a certain number of portions of different foodstuffs.  Really helps in simplifying it and making sure you felt in control of eating what you wanted most of the time (within the limits of portion sizes and food categories.  Something I’m really interested in and am currently playing with is pre and post workout nutrition.  Issues such as when to time the carbohydrates and how long before and/or after workouts to consume which macronutrients.  It’s an issues which is always under debate with fresh research coming out regularly.  A couple of years ago you were recommending protein shakes within 30-40 minutes of finishing a workout.  What do you currently recommend for pre and post workout nutrition and what do you, yourself, do?

AM:  Personally, around my training, I consume a meal about an hour before training.  During training I consume 1-2 workout concoctions, immediately post training I drink another post-workout concoction and then within the hour of that post workout shake I will have my post-workout meal.

So, beyond just getting protein 30-40 minutes post workout, it’s (1) appreciating that it’s about the peri-workout period (before, during and after) and (2) it’s about a range of nutrients – macro (protein/carbs), micro and phyto – not just protein; in addition to some specialty aminos like BCAAs, creatine, etc to enhance recovery / leverage the workout as much as possible.  This is all a bit beyond me, so I leave the strategy up to my expert, Carter.

When it comes to figure prep, we needed to do some sleight of hand with the body since we were restricting kcals so we used low-energy but highly “nutrient” dense items like the aminos, fast absorbing hydrolysates, greens / superfood powders, etc.  Otherwise, it’s about concentrating a good chunk of daily intake in and around the workout, especially with respect to starchy carbs.  

In short: 

1. Fast digesting protein (hyrdolysate) or BCAA before, during and/or after as needed.
2. Starchy carbs before/after with “sugary” carbs during, depending on goals – performance and lean mass = more carbs; fat loss = less carbs
3. Phytonutrient dense foods pre/post – greens+/superfood or veggies and fruit
4. Specialty aminos like creatine, beta alanine, glycine, arginine, citruline malate, glutamine, etc as needed – especially when kcals are restricted.

*****

I’m sure that’s all given other people plenty of food for thought, if you can excuse the pun.  I’ve certainly got a few bits milling around in the back of my mind which I need time to think about.  Next week, in parts three and four, we’ll pick up on the training needed to prepare for a Figure competition.

Related posts:

1. Interview with Alli McKee (part 1)
2. Interview with Alli McKee (part 4)
3. Interview with Alli McKee (part 3)

2010 proved to be the year when I really nailed my hip mobility, subsequently made massive increases on my squat and started to get a grip on the real weaknesses in my lifts (such as shoulder stability on my bench press). 

For 2011 my focus is on maintaining and enhancing the figure which I worked hard on towards the end of 2010 and on getting my deadlift past the national qualifying standards.  I’ll also carry on hammering away at my shoulder stability issues with the intention of making bench press the lift of 2012.  Of course I won’t abandon my squat.

I’m making a lot of use of Hepburn routines this year, giving me slower but steadier progress and trying to void my nemesis of mental burn-out.  For the main exercises it keeps me on the same weight for 9 workouts while I add 1 rep per workout from 8×2 to 8×3, immediately followed by a lighter back-off workout (3×6 rising to 3×9).  After 9 weeks I put the weight up by a slightly bigger step than I would have used when putting the weight up every workout.  It’s really reducing the mental exhaustion from putting the weight up every session.

I’m recording my progress in this series: powerlifting progress.  It is serving as a journal and makes me a bit more accountable to my goals. 

This week

This was week on in a special high speed fat loss experiment.  I didn’t fit comfortably into my combat trousers and, with a long weekend away in Yorkshire planned for the Royal Wedding weekend, I knew I needed to do some preliminary fat loss to (i) look nice; and (ii) give myself some “eating out” leeway.  I’m not sure if the experiment is working.  I’ll write it up once it is finished and I’ve had time to think about it.

The main drawback has been serious carb depletion which I was already feeling on Tuesday night as I did my squats.  I’m writing this on Saturday afternoon and looking forward to my weekly carb re-feed tonight.

Deadlift

Action plan

• Maintain – leg strength and hip mobility
• Develop – ab strength and lower back strength

Progress this week

For my deadlifts, I am very much sold on the article written by Joe Mills in 1975 which I read on Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban last year.  This explained that the old time strongmen didn’t deadlift to improve their deadlift but instead increased deadlift strength through assistance exercises (eg. Olympic lifts, Good Mornings). 

