Time has an interesting article on experts, their studies, and their tendency to be wrong:

Experts and Studies: Not Always Trustworthy

Anyone who’s spent anytime looking at diets won’t be surprised. Low-fat, high-fat, low carb, fibre, exercise: all have vast seas of conflicting studies.

Gary Taube’s excellent book Good Calories, Bad Calories is an interesting walk through some of the science and processes that shape this issue in the weight loss and health fields. We blogged about it here: Diet and The Philosophy of Science which opened with the following suggestion:

“As strange as it sounds, if you want to lose weight, it is worthwhile to learn something of the philosophy and practice of science.”

And InnerPlate.com is built to that philosophy: find your own evidence in your diet history. Trust your results, and find what works for you. InnerPlate.com is uniquely built in it’s focus on commitment periods, weeks, and returning feedback on your efforts across these different periods. Once you start, everything is driven by feedback and awareness and commitment generated by that feedback.

The longer InnerPlate.com has run, the more important this concept – trust only your results-  has become to us. And the results aren’t just weight loss, but ability to stick to the losing weight, do so consistently, and do so without too much hunger. They are all related, and strong feedback allows you to tune your diet to optimize all three- results, consistency and comfort.

As we finish the next version of our site, this will be our central focus – only trust your results. YOUR results. Not mine, not theirs. There will still be the blog, and information and ideas, but it will be there to help you find your path and will focus on finding the path, rather then suggesting the path.

Finding your stable daily calories can be a bit daunting. There are all kinds of different measures out there, they often disagree, and we often aren’t sure what our activity levels are according to the calculations. A scientific test can be done, but they are expensive and not very widely offered. But there is an easy answer- take your best guess, track your calories, and compare the results. Try different formulas and use the one that is the best match!

When I started my diet a year ago, I used a calculation that said my stable daily calories were 2300. Imagine my surprise when I lost 5 lbs eating 2350 calories on average! As my diet theory was to track and adjust my behaviour based on a constant feedback loop, I didn’t mind the 2350 vs 2300, and learning that 2300 was so very wrong was a huge benefit.

I then tried a number of different stable calorie equations (= basal metabolic rate(BMR) + activity calories) and found one that matched- the Harris-Benedict and a surprising admission that I wasn’t as sedentary as I thought. Coaching soccer and running after 3 kids must add up.

Then came my plateau. It was after Christmas, and I ate 2300 calories per day on average for all of January, taking a slow road back into my diet after Christmas fun. And lost no weight. Where was my weight loss? Had my body metabolically revolted against weight loss? Had I lost excessive lean muscle mass having dropped 20 lbs in 6 months? What was going on?

I adjusted my stable daily calories to match my weight loss (none!) and continued on through February, striving for a new deficit based on my experimentally determined stable daily calorie rate.

Now calories in matched my weight loss again! But I still wondered what happened, and so I finally got a round to doing the numbers again.

Diet Start- Harris-Benedict

Age: 39, Weight: 235, Height: 6 feet,

Activity Level: moderate 3 times per week.

DAILY STABLE CALORIES = 3006

Now remember, another website had said 2300! That’s a big difference. I had started trying to diet at 1600 per day, for a 700 deficit, but it was too much, I landed at 2350, and still lost weight. Then I did more experimenting with different formulas and found a good fit.

But now my daily stable calories were 2540 based on my January weight loss. What was going on? Well, three things had changed- I had lost 20 lbs, I was doing less activity in the winter, and I had aged, turning 40. Running the Harris-Benedict equation with these three changes:

Diet @ 6months- Harris-Benedict

Age: 40, Weight: 220, Height: 6 feet,

Activity Level: low/none

DAILY STABLE CALORIES = 2503

Wow. I needed 503 calories per day less then last summer. And here I thought I had gotten better at managing my diet discipline and improving my calorie deficits. And this was almost a perfect fit for my experimentally calculated 2540.

