Nutrition Research: Problems Measuring Calories

Nutrition researchers are trying to determine what the best weight loss diet is, and in order to do this they must account for all the calories a person eats before they make any conclusions. This however is a bigger challenge than you might think. It has become apparent that people cannot accurately report how many calories they are eating on a regular basis. In fact chronic under-reporting of calories is one of the most common and pervasive issue in diet/health/fitness research.

Whether it is due to embarrassment or lack of memory, people will simply get it wrong when they are asked to report how much they’ve eaten. This makes studying diet and weight loss almost impossible as there is no solid conclusions that we can make about dieting other than the fact that people won’t admit what they’ve eaten.

In this audio training session we’ll discuss the issues with nutrition research and why the results are hard to measure. We’ll also talk about the permission to be light, to wear a size medium shirt and the difference between shirt on big and shirt off big.

(Download Transcription: “Problems Measuring Calories“) [pdf]

John

Body Fat Regulation, Can We Change it?

The regulation of body fat stores is a complex interplay of many hormones, chemical messengers and systems with your body. It’s also big business for the food and supplement industry. It is also a growing area of research as we try to get a better understanding of what exactly is going on.

In this podcast I interview Stephan Guyenet, his area of research is body fat regulation.

We discuss the possible mechanism for body fat regulation and why we are seeing the overweight and obesity issues that are becoming prevalent in todays society.

John

Water Weight, Fat, Muscle, What is Signal vs Noise?

Claims in the health and fitness industry (and any industry for that matter) can be clinically or technically significant, but have no significance in the real world.

In other words, something might have a significant effect in a laboratory setting, but will never be applicable to you in your daily life.

This makes it difficult to tell what is a realistic and useful claim that you can incorporate into your daily routine for real results, and what is just marketing speak to get you to buy into something that you can never actually take action on or use.

In this podcast we’ll examine all of the following issues:

1 – The difference between real world significance and clinical significance

2 – Separating the signal from the noise: are the results that you are hearing about normal changes in human physiology that are simply being brought to your attention for the first time.

3 – The 80-20 principle and how 20 % of your effort will end up being responsible for 80 % of your results.

4 – Water weight: how water weight/retention is the big confounding factor in the way your body looks and how fitness and nutrition marketers take advantage of this to make claims that their products can do things that are not possible.

5 – Getting to the core principle of what works for weight loss.

John

Fitness Marketing, Drugs & Taking Responsbility for Your Body

How Many Calories Do You Need to Lose Weight?

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Losing weight is just a matter of calories in vs calories out. Specifically it’s a matter of eating less calories than you burn off.

So just how many calories are we talking here? The answer is actually much lower than you probably think.

In this podcast we talk about how low the real amount of calories is that you need for weight loss, and why most people overestimate it and sabotage their own weight loss success.

John

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