By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

Question: If you would allow me a brief intro . . . my name is Leland Hammonds and I am a 29 year old Kinesiology professor here in San Antonio, Texas. I also own my own personal training business. For the last three years, I have spent approx three hours a day, six days a week studying nutrition and exercise research as they relate to fat loss. It consumes my every waking thought.

Although I do absolutely no marketing – I am booked solid Mon-Fri early mornings and late evenings (basically every second I am not at the college) with fat-loss clients. I believe this has more to do with my client selection/admission process and absolutely constant nagging about nutrition (I normally do not allow a client to continue training with me if they don’t get their nutrition right within the first few weeks of training). All my clients are referrals and almost all of them want fat loss.

That being said, although I read research incessantly, I was very apprehensive about using the internet and hearing what the “fitness experts” are saying and advocating. While I still believe a strong filter should be in place, I am so glad I changed my mind. Your articles, interviews, and books and been such a help to me, I felt obligated to thank you via email (I have also enjoyed Alan Aragon, Alwyn Cosgrove, and a few others but your work has really inspired me – end of dorky praise).

I have a few questions for you (sorry I am not using the forum – but basically they piss me off and I am always dumber for reading the crap in them), I know you are busy so I will just ask one (for now). First, I have read tons of your articles on the internet (I think I even found something you may have doodled on a napkin and threw away and somehow it made it to a website!) and I have only found that you mentioned multiplying a woman’s bodyweight for 14 and a man’s by 15 to calculate maintenance calories.

Because your a true nerd like me, I don’t believe that what you would actually do with a client (figured you mentioned it for simplicity and not to blow your readers minds) and was wondering if you would share what equation, formula, or what have you that you to set maintenance calories, taking age, weights, height, and current activity level into consideration.

By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

Q: Love your articles…keep up the great work!What is most efficient pharmaceutical/herb for blunting appetite?

Q: I just read your review of EPOC. Probably 16 years ago I read a study done at Laval U. It compared fat loss from steady exercise vs short bouts of intense exercise all done on a stat bike. Like the article, there was little difference in calorie burn between the two groups. But the intense group had significantly greater fat loss than the steady group. The researchers has no real answer as to why that happened. I wondered back then if it could be explained by the intense exercise stimulating growth hormone (GH). GH has a steroid-like effect on the body, accelerating fat loss among other effects.

Question: I have three of your books and find them very informative. I have a question you do not address in your books. Does taking Benedryl (dyphenhydramine) negatively affect either muscle building or fat loss?

By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

Over the weekend I did a podcast for Patrick Ward and Keat’s Snidemans Reality Based Fitness site and one of the topics came up had to do with flexible dieting and the full diet break.  This is something that I wrote about in both A Guide to Flexible Dieting and The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook but it occurred to me that there really wasn’t any information about it on the main site.

So that’s the topic of today’s article:: The Full Diet Break.  What it is and why and how (to a limited degree), to do it.

By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

With the holidays looming, and all of the food and candy that that entails, I wanted to write a quick article post about a topic that I consider very important. In fact, it’s so important to the goal of long-term body composition changes that I wrote an entire book (A Guide to Flexible Dieting) about it.

Over the years, I’ve seen a particular pattern that is pretty endemic among the body obsessed: that is what dietary behavior researchers would call rigid dieting patterns (restrained dieting might be a little more accurate here but I don’t want to get into the distinction that deeply).

Note: The following is the entirety of Chapter 5 from A Guide to Flexible Dieting.

In this chapter, I want to discuss some two of the primary ways that dieters tend to sabotage their own efforts on a diet, that is the way that dieters fail diets. These two ways are being too absolute and expecting perfection and by thinking only in the short-term.

And before you complain about how bad it is form wise to write a short introductory paragraph instead of just going straight into the text, I’ll defend my style choice by explaining that I don’t like starting a chapter with a bold-faced sub-category. So there.

By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

This week, several people have brought a recent case-study to my attention and asked me for comment.  In it, a 51 year old female began marathon training along with a (self-reported) low calorie diet and either appears to have gained weight or not lost weight (she also showed a very depressed metabolic rate, nearly 30% below predicted).

By raising her calories gradually, her body fat (as measured by BIA) came down and her metabolic rate increased.  Now, without more details, it’s hard to really comment on this and the link to the case study is the total amount of information available.

But we’ve got an older (either post-menopausal or peri-menopausal) woman, undisclosed anti-depressant medication, self-reported food intake and a method of body fat measurement that is, at best, problematic (read Methods of Body Composition Measurement Part 2 for more details).  Odd things happen metabolically around menopause, some medications can cause issues, food reporting is notoriously inaccurate and BIA isn’t ideal to track changes.  Then again, the measured metabolic rate change is pretty interesting; something was going on.

By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

Ok, seriously, time to finish this thing up.  In Training the Obese Beginner: Part 5, I made a case for the inclusion of both weight training and cardiovascular training for the obese beginner, despite having listed some initial limitations to both in earlier parts of the series.  I also described what I did generally as far as a first workout session with my beginners, including the obese.

Today I want to look specifically at how I approached training (again noting that there are obviously more ways to approach the situation than just this one).  I’ll also look a bit at some things I might do differently now as well as talking about progressions, variation, etc. to keep the obese beginner moving towards their goals.  And I will finish today even if it ends up being long.

We catch up with a beginning trainee just having done roughly 30 minutes of paperwork and possibly some basic measurements (tape measure, weight, skinfolds, depending on the situation) leaving roughly 30 minutes or thereabouts for the first workout.  What did I have them do?

By Lyle McDonald: www.bodyrecomposition.com

Well, I had really hoped to finish up today since I have something else to talk about next week but, well….Tuesday or today’s installment will be unreadably long, even for me.  Today, I want to start to bring together everything I’ve talked about, addressing why I think the inclusion of both weight training and cardiovascular training of some sort is important for the obese beginner and why both should be done from day 1.

After that I’ll talk about how I approached the first workout with obese (or non-) beginners in terms of structure and some generalities of training and such.  Finally (really, I mean it) on Tuesday I’ll truly finish up and talk about progressions, when and how to increase things and keep the beginning obese trainer progressing.

Let me note up front that some of what I’m going to write simply represents what I did/found to work in this population when I was working as a personal trainer, some of it will be more what I would do now were I still working with that population.  You’ll note that nothing really would change now except in degree (e.g. I might do things a touch differently in the weight room in terms of rep ranges or total volume).