Speaking of which, the inspiration for this post came from my mother, who I'm staying with for a few weeks here in "Nashvegas." Yesterday she went to have her hair done down at the local beauty joint, and came back excited to tell me what she heard down at the salon.
Seems someone came in after having lost a 100 pounds or so on Medifast.
"Wow! Congratulations you look so great!" Blah, blah, blah.
"Oh little old me? Why thank ya'll. I feel amazing!" (hyperchondria)
You get the picture. Of course, she's there because she is having some serious problems with her hair falling out. This must be a side-effect of healthy weight loss and feeling amazing. And in fact, it is. It's a recognized side effect that Medifast acknowledges. They recommend, to minimize this side effect, to take 1-2 T of canola oil daily. Good to know.
I guess it's just like how one HCG weight loss site describes hair loss while on HCG - "Some may experience hair loss while their thyroid is going through changes and resetting itself."
Oh, "resetting itself." That's what it's called. I see, as in resetting itself closer to the metabolism and 93 degree body temperature of the tree sloth.
So what would you do if you had undergone a medical treatment that made your hair fall out - something that the workers of the salon told my mother "happens to a lot of people that come in here and have lost weight quickly?"
This woman announced that she was going to take her husband and 13-year old daughter to the doctor to get them started on Medifast.
When I rule the world, everything will be wire-tapped. When someone says something like this in public sirens will sound, and Ninjas in Chuck Norris masks will drop from the ceiling and taze people into a mild coma. Offspring will be immediately taken into custody by Child Protective Services's (CPS) special Dieting Parent Unit - DPU (yes, all government branches are to be referred to by their acronym, which will be a law).
At that point they will be shipped to a chain of paradise islands in the Pacific currently inhabited by Lorelei, Gina, Pippa and others but soon-to-be owned by me and purged of all non-believers. There they will be able to eat to appetite of unadulterated, nutritious foods and frolick in the sun in loin cloths with me and the ghost of Bernarr MacFadden who, post-mortem, has invented a device that, when activated, erases all memory of the existence of television, internet, airbrushed models, and commercial flavor enhancers.
And yes, Johnny Lawrence, if he is still alive after his last feast at Waffle House, will train the team of Ninjas in Chuck Norris masks.
Summary: Medically-supervised or not, intentional weight loss via calorie restriction comes with a great penalty to your health and metabolism, leads to weight regain within a year or two, and increases risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and, ironically, obesity. Like author Jon Gabriel describes - "Dieting is like holding a volleyball under wudder (water). You can keep it down for a little while but as soon as you let go it shoots up much higher."
“There is no good evidence that significant long-term weight loss is beneficial to health, and a great deal of evidence that short-term weight loss followed by weight regain (the pattern followed by almost all dieters) is medically harmful. Indeed, frequent dieting is perhaps the single best predictor of future weight gain.”
“…treating cosmetic weight loss as if it were medical and moral issue tends to make people both considerably fatter and a good deal unhappier than they would otherwise be.”
“…there is a great deal of evidence that weight LOSS increases the risk for cardiovascular disease among ‘overweight’ individuals..."
“The case against fat proceeds on the assumption that if a fat person becomes thin, that person will acquire the health characteristics of people who were thin in the first place. It also assumes that there is some reasonably safe and reliable method for producing this result.”
Oh yeah, nothing like some good old fashioned 11Beta Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase. I know it was on everyone's mind lately, so I thought I'd bring it up. Thanks to Shawn Talbott (shown left), author of The Cortisol Connection, as well as Jon Gabriel of the The Gabriel Method for turning me on to this intracellular enzyme that takes inactive corticoids and converts them into cortisol, our buddy and driving force of the creation of the infamous potbelly.
I do think 11Beta HSD is a huge game changer though. Knowing the properties of cortisol, it seems increasingly obvious that it is the primary driver of insulin resistance, leptin resistance, obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and so on. At least in theory it should be, due to its basic properties. But in actuality, most people don't have high cortisol levels. In fact, most people tend to have cortisol levels on the low side due to adrenal fatigue/hypoadrenia which we are bound to discuss in the near future.
But with 11Beta HSD, which is particularly active in liver and adipose tissue, particularly in the abdominal region, you don't have to have high cortisol levels to have high cortisol levels. Does that make sense? Anyway, watch the 2-part video and don't make fun of my hair or how I say "considerable" or I will freakin' cut your face man!
About a month ago we were having a big nerdfest about the role of dopamine in weight set point and what Seth Roberts calls the “Flavor-Calorie Theory” of obesity – or what I have started calling, because my coolness rating is so much higher than Seth’s, PCAT (Pleasure Center Activation Theory). But dopamine is only one of the pleasure neurotransmitters that is involved in the human sensation of pleasure – another is serotonin. And weight is only one thing that is potentially influenced by these reward chemicals.
Here is another connection for you.
Author Jon Gabriel in his book, The Gabriel Method, discusses how pivotal emotions are to weight set point specifically. Negative feelings about your weight or body image are very central to weight problems, and take a small problem and blow it up into a big one in a vicious cycle. Other emotions such as anxiety, guilt, stress, sorrow, worry, and fear may often play a central role as well.
