Ok, the study I’m going to share with you here is pretty cool…

The researchers fed their subjects a control diet for four weeks and measured body fat mass and metabolism.

Then, they took 6 grams of fat out of the diet and replaced it with 6 grams of fish oil.

So, exactly the same calories, exactly the same fat.  Only change was swapping out other fats for fish oil – and only 6 grams of it at that.

What do you think happened?  Even though metabolism remained unchanged, the subjects LOST FAT!

The control group who kept on the original diet lost 0.7 pounds over the next 3 weeks.

The fish oil group lost 2.2 pounds (over 3x as much) in the same amount of time.

Diet was the same.  Calories were the same.  Exercise was the same.  The only difference was the switching in of fish oil, and they lost 3x as much fat.

What does this mean for you?

Start taking some freaking fish oil!!

I take 12-15 grams a day.  I recommend at least 6 grams a day.  Start with 2 grams, one capsule with breakfast, the other with dinner.  If you stomach still feels ok, add another capsule every few days until you reach six.

SPOILER ALERT:  This next paragraph is gross.

You’ll know when you’ve reached your temporary maximum dosage because your poop will turn grey and runny.  Back down a gram or two if this happens.  As your system adjusts over a few weeks, you can start adding again.

To keep fish burps to a minimum, take your capsules with food, get enteric coated capsules, take lemon-flavored fish oil, or keep your capsules in the fridge (good idea anyway).

If you’re interested in the study, here’s the citation:

Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 1997 Aug;21(8):637-43.
Effect of dietary fish oil on body fat mass and basal fat oxidation in healthy adults.
Couet C, Delarue J, Ritz P, Antoine JM, Lamisse F.
Laboratoire de Nutrition et Clinique Médicale A, J.E. 313, Université François Rabelais, 37000 Tours, France.

And here’s a link to the abstract: Fish Oil Is Awesome

This is pretty cool: When Calorie information for sugar sweetened beverages (soda) is displayed in convenience stores, kids aged 12-18 years buy less of them.

A study in the American Journal of Public Health tracked buying behaviors of adolescents in low-income areas.  They put up one of three different posters in corner stores.  The posters were randomly chosen out of these three options:

(1) Absolute caloric count. Ex: This soda has 300 Calories

(2) Percentage of total recommended daily intake.  Ex: This drink has 12% of your daily Calorie need

(3) Physical activity equivalent.  Ex: This one said they’d need to run for 50 minutes to burn off the Calories in the drink

The researchers found that sales of sugar-sweetened beverages dropped by 40% with any of the three posters.

The best-performing poster was the physical activity equivalent poster – it reduced drink purchases by 50%.

Food and Drug Administration officials are publishing regulations for restaurants to put Calorie information next to food items on the menu.  This study shows that providing ANY information is better than providing none, when it comes to making healthier choices.

Here’s my reference (do I get bonus points that it was released 2 days ago?):

Sara N. Bleich, Bradley J. Herring, Desmond D. Flagg, and Tiffany L. Gary-Webb (2011). Reduction in Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Among Low-Income Black Adolescents After Exposure to Caloric Information. American Journal of Public Health. e-View Ahead of Print.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300350

And, as usual, here’s a link to the abstract: Posters Reduce Pop Sales

Welcome to another edition of study corner!  Today we’re going to look at a study from the Journal Of Strength And Conditioning Research.

This study is titled… Effects of 4 weeks of traditional resistance training vs. superslow strength training on early phase adaptations in strength, flexibility, and aerobic capacity in college-aged women.

Aren’t you glad I read all these things for you? Just the title makes me want to fall asleep

So, why super-slow training?  Well, wanna-be fitness experts on the news have promoted slow-cadence lifting, and people believed it.  But what does the actual science say?

This study split college-aged women into 3 groups: No lifting, Slow Lifting, and “Regular” Lifting.

The No Lifting group didn’t make any changes during the study.  I’m sure they were very nice people, but let’s forget about them and forge onward.

Slow Lifting group trained for 35 minutes twice a week.  They used 50% of their one rep maximum (the amount of weight they could lift one time) and lifted 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down until they couldn’t do any more.

“Regular” Lifting group trained 25 minutes three times a week.  They used 80% 1RM and did 3 sets of 8 reps, with a 4 second contraction time for each rep.  This 4 second contraction is why I put quote marks around “regular.”  4 seconds is still very slow.

Both groups’ workouts consisted of 5 exercises: shoulder press, chest press, leg press, low row, and lat pull down.

