Anyway.  In this post, I’m going to have a quick look at the course material on weight management.  The course notes look at weight management and obesity from a number of perspectives, including:

• Why more people in society seem to be fat or obese now than they were a generation ago
• How obesity causes health problems
• The financial cost to society of obesity
• How obesity might be reduced

I detail below the key points in my course notes about the above issues and then comment on what I think are the interesting questions.

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My course notes

I had a bit of an altercation with my course notes last week (see my post on healthy eating guidelines).  Fortunately, I have managed to calm down a bit now and  I can just about see through the red mist well enough to read the section on weight management.  Here is what it had to say:

• Eating behaviours can be caused by psychological distress: some people’s weight gain is caused by psychological issues that lead them to eat in order to deal with emotions.  Therefore, in order to restore them to a more healthy bodyweight, we may need to help them:
  • Address the underlying psychological problems
  • Re-establish healthy diet and lifestyle patterns
  • Help them learn to listen to their own natural body signals and messages
• Obesity is caused by the increased consumption of fat:
• Prevalence of obesity: obesity affects 1bn of the 6.7bn people worldwide, which put another way means that 15% of the world are obese.  The UK is a little worse than the mean, with 17% of men and 21% of women classifying as obese.
• Health risks of obesity: obesity causes four main issues:
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Type two diabetes
  • Osteoarthritis
  • High blood pressure
• Financial cost of obesity: in 2001, the House of Commons estimated that obesity cost £2.2bn (mostly NHS treatment and lost productivity due to sick days).
• Why are some people more prone to obesity? my course notes suggest some key factors:
  • Somatotypes - different somatotypes (endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph) will find it harder or easier to lose fat
  • Number of fat cells - some people have more fat cells than others
  • Leptin – fat cells produce a hormone called leptin, which regulates our metabolic rate and appetite.  When fat in our cells increases, they produce more leptin, which increases our metabolic rate and supresses appetite.  When fat decreases, they produce less leptin, which decreases our metabolic rate and increases appetite.
• Weight management techniques may include: various stringent methodologies, including medical intervention techniques such as liposuction, gastric bands or jaw-wiring.
• Eating disorders are prevalent – and include annorexia nervosa and bullimia.

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My questions and comments

There are a couple of interesting issues here that deserve a certain amount of investigation.  Here are the questions that I asked myself as I was reading the material, along with some thoughts and ideas that I gleaned from researching around the subject:

