Tag: Weight loss

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Weight Loss is Not the Same as Fat Loss

 

The real problem with losing weight in general, is that the focus is on totally the wrong thing. You don’t actually want to lose weight, what you want to lose is fat. When you lose fat the weight takes care of itself. It truly doesn’t matter what you weigh, as long as your mirror reflects back to you a body that pleases you.

When you focus on losing fat rather than weight, the waistline takes care of itself. If you build muscle at the same time, then body-shape moves towards what looks attractive all by itself. Your body knows how to look good. It just can’t manage it when you cover it in fat.

Does that mean throw away the scales?

No, the scales can be a useful tool as long as you remember what they are measuring – total body weight. Pound for pound, muscle takes up one-fifth less space than fat. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it makes a huge difference. Muscle tissue is also smoother and less ‘lumpy’ than fat so replacing fat with muscle gives the body a smoother look.

Businesses like Weight Watchers focus on reducing body weight by doing a weekly weigh-in. The start of a diet often produces a dramatic weight loss in the first week or two – this is hugely encouraging – and the likes of Weight Watchers use this to convince you that what they do works. In fact it is mostly water loss and that happens when you drastically reduce calorie intake, or change the kinds of food you eat. Of course once the water is gone, you suffer dehydration, drink more, and in subsequent weeks struggle to lose weight. But that early success has you hooked on that Weight Loss System and you are subtly encouraged to feel that your failure is actually all down to you – not the flawed Weight Loss System you are using.

Even if you are aware of the body fat problem and use a scale that measures body fat, you are likely to be misled. These scales work by measuring the electrical resistance of your body and using that information to carry out a body fat percentage calculation. The trouble is that electrical resistance is affected by the amount of water in your body and so as you lose a lot of water at the beginning of a diet you can be fooled into thinking that you have lost body fat.

We tend to believe numbers and electronic gizmos without question – especially when we have spent a lot of money on a hi-tec body fat measuring scale like the Tanita BC-587 that costs around £300. The truth is that these devices are wildly inaccurate and not worth spending your money on.

A much cheaper option to gauge body fat is the mirror you probably already have in your bedroom.

 

Normal body fat percentages for women

Body Builder 8-9%

Female Athlete 18-20%

Normal 25% – 30%

Obese 30%+


Normal body fat percentages for men

Body Builder 3-4%

Male Athlete 10%

Normal 18% – 25%

Obese 25%+

 

How you look is a pretty good guide and once you are over the 30% it’s going to be hard, but worthwhile, work to get that number down.

Still it’s nice to have some numbers and to keep a record so that when you feel the urge to eat there is something to look at to keep you motivated.

One the cheapest solutions for measuring body fat is a set of body fat callipers like the Accu Measure which is only around a fiver (plus postage). With these you grab a lump of skin around your hips and use this simple piece of equipment to measure the thickness of the skin fold. This then allows you to calculate your body fat percentage. Or if that is too complicated just use it to keep track of the skin thickness measurement and watch it shrink as you lose fat.

Measuring skin fat, and focusing on building muscle, as you lose weight guarantees that the weight lost is fat and not muscle. So you get a much greater reward for your efforts at changing your eating habits.

And if you want an easy way to change those eating habits for good then check out my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever which sets out 10 easy steps to set you on the right track to permanent weight loss without any food restrictions. If you are curious about how you can eat what you want and still lose weight then check it out.

For an in-depth look at this subject:

http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2012/07/02/body-fat-percentage/

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weight control

Fat Acceptance is the New Weight Loss

It seems that there is a new Buzz Phrase in the weight loss world – Fat Acceptance. It’s going to catch on. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be huge because it makes it sound like being fat is ok, and if you are overweight that’s exactly what you need to hear.

There is only one problem with it – it isn’t new. I’ve been teaching this to my clients for 15 years. I just never gave it a fancy title.

“Fat acceptance is the idea that an overweight individual has every right to be happy and content with respect to their sense of self as well as their own body.” Caroline J. Cederquist MD.

What I have always taught is that you cannot lose weight while you hate your body the way it is now. Of course this is difficult for my clients because most of them end up in my consulting room because they hate the way they look and have battled their fat for years – all to no avail.