The weakness in my deadlift is my lower back which “pops out” as soon as I get near a maximum effort lift.  For the last few months of 2010 I was concentrating on Good Mornings which gave some improvement.  I am now spending 2011 working with Romanian Deadlifts (RDLs) to see if I can further improve my lower back strength.

85kg is starting to feel achievable although I’ve started doing RDLs without gloves now that the gym (and equipment) has warmed up.  I can’t tell if the callous pain is worse or better without gloves.

Squat

Action plan

• Maintain – hip mobility and glute strength
• Develop – ab and lower back strength

Progress this week

I’m quite happy to believe that the best way to improve my squat is to squat.  The abs and lower back strength comes partly from the squatting and the lower back strength will also be helped by the assistance exercises that I do for deadlift.

Well, I managed the six sets of three planned for this Tuesday and the box squats for the back off set are getting better.  However I was definitely feeling the carb depletion and am not looking forward to next Thursday’s squats when I’ll be two days further into carb depletion.

Bench

Action plan

• Maintain – technique
• Develop – scapular stability and thoracic mobility

 Progress this week

My upper body strength is not the limiting factor on my bench press at the moment.  It’s my shoulder stability.  So I am only doing assistance exercises on my upper body and the upper body is never taking the position of primary exercise in my workouts.  That said, problems with putting the weight up on my row and overhead press early in the year meant I’m trying a five set Hepburn cycle and singles Hepburn for the pull and push (supersetting) after the squat.  After RDLs I am pursuing a 3×5 system with pull ups and press ups (supersetting).

I am so pleased that I finished 18kg overhead press this week.  Roll on next week with a messy attempt with a new weight!  And yes, I’m aware I’ve lost a rep on my pull up and press up.  The less said about that, the better…

Here’s where I was by the end of this week:

• RDL day:  Weighted pull up (6.25kg – 3,3,3), weighted press up (16kg – 3,3,3)
• Squat day:  Pendlay row (55kg – 1×3,4×2), one-arm dumbbell overhead press (18kg – 8 singles)

Figure development

My fat-stripping session at the end of 2010 revealed that my glutes were tiny, despite having a huge amount of strength (I was doing 5 sets of 4 reps hip thrusts with 102kg, doing a good 4-5 second hold at the top each time).  For 2011 I am therefore on a mission to get some serious hypertrophy in my glutes while retaining strength.

As I said in the intro, I’m having a bit of a fat loss session for two weeks of figure tidying.  Meanwhile the heavier hip thrusts (with lower reps are getting back to where they used to be in weight (6 sets of 4 reps with 100kg), so I’m a happy little lifter again.  Once I’m back from the Yorkshire holiday I’ll start the next experiment in glute hypertrophy.

Related posts:

1. Powerlifting progress 2010: week sixteen
2. Powerlifting progress 2011: week one
3. Powerlifting progress 2011: week nine

Briefly, before I start though, I did want to make two brief comments:

1. I have made a slight edit with respect to cholesterol and saturated fat on part one, thanks to some reading I was doing on holiday - you’ll find the correction at the end of that post.
2. I wrote the post below before going away on holiday.  While I was hauling myself over many miles of hill, dale and moorland, I had time to think about what I had written as I was trying to work out the diet changes I would need to make to test my suggestions.  It made me realise that the conclusions below are specific to women who are not on hormone-altering contraceptives (whether oral contraceptives or hormone-releasing IUDs) and who therefore have a “normal” pattern of hormone production throughout their cycle.  Since returning on Saturday I have embarked on a bit of research to see if I can create a second set of conclusions about exercise and diet recommendations through the menstrual cycle for those on these hormone-altering drugs (very pertinent to me, since I am on a combination pill) and will do a post on this as soon as I can.

Now, to pick up from where I left off last Thursday…

Menstrual cycle (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Fitting this into the menstrual cycle

This is where I came unravelled until I drew the graph and scribbled all over it.  I’ve outlined below how I think all the different strands come together and how we may therefore optimise our diet during the menstrual cycle.

