The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth

Linda Hahn's Results Doing The Cure

My wife Linda finished doing the Eades 6 Weeks Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle. She did quite well if I may say so.

Linda lost a total of 11 pounds in 6 weeks. This is excellent by anyone standards. All with no added physical activity.

I'd like to see a single study showing better results than this while including added physical activity. All she did was two, 15 minute strength sessions which came to a total of 15 minutes of total exercise per week. But she was doing this before.

Her lean mass went from 107.41 pounds on August 20th to 105.5 pounds on October 2nd. This loss of lean was accounted for by a half liter of water loss. 1/2 liter weighs 1 pound. Since she lost 2 pounds of lean, 1/2 came from warer, the other 1/2 from lean tissue. A small price to pay for such fantastic results. However, her percentage of lean mass to fat mass went up by 2%. This is more important than her total lean mass.  

Her fat mass went from 44.59 pounds to 39.04 pounds on October 2nd. A loss of 5.5 pounds.

Today she weighed in at 141 pounds with no loss of lean mass. So She went from 152 to 141 - 11 total pounds lost. 9 from fat, 1 from water, 1 from lean tissue.

Here's her electronic body fat printout before and after:

One of the amazing things about this program is that it's, well, really easy to do and to stick to.

If the entire country adopted this eating plan, my predicition is that obesity and adult onset diabetes would virtually vanish in one year - two tops. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Feel free to email me with any questions.

If your thinking of trying The Cure, do so. Don't think - just do. 
 

Lean Times

While John Cloud erred in several ways in his Time magazine article titled Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin, he's correct on the fat loss issue. Many people including the Surgeon General have lambasted Mr. Cloud for his candor and scientifically sound information on getting svelte.

 What he was saying is that exercise does not affect fat loss much if at all. And research on the subject of exercise and fat loss supports his statement time and time again. Even the American College of Sports Medicine agrees that exercise does little to affect it as we’ll learn shortly.

 The knee-jerk reactions that bombarded the internet lambasting Cloud for the article which include Jake Steinfeld (the Jake of  Body by Jake Fame) only serve to keep people fat and injured.  They assume that Cloud is saying that exercise is not good for us or that it provides no benefit. That is not what John Cloud was saying. And he does, in fact, make mention of the many benefits of exercise. In fact he even says at the end of the article “You should exercise to improve your health…” Again, the title of the article is "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin." And it won't. It never has and that is a fact of science. Good for John for having the guts to reveal this information and help us all get closer to the truth and, perhaps, save us from an orthopedic injury.

 Jake Steinfield, who may I say I respect and admire, had this to say on his Huffington Post blog:

 “Cloud states that the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association's guidelines regarding weight loss and exercise are unrealistic, especially for those with jobs or those looking for jobs. The guidelines encourage exercise for 60 to 90 minutes on most days of the week. What he fails to mention is that they also say that "research shows that moderate-intensity physical activity can be accumulated throughout the day in 10-minute bouts, which can be just as effective as exercising for 30 minutes straight. This can be useful when trying to fit physical activity into a busy schedule."

 What Jake neglects to mention is that, unfortunately for those who seek to lose weight via exercise, the ACSM admits exercise doesn’t work. From the AHA/ ACSM paper titled: Physical Activity and Public Health. Updated Recommendation for Adults From the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association (page 7):

 “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.”

 Also from Jake’s Huff Post blog (he is quoting Dr. Robert Sallis, past president of the American College of Sports Medicine): 

"If exercise were a pharmaceutical it would be the most potent drug ever invented. Exercise has been clearly proven to prevent and treat chronic diseases and lower mortality rates. From a scientific perspective, any attempt to discredit the value of exercise is just laughable and potentially very harmful to the public. As a physician who works hard to get patients more active, I find it very irresponsible for Time magazine to run a story that so misrepresents the facts."

Well, Dr. Sallis isn’t quite correct. All of the studies done on exercise that are used as iron clad proof that exercise prevents and treats chronic disease and lowers mortality rates are epidemiological / observational studies. These types of studies are not controlled research studies. They can only suggest an association - they do not prove cause and effect. Just because people who exercise regulary live longer and are generally healthier than those who don’t doesn’t mean that the exercise caused these benefits.

But why? Why does exercise have little to no effect on fat loss? There are many reasons including increased appetite and being more sedentary after the workout. An interesting example of this was watching my daughters ride their bikes around Mackinac Island last week while we were on vacation and after the 8 mile ride all they wanted to do was sit in bed and read.

But the most important issue is the understanding of the language of fat loss. What tells the body to release fat from the fat cells?

