Here’s Cara Heads, the 2000 Olympian taking someone off the street and teaching them the Olympic lifting movements to prove her point that anyone can get into this sport for fun and fitness.

I have proven over and over in my coaching practice that I can show ANYONE how to do the basic Olympic lifts in under 1 hour.  Period.

You don’t need to be a world champion to get in great shape!

And here’s Cara working on her Snatch technique off the blocks:

Now I’ve heard it all.  A woman was diagnosed with lachanophobia, or a fear of vegetables.  I didn’t say that she doesn’t like them … I mean she is flat out afraid of them.

“Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.

“People might think it is a bit of a laughable affliction but I have a genuine fear of greens it’s not just that I dislike the taste of sprouts or broccoli, but the actual sight of them fills me with dread and I could never touch them.”

Hat tip: Bradley Simpson at Kitchenpt

Gruber J, Tang SY, and Halliwell B came out with a study in 2007 showing that Resveratrol, the substance in red wine that is thought to be the major cause of the “French Paradox”, excerts it’s life extending effects at a cost to early life reproductive capacity in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.  This didn’t affect didn’t exert itself at later stages of life.

Don’t think this is necessarily bad.  If it’s also true in humans, then resveratrol may help extend life, and reduce teenage pregnancy!

Calorie restriction works in much the same way, but is hard to implement with athletes who need large amounts of food just to survive. 

The TV show “The Biggest Loser” has been on for quite a while now.  It is extremely popular, and is touted by many to be an example of triumph over adversity.   But, there are a number of vocal opponents, especially in my industry–the fitness industry.

Among the charges against the Biggest Loser are that it sets up unrealistic expectations, uses unhealthy methods, is all hype and no substance, and is in fact perpetrating a fraud.

Of course, they are totally correct on most counts (except fraud, that’s going too far).  But, that isn’t the point.  What is?

In short, I don’t think you are so dumb that you need we trainers to monitor your television habits lest you fall into a pit of self loathing.  I think you are smart enough to tell the difference between a TV show and real life.

Entertainment is entertainment.  The Biggest Loser is first and foremost an entertainment reality TV program that does a very successful job of selling advertising.  But, it is about a subject that hits home for every American (and increasingly, the rest of the world).  I don’t believe it’s my place to call someone stupid for liking to watch (or God forbid, feeling inspired by) The Biggest Loser. I don’t think it is my place to tell the contestants that they don’t have a right to do the show, simply because it might be unhealthy.

Is the UFC good for us, or the contestants?  How about the WWE?  No matter how you look at it, getting kicked in the teeth is not healthy.  It is the choice of the contestants themselves to go onto the show in the first place.  It’s been 8 years that the show has been on.  They’ve likely watched every season before they got on themselves.  They know what they are getting into, they are adults, and who are we to tell them they can’t.

Again, we aren’t asking the guys at the WWE to quit doing what they are doing because it’s bad for their health.  We just want to watch Triple H slam a metal chair over the head of The Undertaker.  What’s wrong with that?

The detractors of the show feel like they are doing the “average overweight person who is desperately looking for a weight-loss secret” a favor.  As though, somehow, a fat person is also less intelligent than their thin counterparts, more susceptible to TV hype.

I trust people enough to be able to watch TV without falling off the deep end.  It’s just TV for God’s sake.

Instead of that kind of silliness, I’m just going to lay out what I think are the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of The Biggest Loser from the perspective of fitness coach.  You can decide for yourself whether you want to continue watching it.

And just for fun, I’m going to do it in reverse order.

The Ugly

Certainly not ugly

The ugly of The Biggest Loser is worse than the bad.  There are real health dangers involved for the contestants themselves.  During the first few months at the ranch, these very obese people go through workouts, and have workloads, that are absolutely insane.

Most athletes don’t even train for 6 to 8 hours a day.  Those that do built up to it for years in advance.  It is very dangerous to throw the contestants into a workout program like this out of the blue.

The show has already had a few disasters and hospitalizations.  There is real risk that someone is going drop dead eventually.  I know the show says that they have doctors monitoring them at all times, keeping track of what they eat, etc.  And I’m sure they do (given the risk of a law suit), but the producers need to watch out.

