Ben Greenfield says: “Eating less does not create the need to burn body fat. Instead, it creates the need for the body to slow down. Contrary to popular opinion, the body hangs on to body fat. Instead, it burns muscle tissue, and that worsens the underlying cause of obesity.
Only as a last resort, if the body has no other option, it may also burn a bit of body fat. When you are starving your metabolism wants more stored energy and body fat is the greatest source of stored energy – so it holds onto it.
Your tissues burn a lot of calories so when your metabolism thinks you’re starving it gets rid of calorie-hungry muscle tissue. Studies show that up to 70% of the weight lost while eating less comes from burning muscle – not body fat.”
Tim Rice says: “The old disproven “calories in vs. calories out” model of weight loss simply doesn’t work and does not account for the differing hormonal effects of varying macronutrients.
It is much more likely that an overweight person has eaten too much of the wrong kinds of foods and unfortunately, due to misguided nutritional advice given out by most healthcare providers, they don’t even know what the wrong kinds of foods are.”
Prof. Noakes says: “Persons with insulin resistance have a reduced capacity to burn carbohydrates as fuel both during exercise and when at rest. Humans differ in the ease with which they will gain weight when exposed to a high-carbohydrate diet.”
Tim Rice says: “Obesity is a slow, degenerative, metabolic process of gradually increasing degrees of insulin resistance. No one just wakes up one day to discover that they are obese.
The simplistic “eat less, move more = weight loss” was conceived under the notion that all calories behave the same in our bodies.”
As a personal trainer, I have a responsibility to my clients to provide them with the best advice based on up-to-date science.
I recently watched a video interview by some young personal trainers on #wastebook, and the advice they provided about health and nutrition prompted me to write this article. This is a small section of the full article. If you want to learn more and read the full article, simply click here.
As far as I’m concerned, the advice some trainers are providing and the intense training they are putting their clients through, as though everyone is the same, is based on old principles and old science.
The problem is that almost anyone can become a personal trainer these days. With government funding supporting these courses and the number of gyms supporting these personal trainers, I think it’s getting worse.
In my opinion, there is not enough content covering nutrition on the accredited personal trainers' courses in Australia – certainly not enough to provide the proper advice to someone who has had weight problems for years. Because of this, the advice provided can actually do more damage than good.
This includes injuries through high-intensity workouts that often lack appropriate techniques and elevated cortisol (stress hormone) levels, day after day, session after session, which often leads to adrenal fatigue, weight gain, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, and binge eating.
As a fully qualified personal trainer, group fitness instructor, advanced level 1 Les Mills RPM instructor, spin coach, USA and Australian triathlon coach, and currently ranked number one in my 50-54 age group in the AWA Ironman 70.3 rankings, I do know a little about exercise and nutrition (about me).
However, I don’t pretend to know it all, and I turn to the real experts in their fields for guidance.
With help from these experts, I’m going to correct some nutritional advice provided by some young personal trainers. After four years of restructuring my approach to nutrition and reading an extensive list of books, I have decided to collate much of what I have learned in order to save you four years of your own research.
If after reading this article, you do decide to fundamentally challenge your beliefs on training and nutrition (thanks, Prof. Noakes), you should book some time to talk to me.
Andre Obradovic is an ICF Leadership PPC Level Coach, A Primal Health Coach, a Certified Low Carb Healthy Fat Coach, & a Certified Personal Trainer. Andre is also a Founding member of the Dr. Phil Maffetone MAF certified Coach. He is an Ambassador for the Noakes Foundation, and a regular subject matter expert lecturer for the Nutrition Network (a part of the Noakes Foundation) Andre has completed 16 x 70.3 Ironmans and in 2017 he competed in the 70.3 Ironman World Championships. He has completed 18 Marathons and over 30 Half Marathons. Andre currently focuses his athletic competition on Track and Field with the occasional Marathon.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan says: “No human has the enzymes to fully digest the proteins of wheat, rye, and barley. These grains will cause inflammation and intestinal permeability every time they are eaten.
Dr Alessio Fasano conducted research at Harvard University and recently published a paper that showed that gluten in wheat causes intestinal permeability in every human.
His team studied four populations; recently diagnosed coeliacs, coeliac patients in remission, non-coeliac gluten sensitivity patients, and patients with no sensitivity to gluten, amazingly in his conclusion he states that “increased intestinal permeability after gliadin exposure occurs in all individuals.”