1. Why is it that we are getting fatter as a society?
   1. We are getting fatter – and we are getting fatter, this is not in doubt.  So before anyone jumps in and disagrees with this assertion, check out this amazing info-graphic from the Washington Post, which shows very clearly the changing BMI of people in various countries around the world over the last 28 years.  It’s pretty obvious what is happening.
   2. We are eating too much because we feel hungry all the time – we are getting fatter because we are eating too much.  But we are eating too much because our hormones are telling us we need to eat more.  I thought that this quote from Tom Naughton was a very good summary: “people get fat because hormones signal their bodies to store a disproportionate share of the calories they consume as fat, which creates a fuel shortage at the cellular level, which ramps up appetite, which leads to eating more.”
   3. Eating too much is correlated with insulin response – to my mind, the progression in fatness seems correlative with the magnitude of the insulin response.  In hunter-gather societies eating Palaeolithic diets, the insulin response to feeding is small and so people don’t eat more than they need.  They wander around in bearskins looking awesome and flaunt their abs a lot of the time.  In agricultural societies, the insulin response is bigger so people get soft and fat and stop walking around without their shirts on.  In post-industrial societies with manufactured food full of sugar and HFCS, people don’t even fit in shirts anymore because they are so huge.  They need specially designed tent-type clothing to encompass their massiveness.
2. How does obesity occur as a result of psychological distress?
   1. We like to eat comfort foods because we are stressed – this Independent blog suggests that obesity is always as a result of psychological distress “as no-one chooses to be obese” and that it is the over-consumption of comfort foods that lead to gaining weight.  The blogger suggests that by attacking the source of the psychological problem, we might then remove the reason that people reach for comfort foods in the first place.
   2. So are we undergoing unprecedented stress? – so if stress is the cause of obesity, do we have a stress epidemic?  Are we as a society fundamentally much more stressed than any group of people who have ever lived before?  Or are we just as stressed but with access to more calorific comfort foods?  I suspect that we are just as stressed (if not less stressed) as any group of people in the last couple of hundred years have been but we seem to be getting fatter quite quickly. So while I agree that there is an unnatural level of stress in our society at the moment, I do think it has been largely in place at that level since the industrial revolution.  Therefore, I think that we are probably not over-eating for blanket psychological reasons.  This may, of course, vary in individual cases.
3. How does obesity cause disease?
   1. It starts with metabolic syndrome – metabolic syndrome is the name for a group of risk factors that increase the likelihood of heart disease, stroke and type two diabetes.  Mainstream health sources will tell you that they don’t know what causes it, other than it seems to be related to obesity and fat distribution around the middle.  Robb Wolf, however, knows exactly what is going on and he explains it far better than I ever will so go read his book.
4. Does obesity really cost society money?
   1. Conventional wisdom says yes – as in many newspapers, The Telegraph reports that the incidence of obesity-reducing operations has increased by 70% in one year in the UK and has cost the UK tax-payer an additional £20m.
   2. Counter-culture says no – Overcoming Bias suggests that we like to make up reasons for why we can tell fat people what to do because they have low status.  A good reason might be that they cost us money to maintain.  However, the blogger suggests that studies show that fat people reap the costs and benefits of their own eating habits and that health insurance and early mortality mean that it is unlike that obesity does cost society money.  I nearly fell off my chair when I read this.  Partly because I think there is a connection between obesity and low status (via stress, which I will write about in due course) and partly because I cannot see how it does not cost society money.
   3. I think it does – While health insurance may pick up the tab in the US, health insurance isn’t free and if more people claim then the premiums go up.  Also, obese people are often economically inactive and require support and often die slowly of complications that require significant amounts of medicine.  Certainly, if you see obesity as the primary driver for heart disease, strokes and type two diabetes, then the bills really start to mount up.  That’s before the obesity-specific operations noted above.
5. Is the concept of somatotyping even valid?
   1. Who invented it anyway? – somatotyping was invented in the 1940′s by William Herbert Sheldon, who proposed that people could be classified into three categories: ectomorph, mesomorph or endomorph.  He also suggested that people’s temperaments could be linked to these physical characteristics.  His theories on physical characterisation seem to have survived, although the link to their temperaments has not.
   2. Does your somatotype affect how quickly you can lose weight? – I would like to know whether what we refer to as somatotypes are simply the condition people are in or whether they refer to more enduring characteristics reflective of bone-based measurements.  So let’s say that we somehow predicted (perhaps by hereditary means) what a child’s somatotype was going to be and then acted decisively in order to alter it (i.e. by making sure that the endomorph never gained weight and that the ectomorph ate like it was going out of fashion).  Would we end up with temporarily thin endomorphs who would naturally revert to being fat once we released them from our control and temporarily robust ectomorphs who would naturally revert to being thin once stopped making them eat?  The question is, do the skeletal measurements impact on the hormones or the appetite?  If so, what is the mechanism?
6. Are medical interventions such as liposuction helpful?
   1. Liposuction doesn’t improve health – I was fascinated to learn via the PLoS blogs that liposuction does not necessarily make the patient healthier than they were before.
   2. Gastric bands often have complications – and Livescience report that gastric bands cause complications in up to 40% of cases.
   3. Do fat loss supplements work? – I am not sure but there does seem to be some evidence to suggest that they do but with only small results.

***

And that concludes my thoughts.  For further reading on obesity and related issues don’t forget to check out:

• This awesome bibliography from the PLoS blogs
• This interesting economic study.

I also come across books that get picked up purely because they are cheap or free.  Those books get put on a pile to read later if and when I have time.  I have to confess that The Natural Fat-Loss Pharmacy (affiliate links: UK, US) was definitely in the latter category.  However, I was pleasantly surprised.  It was a good read and it certainly challenged some of my assumptions.  It also made me go and work on your behalf a bit, tracking down the veracity of some of its claims.

