The Biggest Loser, Part IIthe horror continuesThe Obesity Manifesto
15 September 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Whats the worst show on TV? The Biggest Loser in a landslide. Its one thing to be bad and its another to be harmful and injurious to participants. The idea is to sequester a bunch of obese people in a mansion in Los Angeles and try and see who can lose the most bodyweight in the proscribed period of time. This years abomination began with a bang: the show outlined the diet the selectees would be subjected topure prison camp stuff: 400-pound men limited to 1500 to 2000 calories? Under the rules of the Geneva Convention limiting a prisoner of war to 3.75 calories per pound of body weight would be grounds for indictment as a war criminal. Then there are the trainers: what a pair of losers. The Nazi babe has obviously been told to tone her cruel mouth down a notch but her horrific brand of training sadism rolls ever on. Watch the fat men suffer as the little death camp guard makes men who could easily generate a 90% of age-related heart rate maximum by simply walking run (not jog) while carrying her on their backs. Watch the sensitive metrosexual trainer make the obese women who couldnt carry two bags of groceries from the checkout line to the car without getting so winded run up the side of a mountain. Why? To what end? So the television audience can get their ya-yas out, for the same reason people watch auto racing for the fatal crashes? There is no scientific rational that supports the contention that overwork and starvation is physically beneficial on the contrary this is a recipe for disaster.
Again, the formula of working people beyond capacity and then starving them is pure prison camp methodology. Any physician who recommended this type of high impact aerobic activity combined with the restricted diet used on this show would be in danger of being sued successfully for malpractice. Here we have a situation where totally untrained individuals are suddenly told to run, jump and endlessly ride on cardio machines in massive mindless daily doses on endless exercise. When untrained tendons, ligaments, muscle attachments and insertion points are subjected to repeat violent jarring, the risk of tearing, ripping, shredding or shearing these soft-as-butter body parts always lurks just around the corners. What are the TV show directors thinking? Do these trainers actually believe and recommend this torture - or are they doing it at the insistence of producers seeking high Nielsen ratings? No acclimatization or gradualness, no ramp up or sensitivity for the specific circumstance of the individual, just demand poor pathetic fat people undertake athletic feats and stresses that would tax a 10-year trainee. As you know Ill be working with obese folks in the near future and my approach will diametrically oppose everything the Loser represent; from every angle and on every level. Dont beat people up in the gym then starve them: this triggers catabolism and when catabolism takes root no progress is possible. When a person triggers catabolism the human body will cannibalize its own muscle to feed itself. You might lose body weight but since most of it will be muscle in the end the participant still looks fat because they still ARE fat.
Optimally we feed the body nutrients that are nearly impossible to end up stored as body fat: lean protein and fibrous carbohydrates are either used for energy or used to build muscle tissue. Secondly we break the daily caloric allotment into smaller feedings instead of taking all our calories in during three traditional meals. 3,000 calories spread over six feedings of 500 are far superior to three traditional meals of 1,000. Multiple meals also take into account the phenomena of positive nitrogen balance. When an individual is in PNB, the optimal metabolic state, all the prerequisites needed for muscle tissue to grow are present and accounted for. Establishing and maintaining PNB is dependent on providing the body with a steady source of calories. We can have our PNB cake and eat it to by supplying the body calories every 2-3 hours AND making sure those calories are comprised of nutrients that are difficult for the body to convert into body fat. We take into account anabolism (good), catabolism (bad), positive nitrogen balance (good), negative nitrogen balance (bad) and by setting up an intelligent multiple meal schedule we lessen the digestive burden: the worst thing an obese individual can do is teach the body to live on one meal a day then overload the digestive system for that single meal.
One hypothetical approach could be laid out as follows: assume that our individual weighs 200-pounds with a 30% body fat percentile. The person carries 140 pounds of lean body mass (LBM = muscle tissue, bones, organs) and 60 pounds of body fat. We allot the individual 15-calories per pound of LBM, which comes to 2,100 calories per day. These calories are then broken out into a daily feeding schedule as follows:
Meal 1 6am breakfast 600 calories
Meal 2 9am snack 100 calories
Meal 3 12 noon lunch 600 calories
Meal 4 3pm snack 100 calories
Meal 5 6pm dinner 600 calories
Meal 6 9pm snack 100 calories
Reality would be different than our illustrative example. Meals and snacks would not break out into perfect little identical caloric allotments but the schematic shows how the ideal dietary template is set up. There is great symmetry and balance to this approach. By using lean protein and fibrous carbohydrate to near exclusion we build the metabolism, to lift a phrase from my nutritional mentor. Think of the metabolism as the bodys thermostat, similar to the thermostat you have in your house. Obese people have turned their thermostat way down and taught their body how to become super-efficient at using calories. We seek to elevate the bodys thermostat, make it wildly inefficient in its use of calories. To use another appropriate analogy: an obese individual has a metabolism akin to a fuel efficient compact car that obtains 45-miles per gallon; we seek to transform this caloric efficiency into a gas guzzling (calorically demanding) 5000-pound 1966 Cadillac Eldorado with a 500-cubic inch engine that gets 7-miles to the gallon. We seek to transform the obese persons pathetically slow metabolism into a blast furnace. A 400-pound sedentary individual will often exist on 900 to 1200 calories a day and when they binge on a 400-calorie ice cream cone they gain three pounds.
Activity elevates the metabolism. Certain food types (lean protein/fibrous carbohydrates) elevate the metabolism as the bodys digestive system must gear up to break these nutrients down. Adding muscle elevates the metabolism as muscle is a metabolically active tissue and every pound of muscle requires 30-40 calories per day to exist: adding ten pounds of muscle fairly easy to do for an out of shape untrained individual will require the body burn an additional 400-calories per day to sustain the new muscle. This is the caloric equivalent of a 40-minute cardio session that burns 10-calories per minute. Putting all the nutritional aspects into play requires the obese individual will eat often but eat only nutrients that ramp up the metabolism and are difficult to end up compartmentalized (stored) as body fat. To recapitulate: clean up the food selections, break the daily caloric allotment down into smaller chunks, use cardio exercise to elevate that basal metabolic rate and use weight training to build additional metabolically active muscle tissue.
Tomorrow well turn to exercise what kind, when and why.
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