Diet is another issue.  Many weeks, the contestants are reported to be getting under 1000 calories a day.  Given their daily workloads, they are likely burning anywhere from 2000 to 5000 calories.  Do the math.  That is scary.

Of course, one sure fire way to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit.  And whenever you are training a severely overweight person, this is a must.  But, a deficit of 500 to 1000 calories is more than enough to accomplish that goal.

If you up someones workload to the level that they are doing on the show, then you up their need for glycogen, protein, and all sorts of micro-nutrients that are impossible to get enough of on such a low calorie diet.

When you overwork someone, and artificially keep their calories so low, you actually impede their progress, and (ironically) cause them to be  less likely to lose fat.  Instead, they’ll start to break down, lose muscle, become stressed out (via massive levels of cortisol)–all progress stalls.

Top athletes train like maniacs, but they also eat like maniacs.  Remember all the news stories on Michael Phelps diet?  He eats upwards of 12,000 calories a day so that he can train for the same number of hours as the contestants on The Biggest Loser.  See the problem?

As a coach, I almost never see genuine overtraining in anyone other than my competitive athletes.  But, these contestants are getting hammered.  They are nearly all massively overtrained by the 3rd or 4th week.  Some crawl out of it, others get booted (voted) off the show.

And then there’s the weigh in.  Competitors have been known to use any means necessary to drop every last pound for the weekly weigh in.  They’ll dehydrate, workout with heavy sweats on, not drink water for 24 hours, etc.  Not healthy.  Potentially life threatening.  But, again, it is their own choice.

They chose to go on the show and they chose to dehydrate to make themselves more competitive.  High school wrestlers do it all the time to make weight.  I don’t condone it unless you are under the supervision of someone who knows what they are doing, but it is hardly anything new.

Of course, all this craziness makes for great TV. The farther down the hole these people go, the more emotional they become, and then we get the crying sessions, the yelling, the storming out of the gym, etc.  But, it is dangerous.  Make no bones about it.

The Bad

Yoga is never enough

The Bad isn’t as bad as the Ugly.  These objections aren’t life threatening, but they aren’t good.  The primary problem in this category is the idea that The Biggest Loser gives people at home, who hope to lose a lot of weight themselves, an unrealistic picture of how to do it.

It is certainly unrealistic.  Who has time to do 6 or 8 hours a day of working out?  Who’s got the self control to do all that exercise, and then only eat 800 calories?!  I’d be at Crispy Cream every day (those of you who know me, know how true that is).

Losing more than 1 pound of fat per week is unrealistic for most.  Some people can do it.  And when you are 200 pounds overweight, then it is in fact likely that you will lose more than a pound of fat per week.  But, it is never easy.  It is brutally hard.

A great friend of mine, who is only 30 or 40 pounds overweight, recently sat down to talk to me about losing weight.  I suggested that to start she simply start by doing 20 minutes a day, every day, of something physical.  Nothing too complicated.  Get up in the morning, do a few sets of wall push ups, and some jumping jacks, for example.  If you can do just 20 minutes of light exercise every day for a month, you can build in the habit, and we can build on that.

Funny thing was, even that seemed like too much. The prospect of doing something everyday was daunting, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t even supposed to be hard.  She’s a hard worker in every area of her life.  But, she’s not yet built the habit of daily exercise, and that is a tough habit to build.

The people on The Biggest Loser are going well beyond 20 minutes a day, or even 1 or 2 hours a day.  There is nothing easy about their diets and exercise routines.  They can lose 100 pounds or more in a season because they are dedicating every waking hour to that pursuit.  And they have a large staff cooking their meals for them, trainers pushing them in the gym, and no access to cheat foods.

At home, you don’t have any of that.  Instead, it is all on your shoulders.  Sure, you can hire someone like me to write you routines and push you in the gym.  You can hire a nutritionist to make you a diet plan.  But, I am not going to go to your house at 5am to wake you up and drag you into the gym (sorry, you can’t pay me enough).