At the end of the 4 week study, both groups had gained strength.  The super-slow group’s strength gains were so slight so as to be only “statistically significant.”  (Translation:  so little improvement you wouldn’t notice without having a degree in mathematics).

So only the regular speed training group made real improvements.

Conclusion: Slow speed resistance training is a waste of your time.

J Strength Cond Res. 2011 Nov;25(11):3006-13.
Effects of 4 weeks of traditional resistance training vs. superslow strength training on early phase adaptations in strength, flexibility, and aerobic capacity in college-aged women.
Kim E, Dear A, Ferguson SL, Seo D, Bemben MG.
Source
Neuromuscular Research Laboratory, Department of Health and Exercise Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA.

And here’s a link to the abstract if you want to see what it looks like: Slow Lifting vs Regular Lifting

This is an interesting study: Increasing protein intake improves weight loss and glucose metabolism in women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Researchers compared a high protein diet (more than 40% of calories) to a standard protein diet (15% of calories).

After 6 months, the high protein group lost more weight and more body fat, and lost more off of their waists.

And as a bonus, the higher protein group improved glucose metabolism, which will help with further weight loss.

The Take-Home Message is: Bump up your protein intake to lose more weight and lose more off your waist.

Here’s a link to the abstract: Increased Protein Intake For Women With PCOS

According to Wikipedia:

Anaerobic exercise is exercise intense enough to trigger anaerobic metabolism. It is used by athletes in non-endurance sports to promote strength, speed and power and by body builders to build muscle mass. Muscles energy systems trained using anaerobic exercise develop differently compared to aerobic exercise, leading to greater performance in short duration, high intensity activities, which last from mere seconds up to about 2 minutes. Any activity after about two minutes will have a large aerobic metabolic component.

A study from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Japan compared the effects of 6 weeks of traditional aerobics training to high intensity interval training.

The aerobic group exercised at 70% of their maximal aerobic uptake for 60 minutes 5 days a week during the study. At the end of 6 weeks the endurance group did not increase their anaerobic capacity and only increased their aerobic capacity slightly (from 53 to 58 ml/kg/min).

The interval training group also exercised 5 days a week during the 6 week trial. Their workouts consisted of 7-8 sets of 20 second sprints, followed by a 10 second recovery. After the 6 weeks, this group increased their aerobic capacity slightly MORE than the aerobics group (7ml/kg/min increase for the sprint group compared to 6ml/kg/min for the aerobics group). The interval training crew also increased their anaerobic capacity by 28%!

Let’s compare total exercise time for the two groups over the six week study:

Aerobics:
6 weeks x 5days/week x 60 minutes = 1800 minutes

Intervals:
6 weeks x 5 days/week x 4 minutes = 120 minutes

So… in less than one tenth the time, the interval group beat the aerobic group in both aerobic and anaerobic improvement!

Hooray science!

If you’re interested in checking out this study, here’s the citation:

Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1996 Oct;28(10):1327-30.
Effects of moderate-intensity endurance and high-intensity intermittent training on anaerobic capacity and VO2max.
Tabata I, Nishimura K, Kouzaki M, Hirai Y, Ogita F, Miyachi M, Yamamoto K.

And here’s a link to the abstract: Effects of moderate-intensity endurance and high-intensity intermittent training on anaerobic capacity and VO2max

I’ve written about my personal experience with soy overdosing here: Soy, My Nipples, And Your Health.

And a friend of mine just sent me this study on soy: Soy food and isoflavone intake in relation to semen quality parameters among men from an infertility clinic

Researchers looked at “subfertile couples” undergoing treatment at fertility clinics and found that there is an inverse relationship between soy intake and sperm concentration.

Translation: The more soy you eat, the lower your sperm count.

Uh-oh.

Soy’s natural defense against being eaten isn’t thorns or poison, it’s much more subtle than that.  When a soy plant is eaten, it makes the animal (humans in this case) sterile to prevent any future eating.

Diabolical, isn’t it!

So the take-home message for today is: Soy really messes up your health.

If you want to find more studies on soy, google any of the abstracts on this page: Survey Says… Soy Is Bad News!

Ok, today’s scien-tastic study will really appeal to you if you’re pressed for time to work out.  (And who isn’t?!?)

Researchers from McMaster University in Canada compared low volume sprint (interval) training to high volume aerobic (endurance) training.

Without bogging down in too many details (I’ll link to the study at the bottom of this post), the aerobics group worked out at 65% of their maximal oxygen uptake for 40-60 minutes, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks.

