Share post on ...

Facebook

Twitter

Google

Email

Dude, this has nothing to do with FUMPing, but I was working on this today and too proud not to share it. Look for the finished version (this is just the first half), to appear in my January newsletter at http://180degreehealth.com/

YOU! The Boner’s Manual

Recently I hopped over to a website about Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz, for those of you who are somehow even more removed from society than I am, is that guy that wears scrubs on Oprah and has an answer for everything. He’s written a bunch of YOU! Books, like, You! The Owner’s Manual, and You! On a Diet. As far as I know, he also coined the phrase, ?waist management,? in substitution of the more common, ?weight management.

I must admit, that is pretty-clever for a man, much less a monkey. Seriously, I’ve never seen an animal talk and act as smart as Dr. Oz, except for the chimps in Project X and Clyde, Clint Eastwood’s Orangutan sidekick. His intellect dwarfs even the mice in my childhood favorite movie, Explorers, who repeatedly pushed a button that said, I want my cheese. (See the video here – the line, ironically, is at precisely 4:20).

Dr. Oz gets his name from The Wizard of Oz, a fictitious movie about fictitious characters where everything that was said only existed on the screen but never in the real world itself. Most of Oz’s advice is akin to clicking your heels three times, particularly his advice on weight loss.

On the site I regretfully stumbled into, Oz makes the claim that you can lose a pound per month by eating 100 less calories a day. That is a fairy tale indeed, and Dr. Oz is basically telling someone that they can lose weight by putting more ice in their habitual 44-ounce Mountain Dew, thereby reducing their caloric intake. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!

Poor Oprah. She epitomizes the failed American diet sucker. There are smallmouth bass that have fallen for fewer sparkling purple worms than Oprah has diets. But can you blame her? She is 100% heart-driven and believes two things that are absolutely false:

1) That people know what they’re talking about.
2) That the status quo on health, if everyone’s saying it, must mean it’s true.

We love Oprah. She’s as sweet as the agave nectar that’s been converted into body fat on her hips (through a process known as fructose-induced lipogenesis; agave nectar is almost pure fructose). And I’m pulling for her more than anyone on earth. If she were to really understand fat loss and succeed at it, the millions of dieters that ?feel her pain? might also finally have a chance at achieving lipo-liberation.

Well you can be one step ahead of the game, by understanding exactly why eating 100 less calories per day is about as useful for ?waist management? as a bowling ball is for filleting fish.

For one, nobody can realistically keep track of caloric intake with that much precision. Secondly, if you did cut back caloric intake by 100 calories, your appetite would be slightly unsatisfied. So eating 100 calories less makes you 100 calories hungrier. If you don’t eat that, your body will be 100 calories more tired. If you exercise and don’t eat those 100 calories your body will be 100 calories colder. All of these things are guided by physiological mechanisms.

Waist management is no different than oxygen management or blood management. You can make some sudden changes, but the body quickly responds to compensate. If you run a 100 yard sprint holding your breath, you will gasp for air when you get to the end and pant like crazy until your body restores those oxygen levels. For a brief moment, oxygen levels will be below normal, but they rebound right back.

Body fat regulation works by similar mechanisms. Virtually everything in the human body is designed with homeostatic regulation ? checks and balances, so that constant equilibrium is maintained. The body is designed, not to store up more and more fat as if for hibernation (unless you practice force-feeding like a Sumo wrestler), but to maintain a perfect balance of fat-burning and fat-storing, so that over periods of weeks, months, and years the amount of fat you have stored in your tissues is almost exactly the same. That’s how it’s supposed to be, but a very subtle glitch in the feedback system can trigger an imbalance, and a slow, steady accumulation process begins. Anyone familiar with that?

If a person gains 40 pounds between the ages of 20 and 60, which is pretty typical, that is precisely one pound per year. This pound of fat represents an excess calorie accumulation of 3,500 calories, or just 9.6 calories a day. That’s barely a peanut a day. So really what we’re looking at is telling someone if they eat only half of their last bite of dinner, they will avoid gaining a single ounce from 20 to 60. Sorry everyone, but this is absurd. No one in the world can consciously manage energy intake and expenditure within 100 calories, much less the 9.6 that still results in obesity and a higher risk for most degenerative diseases.

The point is that the conscious mind doesn’t regulate energy intake and expenditure, the body does, just as it does oxygen and the pumping of blood. Trying to eat less and/or exercise more to change the intake-expenditure ratio is futile. Not only that, but doing so results in counterbalancing forces that make the underlying imbalance even worse. That’s right, dieting makes you fatter. Creating a calorie deficit, which is the whole point of the eat less, exercise more mantra, has profoundly-negative consequences for someone trying to better regulate fat storage.

For one, when the body goes into energy deficit, the muscles and organs are starved of energy. When the muscles and organs ? the active tissues, are not supplied with sufficient energy, the body lowers the metabolic rate (the amount of energy it runs on), by lowering the secretion and uptake of thyroid hormones. The lower the thyroid is running, the more the body favors lipogenesis (the formation of fat) over lipolysis (the burning of fatty acids for fuel). This process also triggers a physiological phenomenon called ?rebound hyperphagia. Hyperphagia means to overeat. Thus, just as running sprints holding your breath causes rebound hyperventilation, dieting causes rebound overeating. It’s as simple as that, only prior to the overeating your body shifts to a metabolic state (lowered thyroid) that favors more of your food being converted into body fat instead of being burned as fuel, and you end up wearing more fat than you did before you started ? even if you weigh the exact same.

This all works against your goals. The goals of any person seeking to lose weight are to reduce appetite, increase the metabolic rate, and create a state that favors fat-burning over fat-storage. Typical low-calorie dieting, especially when combined with a grueling and unsustainable exercise program, serves to make the fundamental problem significantly worse, and you encounter the infamous Yo-Yoprah effect.

FUMP details…

Breakfast: 3 eggs scrambled with 15 shrimp and 3T butter

Snack: 3 ounces cheddar cheese

Lunch: 14 ounces fatty oven-roasted prime rib (rare)

Dinner: ditto lunch, only with 8 ounces instead of 14