The Natural Fat-Loss Pharmacy: a surprisingly good read

***

So you enjoyed reading it then?

I have to admit that I was very sceptical that I would even be able to finish a tome like this.  But the book is actually very well thought-out and well-written.  Reading it cover to cover was a bit like trying to memorise a dictionary but I think that having it on the shelf is definitely something to consider if you are interested helping people get leaner (and those people have money to spend on supplements).

And while I am not the world’s biggest supplement fan (I think that they make a very small difference in comparison to more important factors like diet and exercise), I do accept that some things can make a small difference.  However, it can be hard to get honest advice about which products work, as most people who are giving the advice tend to be the ones selling the supplements.  This book might be a good way to get that impartial advice.

***

So do all these supplements work then?

Well, whether you consider the impartial advice to be accurate is another matter.  For every supplement you read about in this book, you can probably find an article online somewhere that tells you they either don’t work or worse still that they are bad for you.  I’ve tried to flag the more obviously contentious ones as I do the review but, ultimately, I am afraid that it is caveat emptor.

If you want to get into the detail, the authors do describe the studies they feel are conclusive.  If you can’t get the studies you need for free on PubMed or another scientific paper provider, then I have found that an obsequious email to one of the scientists doing the study usually gets the required result…

***

OK, point taken, but will I find it useful?

Well, this is a pretty big book.  Unless you are an absolute contest-preparation guru, I would be amazed if you didn’t find something you hadn’t heard of in here.  And while all of the active ingredients can be found in supplement form, many of them can also be found in foodstuffs you can buy in the local supermarket, making their powers accessible to people who don’t like popping pills.

What’s more, each chapter explains how the scientists understand the supplements to work, so you won’t find yourself recommending a supplement only to be stuck for an answer when some smart-alec asks why…

***

Go on then, surprise me…

OK, here are the main section headings.  There are individual chapters within each heading about each of the supplements in that category.  I’ve tried to summarise as closely as possible what you will find in each chapter but please excuse me when I go off on a tangent mid-explanation.  I have been reading a lot about nutrition recently and I have all kinds of thoughts bouncing around in my head.

1. Fat busters – under this heading come Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), which is an extract from green tea, Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), Hydroxycitric Acid (HCA) and Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCT).
   1. EGCG helps to increase the number of calories that the body burns each day at rest.  For those of you interested in getting your EGCG from tea, note that EGCG is found only in green tea and not in black tea.  So you need to channel your inner oriental martial artist and not your archetypal Englishman…
   2. CLA helps to increase lean muscle while decreasing fat reserves.  CLA is found in the meat and diary products of ruminants, which include cows, goats sheep and buffalo.  However, it is the antipodeans that come out ahead, as apparently, the highest concentrations are found in kangaroo meat…
   3. HCA slows down the rate at which fat is deposited into the cells.
   4. MCT, found in coconut oil, also helps to increase the number of calories that the body burns at rest.  For more about the role of coconuts in the diet and the importance of MCT, see Mary Enig’s paper Coconut: in support of good health in the 21st century.
2. Insulin regulators – the authors are very excited about the use of chromium as an insulin regulator, either in the form of chromium picolinate or chromium nicotinate.  The authors quote some doctors who put every one of their clients on chromium supplements.  It is particularly relevant for people with metabolic syndrome, apparently.  However, Wikipedia notes that there is some controversy about the use of chromium picolinate because of cancer risk.  While the authors of the book do not consider this to be a risk, as an alternative, they propose cinnamon, of at least a teaspoon a day.  I quite liked this latter option, mainly because I am quite fond of the taste of cinnamon.
3. Carbohydrate inhibitors – the authors describe two types of carbohydrate inhibitors, starch inhibitors and sugar inhibitors.  Both work by preventing the digestion of carbohydrates.  The authors are quite excited about natural carbohydrate inhibitors because they note that the idea of the low-carb diet has become less popular as “people realise that it is more or less impossible to drastically reduce one of the three macronutrients for a lifetime”.  Now, being wilfully stupid is one thing but being wilfully stupid while splitting an infinitive is something else entirely.  Will someone please introduce these people to an Eskimo?  Anyway.  Moving on.  Starch inhibitors include extracts from white kidney beans, wheat and hibiscus but the only sugar inhibitor discussed in the book is L-arabinose.
4. Fat blockers – apparently, chitosan, which is made from the exoskeletons of crustaceans, and other types of soluble fibre, can be used to block the formation of fat.  Wikipedia notes that there is again some controversy about the use of this supplement because “the mechanism between chitosan and fat has not yet been properly understood”.  That statement really tickled me because the mechanism by which eating saturated fat is supposed to increase blood cholesterol is not properly understood either.  In fact, no-one has ever come up with a sensible one.  But that doesn’t stop that theory driving health policy for whole countries…
5. Appetite suppressors – it has been suggested that 5-HTP, a naturally occurring amino acid, can help to reduce cravings for carbohydrates.  Interestingly, more research has been done into its effects as an antidepressant than as an appetite suppressant.  I wonder whether the two concepts are in fact linked.  I have noted a number of connections recently between obesity and depression and insulin resistance and depression.
6. Muscle builders – in the category of muscle builders, the authors recommend beta-Hydroxy beta-Methylbutyric acid (HMB) and branched chain amino acids (BCAAs).  You already know about those so I’m not going to bother describing them.
7. Thermogenics – the authors do not recommend the use of thermogenics on the basis that they are bad for your health.  Obviously, the most easily available thermogenic is caffeine from your espresso.

