Weight Loss Fraud: Buyer beware

Most importantly you should know that more and more products are being found to contain illegal and/or unsafe ingredients that are not disclosed on the label.

It's understandable that people continue to hope that a "magic potion" for easy weight loss might come in a bottle. After all, scores of products are on store shelves that are promoted and marketed as just that. Despite all these products, however, there just isn't any magic in a bottle.

The reality is that the manufactures of these products are simply out to make a buck off

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Protein and the Thermic Effect of Food

The Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) is one of the three major components of daily energy expenditure, the other two components being a) Basal Metabolic Rate and b) the energy cost of activity.  

The energy expenditure from TEF is related to the stimulation of obligatory energy-requiring processes associated with eating, digesting, absorbing, and storing food (as well as the facultative energy expenditure associated with hormone secretion, sodium-potassium ATPase pump activity, protein synthesis, and substrate recycling).

The TEF raise in metabolism spikes after meals, and gradually declines over ~10 hours (as determined by the return to Basal Metabolic Rate). The main determinant of TEF is the total energy content of the meal (total calories consumed), followed by the protein fraction of the meal.

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How many more diets...?

I’ve been watching diets come and go—for over thirty years (twenty as a weight management professional). A well marketed diet book can pull down big money for publishers and authors, but do they deliver for the consumers buying them that are looking for answers?

For the most part diet books don’t deliver. The vast majority of diet books waste your time on nonsense that won’t—ever—produce results. Every book has its “magic formula,” usually some special combination of protein, fat and carbohydrates that the author asserts makes calories not count, and of course only the author has the secret to! As I've written about before, that's all nonsense.

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Water, Body Weight, and the Scale...

It's normal to have day-to-day fluctuations in body water content, which actually follow variations in calorie intake (energy) as well as variations in the macronutrient (carbohydrate, protein, fat and alcohol) and sodium content of the diet. Carbohydrate and sodium in particular can both cause rapid changes in extracellular water. Additionally, intracellular water increases or decreases (along with increases or decreases) in glycogen (the storage form of carbohydrate) and protein.

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Intermittent Fasting: No Evidence of Enhanced Weight Loss

I recently wrote about why—theoretically—intermittent fasting (or alternate day fasting) actually has little likelihood of enhancing weight loss, over other forms of calorie restriction. (See: Alternate Day & Intermittent Fasting: Magic for Weight Loss or Just Another Fad?)

Today’s blog assesses the research that has specifically compared any kind of fasting regime (intermittent-calorie-restriction) to the typical dieting approach (constant-calorie-restriction) on weight loss.

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