parents

On Dec 31 2007, 3:59 pm, Zebee Johnstone <zeb... DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> In aus.motorcycles on Sun, 30 Dec 2007 17:50:23 -0800 (PST)
>
> JL <jlitt... DeleteThis @my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > Well you probably know far more than I do on the subject, but my
> > perception is you're incorrect - the rise in obesity (and by that I
> > mean people who are "seriously overweight" (1) ) being reported,
> > matches with my general observations. In other words when I went to
>
> And mine. But the definitions *have* changed and it also isn't clear
> what the cause of it is.  The problem is that heights have increased,
> and kids are a lot bigger in all directions.

OK but I thought your thesis was there was no change in obesity
levels? If what you really meant was "the bloody government(s)
has(have) fiddled with the measuring stick and muddied the waters"
Then yeah no argument.

> > Lastly on the "eat too much, exercise too little" when simplified to
> > that extent, yes it is "bull" but the broad intent of the statement
> > isn't.
>
> > If you eat more calories than you burn, you *will* increase in weight.
> > The converse is only true within certain parameters and time
> > measurements.
>
> Possibly not.  Of course a deal depends on what "burn" is.  What the
> science shows is that the body adapts quickly.  If you restrict
> calories, then the body's metabolic rate drops to compensate.  If you
> exercise more, then ditto.

No, it's not as simple as that. If you exercise more *AND* your blood
sugars bounce (because you're eating poorly), your body will demand
more food and in its absence it will then go into starvation mode.
Managing your metabolic rate is the key to weight loss, the primary
effectors of metabolic rate are quantity of high GI carbs (ie sugars
and simple carbs) in diet, muscle mass and exercise levels (obviously
the latter 2 are somewhat correlated)

I'll dig out some articles on insulin, metabolism and exercise and
email them to you (I'm not actually terribly interested in the weight
loss side, I'm more interested in the optimisation of performance -
the weightloss stuff is just the flip side of the coin).

> > - Your body will burn muscle rather than fat, and rebound to a higher
> > total weight if you "crash diet" as your body is programmed
> > genetically to go into "famine" mode if you suddenly cut your intake.
>
> Yup - but it isn't clear jsut what caloric restriction has that
> effect.  Most commercial diets definitely do, but even moderate
> restriction appears to.

That's because it's not just about calorie restriction, in fact
focussing on calories rather than where you get the calories from is a
recipe for failure.

> > - Somewhat self evident but some foods have very high calories while
> > not making you feel "full" hence including them in your diet in any
> > significant proportion makes it nigh on impossible to lose weight.
>
> Except in calorie controlled and/or monitored studies, people ate
> the same but their weights differed.
>
> Some lost, some gained.  

Of course, see above. Metabolism changes according to a large set of
factors, there are quite well known though. Maybe nobody has ever done
a study from the holistic picture - research scientists tend to focus
on the micro components rather than the macro.

> And there isn't that much evidence that this "nutrient dense" or
> "empty calorie" foods make a lot of difference.  The work's still
> being done, high fructose corn syrup is one of the current possible
> culprits for example.  And there's a chunk being done on visual cues
> which is also interesting - you eat what's there, so smaller portion
> sizes lead to less eating.
>
> Problem is that you get something like the Women's Health Initiative
> studying a coohort of 50,000 women and the intervention group who "ate
> healthy" and dropped their calorie count didn't lose weight and didn't
> have a different disease profile to the control group.

That's because the conventional wisdom of "eating healthy" (the food
pyramid) is fundamentally flawed as has become apparent in the last
decade (through research).

I'll google up the above - I'd love to see what their definition of
"eating healthy" was (and how they managed to record that across 50K
people). I'm sceptical - my bet is the above 50K ate what has
generally been accepted as OK for the last few decades - which is far
too high GI and high in prcessed foods to be likely to allow long term
weight loss.

> What is quite clear is that so far there has been *no* diet that has
> managed long term - more than 5 years - weight loss, and none that has
> managed no weight regain in a year.

Atkins has, but it has some nasty side effects. The smart move is to
take the good bit out of Atkins (no carbs) and do something useful
with it. (make it low GI and minimal carbs and flip flop the meat vege
ratio)

> If you have a long term diet study with 5 year followup I'm all ears.
> Because the majority are short term (including all the GI ones) and
> even within 6 months most have weight regain and in a year are above
> baseline.

I'll get you a copy. The anti - Atkins brigade have had more goes at
shooting him down than you can poke a stick at, and none have actually
succeeded.

> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=17469900&cmd=s...
>
> Note that every GI thing I've seen is also calorie restricting, that
> is just changing the food doesn't make the difference long term.

GI is only one piece of the puzzle, it does one thing and one thing
only.

It gets the body out of the sugar bounce treadmill - while ever your
body is on that, it is NOT pulling fat out of stores and metabolising
it, it is soaking up the blood sugar for energy and demanding more
when it runs out. Once you've stopped doing that, then you can start
managing your metabolism to not go into starvation mode while it's
consuming the body fat.

JL

On Jan 2, 10:39 am, Matt Palmer <mj....TakeThisOut@hezmatt.org> wrote:
> JL is of the opinion:
>
> > The second is these med GI foods - (it's a scale of 1-100, for the
>
> Not an absolute scale, though -- there are a few things (such as jasmine
> rice) which have a GI higher than pure glucose (which is the 100 reference
> point).

Hey cool, thanks for that, didn't know that one !

JL