The interval training group did 4-6 “all out” 30 second sprints with 4.5 minutes rest between sprints, 3 days a week, for 6 weeks.

Total training time for the aerobic group was 4.5 hours per week.  Total for the interval training group was 1.5 hours per week (with 90% of that time being rest!!).

After the six weeks both groups showed the SAME metabolic changes!

Now, I would have expected the interval training group to be burning more fat, but even though the results were the same, look at the total training time!  90 minutes a week of interval training gave the same fat loss benefits as 270 minutes of aerobics training!

That’s pretty freakin’ cool

So, if you want to save time in the gym, start hitting some intervals.  Here’s a step-by-step plan to get you started: Interval Training For Fat Loss

Here’s the citation for today’s study:

J Physiol. 2008 January 1; 586(Pt 1): 151–160.
Published online 2007 November 8.
Similar metabolic adaptations during exercise after low volume sprint interval and traditional endurance training in humans
Kirsten A Burgomaster,1 Krista R Howarth,1 Stuart M Phillips,1 Mark Rakobowchuk,1 Maureen J MacDonald,1 Sean L McGee,2 and Martin J Gibala1

And here’s a link to the abstract: Similar metabolic adaptations during exercise after low volume sprint interval and traditional endurance training in humans

All of my bootcamp clients know that I’m constantly on the lookout for new research that can make my Unstoppable Fitness Formula even MORE effective.

For example, I noticed that a certain type of workout was getting clients better weight loss results in less time.  When I went looking for the reason why, I found out research has proven that training in a certain way can elevate your metabolism for 39 hours AFTER your workout.

And that’s only one tiny piece of what I do to get your body changing.  For instance, adding interval training greatly improves your results, as does the correct exercise choices and set/rep scheme.

Well… I was looking through some newly published studies (in preparation for my next seminar) and I found this…

McKay et al.
Effect of short-term high-intensity interval training vs. continuous training on O2 uptake kinetics, muscle deoxygenation, and exercise performance.J Appl Physiol. 2009 Jul;107(1):128-38. Epub 2009 May 14.

This study used 8 sessions of 8-12 intervals. The intervals were one minute hard, then one minute easy, repeat.

The “cardio” group did 8 sessions of 90-120 minutes steady-state exercise (like going on a treadmill or elliptical at an even pace)

To compare times: The interval group exercised 80 minutes over the 19 day study. The steady-state group exercised for 825 minutes.

As it turns out, the subjects had the SAME adaptations despite the interval group exercising for only a tenth of the time as the steady-state group.

If you know what you’re doing you can cut down your workout time by 90%!

Let me repeat: YOU CAN CUT YOUR WORKOUT TIME BY:

This proves the importance of following the right training program!

In my seminars I share studies that show:

• How one type of interval training burns 900% MORE abdominal fat than regular training…
• How ONE simple change in your eating makes the difference between losing thirteen pounds of fat or thirteen pounds of toned muscle…
• How endurance training makes NO change in your resting metabolism (where you burn most of your calories)
• That the addition of 45 minutes of hard aerobic training, 5 times a week for twelve weeks – has NO effect on fat loss!

Those are just a few of the things that my research and experience has shown me.

If you train with me, you’re great!  You’re following a proven, research-backed system that delivers incomparable results.

If you’re training in your own, don’t just “wing it”.  Do some research in publications that don’t have glossy covers and find out what REALLY works.

Here’s one of my favorite free research tools: http://www.PubMed.gov

All right, I’m going to get back to geeking out over some new studies, talk to you soon!

A study published in the International Journal Of Obesity split 324 subjects into four diet groups: control, lean fish, fatty fish, and fish oil.

All four of the groups had the same macronutrient (protein, fats, carbs) and calorie breakdown.  On a side note, this was a pretty crummy diet, and all four groups lost weight.  Just goes to show that following ANY plan is better than following none.

The control group took sunflower seed oil capsules, and didn’t get any seafood.

The second group got cod (150g) three times a week.

The third group got salmon (150g) three times a week.

The fourth group took fish oil capsules, and didn’t get any seafood.

The average weight loss over the study was 14 pounds, and everyone who had ANY of the marine products: lean fish, fatty fish, or fish oil, lost an additional 2.2 pounds over 4 weeks.