Days 1-4: menstrual phase

• Oestrogen and progesterone are both low. 
• Studies of women who allowed themselves to eat as much of whatever foods they wanted showed that they naturally tended towards lower energy intake in this phase.
• There seem to be contradictory results that this may be either the best or the worst time for resistance training.  My (and others) personal experience tends towards worst.

Days 5-13: proliferative phase

• Oestrogen levels slowly rise while progesterone stays low.
• Fat oxidisation should be good during this phase but protein catabolism isn’t effective.  Glucose uptake won’t be much good until near the end of this cycle.
• Care needs to be taken, especially early on in the phase, with too many carbohydrates, since they are more likely to be stored as fat rather than uptake being into the muscles.  Any requirement for a large carbohydrate load (eg. a sports competition of some sort) will need some very specific high carb-loading immediately before the event since any exercise you do undertake during days 1-13 is likely to be depleting your glycogen reserves until the oestrogen levels are high enough to start signalling the body to store glycogen again.  I would imagine that if your event is around days 6-8 you will probably have glycogen stores at their lowest in the whole cycle and fat-oxidisation will not yet be optimal either, so high carb loading would be essential in this situation.  However, I’ve not felt particularly weak at this point in my cycle in the past so I need to do a bit of experimentation to understand if this is correct.
• If you want to lose weight it strikes me that a diet that is high percentage protein with minimal carbs would force your body to burn body fat for fuel in this phase (since there’s minimal progesterone to promote protein catabolism and, as you progress through the phase, the increasing oestrogen will improve fat oxidisation).

Days 13-16: ovulatory phase

• Oestrogen peaks but progesterone is still low.
• This is the time to load up on the carbohydrates and fill up the glycogen stores.
• Endurance performance in competition is good at this point, probably partly as a result of the optimal ability to oxidise fat as an energy source. 
• Resistance exercise is also likely to be good due to the better uptake of glucose to the muscles but it is probably important to make sure that any glycogen is replaced while you are still in that optimal window for glucose uptake to the muscles.  Perhaps this is the time in the cycle for both pre and post-workout carbohydrates.
• Recovery from exercise should be good due to the oestrogen-improved blood flow to the muscles.  A time to really push your training limits.

Days 16-22: early luteal phase

• While the oestrogen peak drops off a little there are greater overall oestrogen concentrations throughout the luteal phase.  Progesterone also peaks in this first half of the luteal phase before starting to rapidly reduce again.
• For this part of the luteal phase I suspect that those chasing physique goals would benefit from a diet with minimal carbs and perhaps 50:50 protein and carbohydrate.  Protein catabolism is at its best but fat oxidisation is also reasonably good.  Perhaps you could subsist on plenty of steak with some green veg on the side for vitamins and minerals.
• Towards the end of this phase endurance training sees the best improvements to long-term performance, most likely due to the gradually increasing ability to store glucose in the muscles again and increased reliance on fat oxidisation as the progesterone (with its protein catabolism effects) drops off.  Though note this is the endurance competition peak evidenced in the ovulatory phase when oestrogen was at an all-time high.

Days 22-28: late luteal phase

• Progesterone is now getting quite low again while oestrogen continues to tick over at higher proportions.
• Studies of women who allowed themselves to eat as much of whatever foods they wanted showed that they naturally tended towards a much higher energy intake (across all macronutrients) in this phase and also tended towards significantly increased vitamin B and C intake.  This is that time every month when you just want to eat.  All the time.  It is also the point when your will is most likely to break on a low-carb calorie deficit diet.
• As with the ovulatory phase, this is another time to load up on the carbohydrates and fill up the glycogen stores.  Bear in mind that we are about to go into the menstrual and proliferative phases when glycogen stores get depleted with each workout you do, so I imagine we need to fill those stores up while we can.  I wonder if this is a reason for the discrepancy between studies showing the menstrual phase as the best and worst times for resistance exercise.  I know that I currently take the same low-carbohydrate approach throughout the cycle – if the test subjects were the same then they may have insufficient glycogen for resistance exercise in the menstrual phase.
• As with the ovulatory phase, resistance exercise should be good due to the better uptake of glucose to the muscles but it is probably important to make sure that any glycogen is replaced while you are still in an optimal window for glucose uptake to the muscles.  This may also explain the excellent performance some strength athletes see in the last few days before menstruation.
• Recovery from exercise should be good due to the oestrogen-improved blood flow to the muscles.
• The improved endurance training from the mid luteal phase should continue throughout this phase.

