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A reader sent me a note over the weekend asking me what I thought of the HCG diet. To be honest, I never even heard of it, but hey, I’m always open to learning about new things. So I turned to my trust search engine (hi Google!) and started researching. Here’s what I came up with.

What Is It?

HCG is a diet regimen in which you limit your daily calorie intake to less than 500 calories a day.  At the same time, you inject yourself with HCG, Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, a hormone found in the placenta of pregnant women.

Does It Work?

Assuming you’re still curious after hearing that you’ll have to inject yourself daily with hormones from the a human placenta, then yes, this diet works.  Dah! OF COURSE it works.  YOU’RE EATING 500 CALORIES A DAY! Heck, at 500 calories a day anyone would lose weight and the injections have nothing to do with it.  You can inject me every hour with hormones from the testicles of a rabid hyena and I’m still relatively sure I would lose weight on a diet of 500 calories a day.  It’s not magic folks, it’s simply starving yourself, and the hormone injections are just pseudo science intended to fool you.

Do I Recommend It?

In case that last sentence didn’t get the point across.  NO.  NO WAY.  NOT A CHANCE.  NO CHANCE IN HELL.  This diet is crap.  You’re starving yourself plus you’re injecting yourself with something that has no basis in science.  If you want to starve yourself, be my guest, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s healthy just because some one put scientific sounding words in the description.

Seriously

1. The diet claims you will lose .5 to 3lbs A DAY.  Even if you starve yourself you won’t lose this much.  3lbs lost a day means you burned 9000 more calories than you took in.  Unless you’re Michael Phelps, your metabolism just doesn’t work that way.  Anyone promising you more than 1 to 2 lbs lost in a week is either a quack or a liar, or both.
2. Speaking of liars and quacks, let’s do some research.  The guy who’s selling this diet, Kevin Trudeau, was busted multiple times already.  Once by the FTC for claiming his calcium supplement cured cancer and another time by the FTC because Trudeau “has misled thousands of consumers” about his weight loss plans.  This is the guy you want to buy hormone shots from?  I’d rather take stock tips from my 6 month old nephew.
3. While we’re on the subject of nutrition, the American Journal of clinical nutrition already looked into HCG and guess what they found?  It’s useless.  That was back in the 70’s, but hey, I guess everything old is new again at some point.

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Repeat after me, there are NO quick fixes.  There are no easy cures for extra weight.  There are no magic weight loss plans, no magic pills, no wonder drugs.  You want to be fit and healthy?  Eat healthy, be active and exercise.  It’s that simple.

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Today’s post was guest written by Heather Johnson, from Nursing Degree.

Debunking the Diet Myths

You’ve heard everyone from your mother to next-door neighbor tell you how to keep the weight off after you’ve successfully reached your weight-loss goal. Some of these tips certainly have their credence but many are devoid of any value. It boils down to you knowing your body and what your body can handle as you try to keep the body you worked so hard to attain. Take any advice with a grain of salt. Just know that some of what you hear is complete nonsense. Here are a few of the myths that are just not true and ones you should avoid:

1. Cut your meals down. The idea that you have to starve yourself to keep the weight off is not only ludicrous but dangerous. Low-calorie diets are completely unhealthy and should only be adhered to when ordered by a physician. The only acceptable reason for such a diet is if losing weight is mandated by a serious medical condition.
2. The fad diet is just that – a fad. All fads pass. Remember bell-bottoms, afros and the pet rock? Yeah, they’re all gone and this is what will happen to the fad diet. Lose 30 pounds in a month? If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. If you go on a crash diet and see immediate results it’s probably due to water loss. This won’t last as the true way to lose weight is to lose the fat.
3. Eat everything and still lose weight. Once again, common sense needs to be applied here. If you intake more calories than you burn you’re not going to lose weight. Putting anything in your body besides water is going to add calories to your mass. You lose the calories by performing cardiovascular activities. It’s simple math, just make sure you pay attention to it.
4. Try a bunch of different diets. Jumping around from one diet to another is not the answer. If you keep fluctuating what your diet is then you’re setting yourself up for failure. Sticking to one dietary program is much healthier in the long run than trying all the different diets you hear and read about.
5. Just because it worked him doesn’t mean it will work for you. Hey, you get lots of great ideas from your friends. Just remember that because a diet worked for one person doesn’t equate into success for you. We’re all built differently and we have different needs when it comes to dieting. Stick to what works for you and applaud your friends and family when they achieve success.

By-line:

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of nursing schools in Georgia. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

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That’s the question I got over email last night from someone who happened to stumble upon 60 in 3. I responded back with most of the same information I’m about to post here and exchanged a few more emails with this person. They proved to be quite intelligent and I would like to thank them for allowing me to use this conversation as a post topic; it’s not easy sometimes to admit that you don’t know something other people consider to be basic truth.

Can You Lose Weight In A Specific Area?

