American Fitness Professionals & Associates

By: Mark Occhipinti, M.S.,Ph.D., ND.c.
 

We have a national obsession with thinness today as never before. The pre-occupation with body size and thinness appears to do little other-than fatten the wallets of the diet and exercise business. According to the National Center for Health Statistics. Americans are getting fatter every year. and at the same time, more Americans than ever before are trying to lose weight. (1)

Today, in 2005, more than one-third of all Americans (110 million) are on a diet at any one time. (2) The diet hucksters are well aware of this vast gold mine, pulling In billions of dollars a year pushing lies. There Is nothing to stop the outrageous claims and promises of lifelong thinness that lure the desperate and the gullible to follow one weight-loss scheme after another. Nothing. that is. except you as an educated consumer.

EXPLORING THE MYTHS: OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS

The advertising Pitches of diets and weight loss schemes are targeted to appeal to overweight peoples; vulnerable to wild fads or fantasies about 10 or more pounds of weight loss per week. There are more than 300 hundred books currently available in the English language along with over 16,000 diet variations and articles on how to weight. (3) Typically the claims made are based on faulty premises. Yet there are plenty of people wanting to believe them and lay down their hard-earned money chasing a paper moon. A major problem is that most people, including athletes, know very little about nutrition and even less about the processes of metabolism. This is the only explanation for why people continue to accept bizarre claims that am totally without scientific basis.

Some examples:

1. Fiction: ‘Grapefruit burns fat’
Fact: The grapefruit. a wonderful citrus fruit that contains vitamins (C, some B vitamins and mineral). It is also highly acidic and can cause stomach upset if eaten in large quantities. Grapefruit is an excellent source of simple carbohydrates that can supply quick bursts of energy as well as other fruits. However, Grapefruit has no fat-BURNING properties. It is true that if you eat a grapefruit instead of a balanced meal you will be reducing calories which can lead to weight loss, which can lead to weight loss with a catch.

2. Fiction: The classic “calories don’t count” diet that states that the order in which foods are eaten makes a difference in how fattening they are does not add up.
Fact: It is a fact that calories are a measure of energy units that a particular food contains when metabolized by the body, and this is all that counts in determining how fattening a food is. The all important point is that if a person eats more calories than he/she needs it will be stored as fat on the body, whether the food is protein, carbohydrate or fat.

THE MYTHICAL MIRACLE: DANGEROUS CLAIMS

Bodywrapping

One weight loss scheme is body wrapping which attempts to squeeze the fat away by wrapping the body from the chest to the knees with elastic bandages that have been sterilized and soaked in herbs and moisturizers. Then the semi-mummified individual dons a nylon suit designed to keep the heat in for the next 45-70 minutes. Proponents claim that body wrapping: “they draw toxins and water out of the fat cells (adipose tissue which are then flushed out through the bladder. Actually what the body wrap in doing is tissue compression. Just think of when you wear a tight pair of socks and take them off to be left with an indentation.

The tight compression of the of the wraps, forces capillary blood to be restricted and shifts inward around the internal organs which can have serious health consequences. By the way, there is nothing in fat but fat! Fat has no water or toxins, just 3,500 calories of lipid material per pound.

LOW CARBOHYDRATE DIETS

Severely cutting back on carbohydrates upsets the bodies chemical balance in such a way that fluids are deleted from the muscle. While this gives the illusion of weight loss, fat is not lost, but muscle tissue is broken down, and water that makes up much of this tissue is excreted. All of this water weight will eventually be regained. Besides, carbohydrates (potatoes, rice, vegetables, grains- including pasta) are the prime source of energy. Starches are not fattening: fat is fattening!

FASTING These regimens come and go. Most recently, a fast consisting of only liquid protein (330 calories, twice a day) resulted in the deaths of eighteen people nationwide. Probable cause: The bodies were forced to digest muscle proteins to liberate stored blood sugar (glycogen) to feed the brain and compensate for inadequate caloric intake. These poor souls. In a quest to lose some excess weight, died from cardiac arrest. (Remember, the heart is a muscle too and is affected by extremes in diet).

