“You Can Burn the Fat Covering Your [Body Part]”
Pick up just about any fitness magazine and you’ll find workouts for getting ab definition, slimming the thighs, eliminating back and arm fat, and the like.
If only it were that simple.
While research shows that training a specific muscle increases blood flow and lipolysis (the breakdown of fat cells into usable energy) in the area, the effects are far too small to matter.20 Training your muscles burns calories and can result in muscle growth, both of which certainly can aid in fat loss, but it doesn’t directly burn the fat covering them to any significant degree.21
Instead, fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion. You create the proper environment (a calorie deficit) through diet and exercise, and your body reduces fat stores all over, with certain areas leaning out faster than others (more on why this occurs later).
This is why studies show you can do all the crunches you want, but you’ll never have defined abs until you’ve adequately reduced your body fat levels.22
Myth #6
“Dieting Can ‘Damage’ Your Metabolism”
According to most theories, “metabolic damage” refers to a condition where various physiological systems have been disrupted, and as a result, your metabolism burns less energy than it should.
In other words, it’s a hypothetical state wherein you burn fewer calories than you should based on your body weight and activity levels. Furthermore, the story goes, once you’ve “damaged” your metabolism, it can remain hamstrung for weeks, months, and even years.
It’s called “metabolic damage” because the idea is your metabolism is literally “broken” to one degree or another and requires “fixing.”
The common causes of metabolic damage are believed to be remaining in a calorie deficit for too long, starvation dieting, and doing too much cardio. Therefore, when you’re restricting your calories and stop losing weight for no apparent reason, or when you’re struggling to stop gaining weight after a period of dieting, some people will say that you probably have metabolic damage that needs repairing.
The evidence to support this hypothesis is almost always stories. Stories of people failing to lose weight on a measly few hundred calories per day, and even worse, stories of people gaining weight on very low-calorie diets and intense exercise routines.
And so people everywhere have become convinced that dieting has screwed up their bodies—maybe even irreversibly—and that their only hope for returning to normalcy is special dietary measures.
What does science have to say on the matter?
Well, several studies have shown that the metabolic decline associated with dieting, including long periods of very low-calorie dieting, ranges from less than 5 to about 15 percent.23
Furthermore, it took about a 10 percent reduction in body weight to produce the larger, double-digit drops, and most of the research on the matter was conducted with people who made the cardinal diet mistakes of eating too few calories and too little protein and doing no resistance training.
We also know that while these metabolic adaptations can persist long after weight loss has stopped, they can also be easily reversed by raising your calories, lifting weights, and eating a high-protein diet.24
And that’s true even for people who have already gone to extreme measures to drop pounds in the past. No matter what they’ve done, it can only produce a relatively small metabolic dip that can be easily reversed with proper diet and training.
Even more encouraging is research on what happens to your metabolism over time when you do things correctly, which we’ll discuss later in this book.
Myth #7
“Dieting Can Send Your Body into ‘Starvation Mode’”
The idea behind “starvation mode” is similar to metabolic damage.
It goes like this: if you’re too aggressive with your calorie restriction, then your metabolism will slow to a crawl, making it more or less impossible to continue losing weight without eating like a runway model.
The way most people describe it, starvation mode and metabolic damage work together to stymie your progress in a process that looks like this:
You eat too little and lose weight too fast.
You plunge your body into starvation mode, and weight loss stops.
You eat even less and move even more, which further aggravates the problem and causes metabolic damage.
The longer you remain in starvation mode, the less and less weight you’ll lose regardless of what you do, and the more and more damaged your metabolism will become.
One of the only ways to avoid this metabolic carnage, we’re told, is losing weight slowly through very mild calorie restriction. If we get greedy, they say, we’ll pay for it later.
There’s a shade of truth here, but like many of the things that “everybody knows” in the fitness space, it’s more wrong than right.
Your body responds to calorie restriction with countermeasures meant to stall weight loss, but there’s no “mode” it enters or physiological switch that flips to magically block weight loss.
A striking example of this is one of the most extreme studies on the human metabolism ever conducted: the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.25
This experiment started in 1944 as the end of World War II was approaching to discover the healthiest way to help the millions of starving people in Europe return to a normal body weight.
As you can guess, this study involved intentionally starving people. And by “starving,” I truly mean starving. Scientists took 36 volunteers who had the choice of shipping off to the front lines or offering their metabolisms to science, and subjected them to the conditions of your average POW camp. These volunteers had to do several hours of manual labor every day and march 22 miles per week on a diet that provided about 50 percent of their average daily energy expenditure (or about 1,500 calories per day). For six freaking months.
As you can imagine, things got pretty grim. By the end of the study, the men were rawboned, some had almost starved to death, and one even cut off several of his fingers to wash out.
