Free The Animal

I think I touched on this earlier, but Michael Eades has a good one about how you simply cannot trust the media to accurately report the findings from diet studies. It’s bad enough that so many of the studies are flawed with selection bias, but even when a study is honesty done and its finding sound, you can’t get honest reporting on it.

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Got an email today from a reader interested in cheese and whatnot in my diet. I love getting stuff like this. It repeats much of what I’ve written, but what the hell. The main point I’m trying to get across is that it’s the fasting that dramatically changed everything. Up to that point, it has always been a struggle. Adding lean mass through the workouts helped. Eating in more of a Paleo fashion helped a bit more, but nothing so turned on the fat loss, plus fundamentally altered my appetite like the fasting. Here goes. A: Mine has been an evolution. When I began pushing weights last May I wanted to focus on that, so I did and I built muscle and lost a little fat. Tried to eat good some of the time, but still lots of burgers (which are fine, without the bread). I was losing about 1 pound per month net (I was also gaining muscle). Then around October I began to eat well most of the time. Probably the closest approximation is “Paleo.” This is the authoritative resource: http://thepaleodiet.com/index.shtml http://thepaleodiet.com/faqs/ http://thepaleodiet.com/articles/2006_Oxford.pdf Now I was losing maybe 2 lbs. net per month. However, I kept hearing about…

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The principle hypothesis, generally accepted, is that obesity is caused by eating more calories than are expended, the excess being stored as fat. Reduce intake, increase output, or both, and fat comes off. It’s a tidy equation. Overeating causes obesity. Suppose you come up with a competing hypothesis that says that over or under eating, and/or low or high energy output are caused by the accumulation of fat, i.e., a hypothesis that at first glance seems more complicated, but is actually — Occam’s Razor style — simpler. What if, for whatever reason, a body simply accumulates fat, and overeating and sedentary behavior are in response to it? Can you see how that’s simpler? So then the question becomes: what causes fat accumulation, which then sets off what in some ways is a positive feedback mechanism, including behaviors that are widely seen as causal rather than effects? Well I’m no expert at this, but Gary Taubes has spent the last several years pouring over studies going back as far as the 1800s. Rather than rehash it, I’ve got links for you accumulated from Chris at Conditioning Research. Big Fat Lie; Telegraph The Scientist and the Stairmaster; New York Magazine Interview with…

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