Fat loss is not a numbers game. In other words, a calorie is not always just a calorie. Fat loss is a hormonal game. Fat is not released from the fat cells because you burn calories doing exercise. No one loses fat without altering their diet and sticking to that alteration. And the specific alteration is a reduction in carbohydrates, not necessarily calories, which in turn reduces insulin secretion, which in turn allows the lipids to be released form the fat cell. That's the biochemistry. We don't get to vote on it. There are other issues, but this is far and away the most critical.

And why do so many experts and the ACSM assume exercise will work even though time and time again research fails to support the assumption. So too do the failures of millions of Americans who try to shed the pounds by sweating to the oldies.

A thorough read of Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories explains this in great detail. According to Gary:

"Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. So the question everyone should be asking and always should have been asking is what factors regulate fat accumulation? As it turns out we've known that since the 1960s and it is not controversial. You can find it in endocrinology and biochemistry textbooks, just not in obesity textbooks. Fat accumulation is fundamentally determined by the hormone insulin and our insulin levels go up and down with the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume. The more carbs we eat, the more refined they are and the sweeter they are (the more fructose in them, in other words), the more insulin we will ultimately secrete. The higher our insulin levels, the more fat we accumulate."

Exercise cannot and does not solve the problem of fat release from the fat cell. The real key to the fat cell is not exercise. It is the control of hormonal tone and the most important hormone to control is insulin.

As the late Carl Sagan said: "Science as a candle in the dark."

Seven Things You Can Do Right Now To Get Lean Fast

1. Get an extra 2 hours of sleep per night
2. Eat no carbohydrates save for leafy, cruciferous veggies
3. Watch comedies, read a good joke book and laugh with friends
4. Drink cool water, water and more water and no other beverage
5. Walk everywhere you go (this is NOT for calorie burning but for improving insulin sensitivity)
6. Weight lift twice per week in an intense (but safe) manner (my book would help!)
7. Eat a protein rich meal or drink a shake within 30 minutes after your workout

Go. Do. Start. Enjoy!

New Study on Obesity

A new study by a group of Austrailian researchers found that obesity in Americans is caused by overeating, not inactivity.

My friend Bill tipped me off via email to this unbelievable story. (Tongue deeply inserted into cheek.) Here's what Bill wrote to me in the email:

"Fred, What's it like to continually be backed up by the evidence?"

"Lovely." I replied.

This was found to be especially true for children. For my book Strong Kids Healthy Kids I scoured the research and, lo and behold, I could not find a single study that supported inactivity as a cause for adolescent obesity. In fact, research revealed that obese kids were just as active as lean kids.

Said Boyd A. Swinburn, a professor at the health faculty of Australia's Deakin University:

"Among children, the tests yielded a 100 percent match, leading researchers to conclude that changes in physical activity had had no impact whatsoever on America's children growing fatter."

Thank you Dr. Swinburne.

If you all recall, Bob Greene (Oprah's trainer) argued this point with me  Clearly Bob had not read any of the research. Bob insisted that research clearly shows that physical activity is necessary for kids to lose fat and inactivity is one of the main causes of the alarming rate of fat gain in kids today. 'Fraid not.

The researchers found that American adults actually weighed less than could be expected from their diet. Swinburn remarked:

"Which means that if anything over that period of time the adults had been increasing their physical activity, not decreasing."

That's one way to look at it. However, there are almost no studies that support the idea that increasing physical activity will result in weight loss. The ACSM and the American Heart Association had this to say in the 2007 updated recommendations for physical activity and public health Aha exercise recs 2007:

“It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to  gain weight over time, compared with those who have  low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.”

   

My guess is that Americans have NOT increased their physical activity a jot. Rather, an increase in carbohydrate consumption is the cause of the added fat gain despite the total calories not adding up. We know from recent research that isocaloric diets of different carbohydrate amounts yield different gains in adiposity. In other words, people gain more fat on non-reduced, isocaloric diets that are higher in carbohydrates. Put simply carbs make you fatter than calories from fat and protein. In other, other, words, a calorie is not a calorie.

And we know that carbohydrate intake has increased dramatically from the recent NHANES figures. In fact since 1971, carb intake is up in men and women by a whopping 23% and 38% respectively.


I am tickeld thin by this recent study and perhaps now we'll be able to get somewhere in the fight against obesity especially for kids.

Let's ride into the sunset of health in the direction science says the horse is going.

