Four important fat loss guidelines, part 2....

Today's Post:  Monday, 8-5-2013

You might have seen the article Yahoo had last Friday, 8-2-2013, on 5 myths about weight loss.

Some of what they wrote is accurate but can be harmfully misleading if you don’t know more.  And, one of them is flat out wrong!

I skip the one about calories burned during love-making as their point is just too simplistic and under-researched.  But only very young and active people who skip eating for their love-making get a big effect comparable to how much the other 4 areas matter. 

AND they left out that becoming less fat and more fit dramatically increases how well and often you make love.  It’s a major motivator to lose fat rather than a way to do so!

But these other four things they listed  had more substance --  both the good and the likely wrong or harmful things they said.

Here, their 4 points and my comments:  (Only have time for the first one today and the other 3 will be next time.)

Here are my comments on their other 2 points:

(I lost the third one between Friday and today, unfortunately.)

1.  She said that: “Setting realistic goals for weight loss will help you stick with it.”

She said this was false and that many studies found more ambitious goals led to more weight loss.

This one is really dangerous even if true.  And they had no clue they should include the danger and what to do about it to be helpful instead of harmful!

Last Friday we posted about the difference between HOW most people use this to cause fat loss failure and how to use it to boost your fat loss success instead!

Simply put, cutting back too much on how much you eat every day causes failure something like 99% of the time.  So doing more of that instead of less as they seem to possibly suggest makes failure even more certain.

But what does work to cause mostly hunger free fat loss using the 4 methods that do this AND cause more fat loss is to do each one as well as you can and begin them all the first two to four weeks and upgrade them in four more weeks.

We described those 4 methods last Friday.  People who do that instead of cutting back too much every day can lose 8 to 25 pounds by the end of the first 8 weeks.  But their metabolism stays high or goes up; they don’t get much hungrier and hardly at all for 5 days a week; and they gain muscle or stay the same instead of losing it!  THAT is sustainable and you can do it until your excess fat is all gone!

Here are my comments on their other 2 points:

(I lost the third one between Friday and today, unfortunately.)

But these two are mostly true, NOT false!

1.  They said that eating breakfast helped with fat loss and not gaining it back was FALSE.

Their authority was that in 2 randomized, controlled trials always eating breakfast or always skipping it, showed no effect.  The key is the “controlled” part.  If you force people to eat the same total calories each day, sure they will tend to get very similar results.

In real life, people do tend to eat more calories later in the day and more fattening foods if they skip breakfast. 

Eating breakfast is effective in part because it enables people to have far more appetite control at the time of day many people eat fattening mid-morning snacks and at dinner.

A breakfast high in health OK protein and fiber foods tends to hold off hunger until lunch time far better than skipping it does.  This is also the case for dinner.  People who eat no breakfast are often starving hungry at dinner time instead of just normally hungry.

Almost all other studies have found that always eating breakfast helps with fat loss in several ways.  One even found though this was less true of men, always eating breakfast was close to essential for women.

But it gets better!  People who always eat breakfast tend to actually eat MORE calories total and get more nutrition AND are LESS fat than people who do not.

This is because eating that kind of breakfast tends to boost the metabolism of people who do it and lower their average insulin levels and blood sugar levels!  That’s in addition to eating better foods and more appetite control later in the day.

Even better, at breakfast, you can get away with eating whole fruit or even fruit juices because your body processes carbohydrates better at breakfast than it does later in the day.

One fat loss expert even allows her clients to have sugary treats or desserts at breakfast some days a week because of this.  She finds they then are much more likely to be disciplined in what they eat the rest of the day since they DID get to have the treats.  I don’t suggest this since these kinds of foods are also directly harmful to eat that often.  But it does show how robust this effect is.

Lastly, what  the medical profession calls the gold standard is what those people do who lose over 30 pounds and keep it off for years.  Over 80% of these people always eat breakfast!

There are some people who can get away with not eating breakfast and still lose fat.  But at the very least these are people who do everything else right and have very high levels of self control.  That fits the data since more men do this than women.

For most people, always eating breakfast gives them substantial extra leverage on causing and maintaining their fat loss!

They also are more able and competent at work than people who skip breakfast yet other studies have found.

So she got this one very, wrong indeed!

2.  She said that believing that snacking leads to weight gain is false

She said that both controlled and observational studies simply don’t find consistent results one way or the other.

Once again, what she found is so. 

But the implication she leaves readers with is completely and totally false!

Both the inconsistent and conflicting results and the important to know underlying reality are because there are basically TWO kinds of snacks!

 The data on that are VERY clear!

a)  Uncontrolled and even automatic and compulsive snacking on harmful and fattening foods is a MAJOR cause of getting fat and staying fat!

If you have a supply of such foods at your desk you have a bit of several times each morning and afternoon, you will be fat no matter what you do or think you are doing at eating very low calorie meals the rest of the time.

The snacking calories from this kind of snacking amount to huge totals over every week and the kinds of foods are fattening on top of that!

And, that’s not all!  Many people snack on these kinds of foods while watching TV and eat them almost on autopilot in huge quantities.

NEVER eat such snack foods while watching TV every day!

b)  Controlled and planned snacks of health OK foods that have some health OK protein or fat or fiber by contrast can actually help fat loss!

So as you can see, studies that mix these two kinds of snacks get confusing and inconsistent results.

BUT, if you compare uncontrolled snacks several times an hour of fattening foods with controlled, regular snacks once or twice a day of health OK foods that are NOT fattening,

THEN you see VERY consistent results.

Uncontrolled snacks several times an hour of fattening foods is virtually ALWAYS fattening!

That’s true and NOT a myth.

Conversely, many people who have one or two snacks a day at the same time each day of controlled amounts of health OK foods that have some health OK protein or fat or fiber by contrast can actually help fat loss!

That is also true.

The key difference is WHICH kind of snacks are we talking about!