Getting Thinner After Yeasr

Now the author is pleased to report that some small changes in life have resulted in a major and stable weight loss over the last six or seven months.

I have gone down 12kg from my maks weight and around 7 kg from my best low weight - that is 30 llbs and almost 20 respectively in old money.

How have I done this?  Well firstly, why was I not achieving this when in fact I was training maybe five hours a week?


1) Training is not enough, Train, train some more and do other activities

2) Avoid the  Fat Gain / Maintain traps


1) Training was something I luckily did a lot of before. However I wasnt quite doing enough and I was falling into one of the traps of injesting compensating calories with high energy snacking.

Often too if I trained I would do little else that day. All my training for four years was conditioning Cardio too. So the three things I have done are:

i) Focus on being physically active IN ADDITION to cardio training
ii) Extend the duration and / or intensity of cardio vascular sessions
iii) Take up weight and stregnth training

Combined with dog walking and going the the shops, gardening and so on, together with training I am up around 8 to 12 hours a week movement. Weight training is also important, although I am not a full believer in muscle mass, it is maybe that the bodies' own steroid hormone production rises enough to burn fat. Regularity has been important and I have had tips on very effective body buuilding techniques which dont use large lifts. Rather you hold tension in the muscle in stead of locking out, come off the lift 4 time slower than you press or pull into it, and do some light lifts which use the muscle group in between your set and thus hold blood pressure in them without straining the muscles into injury.

I eased up from two session a week in the gym, where in addtion I must say I nearly always do some conditioning and work in leg sets or sit ups with upper body sets so my heart rate is higher than the usual gym lizard. I was conscious of then of being active in addition to these sessions as in dog walks etc and also take outdoors cardio on the bike, or earlier in the year it wa XC skis. Just grab the time, the kids are older and I found that I could nab an hour or two on sunday mornings, friday or saturday evenings, the odd afternoon or mid evening.

Regularity is important because it helps maintain muscle mass and grow it, and keeps your metabolism higher all the time, this all also meaning your hormonal switches are telling your fat cells to give up their content for use elsewhere!

Those hormones you will have heard of - adrenalin of course, plus noradrenalin and cortisol. All work to force the body to use burn sugar a little more and more importanly act directly on fat cells ( adipose cells) to release their fat content via hydrolisis. A heightened level of these then breaks down fat, and if you can maintain that from a good regular training programme with intensity which leads to their production, ie grunting and straining quite a bit, then you will magically burn off fat.

In relation to this, we mention that weight training is good and it releases other anabolic hormones too which divert energy to building the body. It can be that other sports get  your adrenalin going more than the usual condiitoning on the treadmill, for example an hours football where you take it a little too seriously and get the adrenalin going and the stress to win and not lose up!

I noticed it first on my face, then on my beer gut and now I have only my love handles and some loose fat on my thighs to work on!


2) The Fat Traps

One i have mentioned, so lets list them all anyway.

1) Peaking blood sugar
2) Snacking with high calorie, refined foods after training
3) Starving your body too long

Lets start with the last one first, because it is the big surprise to me and many others.

That you are in fact starving and getting fatter!

In western culture the most common form of "temporary starvation" is from dinner to breakfast, and people who miss breakfast may find they are slimming, but may well find they rebound back once they try to eat normally again. The body does not like being depleted of calories from digestion more than average 10 hours. From dinner at say 6 pm to breakfast at 7am there has gone 12 hours, a little less when you take digestion into account, but it is too long.

For care homes it is recommended residents eat four meals a day, which are quite small portions compared to what young people eat, but still make up 1500 - 2100 kcal a day. Supper is seen as important and some there is room too for fruit and bread inbetween those times, and higher calorie treats for those who struggle with their appetite too.

Here though we come into a slight dilema and that relates to the other two issues. Snacking is bad if we injest too many simple carbohydrate and oil/ fat content and carry on to eat the same ahem, generous portions for dinner.