I explain to them that the very first thing you need to do is to be ok with your body just the way it is. It’s all you – even the fat cells contain your DNA. The fat on your body is not your enemy. Do not fight it. Instead, be appreciative of who you are and the journey you have made to arrive here.

Of course the overweight body does not meet society’s expectations of attractiveness and so the problem faced by my clients is how to accept and appreciate that which they themselves find unattractive. This is no easy task when every time you turn on a TV; open a magazine; or even take a walk through town; you are bombarded with images of what society currently considers attractive/beautiful. What else can you do except compare yourself and find yourself woefully inadequate?

Well you could look on facebook at all the photo albums of your friends. There you will find real people – the kind that the world is actually full of. This will give you a reality check. Tv, magazines, and posters create an illusion of some mythical world filled with physically attractive people. It isn’t the real world so you can safely ignore it. If you really must compare yourself with other people then compare yourself with the people you see in the supermarket, or on the street, or in the doctor’s waiting room. Notice that there are people who are more overweight than you are and there are people who are slimmer than you are.

Once you arrive at the realisation that there is nothing special about your excess weight, you can move to a state of okayness about it. From there you move to acceptance. Acceptance isn’t saying to yourself this is fine let’s just carry on overeating and die from some horrible weight-induced disease. Acceptance is recognising that you are the way you are right now and right now that’s just how it is, and right now that isn’t going to change, so right now there is absolutely no point in beating yourself up over it. You think the beating up is what motivates you to change. It isn’t. It motivates you to think about change and start that battle with your body where you seek rapid weight loss and all the pain, cravings and denial that requires.

What you resist persists.

Acceptance allows you to acknowledge what is and then make plans for a different future.

Do you not treat someone you love in a very different manner from someone you hate?

Would you force feed someone you love so they slowly became a bloated, overweight, unhealthy human being who had little pleasure in life simply because moving around was so difficult?

Acceptance is like love. It wants what is best, but doesn’t berate what is. Love guides gently, carefully, supportingly towards the goal. Love commiserates with failures, but encourages you to keep going. Love is always there and will ensure success – no matter how long it takes. Love never, ever, ever, gives up on you.

So accept you the way you are right now. Learn to love your body – it is after all your home for life.

 

 

If you are curious about an easy way to lose weight through acceptance then check out my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caroline-j-cederquist-md/positive-body-image_b_4766811.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living

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Happiness health self-help weight control

Biggest Loser Wins, Or Do They Really Lose After All

Biggest Loser, is a TV show where you need to be obese to get on the show. The winner is the person who loses the biggest percentage of weight relative to their initial weight. The premise behind the show is that you will be entertained by watching people who are seriously overweight struggling with their emotions, serious food rationing, and an exercise regime that belongs in a barracks.

The latest US series winner, Rachel Frederickson, lost 155lbs, around 60% of her starting body weight. The last 45lbs disappeared in just 2 months. That’s around 5lbs a week.

Interestingly she says that her weight gain was the result of a relationship break up.

The big question is did she lose too much too fast?

I’m also curious about whether or not it will stay off.

You see the prize for this feat of body sculpting is $250,000. Money is a powerful motivator. One quarter of a million dollars is a lot of money, clearly Rachel was more motivated than the other contestants.

I wonder, now that the money is in the bank, whether she has the will to maintain her current pattern of eating and exercise. I suspect that, if she plays her cards right, she can monetise her momentary celebrity and prolong her moment in the sun. There is a rich world out there for celebrity exercise videos, telling her story, endless chat shows while the star still shines, and so on.

My issue is not with Rachel, she worked very hard and received a well-deserved reward. My issue lies with the encouraging and lauding of rapid weight loss. Rapid weight loss is bad for your health. Rachel’s BMI is now significantly below normal – in other words she is under-weight. Still, that’s just Hollywood isn’t it? Every female working in CelebrityLand pretty much has to be underweight. Normal body weight just looks, well, fat compared to the majority of female celebrities.  It seems to be a lifestyle choice. Still the financial rewards provide the motivation to maintain the situation.