What about their metabolisms, though? Were they as devastated as proponents of starvation mode and metabolic damage would predict?
Nope.
After losing about 25 percent of their body weight on average, their metabolisms were about 20 percent lower than scientists predicted based on their new, lower body weights. In other words, their metabolisms were “underperforming” by just 20 percent on average after enduring six months of the most extreme weight loss regimen you could ever devise.
Then, in the next phase of the study, the same people were put on a “recovery diet” to allow them to regain most of the weight they lost.
After 12 weeks of this recovery diet, their metabolisms were assessed again. This time, average metabolic performance was only about 10 percent lower than it should have been, and for some individuals, everything was already back to normal, as if their severe weight loss had never happened.
Moreover, according to a recent study conducted by my friend and researcher Menno Henselmans, when you analyze the data beyond the first 12 weeks of recovery, you find that everything eventually returned to normal in every volunteer.26 Some just took longer to recover than others.
This groundbreaking experiment also provided another nail to drive into the coffin of the starvation mode myth: every volunteer continued to lose weight until the very end. The rate of weight loss slowed, of course, but it never came to a complete standstill.
It’s safe to assume, then, that if people can eat about 1,500 calories per day and do many hours of moderately intense exercise every week and still lose weight steadily—for six months—then we have nothing to worry about with our comparatively ho-hum diet and exercise routines.
Myth #8
“Eating More Smaller Meals Is Better for Weight Loss Than Fewer Larger One
s”
Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one before: you should eat many small meals when trying to lose weight to “stoke the metabolic fire,” accelerate fat loss, and better control your appetite.
The theory here is simple: When you eat, your metabolism speeds up as your body processes the food. Thus, if you eat every few hours, your metabolism will remain in a constantly elevated state, right? And nibbling on food throughout the day should help with appetite control, right?
While this may seem plausible, it doesn’t pan out in scientific research.
In an extensive review of diet literature, scientists at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research looked at scores of studies comparing the metabolic effects of a wide variety of eating patterns, ranging from 1 to 17 meals per day.27
They found no meaningful difference between nibbling and gorging, because small meals caused small, short metabolic increases, while large meals caused larger, longer increases. Therefore, when viewed in terms of 24-hour energy expenditure, eating pattern had no significant effect.28
Further evidence of this conclusion can be found in a study conducted by scientists at the University of Ottawa, which split subjects into two dietary groups:29
Group one ate three meals per day.
Group two ate three meals plus three snacks per day.
Both groups maintained the same calorie deficit, and after eight weeks, scientists found no significant difference in weight, fat, or muscle loss.
And what about the appetitive effects of meal frequency? This can go both ways.
For example, a study conducted by scientists at the University of Missouri found that after 12 weeks of dieting to lose weight, increasing protein intake improved appetite control, but meal frequency (three versus six meals per day) had no effect.30
Scientists at the University of Kansas conducted a similar experiment, investigating the effects of meal frequency and protein intake on perceived appetite, satiety (fullness), and hormones.31
They also found that higher protein intake led to greater feelings of fullness, but surprisingly, six meals resulted in generally lower levels of satiety than three.
On the other hand, you can find studies wherein subjects were less satiated on three meals per day than more, and where increasing meal frequency also increased general feelings of fullness and made it easier for people to stick to their diets.32
In some ways, the best dietary protocol is the one you can stick to, and that’s very true in the case of meal frequency. Most people I work with enjoy eating four to six meals per day (I’m the same way), but some enjoy eating just two or three meals per day, and that’s totally fine.
Myth #9
“You Have to Exercise to Lose Weight”
If you’re willing to eat very little food every day, you can create a large calorie deficit without doing any exercise.
You can lose plenty of weight this way, but you’ll probably also lose at least a fair amount of muscle, which is undesirable for a number of reasons, not the least of which being vanity.33
This is one of the main reasons you should exercise when you’re dieting to lose weight and you shouldn’t do just any exercise, either. The best kind of exercise to do while in a calorie deficit is resistance training, which is a form of exercise that improves muscular strength and endurance.
A good example of the effectiveness of resistance training while dieting is found in a study conducted by scientists at West Virginia University, which split 20 men and women into two groups:34
Group one did one hour of cardio four times per week.
Group two lifted weights three times per week.
Both groups followed the same diet, and after 12 weeks, everyone lost about the same amount of fat, but the cardio group also lost nine pounds of lean body mass, whereas the weightlifting group didn’t lose any.
A number of other studies have echoed that finding: if you want to lose fat quickly and not muscle, then you want to include resistance training in your weight loss regimen.35
Myth #10
“Cardio Is Better for Fat Loss Than Weightlifting”
This one is a natural follow-up to the previous myth.
