Myths

Is it really 80% diet and 20% exercise? Or is it 70/30?

We hear it all the time – 20% exercise, 80% diet. Or, wait…is it 30% exercise and 70% diet? Aren’t abs made in the kitchen, but you won’t get definition without some heavy liftin’?

It’s not that these sayings are untrue so much as they’re misleading. No worries, I’m here to clear this up for you.

There is no mathematical way to break down whether exercise or diet is more important for your goals. If you want to run a marathon, changing your diet isn’t going to help you with endurance. Exercise, specifically running, will. This goes the same for any goal – gaining muscle isn’t achieved by just increasing protein consumption, it’s gained by exercise. Sure, the two go hand in hand, but is it really as simple as an 80/20 or 70/30 ratio?

So what are these numbers trying to tell us? If you’re falling short on your goals – fitness or weight loss – you need to look at your diet. If you don’t appropriately fuel your body you’re not going to get anything out of it. Additionally, if you’re trying to lose weight, falling into the “exercise your pizza away” trap will lead to a vicious cycle. Exercise should never be a compensatory tool for any meal you just ate.

The truth of the matter is that diet is very important, and much easier to tailor than exercise for weight loss. If you want to lose weight, you must create a caloric deficit (you can read about this here). Creating a calorific deficit by switching out high calorie foods with low nutrient density for low calorie foods with high nutrient density (see: trading pizza for chicken breast) is much easier and takes all of 1 minute. If you wanted to burn those calories off, you’re committing yourself to miles of running or hours at the gym. It’s easier to rein in your diet and make small changes here and there than to spend surplus time at the gym to “make up” for a bad diet.

Additionally, people tend to underestimate what they eat and overestimate what they burn. The science behind burning calories is not exact. The science behind the caloric content of your food an estimate. Watching your portions is easier, and more effective, then plugging away on the treadmill for 4 hours every morning.

Diet is important because your body requires fuel to function. It also takes less time to swap out high calorie for low calorie than exercising “off” excess calories.

Exercise is important because without challenging your body, you’ll never see results. Lifting weights, running, swimming, etc. is how you increase muscle mass, strength, endurance or cardiovascular healthy. Diet alone cannot do that.

It’s not x% vs. x% – it’s a good balance between fueling your body and making it work hard.

August 15, 2012 Exercise, Fat Loss, Myths Read more >

What weighs more – a pound of muscle or a pound of fat?

A pound of feathers and a pound of bricks both weigh a pound – it’s not a trick.

The idea that a pound of muscle weighs more than a pound of fat is a misunderstanding. A pound is a pound is a pound. The difference is how much space they take up. Since muscle is more dense, a pound of muscle takes up less space than a pound of fat. That’s why two people of the same weight and height can look so different – muscle mass can change your appearance drastically.

It’s also important to remember that fat does not become muscle. You lose fat, you gain muscle – they’re two completely different things. So when you’ve gained weight but lost inches you’ve LOST fat and GAINED muscle. Your fat didn’t become muscle.

August 15, 2012 Myths Read more >

The Sugar Series: Diet Soda and Fat Loss

Does diet soda slow down your weight loss progress by slowing your metabolism? Does it make you pack on the pounds?

No, it doesn’t.

Let’s look at this 6 month study that compared sucrose sweetened soda (“regular soda”) with milk and diet coke given to obese people. Basically, they drank 1 liter per day of their drink of choice and then at the end the researchers compared the fat in their liver and muscle. End result? “Regular soda” showed an increase in liver and muscle fat over the other two groups. The study didn’t mention the rest of the diet of these individuals, much less the mean calories ingested by each person, however it does show that diet soda was no more likely to increase your fat than any other drink.

So, what if you replace regular soda with diet soda? Or juice with diet soda?I’ve got a study for that. As expected, when you replace regular soda (with calories) with diet soda (without calories) you lose weight. In fact, it had the same weight loss effect as switching from regular soda to water.