Conclusion: If you’re following a diet, adding fish or fish oil will help you lose more weight

Here’s the citation:

Int J Obes (Lond). 2007 Oct;31(10):1560-6. Epub 2007 May 15.
Randomized trial of weight-loss-diets for young adults varying in fish and fish oil content.
Thorsdottir I, Tomasson H, Gunnarsdottir I, Gisladottir E, Kiely M, Parra MD, Bandarra NM, Schaafsma G, Martinéz JA. Unit for Nutrition Research, Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Landspitali University Hospital, University of Iceland, Eiriksgata-29, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland.

And this is a link to the abstract: Weight Loss For Young Adults Varying In Fish Content

By Brad Pilon, MS
www.eatstopeat.com

It was back on March 12 of 2007 that I first wrote about the now famous A to Z weight loss trial (you can see my original blog post here http://nutritionhelp.blogspot.com/2007/03/newest-diet-study-what-does-it-really.html).

In this ground breaking study, 311 overweight women were recruited to follow one of the following popular diet programs: The Atkins Diet, The Zone Diet, the LEARN diet or the Ornish Diet.

To start the study, each woman was given a copy of the popular diet book that she was randomly assigned to follow.

Then, to make sure she was an “expert” on her program before she started dieting, each woman attended a series of 8 classes (each lasting an hour) explaining exactly how to follow her assigned diet.

(Side note- This just shows how OCE these diets are considering that it takes EIGHT classes for these women to know how to properly follow each diet!)

After the courses were completed the women then set off to follow their assigned diet plan for a total of 1 year.

The results were pretty much exactly what I expected – everybody lost a lot of weight in the first two months, after that the diets tended to even out and by the end of the trial the weight loss was far from impressive – none of the groups averaged more than 10 pounds of weight loss after an entire year of dieting.

And while many people used this study to ‘prove’ that diets simply didn’t work, or that the body somehow adapted to dieting, my take was much simpler – Firstly, this trial is in agreement with most research that shows it is very hard to accurately measure how many calories a person eats in a day, and secondly I thought that these results showed that the number one reason diets fail is compliance.

In other words, the more complicated and the more rigid the diet is (or the more OCE it is), the more likely it is going to fail in the long term. – People just can’t stick to these types of diets for long periods of time.

Apparently I wasn’t alone with my analysis.

In a study published in the International Journal of Obesity titled “Dietary adherence and weight loss success among overweight women: results from the A to Z weight loss study” researchers re-examined the A to Z weight loss trial to see if there was an association between the level of compliance and the amount of weight that was lost.

Guess what they found?

Astonishingly only ONE subject in the ENTIRE study followed the diet as directed for the whole 12 months. This means that every other subject was not following her assigned diet properly at some point during the research trial!

The researchers also found that adherence was significantly correlated with 12-month weight change for all three-diet groups. So the better a woman was at following her diet, the more weight she lost.

The fact that adherence was so low is very interesting considering that these women spent eight class sessions reviewing their assigned diets with a registered dietitian before they even started the diet…you can imagine what adherence must be like for someone who simply bought one of those books, read it cover to cover and then gave it a try!

The findings from this follow-up analysis also suggest that the difference in dietary macronutrients had only negligible effects on the participants weight loss success.

The bottom line is that you can generally figure out how successful a diet will be by looking at how complicated it is.

More rules = more complicated = low chance of success

Less rules = less complicated = high chance of success

In my opinion weight loss can be incredibly simple if you let it.

Find the easiest, most comfortable way to reduce the total amount of calories that you eat. The less intrusive a diet is on your lifestyle the greater chance you have of sticking to it long term.

For me, this is flexible intermittent fasting. After all if you can fast for 24 hours once, you know you will always be able to do it. Some fasts maybe harder or easier than others, but you know you can do it!

Obsessive Compulsive Eating habits that make diets complicated and difficult spell doom for long term weight loss.

10 Signs a diet suffers from OCE:

1. It contains a list of foods you can and cannot eat

2. It lists specific times of every day that you are allowed or not allowed to eat

3. It contains specific diet plans that do not take into consideration your own personal food preferences

4. It lacks flexibility

5. It focuses on macronutrients and micronutrients excessively

6. If fails to point out the importance of long term compliance

7. It requires you to pre-pack and carry certain foods with you while you travel

8. It promotes certain foods because they PROMOTE weight loss

9. Over reliance of food Journal

10. Metabolic Typing

****
Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional with over eight years experience working in the nutritional supplement industry specializing in clinical research management and new product development. Brad has completed graduate studies in nutritional sciences specializing in the use of short term fasting for weight loss.

His trademarked book Eat Stop Eat has been featured on national television and helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat without sacrificing the foods they love. For more information on Eat Stop Eat, visit www.eatstopeat.com