Fitness Thread

My son’s update — down 49 lbs since June 20 on low carb. He still has the occasional fries or slice of pizza but it hasn’t mattered. The boy is looking great, if I may say so. :clap:

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TheWalkingHorn said:
About 3 years ago I started my fitness journey and lost 50 lbs. I've kept it off for over a year now, but I'm feeling the urge to lose more. I never thought I would look the way that I do now, but now that I'm here I want to take it to the next level. I enjoy being very physically active, and I've definitely slacked off on my dieting. While I'm glad that my lifestyle affords me the ability to eat pretty freely and not gain weight, I'm ready to look more like an elite athlete.

I'm just planning on keeping track of my intakes through MFP, and altering my macros (I'm usually 50/25/25 of carbs/protein/fat, but I was planning on changing to 40/30/30). @I35 can you take a look at a typical day and tell me what you notice either good or bad? I'm so big on fruits and usually eat them to my heart's content, but I'm going to try and limit them to just the morning.

Breakfast (#s are calories, carbs, fat, protein, sodium, sugar)
Heb quick oats - Oatmeal, 0.5 cup 150 27 3 5 0 1
Strawberries - Raw, 0.5 cup, halves 24 6 0 1 1 4
Heb - Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk, 1 cup 40 2 3 1 180 0
Central Market Heb - Whey Protein Powder - Natural Chocolate Flavor, 1.5 Heaping Scoop (24 g) 143 3 2 27 90 1
total: 357 38 8 34 271 6


Snack #1- nothing planned yet, any advice?

Lunch
HEB Central Market Organics - Baby Spinach, 113.33 g 27 4 0 3 93 1
Heb Natural - Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast, 140 g 150 0 1 33 94 0
Avocados - Raw, 0.25 cup, cubes 60 3 5 1 3 0
Dannon - Light & Fit Toasted Coconut, 1 cup 80 9 0 12 45 7
Heb Organics Italian Salad Dressing - Salad Dressing, 1 tbsp 50 0 6 0 125 0
total: 367 16 12 49 360 8

Snack #2
Think Thin - 60g 1 Bar - Brownie Crunch, 1 bar (60g) 230 23 8 20 210 0
total: 230 23 8 20 210 0

Dinner
Salmon, 6 oz. 150 3 2 32 360 0
Rice, brown, medium-grain, cooked, 1 cup 218 46 2 5 2 0
Steamed Green Beans - Steamed Green Beans, 1.5 cup 66 15 1 5 6 0
total: 434 64 5 42 368 0


Totals 1,388 141 33 145 1,209 14
Your Daily Goal 1,447 180 40 91 2,300 52
Remaining 59 39 7 -54 1,091 38

That daily goal of 1,447 calories is set at my current BMR according to In Body testing. I'm definitely not scared to go above that since I work out at least 5 days a week and I'm a teacher so I'm on my feet all day. Do you have any suggestions for me?

Currently I'm just kind of eating as I please (within reason), but not tracking anything at all. I'd love to have some pointers!
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Walking Horn,

Sorry it took me a while to respond. I forgot about this topic here. You are putting the right food in your body. Everybody is different so my macros %'s would be different than yours. I did trial and error before I figured out how my body responds. How much cardio are you doing? I'd hit all body parts once a week for strength training. Break out the body parts to hit in a 5 to 6 day rotation. I put one day chest only and destroy it. After lifting replenish asap and no longer than a two hours period. You break down the muscle and your muscles are craving replenishment. If you are eating 1,447 calories a day then I'd add about 50 calories a week. That would put you around 2200 calories in 3 months. If you are having trouble going up at that rate then back down to 25 calorie add per week. We all train our system to handle a certain amount. So you are training your body to handle more calories which is giving you more nutrients in your system. Treat cardio the same way. However many calories you are burning I'd go up 50 more calories burn per week to match your added calories on your diet. You want to be conditioned to get that athletic look you are talking about. After three months re-evaluated where your at to see if you need changes or keep going up on diet and cardio. Without knowing you and following you it's hard to project what you exactly need, but that would be a good starting point. I'll try to check in here more often.
 
