Lean and Hard

Authority Nutrition - 8.26.13 by Kris Gunnars

I’m tired of having to constantly defend my position regarding animal foods, so I decided to summarize what I think are the key problems with vegan diets.

There is no one right way to eat for everyone.

We are all different and what works for one person may not work for the next.

I personally advocate consumption of both animals and plants and I think there is plenty of evidence that this is a reasonable way to eat.

However, I often get comments from vegans who think that people should eliminate all animal foods.

They frequently say that I’m giving out dangerous advice, that I must be corrupt and sponsored by the meat and dairy industry, or that I’m simply misinformed and need to read The China Study.

Really… I have nothing against vegans or vegetarians.

If you want to eat in this way for whatever reason and you are feeling good and improving your health, then great! Keep on doing what you’re doing.

But I do have a serious problem when proponents of this diet are using lies and fear mongering to try and convince everyone else to eat in the same way.

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Sorry, juicers. Eating it is good. Drinking it, not so much.

The Verge - 8.31.13 By Vlad Savov

"FRUIT JUICES LEAD TO MORE RAPID AND LARGER CHANGES IN SERUM LEVELS OF GLUCOSE AND INSULIN."

A study published by the BMJ this week affirms one piece of conventional wisdom — that eating fruit is highly beneficial to your health — while refuting another — that fruit juice is just as good as the unprocessed stuff. Analysing the dietary habits of 187,382 subjects over multiple decades, the research team concluded that "greater consumption of specific whole fruits ... was significantly associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, whereas greater fruit juice consumption was associated with a higher risk."

Type 2 is the more prevalent kind of diabetes and, unlike type 1, can be actively prevented through a balanced diet. The new data from the BMJ identifies blueberries, grapes, apples, and pears as among the most significant reducers of diabetes risk, which echoes findings published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last year. Where the new research goes further, however, is in looking at the effects of drinking fruit juice, which you might expect to be equivalent to eating whole fruit, but turns out to slightly increase your chances of developing diabetes.

In juicing the fruit's flesh away, you remove the dietary fiber and other nutrients that may be contained in the peel, while increasing the glycemic index by making its sugar easier to digest. Diabetes is a disorder of the body's ability to regulate blood glucose levels, which is why you might want to reconsider that glass of orange juice in the morning.

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Do anything to lose weight that is temporary, and you will gain it all back and more when you go back to your normal eating habits. Guaranteed. That's the main reason diets are a waste of time. What works? A permanent change in the way you live.

Fox News - 8.22.13 by Christopher Wanjek

Indeed, the authors wrote that the only consistent fact in all the diet studies is that adherence is the element most strongly associated with weight loss and disease risk reduction.

What's the best diet for maintaining a healthy weight and warding off chronic diseases? Is it a low-carb diet, a high-carb diet, an all-vegetable diet, a no-vegetable diet?

Researchers say you'd be better off just forgetting the word diet, according to an editorial published August 20 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Two researchers Sherry Pagoto of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass., and Bradley Appelhans of the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago call for an end to the so-called diet wars, because they are all equally as good, or bad, in helping people fight obesity.

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Hemera/Thinkstock

We've all heard of "the wall." It's a physiological and emotional barrier faced by marathon runners, typically at about the 20-mile mark of the race. Scientifically, it has to do with glycogen depletion. Here's an excellent description from HowStuffWorks:

Hitting the wall, at its core, could just as aptly be called glycogen depletion onset. It's less graphic, but more scientifically accurate. Glycogen is a variety of glucose that the body stores to produce energy. Think of it as the fuel for your body's engine. Your muscles need it, and your brain thrives on it. Unfortunately, there is a limited supply of glycogen that your muscles and liver can stockpile -- about 2,000 calories to be exact. [sources: Latta, Galloway]

The average runner burns approximately 100 calories per mile. It's no coincidence that many endurance athletes describe hitting the wall at the 20-mile mark of the marathon. That's the point at which 2,000 calories of glycogen fuel have been exhausted, resulting in an overwhelming feeling of heaviness in the legs, a lack of concentration and even feelings of outright despair.