Gabriel loves to reflect upon the work environment that he was in when his weight was the highest – and how he lived in a constant state of unease around his moody and hot-tempered colleague who I envision treating the office copy machine like the character Michael Bolton in the movie Office Space. In videos he laughs at how he (Jon Gabriel) would always be on some kind of diet while weighing in at nearly 400 pounds… one week he’d “be eating the burger without the bun and the next week be eating the bun without the burger.” His business partner, however, would order something like a chocolate milkshake for lunch, would have a few sips of it, and then just throw the rest out – while Gabriel would be starving and could hardly take his eyes off the milkshake. He just wasn’t interested in the milkshake, and kept losing and losing and losing weight while Gabriel gained weight in the same stressful work environment.
But Gabriel, interestingly, would internalize all of the problems at work and all the stress, whereas his colleague would scream and shout and throw things and then move on. He talks about all this beginning at 6:00 in this video (and at around 2 minutes in he discusses acute vs. chronic stress in terms of exercise which is discussed at the bottom of this post)...
One way of dealing with a situation leads to chronic low-grade stress similar to what is experienced during famine. The other is a more natural way of dealing with stress – a way that you will see any less cognitively-advanced creature dealing with stress and trauma. There one minute, gone the next. An emotional flurry is gone in a hurry (Yeah, I just made that up… I’m the awesomest).
This theme is repeated throughout Peter Levine’s book on emotional and physical trauma entitled Waking the Tiger. Those who remain active during traumatic situations manage to dissipate the trauma and have very little lasting post-traumatic stress. It’s those that internalize the trauma and shut down physically and mentally that have this trauma stored in the body where it resides, causing disease and distress, on a long-term basis which is far more harmful.
I came across this theme again recently while reading Shawn Talbott’s excellent book, The Cortisol Connection. The concept is simple really. There is acute stress, and there is chronic stress – and how difficult and traumatic situations are dealt with makes a huge difference in the outcome as regards your health, well-being, and waist measurement.
This is because these negative emotional states induce a release of cortisol. Actually, a more accurate depiction of what happens is that negative emotional states ramp up the activity of 11-HSD-1, an enzyme in cells (particularly centered around the abdomen) that, for lack of a better description, helps cells utilize a larger percentage of the cortisol coursing through the body at any given time.
In other words blood levels = normal. Actual functional cortisol = high, as this intracellular cortisol cannot be measured via normal blood or saliva tests, which are, like thyroid hormone panels, only useful in cases of extreme abnormality (like Talbott says, if you actually have truly abnormal levels of cortisol, you’re lucky to be able to get out of bed in the morning). Huge and unpredictable fluctuations throughout the day in terms of cortisol in the bloodstream complicate the usefulness of testing even further.
Anyway, you can now clearly see why substances that spike neurotransmitters to unnatural highs can lead to an increase in weight set point. Spike serotonin into the stratosphere using foods with extreme sweetness, unnaturally high calorie density, and rapid absorption rates – or by using psychoactive drugs like alcohol that induces a massive pleasure response, and you do witness downregulation of receptor sites (closure).
The result is that these things send you on an emotional roller coaster ride in which you feel extremely good immediately after consuming these highly-pleasurable things, but then exist in a low-pleasure state the entire time that you are not on one of these substances - depicted very well in Kathleen DesMaisons short video HERE (sugar – particularly the fat-sugar combo, no-calorie sweeteners, alcohol, drugs, white bread, etc.). This results in chronic, low-grade negative emotional states of stress, depression, anxiety, fear, guilt, worry, an inability to shake off painful past experiences, and a tendency to see the worst in the people, places, and things that you interact with in life.
And it’s this chronic, perpetual, low-grade level of psychological malaise that leads to real problems with your cells drowning in a steady flow of cortisol and the manifestation of metabolic disease, frequent infection (cortisol suppresses the immune system), autoimmune disease, allergy/asthma, and so on.
After all, it is cortisol (along with other counter-inflammatory molecules such as SOCS-3 as discussed in the video below) that blocks the action of leptin and insulin – causing leptin and insulin resistance. This, in turn, leads to lowered testosterone, reduced metabolism, impaired immunity, hyperinsulinemia, impaired glucose tolerance, increased appetite (although your appetite is a lesser factor if you are eating to get a serotonin and/or dopamine high), and so on. Chronic emotional stress, chronic physical stress in the form of diet and overexercising, and excess tissue composition of omega 6 and other causes of inflammation all contribute to this effect.
The take-home message from this initial serotonin post is simple though. There are foods and substances (all of them with a drug-like quality due to the influence they exert upon the pleasure centers in our brains) that cause chronic low serotonin levels (via receptor closure) of which chronic high cortisol levels is the counter-result. In this way, the vast spectrum of negative moods, if they are chronic, lead to chronic problems with infectious and degenerative illness including weight problems. When you eat to keep pleasure centers as stable as possible, which will be discussed at great length in this series of posts, it is almost impossible to trigger irrationally-negative emotional states – and the response to stressful and traumatic situations is infinitely enhanced and doesn’t weigh on you for days and weeks like it would someone in a chronic low serotonin state.