Lets see what happens approximately 1 month later with weight loss based on this new stable rate:

Diet @ 7months- Harris-Benedict

Age: 40, Weight: 211, Height: 6 feet,

Activity Level: low/none

DAILY STABLE CALORIES = 2435

The weight loss matched my calorie intake to within .2 pounds. But wow! Another 70 calories less. After another couple of months, there will be a huge impact here. Even 70 is pretty huge: 70 * 365 days / 3500 calories/lb = 7lbs a year. Another month, and 140 cals would be roughly 14 lbs a year in wieght loss opportunity lost, and possibly the impression of a new plateau.

Now what happens when my activity level increases with the warmer weather…

Diet @ 6months- Harris-Benedict

Age: 40, Weight: 220, Height: 6 feet,

Activity Level: moderate 3 times per week

DAILY STABLE CALORIES = 2790

Up 300 calories. But still 216 calories less then six months ago. So in six months, by virtue of weight loss and age alone, I need 200 calories less per day. That’s 6000 calories- almost 2 lbs – a month of weight loss that I would be expecting and not getting if this went unnoticed. Over a year, that’s 73000 calories and 20 lbs. This is weight loss I would have been expecting, but not finding due to the impact of lost weight.

With less activity, I was missing 500cal/day of weight loss. Assuming I never noticed, I would have 1) stopped losing weight, and 2) missed the opportunity for 52 lbs of weight loss in a year if I had adjusted and maintained a similar calorie deficit (assuming I had 52 left to go- it’s actually 31- but it does mean hitting my goal in the middle of the summer versus at Christmas).

Not only have I learned this by tracking my weight versus calories for the last six months, but I know it to be accurate. My predicted weight loss in the last 2 months versus my calorie deficit estimate (with the correct numbers) match to within 1/4 of a pound. That’s on 10 lbs lost. This means I trust I will see progress over the next 6 months so long as I stay aware and mindful of my eating inputs.

My recommendation- run the numbers over your expected/desired milestones in the next 6 months and year. What is the impact of 20, 30, and 40 lbs lost. Then pay attention- that plateau you are seeing may just be an illusion.

And by learning your true stable daily calorie rate, and gaining a sense of trust generated by an effective awareness and feedback mechanism, you will have a tool lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that you will be successful.

As strange as it sounds, if you want to lose weight, it is worthwhile to learn something of the philosophy and practice of science. And more diet and health books are opening with a short discourse on the topic, as they try to explain how so many well-intentioned researchers can be violently at odds on what the best diet is.

The best known and best written book of this caliber is Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, and if you are new to science, research and the philosophies and practices of science, I suggest that you don’t give up and read the first section twice. If you have no interest in diet, but are interested in science, I also recommend this book.

In it, Taubes goes backwards in time to prevalent beliefs, diets, and studies, and then comes back to the present, adding new believes, studies, recommendations and controversies. As each new element is added, he studies the conflicting studies, and notes how they are never resolved, disappearing slowly into the background, with studies of that time ultimately becoming “unobserved”- published but not read or referenced, and, ultimately, unfunded.

Also impacted is how studies are constructed on what they focused on. Certain seminal studies used to drive national nutritional recommendations turned out to be extremely poorly designed. A common flaw is not have a comparable control due to calorie restriction on one diet, but not the other. Another was to measure heart disease, but not overall mortality. A lot of studies raised the spectre of reduced heart disease but increased cancer. That was blithely ignored as “likely due to other unknown factors”.

Good science tries to actively falsify it’s own theories. Scientists who move past all the warning markers because of some positive markers move deeper and deeper into the quagmire, where all results are suspect to do compounding assumptions, confounding factors, and ongoing confirmation bias.

Some great insights in Good Calories, Bad Calories:

1. the heart disease epidemic post WW-II didn’t actually happen. It was poorly interpreted data.

2. the definition of the “classic” American diet pre-WWII used to identify causes of the non-existent epidemic was largely wrong.

3. most recent drops in heart disease mortality is from better treatment.

4. high fat diets don’t cause weight gain due to caloric density (9 calories for fat due to 4 for proteins and carbs). This was a strong factor in “it can’t hurt to recommend low fat anyway, since fat causes weight gain” rationalizations. It turns out to be very wrong. Fat is strongly correlated to satiety and less calorie consumption.