Unless you’re rich, you aren’t going to be able to hire someone to cook all your meals.  And there is no way you can avoid the temptations of the modern world with a Star Bucks on every corner, fast food coming out our ears, and supermarkets where the junk is cheaper than the good stuff.

At home, it is all up to you.  That is hard.  Much harder than what the contestants on The Biggest Loser have to face.

A second problem is that extreme weight loss almost never works long term in the real world.  People who lose fat fast tend to gain it all back at a rate that is higher than those who lose the same amount of weight, but did it slower.  I’m convinced this is because when you do it slower, you build in something that is more important that the numbers on the scale–consistency.  Losing weight fast robs you of the time it takes to build habits.  If you are going to keep the fat off, you HAVE TO change your habits forever.

Changing your habits is not a matter of will power.  If it was, we’d all be able to do it all the time.  Changing your habits is about time.  The longer you plug away at something, the more ingrained the process becomes in your neural pathways.  Baseball pitchers can do what they do only because they have done it for so long.  When you first started learning to ride a bike, you fell off–a lot.  But, after plugging away at it, you made it a habit.  Now it ain’t nothing.

On the show, they don’t have time to build in a habit of exercise and healthy eating that will last a lifetime.  They take people out of their real lives and put them into fantasy land for a few months of high-action television.  And when these people get home, they have no way to integrate what they were doing in fantasy land into their real lives.

If you want to lose weight and keep it off forever, you have to start out by building in the routines, and make both exercise and diet a major part of your day to day life.  You know, your real life.  The one with kids, a job, bills, and no time.  Once you do that, you’re on the road to seeing a level of progress that is even more impressive than what happens on The Biggest Loser.

The last problem is the in-your-face advertising.  This season’s sugar-free gum ads are just wacky.  Every time Bob Harper pushes some gum on one of his trainees, I burst into laughter.  It’s become a farce.  But, in today’s world, how shocking is that, really?

The Good

Looking Good Now

Alright, no more bashing the show.  Now I’m going to tell you what I think is good about it.

There are two things that The Biggest Loser makes abundantly clear, that so many clients I’ve had didn’t believe (in their heart of hearts) until they saw the show.  The first is that losing extreme amounts of fat (over 200 pounds) is actually possible.  The second is that it is not going to be easy.

For nearly 2 decades Americans have been blaming obesity on genetics.  Sure, we knew fast food was bad for you, and that we should workout more, but in the end, our parents were fat, and that is why we were fat.  We were a country in denial.

The Biggest Loser has brought obesity to center stage and made it the most popular subject on television.  It shows some of the heaviest people in the country doing what we as a nation previously thought wasn’t possible.   They lost the weight.  They really did it.  8 seasons in a row, this program has taken mega-fat people and brought them down to size.  You can disagree with their methods, hate the hype, and I’m sure you could certainly do without the over-the-top advertising.  But, there is no denying that these people lost a LOT of weight.

Secondly, the show does a great job showing the contestants in a lot of pain. That may sound bad, but as a trainer, I think that it’s a good thing.  If you want results, the results you are dreaming of right now (I know you have dreams about changing your body–because we all do), then you have to work your ass off.  Period.

Now, obviously, I would want you to work into it slowly, get up to speed for a few months, and meet some benchmarks that I’ve set into place before we get too crazy.  But, hard work has to be on the horizon if you are going to get anywhere.

The contestants on The Biggest Loser are suffering.  They’re crying.  They’re whining.  And, in the end, they are succeeding.  This is a good message.  Sometimes things that are worth doing are very hard, but if you fight through it, you can come out on top, and you’ll be a better person for it.

Conclusion

So, there you have it.  Coach Nick’s version of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of The Biggest Loser.  Sure, the show has it’s problems, but the contestants are doing it of their own accord, and we have no right to stop them.  The show is hyped up like crazy, and it portrays an unrealistic way of losing weight for the average person at home.  But, in the end, it is only an entertainment TV show, one that shows real people in struggling situations, losing an amount of fat that too many people fear is impossible to lose.