There you have it – my final conclusions after pulling together all the good work done by Jamie Scott into one place.  I will now commit to test some of the hypotheses set out above on me over the next few months and will report back once I have some conclusions.

In the meantime, do you already have any experiences that may contradict or support any of this?  If so I would really love to hear them.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part one
2. Blog-watch: diet and the menstrual cycle
3. Real experiences compared to hypotheses about the menstrual cycle

A few weeks ago he wrote two articles about the menstrual cycle.  He had been asked by someone else: “how can the female hormonal cycle best be utilized for optimal health?”  His posts were so detailed that I felt they warranted a blog-watch to themselves.

I had hoped to make this a single post, but the volume of what I wanted to cover with it has extended it into two.  However, I hope you’ll find them useful in helping with implementation of the information Jamie has found.

A quick summary of Jamie’s articles

Post one provided a summary of the menstrual cycle, including detail of the different phases and the patterns of oestrogen and progesterone throughout the menstrual cycle.  These are the two key female sex hormones which drive the process.  It then covered how those hormones impact on the way our bodies manage different macronutrients and subsequently how the hormones fit with exercise metabolism.

Post two then took this further by looking at several different studies to understand how dietary changes could impact on the hormone cycle. 

 What I’m going to do in these posts

Jamie’s two posts are, unfortunately, quite difficult to get your head around.  By the end of reading them I felt like I had learned all sorts of useful facts, but when I tried to work out how they tied together I quickly came unravelled. 

I ended up drawing a massive copy of the menstrual cycle hormones graph and then worked my way through the two articles writing slotting bits of information all over my diagram.  I’m therefore going to spend today’s post outlining what those key posts are and then, next week, walking through the menstrual cycle, in order, with the conclusions I’ve drawn about diet and exercise for each sub-phase.

Some basic terminology

Before I get started, it helps to set out the basic terminology of the menstrual cycle and what happens when.  I’ve also used the opportunity to highlight one significant reason why diet may impact on fertility.

The menstrual cycle is divided into two main phases although it’s actual length can be anywhere from 21to 35 days.

Days 1-14:  follicular phase

This starts on the first day of menstruation and finishes on the day that the body releases an egg.  At the point of menstruation, both oestrogen and progesterone are very low while the signal to release an egg comes from a sharp peak in oestrogen which slowly builds throughout this phase. 

Days 15-28:  luteal phase

The egg passes along the fallopian tube and hopefully gets fertilised.  As this is happening, progesterone is being released to prepare the body for pregnancy (high levels of progesterone are needed to create the right conditions in the womb) and the body starts to create a lining for the womb which the fertilised egg can attach to.  If the egg isn’t fertilised then progesterone levels taper off, telling the body to shed the womb lining instead. 

Here’s a graphical representation of what is happening through the cycle.  The oestrogen and progesterone are the grey and purple lines on the middle chart, with oestrogen being represented by the grey line:

Menstrual cycle (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Wikipedia also has more detail on the sub-phases, as follows:

• Days 1-4: Menstrual phase
• Days 5-13: Proliferative phase
• Days 13-16: Ovulatory phase
• Days 16-28: Luteal (or secretory) phase

 *****

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, I’ll move onto the information I learned from Jamie’s articles, including a few of my own thoughts.

Basic ways diet could impact the menstrual cycle 

Jamie points out that the body makes hormones from cholesterol, specifically from large LDL particles.  These are obtained from saturated fat and studies have shown that reduced saturated fat in the diet, especially caused by vegetarianism, can slow and even reduce this oestrogen peak.  In those studies ovulation was either delayed by up to two days or even failed to peak high enough to signal ovulation.  If there is no ovulation then there are fertility issues which could be why fertility is often improved by the Paleo diet with it’s emphasis on animal products.

While I’m on this topic I also wonder if this is why people moving to a strict Paleo diet find their period dates change.  It is likely that any significant change to diet will change your LDL levels.  If your LDL increases so that you produce more hormones then the first half of the phase may shorten as more oestrogen can be created. 