LIQUID DIETS: HIGH PROTEIN DIETS

Recently. television personalities who have lost significant amounts of weight have popular diets that restrict your caloric intake as low as 400 calories daily. Because the body can not burn fat quickly enough to compensate for so few calorie muscle tissue Is again digested.

Single Category Diets

These regimens restrict the dieter to one kind of food such as fruit, vegetables, etc. alone. Whether it be weeks or months, these diets depend on how long you can tolerate rice in 500 ways. No single category of food contains enough nutrients to maintain healthy body tissues. Research has demonstrated that the more a person diets the less likely they are to lose the weight and keep it off. Each time they diet it takes the individual longer to lose the weight, and whatever weight is lost is regained more quickly.

Why?
Because the extreme dieting practices that have been mentioned above create a yo-yo effect on the body, and lowers your metabolic set-point (internal thermostat). This system maintains your weight when eating enough food to neither gain nor lose weight. Before throwing up your hands in disgust and heading for the refrigerator, read further.

THE FACTS FOR PERMANENT WEIGHT (FAT) LOSS

Many readers will already be aware of what they eat and will be following some type of exercise program, which is a good start. Below are tried and successful fat loss guidelines.
A. Your diet should consist of 65-70% of your total caloric intake from complex carbohydrates.

B. Maintain your caloric intake at or above 1,200 calories per day. This is not an arbitrary number. Research conducted on twenty-six thousand men and women between 1992-93 had found that not one in the survey took in the minimum RDA’s (recommended daily allowance) for 26 vital nutrients (minerals & vitamins) with an intake 1,200 calories a day.(10) This is where the supplementation of vitamins enters the picture during these low-calorie, low carbohydrate diets.

C. Increase your aerobic activity to stimulate the use of stored fat, and improve insulin’s ability to regulate blood sugar.
Use any of the cardio-vascular forms of exercise, for example: cycling, running, stair climbing, walking.

D. For example: a 140 pound woman can burn up to 500 calories per hour walking on a treadmill at 3.5 mph at a 12% incline. Aerobic training can be split up in the same way as weight training with 30 minutes of training in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening.

E. Weight training is vital for its role in developing skeletal muscle. However, it is not an aerobic activity, and will not have significant cardio-vascular effects that are achieved through regular aerobic activity. Increased muscular tone improves over-all caloric expenditure every day and is a great additional fat burner.

F. An example of resistance trainings ability to elevate Basal Metabolic Rate was recently demonstrated when comparing 30 minutes of leg training (combination of leg presses, reverses lunges, leg curls, and leg extensions=3 sets of 10 repetitions to positive failure) versus 30 minutes of cardio-vascular training.
Resistance Training of Legs elevated BMR for 48 hours versus 4 hours for cardio-vascular training.

G. Do not attempt to lose more than 2 pounds of fat in one week. A more sensible goal is 1 pound per week of fat loss. Note: Remember a pound of fat contains 3,500 calories. To burn off this one pound of fat will require time spent in exercise during the week.

FACT: SOME NUTRIENTS THAT WORK IN ASSISTING FAT-LOSS

Currently several nutrients are effective in weight (fat loss), are being used by endurance athletes for increasing stamina, and by bodybuilders whose focus is to maintain muscular body-weight by reducing fat. Those who have used carnitine have found this nutrient beneficial over the traditional diet preparation and exercise alone in achieving their desired goals.

WHAT IS CARNITINE?

