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Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 3)

By On · 279 Comments

calories burned with kettlebell swings - boost metabolismYou can’t out-exercise your mouth.

It is a fundamental truth and a brilliant evolutionary strategy.  Exercise has many interesting impacts, both positive and negative, but if you’ve been chronically obese, I want to encourage you not to start here. Not only are you putting your heavy, out of shape body into an increased risk of injury, but until you’ve been successful in the one exercise that ALWAYS works, you’ll simply eat your way through any progress.

What is this magical exercise? Isometrically clench your teeth in the presence of fattening foods and excess calories.  It’s necessary to control appetite, not “fuel Read Full Article →

Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 2)

By On · 182 Comments

IMG_0794The curtain is pulled back and the great OZ is exposed.

If you want to run faster, jump higher and swim farther, then there’s nothing that replaces planned biological stress that trains muscle memory and invokes hypertrophy. That being said the idea of calories in – calories out doesn’t fail because a “calorie is not a calorie,” but rather because the output isn’t really exercise.

You can’t out-exercise your mouth.

While this became fundamentally important to me years ago, it is only in the last year that I have had the ability to dive in and actually test it. Read Full Article →

Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 1)

By On · 128 Comments

defiant healthAs I sat on my back porch early one morning in October, 2008, there was no way for me to realize how this one crazy moment would completely change my life.  Over the weekend, I attended a meeting in Philadelphia and on the last night proclaimed to a friend that I was about to do the most odd experiment in my life.  I wanted to get to the bottom of “metabolism” and “burning calories.”  I wanted to understand why it seemed so difficult to lose a couple of pounds and yet I could easily GAIN a couple in a weekend. Read Full Article →

Beauty Sleep

By On · 72 Comments

gloves before sweater make you look better - how sleeping chilled can thin your thighs. Over the last 6 months, we’ve spent a lot of time on macronutrients and food. I believe (and can prove) the common protein-carbohydrate-fat speak paradigm is broken. These macromolecules are all well understood scientifically, and yet conceptually, real food doesn’t come in simple little packages; macronutrient density/percentage varies from food to food. Even when we attempt to cluster foods together with the these labels, it doesn’t capture the dynamic and interchange of the overriding metabolic rules and microbiome influence.

Generally speaking, the more refined one or more macronutrients in a “foodstuff,” the more unhealthy ingestion becomes. Take natural “sugar” for Read Full Article →

No Guts. No Glory. (Part 2)

By On · 428 Comments

As we wind down this journey, I hope you can clearly see the problem with the very simplistic “molecular biology” approach to our biological systems. More than one time during the last two TEDMED events I heard that this approach is dead. The idea that we can use a reductionist attitude to manage one hormone or one macronutrient and have widespread impact has failed repeatedly.

Sugar and oil (not foods, but refined energy) will probably end up being the exception.

We now know that there are a “symphony of reactions” that happen in our body and it is far more Read Full Article →

No Guts. No Glory. (Part 1)

By On · 45 Comments

I hope that everyone feels a little more enlightened on macronutrients and I’ll try to refrain from using the “protein, carbohydrate, and fat” dietary jabberwocky  unless there is a biological/technical reason for pointing it out. If you SEE those words, please note that I am not describing food  groups (like meat or potatoes).

I really believe everyone’s health would be greatly improved if you simply didn’t use these three words in any way in making food choices.  It may seem trivial, but it’s not. Our image of these words and the cascading, general inadequate explanations of what happens when these Read Full Article →

Pass the Protein (roots) – Part 2

By On · 40 Comments

After 4 months we are finally nearing the end of our dietary journey.  We discussed the basic context of Macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) as “fuel.” We learned that there is a group of Micronutrients – vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that all constitute “service” or biological maintenance.  We understand that fat has more energy density (2x) than protein or carbohydrate.

Our body uses primary fuel glucose/glycogen through the TCA or krebs cycle to obtain energy (brain biggest single user, followed closely by liver and muscle)  and the body stores a glycogen (a special muscle protein with a carbohydrate shell) and Read Full Article →

Pass the Protein – Part 1

By On · 122 Comments

NASA Protein Crystal Growth (PCG). High quality crystals grown in microgravity to determine 3 D structureCan you pass the protein? I’ll have a little protein with that. I’m dragging a little, I think I need some protein. I’m really trying to bulk up, what are you eating for your protein?

Okay, I admit I was of the same mindset. I once recommended “one serving of protein and one serving of carbohydrate with every meal.” I lost 50 lbs on that advice and yet when challenged by a 11 year old girl with a simple question my “belief system” was stopped in it’s tracks. I took biochemistry in undergraduate and graduate school. I worked in the Read Full Article →

The New Eye On BAT

By On · 41 Comments

Irisin transforming fat to BATWe take a quick break from our macronutrient discussion to talk about some really exciting news in the hypothermics world that showed up in the last two weeks. It’s great when new data shows that old thoughts might be wrong.  This one comes from researchers at Harvard Medical School (and a host of other institutions).(1)  These scientist discovered a new hormone, irisin, named after the greek goddess iris – the personification of the rainbow and messenger of the gods.

What is most exciting is that this hormone could be another piece of the “calorie” controversy – the irritating paradox of calorie Read Full Article →

Fat – Part 2

By On · 47 Comments

the facts on Fat and weight loss. In Fat – Part 1 I explained some details about our body’s use of lipids (fat) and the role it plays in both survival and diet.  The most important concept to take away is that you MUST go on a naturally “high-fat diet,” digesting your OWN adipose tissue, to lose weight.  This may seem so incredibly obvious, but if you take a few minutes each day to think about it, I believe it will have profound impact on your results.

Why? because every calorie you put into your mouth will fuel your body and that will result in the part Read Full Article →

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