***

Anything else I need to know?

If you do decide to use any of the supplements described in the book, don’t forget to do your homework on them.  As I noted above, a basic Wikipedia search showed that there was some disagreement about the usage of chromium picolinate as a supplement because of cancer risk.  Similarly, Wikipedia didn’t like the idea of using chitosan because the research wasn’t clear and they didn’t understand the mechanism by which it worked yet.

If you have any experience or knowledge about any of these supplements or the studies behind them, I would be interested to hear from you.

Please bear in mind, though, that this man has written quite literally hundreds of articles and this top 10 represents only my take on what is a remarkable literary opus.  Here is just a taster:

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1. Synaptic facilitation (greasing the groove): read how Clarence learned how to do more pull ups plus some nice anecdotes about the Bulgarian weightlifting team.  A winning combination in my book.
2. Pavel’s ladder: read how Clarence learned to maximise training time and still take advantage of synaptic facilitation (greasing the groove) to do more pull ups.
3. Biomarkers: Clarence reviews “Biomarkers”, a book that he sees as passing the test of time.  The book identified ten signs or biomarkers that dictate how old you feel.  They are (1) Muscle Mass, (2) Strength, (3) Basal Metabolic Rate, (4) Body Fat Percentage, (5) Aerobic Capacity, (6) Blood-sugar Tolerance, (7) Cholesterol/HDL Ratio, (8) Blood Pressure, (9) Bone density, (10) Ability to regulate Internal Temperature.  Significantly, all 10 biomarkers can be revived or improved through strength training.  But it is the first biomarker, muscle mass, that is responsible for the vitality of your whole physiological apparatus. So strength training is pivotal if you want to stay young longer.
4. Sitting: Clarence reviews a study that correlates increased sitting time with higher mortality rates.  It’s interesting that even regularly weekly exercise doesn’t help to reduce the risk of earlier death caused by sitting.  Only moving around regularly seems to help.
5. Go hard and go home: Clarence explains why and how he does intervals.  I found a lot in common with Clarence as he described his method of cycling his intervals downwards in length over a period of weeks (1,000m down to 500m down to 250m), how he prefers intensity over volume and how he prefers slightly longer rest periods than work periods.
6. Sleep: as you might have gathered from the above article about biomarkers, Clarence is a guru in how to avoid ageing as you get older.  This fascinating article about his experience in his sleep patterns changing as he gets older is well worth a look.
7. The Metabolism Myth: Clarence explains that there is no reason that you should get fatter as you get older unless your muscle mass is decreasing.  If your muscle mass is decreasing, then you better get strength training.
8. John Grimek: Clarence takes a moment to pen an appreciation of one who was probably the most revered bodybuilder of all-time (to those in the know).  According to Bass, Grimek was so far ahead of other bodybuilders that the rules had to be changed after he won the Mr. America title in 1940 and 1941 to prevent him from dominating the competition for years to come.  As well as being the only two-time Mr. America, he was a national champion and member of the US Olympic weightlifting team in Berlin (1936).
9. Floyd Landis: Clarence explains some of the drug-related background to what may have been the most remarkable dethroning of a champion in modern sport since Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal at the 1988 Olympics.  Clarence explains why testosterone wasn’t really a very useful drug to have taken, as its activity is to produce an effect over a long period of time.  I always had a lot of sympathy for Landis and, having read this article, I have even more.
10. Norbert Schemansky: Clarence sets out to review a book he is sent entitled “Mr Weightlifting” about the great Norbert Schemansky and ends up recounting half the book from memory.     

