SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

With adequ. protein and nutrients "crash"- beats "low and steady" -dieting. In the obese that's almost certain, in athletes more experimental evidence are needed. You will have heard and read that rapid weight loss will make you lose muscle and set you up for weight regain aka the " Yo-Yo effect ". As a SuppVersity  reader, you know that things are not as simple as that. While some studies appear to support this urban myth others suggest that the exact opposite may be the case. A 2014 study by Purcell, Sumithran, and Prendergast that was published in the venerable scientific journal The Lancet  for example, showed that rapid weight loss on a very low calorie diet leads to better long-term outcomes than gradual weight loss on a much less restricted diet. You can learn more about improving your body composition at the SuppVersity Long-Term Dieting Makes Gymnasts Fat! Minimal Carb Reduction, Max. Results? HIT Circuit + Plyos for Glu...

It is hard and it will cost you muscle, but dieting as in simply eating nothing for a few days won't kill your metabolism and it will shed a lot of weight (assuming you're as obese as the subjects in a new study). Common sense dictates: The more you reduce your energy intake, the more your resting and total energy expenditure will decline. That's a normal adaptational process, right? Right, at least in the short run, however, the equation isn't that easy. Scientists from the from the Newcastle University  just published the results of an interesting experiment, in which they aimed to investigate whether three groups of obese men, exposed to different levels of negative energy balance (fasting, very low calorie diet (VLCD, 2.5MJ/day) and low-calorie diet (LCD, 5.2MJ/day)) in experimental controlled conditions, were characterised by distinct changes in resting and total EE after losing a similar amount of body weight (5% and 10%WL). As the scientists point out, ...

Always hungry? Can't lose weight? "Train more and eat more" ( not less!) could be the solution. A recent thesis from Rebecca Foright, highlights that a high energy flux state characterized by high daily energy expenditure (resulting from increased physical activity) with matching high energy intake (high-calorie throughput) may attenuate the weight-loss-induced energy gap by reducing hunger and ameliorate the otherwise diet-related reduction in resting metabolic rate. Foright recruited eleven obese study participants from the Colorado State University community and surrounding areas to test her "exercise more, eat more, lose more (easily)" hypothesis. The enrollment criteria included: BMI between 30-43 kg/m², age 18-55 years, weight stable over the prior 12 months, desire to lose weight, and ability to exercise as assessed by electrocardiogram (ECG), resting blood pressure and a normal incremental exercise test to exhaustion with simultaneous ECG. Exclu...

It's not your thyroid, but your behavior that's to blame for your low T3 levels, the fatigue and being "unable to lose weight". If you exercised less and ate more, you could fix it without medical intervention or thyroid madness using Lugol's or other junk ;-) It's something I am facing on a daily basis - on Facebook, in Emails and private messages: Women with self-induced thyroid issue who wonder that their body does everything to conserve lean and fat mass. Women who are working out on a daily basis, dieting like crazy and (in their words) "still not losing weight". It does not take a thyroid expert to identify the reason for their problems: They are training too much and eating too little. Just like the 27 women in seminal experiment that was conducted at the Ohio University in the early 1990s. A study I am going to elaborate on in today's SuppVersity article, although I personally believe it shouldn't take experimental evidence t...

Actually, even cherry tomatoes were not allowed in the first 4 days ;-) Wow! If that's what you thought, when you read the figure in the headline you know what I thought, when I spotted the latest paper from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the "ahead of print" section of the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports (Calbet. 2014). I mean, the title of the study, "a time-efficient reduction of fat mass in 4 days with exercise and caloric restriction", sounds pretty harmless. Too harmless for what happened to the 15 subjects the researchers recruited for an experiment that was almost as extreme as its astonishing results. Wake up, work out, starve and sleep I would say the above summarizes pretty well what I was referring to, when I said "something happened to the subjects" in the first 4 days of the study, the 15 not exactly lean study participants (mean BMI ~30kg/m²; body fat 31%) started their days with 45mi...