Starvation though leads to a simple set or hormonal responses in the body. Lay down some of your calories as fat because you have experience a fast. You need to teach your body that it isnt going to starve!


2) Snacking - as said above we want to snack actually, but what we are doing is spreading our calorie intake out over the day and meeting our body's need for replenishment after in particular exercise or a long time between meals.

What we also want to snack on is not chips (crisps to you and me), nuts, chocolate and those dairy and other energy drinks high is maltodextrines and simpler sugars. We want to snack on fruit, especially bannanas and pears, bread slices with protein topping or small portions left over dinner with a protein content.

If we snack we can either then count our calories, or we can just be conscious and reduce the amount of main meal we eat.

3) Avoiding blood sugar peaking

Here we get into a major crux of being sporty yet fatty, when taken in combination with that self rewarding snacking or huge hunger pangs at 5 pm after work and / or training right after the jhob.

Let us start with the low hanging ahem, fruit, or rather dessert. With a typical western lifestyle and main meal diet, you do not need to eat dessert. Nor do you need to have a starter. A decent portion of dinner will maks give you 800 kcal, and on average around half that. Dessert brings in additional, high sugar calories on top of a western high starch based dinner, and your blood sugar will peak beyond that which can sensibly be stored as glycogen in muscles and liver, and the body will lay this down as fat. Just a few micrograms maybe per dessert, but it is teaching itself to lay down fat fgor hard times because you are experiencing plenty now!

You need 2200 kcal -2500 kcal per day as a more active man, 10 -15% less for women by in large to keep up your energy level if you are physically active 8 or more hours a week. Otherwise you risk starvation mode.  The issue is then to spread out your calorie intake such that you avoid peaking over blood sugar.

Unfortunetly our modern wheats, white rice and use of potatoes have a draw back, in that they both have a lot of simple chain starches which are rapidly broken into blood sugar by enzymes like amylase. Spelt and other tubers like sweet potatoes have branched starches in higher amounts and this takes more time to digest, Also of course, higher fiber grains lock away this starch more so it takes longer to digest. This means we can peak over max sugar and lay down fat from too large a meal eaten quickly.

Another really good thing to slow down digestion then is to combine protein with those carbohydrates, which in the west we tend to do for lunch and dinner but not so much for breakfast. Breakfast is an absolutely key meal in dieting and good nutrition. I started eating a BIGGER breakfast than ever before, almost of bruch like proportions and was very decided about waht I really liked, Luckily I am up 0550 week days so my brain is not too fussy to demand variety. I went over to eating porridge AND an egg AND an open sandwich with protein content.

Protein when taken in reasonable quantities together with carbos does two things. Firstly it gives a quite quick signal to your brain that you are sated, you are satisfied, your hunger is abated. This may be in fact because of the second effect. Protein mixed in slows down the digestion of carbo in the gut because maybe there are more protealases needing to be made which gut cells then divert some energy and effort  from making carbo cracking amylase.

Protein has been a key in the (otherwise unhealthily practiced ) Atkins Diet. Atkins worked a little for me, but I rebounded quite quickly after. It did make me think of the carbo loads I need and how they might peak, but it wasnt until I came into BIG BREAKFASTING that I realised how effective protein is. I go from roughly 0650 to 1130 without feeling at all hungry most days at work or college.



Then I eat a bigger lunch that before, with three slices of bread (two protein, one sweet topping) and two or even three pieces of fruit. This is with wholemeal bread, low fat protein toppings and a moderate amount of jam.

I do then get hungry late afternoon and will try a banana on my commute BEFORE i reach the gym to avoid this hunger, eating it by the clock at 1515 to 1545 rather than waiting to be gymn, Also I then eat around 2030 to 2130 with a simple fruit or a single slice of bread and say small glass milk.

Refined sugar is also a key area to reduce, and that includes grapes, oranges and apples and juices of those fruits because they contain high levels of sucrose and fruktose which are easily digested. Sweets and especially sugar sweetened fizzy drinks, and those new energy drinks are definetly to be taken in very, very small quantitie or infrequently. You can have it all, but in much smaller quantuities and take them instead of your snack rather than just after a meal as is often tradition in the west.