***

If you want to read more, you can find the index for all of Clarence’s articles here.

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These are the articles I found most useful

Bearing my goals in mind, here are my current top 10 dieting articles for getting that lean and mean look in time for summer:

1. Death match: you versus your body – Mike Roussell has written this article about exactly the scenario I have now found myself in: coming off a mass-gain cycle and going into a fat-loss cycle.  His advice also perfectly mirrors what I have found to work for me in the past.  Mike suggests that low-carb diets force your body to use stored fat as fuel, once you become fat-adapted.  He notes that there is research to support the idea that high protein diets result in better fat loss and better muscle retention.  And he believes that heavy lifting during a fat-loss phase is the best way of forcing your body to keep the muscle it has gained.  This is pretty much what I will be doing over the next few weeks.  I couldn’t have put it better myself.
2. The Dave Tate Project (part one and part two) – this is just an amazing set of articles (and they’re long, too).  Dave Tate transformed himself, with the assistance of John Berardi of Precision Nutrition, from a 300lb powerlifter into a lean and mean bodybuilder.  Along the way, he found ways to improve his health considerably and to improve his overall mobility and joint health.  I’m not so deluded as to think that what worked for someone with 250lbs of lean body mass will work for me but it’s an inspiring story none-the-less.
3. How to manipulate your diet and exercise to look great naked – in this article, John Berardi explains the history of dieting and exercise for weight-loss and comes up with some basic principles that work.
4. Nutritional leverage with Shelby Starnes (part one and part two) – I get the impression that Shelby has a real passion for excellence as a physique coach and isn’t interested in settling for second best.  But I also like the fact that he is flexible in his advice and doesn’t get too prescriptive.  This article series is set up as a Q&A and as such it’s a real mixed bag of points.  You may find a gem next to a couple of points that leave you cold.  I get bored reading about grass-fed beef and the latest supplements (because I can’t afford them) but I appreciate little tips like drinking diet coke to combat cravings in the evenings, what ratio of egg-whites to whole eggs to eat and how to schedule cheat meals properly.
5. Fat loss for dummies (part one and part two) – I particularly like this set of articles because it reminds me that, while diet is probably 90% of body transformation, I do still have to work hard at it.  And I also need to remember that working for a long time is not the same as working hard!  Long, slow cardio is out.  Short, hard intervals are in.  Now lead me to the sled, as I have some hard work to do!
6. Five reasons for failed body transformations – Christian Thibaudeau explains here what the five main reasons are for failed fat-loss projects.  For those of you who may not know, Christian actually did a significant fat-loss transformation himself, which took him from being quite a chunky ex-Olympic lifter to being the unofficial face (and body) of T-Muscle.  Christian talks specifics here, diving into the psychology of how the underfed body tries to trick you into breaking your diet.  But you can resist these temptations.  Forewarned is forearmed!
7. The Marc Bartley Undertaking – here, at Elite FTS, Shelby Starnes talks about the diet that he used to get Marc Bartley into better shape.  Again, a man who consumes six chicken breasts a day and still loses weight is probably from another planet to me but it is fascinating to see how Shelby starts to incorporate carb-cycling in a real-life scenario.  I find generic carb-cycling articles a bit dry and difficult to get to the end of so this is a nice primer that makes the subject easy to digest.
8. The get shredded diet – John Berardi talks here about what it takes to get to the next level of leanness.  I always check this article before I get into the detail on my own plans just to make sure I’m not way off the mark.
9. Interview with Justin Harris – I was trying to limit the number of T-Nation articles I linked to but this interview is just too good.  Justin is a business partner of Shelby Starnes and sometimes I think that the two of them must have dug up a secret store of knowledge together and then refused to share it with anyone else.
10. Dan John’s three principles of fat loss – Dan reminds us here that to achieve proper fat loss we need to remember that advanced training methods are for advanced trainees, that sometimes we need to think of hypertrophy to make good things happen and that ultimately fat loss is a war that we should wage for 28 days, commit totally to it and then go and do something else instead.