There's a similar experience I face often. Maybe you do too. Some days, at around 4 PM, I start having discouraging thoughts about my planned workout at 6. I start thinking, "What's the point? Why am I doing this? Why not just go straight home and pig out? Who cares? I can make up for it later." Etc., etc., etc.

Perhaps it has to do with my blood-sugar levels, in which case a small snack can renew my determination to stay fit. At other times the cause is less clear cut and the solution more elusive than consuming an energy bar. Sometimes I just have to push through it. Or more in line with the metaphor, climb over it.

What I know in the rational part of my mind is that the feelings of futility are not justified by my reality. And better, I know that they are temporary. I know that once I change into my workout clothes and step up to the elliptical, with good workout music coming through my headset, I'll feel better.

So climb the wall, friends, and see how beautiful it is on the other side!

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I've long held the conviction that people being critical of my unhealthy weight did not help me in the least. Family, friends, doctors, anyone who just felt compelled to confront me on the fact that I was fat and ate too much, utterly failed to motivate me to change. Why? Because my problem was never one of motivation. And I believe this is true for most people who struggle with weight issues. The article below makes the point and will be a great one for you and people you know to read and understand.

NPR - 7.26.13 by DEBORAH FRANKLIN

Overweight people who said they'd experienced discrimination based on weight were more than twice as likely to be obese four years later than people who didn't mention such discrimination.

Don't try to pretend your gibes and judgments of the overweight people in your life are for their own good. Florida researchers have evidence that discriminating against fat people only makes them fatter.

"People often rationalize that it's OK to discriminate based on weight because it will motivate the victim to lose pounds," Angelina Sutin, a psychologist at the Florida State College of Medicine in Tallahassee, tells Shots. "But our findings suggest the opposite."

Sutin and a colleague checked survey data from more than 6,000 American men and women age 50 and older who were asked how often in their daily lives they experienced different types of discrimination. Examples ranged from discourtesy or refusal of restaurant service to not getting a job or promotion.

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No one has time to get exercise, right? So if we're going to get it done we have to be efficient about it. That means working out in such a way as to get the most bang for our buck, or the most results for the time and energy we put in.

To accomplish this, we need solid advice and a high level of motivation. Wasting time and energy on workout routines that produce next to nothing in terms of our fitness goals just isn't an option. Neither is the kind of motivation that only lasts a week or two. (I always say that it's easy to decide to eat less right after a big meal. But it's what you do when your belly isn't full that counts.)

This app is designed to help, both with advice and motivation. The developer says,

"Up your motivation, improve your fitness, and stay on track with Gymprovise - a powerful, versatile, and flexible workout tracker for the Gym and outdoors, which gives you everything you need to plan, track, and review all your fitness activity. Gymprovise is THE Workout, Fitness & Bodybuilding app for gym junkies, fitness enthusiasts, bodybuilders & anyone serious about getting fitter and stronger. This is the free, ads-supported version, with core functionality. Get the paid version for no ads and TONS of additional features! Gymprovise makes it easy to plan & track all your fitness activity, in the gym & outdoors. We have many features to suit everyone from beginners to advanced,"

Check out the screenshots:



Get it by clicking below!


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The Atlantic - 7.19.13 by Paul Offit

At least 15 studies have now shown that vitamin C doesn't treat the common cold.

On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that women who took supplemental multivitamins died at rates higher than those who didn't. Two days later, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic found that men who took vitamin E had an increased risk of prostate cancer. "It's been a tough week for vitamins," said Carrie Gann of ABC News.

These findings weren't new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world's greatest quack.

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Telegraph - 7.5.13 by Richard Gray

After analysing 480,000 sites in each persons DNA, they found 17,975 locations were altered on 7,663 genes. The human genome contains around 20,000 genes.