Despite every infomercial that tells you it has the machine that melts belly fat or the exercise regime that shapes your thighs, it’s actually very difficult to do spot fixes on your body, especially when it comes to losing fat. Where your body stores fat is determined mostly by genetics and gender. Most men tend to store fat in the belly area while most women tend to store fat in the thighs and rear end. This isn’t always true but it’s generally accurate. Once you put on enough fat, the body will start storing it everywhere it can which is why very obese people don’t just have thick thighs or large bellies.

No Spot Losses

This is bad news because it means that we can’t diet in a way that specifically targets certain areas of the body. There’s just no way to lose the love handles. Also, making radical changes to your body in two weeks is almost impossible and usually unhealthy. To lose weight the healthy way, you’re going to want to lose between 1 to 2 lbs per week. Anything more than that and you’re probably doing damage to your body by starving yourself and cannibalizing muscles.

Exercise is slightly different. You can actually target different muscles in exercise. However, building stronger belly muscles is not going to specifically target belly fat, it will just mean that you have good muscle tone under that belly fat.

So What’s The Answer?

Well, the answer is the same as always. Eat a healthy diet, lead an active life and exercise at regular intervals. Eventually, your body will become fit and those love handles will go away. The down side is that it takes more time than two weeks. The upside is that you end up feeling good and looking good all over rather than just losing weight around your belly.

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There are no miracle solutions in health. Anyone who promises you major changes in two weeks is more than likely trying to sell you something.

NOTE - Right after I posted this ad I noticed an advertisement on 60 in 3 called “learn the secret to losing belly fat”.  Needless to say, I went ahead and blocked it.  If you see other such ads for junk health sites like this one, please let me know.

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The title of this post is a paraphrasing of a famous quote by Warren Buffet, the famous investor who’s one of the wealthiest people in the world today.  His point is that lots of things can be measured, but unless those measurements have meaning, then they’re useless.

How Do You Measure Your Health and Fitness?

What are you using as a measurable metric of your health and fitness?  That is, what number do you keep track off to see how well you’re doing fitness wise?  For almost everyone I talk to, the answer is probably weight.  Everyone keeps track of weight, including me.  Unfortunately, for most people, the ONLY number being tracked is weight.

We use weight to measure our success in controlling eating.  We use it to measure our success at exercise.  We even use it to measure our overall health, with people who weigh more being considered less healthy.  Well you know what, weight in and of itself is totally useless and if you’re using weight as the sole measure of your fitness, you’re making a big mistake.

What’s Wrong With Using Weight?

• No account for height - Do you really know how much you should weigh?  My wife is 6′ tall, how much should she weigh compared to my friend who is 5′2″?  How much more weight should your body carry per extra inch of height?  Do you know the ideal weight range for your height?
• No account for gender - On average, women have a higher percentage of body fat while men have a higher percentage of muscle mass.  So should a man and a woman, both 5′10″ weight the same?  Should I at 5′11″ weigh less than my wife at 6′?
• No account for muscle mass - Here’s the worst part about weight.  It can actually tell you you’re doing well when you’re getting worse and vice versa.  That’s because muscle is dense and fat is only a small percentage of your body.  So losing weight could mean losing muscle and that’s a bad thing.  If I stopped working out I could lose weight.  Sounds odd but it’s true.  As my muscle mass shrank, my body would weigh less assuming I controlled my eating.  So my weight could go down but my overall health and fitness would decrease.  If you started exercising, you might actually gain a bit of weight or at least stay at your current weight because the muscle you’re adding weighs more than the fat you’re losing.  However, you’d be far healthier, fitter and slimmer with the added muscle and reduced fat.

So Weight Is A Bad Measurement?

Not completely.  In general, weight loss does correspond with increased fitness and health.  However, if the only measurement you use is weight, then it’s meaningless since there could be a whole lot of other things going on.

What Other Measurement Should I Use?

• BMI - I’m not a big fan of BMI since it doesn’t take muscle mass into account, but at least it’s more accurate than weight alone.  There are numerous websites that can help you measure this.
• Body Fat % - A much more accurate measurement of how good the composition of your body is.
• Resting heart rate - Measure your heart rate when you wake up after a good night’s sleep to see how well your cardiovascular system is doing.
• Active heart rate - Measure your heart rate after 3 to 5 minutes of cardio exercise.
• Strength - There are a variety of these.  For example, see how many barbell presses you can do at a rate of one every two seconds.  For men, do these with an 80lb weight.  For women, a 35lb weight.  There are numerous other strength and flexibility tests.  A personal trainer can help you with these tests.
• Cholesterol and blood pressure - Have you had your physical this year?  If not, why not?  I’m a big fan of staying away from the doctor’s office and I try to avoid the “there’s a prescription drug for every minor issue” mentality that a lot of people have, but I do strongly believe in a yearly physical.  During this physical your doctor can help you check on a variety of health measurements.

So Which One of These Should I Use?

Ideally?  All of them.  Now before you panic, keep in mind that you don’t need to track them every day.  In fact, that would be a little crazy.  Realistically, you should track these monthly or even yearly.  For example, I track my BMI and weight once a month.  I track my heart rate measurement and do my strength tests every 6 months and I have a physical during which I find out my blood pressure and cholesterol once a year.  That’s a pretty minimal amount of time required to get a very detailed picture of how well I’m doing health and fitness wise.  I know people who spend far more time than this every month balancing their checkbooks, tracking their friends on Facebook and catching up on the latest episodes of Lost.  Are those things really more important than your health?