Have I missed your favourite fat-loss article?  Just let me know in the comments.

That doesn’t mean I think that it’s possible to breach the laws of physics and that you can lose fat while being in a calorific surplus.  But I do think that different people handle carbohydrates and fats in different ways when dieting.  I also know from experience that I handle cardio and other life stresses in a different way to Anna, for example.

That being said, this is what I think works for me:

Realistic expectations – I don’t like to go into a programme with huge expectations and then to fall short of that.  I prefer to set myself an achievable goal and then to hit it and push on for more.  In this case, I think that 5kg (10lbs) should put me back roughly at the same level of body fat that I was for most of last year.  If I feel like I’m on a roll, I’ll push on a bit and see if I can make the step from four visible abs to six.

A real deficit – I’m not the sort of person for whom a little tweak in the diet makes a lot of difference.  My body doesn’t naturally carry a great deal of fat except around the waist and boy is it stubborn fat!  Come to think of it, I need a big surplus of calories before I start to add muscle as well.  So I guess my body is just stubborn full stop.  I reckon on needing at least a 500kcal deficit from a maintenance level, which is around 1,800kcal per day to start with.  As my diet progresses, I dial it down slowly.

Cardio boredom – I have always found it very hard to do any type of exercise unless I have a specific goal that I’m aiming for.  I could never just go into the gym and do a workout.  I have to have a plan in place to get a lift up or to develop a new skill.  I absolutely hate doing cardio unless I’m going all out and trying to beat a time I set last time.

Cardio boredom: there’s nothing worse than staring at a clock

Cardio quota – for some reason, I get hit really hard after cardio when I’m dieting.  I know I don’t push it too hard but I still feel like I could sleep for a week after a (relatively) short bike ride or a long but brisk walk.  I can do Non-Exercise Physical Activity (NEPA) forever but dial up the intensity even slightly and I’m toast for days afterwards.  So I find it very effective to do short, hard intervals session after each weights session (four times per week).

Non-Exercise Physical Activity (NEPA) – I really like NEPA because it doesn’t tear me down in the same way that cardio does.  The only problem is that it is very time-consuming.  I start my programme with 30-minute daily walks before bedtime.  I did this last time and it was very effective at avoiding late-night cravings plus it was useful for getting me out of the house and into the fresh air, which tends to relax me a bit and make me less grouchy.  This year, I’m thinking of adding a bit of extra weight in the form of a rucksack with a few weights plates in it but we’ll see how that goes.

Weighted or traditional cardio – I used to think of cardio in terms of cycling and using the Concept 2 rowing machine.  In the last year or so there has been a lot written about weighted cardio or strength cardio.  The idea behind strength cardio is that you don’t lose muscle or convert your muscle from fast-twitch to slow-twitch in the process.  I like sledgehammer striking and sled pushing.

Progression – I need to keep piling on the pressure.  My body quickly adapts to a certain level of cardio and a certain level of calories and I need to keep adding extra work and taking away food until I can’t do any more.

Protein – I find that I feel fuller for longer if I eat mostly protein for my dieting meals.  I don’t particularly have a sweet tooth and I’m really not much of a foodie (you can get on my good side with nothing more than a big hunk of brisket).  I do like beer but I have got to the age where I can put that down for a few weeks to achieve a goal if I need to.

Sardines: mostly protein

Fat – I can take or leave fat and I tend to leave it if I can get away with it.  Anna keeps me in check and stops me essentially eating nothing but chicken.