Savor the flavor

One of the things that a lot of folks do when they eat is they scarf their food down like a pogrom is coming. Besides resembling a vacuum cleaner and potentially choking to death, eating fast has other negative effects.

I am now reading Dr. Richard Bernstein's book The Diabetes Solution. In it he makes mention that eating too quickly and too much raises insulin levels far higher than if one eats slowly.

Like a jerk, I lost the page that its on and cannot seem to find it (the book is over 500 pages) so, I can't quote the good doctor directly. But suffice it to say, to minimize insulin spikes which facilitate fat storage, eat slowly - savor the flavor. Don't swallow until the food in your mouth is close to a liquid.

And of course the food in your mouth will preferably be not a grain or a processed food. But real food. Something like this:

Or this:

My wife is finding Paul McKenna's book (with a somewhat self-serving title) I Can Make You Thin (which should have been titled You Can Make You Thin) a very motivating book. In it he discusses the same idea - enjoy your food and eat slowly.

Try it!

Oprah's dilemma

Take a look at this.

It's a story about a well-meaning personal trainer from Canada, Jessica Zapata, who is trying to appeal to Oprah to try her way of training to lose the weight she has regained. Kudos to her for giving it a shot. But Oprah already has a top, expert, veteran trainer by her side named Bob Greene. It is doubtful Bob doesn't know everything Jessica knows and then some.

The interesting thing is though Ms. Zapata is correct that a busy person like Oprah needs to keep her workouts simple and focus on strength training (pretty much like anyone else), her recommendations are anything but simple. In fact, the workouts Zapata recommends are overly complicated, hugely cumbersome and way overkill. If you haven't clicked on the article yet please do so and take a look. Clearly she means well, but I would cut the volume of exercise she suggests in half - at least.

I watch Oprah from time to time. The unfortunate thing for Oprah is that she, like Jessica Zapata and many others, believe that exercise is part of the cure for obesity. It's not and literally has almost nothing to do with it. Sure, be active. Run, skip jump all you like. But it won't do much at all for losing fat. That's a fact. Inactivity is not how we become fat in the first place. We all know lean, inactive people and over fat active people.

So how do we become over fat? I'm going to bold the answer for emphasis:

We become fat mainly because we eat too many carbohydrates.

Fat loss (and gain) is a hormonal game, not a calorie game. And the specific hormone is insulin.

Some people are more susceptible to fat gain due to having a less robust hormonal tone. But ALL people function the same in that eating carbohydrate increases the hormone insulin. One of the main jobs of insulin is to store body fat. In fact, without insulin, you can eat anything you want and you will remain lean.

Of course, without insulin you'll be dead too. But before you die you won't store a molecule of fat.

If Oprah really wants to lose fat and keep it off forever, she needs to eat foods that will not allow her insulin levels to rise too high. And restricting carbohydrate is the key to keeping her insulin levels low. A previous show revealed an eating plan that science would suggest included too many total carbs. Though her choices were smart for being lower on the glycemic scale, she still had far too many total carbs on her menu.

It's this simple. It really is. And again it's science, not my opinion. If she eats the menu she talked about on her show, she's going to have a tough fat loss road ahead. It's not that it can't work the way she is approaching it mind you, but it will be harder to achieve - all the while with a loss of lean mass (muscle and bone) to boot. Her diet is too low in fat and protein to maintain her current lean mass.

Again, this is not my personal opinion - what I am saying is rooted in science. 'Don't shoot me - I'm only the messenger!' as it were. Anyone reading this who disagrees with me and perhaps is getting slightly ticked off by my words I urge you to delve deeper into the current research on the issue. Go here to start your journey.

Call it Atkins. Call it Protein Power. What both these eating plans have in common is science. We've known that restricting carbs is the way to leanness and better health for a century or more. It's nothing new. These two diets are not fad diets at all. The fad diet is actually the current food pyramid which suggests that almost 80% of our calories come from carbohydrates. No wonder there is an obesity/diabetes epidemic!

I hope Oprah succeeds. More than likely she will. But it is far tougher to go the route she is going to travel than the one science suggests she should. We must all be willing to step outside ourselves - our opinions - and take a fresh look at many of the ideas and tenets we hold onto especially when it's painless to do so. Heck, you never know what you might find out.

"Science as a candle in the dark." - Carl Sagan

An Honor

I was honored the other day by being included in Jimmy Moore's list of the Top 10 low-carb movers and shakers for 2008.

To be placed in the same company as these professionals is a true honor.

Whither Did I Go?

Last week starting on Sunday, I was viciously attacked by some nasty germs that defeated my immune system and made me feel like a ball of phlegm. This is rare for me.