Protein then helps slow down carbohydrate digestion and absorption and this reduces the chances that you go into peak blood sugar. Combined with whole grain carbos this makes for very healthy eating and is a bit part of the plan to diet effectively and stabily, by small changes in lifestyle which dont annoy or fatigue you!

Running In....

Running has always been a bug bear thing for me. I love the idea of slinging on jogging shoes and just getting on with it from your doorstep, contra driving via the gym', getting my cycling gear and bike in order or worse of them all maybe, driving and messing about with ski-prep in XC ski. I even quite enjoy the meditative nature of running. However running hates me.

How can people who are quite over weight, big boned or bitty-obese, tackle runninn and its high impact on your body ?

My own story is that i was a bit lazy and anti sport as a small kid and this had a long hangover into my teen years. Not only was I a bit overweight and unfit, I was also hindered by growing pains and small feet. About age 12 or 13 i got growing pains in my heels and my previously quite large feet grew it seems less than they should have done - i endes up with EU 45-GB10 at 6'2" which is decidely the smallest feet to height any of my tall peers had. I even squeezed into a pair of nine and a half heels a girlfriend had who was three inches shorter than me!  Coupled to unusually high arches, running has usually lead to injury and me giving it up having maybe built up to 3 or 4 mile jaunts.

In my late teens I took up cycling and the low impact on the body meant I could build up fitness over a couple of years and really enjoy the sport. By age 21 I was a lythe racing cyclist, had a resting heart rate of 38 and could cycle 120 miles at around 24 mph.

Cycling stayed with me as did that rotten appetite you develop, and of course need to cycle five six hour days. Pasta for supper and breakfast, eatiung when you aren't really hungry because otherwise you will go empty or have to eat more than a morcel underway and end up with stomach ache. These days I don't have the time for a lot of cycling and added to the time it takes to clothe up in our often chilly spring and autumn, I decided to try and crack running for the four months or so of the year which are my desirable or qeather enforced gaps between xc ski and cycling seasons.

Dag Otto Lauretzsen the former Tour de France rider, robbed of the world championship hoops by an idiot in Japan, says in his book "get in shape' he had a mate who was very unfit and quite overweight. Of course he decided to something about it, but unlike a lot of folk with a plan and determination, he set out with modest, step-wise goals. He used 'the lampost technique' in building up his running by combining it with walking and running between lamposts, builsing up the running distance one post at a time. That is probably max' a hundred yards in a residential neighbourhood.

I took a leaf from his book then, and decided to build up very gradually towards a five kilometer cross country run ( or jog for me)  at the end of May. Why only five clicks? I can ski 30 and could get on a bike right nownafter seven months off it and cycle 40! Running is just so much higher impact on your body and also for your or I the life long cyclist , the way it stretches the calve muscles and engages other muscles take adaptation. In the reverse situation, I had a friend who was a Royal Marine but when he started cycling, the whole MTB club left him on the first climb.

Starting low is a good idea if it is Tarmac you have outside your froint door. I live on a grove, or ring access road which is about 480m and very lightly traffic'd. The first day out was just that, a 480m half run-jog affair after once round walking. I doubled it pretty much straight away as I had no ill effects and am fairly fit from the xc ski season just behind us. 200m gentle jogging after 800m walking may be ideal for someone heavier and less fit. Since then I have been building it up by ten percent roughly every five days or so.

