Diet advice do jour. Usual grains of salt apply.

[elfs]

In an article entitled Unhappy Meals, author Michael Pollan documents the rise of food science and "nutritionalism," the belief that one can control one's nutrition completely by understanding nutrients. Pollan's advice is simple and direct: all of the diet advice in the world comes down to seven words:

"Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."

Pollan's main point is that it is the second word in all that advice that is difficult for people to grasp. Power bars and soda pop are not "food"; anything that tries to sell itself to you as "nutritionalized" is probably not "food". His advice: if someone from 1900 wouldn't recognize it as food, it's not. Avoid ingredients that are unfamiliar and unpronouncable. I especially like his "You're an omnivore: eat like one!" line.

And the bad news came in yesterday: A calorie is a calorie. I can't make my gut go away by doing abdominal crunches. The distribution of fat is wholly genetic: the only way to make it go away is to eat less. That may not be entirely true: some of the middle-age abdominal distension is due to a loss of muscle tone in those areas, so exercise will help that. But not the love handles.

Comments

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

You can so make your gut go away by doing abdominal crunches. It's just that they are no more nor less efffective at making belly flab go away than are bicep curls. This is subject to the caveat, of course, that most strength training exercises aren't aerobic, and that aerobic exercise -- exertion that raises breath and heart rates only moderately but over sustained periods of time -- burns body fat directly.

It isn't so much "eat less" as it is "burn it away and don't replace it" -- if losing that body fat is your goal. Exercise is a key part of this. You could be exercising a lot, eating more and still be burning body fat. And you are better off six ways from Sunday exercising regularly anyway. It is far more important that your belly fat be an active participant in your body's energy economy than that this fat be reduced or eliminated.