The fitness fact thread
I amass knowledge about fitness because it's important to me, so I thought I would make a thread with some quick facts that could be useful to people.
1. The concept of "starvation mode" is a myth. I recently learned this. It has grown to be accepted as gospel, when in reality it's little more than a bad interpretation of even worse studies conducted in the 60s and 70s. In other words, no matter what your calorie intake is, the body will continue to burn at a constant rate until you have nothing left to burn. You must literally be wasting away to enter starvation mode.
2. The maximum amount of calories you can safely burn per day (through cutting calories and/or adding cardio) is equal to the number of pounds in fat you're carrying * 32. In other words, no matter how much cardio or calorie cutting you want to do, you have to eat enough food to make sure that you don't exceed your limit; your body will start burning muscle mass if you do.
3. One day of hitting the gym hard with a typical 3 or 4-day gym routine, like bench/squat/deadlift + 4-5 other exercises, only burns around 100 calories per session.
4. Soda is not a diuretic. Caffeine has mild diuretic properties, but pop is something like 90% water, which dramatically outweighs the effects of caffeine.
5. Restricting carbohydrates has been all the rage over the last 20 years, but it's somewhat pointless. The vast majority of the population won't need any more restriction than what's inherent to a reduced-calorie diet composed of 40% protein.
1. The concept of "starvation mode" is a myth. I recently learned this. It has grown to be accepted as gospel, when in reality it's little more than a bad interpretation of even worse studies conducted in the 60s and 70s. In other words, no matter what your calorie intake is, the body will continue to burn at a constant rate until you have nothing left to burn. You must literally be wasting away to enter starvation mode.
2. The maximum amount of calories you can safely burn per day (through cutting calories and/or adding cardio) is equal to the number of pounds in fat you're carrying * 32. In other words, no matter how much cardio or calorie cutting you want to do, you have to eat enough food to make sure that you don't exceed your limit; your body will start burning muscle mass if you do.
3. One day of hitting the gym hard with a typical 3 or 4-day gym routine, like bench/squat/deadlift + 4-5 other exercises, only burns around 100 calories per session.
4. Soda is not a diuretic. Caffeine has mild diuretic properties, but pop is something like 90% water, which dramatically outweighs the effects of caffeine.
5. Restricting carbohydrates has been all the rage over the last 20 years, but it's somewhat pointless. The vast majority of the population won't need any more restriction than what's inherent to a reduced-calorie diet composed of 40% protein.
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The body fat does the work.
For example, I have 22 pounds of body fat. That's 704 calories I can safely cut from my diet each day without compromising my muscle mass. Assuming for a moment that I burn 2100 calories per day WITHOUT EXERCISE OF ANY KIND, that means I should go down to 1400 calories on days that I don't do cardio. That's a 700 calorie deficit.
What happens if I add 360 calories of cardio, though? I can't eat 1400 calories any more, because 1400 - 360 from cardio is well below my safety threshold. The answer is to eat a number of calories equal to what I burned so my deficit remains the same.
So, if I eat 1400 on non-cardio days, and about 1800 on cardio days, that's 700 per day every day of the week, or 1.4 pounds.
But somebody with 50 pounds of fat could lose up to 1600 per day! WOW! That means not only can they eat ~1500 per day just like me, but their body can support a lot more cardio before they have to adjust their diet to stay within their threshold. It could be 700 calories from food restriction, and another 900 calories on the bike or treadmill. Holy piss, that's 3-4 pounds a week with no troubles.
John
Um, one more question I might have to clarify: Doesn't the human body NEED some fat to have calories potential and insulation to stay warm without stressing the heart more to do so in cooler climates or seasons?
John.
Like many common fitness myths, the "omg don't eat carbs" thing is due largely to a misinterpretation or exaggeration of the truth.
In reality, if you put yourself down to the 1500 daily calories that's really required to lose weight, and shave off 40% of that for protein, you're really only left with around 120g of carbs per day. That's low enough to get the job done for the vast, vast majority of people.
Something else I just learned- that whole, you have to eat breakfast thing? Total myth. Your body does not need to have its metabolism jump started in the morning. You can skip breakfast and it won't do a thing, besides maybe make you grumpy.
From Reddit:
Starvation mode is a myth. It was popularized due to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in which subjects were given 50% of their daily calorie intake for months. The result? Well, they lost weight until they had almost no weight left to lose and their bodies simply could not get the calories ANYWHERE. Concisely put: starvation mode happens when you are, quite literally, wasting away. Not when you have a simple caloric deficit. Your body will make up for it with fat stores. That's what they're for.
Have you found any PubMed articles that address these points? These articles would have gone through a peer review process, and are more reliable than fitness magazines (or wikipedia.)
//EDIT: Also this.
1) Most people aren't as good at calorie restriction as they think they are. They under-estimate what they're eating over drastically over-estimate the baseline they should be coming from. Even I fell prey to the latter for years.
2) Extreme calorie restriction (that is, exceeding fat pounds * 33) could have an effect on your muscle mass. This would cause weight loss, but little change in body fat percentage.
3) The speed of your metabolism is greatly influenced by what, how much, and how often you eat. I imagine there's some sort of break point where the metabolism you "lost" by eating less food less often is overpowered by the body's natural metabolism.
Where does this formula come from?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15615615
1. How does caffeine (coffee, energy drinks, caffeine pills) affect your metabolism and physical performance. I've noticed that when I drink one or two cups of coffee an hour or two before a jog I generally feel better / perfom better. Is this fact or am I just imagining things?
2. Nicotine. I do use snus, and the Norwegian board of sports or whatever I could translate it to are thinking about banning it from professional sports because of its "performance enhancing" effect. Do you know anything about this?
3. I've heard people say that eating right after a workout is beneficial to restitution. However, I rarely feel like putting anything in my mouth after working out, and I have trouble swallowing food. How much trith is there to this theory?
Thank you.
2. I don't know anything about tobacco products, aside from the fact that they're pretty much all terrible for you.
3. It's good metabolic sense to eat some good carbs and lean protein right after a workout. The theory goes that having this food in your body will divert your metabolism to the food and fat stores, rather than its tendency to go after muscle when you've depleted bodily sugar from cardio.
Probably because nicotine triggers the release of adrenaline/noradrenaline into the bloodstream.
Elevates heart rate, increases blood glucose/fatty acids and blood flow gets shunted away from nonessential organs to skeletal muscle.