As a personal trainer, I have a responsibility to my clients to provide them with the best advice based on up-to-date science.
I recently watched a video interview by some young personal trainers on #wastebook, and the advice they provided about health and nutrition prompted me to write this article. This is a small section of the full article. If you want to learn more and read the full article, simply click here.
As far as I’m concerned, the advice some trainers are providing and the intense training they are putting their clients through, as though everyone is the same, is based on old principles and old science.
The problem is that almost anyone can become a personal trainer these days. With government funding supporting these courses and the number of gyms supporting these personal trainers, I think it’s getting worse.
In my opinion, there is not enough content covering nutrition on the accredited personal trainer's courses in Australia – certainly not enough to provide the proper advice to someone who has had weight problems for years. Because of this, the advice provided can actually do more damage than good.
This includes injuries through high-intensity workouts that often lack appropriate techniques and elevated cortisol (stress hormone) levels, day after day, session after session, which often leads to adrenal fatigue, weight gain, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, and binge eating.
As a fully qualified personal trainer, group fitness instructor, advanced level 1 Les Mills RPM instructor, spin coach, USA and Australian triathlon coach, and currently ranked number one in my 50-54 age group in the AWA Ironman 70.3 rankings, I do know a little about exercise and nutrition (about me).
However, I don’t pretend to know it all, and I turn to real experts in their fields for guidance.
With help from these experts, I’m going to correct some nutritional advice provided by some young personal trainers.
After four years of restructuring my approach to nutrition and reading an extensive list of books, I have decided to collate much of what I have learned in order to save you four years of your own research.
If after reading this article, you do decide to fundamentally challenge your beliefs on training and nutrition (thanks, Prof. Noakes), you should book some time to talk to me.
If you want to read the full version of my article, just go here and enjoy listening to the real experts. Apparently, Oprah Winfrey collected $12 million from Weight Watchers for posting a tweet about losing weight and eating bread. What a joke.
Andre Obradovic is an ICF Leadership PPC Level Coach, A Primal Health Coach, a Certified Low Carb Healthy Fat Coach, & a Certified Personal Trainer. Andre is also a Founding member of the Dr. Phil Maffetone MAF certified Coach. He is an Ambassador for the Noakes Foundation, and a regular subject matter expert lecturer for the Nutrition Network (a part of the Noakes Foundation) Andre has completed 16 x 70.3 Ironmans and in 2017 he competed in the 70.3 Ironman World Championships. He has completed 18 Marathons and over 30 Half Marathons. Andre currently focuses his athletic competition on Track and Field with the occasional Marathon.
Before we started believing the false science about fat and cholesterol, we were lean and did not develop many of the diseases that afflict a significant proportion of the world today. Prior to the 1970s, our grandparents and even some of our parents cooked with lard, butter, or duck fat.
In those days, obesity and diabetes rates were very low. Today, supermarket is full of low-fat products that come with Heart Foundation Ticks. Many of these so-called healthy foods are full of sugar, additives, genetically modified grains/flour, and toxic vegetable oil products.
The thing is that low-fat foods taste awful unless lots of sugar is added. The common misconception that when you eat fat, you get fat is just plain wrong. Why?
In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, cardiovascular disease (CVD) was becoming more prevalent in the USA. CVD was seen as the no. 1 health problem in the U.S. Well-intentioned scientists had an invalid hypothesis that there was a link between dietary cholesterol intake and CVD.
In response to this incorrect science, the government released new dietary guidelines – low-fat, high-carbohydrate food was the order of the day in the newly developed food pyramid. People stopped eating healthy fats and started using highly processed vegetable oils.
These oils have an adverse effect on our bodies right down to the cellular level, and therefore disrupt every system within our body. People were also encouraged to eat high-carbohydrate foods.
Watch this short 5-minute video. How many overweight or obese people do you see in this video from the 1970s?
When we eat highly processed, nutrient-void carbohydrates, they can cause dramatic surges of glucose into the bloodstream.
These constant surges of too much glucose from highly processed food being released into the bloodstream cause many problems for the organs that are trying to control our blood sugar regulation – namely, the pancreas, liver, and adrenal glands. These organs eventually become exhausted and further impact other systems within the body.
As glucose levels soar, excessive amounts of insulin are needed to bring the body back into homeostasis. However, insulin is a storage hormone.
Yes, that’s right – it is a FAT storage hormone. Most people think its job is to lower blood sugar, but this is not true. Its main job is to transport glucose to the cells for energy and then store any excess in the muscles and liver.
