SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Not basing both the ketogenic and regular very low calorie diet on whole foods, only was only one of at least 3 problems with the study at hand that can thus not be considered the ultimate litmus test to compare VLCD with en vogue VLCKD diets. Ketogenic diets are characterized by constantly low insulin levels. That's not exactly what has been considered muscle protective in the old age of bodybuilding, where insulin's protein-anabolic and anti-catabolic effects were still hailed as a benefit you wouldn't want to miss (Fulks. 1975; Woolfson. 1979), but according to a recent study from Rome, a ketogenic diet may be the go-to diet for everyone trying to shed as much as weight as possible in as little time as possible by cutting your total daily energy intake down to a hilarious <700 kcal/day (Metta. 2016). Now, cutting calories back that much may sound (and be) idiotic for someone who has been lean all his / her life and is just trying to make his abs more visible. Fo...

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, ...

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...