But take away the money and what is left to drive the starving yourself every single day for the rest of your life?

My work with weight loss focuses on easy and sustainable lifestyle changes; changes that are small shifts in eating behaviour over a long period of time. This works. Weight is lost gently. There is no fight with food. There is no battle with denial. Eat what you like; just eat what you need and no more. It works. There is no gruelling regime to follow. Of course my recommended rate of 2lbs a week is far too slow for most people, despite the fact that those 2lbs stay off for ever rather than creep back on, and Rachel would not look much different now if she followed my weight loss plan. She would also be considerably poorer.

However, because the change is assimilated slowly it is effortless to maintain. It is based around changing attitudes to food. There is no reason to treat your body as an enemy that must be brutally punished for having the audacity to look fat and unattractive.

Good luck to you Rachel, I sincerely hope it all works out for you.

 

…and if you want to know about a gentler, permanent way to reduce your weight then check out my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

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health weight control

That Cream Cake Might Kill You After All

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with smokers and helping them to break their habit. You might expect that fear of lung cancer is what drives smokers to seek help to quit, but that isn’t always the case. In fact concerns about ill-health only drive smokers who are already experiencing health problems to quit. The majority don’t like the anti-social aspects of being a smoker or the smells.

Part of the problem is that people only seek to take action to maintain good health when their health is already beginning to fail. While individuals have no adverse symptoms there is nothing to drive the motivation for change. This is why the graphic anti-smoking advertising campaigns have little effect on smoking numbers.

Because of this belief in immortality and permanent good health, individuals tend to continue to do what they do. So if you live a healthy lifestyle with lots of nourishing food and exercise then you will continue. But if you live an unhealthy lifestyle with an unhealthy diet then you will also continue. The reason for this is that although, when we worry, we worry about the past and the future. When we eat or exercise we do it now. So unless you have developed the habit of exercise in the same way that smokers develop the habit of smoking, you will choose to eat rather than to walk, run, jog, or cycle.

That is why change is so difficult for most of us. We did what we did yesterday and nothing bad happened so we can probably do it again today and nothing bad will happen – and that’s good – right?

When the bad is small, we do not notice it. But when the small bad happens every day, then one morning we wake up and we’ve got a big bad that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.

I was reading today about how obesity is now being linked to several cancers:

Breast – 33,000 cases a year caused by obesity.

Endometrial – 13,900 cases.

Kidney – 13,900.

Colorectal – 13,200.

Pancreas – 11,900

Oesophagus – 5,800.

Gallbladder – 2,000.

These are US figures for incidence of cancers directly related to obesity.

With breast cancer the problem is increased oestrogen in the bloodstream after the menopause. The oestrogen levels are directly linked to excess fat. The slimmer you are the less oestrogen you produce and the less likely you are to have to suffer the radical treatment offered for breast cancer.

“To lower your risk for cancer: Lose weight, increase physical activity and eat healthier”, says Anne McTiernan, director of the Prevention Center at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The trouble is we worry about things that we think are definitely going to happen, like an interview next week, or a dental appointment next month; and we worry about things that we convince ourselves will happen, even though they don’t – like the plane crashing, or that person we like rejecting us. What we don’t worry about are the things our body might experience until it is.

The problem is motivation. We do anything – even eating less and exercising more – if we are sufficiently motivated. But when we are physically comfortable in our armchair watching mind-numbing dross on TV and enjoying our snacks the world seems a cosy place where nothing bad will happen if we stay just where we are. It’s not true, but we believe the illusion we have created and continue to do nothing to love and cherish our bodies by moving them and using them and caring about what we put inside them.

It’s up to you.

 

If you want some help check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/04/weight-loss-breast-cancer/5201621/

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2009-11-05-obesity_N.htm

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health weight control

Weight Loss Isn’t Just About The Calories

The trouble with science is that it has no soul.

It says if you do this and this and this, then that will always happen.

That’s what happens when science gets involved with weight loss – it says if you eat this many calories and burn this many calories then what’s left turns into this much fat.

I’m not suggesting that this isn’t true, but it isn’t as true as it seems because what you burn isn’t just about physical activity. A supremely fit athlete burns many more calories just sitting watching TV than someone who is overweight and covered in flabby muscles and fat.

