HELP! Having my lunch later is making me fat!

The other day I was down the shops minding my own business when I overheard a girl say to her boyfriend “The reason I’m putting on weight is because I’m having lunch two hours later than normal” immediately my ears were pricked as my BS detector began sensing some activity. She went on to say “My personal trainer told me that my body thinks it’s going to starve so it then grabs hold of the calories and doesn’t let them go”. Needless to say my BS detector was off the scale at this point.

Starvation Mode

What this young lady was referring to was something called ‘starvation mode’ and unfortunately within fitness circles it is more common to hear about starvation mode than it is to see Ant and Dec on the telly!

It centres on the idea that if you go without eating for more than a few hours your body senses this and thinks that is going to starve. The body then reacts to this perceived threat of starvation by decreasing it’s resting metabolic rate (the rate at which your body burns calories at rest) which in turn makes it easier for you to put on weight.

In short starvation mode is the idea that if you don’t eat regularly the rate at which your body burns calories slows down which in turn makes it easier for you to put on weight.

This is all pretty logical and makes perfect sense, right? Wrong!

The All Important Research

I know this may not be a trendy thing to do but if you have a look at the research there is just not the evidence to back up these claims. In a recent analysis of the numerous studies investigating whether eating frequent meals is beneficial for body composition, (amongst other things) the authors concluded that there is no evidence that the body goes into starvation mode.

Sssshhhh! Say it quietly but on this extremely rare occasion the girlfriend was wrong!

Now, the girlfriend in question can probably come up with more reasons as to why she was putting on weight than there are syllable’s in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name but the likely answer is she was consuming more calories through food than she was burning through physical activity! Regardless of what time she was eating her lunch, or her breakfast or dinner for that matter.

Now I know this is not a very exciting notion but if you want to lose fat the most important thing you have to do is control your overall calorie intake. Going a few hours or so without eating matters about as much as the words that come out of Piers Morgan’s mouth – very little!  

To book your free trial session, or for any fitness and nutrition advice please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks for reading.

Matt

     matt@mlrpt.co.uk                               www.mlrpt.co.uk                              07939316401

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FITNESS LESSONS FROM A STAG DO!

Recently I was invited to friend’s stag do – a weekend away in Bournemouth, owing to the soon to be groom being such an erudite, debonair young man, he had many, many friends clambering to be part of the festivities (either that or they just fancied a weekend away on the lash).

Either way this led to a bit of dilemma for the best man for he was a stressed control freak and wanted to plan everything down to the most minor detail. This became glaringly apparent when making travel arrangements - he wanted to hire a coach so that everyone could travel together.

However, this was never going to happen, some were of course happy to travel by coach but some wanted to go by train and others wanted to drive.

This caused the best man to worry like an Olympic sprinter with the drug testers at the door, for he wanted everyone to arrive at our destination all together at the same time.

Fast-forward to the actual stag do itself and oddly enough despite the best man’s endless worrying and attempted interfering with everyone else’s travel plans, every single person arrived at our destination at more or less at the same time (give or take half an hour) whatever mode of transport they took.

The obligatory strip bar (it is a stag do after all)
Later that evening as the rest of the stag-do were enjoying the adult art provided by the extremely friendly ladies in the strip bar, I of course opted to wait outside (I had to put that in just in case my wife reads this) it dawned on me that I could draw parallels with the best man’s travel saga and people trying to reach their fitness goals, in that there are multiple paths to the same destination.

Just as some of the lads in the stag party preferred taking the train rather than the coach, some people prefer high intensity interval training (HIIT) to low intensity, long distance training.

Likewise, just as some of the gentleman chose to travel by car rather than coach, some people enjoy doing one set of as many repetitions as possible when weight training as opposed to doing multiple sets.

Anyway the examples are endless and I think you get my drift.

Tabata Training

There are numerous studies out there which back up one form of training over another and the vogue method of training at the moment seems to be Tabata which is great if you enjoy working really, really hard, however if you don’t and you prefer perhaps a more sedate form of exercise this is obviously not for you as you are not likely to do it and therefore not reap any of its benefits.

I of course have my preferred methods of training which work for me, the trick is to find which method works for you.

Sir Steve Redgrave

Perhaps Sir Steve Redgrave (British Olympic rowing legend) puts is best with his take on training. When discussing the huge success he enjoyed using different training regimes employed for each of his Olympic gold medals (which included HIIT, low intensity high mileage training, training with weights, not training with weights) he said “It probably doesn’t matter a great deal about how we train, we just need to do a lot of it and with plenty of variety”.

For help finding your perfect training programme and to book a free trial session, or of course just to find out what the hell Tabata actually is (don’t worry, once you know the whole truth about it you won’t be that impressed), please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

     matt@mlrpt.co.uk                               www.mlrpt.co.uk                              07939316401

 www.twitter.com/mlrpt                www.facebook.com/mlrpt            www.twitter.com/mlrpt