The traditional approach to weight loss centers on the idea that you can count calories and then determine, by weight and age. how many calories to cut to produce a given weight loss. According to this theory, you simply use printed "caloric value tables" to calculate calories f food intake and subtract activity output, arriving at a net daily figure.
However, as researchers now realize, 3500 calories may equal a pound of fat in a laboratory but in the real world the equation doesn't hold up. Inactive, overweight people struggle with a metabolism that works against them, failing to achieve desired weight even when they closely follow these rules. Before long, in confusion or frustration, they turn to fad diets, hoping for an answer.
If weight loss was a simple matter of reducing total caloric intake, it would be easy to lose weight by simply skipping breakfast and eating normally the rest of the day. Theoretically, this should result in a 30-50 pound loss each year. With further cutbacks you could expect even better results. But, that's not what happens.
Two things determine what you weigh: energy balance, the number of calories you consume each day(energy input) in contrast to the number of calories you burn off(energy output), and body composition, your percentage of body fat compared to lean tissue.
Energy output depends on body composition and basal metabolic rate(BMR). lean tissue is active, producing and using energy by burning calories. The greater your body percentage of lean tissue, the more energy you expend, and the more calories you can eat in small meals throughout the day without becoming fatter. Body fat uses very little energy. The greater your body's percentage of fat, the less energy you use and the less food you can eat without gaining fat.
So, what about following a low calorie diet as recommended by many doctors and diet experts? It's a good starting point and makes sense for a lot of people. (Never undertake a severe caloric restriction diet under 1500 calories a day without medical supervision.) If you count calories, follow the common sense advice of most experts who advocate frequent small meals and light snacks consisting of a variety of fresh, wholesome, low-fat, high-fiber foods: vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, seafood, lean meats, and low-fat nonfat dairy products.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Hoodia Diet Review
60 Minutes Report on Hoodia
(CBS) Each year, people spend more than $40 billion on products designed to help them slim down. None of them seem to be working very well.
Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it'll be tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural substance that literally takes your appetite away.
It's very different from diet stimulants like Ephedra and Phenfen that are now banned because of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn't stimulate at all. Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think you're full, even if you've eaten just a morsel. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
"Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by making the stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South Africa's Bushmen for thousands of years."
Because the only place in the world where hoodia grows wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen were featured in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy."
Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. "I really like to eat them when the new rains have come," says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. "Then they're really quite delicious."
When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines. In the interest of science, Stahl ate it. She described the taste as "a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad."
So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects - no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn't hungry all day, even when she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. "I'd have to say it did work," says Stahl.
Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very long time. After all, they have been living off the land in southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.
Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still live in old traditional huts, and cook so-called Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa's national laboratory. Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a study of indigenous foods.
"What they found was when they fed it to animals, the animals ate it and lost weight," says Dr. Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss products based on hoodia.
Was hoodia's potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?
"No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.
It took the South African national laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so far on research, including clinical trials with obese volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects given hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a day less than those in the control group. To put that in perspective, the average American man consumes about 2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.
"If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we've seen that very, very dramatically," says Dixey.
But why do you need a patent for a plant? "The patent is on the application of the plant as a weight-loss material. And, of course, the active compounds within the plant. It's not on the plant itself," says Dixey.
So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? "As a weight-management product without infringing the patent, that's correct," says Dixey.
But what does that say about all these weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is pushing its product with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notified Trimspa that it hasn't demonstrated that the product is safe.
Some companies have even used the results of Phytopharm's clinical tests to market their products.
"This is just straightforward theft. That's what it is. People are stealing data, which they haven't done, they've got no proper understanding of, and sticking on the bottle," says Dixey. "When we have assayed these materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the active ingredient claimed. But they use the term hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they -- does nothing at all."
But Dixey isn't the only one who's felt ripped off. The Bushmen first heard the news about the patent when Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who are also called "the San," was appalled.
"The San did not even know about it," says Chennells. "They had given the information that led directly toward the patent."