It is worth noting that if there was no ovulation due to insufficient oestrogen then the progesterone signalling will be disrupted as well so it’s a downward spiral of fertility issues.  Reduced LDL (maybe removing certain things from the diet but insufficient animal fats being put into the diet) could also leave the body with insufficient building blocks for progesterone.  In sufficient progresterone is known to result in early bleeding, spotting and similar problems can arise.

Oestrogen – some key facts

• Oestrogen promotes glucose availability and uptake into type I muscle fibres (the endurance muscle fibres).  This was shown through experimentation and I am suspicious that in reality it promotes glucose uptake into all types of muscle fibres.
• It increases free fatty acid availability and oxidative capacity in exercise, so it is easier than it might otherwise be for your body to burn fat for fuel.
• This glycogen-sparing effect at the same time as promoting storage of glycogen allows the body to build up glycogen stores for the follicular phase when oestrogen is low and glucose uptake limited.
• Oestrogen suppresses protein catabolism (turning protein into fuel).
• Oestrogen deficiency can cause impaired regional blood flow when exercising (eg. blood flow to the working muscles).

Progesterone – some key facts

• Progesterone inhibits glycogen storage.
• It also promotes protein catabolism.

Exercise and hormones – some key facts

• Endurance performance and improvements are most marked in the mid-luteal phase, when there is a relatively high oestrogen to progesterone ratio.  I’m still trying to get my head round why this ratio is high at that point and not negative, based on the graph.
• Cycling time trial performance (an endurance effort) is best at the end of the follicular phase when the oestrogen to progesterone ratio is at a peak.
• Some studies have shown that the best strength performances occur during the menstrual phase.  This seems to contradict directly with my (and others) personal experience.
• Women with a low hormone status have a poor response to resistance exercise.  Looking at the graph, this seems to directly contradict the previous point (and support my personal experience).  How can we be at our strongest in the menstrual phase if that is also the point in the entire cycle when we have the least oestrogen and progesterone in our bodies?

• It is worth reiterating in this list the fact from the oestrogen section earlier that deficiency of oestrogen can cause impaired regional blood flow when exercising (eg. blood flow to the working muscles).

 *****

That’s more than enough for this week.  Next Thursday I will walk through the menstrual cycle, pulling all these threads together and explaining my conclusions on optimal diet and exercise at each phase of the menstrual cycle.  In the meantime, if you’ve got any thoughts on the points above I would love to hear them.

*****

Edit 27 March 2011:  Having just got back from holiday and read some of “The Great Cholesterol Con” by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick while I was away, I feel there is a need to make a brief amendment to this article.  I note that our bodies make hormones from large particle LDL cholesterol and that we obtain LDL from saturated fat.  The latter part of this isn’t quite correct if you believe what Dr. Kendrick has to say.  Dr Kendrick states that while we obtain cholesterol from our food we do not require saturated fat to “make” cholesterol.  It just happens that foods which contain higher levels of saturated fat are also rich in large particle LDL.  That’s about as far as the connection between saturated fat and cholesterol goes and Dr Kendrick’s book goes a long way to exploding the fat-cholesterol-heart disease “hypothesis” (myth).  I am intrigued why vegetarians and others with reduced animal foods in their diet might display characteristics which appear to be connected to insufficient large-particle LDL, since the body (specifically the liver) creates cholesterol if we don’t eat enough of it.  Why does the body not create sufficient of the cholesterol-types that we don’t have enough of? However, this is getting into the realms of cholesterol (my next research project, perhaps?) not the menstrual cycle which this post is about!

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part two
2. Blog-watch: diet and the menstrual cycle
3. Menstrual cycle on the contraceptive pill

Unfortunately there is a lot of noise about protein being bad for you, especially for your kidneys, when consumed in excess, although I can’t say I noticed any detrimental effects.  In fact, a lot of the noise about high protein and low carb diets seems to focus on the idea that you’ll consume more animal fats and that these are detrimental to your health, partly because you’ll consume excess calories because you are eating lots of dietary fat.  In fact, it is articles like this one from the BBC which often cause my blood to boil.

So what’s the real truth of the story?  I’ve been hunting about online and pulled together some articles about protein and high protein diets to see if I could reach a conclusion.