Photo: ALAMY

Scientists found that six months of regular exercise, such as cycling or aerobics classes, changed the action of genes involved in the storage of fat and the development of obesity.

The exercise added and removed chemical groups to the DNA in a process known as epigenetic imprinting, or methylation, causing the genes to be switched on or off.

The researchers found more than 7,000 genes were affected in this way as a result of exercise in overweight volunteers.

They also found that key genes involved in storing sugar from blood stream inside fat cells have their activity reduced by the exercise.

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Thought I'd share this with you, since I'm irritated by the public's gullibility and attraction to fads.

New Republic - 6.21.13 by Judith Shulevitz

I think that people who use cleanses may have had rough anal periods (see Freud, Sigmund).” Cleanses and their cousins, colonics, have about as much medical merit, declared Gershon, as the acts of penance done by monks who’d “walk across Europe and hit themselves on the back to purge themselves of the plague.”

Joe Wilson

One afternoon last month, I made a nervous visit to the office of Ghiora Aharoni, an Israeli sculptor and architect of some renown. The awkward part was that I hadn’t come to interview him about his work. I was there to hear about his gut. He had just finished a 21-day cleanse, the kind with supplements, protein shakes, and endorsements by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow. (It’s called the Clean Program.)1 I’d been sent to Aharoni, who turned out to be extremely gracious, by a mutual friend, Ruby Namdar, an Israeli novelist whose skeptical intelligence and Falstaffian appetites made him the last person I expected to find on a celebrity diet. Indeed, the day I learned he was on it—over a dinner of baby carrots—Ruby was very hungry and very grumpy and at a loss to explain why he was doing this to himself, other than that Aharoni had talked Ruby into joining him and three other friends in the enterprise.

I wondered, too. What draws sophisticated and healthy people like Aharoni’s friends to commercial quasi-fasts? Cleanses, whether they last a day, a weekend, or three weeks, and whether they consist exclusively of fruit and vegetable juices or just a severe restriction of solids, are quickly becoming a part of what you might call the cosmopolitan diet, consumed in the more urbane sectors of New York and Los Angeles and Austin or wherever you find Whole Foods–levels of gastronomic consciousness and sufficient disposable income. (A three-week supply of Clean Program products costs $425.) Ask around, and you’ll probably find you know someone who knows someone who’s done a cleanse of one kind or another: Blueprint, Life Juice, Master Cleanse,2 Organic Avenue.

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We can debate the reasons for this all day long, but studies have repeatedly confirmed that, when it comes to fitness, example matters.


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Millions of us have tried going on diets. They are a huge waste of time and a virtual guarantee of discouragement and defeatism. Instead of going on a short-term diet, learn how to substitute. This is what makes for permanent success in the health and fitness arena.

Here's a quote from an article I read recently about Bret Baier, a well-known anchor on Fox news:

"after a while, you become accustomed to what is in your beneficial list and you make that your choice."

That's what substitution is all about. Not starving yourself or sweating bullets trying to stick to some weird set of restrictions (like, you can have as much as you want, as long as it's only the skins of grapes! As much as you want!).


Substituting is simple: You make a list of the stuff that's bad, and another list of the stuff that's good. Then you replace the bad with the good. Every chance you get. Whether you're cooking at home or eating out. What's bad? Simple carbs. What's good? Protein, good (polyunsaturated) fats and complex carbs.

You can't each as much as you want, unless you want just enough to maintain a healthy weight. I'm not that lucky. I don't get to eat as much as I want because, for whatever reason, I want more than I need. So I have to restrict my calorie intake, but eating as much as I need is not that difficult, and the benefits keep me motivated.

An added benefit, though, of substituting good foods for bad ones, is that your appetite is far more controllable. Bad carbs, as we know, cause sugar spikes and are somewhat addictive. The more you eat them the more you want/need them. Replace them with complex carbs and you'll see your cravings diminish to a level that you can control.