Also I have been careful on rest days. I try and be disciplined to run every other day. Rigoruous or challenging exercise will stress your body's systems and actually damage your muscles. And tha is a good thing. Your body learns that it needs to divert resources to repair this and also to prepare the body for the next session- it anticipates more exercise. Unlike cheetahs, we don't retain our musculature and  fitness without significant exercise. We have evolved in societies from the days of first agriculture or even before, where we did not always need to be physically prepared for survival, but rather could survive as a flock. There was maybe even a survival advantage in being lazy and putting on fat, in that we exposed our-ancient-selves to less risk, used less energy in building muscle when we didn't need to, while laying on a paunch for winter come harvest time. Harvest feasting and our positive feedback appetite loops on salty, fatty and sugary foods, rare and aought after in antiquity, couple to give us a horrible predisposition to become obese. A rest day to a fitness fanatic who runs xmas morning, may seem lazy, but it will allow your body to recover, repair and prepare so that you avoid injury and get lasting improvement over time. Furthermore, a lot of research shows that you lose the trajectory of improvement if you don't exercise within 48hrs of your last session.

So there was some science with a dash of heavy ethology - specially for the creationists amongst you. I like the lampost method - my step-up increment being 10% - that is what feels right in my legs and feet.  I tried to really push up with a warm up of 960m and interval training totalling  2.8km , with a short warm down two weeks ago and was out of action for six days with acheing achilles, arches and calves. It was too far, too hard and way too soon on Tarmac and hard forrest trails at least. Your body will tell you - small aches and twinges in you muscles and cardiovascular system are to be expected, and next time out you may still feel a little tender and want to hold to the same distance and intensity as the previous session, or even reduce it a bit. "No Pain, No Gain" is true in as far as that description I just gave , whereas for the quite unfit or those taking a major step-up in intensity, uncomfortable, hundering pain in your legs, joints and feet and especially chest pains or radial shooting pains anywhere on your body, severe dizziness and so on is your body saying STOP. Disclaimer, disclsimer, you should consult your doctore before embarking on an exercise programme or experiencing discomfort during or after training - phew.

As the head strong thirty something I was a wee while ago now, I often forgot that in cycling too, each season or when recovering from i njury, it went softly-softly-catch-monkey when I was younger. I remember with the lighter evenings of March, getting out for just 20 mins, then 30, 40, 50, an hour before building up to the two hour sessions which in Scotland were always challenging for headwinds and hills. As a man with longer working hours I used to expect to be able to do three times one hour sessions a week and get really fit. But I had previously built up to 8-12 hours a week over two spring months, and you really get so much fitter doing two hour or longer sessions on a bike. You too maybe were a marathon runner even in your late teens, and find getting back into running really painful and unrewarding. Step it down a few notches and listen to your body.

Goals, Patience, Bad Habits

I have actually lost around a stone since i started my focus on 2 hour duration exercise sessions in january, ie almost 7kg. That is then above average loss compared to the big diet study i linked to in the last blog, almost double. My goal is then 18kg in one year, so I am about a third of the way in with almost two thirds of the time gone.

To make me feel guilty i have had three weekends of over-beer ration in a row and I have not been careful with extras and portion control the last week, with disrupted days. Some days are very good though with a low appetite compared to my previous gluttony for extras and high calorie travel meals.

Now i have to return to the slog as it seems sometimes, but already i can see the benefits on the scales and in the mirror. This time though i am not resting on my laurels and tightened stomach muscles. Muscle is heavier than fat, but also holds a good stone of fat around my middle in better in the mirror. So i mustnt kid myself on, it is all there as it was when I was ten years younger before i got really bloated. For a long time I looked like a sporty guy on either end with a couch potatoe in the middle, and I just held myself in. Then my weight stabalised miraculously at 118kg, 19 stone uk, given how many extras i considered were par for the course. 99 kg is my target btw. 112 was achieved, may have slipped back a little with the beers?

So dont kid yourself that this approach is quick nor that you can just stop the discipline when you can suck and pucker your stomach in : let it hang out, pinch those love handles, fondle those boobs.

In the long term the diet is a life diet, while the exercise is then reduced although i think i will keep up one long session a week.

By determination i got six and a little hours last week quality training before the surprise monsoon conditions sat it. Now I am looking at doing one three hour session, two two hour sessions and a one hour harder session before the autumn sets in with its dank mists and grey days come along.