The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation is called "bio-piracy."
"You have said, and I'm going to quote you, 'that the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,'" says Stahl to Chennells. "So what did you do?"
"I wouldn't want to go into some of the details as to what kind of letters were written or what kind of threats were made," says Chennells. "We engaged them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it."
Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen who, he says, have been exploited for centuries. First they were pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists arrived, they were nearly annihilated.
"About the turn of the century, there were still hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa that allowed farmers to go and kill Bushmen," says Chennells. "It's well documented."
The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South Africa, and plagued with high unemployment, little education, and lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about to be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their behalf.
"We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming towards the San," says Chennells. "Many, many millions. They've talked about the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in America."
In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits -- if there are profits. But that's a big if.
The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing. The project hit a major snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded much of the research, dropped out when making a pill out of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.
Dixey says it can be made synthetically: "We've made milligrams of it. But it's very expensive. It's not possible to make it synthetically in what's called a scaleable process. So we couldn't make a metric ton of it or something that is the sort of quantity you'd need to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people."
Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia plant itself.
But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came here.
60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm's hoodia plantations in South Africa. They'll need a lot of these plantations to meet the expected demand.
Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a challenge.
"The problem is we're dealing with a novel crop. It's a plant we've taken out of the wild and we're starting to grow it,' says MacWilliam. "So we have no experience. So it's different? diseases and pests which we have to deal with."
How confident are they that they will be able to grow enough? "We're very confident of that," he says. "We've got an expansion program which is going to be 100s of acres. And we'll be able - ready to meet the demand.
This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic. Phytopharm says it's about to announce marketing plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.
MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari Desert. "It's actually a lot more bitter than the plant that you tasted," says MacWilliam.
The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a lot faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl decided to find out. "Not good," she says.
Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it will be certified safe and effective. They also promise that it'll taste good.
For more information visit: www.hoodiadietreview.com
(CBS) Each year, people spend more than $40 billion on products designed to help them slim down. None of them seem to be working very well.
Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it'll be tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural substance that literally takes your appetite away.
It's very different from diet stimulants like Ephedra and Phenfen that are now banned because of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn't stimulate at all. Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think you're full, even if you've eaten just a morsel. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
"Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by making the stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South Africa's Bushmen for thousands of years."
Because the only place in the world where hoodia grows wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen were featured in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy."
Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. "I really like to eat them when the new rains have come," says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. "Then they're really quite delicious."
When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines. In the interest of science, Stahl ate it. She described the taste as "a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad."
So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects - no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn't hungry all day, even when she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. "I'd have to say it did work," says Stahl.
Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very long time. After all, they have been living off the land in southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.
Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still live in old traditional huts, and cook so-called Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa's national laboratory. Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a study of indigenous foods.
"What they found was when they fed it to animals, the animals ate it and lost weight," says Dr. Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss products based on hoodia.
Was hoodia's potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?
"No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.
It took the South African national laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so far on research, including clinical trials with obese volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects given hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a day less than those in the control group. To put that in perspective, the average American man consumes about 2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.
"If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we've seen that very, very dramatically," says Dixey.
But why do you need a patent for a plant? "The patent is on the application of the plant as a weight-loss material. And, of course, the active compounds within the plant. It's not on the plant itself," says Dixey.
So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? "As a weight-management product without infringing the patent, that's correct," says Dixey.
But what does that say about all these weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is pushing its product with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notified Trimspa that it hasn't demonstrated that the product is safe.
Some companies have even used the results of Phytopharm's clinical tests to market their products.
"This is just straightforward theft. That's what it is. People are stealing data, which they haven't done, they've got no proper understanding of, and sticking on the bottle," says Dixey. "When we have assayed these materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the active ingredient claimed. But they use the term hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they -- does nothing at all."
But Dixey isn't the only one who's felt ripped off. The Bushmen first heard the news about the patent when Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who are also called "the San," was appalled.
