Can you Become Obese by Eating Just an Extra Bite of Food per Day?

Jane Brody (veteran food columnist for the New York Times) recently reported, “According to researchers is easy to gain weight unwittingly from a very small imbalance in the number of calories consumed over calories used.” Brody continues, “Just 10 extra calories a day is all it takes to raise the body weight of the average person by 20-pounds in 30 years, the authors wrote.”

What do you think Ms. Brody meant in the preceding statement?

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Weight Loss Math Uproar: Sorting it out!

An article recently published in the medical journal Lancet,[i] authored by Kevin Hall PhD, a biophysicist at the National Institutes of Health set off some erroneous news coverage on the effect of calorie-restriction on weight loss.

Since there is too much misinformation from the “reporting” on this research paper to try to set straight in a single blog, I’m going to devote my next few blogs to clearing up one piece of confusion at a time.

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Breakfast Boosts Metabolism – Fact or Fiction?

Have you ever wondered if breakfast really boosts your metabolism—as you so often hear?

ANSWER: False

As a health educator I can give you a lot of good reasons to eat breakfast—the notion that it boosts your metabolism, however, isn't one of them!

Digesting food does “cost” an average of 10% of a meal's calories to digest and assimilate it (see TEF, below). However, is that really a “boost” in metabolism? No, it is not. When you read these claims that "breakfast boosts your metabolism" it's implied that eating breakfast has an affect on your underlying metabolic rate. That is simply not the case. The only metabolic affect of eating breakfast is the commensurate TEF, just as for any meal.

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Weight Training and Weight Control...

Strength training has lots of benefits -- for people of all ages -- and ideally it should be a component of a balanced overall fitness program. However, for the average person (following the average gym-based workout routine) it won't have a clinically significant affect on their Resting Metabolic Rate.

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Set-Point Theory: Fact or Fiction?

It’s not uncommon to hear both lay persons and professionals matter-of-factly refer to the “starvation response” (also called metabolic adaptation) and “set-point theory” as if they were accepted facts. The supposition of these theories is that the body reacts to reduced energy intake, or weight loss, by lowering its basal metabolic rate in an attempt to maintain the current weight or return to a higher weight.

These theories however, have not survived sound scientific investigation, and those researchers who are familiar with this area of medical literature have known that for almost 20-years. Three comprehensive reviews of the literature in 1992, 1994, and 1995[i]^,[ii]^,[iii] all reached the same conclusions that:

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