So try substitutions rather than going on short-term diets. You'll see that I'm right!

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It would never happen, but I wish fitness product ads would all have to have a big warning on the screen. Something like, "Please know that this product will NOT make you look like this model we paid to promote it. EVER!"

You can't get chiseled abdominals by using that gadget for only 10 minutes a day. Maybe 2 hours a day would do it in a year, but then you'd probably get a hernia.

These models got to look the way they look only by lots and lots of exercise, and some pretty serious portion control along with it. Believe it. And you can look like that too, assuming you're also 25 and willing to devote yourself to fitness and healthy eating.

When we see people who look good - I mean trim, strong, energetic - it's easy to assume they're just lucky that way. Don't believe that. They don't look that way by luck and great genes. They look that way because they're careful about what and how much they eat, and because they stick to a good exercise regimen.

The cool thing about all this - the fact that it's not about luck or good genes - is that you can do it too.

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Not discussing unpleasant people here, although they should be given a wide berth. We're talking about creeping weight gain.

Things have a way of catching up to us when we stop paying attention. The cute little wildebeest foal kneels daintily to sip cool water from the Nile river. It's not focusing on its surroundings for the moment, the water is just too delicious not to enjoy the pleasure of slaking its thirst. Sadly, you know what happens. The ravenous, 20-foot crocodile has been creeping up, closer and closer until...the little foal is now afternoon tea.

If you stop paying attention to your fitness, guess what? The fat will get laid down, cell by cell, not calling attention to itself, as stealthily as a Predator drone seeking targets of opportunity
over Afghanistan. You don't really notice anything wrong for awhile. But eventually, when your clothes start feeling a bit tighter than usual, what happens? You blame the dry-cleaner.

Some of us don't start to really show weight gain until it gets to 30 or 40 pounds. When it gets to the point that we can't deny the truth any longer, we  feel discouraged and defeated. How am I going to lose this 40 pounds? Dieting is a waste of time! I'm OK the way I am! Etc.

The only way to avoid this unhappy outcome that I have found is to beware the creep. I have to stay on top of it or it will get so out of hand that the difficulty of fixing it seems overwhelming. It's so much easier to trim off 5 extra pounds than it is to confront and defeat 50 or more.

So take my advice and beware the creep!

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The Fight Against Cancer Includes Exercise - by Melanie Bowen

At the moment of receiving the initial diagnosis, cancer begins taking its toll on the body and the mind. The stress alone involved with hearing the news can be devastating. In addition, enduring subsequent treatments and medications all cause an emotional, physical and psychological strain. Numerous studies indicate that when cancer patients engage in some type of physical activity from the beginning they gain numerous benefits, aid in a quicker recovery, and improve the overall quality of life.

Light Exercise

When undergoing aggressive treatments for mesothelioma or other lung related cancers, even light exercise often makes a world of difference. Light exercise involves any repetitive physical movement that does not alter an individual’s breathing pattern. The activity does not cause shortness of breath and one may carry on a conversation while performing the exercise. The regimen is also not so strenuous that it causes perspiration.

Walking is a great example of a simple light exercise. The activity improves overall muscle strength, inhibits bone loss and helps combat the fatigue that patients commonly endure secondary to chemotherapy. Walking also offers emotional and psychosocial benefits, as individuals feel a sense of accomplishment. How often and how far patients walk depends on individual tolerance. Start by simply walking to and from the end of the block, and gradually increase the distance. Walk with a friend or a family member. This type of exercise proves especially beneficial for patients with cancers affecting the lungs.

Moderate Exercise

Patients finished with cancer treatment often begin some type of moderate activity, which helps regain strength faster. These activities typically produce perspiration after repetitive movement for 10 minutes. Respirations may become faster, but the exercise does not render the individual breathless. During the activity, one should have the ability to carry on a conversation without difficulty.