It does seem a little unfair though, doesn’t it? Imagine two people sitting on the couch next to each other watching TV. One is covered in muscle, the other is covered in fat. The muscley one is getting thinner just sitting there, while the fat one is getting fatter just sitting there.

Why is this?

Muscle tissues needs energy just to live and breathe. Muscle burns calories just by existing. Fat just sits there. Of course in order to maintain that muscle, physical exercise needs to take place. The more exercise you engage in, the more muscle you build, the higher your metabolic rate, and the more calories you burn.

Of course science likes to deal with numbers, and you want to know how many calories going to the kitchen for a snack is going to burn.

1lb of fat converts to 3500 Calories (that’s big C Kilocalories for the scientists). This is great news because all you have to do in order to lose 1lb a week consistently is burn 500Cals a day more than you eat.

So how easily can you do that?

Moderate walking (3mph) burns about 250 Calories an hour; birdwatching 140; dusting 180; golf 350;  Cycling (easy, less than 10mph) 300; yoga 300; gentle skipping with rope 600; cross country walking 470; swimming breaststroke 800; weight lifting/body building 470; and housework 250.

You don’t need to join a gym to burn calories. You just need to move. But you need to move daily and consistently and for at least an hour. Remember, that Mars bar is going to take two hours walking to pretend it never happened.

But that’s just the sums that scientists like to do. You see when you do that hour of yoga, hour of housework, or hour of walking every day, you build muscle tissue. When you build muscle tissue your metabolic rate goes up and your resting heart rate lowers. So over time, you burn more calories during the day and so your weight loss increases rather than drops – for the same effort. You also get fitter, your body shape moves in the direction that you desire, and your endorphin levels increase. This means you feel happier, more alive, and more interested in enjoying life rather than spending it watching mind numbingly boring TV shows. When your body feels fit and well, you are quite naturally and effortlessly attracted to healthier foods, and the fats and sugars that used to fill your plate gradually drift away. No resistance, no battle, no struggle, just a gentle natural movement towards foods that you enjoy.

It isn’t just about Calories. It’s about you feeling good. You achieve that by making a conscious choice now to move a little more today than you did yesterday and to make that same choice tomorrow, and the next day, and…

 

 

If you’d like to find out more then check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

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health self-help weight control

Weight Loss Is Not About Fighting Hunger

 

Feeling hungry isn’t really the issue with weight loss. By that I mean that people who are overweight eat regardless of whether or not they are hungry. Sometimes the problem is simply that they are so out of touch with the sensations their body produces that they just respond to external stimuli as the trigger for eating. But most of the time it’s about the tricks other people play with our minds.

It’s really difficult to watch an evening of tv with all of those food & snack adverts and not, at some point, decide you need something to eat. This is the subtle hypnosis of tv. It puts ideas in your mind purely because of the associations it creates. When was the last time you saw any food advert with fat people in it? When was the last time you saw any food advert with unattractive people in it? When was the last time you saw a food advert with miserable people in it? Unless, that is, they were miserable because they were not getting the food that was being advertised.

I especially remember a series of food adverts that M&S ran. It stuck in my mind because of two things – the stunning quality of the photography, and Dervla Kirwan’s sexy, seductive voiceover. No people appeared in these ads just the food. But there was a hidden promise if you buy this stuff.

It doesn’t mean that you are weak-willed if you are influenced by this stuff. It’s designed to do that. It’s designed by experts to make you want to eat, and to become familiar with the brand so that you automatically pick it up on your next trip to the supermarket. That way, when you next see the advert there will be some of that in the cupboard. The subliminal message is that you too will have the lifestyle and body shape of the people who eat this stuff on tv.  

What you actually get is fatter.

Feeling negative emotion is another eat trigger. Anything from boredom to despair can trigger a trip to the kitchen for something to eat. It passes the time, it reminds you of getting treats as a child and knowing you were loved. Watching an evening of tv is quite likely to fill you with negative emotion even if you didn’t have any to start off with. That’s why the food manufacturers’ advertising is so effective. The soaps are dreary, the news is never good, and reality tv is nothing like reality. It is hardly surprising that we seek a distraction and food is the easiest and quickest solution.