• Don at Primal Wisdom did a review of a recent study (based on the abstract) in which scientists compared the effect of isoenergetic (equal calorie) diets containing different amounts of protein.  The findings suggest that those athletes with the higher percentage protein intake in their diets showed some decreased body fat and increased lean body mass with no change to their total body mass.  Apparently there was no change to their exercise amount either.  As Don points out, the conclusion potentially seems a bit “extreme” given the limited evidence to support it, although the results do at least start to move in the right direction.  Potentially there is a need for a wider study on this subject though and, as we all know from personal experience, there are always other slight changes to lifestyle etc (even when you are trying really hard to not make any changes) which can cloud the issues of what is causing the changes seen in the results.
• Something I’m really interested in is whether a high protein diet really is bad for my kidneys.  After all, I don’t want to find out in a few years time that, in my quest to look a bit better I’ve completely ruined my chances at my main lifetime goal of happy and healthy longevity.  To the rescue comes Helen Kollias who did an article for Precision Nutrition looking first at the role of the kidney and how kidney function is tested before looking at a recent study which considered the effect of a high protein diet and resistance exercise on weight loss and body composition for overweight and obese patients with type 2 diabetes.  “High protein” for this study was nowhere near the percentages I was consuming, being 33% of the total dietary intake (I was on 70%, but then, I wasn’t eating very much either so total protein may well have been similar).  From the study they concluded that high protein diets plus resistance training resulted in fat loss, increased strength and, crucially, no kidney damage.  Of course, the biggest problem with this study is that there is no way of knowing whether the body composition changes were more a result from the training or the diet, but at least it gives some answer on the kidney point.
• So what are the options on high-protein diets and do they work?  The standard high-protein diet for weight loss is the protein sparing modified fast (PSMF) diet.  I’d never heard of this until someone asked me in a comment on a post I did about my latest foray into fat loss whether it was a PSMF diet.  Technically I suppose it was.  A PSMF diet is defined on Wikipedia (if you trust Wikipedia, although I recently heard an interview with a playwright on the radio where the interviewer told him that, according to Wikipedia, he was writing under a pseudonym – the playwright was pretty surprised to find his birth name wasn’t actually his real name).  It appears to be, essentially, a diet where you only eat protein, supplementing with certain minerals and consuming a lot of fluid (your body will burn through fluids at a rapid rate due to the use of body fat for energy).  This foods/directions chart for a PSMF diet with sample food menus gives a good feel for it though I’m surprised at some “high carb” foods they’ve left in like cheese and cottage cheese.  Especially since carb are the least satiating macronutrient.  More examples of the “fat is bad” myth?
• Lyle MacDonald has helped popularise the PSMF diet through his Rapid Fat Loss Handbook.  It’s a handbook designed to help you implement a PSMF diet and the results it achieves are clear from the photos. 
• For those wanting to identify high protein foods and know exactly how much protein they are consuming then you could consider turning to the High Protein Foods database which does exactly what it says.  Personally, I would find Fitday easier to use since you can then more easily compare different foods.

That’s all the links I found before I got high blood pressure from reading endless articles quoting the American Heart Association (AHA) that animal fat is bad for you, you’ll intake far too much animal fat on a high protein diet and “too much protein is bad for you” without providing any evidence.

It seems there are well-popularised high protein diets out there and it seems that, treated sensibly, high protein diets won’t damage your kidneys or do other dreadful damage to you so I’ll be sticking with my highly successful PSMF diet!

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: protein
2. Blog-watch: weight loss diets latest news
3. Blog-watch: low-carbohydrate diets

6.  Learn to be a difficult customer.  With the Christmas client-entertaining season I encountered a new challenge.  Large dinner functions as well as plenty of lunches and dinners at pubs and restaurants.  Having been brought up to always eat everything that was put in front of me and not to be a fussy eater (and also being a generally shy and retiring type when it comes to situations like ordering food) dealing with these scenarios involved a complete change of mindset for me. 

