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

[heofmanynames.livejournal.com]

the actual equasion is: Calories taken in - calories burned = calories stored
since unburned calories are converted to fat for storage, there you go.

of course, the quality / actual-food-value of the calories you take in matters greatly, but the bottom line is so straight-forward: calories consumed but unused become (larger) fat deposits.

crunches can and will tighten up the abdominal muscles, which is important (*very* important, actually - and for far more reasons than just 'love-handles'), but crunches are not a particularly thermogenic (ie, fat-burning) activity. Cardio will burn fat, but it is not particularly kind to the system overall.

Weight-bearing exercise (weight-lifting, bodyweight exercise) is much more effective at burning calories because muscle is metabolically more active than any other tissue type, excluding organs / viscera); the end result of adding muscle is an elevated metabolic rate (BMR)...and the end result of that is that your body burns more calories on a continuous basis - not merely as a response to exercise.

Weight-bearing exercise also offers the benefit of increasing one's energy, one's physical capacity for activity (greatly increasing one's ability to perform and enjoy sexually, among other things).

As with anything in life, there's always a trade-off.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

The 'rubber bag' theory of weight loss (i.e., your body is a bag, you take in food, dump waste, and burn calories; put in more than you burn, and you gain weight, put in less than you burn, you lose weight) is the basic premise behind the Hacker's Diet, which takes an engineering approach to weight loss, including a tiered exercise program that works up from a level that any couch potato can do to serious workouts, moving up a rung only when the current level becomes easy. Along with the material on exercise and diet are sections discussing how the random variations in day-to-day measurement can make people think they're not making progress, and how to use well-known statistical measurements to help kill noise and show you what your real progress is.