I thought I had hit peak weight loss but that was a dip from doing sessions which stretched out more than 2 hours and from being very strict, surpassing my extras prohibition! However I do get that tank empty feeling at around 1 hr 45 on my bike so every minute after that is effectively fat burning, and if I avoid sugary replenishment then fat burning continues until the next meal.

Equivalence In Diets Which Lack Duration Exercise

All diets 'have similar results' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29031985

This is an interesting study, a meta study of long term results, more because it should point to two of my own conclusions about dieting. Firstly, the weight loss takes a much longer time than people imagine or rather hope for. Just under 8kg for a year's atkins or weight-watchers. Secondly you have to comply of course, strictly to the diet, and this research actually excludes those who do not comply, which is actually useful to compare the real efficacy of diets versus each other.

The conclusion is as the title> there is  no actual huge difference over the long term if you manage to stay on the diet. These calorie counting diets and low carbo, high protein diets which achieve the same for glycogen, blood sugar and fat burning then, by in large do not have a component of exercise and those that have, there is a lack of prescription on duration.

Weeks update now is the interesting effects on my own appetite. I have started to get less satisfied by meals unfortunetly, so will need to work on chewing and distractions and water after dinner. I am also more often a wee bit hungry, a bit of a pit in the stomach, but I am less actually tempted to snack or use up my fruit allowance.

I have spread my exercise sessions this week a bit more and will try to get another extra session in the weekend, which may take me up to 7 or 8 hours. Weeks run monday to sunday if you remember, such that weekend allowances of extras are not split !

Hidden Calories

Today I came upon a trap which you should be aware of.

I train like I sai in my last blog, a little at the top end of the fat burning bpm zone and into the conditioning zone because I have the luxury of middle of the day hours to put in, while I spend evenings and weekends with the family. So the last two times I have been out on the longest cycle route I like to do, I have gone empty and hit the wall about 6km from finishing. Those last six kilometers are hard. The body has exhausted all its carbohydrate stores, and I probably have had the runner's wall, a big imbalance in salts.

After exercising I then allowed myself a small can of italien tuna and some nuts, with a quite low calorie sports drink before hand. I also bought a frappe cappucino. Last time I read the label of these rather delicisous little treats from our national dairy producer, Tine, I saw that they contained about 3 spoonfuls of sugar. Wrong, They are actually 62 kcal per 100g. That confuses it more: is coffee heavier or lighter than water?  So it now means this is nearly 200 kcal.

Thus you can be fooled into thinking a snack is a non event in the calorie count. It could be a drink or a small cake or a sports bar. Dont skim read to the calories. Remember to do this also when you are doing your cathartic calorie count of all your extras in life. Be honest about what you take as treats, luxuries, beer and larger or repeat portions of dinner. Weigh some items if you are not sure, and compare a few different calorie counting web sites to see what they mean by a portion.

Calories are difficult but also there is a really easy rule. Here's why:

Calorific value is calculated by literally burning the foodstuff in pure oxygen, and then measuring a volume of water around the glass bubble the burning happens in, to attain how many kilojoules it has used in rising the water temperature per gram of food. However the body does not digest all foods as well, nor does it metabolise some as effectively as burning in pure O2. Nuts and sweetcorn are notorious undigested left overs in your faeces. So is a lot of longer fibre carbohydrates or those bound up tightly in whole grain foods. You shit out calories. This muddies the waters a bit, but let us not follow that debate.

The easy part as the alternative  then is that anything with a high sugar content and particularily a high sugar and fat content  is going to be high on the hit list of cutting right back on, rationing down to say 150 kcal a couple of times a week. Also crisps and ground nuts which are high simple chain starch based and have a lot of oils and fats in them. Other nuts like hazel nuts are not so bad, but I would say limit total intake of nuts and crisps to between 50 g and 100g PER WEEK. That is not a lot, a small portion. Also then limit cakes or buns to ONE A WEEK, and check that it is under 400kcal. Alternatively cut it up or buy small sized cakes but be disiplined to 350 kcal per week.