Fat gain comes down to ingestion of calories, no one single item slowing down your metabolism and sabotaging weight loss. Diet soda can be a helpful way for people to transition from “drinking their calories” in the form of regular soda.

July 24, 2012 Myths, Nutrition, Sugar Read more >

The Sugar Series: Aspartame and your Appetite

When I was in undergrad I was told by a professor that diet soda makes you hungrier later. He said that aspartame binds to receptors and releases insulin and other hormones, and when your body goes to convert it to energy it finds no energy. This makes you hungry. I’ve also heard “empty calories” used to discuss a phenomenon in which you eat zero calorie food and, as a result, your hunger hormones flair and sabotage you.

None of this is true.

Let’s look at the first claim – your body sensing sweetness and releases enzymes in response to it. This is no phenomenon, this is the “Cephalic” or “Anticipatory” phase of digestion. Regardless of what you eat this phase is put into effect the minute you put anything into your mouth (and before). We’ve already shown in a previous study that insulin isn’t released by non-nutritive sweeteners, so we know that part is false. Additionally, it’s shown that carbohydrates decrease appetite in this phase, but sweetened carbohydrates do the opposite effect. Moral of the story? It’s too complex to chalk it up to just artificial sweeteners, so we’ll move on.

What about the hormones that control appetite?

There’s two major players examined in this study – CCK and GLP-1, the so-called “satiety hormones.” This study wanted to see if aspartame paired with a meal vs. aspartame alone vs. a control did anything to these hormones. They found that aspartame plus a meal actually increased desire to eat from 1 hour to 2 hours, but none of these hormones were effected. Basically, if you pair diet coke with amino acids in a meal the average joe took twice as long to get hungry again, but not because of the satiety hormones. Sorta on the same vein, this study found that aspartame doesn’t increase cortisol or growth hormone.

What about self reported hunger? Back in the day a man gave people as much as 10g of aspartame in a pill and checked out their hunger response.This reanalysis shows that aspartame at high levels may actually decrease your appetite, going against the idea that diet soda will make you ravenous.

July 21, 2012 Myths, Nutrition, Sugar Read more >

The Sugar Series: Sugar and Insulin

So we started the series out by looking at some basic terminology, now we’re going to dive deep. This particular portion looks at how different types of sugar influence our insulin levels. Remember, insulin is the hormone that says “store this sugar in our liver, muscles or fat cells.” A lot of arguments against diet sodas, particularly aspartame sweetened ones, cite this as a cause of concern with weight gain.

Let’s look at aspartame in particular. This study and this study tried to see if ingesting aspartame caused an insulin spike. The first study compared just plain aspartame vs. aspartame plus albumin (a primary protein in the blood). They found that aspartame alone had no effect on insulin, but albumin + aspartame did. The second study looked at a common fear of aspartame – that if you drink a diet coke + carbohydrates your insulin spikes higher than normal causing you to store more sugar as fat. This turned out to be false as well. Diabetic? Turns out that non-nutritive sweeteners had no effect on insulin either.

It wasn’t just aspartame either, it was a wide range of low energy sweetenerswithout an effect on insulin.

So where did this myth come from? Probably this study, which showed that in certain cells in the rat pancreas when infused (not orally ingested) with aspartame AND glucose could cause a spike in insulin.

What about the others? Sucralose also didn’t cause a spike in insulin, nor did it effect appetite in those who ingested it. In fact, if we’re looking at sucralose vs. sucrose you’ll find that the “crash in blood sugar” x hours after ingestion only occurred with sucrose, and that sucrose was also the only sugar shown to cause a spike in insulin. If you’re familiar with table sugar this should come as no surprise to you. Stevia fairs about the same.

Long story short, current literature does not support the idea that no-calorie sweeteners cause a spike in insulin.

July 18, 2012 Myths, Nutrition, Sugar Read more >