"The San did not even know about it," says Chennells. "They had given the information that led directly toward the patent."
The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation is called "bio-piracy."
"You have said, and I'm going to quote you, 'that the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,'" says Stahl to Chennells. "So what did you do?"
"I wouldn't want to go into some of the details as to what kind of letters were written or what kind of threats were made," says Chennells. "We engaged them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it."
Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen who, he says, have been exploited for centuries. First they were pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists arrived, they were nearly annihilated.
"About the turn of the century, there were still hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa that allowed farmers to go and kill Bushmen," says Chennells. "It's well documented."
The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South Africa, and plagued with high unemployment, little education, and lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about to be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their behalf.
"We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming towards the San," says Chennells. "Many, many millions. They've talked about the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in America."
In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits -- if there are profits. But that's a big if.
The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing. The project hit a major snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded much of the research, dropped out when making a pill out of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.
Dixey says it can be made synthetically: "We've made milligrams of it. But it's very expensive. It's not possible to make it synthetically in what's called a scaleable process. So we couldn't make a metric ton of it or something that is the sort of quantity you'd need to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people."
Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia plant itself.
But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came here.
60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm's hoodia plantations in South Africa. They'll need a lot of these plantations to meet the expected demand.
Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a challenge.
"The problem is we're dealing with a novel crop. It's a plant we've taken out of the wild and we're starting to grow it,' says MacWilliam. "So we have no experience. So it's different? diseases and pests which we have to deal with."
How confident are they that they will be able to grow enough? "We're very confident of that," he says. "We've got an expansion program which is going to be 100s of acres. And we'll be able - ready to meet the demand.
This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic. Phytopharm says it's about to announce marketing plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.
MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari Desert. "It's actually a lot more bitter than the plant that you tasted," says MacWilliam.
The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a lot faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl decided to find out. "Not good," she says.
Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it will be certified safe and effective. They also promise that it'll taste good.
For more information visit: www.hoodiadietreview.com
Monday, February 04, 2008
Politically Incorrect Fat Loss Works
By: Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
www.TurbulenceTraining.com
You know who is your worst enemy in the fight against fat?
Craig Ballantyne is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and writes for Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Maximum Fitness, Muscle and Fitness Hers, and Oxygen magazines. His trademarked Turbulence Training fat loss workouts have been featured multiple times in Men’s Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines, and have helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat, gain muscle, and get lean in less than 45 minutes three times per week. For more information on the Turbulence Training workouts that will help you burn fat without long, slow cardio sessions or fancy equipment, visit www.TurbulenceTraining.com
www.TurbulenceTraining.com
You know who is your worst enemy in the fight against fat?
Well-meaning fitness professionals that don't want to make you feel bad for being lazy and eating crap. That's who.
They write articles about how "diets are bad", how you can lift
soup cans and get fitness model arms, and how you should exercise in the nice and easy "fat burning zone" to get results. Basically, they give you what want to hear - plenty of excuses for avoiding hard exercise and strict nutrition (the real keys to fat loss).
But I don't. You'll get no such excuses from me.
Here's the real deal on fat loss. You have to work hard in your
workouts and even harder on your nutrition if you want results. Or you can take the politically-correct easy way out and have the same body in 3, 6, and even 12 months from now.
Love me or hate me, I promise you results. Let's take a look at why the PC-solutions don't work...
Q: I've been told to exercise in my "fat burning zone". What's the best cardio method for weight los.
Answer:
Cardio is not the only solution.
Clearly it adds to the energy deficit and overall calorie balance
that favors fat loss.
BUT it's not the "be all & end all" of fat loss success - and that
is anecdotally supported by the number of overweight distance
runners.
I almost never recommend long, slow cardio...simply because no one I train or consult with has the time for this, and it doesn't work any better than shorter, less frequent, more intense interval training sessions.
Five or six days of 45-minute cardio sessions in my fat-burning
zone? Yeah right, like anyone has time for that.