There is or has been recently a lot of research going on about training on a very low carbo diet, and I am not an advocate of a high fat, high meat diet. In any case a lot of low carbo recipies in the books or web sites are actually very healthy, for example salmon with asparagus or broccoli. Ketosis, catabolising fat, is not a normal, sustainable form of energy provision in western humans. Ikinuits had a shorrt life expectancy before western medcine came to them. So I am a critic of the long term high fat, low carbo diet, while I can see that reducing starchy calories can help. Training on low carbo is a painful affair I found and due to this and the high colestrol intake, I fell off the Atkins wagon. 

I am proposing that we simply match what the human body is meant to do> go on a long hunting trip , burn up sugars and then wander back home with the kill while burning fat reserves. I say that you have to go out and hit the glycogen wall , sometimes like me today, consciously in order for the body to start catabolising its fat reserves. The low carbo diets make the short cut or starving your body of anything which can make glycogen and forcing the fat system on. I dont believe this is natural or sustainable in the long term, but could agree that sedentary candidates who are in a danger zone for obesity could benefit from this instead of exercise in the short term weight loss phase.

Some research seems contradictory, but the medical establishment knows that a low quality diet of sugars, refined starches and saturated fats is what is on the menu of the majority of western patients who have heart attacks, even if they arre not very overweight at all. It is most likely the combination of the western super carbo consumer life style which  is so dangerous, although I suspect that long term high fat low carbo diets are going to prove dangerous to mortality and later life morbidity. I stand to be proven wrong of course.

The consumer snack and soft drinks  industry stands in line at every retail food outlet to pump you with high sugar, high refined starch, high fat products and hides a good deal of deadly palm oil in innocious products like even raisins. The drinks industry has been better to respond to consumer demand for low calorie options of course since the 1970s dieting fad. However the snack industry is currently wrapping a whole load of quite unhealthy bars up as ' sports' oriented products and this not good. Read the label about the kcal inhold, and see how much it all weights.

I found the best snack trade off right now is the chocolate Alpen  bar, at 167kcal. less than half a comparable sized chocolate bar, and with mixed whole grains.

The mantra is limit snacks, subsitute in fruit, and avoid super sizing drinks and meal times.

Sporty and Little Thinner. Pre Weigh In Chat

I am a little excited about my weigh in but really I shouldnt be. For any sporty fatty who wants to lose maybe 2 stone tops, it is better to take it off two pounds at a time. In metric, that is 12kg and 1 kg per month, so that makes a nice round year.

I have been suddenly going down at a kilo a week, and in the holiday month I managed a kilo, so I am pretty anxious about the weekly weigh in tommorrow, but actually that is just going against my own philosophy ! Go slow , stay off for good, change for ever.

I have a little higher a figure 18kg which is around 3 stone to lose. Also I am being a house husband for a while so I can train a little harder during the day. This means that I am up in the top range on some of my cycling tours, pushing 75 / 85 % max bpm during a good proportion of my daytime tours between house work and picking up the kids. For people in full time jobs who feel quite fatigued, it is best to be in the lower segment of fat burning bpm, around 50% to 65% as this will tire you out less and require less concentration. It may seem like a lot of work, and sonme weeks  you may not make 7 hours, but if you can do 5 by stretching out sessions, and squeezing more time somewhere, then you will get the benefit of life changes. If you keep to 7 hours a week, then you will probably see a faster weight loss at some point  in your six months to a year programme.

light is at the end of the tunnel. Like a year out to do an MBA or become a firefighter, the investment in time and the discipline with extras should be very worth while in the long term. After the weight loss period the maintainance period means you can go back  to  a more typical varied training calender, but remember that you can never go back to all those extras again, 22 000 Kcal / month in my case.

I feel my appetite is under control, although you have to be weary.

queue next blog

Weighing in this week

Weigh in this morning on the flat line, and a kilo down in the last week.