5. much of the supposed benefit of a low-fat diet is at the population level. i.e. the net benefit to an individual’s personal risks is pretty low, with researches predicting 3 days to 3 months of additional life span IF the low-fat theory is in fact correct.

6. you need to consider that when you remove something from a diet, something is added. By removing fats and increasing carbs, what is the result? Diabetes? More heart disease?

So the epidemic that pushed people to quick action in making the low-fat diet the national standard never existed, and main supporting facts that helped to move it along were false. However, once these were accepted, other studies had been cherry picked to move the movement along, with highly disturbing other facts being ignored.

The most disturbing point for me was that even the tenuous correlation between blood cholesterol and heart disease was mostly in men. If fact, a strong reverse correlation between cholesterol and mortality was often observed in women. This, amazingly, seems to have been ignored by many researchers.

The sad truth that Taubes brings us to is that there is a desperate need to do a lot of good science that wasn’t done previously, and that some seriously bad science has been used to turn all of us into guinea pigs.

Another book that is a bit lighter on the science, but has a more pointed introduction to some of the impact of complexity and scientific process on diet, is Body By Science, By Doug McGruff and John Little. It has a great overview on genetics and considerations of that for “what works for 95% of the population”, and makes a great case for the benefits of weight training over low-intensity aerobic type exercises. The science can be overwhelming, but the end recommendations are very compelling.

And finally, there is Michael Pollan’s books. They are lighter on the science overall, but give a good survey to the sociology of science and the bad suggestions that can result.

In Defence of Food

The Omnivore’s Dilema

Pollan also makes the suggest of considering what you add to your diet more then what you remove. If you remove fats, what are you adding? If it’s not vegetables, you may ruining your health with refined carbs.

Pollan’s books are, also, ironically a good example of the “nutritionism” issues he mentions. He does an admirable job of knocking it down in the beginning of “In Defence of Food” but lapses quit heavily into it himself in the second half. Whereas Taube’s takes excess carbs and refined foods and switches them back to fat and protein, Pollan moves them over the vegetables, even though he does identify many successful hight fat traditional diets. He also makes nutrient recommendations from the current state of science, which is exactly what all previous purveyors of “nutrionism” did. However, he does so by excluding processed foods and supplements.

We all want to share our beliefs and insights, and it becomes almost irresistible to hold back. But that is where the best scientists shine, actively trying to disprove their own theories, and not ignoring the warning markers that exist in their data. Good science, like good quality, is conservative and slow, because complexity is a wild beast that can strike in many hidden and insidious ways. The only way to combat complexity and our own nature is a strong process, with a strong, proven, philosophy and practice of science. If you are fed up with all the conflicting diet messages out there, consider these books are gain a little comfort from understanding why things are as crazy as they are.

The Paleo Diet is slowing taking off and gaining broader acceptance.

In many ways, it’s similar to the Atkin’s Diet, following a similar theory of insulin resistance and blood chemistry. But it’s driving forces are very different different- whereas Atkin’s was formulated on the concept that carbs were bad and the cause of weight gain, and not much else, the Paleo Diet is formulated on an evolutionary analysis of the human diet. Basically, our bodies are an evolved response to our environment and as a result what’s best for our bodies is what was typically available to our ancestors for millions of years.

But more then just hand-waving and guessing, the Paleo community is really dedicated to research and confirmation of it’s theories. Popular blogs are awash with postings of research studies and comments from very well studied chemists, biologists, and self-taught enthusiasts.

It’s the natural sibling of the HIT movement – high intensity training – which argues that short training (as little as twelve minutes) once a week will produce more and better results then training hours several times a week. Both have an incredible enthusiasm for research confirmation and exploration of the best way to train and feed our bodies. And both draw a lot of their inspiration from evolutionary analysis of human physiology. Many of the figures in one are involved in the other, and we will discussing both more frequently down the road.