Carnitine is a water-soluble vitamin found in all living tissue. it is synthesized in the liver from its amino acid precursors, (Lysine, Methionine and vitamin C).(11) Because carnitine is water-soluble and sensitive to heat, losses can occur quickly during cooking. This can have potentially serious side effects on the vegetarian athlete since plant sources contain small amounts of this vital nutrient.(12) Carnitine plays an important role in the metabolism of fat and in the reduction of triglycerides when a dosage of three grams are administered daily.(13) Carnitine breaks the bonds of fatty acids, thereby liberating free fatty acids which are then transported across the cell membranes and into the mitochondria to be burned for fuel to produce ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate).(14) Since fat is more readily mobilized in the presence of carnitine, there have been significant clinical applications of carnitine in heart disease and other physiological disorders.(15-17)

Carnitine is administered in conditions of ketosis in individuals on high-protein diets. These diets produce an accumulation of ketone bodies or fat waste by-products that circulate in the blood.(18-19) Such a build-up can acidify the blood resulting in calcium, magnesium and potassium loss (essential electrolytes) that can be life-threatening when out of balance.(20)

CHROMIUM PICOLINATE

The original research completed on chromium picolinate was conducted its developer by Dr. Gary Evans initially at Bemidgi State University in Minnesota. Follow up studies using between 200 mcg., for lower body-weight athletes (under 125 lbs.) to 600 mcgs., for those athletes above 165 lbs., recorded the following information. Average lean body mass increase of 2.7 lbs., for females, and 3.5 lbs., for males during a six week intensive training program. This vita micro-nutrient was found to act in two ways in the body to regulate blood sugar.

1. Clear excessive glucose (blood sugar) from the blood stream and into the muscle, thereby assisting insulin to carry out it’s vital function with smaller amounts of insulin being produced from the pancreas.
2. Shutting down excessive insulin production to protect necessary levels of glucose remaining in the blood stream, creating a balanced blood sugar level.
3. Chromium picolinate caused muscle cells to take up more than twice as much branched-chain amino acids (leucine, Iso-leucine, and Valine) than in the control group.

This resulted in constant blood sugar levels being maintained in the blood stream (plasma) and sparring muscle (lean body mass) from being destroyed (broken down) to liberate stored blood sugar (gluco-neogenisis).(22)

References

1. National Center for Health Statistics, Bulletin, 1988.
2. National Cntr. Health Stat. 1988.
3. Encyclopedia Britannica, health Update, 1988.
4. Katch,et al. Exercise Physiology, Energy, Nutrition, and Human of Performance, 1990.
5. Asbury Park Press, Section B. Dec. 13th, 1988.
6. Katch, et al. 1990.
7. Guyton, Textbook of Medical Physiology, 1990.
8. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1988.
9. Bremer, J. Carnitine, Metabolism and Functions, Phys. Review: 63: 1420-1480. 1983.
10. Angeline, C. et al . Carnitine Deficiency of Skeletal Muscle, Report of treated cases, Neurology, 1987.
11. Chaitow, L. Amino Acids Therapy, 1985.
12. Fritz J.B., Carnitine and its role in fatty acid metabolism. Adv. Lipid Res. 1: 285-334, 1963.
13. Memdell. E. Carnitine, 19083.
14. Chatow, 1985.
15. Hulse, J. et al. Carnitine J. Biochemistry No. 253: 1654-59, 1978.
16. Thompsen, J.H. et al. et al. Improved pacing tolerance of the ischemia human myocarium after administration of carnitine. Am J. Cardiology. 43:300-305, 1979.
17. Ferrari, R. et al. The metabolic effects of L-carnitine. Am. J. Cardiology. 5:213-216, 1984.
18. Kamlkawa, T. et al. Effects of Carnitine on the Human Body, 1987.
19. O’Connor, J. et al. Prevention of ammonia toxicity using L-carnitine. Neurochem Research. 9:4, 563-570, 1984 20. Occhipinti, M. Carnitine: The wonder nutrient. Natural Body & Fitness, July-August, 1988.
21. Colgan,, Michael, Optimum Sports nutrition, Advanced Research Press, 1993.