On the balance, I’m for it.  Besides, it’s just fun to watch.

Ice Cream Sushi!

Great news for Athletes trying to pack on muscle mass.  A new study has shown that eating saturated fat can increase your appetite and trick you into thinking you need more food.

Since THE major factor holding back athletes who are looking to add large amounts of muscle (or even to maintain what they have–marathon runners, I’m looking at you!) is their inability to eat enough, this fact may come in handy.

My suggestion? Eat ice cream.  It’s high calorie and loaded with saturated fat which will apparently make you hungrier.  You get two for the price of one!

Of course, the article I found this tid-bit on was most worried about the implications of saturated fat on our overall health profiles.  But, that isn’t your problem.  You’re too skinny, and you need to muscle up.  That takes more calories than you can eat comfortably.   Science (and Ice Cream) to the rescue!

Below is the abstract to the  actual study (I hate that most articles don’t do this, especially when they are on the web).

Insulin signaling can be modulated by several isoforms of PKC in peripheral tissues. Here, we assessed whether one specific isoform, PKC-θ, was expressed in critical CNS regions that regulate energy balance and whether it mediated the deleterious effects of diets high in fat, specifically palmitic acid, on hypothalamic insulin activity in rats and mice. Using a combination of in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry, we found that PKC-θ was expressed in discrete neuronal populations of the arcuate nucleus, specifically the neuropeptide Y/agouti-related protein neurons and the dorsal medial nucleus in the hypothalamus. CNS exposure to palmitic acid via direct infusion or by oral gavage increased the localization of PKC-θ to cell membranes in the hypothalamus, which was associated with impaired hypothalamic insulin and leptin signaling. This finding was specific for palmitic acid, as the monounsaturated fatty acid, oleic acid, neither increased membrane localization of PKC-θ nor induced insulin resistance. Finally, arcuate-specific knockdown of PKC-θ attenuated diet-induced obesity and improved insulin signaling. These results suggest that many of the deleterious effects of high-fat diets, specifically those enriched with palmitic acid, are CNS mediated via PKC-θ activation, resulting in reduced insulin activity.

Normally your bodies cells are told to stop demanding food by a couple of hormones, leptin and insulin. This study suggests that certain saturated fats, particularly palmitic acid tell your brain to send signals to your bodies cells instructing them to ignore leptin and insulin.  And therefore, you can be “objectively” full, but not feel like you are.  So, you keep eating.

Clearly, if you want to lose weight, this is bad news.  Keep your saturated fats down, and stick to unsaturated fats if you can like fish oils and olive oil.

But, if you are trying to gain size, this is GREAT.  More ice cream, fried chicken, bacon, and even more ice cream!

(The image above is from SushiGallery.net.  Very cool.)

References

Benoit, Stephen C, Christopher J Kemp, Carol F Elias, William Abplanalp, James P Herman, Stephanie Migrenne, Anne-Laure Lefevre, et al. 2009. Palmitic acid mediates hypothalamic insulin resistance by altering PKC-theta subcellular localization in rodents. The Journal of Clinical Investigation 119, no. 9 (September): 2577-2589. doi:10.1172/JCI36714.

John Hawks reviews an article by Roni Caryn Rabin on the connection with glucose metabolism and age related cognitive decline.

The original authors made clear that we remember:

Previous observational studies have shown that physical activity reduces the risk of cognitive decline, and studies have also found that diabetes increases the risk of dementia. Earlier studies had also found a link between Type 2 diabetes and dysfunction in the dentate gyrus.

But John Hawks worries:

Here the causality is not necessarily clear. Maybe people who have healthy metabolic profiles are more likely to be active and less likely to exhibit cognitive declines. In that scenario, you wouldn’t necessarily benefit from changing your activity pattern.

I disagree with him here.  In our society people do not (generally) exercise because they find it fun, or because it’s something they are naturally good at.  People exercise because they believe the have to.  There is a strong cultural pressure that leads people to feel like they should work out regardless of how natural it feels.

Nearly all of my clients come to me wanting to change how they look.  They know they need help from me, a trainer, precisely because they don’t find exercise natural.

