What Really Makes Us Fat?

Sane discussions of weight, like sane discussions of aging, are ever clouded by the large constituencies with large marketing budgets who benefit from selling you on things that are both useless and popular. e.g. you can become fit without much effort, just buy our product. You can turn back aging, just buy our product. You can eat as much of our product as you want and not get fat like those other slobs, so go ahead and fill your plate.

Here's an experiment you can run on yourself. Eat the same diet as you are now, but less of it. Take up alternate day fasting, or just skip a meal every day. Be rigorous - keep track of how much your eat, and eat less than you were. Do it for a couple of months.

You will, absolutely, definitely, without a doubt, lose weight, largely adipose tissue mass.

Everything else is either (a) discussion of nutritional quality with regard to what you are eating, which is a rat-hole that never ends and you will never do better than a good 80/20 result no matter how much time and energy you spend on it or (b) the self-delusion of people who don't want to give up their capacious eating habits.

After years of study, self experimentation and research into the topics (I'm an amateur powerlifter, bodybuilder as well as a general fitness freak...I also write fitness related content, books mostly) here are some quick things to help sort this out. It's all about the hormones.

The single most important element to not getting fat is identifying yourself and then eating appropriately.

Are you a couch potato? Then YES, you need to restrict carb content.

Are you an athelete? Go ahead and eat carbs, but eat them AT THE RIGHT TIME (meaning, post workouts* mostly). And eat the right ones (high GI immediately post heavy lifting session, lower GI later in the day (generally speaking)).

Protein is your friend. Make sure all meals have it. Eat lots of veggies, mostly green. Drink lots of water. Limit chemical consumption (most diet sodas spike insulin...might as well be eating a candy bar).

Getting more specific is going to really depend on our goals. This is critically important. If you can state what your goal is, it is REALLY EASY to understand how to eat, workout and live to meet those goals...but if you don't know the goal, you'll flounder.

For instance, to lose weight:

Restrict carbs for 6.5 days in a week. Do a carb refeed on the 7th night. Eat only protein, fat and veggies (think eggs, bacon and broccoli) when you restrict the carbs. You'll lose tons of weight and retain the muscle. To put this in to high gear, do a HIIT sprint session on day 1 and 2 to completely deplete your glycogen stores.

To gain weight (muscle):

Before you workout, water, protein, fat and veggies. After you workout (heavy weight workout), protein, carbs and veggies. Carbs stimulate insulin, shuttling nutrients to muscles, helping them grow.

There are TONS of tweaks to each of these if you are having trouble (like, for instance, add milk if you are still having trouble gaining weight or add some light cardio if you are having trouble losing weight), but the basics are the above.

I love this stuff....

* btw..when I say "workout", I mean heavy weight workouts (barbell etc). There is something special about the way it stimulates your body that high rep bodyweight workouts just can't do. Bodyweight workouts have their place, but they should be used for a very specific goal...

The study cited was very short term, one month in duration. A much larger time frame is required, which may be difficult to do in a controlled setting. From the actual study report: "Although the very low-carbohydrate diet produced the greatest improvements in most metabolic syndrome components examined herein, we identified 2 potentially deleterious effects of this diet. Twenty-four hour urinary cortisol excretion, a hormonal measure of stress, was highest with the very low-carbohydrate diet. Consistent with this finding, Stimson et al31 reported increased whole-body regeneration of cortisol by 11β-HSD1 and reduced inactivation of cortisol by 5α- and 5β-reductases over 4 weeks on a very low- vs moderate-carbohydrate diet. Higher cortisol levels may promote adiposity, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular disease, as observed in epidemiological studies.32 - 34 In a 6-year prospective, population-based study of older adults in Italy,35 individuals in the highest vs lowest tertile of 24-hour cortisol excretion, with or without preexisting cardiovascular disease, had a 5-fold increased risk of cardiovascular mortality. "

One thing I find a tad irritating about being male and trying to look good (as superficial as it is) is the discrepancy between gaining muscle and losing fat.

It seems females only have to go one direction -> be skinny whereas for males we need to somehow add muscle (for which the general advice is eat a lot of food specifically protein) and lose fat. Those seem very contradictory in my mind though I know little about nutrition.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070707/quotes?qt=qt0231370 When Sleeper was released 39 years ago, I thought this was a cheap joke. But every few years I think about it when there is yet another reversal in what we think we know about nutrition.

TLDR: Second law of thermodynamics still in effect. However, food is not the limiting factor in developed countries so being fat is really a question of eating behaviors and there are relationships between food types and eating behaviors in both the short and long term.