Book Review: The 17-Day Diet

The 17 Day Diet, one of the latest best selling diet books is new wrapping paper on an old package—high-protein/low-carb diets.

Author Dr. Mike Moreno claims that “you’re not apt to plateau” on his plan because of his “carefully designed balance of food and exercise [that] adjust your body metabolically so that you burn fat, day in and day out.” Moreno says that, “by changing calorie counts with each 17-day cycle you prevent your body from adapting,” and he calls this notion “body confusion.”

When looking at fad diets you’ll find that they all consist of two key components:

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Weight Loss Plateaus: How to reignite your weight loss

A common development after a few weeks of losing weight is that your weight loss stalls, or stops. The scale isn’t budging. This situation—a weight loss plateau—has all kinds of mythology attributed to it.

When you start a diet, you reduce your intake of calories and a big part of that reduction is from carbohydrates. The reduction in carbohydrates leads to the depletion of glycogen (how your body stores sugar) from both your muscles and liver. Each gram of stored glycogen normally holds 3- to 4-grams of water with it.

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Set Point Theory: a few more thoughts

As I talked about in my last post, the set-point, starvation-response, and metabolic-adaptation theories have kept changing over the years as their advocates attempt to maintain a viable theory. The Truth? Are there physiological changes associated with energy restriction? Yes. Do they prevent weight loss, or maintenance of weight loss? No.

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Information you can trust? Or, your daily dose of misinformation?

You probably already know that you can't trust what you read about weight loss, or dieting, and that has never been more true than it is today with the internet where anybody can write anything (and they do, every day)!

Combating the misinformation in this area could be a fulltime job! Here are two examples from this morning:

Misleading Article #1 - The best fat-burning breakfasts

This article misleads in two ways:

a. Does "eating breakfast really crank up your metabolism?" Any time you eat, the process of digesting what you ate, creates what is called the "thermic effect of food." The thermic effect of food amounts to an average of 10% of ingested calories on a balanced diet, or about 13% of ingested calories on a high-protein diet. There is however, no increase in your underlying metabolic rate, as the "eat breakfast and boost your metabolism" notion promotes. Eating breakfast has long been associated with lower BMIs (body mass index, a weight to height measure) however, researchers suspect that that's because people who eat breakfast have a generally more healthy lifestyle than non breakfast eaters. For instance, "night eaters" tend to eat one (huge) meal a day, and they don't eat breakfast.

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What do You Really Know About Your Metabolism?

You may not be aware that the resting metabolic rate (RMR) associated with a given body weight can vary ±20%. Like many things in nature metabolic rates fall into a "normal" bell curve. The middle of the bell curve is the "expected" or average metabolic rate.

Another way of saying this is that 80% of you have a metabolic rate that is ±10% of the middle of the bell curve (for your gender, height, weight, and age).

Where you fall on the curve is based (mainly) on the genetic "hand" you were dealt.

The chart here shows an example for a 150-lb. 32-year-old female, using the World Health Organization's formula for metabolic rate

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