Eat cookies and lose weight?
A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were at a seminar in Orlando and had the chance to hang out with Joel Marion, a good friend of mine who just happens to be a fat-loss guru.
Now Joel has some interesting thoughts about dieting (eat cookies and cake to lose weight?) and since the holidays are coming up, I asked if he'd write a guest blog about fat-loss and one particular hormone that plays a crucial role.
But before you read his article below, I want you to go check this out:
http://www.cheatyourwaythin.com/holiday/
For the next few days Joel is giving away his brand new “Holiday Fat-Loss Black Book” exclusive report for free. I read the report a few days ago and picked up a few new tips myself.
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The Most Important Hormone You Never Heard Of
It's name is leptin and it's time you knew how to use it to your advantage.
Leptin was only first discovered just over ten years ago (as far as weight loss is concerned, that’s extremely recent) and its function is to communicate your nutritional status to your body and brain.
Leptin levels are mediated by two things. One is your level of body fat. All else being equal, people with higher levels of body fat will have higher leptin levels. Because leptin is secreted by fat cells, it makes sense that under normal conditions there is a direct correlation between leptin levels and the amount of fat you are carrying.
Unfortunately, when you’re attempting to lose fat and begin to restrict calories, conditions are anything but “normal” and the body responds accordingly by lowering leptin levels.
This is because the second mediator of blood leptin levels is your calorie intake. Lower your calorie intake and leptin will fall, independent of body fat.
So what happens when leptin levels fall and why the hell does it matter?
Again, under normal conditions leptin levels are normal and the brain gets the signal loud and clear that nutrition intake is adequate. Metabolism is high and the internal environment of the body is one very conducive to fat burning.
Until you start dieting.
Go on a diet and leptin levels quickly plummet (by 50 percent or more after only one week), sending a signal to the body that you’re semi-starved and not consuming enough calories.
This puts the breaks on metabolism and creates a hormonal environment extremely conducive to fat storage. Thyroid hormones (hormones extremely important to metabolism) respond by taking a dive and the abdominal fat-storing stress hormone cortisol skyrockets measurably.
Hello belly fat.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the appetite stimulating hormones ghrelin, neuropeptide-Y, and anandamide all hop on board to make your life even more miserable.
You don’t have to remember any of those names, just remember that when leptin drops, you get seriously hungry.
Despite having a pretty good reason for its reaction, it’s pretty ironic that our bodies are primed for fat loss at every other time except when we are trying to burn fat.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could maintain high leptin levels and a body primed for fat burning while dieting? It would seemingly solve all of our problems.
But in order to do this, we’d have to somehow keep leptin levels high as we attempt to lose those extra pounds.
How About Supplementing with Leptin?
A couple of problems here: First, leptin is a protein-based hormone, which means that it can not be taken orally (otherwise, it would simply be digested). So that rules out a leptin pill.
This leaves the method of “supplemental” leptin administration to injection. And leptin injections do indeed work, reversing the metabolic adaptations to dieting and “starvation” even while continuing to restrict calories.
In 1999, Heymsfield et al. performed a double-blind placebo controlled study analyzing weight loss over a 24-week period in 73 obese humans. Subjects either injected daily with leptin or a placebo (i.e. bogus alternative). At the end of the 24-week period, the leptin group lost significantly more weight than the placebo and a higher percentage of fat vs. muscle.
In 2003, Fogteloo et al. showed that leptin injections “tended to reduce the decline of energy expenditure associated with energy restriction, whereas the tendency of energy intake to increase back to baseline levels in placebo-treated subjects was largely prevented in subjects treated with leptin.”
Yeah, that’s a mouthful. Let me put in simple terms: not only did the leptin group experience less of a decline in metabolism, but they were also less hungry, allowing them to more easily stick to the prescribed diet.
So, as theorized, keeping leptin levels high during a diet does indeed solve our dilemma by avoiding the negative metabolic (and perhaps behavioral) adaptations that calorie restriction perpetuates.
The problem?
Daily leptin injections are far too expensive, costing thousands of dollars per week. So, we can pretty much forget about supplemental leptin as a solution.
A Real Solution
Now that we know that leptin injections aren’t going to save us, let’s talk about the possibility of manipulating your body’s natural leptin production.
And I’ve got good news – this can indeed be done, and without involving needles or thousands of dollars. In fact, we’ll swap the injections and mounds of cash out for two things I can guarantee you’re absolutely going to love: more calories and more carbs.
We know that leptin levels decrease by about 50% after only one week of dieting, but fortunately, it doesn’t take nearly that long for leptin to bump back up with a substantial increase in caloric intake.
In fact, research has shown that it only takes about 12-24 hours.
So, the answer to the fat loss catch-22? Strategic high-calorie, high-carb CHEATING.