InnerPlate.com is a diet tool and psychological approach that’s focused on tracking food consumed and feedback on how you are doing and how that correlates to your weight loss. It’s principles and philosophies are based on performance psychology, and recognition of only one diet and exercise principle- exercise doesn’t cause your to lose weight.

Of course, some people will say that’s ludicrous, and it surely does because it burns calories and calories in = weight gain/loss. Yes, that’s true, but practically speaking it doesn’t cause weight loss, and well constructed studies have shown this. The reasons are pretty simple:

- you don’t have time in the day to do enough exercise to produce meaningful weight loss.

- the impact of calorie reduction is far more important.

- activities tend to make you hungry, and it’s easy to overcompensate and wipe our any marginal calories burned.

- the stress on your life losing 10 hours a week to the gym is pretty harsh, making it hard to find the time to focus on food. We can only focus on so much, and it can be better to focus on food.

- the metabolic advantage of muscle is overrated. If you gain 5 lbs of lean muscle, you may burn an extra 250 calories a day. But some studies have put it as low as 50 calories for 5lbs lean muscle gained. And in any event, your body will likely be 250 calories “hungrier”, making your sustainable calorie deficit the same.

And that’s what the core to weight loss is- finding and maximizing your sustainable calorie deficit. What is yours and how can you improve it?

This is where food selection and exercise can be critical. While we haven’t talked much about these, focusing on the tracking, feedback, and instinct development, we are seeing the need.

So, in order to help our members move forward more effectively, we will be discussing in our blog and on twitter more food selection and exercise considerations, with a strong emphasis on FINDING WHAT WORKS FOR YOU. InnerPlate.com provides an amazing tool for tracking your patterns over time and learning about things like 1) your true basal metabolic rate (BMR) and stable daily calories, and 2) what kind of foods to eat and when to maximize your sustainable calorie deficit. Within this framework, you can experiment with different eating and exercise patterns and continually improve on your progress. There is just one rule of InnerPlate dieting- DON’T STOP TRACKING!

If interested in Paleo Dieting or High Intensity Training (in only 12 minutes a week) have a look at our blog roll on the bottom right side of our blog. As we add new entries to our blog roll, we’ll tweet and discuss them in the blog.

Keep Fighting the Fat!

The InnerPlate Team

The InnerPlate diet is focused on portion awareness. It’s a mindful approach to the right portions for losing weight, and the right portions for staying at a healthy weight. It does so by creating a feedback loop- what you eat is tracked, and it shows how you are doing. You are then motivated at multiple levels to adjust your path forward.

Fundamental to this is finding your correct stable calorie level. Typically, this is based on age, height, weight, gender and activity level. However, it’s still a guess, and InnerPlate.com’s feedback capabilities are simply amazing at helping you find you true number.

The goals of the first two weeks of the InnerPlate diet are pretty simple:
1. track everything
2. build your personal database, creating an environment where you can track everything in 2-4 minutes per day (making 1 idiotically easy)
3. learn about your eating patterns and try to improve them based on feedback.

After the first two weeks, goal 3 is the dominant goal, and you are encouraged to use estimation and rules of thumb to make tracking easy.

In this blog post, I’m going to share the first two weeks of my diet. With some online calculation help (Mayo Clinic, as linked to in http://innerplate.com), I started tracking based on a 2200 calorie stable level. To lose weight, I’d have to average a calorie level lower then that, creating a deficit and losing pounds at a rate of 3500 calories per pound (all standard predictive values).

With the InnerPlate diet, it’s one commitment is to track. And in that spirit, most of the first two weeks I focused on tracking every day and refining my food database on InnerPlate.com as I went along. I wasn’t overly concerned about losing weight. By day nine, I was only adding 1 new food to by database every two days, and I was tracking in 3-4 minutes per day. So far so good! However, I was missing my calorie targets- by a lot.

Here are my results:

Results Against Estimated 2200 Calorie Stable Consumption

The RESULTS listing is a stream of your calories over the length of your tracking commitment. It’s divided into weeks and days, giving calorie feedback at the daily, weekly and commitment level. Red means you are way off target, orange significantly off target, and green means you are largely on target. Each Week, Day, or Meal can be expanded or folded by simpling clicking on it. This screenshot shows all of the last day, and the meal level view of the prior day (with a full view of breakfast).