In a sense, chronic stress and acute stress are polar opposites, which is an excellent tie-in to the continued conversation we’ve been having on exercise – from a metabolic standpoint, it appears that short-duration, high-intensity exercise improves the stress response – sending it in the acute direction. This is, of course, the exact type of exercise Jon Gabriel recommends as the exercise component of his program. Long-duration exercise appears to be more of a chronic stress, which can easily be observed in the difference in body type between an endurance athlete with a characteristic low-testosterone/high-cortisol profile (low muscle mass, gains fat easily when sedentary) compared to a high-performance/short-duration athlete (high muscle mass to body fat ratio – high testosterone to cortisol ratio).
By the same token, chronic vs. acute consumption of junk food, alcohol, etc. abide by the same rules. In my personal experience, acute consumption of such foods can be equally as beneficial as chronic consumption is harmful.
Stay tuned for more in this series, including how to reset your cortisol clock and stress response, serotonin’s role in our circadian rhythms, serotonin’s role in sleep quality, appetite, cravings, and energy levels, the carbohydrate to protein ratio and how it impacts serotonin, emotional eating, how to potentially keep your serotonin receptor sites from upregulating when eating a diet that keeps serotonin on an even keel, and more.
In an ongoing conversation about what the best of the fitness and physique industry has to offer someone trying to lose body fat without sacrificing metabolic health, room needs to be made for Clarence Bass.
Bass is a famous ripped old dude, known for his multiple Over-40 Mr. America titles and maintenance of a very impressive physique all the way into his 70's as shown in the photo (age 70).
Bass is an excellent example of someone who truly has achieved great leanness and has maintained that leanness his entire life - and done so without excessive strain, hunger, and so on. His secret - a coarse, low-calorie density whole foods diet of "coarse," and more or less allowing the weight to come off naturally by eating to appetite of a whole foods diet (high-carb/low-fat relatively speaking) while doing a lot of exercise (but nothing absurd - his exercise routine includes a couple of 20-minute aerobic intervals per week, a couple of leisurely hikes, and two full-body weightlifting sessions).
Although Bass should not be worshipped for his appearance of health - he has had many health problems recently including hip replacement, osteoarthritis, and hypertriglyceridemia (I probably would too if I consumed soy milk, skim milk, and a peanut butter sandwich every day and fruit with every meal), clearly he has some secrets to share. His main secret, as you can read about in this online article, is simply eating a nutritious whole foods diet and being very patient with the weight loss - losing no more than a couple of pounds per month.
But as you can see from the compilation of quotes below, his philosophy is very much in line with that promoted by 180 and other 180 favorites like Jon Gabriel. In short, if you are hungry and deprived, impatient, and you don't eat real, whole, nutritious food most of the time - you will fail.
These are all themes of healing the metabolism, regaining lost health, and pursuing any health and physical appearance goal as lined out in THIS FREE EBOOK.
Anyway, here's some words of wisdom from this largemouth Bass (the dude writes almost as much as I do) from his most recent book, Great Expectations... Emphasis on certain lines by me:
pp. 36-37 “…it’s not a good idea to limit the quantity of food you eat. Forcing yourself to stop eating before you’re full and satisfied doesn’t work very well. My observation is that few people can do it for long, and it’s not necessary anyway. As explained in my earlier books, eating a balanced diet of mostly whole foods will usually put your weight on a downward path. You don’t have to worry about restricting the amount you eat, because you become full before exceeding your calorie needs.”
p. 87 “Some of you, especially new readers, may be wondering why a guy interested in lifetime leanness would eat calorie-dense nut butter. The answer is simple and lies at the very core of my diet philosophy. I like nut butter, and it’s a bad idea to deprive yourself of foods you enjoy… Diets based on denial are psychologically flawed… It’s human nature to crave what you can’t have, and craving usually spells doom for dieters. I don’t have cravings – because I don’t deny myself foods such as nut butter.”
p. 98 “My dieting philosophy is that I don’t believe in dieting. I don’t diet in the normal sense of the word, ever, even when peaking… Dieting conjures up thoughts of hunger and deprivation. Dieting doesn’t work, because it makes people uncomfortable and unhappy. I believe the key to permanent body fat control is eating satisfaction. There’s no need to eat foods you don’t like – even when peaking – and there’s no need to ever leave the table feeling hungry.”
p. 104 “Severe dieting (or starvation) causes the body to produce more of the enzymes responsible for depositing fat. These fat-depositing enzymes create a tendency to get fat. Severe dieting also causes a slowdown in metabolism. This isn’t just a theory. It has happened to me on several occasions. Cutting calories too severely caused me to lose weight but gain fat. On one occasion, I lost 5.6 pounds, and my body fat went up. I lost a little over 6 pounds of muscle and gained a pound of fat. Not good!”
p. 141 “… if you want to stay motivated for a lifetime, develop your own health and fitness program. Own it.”