By strategically cheating with high calorie foods (and yes, even stuff like pizza, ice cream, wings, cookies, burgers and fries, etc.), you can give leptin and metabolism a major boost mid-diet which sets you up for plenty of subsequent fat loss when you resume your reduced calorie eating regimen.
This means greater net fat loss week after week, and ultimately, a much more realistic, maintainable way to bring you to the body you truly want and deserve.
So what’s so special about carbs?
Well, leptin, carbohydrates, and insulin have been shown to have very strong ties.
Calories alone don’t get the job done, as research shows that overfeeding on protein and fat has little effect on leptin.
In order to get a strong leptin response from overfeeding, there needs to be plenty of carbs in the mix. In fact, the relationship is so strong that research conducted by Boden et al. at the Temple University School of Medicine shows that leptin levels will not fall even in response to all-out fasting so long as insulin and blood sugar are maintained via IV drip. That’s crazy.
Because of this carbohydrate/insulin-leptin relationship, it makes sense that foods combining both carbs and fat (like pizza, burgers, cookies, ice cream, etc) work best for reversing the negative adaptations caused by dieting because of the big-time insulin response they produce.
This why strategic cheating with your favorite foods is so powerful. This is why you truly can use your favorite foods to lose fat faster than you ever could with restrictive dieting. This is freedom.
Essentially, it’s everything “typical” dieting isn’t.
With regular dieting, come week two, you’re screwed.
With strategic cheating, you can literally use any food you want to ensure that you never go a single day without a body primed for fat loss.
To cheat or not to cheat? I think the choice is clear.
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Have you checked out the page and received your free download yet? Make sure to do it now! And, of course, please post your thoughts in the comments!
http://www.cheatyourwaythin.com/holiday/
Posted Nov 09, 2009 by .
This entry is filed under fat loss and nutrition.
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Comments for This Entry
Great post - a really well written summary that makes a lot of extremely complicated science both understandable and actionable. Well done, Joel.
@ Nate - For someone like yourself, who doesn't really change diet much, where does cheating fit in for you?
I know first hand this works. I follow a mostly Paleo diet but I indulge in desserts on occasion (cheeecake, brownines, ice cream, you name it). I love desserts and have actually first hand seen the effects of this strategic type of cheating. I cheat on weekends mostly and those are my hardest training days. I also can see the diff in the mirror the abs pop significantly more after a high caloric meal. Just do not get carried away, because it is real easy to mess up your hormones and get into some crazy sugar cravings.
P.S. A small piece of dark chocolate curbs cravings. ;)
What's the difference of an increase in leptin levels between eating an excess of shi* food(ie pizza, ice cream, wings ,etc), and an excess of good food from lean meats, nuts, grains, etc?
I've always found that if I go for long enough without eating "the junk" food, I now longer crave it. But as soon as I do a cheat day, it feels like I'm once again craving sweets and other junk on my diet. Any ideas?
@ Steve - The main thing is that studies (and empirical evidence) have shown pretty clearly that leptin levels upregulate most effectively with meals containing high GI carbs, as well as fats.
As Joel mentioned in the post, insulin and leptin are tied together pretty strongly, so this is not really surprising. That said, it is of course very possible to get a lot of high GI carbs from 'clean' sources, such as fruits, potatoes, etc.
One thing to remember though, is that you need to do two things:
1) Take in a tremendous amount of fast digesting, high-GI carbohydrates
and
2) Take in a tremendous caloric surplus
For most people, it's difficult to do both with clean foods. If you are mostly getting high GI carbs from clean foods, you are going to reach a point of satiety far before you're really hitting a caloric surplus.
In most cases, eating "cheating" foods actually helps you achieve those two things concurrently in far less time.
Obviously, many people dieting to lose fat are also thrilled by the prospect of the physical and psychological "break" from having to maintain a strict diet, but that is largely a personal thing.
I have been trying to do research on this process of calorie "shifting" or "cycling" in order to trick the body to not go into starvation mode when calorie intake is cut.
However, I am an ectomorph (6 foot and ~150lbs) and despite working out 3 times a week and eating ~3500 calories per day (I track them online) have seen only minimal weight gain despite moderate strength gains. Currently following the winter portion of Built for Show (which is an awesome book btw).
Do you think this process of "cheating"/"cycling" could be applied in reverse to help us chronically skinny guys gain mass? Maybe have 1-2 days a week where you cut calorie intake by 25-50% but still keep the same amount of average calories per week? Maybe focus on having a higher percentage of calorie intake be protein and fat versus carbs in order to keep leptin levels down?
Example:
Weekdays eat 4000 calories/day
Weekend eat 2250 calories/day
Average of 3500 calories/day
Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated
@DH: I'm going to parrot Mark Rippetoe in "Starting Strength" for a second here.