I learned that most restaurants actually deal quite well with the situation of being asked to prepare something “without the …” and I was frequently reminded of the diner scene from the film, When Harry Met Sally.  I did get some uncertain double-checking from the waiter in one particularly exclusive restaurant when he brought out my no-chicken Caesar Salad without dressing or anchovies (so just a bowlful of dry Cos lettuce with some croutons and parmesan shavings scattered over the top which I then left in the bottom of the bowl).  I’m not sure he could believe that I was prepared to pay £8 for a bowl of lettuce. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnlm2e3EN78

Everyone also seems to be used to people with small appetites, especially women but also men.  In fact, most clients I ate out with didn’t have a problem when I left some food on my plate with the declaration of, “that was an enormous helping”.  I even managed to leave all the pasta on my plate at an Italian restaurant where I’d order chicken breast in a tomato sauce on a bed of tagliatelle.

7.  Develop “allergies”.  Set dinners were more difficult to deal with.  My best form of defence for these was to claim I had allergies.  I would email the event manager in advance with a list of foods I was “allergic” to (usually wheat, gluten, sugar, dairy) and explaining that I was quite happy to have plain meat or fish with vegetables.  This had the effect of cutting out the foods I knew would add the most problems and calorie content to my meals, as well as keeping me much closer to a traditional paleo diet than I would usually manage at these sorts of events.  This had a dual benefit.  Firstly, it meant that I got simpler meals with fewer hidden calories (although melon starters, fruit puddings and potatoes featured a lot so that I still had to employ the “I have a tiny appetite” approach).  Secondly, I also had to remain compliant when things like cheeseboards were passed round because I’d usually had to explain to everyone round the table near the start of the meal that I was allergic to these foods and that was why I was being served something different.

8.  Learn substitute quantities of basic replacement foods.  When you are eating out at a restaurant there is a good chance that your usual foodstuffs aren’t on the menu.  However there is nearly always chicken and a few other meats and fish which appear in simple salad and “meat with vegetables” format on most menus.  While my personal daily menu is turkey and tuna, I have also done the calculation on Fitday so that I know how much chicken and pork equates to a tin of tuna (calorie-wise) or my breakfast portion of turkey.  I can then stay as close as possible to my correct calorie count while eating out, yet again applying the “tiny appetite” rule once I’m reaching my limit.

9.  Use personalised key measurements as well as weighing scales.  An error that a lot of people make is to only weigh themselves and then feel discouraged if the scales don’t move one week.  Unfortunately, bodyweight is dependent on so many factors in addition to body fat, including how much you last drank (and when you drank it), when you last had a bowel movement and how many hours it has been since your last meal.  It is far more accurate, and encouraging, to have a set of key measurements that you also track. 

I select my key measurements by where I know I carry most fat: my waist; upper glute area; centre hip; lower bottom/glute area; and the top of my thigh (I just measure my right thigh).  If I was only measuring my waist I would have become disheartened some time ago as it barely moves during some weeks.  Look at yourself objectively in the mirror and establish which places carry the most fat.  Select 3-5 measurements with the main focus on those areas and track those alongside your weight.

Measure more than just your weight (dark blue line) to see genuine progress

10.  Tell your friends and get “public” buy-in.  One of the biggest contributors to my success this time round was revealing my progress graph on the blog every week.  In the past I have shared this once I’ve finished a diet but the pressure of knowing I would have to explain myself to the world in any week when I didn’t make progress was enough to keep me compliant when my eye wandered to the bar of dark chocolate sat in the fridge.  While not everyone has a blog, I think most of us have a group of people we see regularly.  The people you see at work, your family, friends who you go out with.  Get their buy-in to your diet (if they don’t believe you should be dieting they’ll endlessly be trying to tempt you away from it) and ask them to actively challenge you.  Share your progress measurements with them so that you’ll have to tell people when it isn’t working and don’t ignore them when they ask if you should really be eating that biscuit which is halfway to your mouth.

That’s it for my top ten tips.  As I said, they aren’t the usual tips on how to stick with your diet but they are definitely things which have helped me get through so many months of hard dieting with minimal slip-ups along the way.

What other tips and tricks do you employ to help you stay on your diet?

Related posts:

1. Top ten tips for sticking to a diet (part 1)
2. Top ten tips for writing a weight loss diet
3. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part two

Actually, “pretty strict” probably doesn’t do it justice.  At the start I was eating 970 calories a day and by the end I was on about 850 calories a day.  When that’s all you’re eating, you get very particular about eating the foods that you know will leave you feeling satiated and which will also meet your nutritional needs.  For me, that involved turkey and tuna as well as piles of broccoli (sometimes raw), cabbage and lettuce.  I generally consider myself to have strong willpower, but even so there were definitely some methods I need to employ to ensure that I remained 100% compliant and subsequently saw so much fat loss success. 