When most people start exercising to lose weight, they choose some form of cardio, like jogging, swimming, or biking.
This is all well and good, but unfortunately, simply doing cardio guarantees little in the way of weight loss.36 In fact, studies show many people wind up even heavier than when they began their cardiovascular exercise routines.37
Hence the crowds of overweight people addicted to burning calories instead of getting fit.
There are two primary reasons why cardio alone doesn’t always produce significant weight loss:
It’s too easy to eat the calories you burn.Guess how much energy 30 minutes of vigorous running burns? For someone who weighs 150 pounds, about 400 calories. And guess how easy it is to eat that right back? A handful of nuts, a bit of yogurt, and an apple does the trick. Or if you’re the more indulgent type, a measly chocolate chip cookie with a cup of milk.
My point isn’t that you shouldn’t eat nuts, yogurt, apples, or cookies when you want to lose weight, of course, but that cardiovascular exercise just doesn’t burn as much energy as we wish it did.
The energy you do burn during cardio does support your weight loss efforts, of course, but your goal isn’t to just burn calories, it’s to reduce body fat levels. And if you’re eating too much, no amount of cardio is going to get you there.
Your body adapts to the exercise to reduce calorie expenditure.Research shows that when in a calorie deficit, the body strives to increase energy efficiency.38 This means that, as time goes on, less and less energy is needed to continue doing the same types of workouts. This also means that you’re no longer burning as much energy as you think you are when performing the same exercise under the same conditions, which increases the likelihood of overeating and stalling out in your weight loss efforts.
Many people who experience this try to beat it with more cardio, which may raise energy expenditure enough to get the needle moving again but can also accelerate muscle loss and metabolic slowdown.
And what about weightlifting?
Well, research clearly shows that it’s an effective way to lose fat, so why is it generally associated with “bulking up” and not “slimming down”?39
The answer is simple. Weightlifting isn’t a popular way to lose weight because it’s a bad way to lose weight, but it is a fantastic way to speed up fat loss and preserve muscle.
A study conducted by scientists at Duke University illustrates this point perfectly.1 Researchers recruited 196 obese or overweight men and women ranging from 18 to 70 years old and split them into three groups:
Group one did three one-hour resistance training workouts per week.
Group two jogged three days per week at a moderate intensity for about 45 minutes per session.
Group three did both the resistance training and cardio workouts.
After eight months, guess which group lost the most weight?
No, it wasn’t groups one or three. It was number two, the cardio-only group. BUT! That was also the only group that lost muscle as well. And guess who lost the most fat while also gaining muscle? That’s right, group number three—the resistance training and cardio group.
In other words, adding resistance training to the cardio workouts resulted in less weight loss due to muscle gain but more fat loss due to various physiological factors that we’ll talk more about later in this book.
•••
I’m genuinely excited for you right now, because in reading this one chapter, you’ve taken your fitness knowledge to a whole new level—a level very few people, including many doctors, athletes, and even scientists, rarely achieve. And we’re just getting warmed up!
In the next chapter,
we’re going to analyze muscle building in the same way as we just examined fat loss.
That means it’s time to discuss the 10 absolute worst muscle-building myths and mistakes that keep guys from ever getting that lean, muscular body that looks as good as it performs.
Key Takeaways
Energy balance is the relationship between energy intake (calories eaten) and output (calories burned).
Energy balance is the basic mechanism that regulates weight gain and loss.
If you consistently consume fewer calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight, regardless of how much carbohydrate or sugar you eat.
If you consistently consume more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight, even if those calories come from the “healthiest” food on earth.
No individual food can make you fatter. Only overeating can.
The number one reason most people “inexplicably” can’t lose weight is they’re eating too much.
The inability to estimate calorie intake accurately is why so many people fail with diets that deal in rules and restrictions instead of hard numbers.
There are right and wrong ways to “cheat” on your diet, and many people who struggle to lose weight do it very wrong.
The worst type of cheat meal is one that is very high in both calories and dietary fat, which is chemically similar to body fat and thus requires very little energy for conversion into body fat (between 0 and 2 percent of the energy it contains).
Research shows that high-fat meals cause more immediate fat gain than high-protein or high-carbohydrate meals.
While alcohol itself basically can’t be stored as body fat, it blunts fat burning, which accelerates the rate at which your body stores dietary fat as body fat, and it increases the conversion of carbohydrate into body fat.
Training your muscles burns calories and can result in muscle growth, both of which certainly can aid in fat loss, but it doesn’t directly burn the fat covering them to any significant degree.
The metabolic decline associated with dieting, including long periods of very low-calorie dieting, ranges from less than 5 to about 15 percent
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