The Case Against Sugar, by Gary Taubes
aeon.co/essays/sugar-is-a-toxic-agent-that-creates-conditions-for-disease

Gary Taubes is an award-winning science journalist. I have read two of his books on nutrition, Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. These books show why, for many people, carbohydrate restriction is the key to improving or totally reversing some metabolic disorders — especially obesity and type 2 diabetes. Taubes’ new book, The Case Against Sugar, was just released.

One important thing Taubes has shown is that the popular view of obesity as a simple behavior problem (overeating and not exercising enough) is mistaken. The current biological science suggests that insulin resistance — the body’s inability to respond to insulin signaling for managing blood glucose and burning stored fat — is the underlying cause of these conditions.

The full article is at the link above. Below are a few excerpts.

As it turns out, virtually all hormones work to mobilize fatty acids from fat cells so that they can then be used for fuel. The one dominant exception to this fuel-mobilization signaling is insulin, which partitions how we use the fuels we consume: in particular, it directs fat cells to store fat, while facilitating the uptake and oxidation of glucose (blood sugar) by muscle and organ cells. In other words, when insulin is secreted – primarily in response to the carbohydrates in our diet – it directs our cells to burn carbohydrate as fuel and store fat. And so, the one biological factor necessary to mobilize fat from storage and have it used for fuel, as Yalow and Berson suggested in 1965, is ‘the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency’. Put simply, when insulin levels in circulation are elevated, we store fat and use glucose for fuel; as insulin levels drop, fat is mobilized and we burn it instead.

Yalow and Berson themselves described insulin as a ‘lipogenic’, or fat-forming hormone. This lipogenic signal must be turned off, or at least muted significantly, for the fat cells to release their stored fat and for the body to metabolize it for energy. […] The more we consume carbohydrates, though, and particularly sugar, the higher our insulin levels will be.

Insulin is secreted in response to rising blood sugar, and rising blood sugar is a response to a carbohydrate-rich meal. Sugar is implicated, in particular, because its chemical structure includes a large proportion of the carbohydrate fructose, and fructose is preferentially metabolized in the liver. As such, it is a prime suspect for the fat accumulation in liver cells that is hypothesized to be the trigger of insulin resistance itself.

Hence, the same dietary factors – sugars and refined grains – trigger both obesity and diabetes. By focusing on the problems of eating too much and exercising too little, public health authorities have simply failed to target the correct causes.
 
Statalyzer said:
So TL/DR - if you have too much sugar, your exercise becomes less effective b/c it doesn't burn fat?
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I just now saw your post Stat. Right — the exercise becomes less effective as a weight loss strategy. Obviously there are many other benefits to exercise.

As I understand it, excess blood sugar (glucose) provokes an insulin response. This is the body’s natural regulation — insulin either pushes glucose into the cells to be used for energy, or it stores it as adipose tissue (fat cells). On a high carbohydrate diet, glucose tends to remain high because carbohydrates (sugar, starches, grains) all convert to glucose. So insulin stays elevated, and we are unable to effectively mobilize our stored energy reserves (body fat).

This is why weight loss tends to be quick and easy on low carb. The body does not have glucose to use for fuel, so it naturally utilizes the alternate fuel source: fat.

I think this also explains very well why exercise alone is not a great weight loss strategy. You have to work very hard at it, very consistently, and even then the weight tends to come off slowly. I posted a few times on this thread about my teenage son’s experience last year. He dropped over 50 lbs by cutting the carbs. No exercise, just food. He weighed 233 last June, he is now at 178.

Side note:
A great resource for anyone interested in a ketogenic diet (low carb, higher fat) is at www.ketogenicforums.com. Weight loss, T2 diabetes improvement, increased energy, lower blood pressure, lower triglycerides, higher HDL, reduced inflammation, and many other benefits are being found on this way of eating. I have been doing it for 3.5 years and I have never felt so good. Last week I had a body composition scan done and I had 16% body fat, which just blew me away, I had no idea.

Many doctors and even the American Diabetes Association will tell patients that T2 diabetes is both chronic and progressive, i.e. you will always have it, and it will likely get worse. Many people are completely reversing T2D on a ketogenic diet. HbA1c numbers go back in the normal range, no more meds, no more diabetes. It is stunning.

Dietary fat does not make us fat or clog the arteries. Carbs make us fat, especially refined carbs and sugars that are in just about every damn food product out there.
 