A fair bit of hard training, 2 hour sessions three days in a row. I don't know if that has a large effect on rate of weight loss, but it would be interesting to find out. I was expecting two things with this diet and training regime, firstly slow steady loss over.time and secondly a peak rate of weight loss at some time into it. Finally i hope for long term appetite effect and self discipline after I move on.

Like the recent 5:2 starvation diet, my regime is based on scientific facts from other sources and is a common sense and logical approach to losing weight for those who are prepared to extend their training sessions to well over an hour three times a week.

Also I feel a very much reduced appetite and much better control of snacking. Some of which is allowed on the diet to keep you from complete boredom.

However as in the 5:2 and many other diets, in particular the calorie starvation type, is that they have not been proven conclusively - statistically that is to day. In diets you cannot compare to placebo in most regimes and so you lose quite a few of the neutralising effects of a double blind trial, where neither researcher nor patient know which group they are in until their alocation of medicine is decoded.  Also there is more variance in how people comply: so if you compared one diet, say taking a chrome salt tablet, to the 5:2 then there would be a lot of people following the simple take a pill a day ,while a significant number of 2 day starvers would be eating anyway. Worse for my regime which combines a strict 5 hour at over 110 bpm heart rate per week minimum plus a restriction in treats then it gets worse.

So there is an issue with finding out which diets are best for the public. You can of course take people into a hospital or the like and control their every bite and step, but then the diet is just as much about the artificial discipline as much as the content of the diet regime. Diets have to work in everyday life to be relevant to the western human condition.

What you need to smooth out the variances is firstly to just report those who dont comply as failures, and secondly to have a large enough group to make a meaningful average.  That means two things: we see a standard distribution in weight loss for the group, secondly when we compare to another group then we know that these two averages are comparable and the difference between them is large enough to have occured by effect of the different regimes, and not random chance. Look up clinical trials if you dont know about them, and a two tailed t-test for statistical significance.

That is why infact dieting is not like treating many of the diseases obesity and high calorie intake leads to. We can treat or as consultants like to say "manage heart disease" because you eventually die from it. They use pills, they use surgical procedures they even use clinically controlled exercise regimes. All are proven to work because they have to be by law. That is to say all those mentioned above have been subject to infact numerous clinical trials. We "cure" heart disease.

Propriety, branded diets by in large have not gone through the type of clinical trial that shows on average that they are effective enough to bother with. Most are based on controll of calorific intake which is scientifically proven to reduce fatness, in the short term at least. However the variations of people's long term response to the diet and actually the measure of how easy they are to comply to, are  usually not proven in a comparative way to other non branded diets.

There is as yet no magic pill for dieting which is both effective and first and foremost, safe to take.   Stomach stapling surgery of course is proven to be effective. But that is only afforded in morbidly obese people.  This is one reason why a new diet appears every couple of years as the next magic thing, because there are always people who have failed on other diets.

Atkins was a welcome departure because it was genuinely unique and novel, while being based on scientific observation.

Really though what all the low carb and calorie controlled diets should make we in the west aware of is that we take far too many additional sugar based calories which are surplus to our daily requirements, and are sometimes eaten and drunk in a short time span leading to fat deposition due to blood sugar overload.

On the calorie controlled diets i hear people speak and write of the hell week or fortnight. This is within a month of starting the diet usually and it is when you hit a wall of feeling low on energy while thus craving treats and gratification. For me when i last lot more than a stone on exercising and dieting a bit more drastically, hell week was every week. I was depressed by the diet.

This time I did find a bit of a hill to climb. Luckily or not as it prove to be, i had started my longer duration training in january before deciding to cut out beer and extras in june. So i was through the barrier to getting out three or four times a week was broken. The hell was mild when i came to stamp on extras.

There we have the grounds for at least five longtidunal and comparative studies, with varying control groups which could be conducted with some degree of statistical significance if the regime is actually effective for larger groups of sporty fatties.