Plain salads - portable and low calorie

With so many people starting out the New Year with resolutions to lose a bit of fat, I thought I would put together some top tips (in no particular order) on how to stick to your diet.  Five tips this week and a further five next week.  They’re a bit different to some of the usual tips and should probably be read in conjunction with other lists of diet-compliance tips but hopefully they’ll help you get the most out of your diet.

1.  Plan your meals in advance.  I struggled to know where to start with this list, but I have to say that this has been my biggest saviour.  Fitday is the perfect place to start as it gives you the opportunity to play with different combinations and quantities of foodstuffs until you reach the perfect calorie and macronutrient combination.  Once you have your perfect menu, use it.  Do not diverge from the plan.

2.  Keep it simple.  I have a low tolerance for spending hours working things out in Fitday and a high tolerance for eating the same things every day.  I therefore created a single one-day menu for me and then repeat, ad infinitum.  In comparison, when I put together a diet menu for my sister, I created an entire week of varying menus.  Twice during the thirteen weeks my tolerance for the same meal started to wane at which point I took a half hour to play about on Fitday and change my dinner slightly.  You may not be able to tolerate eating exactly the same thing every day but I can’t recommend enough having a simple meal plan, even if it involves a week’s worth of menus which you repeat each week. 

There’s a second part to this simplicity point.  Aim to keep your meals easy to prepare.  While you may sometimes be able to take time over preparing your meals, diet compliance requires meals that can be prepared quickly and efficiently on busy days.  If it takes too long there will be temptation to find an alternative which you won’t have carefully calculated.  If you do that then there’s a good chance you’ll eat too much of the wrong macronutrients.

3.  Write a shopping list.  Before you go shopping use your menu plan to write a detailed shopping list.  Not just what you need but how much of it.  Take this to the shops with you and stick to it.  Do not buy anything that doesn’t feature on the list.  Even if there is a fantastic special offer or reduced tag on something that you would usually eat.  If you’ve bought it you’ll almost certainly eat it.  If you think you can take it home and then spend hours playing about on Fitday to work out a menu to use it then think again.  What you end up with is unlikely to be as good as the perfect menu you had previously identified.

4.  Prepare food in advance.  One of my biggest aids to staying on my diet was the amount of preparation that we do at the weekends.  We have always taken some time at the weekend to make up all our lunches for the five working days of the week, boxed up in individual plastic boxes.  It takes about half an hour to make ten lunches (five days and two people).  To this I added roasting my turkey and cutting it up into bite-sized pieces.  It meant that each evening I could come home from work, dig my mini-tupperware out of my bag, place it on the scales and rapidly weigh out and box up the next morning’s breakfast portion.  Suddenly I had two meals, measured, boxed and ready for me to be 100% compliant.  There was no excuse for getting either meal wrong.

A week's worth of snacks for two people, packed up and ready to go

5.  Design your meals to be as portable as possible.  One of the other benefits of cold salad for lunch and cold roasted turkey for breakfast was their portability.  While I love having fried or scrambled eggs for breakfast, they generally require me to be in the house to cook them.  By selecting a cold, portable breakfast I was able to reach into the fridge each morning and grab both meals, even when I was unexpectedly pulled onto a special work project which required me to leave the house at 06.00 several times in December to go to London.  Just because my schedule changed didn’t mean I couldn’t stick with the diet. 

Given the simplicity of my dinners as well (tuna, cabbage and broccoli) I was even able to take a tin opener with me when I was working away in hotels for a few days and buy my tuna in supermarkets while finding a substitute for the vegetables (raw broccoli ended up being my vegetable substitute – I got very tired jaw muscles during those two weeks).

That’s enough tips for one week – the final five will follow next Wednesday.  Hopefully these are all things that you can easily implement in the meantime if you are in the early days of a new diet for the New Year.

Related posts:

1. Top ten tips for sticking to a diet (part 2)
2. Top ten tips for writing a weight loss diet
3. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part two