With a goal to lose 1.5 pounds a week, my daily calorie goal was 1450 calories- a deficit of 750 calories.

Week 1 average 2539 calories per day. More them 1000 more! And 339 calories above my daily stable. 3 * 339 = 1000 extra calories- 1/3 of a pound predicted weight gain based on 3500 calories per pound. I wasn’t trying too hard here- I was mostly focused on learning and finding new ways to eat.

Also, the InnerPlate diet is feedback based. I didn’t try to count calories while eating. Rather, I simply tracked after the fact.

Week 2, I improved by 249 calories per day! Of course, with the InnerPlate diet the complete history of your commitment results are always onscreen for you to see, offering subtle motivation on a daily basis. I really wanted to move from red (way off goal) to orange or green (yeah! close to on goal!).

Strange thing though- the prediction was I was gaining weight and I lost 2 pounds! Now any weight loss measure is plus or minus 1 or 2 pounds, and you need more then 9 days for a certain number, but this was likely real loss of at least 1 pound. Expecially since I hadn’t changed my diet in a way likely to change water retention (with the Atkin’s diet the first 5 pounds lost is famously water loss).

Lets Now Look at the Goal Summary

It’s predicting I’ve gained 0.5 pounds so far, against my goal of losing 1.9 pounds, and my actual loss of 2 pounds.

Furthermore, it’s predicting that if I continue at my 2363 calorie average, I’ll gain 0.7 pounds rather then lose the 3 I targeted.

Somethings not right. My stable calories must be higher. Maybe I’m more active then I though. So, looking at my loss so far, I changed my stable rate to 2600 and revisited my results and my goal summary.

Results Against Estimated 2200 Calorie Stable Consumption

Look at that! My daily goal calories are 1850 now instead of 1450 to lose my targeted 1.5 pounds per week, and I’m getting better feedback. My first week is orange rather then red, and my second week is green, though right on the border of orange.

Lets Now Look at the Goal Summary

How about that! It now predicts a loss of 0.6 pounds rather then a gain of 0.5 pounds. My actual loss of 2 pounds is bit more reasonable. Remember, it’s only 9 days so far, and any weight loss measure is +/- one or two pounds.

My daily average overall is still way above my target, but that’s okay. I’m learning about my body and the impact of what I eat. I’m getting better at planning meals to avoid hunger, I’ve narrowed down my stable daily calories, and I’ve updated my personal food database so I can track in 3-4 minutes a day. Those are pretty awesome results for 9 days!

And look at the “The Rest of the Way” section. I can see that if I achieve the 1850 calories the remaining 5 days, I’ll lose an extra pound over keeping my current path. Extra motivation! Note that this end weight is projected. When I complete this 2 week tracking commitment, I’ll update my final weight and use that information in planning the next commitments. After a while, these numbers will start to align due to a more accurate stable calorie number and a longer period of time to average weight loss over.

In 5 more days, the initial 2 week commitment will come to a close, and I’ll be moving on to the next commitment.

If you haven’t tried InnerPlate.com yet, give it a try.

Talk to you then!

Study blames over-eating, not poor exercise for US obesity

With all the dietitians and health pundit offering such certain advice on health and exercise, most people would be surprised at how little study has been done regarding these “facts” that are presented.

Well here’s a fact- the rise of health clubs has mirrored the rise of obesity. Not causing it, but shifting how we think about food. That food was secondary to fitness. That to loose weight we needed to join a gym.

This is one the 3 things that are killing your diet (in addition to processed foods and a social environment that gives us the wrong cues and signals on portion size), what killed mine for the last ten years, and why we’ve built InnerPlate.com. In many ways, this one is most devious of the three, since it often stops us from getting to the root of the weight gain issue- food and portion awareness.

Hi,

Welcome to FeedbackDiet.com!

So here we are. We hope you like it.

Regards,
The FeedbackDiet.com Team