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How “Settled Science” Helped Create A Massive Public Health Crisis

At Investors.com, by John Merline

Another article that highlights the disastrous recommendations of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines — and countless dietitians and doctors — claiming that fat and cholesterol are to blame for obesity, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.

Excerpt:

Nutritionists, Leslie explains, had decided that dietary fat was the enemy of good health, based in large part on a huge Seven Countries Study, published in 1970, which looked at 12,770 middle-aged men in countries ranging from the U.S. to Yugoslavia.

"The Seven Countries study had become canonical, and the fat hypothesis was enshrined in official advice," Leslie writes. By 1980, the U.S. government issued its first Dietary Guidelines telling the country to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol, and Americans dutifully complied.

That's precisely when the nation's obesity rate started to skyrocket. While the obesity rate barely changed from 1960 to 1980 -- going from 13% to 15% -- over the following two decades – 1980-2000 – the rate jumped to 35%.

"At best, we can conclude that the official guidelines did not achieve their objective; at worse, they led to a decades-long health catastrophe," Leslie writes.

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Lots of push-back now on the old nutrition dogma. There was never any solid research to support the fat-cholesterol-heart disease hypothesis. Thought this challenge was interesting.

 
Click the image for a larger version.

We are outspending the world on “health care” (read: disease maintenance) but getting fatter and sicker every year. Why aren’t the low-fat dietary guidelines making people lean and healthy?

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Science journalist Gary Taubes destroys the corrupt American Heart Association’s continued cherry-picking of data to support their “dietary fat causes heart disease” narrative. They are still referencing 1960’s research (which is weak at best) and dismissing more recent clinical trials that challenge those findings.

garytaubes.com/vegetable-oils-francis-bacon-bing-crosby-and-the-american-heart-association

A 2016 statement by the AHA:

To achieve our goals, we must engage a wide variety of food and beverage companies to be part of the solution.

Well that’s encouraging. I’m sure those food and beverage companies have the health and well-being of the public as their priority.
 
LonghornCatholic said:
Have any of you watched What the Health documentary on Netflix?
Seems legit, mixed with a hint of propaganda perhaps.
Very very eye opening though.
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It promotes a vegan diet. I didn't watch but a good friend of mine said the film tries to make the claim that meat causes cancer, which of course has never been established. Humans have been eating meat and thriving on it for millennia.

Some people apparently do very well as vegans/vegetarians and do fine without meat. My wife and I tried to be vegetarian a few years ago, I lasted about three months and felt like crap. I had a buttered ribeye and have never looked back.
 
Dionysus said:
I had a buttered ribeye and have never looked back
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I told my wife we should maybe go flexitarian after watching the documentary. Three chili dogs later, we decided to keep exercising, eating plenty of fruits and veggies along with our meat.

Yea, even though the documentary did a good job of making the ADA and other organizations look bad, I had a gut feeling propaganda was at play.
 
LonghornCatholic said:
Yea, even though the documentary did a good job of making the ADA and other organizations look bad, I had a gut feeling propaganda was at play.
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I assume the ADA reference here is American Diabetes Association? If so, yes, they are utterly corrupt as is the American Heart Association and probably just about any org whose names begins with “American” and ends with “Association.” One look at their “funding partners” and you know where their loyalties lie and what their recommendations will be.

I have mentioned it here before but Type 2 diabetes has grown to epidemic levels in the last 30 years or so. For many people this disease is reversible through diet (carbohydrate restriction) but the ADA will not tell you that because they are funded by food and pharma companies who profit from chronic illness. The AHA still recommends highly inflammatory “vegetable” oil garbage (it is actually chemically processed seed oil) over healthy fats, to take just one example. The truth is coming out now but these institutions are not helping people.
 
I think this also explains very well why exercise alone is not a great weight loss strategy.
Click to expand...

I also think it's because if your lifestyle is mostly sedentary, a couple of short quick periods of high-intensity workout a week won't do much. If you're moving and walking around quite a lot daily, it makes a much bigger difference.
 
Last year my older son went low carb and has lost 64 lbs as of last month, from 233 to 169, strictly with diet. In July of this year my other son started the same. He was at 190, and after six weeks he is down 15 lbs to 175. No exercise, just diet.

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