If patients are physically ready to take on a moderate level of exercise then water aerobics should be a consideration. Community swimming pools often offer this type of exercise class. The movements performed while in the buoyancy of an aquatic environment improve overall cardiovascular fitness, circulation and flexibility while increasing bone and muscle strength. Since water aerobics is considered as a low-impact exercise because being 90% lighter in the water, there is less stress placed on the joints. As a result, this exercise may be ideal for those with joint complications.

Advanced Exercise

After having regained strength and endurance from moderate activities, individuals typically progress to a more advanced level of exercise. These activities help tone the body and may aid in weight loss if needed. Aggressive exercise causes deep and rapid respirations. Perspiring begins after a few minutes.

Implementing a weight-training regimen further improves muscle and skeletal strength and enhances cardiovascular fitness when performed correctly. Although you may feel as if your body is ready to do more, when beginning a weight-training program it is important to not forget to start slowly and that healing is a gradual process. Get guidance from a physical therapist or seek advice from a trainer at a local gym. The type of training cancer survivors may attempt largely depends on the type of cancer and treatment individual patients endure. Coaches or therapists have the knowledge and expertise to create a program that targets specific areas of the body depending on a person’s strength and weaknesses.


Other positive aspects of continuing some type of physical routine throughout the treatment process include increased energy, a better appetite and a more restful sleep. Researchers also find that exercise often helps combat the discomfort and unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Before beginning any activity, always consult with your personal health care provider. Exercise and physical activity may not be a cure for cancer, however it should be considered as a crucial component in the road toward recovery.

Editor's Note: Melanie is currently a Master's student with a passion that stems from her grandmother's cancer diagnosis. She often highlights the great benefits of alternative nutritional, emotional, and physical treatments on those diagnosed with cancer or other serious illness.  To read more from Melanie, visit her blog for the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance. In her spare time, you can find Melanie trying new vegan recipes, on her yoga mat, or spending time with her family.

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Being overweight, not to mention morbidly obese, created a multitude of inconveniences and lifestyle restrictions for me, as it does for millions of Americans. One of these restrictions was the hassle of air travel.

Faced with the difficulties for an overweight person of walking through miles of airport corridors, as well as the discomfort of too-small airline seats, many simply give up on air travel altogether. It had been almost a decade since I last traveled by air. The thought of the challenges I would face was simply too overwhelming.

Now that I'm back to a healthy weight and level of fitness, I recently rejoined the air-traveling public, and the experience was a tremendous boost to my motivation to stay healthy and fit.

Walking through the airports was easy and comfortable. I fit comfortably in the economy-class seats. The seat belts had lots of extra length to cinch tight. And I wasn't embarrassed to be seen by the people at the other end.

You have to find motivation wherever you can, and for me, being able to travel comfortably is a biggie!

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Let's face facts: Gym music generally sucks.


I find myself wondering, when subjected to the indignity of having to hear what's coming over the hidden speakers, where do they find this music? There was one gym I worked out at years ago that had romantic soul music playing in the background. Talk about de-motivating. I felt like superman in the presence of a metric ton of kryptonite.

This is why you have to bring your own music to the gym. Good music takes my workouts to the highest levels and pushes my pace and intensity. I don't understand the neuroscience behind this phenomenon. but it's totally real.

So here's a new entry into the smartphone market that's specifically designed to motivate you: FIT Radio.

Check out the video to see it in action:




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They say consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Maybe so in some respects, but with fitness, it's the only way to succeed over the long term.

When I was getting my undergrad degree at the University of Florida, I'm proud to say, I never pulled an all-nighter. Not once. I hate the idea itself, but more than that, it's a bad way to study. It just isn't a good idea to take a test after staying up all night, essentially in a sleep-deprived condition. Instead, I preferred to prepare myself for tests over a period of weeks, a bit at a time. It's like they say, the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

How did I lose 130 pounds? By skipping a bite at a time, and working out consistently. And consistency is also the way to maintain your ideal weight. But I found myself getting away from that philosophy without realizing it.