I laid low for 2 days and sweated out the illness. And when I say sweated, I mean sweated.

My bed sheets became liquid. Eww I know.

What was interesting was I had an appetite. I ate, as usual, never missing a meal. Not one. I even craved pizza one day and ate three huge pieces that had added sausage, hamburger, cheese, artichokes and mushrooms.

I drank tea like it was going out of style but my body shivered and sweat gallons more than I could take in.

Stepping back: On Thursday of last week I had a great, hard, taxing strength workout. The week before I had one of the best body composition readings of my life. Here it is below (I left it big so you can see it better):

As you can see, rounding up or down, I had 158 pounds of lean tissue, and 22 pounds of body fat.

Here is my body comp reading today:

UH oh - whither did I go? A mere week and a few days later it appears I have gained 3 pounds of fat and lost 7 pounds of muscle! Egads! Can this be possible?

In short, no. I bring this up because water loss can be quite deceiving and unnerving to those who don't understand the inner goings on of weight loss.

As I mentioned earlier, being sick and sweating my sheets into liquid, I lost huge amounts of water weight. And look at the water differences. Before I had 53.2 litres of body water. (The machine is a bioimpedence machine that uses an electrical current to measure body water.)

After my illness I had a mere 48.6 litres of water.  A litre of water weighs ~2.2 pounds. If we do the math we see that I lost 10.2 pounds of water. Almost exactly the amount of lean mass lost. 

What I effectively did was shriveled my muscle mass into beef jerky - I dried it up but didn't lose much if any actual muscle tissue.

The fat gain of 3 pounds (22 to 25lbs.) is the difference (in the scale weight). Since I lost 10 pounds of water and only 7.5 pounds on the scale, it had to make up the other 3 pounds somewhere and did so by adding fat weight. This particular reading baffles me a little as I clearly did not gain fat. But none of these devices are absolutely perfect.

The moral of this tale is the scale all by itself can be a booby trap. Water loss can make you lighter - a lot lighter - yet at the same time not really mean fat loss - or muscle loss.

So don't depend on the scale alone to judge fat loss or gain. Always try and keep your water intake consistent and plentiful.

Buy a pair of skinny jeans (or slacks) - the ones you'd LIKE to wear and try them on every week. (If you stretch them, wash them back to tightness). This is one of the best ways to judge progress or lack thereof if the scale is your only measure of progress.

Colpo Continues His Nonsense

Anthony Colpo, the self proclaimed diet and training expert from Australia who I pulverized a few months ago with a post showing his inability to decipher simple exercise studies, is at it again. He never blasted me or addressed the post because he didn't want anyone to read it and see that he doesn't know much when it comes to reading exercise research.

Colpo appears so incensed with destroying the metabolic advantage of low carbohydrate/sugar diets in the paper that he has offered to pay to a charity of your choice $20,000 to anyone who can prove him wrong. (Does he HAVE $20,000 he has yet to prove.) Go here to read all about it.

I know I said I promised I would not write anymore on this guy, but I'm breaking my promise because I want to give you all the opportunity to win $20,000 for a charity of your choice - or to prove he's a liar and shut his trap for good.

The man is prolific - you gotta give him that. He's also clearly bonkers.

But it's sort of fun to read his drivel. He makes his position sound so right - so compelling. You can almost see him tearing his hair out with anger and frustration save for the fact that he shaves his head. (As a balding man, I find it offensive when other men who otherwise would have a full head of thick hair fully expose their pates. It's almost as if they mock us!)

History: Colpo used to be a strict low fat guy, trumpeting from on high that fat was bad, lean meats were good, ex-cetera, ex-cetera,ex-cetera.

Oops - wrong! But hey at least he admits it! What a guy.

After learning fat is good, he writes a book preaching that all of the doctors in the world who say cholesterol is the demon and statins are our savior are not only wrong, but are the reason why his dad died an untimely death. A book that had already been written several times, in whole or in part mind you, by other more credible sources.

At some point he became a low carb believer after his foray with low fat and still is a low carber, BUT he has now found another ring to fight in to gain popularity and prestige. I mean, what is the poor man going to do now that he has written his cholesterol book which didn't make him rich or get him on Oprah and is now a mere personal trainer in Melbourne? He desperately needs something to do for fun right? He must have attended some personal trainer PR/marketing class which said: "If you can't beat them, insult them!"

He even tries to malign the Eades by listing 14 different bad Amazon reviews of their NY Times bestselling book Protein Power. Yes - a NY Times bestseller.