Carbohydrate – I feel that I am at the far end of the spectrum when it comes to carbohydrates.  I pretty much gave them up a long time ago and now only use fruit or yoghurt around workouts or in the middle of a very long bike ride (like 100 miles).  I definitely notice that the fat goes on quite quickly when I eat them and it’s essentially more-or-less impossible for me to lose weight if I eat them.  So when dieting I take it a step further and cut out the fruit and limit myself to just green fibrous vegetables (and the odd onion and pepper to taste) in the main with some yoghurt before a weights session.

100 miles on a bicycle: quite literally a pain in the ass

Stress – there are some stresses that I find easy to bear and others I find harder to live with.  When I’m dieting, though, I get very grumpy and Anna tends to stay out of my way.  I also find that spending time with family and friends, which is normally a big de-stressing agent for me, is difficult when dieting as the English culture requires that alcohol be consumed at such meetings.  When you’re already crabby from hunger, dealing with drunken people while sober is not really a nice way to spend a relaxing evening.  This tends to drive me towards spending a lot more time working or writing when I’m dieting and I have to be careful to take quality time to relax properly or I burn out and end up miserable.   

Heavy lifting – I had the worst ever experience of my training life when I tried a volume-based approach to weight-loss a while ago.  I lost so much strength it took me months to get it back.  Now, I am religious about cutting the volume back really quite strictly (possibly too strictly) so that I can afford really high intensities.  I train four times a week and incorporate two upper body sessions, one lower body session and one strongman session.  I like 5 sets of 2 reps for big compound movements like squats and overhead presses and I’ll throw in some 3RM work as well for good measure. 

So that’s what works for me.  If it works for you too, please let me know.

It’s been an interesting and very informative time.  I’ve been able to apply the lessons I learned the last time I dropped some fat and they’ve worked fantastically well.  I’ve also learned a few new things.

My 4-week fat-loss phase: weight(kg) and waist measurement (cm)

This chart shows my weight in kilograms and my waist measurement over a 4-week period.

Fast weight-loss

You can see that I dropped weight very quickly:

• 2.1kg (4.6lbs) in the first week,
• 0.8kg (1.8lbs) in the second week,
• 1.6kg (3.5lbs) in the third week, and
• 1.2kg (2.6lbs) in the final week
• 5.7kg (12.5lbs) in total

So I lost 5.7kg (12.5lbs) in four weeks.  That’s an average of over 3lbs per week.

Fast fat-loss

I carry fat around my waist more than anywhere else so my waist measurement is a pretty good proxy for how fat I am.  My waist measurement decreased just as fast as my weight:

• 4.2cm in the first week,
• 1.0cm in the second week,
• 1.4cm in the third week, and
• 0.7cm in the final week
• 6.5cm in total

So I lost 6.5cm in four weeks.  That’s an average of 1.6cm per week.  My other key measurements stayed pretty much constant, which gives me comfort that I didn’t lose much, if any, of the muscle I gained over the winter.

What I did right because I learned it last time

I learned lots last time I dropped fat and I applied it well this time.  Key for me are:

• High protein, low-carb, fairly low fat diet
• Plenty of green vegetables
• Heavy weights, low volume, relatively high intensity
• No chasing stupid goals, like maximum deadlifts or squats
• Focus on bodyweight exercises (like weighted dips and pull ups), as they get easier as you lose weight
• Not too much cardio: one long bike ride a week and a couple of short, intense strength-cardo sessions
• Some non-exercise physical activity (NEPA) every day but not too much

What I learned that was new

• Chicken is the perfect dieting food: it is high in protein, fills you up quickly and is low-calorie
• Walking with a weighted rucksack is easy to do and is great for NEPA
• People commenting on how much thinner I looked after just two weeks really irritated me because it made me think I was losing muscle!
• Diet coke is fantastic for staving off hunger pangs in the evenings
• It is impossible to attempt to avoid coffee if you like it during a fat-loss phase
• Fat-loss requires a lot of commitment so dial back your other goals while you’re doing it
• If you do commit to fat-loss and park other stuff it suddenly becomes a lot easier

I’ll do a more detailed post about my thoughts tomorrow but I thought it would be good to get these thoughts out while they’re still fresh.  I hope you found them interesting reading.