It would be great if it actually worked though. If food truly made us feel better then we’d all be happy fatties and the world would be a better place. But we’re still miserable fatties the next evening and the next and the next and we never stop to question whether or not the feel bad-eat, or feel bored-eat strategy changes anything except our weight.

If you want to change this then next time you realise you are heading to the kitchen in a commercial break go to the staircase instead and walk up and down ten times, then return to watch tv.

Don’t forget to check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

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Fun Gadgets To Help You Lose Weight

You look at yourself in the mirror one morning and don’t like what you see.  You constantly need new clothes because the old ones are so tight they show all of your bulges. Members of the opposite sex no longer seem to notice you. And the bathroom scales obviously need replacing because you could not possibly be that heavy.

Whatever the trigger is, something causes you to see the truth.

You have let yourself go. You need to do something about it. But you have been here before. You know that diets don’t seem to keep the weight off. Not only that but diets are hard work and mean months and months of struggle.

There really is only one problem to solve and that is maintaining motivation over the long haul. Slow weight loss is the only way to make it permanent, but what you really need is a coach – someone to look over your shoulder and keep on with the encouragement even when those pounds do not seem to be shifting. But a coach is going to be expensive, so how else can you get that encouragement?

Well, it seems that there are a lot of websites out there that help you keep track of your weight loss and fitness goals. They make it so much easier for you to keep track of progress and maintain your determination to not only reach your realistic target weight, but also to maintain it.

MyFitnessPal is a handy free service that helps you keep track of goals. If you like to count calories it has a database full of foods and a calculator that will give you a pretty good idea of how many calories you are eating. If you tell it how much exercise you do it calculates how many calories you are using and lets you know how much you need to eat to lose weight at a healthy rate. It also has an app that shares your details with your smartphone/tablet so you can keep on track.

Talking of apps there’s a great bathroom scale available now, the Withings WiFi Body Scale. It keeps track of weight, body fat, and BMI and talks to either your web browser or an app on your smartphone/tablet.

Add to that a heart rate monitor so that you get the maximum calorie burn when you exercise and you have given yourself a well-deserved gift that will help to motivate and encourage you long-term.

If you add to that mix a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily you will have the perfect weight loss kit. My book, by the way, has loads of useful hints and tips on how to lose weight without suffering as well as a 10-step guide to successful, lasting, weight loss.

Successful weight loss is all about motivating yourself to keep going until you reach your target. So surround yourself with whatever tools, or equipment,  that you need in order to be successful. Take advantage of everything that you need to support yourself. No one else will do it for you and you do not need any one else’s permission to look after yourself the best way you know how.

Remember, it is how far you have come, not how far you travelled yesterday, that matters.

Michael

The links above are for European readers. If you live in the US please use these:

Withings Body Fat Scale

Heart rate monitor

How to Lose Weight Easily

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As Long As You Do It Regularly – You Can Eat As Much Fat As You Want

At least that’s a rough translation of the research by Dr Hadas Sherman et al at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although the research has only been done using mice as subjects, if it translates to human behaviour, then this is really good news for people who want to lose weight.

The numbers of overweight and obese individuals have only reached epidemic proportions in the last few decades. So this research correlates nicely with a major change in eating patterns that has taken place in that time – snacking.

In my childhood, food was eaten at mealtimes and there were three of those a day, plus a snack for supper at nine every evening. Every day food was eaten around the same time. I was never hungry, and I ate a full meal at lunchtime as well as in the evening. I grew up slim, fit and healthy.

Nowadays people seem to graze, rather like cattle, eating constantly. They eat walking down the street, they eat in coffee bars, and they eat in pubs. They eat in the cinema even though the bucket of popcorn is ten times the volume of their stomach and they had an evening meal a couple of hours earlier. They eat at their desk, and they fill their supermarket trolley with crisps, biscuits, snacks, and chocolate bars so they can continue to graze all evening in front of the tv. But, and this seems to be the problem, there is no regularity to any of this. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners are missed, or eaten early or late, to fit around other activities.  Snacks are used to bridge the space between these irregular meals.

