I was definitely overweight at 104kg (I’m 6’0”) but I wouldn’t say overly so.
I’m looking to get to 75kg but I wouldn’t term that as “normal” as I’m aiming to get back to single digit body fat %
Happy to report that the gym sessions are reaping benefits already. My running had plataeud, but my last run got me back to just below my best time for a given route. Tonight I knocked another 30 seconds off it. No real weight change but undoubtedly a much stronger run.
Now to keep my hands out the biscuit tin.
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Interesting
This is a decent primer on the various components of energy balance and how there can be compensation in one component in response to changes in another.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3696411/
I think the thing I’d encourge people to take form it is how big NEAT is (see figure below)
This covers energy expenditure from doing fidgety stuff. Given how much effort is required to increase exercise energy expenditure (30 mins on a treadmill of decently hard work might get you 400kcal), what you can see from the figure is how easily that can be balanced out with room to spare with compensatory changes in NEAT in the other direction.
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14st and a little bit. So close……
So I had a massive roast beef dinner as I was hungry as fuck. Spent the morning grafting so should compensate. The booze for the football and now at poker doesn’t count.
Makes sense that RMR accounts for 50% caloric expenditure. Doesn’t your RMR go higher the fitter (VO2Max being one measure) and stronger (more functional muscle mass) you are?
Fitness, no. But it will go up with weight gain
So if I want to break that 50 doo da barrier on my vo2 max I need to get fatter?
I did wonder this being stuck on 48 at the moment.
No no, you can train up your VO2Max but that won’t affect your RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate), that’s what @Limiescouse said.
Was a bit tongue in cheek to be honest but thanks for the clarification.
Extra motivation to lose weight this evening. 2nd session back at the climbing wall and I’m already feeling too heavy.
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An excellent podcast here regarding the relationship between exercise and weight loss. And some interesting findings regarding the relationship between Fasting and Exercise.
The guest presenter is a trainer for the INEOS Tour De France team and a professor at the University of Bath.
The Zoe organisation is a really well run and interesting research team dedicated to Health and Nutrition.
Will definitely watch that.
But this is a bummer as I was considering a fasting regime again. Despite beating myself in the gym I’ve actually gained weight over the last two weeks.
Who drinks a sugary drink after having a coffee? Your breakfast should have protein, fat and fibre that a sugary drink doesn’t which will blunt the spike in glucose.
Huberman and a few others online theorise that it’s best to wait a little while after waking to consume caffeine anyway, say 60-90 minutes, due to its relationship with cortisol and adenosine. This is what I do now, I have the bulk of my caffeine intake in that period and anecdotally I’ve found I sleep better as a result.
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I think (hope) that the sugary drink was purely there as something they can measure the insulin response from. Otherwise yeah, I dont touch any sugar drinks at all but I dont doubt there are people out there that do. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people out there that would swear by a Red Bull first thing in the morning. 
Otherwise still need to sort my diet into something measurable and works with my oddities. Slowly finding a way into this I think. I’m finding ways to kerb the hunger pangs late evening, keeping my head out of the cookie jar and slowly finding foods that work for me and those that dont. I’m finding that it not only impacts my running / general energy levels but is making a huge difference to sleep. I’m avoiding caffiene in the afternoon, which has had a more subtle effect than I thought but also too many carbs seems to do odd things for some unbeknown reason to me. I’ll caveat that and say that is this past week. Next week may be different. Next steps are increasing that food knowledge and looking at calorie control. I suspect I’m way off in that department.
Also speaking to a very knowledgeable guy at the gym this morning. He’s at least over 55 maybe in his 60’s and in pretty incredible shape to be fair. Discussing the benefits of resistance training and fasting, especially over 50 and older. Will be definitely picking his brains a little more when I see him.
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Got so close to my target, so very close. Then I bought a few packs of biscuits for a meeting at work. Got the booking (great) but then there was a full packet of jammie dodgers looking at me……
Yeah no doubt, but measuring the insulin response from a meal would surely have been more insightful. I’m sure their budget could have stretched to some egg on toast.
My late night hunger snack hack is a protein yoghurt with a piece of satieting fruit like apple or orange, I can usually satisty any cravings with that combo. At the moment I’m bulking though so it’s hob knobs or ginger nuts with a cup of tea.
That was my excuse
Similar. I make a smoothie out of oat milk, ground flax, coconut yogurt and some berries. Very tasty.
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Then spend the next 30 minutes losing half a stone down the shitter?
Doesn’t have that effect on me to be honest.
Weight loss via the Big White Telephone isn’t working either.
The test they did is called an oral glucose tolerance test. It is designed to spike blood sugar so you can measure how high its spikes and how long it stays elevated. Measuring insulin sensitivity directly is very complex and so this easier test is a reasonable surrogate for it. They are not completely the same and so the results have to be interpreted with caution, but under most conditions the lower the peak and the less time blood sugar is elevated for the better the insulin sensitivity. The downside it is, as you suggest, a very artificial circumstances. It is done on an empty stomach and uses a sugary drink containing a large amount of easy to digest sugar (75g) that has to be consumed in 5 mins. It’s like drinking treacle. The standardization is needed to remove other variables that might influence how blood sugar responds, but it has close to zero ecological validity meaning it is often dangerous to extrapolate the results to meaningful real world situations. Such as eating an actual meal.
With that said, the biggest issue with this study is that it doesnt tell us anything, and certainly doesn’t tell us what they think it does. It is already well known that caffeine decreases insulins sensitivity, and does so regardless of whether it’s consumed on an empty stomach or not. This study doesnt show anything about it being any worse on an empty stomach than if done after eating, nor does it even show any effect of lack of sleep, which it seemed to be designed to test. To do that they’d have needed to have tested caffeine plus normal night sleep and that group was not included int he design.
So what does the study tell us? That caffeine negatively affects a surrogate measures or insulin resistance that has no ecological validity meaning that any practical recommendations based on this are based on very shaky grounds, especially given the wealth of health benefits shown from outcome related research on coffee intake.
Weirdly, their narrative seems to be focusing on cortisol, which they didn’t measure, and despite us already having a really good model for explaining why caffeine has these effects. The nervous system has a preference for glucose and so during times of low food availability the body has to preserve blood glucose. However as blood glucose is well regulated and maintained in fairly tight limits the body needs what is called a second messenger to signal the need to make this switch. The most robust one is fatty acids. So anything that promotes release of fat from the fat cells has the potential to induce impaired glucose tolerance/insulin resistance if there isnt an equitable increase in energy expenditure to burn them. Caffeine is a potent stimulator of lipolysis, which explains why it does what it does to blood sugar in the short term.