If I told you that you could get the same results (or better, as
recent research suggests) in three 20-minute interval sessions
each week as you could from three or five 45-minute slower cardio sessions each week, which would you choose?
Yes, intervals feel about 10x's harder than regular, slow, boring
cardio. And yes, you won't be able to read your people magazine
when doing intervals. And you might breath a little heavy. So if
you're worried about sweating, than maybe fat loss isn't for you.
But if you don't mind going against the crowd, intervals are worth every second for the superior results.
Q: Should men and women train differently for fat loss?
Answer:
Nope. Next question.
Seriously, the answer is no, but just to add to that, men and women don't have that many differences when it comes to fat loss, so they both do well with the Turbulence Training style workouts.
Now here's one reason why TT may actually work better for women than men...
More women tend to start Turbulence Training after having spent months or years using slow cardio and light (if any) weights. And selfishly, I could not be any happier - because when these dedicated women start using the shorter, more intense strength and interval sessions they make rapid progress and make me look like a genius.
The accolades come pouring in...I have dozens of testimonials from women thanking me for saving them TIME while helping them finally breakthrough stubborn fat loss plateaus (and eliminating the pain from their overuse injuries that occurred due to high volumes of cardio). Their words make me feel like a million bucks because the TT workouts are making these women feel like a million bucks.
That being said, I sometimes make small changes in TT workouts to adapt to a woman's pre-conceived notions about strength training. Some women are very hesitant to lift weights. But you and I know that is necessary for bodysculpting, fat loss, and health benefits such as building bones.
So what I do is sub a few (not all!) of the weight exercises out
and replace them with equal intensity bodyweight exercises. Some bodyweight exercises can be classified as traditional strength exercises (i.e. for a woman that can only do 5 full pushups, the pushup exercise is almost a max strength exercise). But women "mentally" deal with this type of strength training better than putting a dumbbell in their hands.
On the other hand, some bodyweight exercises provide more of an interval training effect (i.e. bodyweight squats). Either way,
bodyweight exercises can put turbulence (i.e. "stress") on the
muscle and boost metabolism and help female clients get the results they want and deserve.
Q: What differentiates Turbulence Training from other programs?
Answer:
That's a tough question to answer, as there are other systems out there that give impressive results in an acceptable time frame.
I will say this however, I am extremely dedicated to Turbulence
Training and the entire "fat loss" cause.
One of the factors behind my dedication is that I find the general concept of fat loss to be so simple, and yet millions and millions of people around the world have an incredibly difficult time achieving their goals.
I want to give them every possible resource available to them to
help them succeed.
So I am constantly tinkering with new workouts, exercises, and
interval methods, and interviewing other trainers and nutritional experts for every single little fat burning advantage I can find. And that comes through in what I offer to the readers of my newsletters and clients that use my programs.
I said in a past newsletter that "Fat loss is easy, once you
realize how hard it is." You have to respect that it's not
something you put on "auto-pilot". Taking the stairs at work
instead of the elevator, parking 100 extra feet away from the door, and subbing 1% milk for 2% milk is not going to help you lose 13 pounds of fat in a year like the politically correct articles
suggest.
You need a politically-incorrect plan to eat right 90% of the time
(i.e. saying "no" when an office-mate brings in doughnuts) and you have to have the best workout plan available to you if you want to get the most results in the least amount of time.
And then you still have to have a plan to help you stick to those
plans - and that should involve a social support group. There are
many tricks and tips to success, so you always have to keep
learning and trying to improve. And that's what I help with in my programs and newsletters.
Craig Ballantyne is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and writes for Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Maximum Fitness, Muscle and Fitness Hers, and Oxygen magazines. His trademarked Turbulence Training fat loss workouts have been featured multiple times in Men’s Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines, and have helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat, gain muscle, and get lean in less than 45 minutes three times per week. For more information on the Turbulence Training workouts that will help you burn fat without long, slow cardio sessions or fancy equipment, visit www.TurbulenceTraining.com
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