Now, it seems that regularity is one of the ways that the body’s intelligence knows that the food supply is plentiful. When food arrives in the stomach at the same time each day, the body adjusts metabolism accordingly. If it had a voice it would say something like – “ I know that food always turns up at the same times each day, therefore, I know food is plentiful, therefore, I don’t need to store any fat for emergencies. Even if an occasional meal is missed, as long as the next one is on time I know there is no problem.” Food is converted to energy for immediate use or eliminated.

The Hebrew University research found that mice who ate a high-fat diet consisting of regular meals weighed less after 18 weeks than mice who consumed either a high fat diet with irregular feeding, or a low fat diet with irregular feeding. Unfortunately, all the mice, even the ones on a low-fat regular diet ended up heavier than they were. But the interesting thing here is that every single mouse consumed exactly the same number of calories each day.

So, as I suggested some time ago in my article Calories are not Created Equal your weight isn’t just about the Calories that you consume. It seems that you can offset some of the damage by eating meals regularly and cutting out on the snacking. So become a champion for the family mealtime sitting around a table with the tv off, at the same time each evening. Eat breakfast and lunch at the same time each day and forget about all the rest – regardless of what everyone around you is doing.

This, according to the researchers, is going to reset your metabolic clock to a much healthier state. Knowing what times each day you are going to eat and not eating at any other time will leave you fully satisfied – once you develop the new habit – you will almost certainly start to lose weight and the really good news is that you still get to eat whatever you want.

If you would like some more hints and tips on How to Lose Weight Easily get hold of a copy of my book of the same title. It’s available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback at an almost giveaway price.

Michael

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Coffee Bean That Melts Fat?

That was the subject line of an email in my Inbox this morning. I almost deleted it straight away because it was SPAM from some company I’d never asked to send me stuff, but I thought no, let’s have a look. So I opened it up and was greeted by a scantily clad, skinny lady – rather like the one on the cover of my book How to Lose Weight Easily – and emblazoned across her very attractive bosom in giant writing were the words.

Weight Loss Experts
CAN’T BELIEVE THIS

I couldn’t believe it.

They were absolutely right.

I am a weight loss expert and I can’t believe it.

Having come this far, I thought I’d better check this out, after all it might make for something interesting to write about today. My intention being to quickly discover that it was a load of rubbish and then tell you why and what was wrong with the research.

You might think it’s quite easy to track down a piece of research these days with the internet being what it is. But, truth be told, Google is a bit rubbish when you want to find out specific and accurate information. What tends to happen is that you trawl through twenty, thirty, forty promising looking sites only to find out that they are all rehashing the same information which originated in the same press release. Occasionally there is a snippet of fresh information that leads, like a trail of breadcrumbs either to the goal, or to a giving up on the search.

It really is important to locate the original research paper because, quite often, distortions creep into the reporting of what the results mean. Especially when the reporting is done by a company whose product sales are going to benefit.

For instance one site reported

“16 overweight young adults”

Another…

“The 16 people were obese or overweight and between the age of 22 and 26.”

The study actually used 16 people between the ages of 22 and 46.

The key author of the study is cited as Dr Joe A Vinson, a chemist at the University of Scranton, PA, but the study was conducted in Bangalore, India. Dr Vinson’s research was funded by Applied Food Sciences. Applied Food Sciences are the company that supplied the Green Coffee Bean Extract (GCA – Green Coffee Antioxidant) that the research was testing!!!!

Looking at Dr Vinson’s list of publications on the University website it seems he is a leading light in researching natural products that produce health benefits. But I am nevertheless suspicious when the guy who is paying the bills is also the guy whose products you are testing to see if they do what they say.

Back to the research: 16 people is such a small sample that no statistically significant conclusions can be drawn – which makes me wonder why bother. That said, the results are certainly interesting. The study ran for 22 weeks. Participants had a period with a low dose green coffee extract, a period with a higher dose, and a period with a placebo. There was a two week recovery period between each test. Over that time the subjects showed an average weight loss of 18lbs. 10 subjects had 10% loss of body weight, and 5 of the other 6 lost 5% of their body weight. Average heart rate slowed by 2 beats a minute – this doesn’t sound much but is significant for heart health. There are also indications, but nothing statistically significant, that there might be beneficial effects on blood pressure.