"A gallon of milk a day will put meat on any skinny kid."
Just drink that, on top of what you're already eating.
Between picking more heavy shit (a hybrid of Rip's 5x5 and Wendler's 5/3/1, plus my own crap) and drinking a bunch more milk, I've put on 15# (I'm 170#, 5'7", 14% BF and 36 years old) since mid-June. Admittedly, not all that weight is lean mass (I was around 11% at 153#), but the majority of it is.
You may be onto something with the anti-leptin trick, but I'll defer to someone with a whole lot more biochem expertise to confirm or shoot holes in that idea.
Is fat best with the high GI carbs to cause a transient decrease in insulin sensitivity and subsequent greater secretion of insulin?
As far as the cheat period featuring more junk to focus on high GI and fat, what are the implications of many of these foods having trans fat and concentrated sources of fructose (which can lead to increased triglyceride formation in the liver)? Are these less of an issue because these are isolated periods in the midst of a very defined dieting phase? I realize that not every bit of junk will have trans fat and HFCS, but there's a good bet that any major cheat period will contain these ingredients in much higher quantities than most physique conscious folks would be consuming them.
@Rafe
Thanks for the tips, but consuming excessive amounts of dairy really messes with my body (I think I might be somewhat lactose intolerant). I tend to break out more, get upset stomach, bad gas, etc.
I could try drinking a gallon of soymilk per day (~800 cal) but that doesn't have nearly the calories of a gallon of whole milk (2000+ cal).
@DH: Gotcha. Soymilk isn't a great substitute, both because it's less calorie-dense, and it lacks the mammalian growth goodness that freshly-squeezed cow juice has. Plus, it'll actually hamper T levels because it contains phytoestrogens.
That said, I frigging love Silk's chocolate soymilk, but I've found an alternative: Almond Dream chocolate almond milk. DELICIOUS. I think it comes in other flavors, but they don't exist in my world. :-)
That might be a viable option, but it runs about 1.5x the cost of regular milk, so look for it on sale and go nuts. Also , speaking of nuts, they're a good, calorie-dense snack.
@ Rafe may I just ask what your current goal is?
@John: My goals are kind of at cross purposes, but my timeline is moderately distant (August).
- Bodyfat in the mid to high single digits (and not going any higher than it is right now); ie, "visible abs" I don't have a target figure for what I'll weigh, but assume it'll be in the 160's
- Improve in the "big four" lifts by 5-10# a month for the duration
I've enumerated these at a little more detail over at my blog (http://digitaldiscipline.wordpress.com/goalposts/)
I like how John's just taking over!
Honestly guys, John's a very smart individual with a lot to share. I'm editing an article of his for TMUSCLE right now.
As always, thanks for the comments. I'll chime in more in a bit.
-Nate
Nate, one other thing, completely unrelated to food or iron - the gravatar widget that's supposed to let us change our posting icons doesn't seem to be playing nice. Can we confirm that the redesign will bring it back to functionality?
Not that I don't like you, but I like me more. ;-)
@ Rafe - Okay, that makes sense. I assumed you probably had multiple goals.
This isn't really the time, the place, nor the appropriate thread to get into a detailed discussion, but I just wanted to give you food for thought.
In roughly 18 weeks, you've gained just about 17 pounds. Firstly, great job on packing on some mass, and not being afraid to gain fat.
I would say, though, that you are probably not really getting optimal results in terms of body composition.
You've gone from 136.17 pounds of lean mass to 146.2 pounds--which is awesome by an standard.
However, you've gone from carrying 16.83 pounds of fat to 23.8
So you've gained 10 pounds of muscle and 7 pounds of fat.
I would say this is decent but not exceptional. At my facility, we generally aim for a ratio of muscle gained to fat gain of 2:1. We normally see about 3:1 or, or in slower cases 2:0.75
You have more like 1.4:1. It isn't terrible, and it sounds like you're happy with the progress you've made so far, and that is really the main thing.
I am familiar with both programs you describe, and in particular Wendler's is great.
So, if you're on a JW's program I assume the goal is primarily to gain strength - in which case I assume you have gotten a great deal stronger, and you are probably not overly concerned with the fat gain.
But if you were training specifically for body comp, I think you could tweak a lot. Probably not much in terms of increasing the rate of muscle gain, but you could likely have things structured in such a way as to mitigate fat gain quite a bit.
That said, since you have multiple goals, as long as you're pleased with both the strength and mass gain, and don't mind the fat, it's all good, though.
Sorry again to hijack, just curious. Good job again on the progress =)
Sweet I can't wait til John's new article comes out, the last one about antioxidants was one of my all-time favorites. For those who are still confused as to how leptin functions, I remember Berardi wrote a really good series of articles called "Hungry Hungry Hormones" that explains it pretty well.