Here's what happened. I indulged too often in my greatest temptation: pizza. So I found that I'd add a few pounds from the pizza pig-out, and have to cut way back during the rest of the week just to stay at my ideal weight over the course of the week. I'd starve, then be so hungry and feel so deprived that the end-of-the-week pizza became irresistible. Then back to deprivation, pizza, deprivation, pizza, and so on and so forth and what have you. Not good. I had to break the cycle.

I did it by eating more during the week so as not to feel so deprived, then doing without the pizza altogether. Which is not to say I won't ever have pizza again, but certainly I won't indulge in it very often. Consistency! It works for me.

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Motivation to exercise is sometimes hard to find, I know. That's why we need to store up in our minds and hearts all the great reasons to get out and just do it (sorry, Nike). Here's one that might get you over the hump on those kinds of days...

It helps to know that, when you exercise regularly, some pretty awesome changes take place in your body on a cellular level, and these changes can have profoundly desirable consequences. As it happens, one of the reasons we age and our bodies deteriorate is that our cells have a limited number of times they can effectively replicate themselves. After a certain number of duplications, the DNA bits that cap the end of our cells' chromosomes, called telomeres, run out and our cells die.

Exercise, it has been found, actually prevents the shortening or the telomeres, thus putting off the death of our cells. Hence, a longer, healthier life! This from an excellent Live Science article found here:

The researchers measured the length of telomeres in blood samples from two groups of professional athletes and two groups who were healthy nonsmokers, but not regular exercisers.

"The most significant finding of this study is that physical exercise of the professional athletes leads to activation of the important enzyme telomerase and stabilizes the telomere," said Ulrich Laufs, the study's lead author and professor of clinical and experimental medicine at Saarland University in Homburg, Germany.

"This is direct evidence of an anti-aging effect of physical exercise," Laufs said. "Physical exercise could prevent the aging of the cardiovascular system, reflecting this molecular principle."

This means younger skin, younger organs, a younger body. Thinking about this has gotten me to the gym more than once.

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The Atlantic - 3.13.13 by Emily Esfahani Smith

Far from being delusional or faith-based, having a positive outlook in difficult circumstances is not only an important predictor of resilience -- how quickly people recover from adversity -- but it is the most important predictor of it.

One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly.

Patrizio Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital, where he was sentenced to go after he nearly beat his wife's lover to death. Home from the hospital, living under his parents' charge, Pat has lost his wife, his job, and his house. But he tries to put the pieces of his life back together. He exercises, maintains an upbeat lifestyle, and tries to better his mind by reading through the novels that his estranged wife Nikki, a high school English teacher, assigns her students.

Pat takes up a personal motto, excelsior -- Latin for "ever upward." He tells his state-appointed therapist, "I hate my illness and I want to control it. This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."



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New York Times - 2.20.13 by Michael Moss

What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive.

Grant Cornett for The New York Times

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”



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They say you should "Know thine enemy." The better to defeat him, right? This is true about the temptation to eat more than you need to maintain good health and an attractive, strong body. The more you know about the circumstances and conditions that make it difficult to eat right, the better you will be empowered to counter and successfully resist. Hence, this interesting article:

NPR - February 1. 2013 by SHANKAR VEDANTAM

Has the recession made you fat?

To the long and growing list of risk factors known to increase the risk of obesity, scientists recently added a new one: scarcity.

People given subtle cues that they may have to confront harsh conditions in the near future choose to eat higher-calorie food than they might do otherwise, a response that researchers believe is shaped by the long hand of evolution.

Evolutionary biologists have long speculated that in prehistoric times, when the blueprint of modern human behavior was created as our ancestors struggled for survival, gluttony may have been a useful response to scarcity: If you knew — or feared — a famine was coming, it made sense to tuck away as many calories as possible to prepare for it.