When we constantly have too much glucose and therefore too much insulin in our blood, eventually, the liver and muscles become full, and the insulin then carries the glucose to the adipose tissue to be stored as triglycerides. This is the cause of us putting on weight, especially visceral fat around the tummy.
It is therefore the consumption of medium and high levels of carbohydrate foods, along with poor-quality hydrogenated vegetable oils, that have caused us to become fat, not the consumption of healthy animal fats.
Unfortunately, we have all been sold the biggest health lie in the history of the world, and this has created a global epidemic of chronic disease… and massive wealth for a small number of massive global processed food corporations that are complicit in helping people to an early grave.
Blood sugar regulation is a hardwired system in our bodies. Our bodies have the innate intelligence to regulate all their systems. However, today, the intelligence of the body has been largely impeded by stress.
This stress is not just the normal stress you would think about, but rather the significant stress our bodies are put under by having to react to hourly dips and high of blood sugar levels.
Our fear of the very thing that we are led to believe makes us FAT and gives us heart disease is actually the one thing that, if we include it in our diet, can help improve our health.
The best macronutrient for the heart is FAT – our hearts need FAT to operate in an optimized state. Inflammation is the true cause of heart disease. So what causes inflammation? You guessed it: high-carb diets, high insulin levels, processed foods, stress, smoking, and alcohol.
Low cholesterol is not healthy. Low cholesterol is linked with depression, aggression, Alzheimer’s, and suicidal thoughts, to name only a few negatives. Cholesterol is required to make brain cells. You need cholesterol for memory and cognitive function.
Yes, the pharmaceutical industry that makes $30 billion a year is now even pushing for children to take cholesterol-lowering drugs when they are as young as 5 years. T
hey are driving to change the health policies of safe levels of cholesterol. If that isn’t like putting the fox in the chicken coop, I don’t know what is.
Well-meaning researchers wanted to cure the population of heart disease, but they jumped in too fast and sought fame, and they started passionate experiments with ingrained hypotheses.
When the results did not align, they discarded those results and only used the data that supported their beliefs. They then gained positions on the most influential boards and government panels to influence dietary guidelines.
They jumped the gun. The notion that fat makes you fat and eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol are ingrained in our beliefs and seem logical and true. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is this simple concept of “fat makes you fat and eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol” that actually requires a lot of science and understanding to de-bunk, and therein lies the problem.
To prove a simple theory wrong, you have to have a great understanding to truly believe what is counterintuitive. I and many others call this “challenging a belief.”
Sugar of all types is a drug that strips us of our innate intelligence and our dynamic balance to manage our bodies and health. Remember, most low-fat foods are full of sugar.
Let’s challenge beliefs more, as sometimes, we will find that our beliefs are wrong – like that eating healthy fats makes you fat.
If this has piqued your interest, head over to my resources page – subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll be able to access plenty more useful content and hints directly from my members-only resource page.
Clinical trial research shows that people who reduce total carbs are the ones who see the benefit in terms of weight loss, blood glucose control, and lipid markers.
If you really want to get one of the best books on this topic, Nina Teicholz, who reviewed my blog post, provided me with the note below to make more people aware of her book, which I have now read three times and is an international best-seller.
The Big Fat Surprise explains the politics, personalities, and history of how we came to believe that dietary fat is bad for our health. The Big Fat Surprise was also the first mainstream publication to make the full argument for why saturated fats – the kind found in dairy, meat, and eggs – are not bad for our health.
The Economist named it the best science book of 2014 and called it a “nutrition thriller.” The BMJ praised the book in an extensive review, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said, “All scientists…and every nutrition science professional…should read this book.”
Download a pdf version of “Why Do We Get FAT?” (239 kB)
Andre Obradovic is an ICF Leadership PPC Level Coach, A Primal Health Coach, a Certified Low Carb Healthy Fat Coach, & a Certified Personal Trainer. Andre is also a Founding member of the Dr. Phil Maffetone MAF certified Coach. He is an Ambassador for the Noakes Foundation, and a regular subject matter expert lecturer for the Nutrition Network (a part of the Noakes Foundation) Andre has completed 16 x 70.3 Ironmans and in 2017 he competed in the 70.3 Ironman World Championships. He has completed 18 Marathons and over 30 Half Marathons. Andre currently focuses his athletic competition on Track and Field with the occasional Marathon.