It is important to note here that Green Coffee Extract is low in caffeine. The caffeine comes when the beans are roasted. The extract used is primarily chlorogenic acid which is removed from the green beans, but is destroyed in the roasting process so drinking more coffee isn’t going to do you any good.

You’ll find elsewhere on this site my comments about two drugs, Belviq and Qsymia that the FDA recently approved for use with weight loss – both of which look like they could have very serious long-term side effects. A 22 week trial isn’t going to identify long-term side effects, but no short-term side effects were reported in this coffee bean trial.

It looks to me as though this trial was created specifically to provide scientific evidence and backing to promote the sale of Applied Food Science’s GCA. It is too small to be of any use for anything other than to provide quotable results from a clinical trial in order to convince customers of the product’s efficacy. However, the results are interesting, so I cannot say, as I was hoping to, that this is just more junk. If you are desperate for a solution in a pill – this might help you. If you decide to take it then please let me know how you get on.

Michael

 

If you want to check it out yourself you can find the report here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3267522/?tool=pubmed

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Frying Pans Make Your Children Fat

Well not just frying pans. Any pan with a non-stick coating, according to recent research, has the power to impact the way your child’s body metabolises fat in later life. Now I have to say that the research has not yet established cause and effect beyond any doubt, but there is a significant correlation with the levels of PFCs (polyfluoroalkyl compounds) found in the blood of pregnant women and the weight of their children. PFCs get into pregnant women via non-stick pan coatings.

The study looked at medical information from around 450 women who were pregnant in the early 90’s. What they discovered was that the women with the highest levels of PFC in their blood had babies that, on average, weighed 5 ozs less at birth. However, by the age of 20 months these same babies weighed, on average, 1.3lbs heavier than the children of mothers with the lowest levels of PFC.

This confirms the results of a Danish study revealing that girls exposed to PFCs in the womb were much more likely to be overweight by the time they reached the end of their teens.

PFCs are endemic and most people already have them floating around in their bloodstream, though they are not as prevalent in the environment now as they were 20 years ago when those blood samples were taken.

Still, this research does make you wonder. There is a ‘fat’ epidemic, and while a lot of it is caused by eating much more food than is needed, this epidemic does match the rise in the use of non-stick cookware. I had a quick look around my local hardware store today and although there was an extensive selection of pans there was no shiny metal anywhere. Every single pan had a non-stick coating.

Non-stick pan coatings are a source of PFCs. Now I know from personal experience (largely because I use pans until the handles fall off) that non-stick coatings don’t stay on the pans.  I had a set of pans for around 30 years and they started off non-stick and ended up aluminium. What that means is that some particles of the non-stick coating must come off into the food every time the pan is used. The coating just got thinner and thinner. So I ate it and my family ate it.

Now I know the amounts are miniscule but these chemicals interfere with hormones and hormones operate at microscopic concentrations.

After realising that I’d probably eaten the pan coatings, my next set of pans were plain stainless steel. Interestingly I find that I don’t miss the non-stickness at all and rarely have a problem with sticking food. I remember reading somewhere that non-stick coatings were a by-product of the space programme and probably something we all ended up using because of clever marketing rather than any real need.

Now if it was just pans all it would mean was a little more work with the scourer, but PFCs are used to coat all sorts of things – many of which are food related. Our bodies, nowadays, ingest a huge amount of PFCs from the plastic containers and films that cover food – particularly those designed for microwave heating.

So it might just be time for another revolution – one that means a little more work. Using things like glass or ceramic containers to heat up food, rather than the packaging they come in. I know that’s too much effort, but if you consider the amount of energy you exert into going on diets and trying to lose weight, then using shiny metal pans and dispensing with packaging before microwaving is probably a lot less. Not only that but you get to do without all the guilt and suffering too.

Now if you want to lose a little more weight than non-stick pans will give you, and you’d like to make it really easy and not have to bother with all that dieting stuff,  then get hold of a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

Michael