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Inkfish - 1.15.13 by Elizabeth Preston

BluePrintCleanse claims that the energy you save on digestion by not eating any real food gets diverted to "other metabolic processes." But Swoap says this is false. Your whole metabolism will slow at once, not just the tasks attached to digesting food. This will make it harder to lose weight.

Before I learned that it costs $65 to $90 to starve yourself for a day, I considered trying one day's worth of "juice cleansing" to put myself into the proper cranky fog for writing this piece. But if I'm going to eat no calories, I prefer to spend no dollars.

What did I give up by fueling myself on solid foods instead of liquefied produce? Really, one day would have been merely dipping a toe into the celery water. If I were a serious client of a juice cleanse company, I would pay for anywhere from three to ten days' worth of bottled juices, delivered to my doorstep in a cooler every morning.

The first few days of deprivation would, in theory, "cleanse the blood" and release toxins from my tissues that have been slowing me down and making me sick. I'd give my colon a break while "sweeping" it out. The latter days would boost my immune system and "fight off degenerative diseases." After all that detoxifying and boosting, I would feel energized and restored. I might even have lost a few pounds—but it's about health, not weight.



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I'm always fascinated by pictures from the Depression era. You know, that time in the 1930s when the economy crashed and people had very little? If that sounds like today, think again. There was no safety net provided by the government then, and people literally went hungry. That's why in pictures from that time people look so thin. They didn't have enough to eat. And they didn't have cars and machines to do everything for them. They actually had to expend energy!

Fast forward to today, when you can easily afford far more calories than you need, and you can make a living and live your life almost without moving at all.

It's no wonder that we have an enormous problem with obesity and its many related diseases.


When I started my fitness lifestyle, I started thinking about calories and money. Let's say I have a limited supply of money so that I can only afford to eat 2000 calories a day. And let's say I'm smart, and want to get the most bang for my buck by making sure those limited calories have as much nutrient content as possible. What would I be eating? And how much would it cost?

I realized that all the excess food I ate over the years was still with me, stored as fat. I had thousands of dollars of calories saved up! I could spend less now by eating fewer calories than I was burning, and make use of all that stored energy! So that's what I did and my excess fat lasted about a year. Since then I've increased my intake, but it's still limited, and I'm still saving money.

The idea that I need to spend more to lose weight seems wrong to me. Why should I pay someone to give me less food? I can eat less food and spend less money all by myself.

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Either you've said it or heard it: "When I was younger I ate everything in sight and was thin as a rail. Now I eat a single donut and put on five pounds!"

I can tell you for certain that I gave not a moment's thought to my eating when I was 16, and I was a skinny guy.


I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. And look at me! But then a few decades passed and I weighed more than 300 pounds. What the hell happened?

This is what I think:

It's not that something mysterious changed and my metabolism suddenly slowed to a crawl. It's that I was always eating more than I was burning, but since I was still growing and developing, the extra calories went into producing that growth. I was getting heavier, but it wasn't fat. It was muscle, bone, blood, etc. Add to this the fact that I was very active: I was always on the move and playing sports in school.

But as I got older, I became less active and my body, no longer needing to build, started storing fat. I kept eating what I wanted, but burned and used less. So I put on a few pounds of fat every year. Maybe noticeable, but not alarming, really. With those extra pounds came increased difficulty in moving around, so I became even less active.


From 175 to 180. Then 180 to 185. No big deal. Then I hit 190 and decided to diet. I dieted and lost 20 pounds. Yay! But then I went back to the usual over-eating and under-exercising and started the process over again. This happened maybe 3 or 4 times until I gave up.

Finally, after all these years, I've found a way to limit my caloric intake and eat a nutrient dense diet as a way of life, and have also developed the habit of exercise. The cycle has been broken and I'm not looking back. Except for writing about it. :-)

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