He lists these bad reviews of Protein Power as if to somehow support his stance and help prove he's right about the metabolic advantage. Of course, all this does is serve to undermine a low carb approach to eating - a regimen he himself undertakes. How utterly absurd is this?

He adamantly insists that tightly controlled ward studies are the only way to determine proof of anything but feels that subjective book reviews on Amazon are a valid means to prove the Eades are wrong. Astonishing. 

Colpo knows that most of these reviews are from people who more than likely did not follow the plan as is laid out in the book since there are far more positive reviews than non. In fact of the 439 reviews, 319 are 5 star, 62 are 4 star. So, 381 of the 439 reviews are 4 star or better. And if you look at the Protein Power Life-plan book, 56 out of the 65 reviews are 4 star or better. As an author myself there are always a few naysayers who bad mouth your book without even reading it.

"Nuff said on that. 

When you read his blatherings, you can feel the underlying seething that his book never reached the bestseller list and that he despises others who have made it rich writing about diet and exercise. He mentions fairly often that experts like the Eades and others have made 'zillions of dollar's off of the metabolic advantage idea never stopping to realize that experts like the Eades have been writing books, running clinics and piling up their professional degrees and helping gazillions of people improve their help before Mr. Colpo was in 3rd grade.

In a nutshell Colpo's position is this: Calories in, calories out, is all that matters. Nothing else makes a difference.

In the paper I cited above, he lists several ward studies where no matter what the macronutrient makeup of the diet is, the subjects lost the same amount of weight and fat. Most of these studies had less than 20 people in them (some fewer than 10)which in and of itself invalidates these as credible research studies ward or not.

And if you think you can't cheat during a ward study you are sorely mistaken. In fact one of the ward studies which did show an advantage favoring the low carb diet Colpo rips into by saying that the study was a 'poorly controlled mess' where researchers made the subjects feel bad because they were having food snuck into the ward and cheating left and right. He quotes the researchers as saying:

"The first and main hazard was that many of the patients had inadequate personalities. At worst they would cheat and lie, obtaining food from visitors, from trolleys touring the wards, and from neighbouring patients. (Some required almost complete isolation.)"

So much for your ward studies being pure. Do you think the other ward studies he cited might have been fraught with the same problems? And since we know that protein and to a lesser degree fat satiates the appetite and that high carb low protein/fat diets cause hunger, which group do you think cheated the most?

Fact is this: the more that you eat a diet full of sugar, grains and bad fats -- like trans fats, the more you are mess with your brain’s ability to decipher the biochemical signals that tell it to stop eating and storing fat.

These signals come from your hormones insulin and leptin and one of their jobs is to control your metabolism.

Insulin tells the vast majority of your cells whether to burn or store fat and whether to utilize that energy for maintenance, repair or reproduction.

Leptin sends powerful signals that reduce your hunger, increase fat burning and reduce fat storage.

When you mainly eat carbs is causes your blood sugar to rise and depending on the carbs to spike after you eat and your body becomes resistant to these important messages.

The result? Major hormonal miscommunications that signals your body to eat more food usually sugar, and store more fat. When your insulin and leptin levels are increased, it becomes far more difficult for your body to use fat as a fuel as the enzymes required for doing this are significantly impaired.

That's the metabolic advantage that a study with 11 people over a period of 6 weeks will never be seen.

If I start smoking today my lungs will not show signs of disease for quite some time. This does not mean that smoking is safe for my lungs. It's one of the problems with statin studies. The drug companies conduct a study that lasts a year or so and conclude the drug has few side effects and is safe. BUT if that same study lasted 5 years we'd see a very different picture.

Colpo cannot see the wood for the trees.

What I've been Telling People For 15 Years

It's not what you put out, it's what you put in.

Thanks Gary!

And what Taubes leaves out of this fine article is the fact that you have to subtract the amount of calories you'd burn anyway from the total burned doing exercise simply doing nothing.

EXAMPLE:

1 hour treadmill run = ~300 calories burned.

1 hour sitting on rump = ~100 calories burned.

300-100 = 200 additional calories burned (mainly from sugar not stored body fat).

3,500 calories in a pound of fat.

3,500 -:- 200 = 17.5 days it would take you exercising to lose one pound of fat.

200 calories is a half of a banana and a small glass of skim milk.

Oh - and as you get more fit the amount of calories burned for that same hour goes down as heart rate doesn't go up as much and the entire hour is just easier. Easier efforts burn less calories than harder efforts for the same time frame.

So now you have to run longer or faster or both.

Where is that orthopedic doctor's phone number?