@ John - I'm curious as to how someone could do better with the ratio of muscle : fat gain.
1) Could we use the reverse idea of the Holiday Weight Loss by keeping calories above maintenance on lifting days and dropping them below maintenance on Rest Days? This being so we have high leptin levels from the calorie surplus and while those leptin levels are high, we drop calories on rest days to burn fat?
2) Using the strategy of 1), would doing cardio on Rest Days helps burn fat?
I have been trying to gain muscle without MUCH fat for a while now and I have wanted to do somethings like add cardio after some weight sessions but don't want to do it at the risk of muscle gains.
Any advice you could give would be awesome and if you want for any reason my email is ashylary@ku.edu. Thanks a lot!
-Adam
@ Zach - thanks for the compliment! I have some older articles on TMUSCLE as well, going back as far as 2004 or 2005, I think. I'm glad you liked the article, I had fun writing it.
@ Adam - I'll give some broad recommendations but I don't want to get too specific or really lead the conversation too far away from the topic.
Speaking generally, for gaining muscle and keeping fat gain to a minimum, we try to keep a daily caloric surplus to just about 600-750 above what we calculate maintenance to be. We use formulas as a jumping off point, but it'll vary person to person.
At least 60% of that surplus is coming from para-workout nutrition, and the rest from just two other meals: the meal immediately after breakfast, and the solid meal following a training session. So to be clear, when someone is putting on muscle, their diet is largely unchanged. Only meal 2, para-workout, and solid post workout meal are touched in any way.
If someone is extremely ectomorphic, we'll push for 850 above maintenance. And if we have an underfed mesomorph, we may push a bit further, depending on how demanding the workouts are.
I've played with calorie shifting and bouncing, and it works, but it over complicates things a bit. As I've said, though, some people really dig the control that goes into being really complicated with diet, and for those people I'd say have at it.
The most I would recommend is just allowing the fact that you don't have para-workout nutrition on non-workout days create the caloric difference between training/non-training days. I don't see much need to do things outside of that.
I have all of my clients do at least 1 day of dedicated energy systems work when putting on mass. Sprinting is great, but we do more fun stuff like sled work, kettlebells, and in the summer we push the car around the parking lot. Keeping conditioning up is never a bad thing. It does have a nutrient partitioning effect and you're less likely to put fat on a body active 6 days per week instead of just 3.
To just briefly address your comment about leptin: your idea is good but I want to just be clear that manipulating calories during a mass-gaining phase has almost nothing to do with leptin. Although your leptin levels will fluctuate, in order for them to drop to a degree significant enough to make it relevant for a discussion of physique alteration, you'd have to be in a caloric deficit for about 6-8 days.
Given that this wouldn't really be the case during a training cycle where you are over-eating in order to gain mass, leptin isn't going to play into the equation in the way that we use it for fat loss.
@ John
Thanks for the response, it helped a lot. Lately I've been confusing myself as to eat a lot on my rest days or not, and I think that it's the only reason I've gained the fat that I have. I'm sure the remainder of my bulk is going to be much more successful now.
Thanks again,
-Adam
@JR - Thanks, both for the kudos and the advice. Rather than continue to monopolize Nate's thread, I shot you a note on FB (since I didn't see an email address on your site).
Long story short, I'm going to transition from bulking up to energy system/burning gradually, not as a "okay, twelve weeks of X are up" clean break. If I'm not happy with where I am in, say, June, I can adjust accordingly.
@Adam - anytime man, happy to help. A lot of times it just takes a little outside perspective to set things right. That's the beauty of sites like Nate: when a community starts to form and people share ideas, everyone benefits. I'm always glad to be a part of such a community.
@Rafe - Just checked your FB message. I can't believe I don't have an e-mail listed on my site. Clearly, I am an idiot. I'll take care of that. Your plan looks great overall, and I like the "adjust accordingly" approach. I'm excited to see how you do.
On another note, I actually did a 90 minute coaching call with Joel Marion last night for some of his subscribers where we actually touched on his specialty (leptin) and my specialty (lifestyle) quite a bit, so that may become available to the public at some point.
If you haven't downloaded the Holiday black book yet, get at it, it's full of good stuff.
@JR - I figured it was a privacy thing, not an oversight, actually. IT'S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG!
*grin*
Okay, enough screwing around... it's deadlift day in this neck of the woods. :-)
From what I've read, Leptin is (mainly) associated with carb consuption.
What if we eat a meal containing many carbs, but we also have lots of veggies with that meal, and take chromium or ALA supps.
Will we have the same leptin "spike"?
Is leptin associated only with insulin spikes, or does it have a connection with the water retention that comes from eating carbs?
Can we have leptin spikes just with sodium, creatine or/and glycerine consumption?
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