Because of this, I think that the causal link is more robust.  Most exercising Americans are far from athletes with great natural metabolic profiles.  But, exercising does improve their metabolic profiles, and can bring them up to the level of those lucky few (very few) who have it naturally without working out.

Research at the Seoul National University has suggested that the inorganic phosphates in a whole host of processed foods can increase the growth of lung cancer tumors.

According to Dr. Myung-Haing Cho, D.V.M., Ph.D who (along with his colleagues) conducted the research:

“Lung cancer is a disease of uncontrolled cell proliferation in lung tissue, and disruption of signaling pathways in those tissues can confer a normal cell with malignant properties,” Dr. Cho explained. “Deregulation of only a small set of pathways can confer a normal cell with malignant properties, and these pathways are regulated in response to nutrient availability and, consequently, cell proliferation and growth.

“Phosphate is an essential nutrient to living organisms, and can activate some signals,” he added. “This study demonstrates that high intake of inorganic phosphates may strongly stimulate lung cancer development by altering those (signaling) pathways.”

(cross-posted @ Good Tithings)

Dr. Lam has a post on the link between sugar and all the ills of humanity. While I’m certainly for a low sugar diet (and the proscriptions in the post are largely fine), he brings up some points that are patently false (and therefor irk me something fierce).

In particular, he quotes (favorably) Robert Crayhon, the dude who created the “Paleo Diet”, in his distinction between what Crayhon calls paleocarbs and neocarbs (no, neocarbs are not a description of Karl Rove and his cronies):

Paleocarbs are carbohydrates that have existed since the beginning of time. They include fruits, seeds, and vegetables that primarily grow above the ground. Generally speaking, these are “good” carbohydrates as they provide the body with needed antioxidants, fiber, nutrients, and calories in a slow-release fashion.

Neocarbs are carbohydrates introduced within the last 10,000 years when modern agriculture first started. These include grains, legumes and flour products. Some neocarbs like legumes are grown above the ground and are nutritious. Others are grown under the ground. These include potato, yam and carrots, which are high in sugar and therefore not optimum for heath.

Ridiculous! “… have existed since the beginning of time.” No they didn’t! The most paleo of carbs are BY FAR simple sugars. Glucose, a very simple sugar. The earliest life forms (that had any sort of complexity) on earth were most certainly bacteria, and they use simple sugars all the time for cellular respiration as well as other processes.

True ‘neocarbs’ are anything at all having to do with plants, like cellulose. These wonderful complex carbohydrates that we are all so fond of eating for our health (a good thing) didn’t pop onto the scene for quite some time. And the newest of them all are fruits and vegetables! They are, in fact, a ridiculously recent invention.

Fruits and veggies come from flowering plants. Up until the Cretaceous period, there were no such thing as flowering plants. That means that early herbivore dinosaurs (like the Brontosaurus) didn’t eat fruit, they probably ate pine needles and other hard to digest foods (partially explaining the VERY large gut needed to ferment, digest, the food). That’s fiber, baby!

Fruits and vegetables actually constitute a relatively simple sugar in comparison.

The next complaint is about the idea that his neocarbs are all recent inventions. Many of them are new varieties, but we have to be careful. Wheat existed previously in the wild. We didn’t engineer it in the lab. We just selected for the right versions for long enough that the domesticated variety is now far easier for us to harvest and process.

Simple sugars are not good for you (except during a workout). But the reason is NOT because they are “newer” inventions in the history of life. Simple sugars are the ‘oldest’ of all sugars (still misleading). That isn’t the point. The point is that your body doesn’t do well when inundated with that much sugar.

We humans are a new ‘invention’, and as such we require a NEW kind of diet. Leave the sugar to paleo-creatures like bacteria and yeast.

That’s the (joke) premise of an article in the WSJ.

These days he stays away from junk food and instead snacks on MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and drinks Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, a healthy organic brew. (Sen. McCain is said to have a weakness for Butterfinger candy bars, jelly beans, and coffee and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts.)

Inflate your chest with Met-Rx.