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Our nation is obsessed with weight.  We see it as the holy grail of health when it’s really nothing more than a paper cup filled with misleading data.  Combine it with a few other measurements and it might be helpful but on it’s own it’s pretty much useless.  So stop treating your health as a one dimensional subject that can be measured with a single number.

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Question 

One of my readers wrote in with:

I have a friend who swears by the weight loss properties of the Sauna.  He says he goes in and comes out feeling (and weighing) lbs lighter.  I told him he’s just sweating the weight off but he says that’s exactly the point and says I do the same thing when I exercise.  So is the sauna the same as exercise?

Answer

No, absolutely not.  A sauna is NOT the same as exercise.

What Is Sweating?

Sweating is the body’s way of trying to cool down.  The human body needs to maintain a relatively even temperature.  If it gets too warm, it tries to cool off by sweating.  Part of this cooling off mechanism is sweat.  When we sweat, glands in our skin are letting water from our bodies flow out.  The evaporation of the water uses some of the heat energy which in turn helps our bodies cool down.

Why Do We Sweat When We Work Out?

Easy, because exercise warms our bodies up and in order to stay cool, we sweat.  However, sweat is just the side effect of the exercise.

Why Do We Sweat When We Sit In The Sauna?

Easy, because it’s really really warm in the sauna and our bodies are trying to cool down.

Well, That Sounds The Same As Exercise

Not really.  With exercise, our bodies are warming up because of something we’re doing.  We’re being active and burning energy to workout.  This causes our temperature to rise which in turn causes sweat.  However, it’s the exercise itself which burns calories and gives us the positive effects of physical activity.  With the sauna, we’re not doing anything.  We’re just sitting there baking in steam.  The heat of the sauna causes our bodies to overheat and this in turn causes sweat.  There’s no energy burn here, no calories being used.

But I Weighed Myself and I Weigh Less After The Sauna

Sure, and I weigh about 6lbs less after a long run.  That’s just water loss from sweat.  Drink some water and it will all come right back.  Remember, the sweat you lost is primarily water, with a bit of salt.  You didn’t really burn any energy in the sauna.  At least the run burned some calories along with all that sweat.

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Sitting in the sauna is no replacement for exercise.  It may make you sweat, but that’s just a reaction to an outside influence rather than the result of physical activity.  That kind of weight loss will last about as long as it takes you to drink a glass of water.

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Last weekend I talked about my desire to lose the last fifteen pounds and get down to 200lbs. Assuming I can do this without losing muscle mass, I should be at just the right amount of body fat for a 34 year old man who’s athletic and works out a lot. Now I’m a big believer in planning and I urge anyone who’s planning to improve their health to sit down and plan for a bit before jumping right in. So I followed my own advice and came up with a plan.

Eating Plan

I looked at a variety of calculators out there, and it seems like I need to eat about 3000 calories a day to maintain a goal weight of 200lbs. That number is for a 34 year old man with a moderate physical activity level. The numbers I saw actually varied from 2900 all the way up to 3100 depending on the calculator I used, so I took an average of 3000. I plan on splitting this number up into four meals. For breakfast I will try to eat about 500 calories, for lunch about 1000, another 500 for an afternoon snack and finish off the day with 1000 for dinner.

Now obviously these numbers are just guidelines. I’m not going to sit there at every meal counting every last calorie and making sure I don’t go over or under my number. However, I will keep track of this on a daily basis and see how well I’m doing. More on the tracking bit later on in this post.

This represents a slight change over my current eating plan of about 200 calories per day. This is where I’m hoping the weight loss comes from since my physical activity is going to remain roughly the same.

Physical Activity Plan

I’m already very active, so I don’t think I’ll be changing this too much. My current activity plan goals are:

• Weight training 3 to 4 times a week
• 1 30 minute walk every day
• Cardio training 3 times a week
• Biking to work three times a week
• One physical activity every weekend such as hiking

Control

One of the most important part of any plan is a control. How are you going to measure your progress? How are you going to verify that you’re sticking to the plan? Normally I would do this by keeping a food journal on my PC for a month when the plan first kicked in and keeping track of my workout in Excel. However, for the purposes of this change, I’m going to use a site called FitDay. This will allow me to share the progress of the plan with everyone reading 60 in 3.

I will also be doing weekly weigh ins. I would normally do monthly ones since I don’t really expect to lose a considerable amount of weight every week, but I thought it might be interesting to see changes on a weekly basis.

Time Line

Another important part of any plan is a time line. When are you putting the plan into effect? When does each part of the plan go live? When do you expect to see results? When do you review the plan to see if you need to make changes?

• Eating Plan - In effect as of today
• Activity Plan - Mostly in effect. My injured toe means I may not be doing my walks every day but otherwise the plan is in effect.
• Control - Fitday account has been created and I will play around with the site this weekend and start using it next Monday.
• Results - I expect to lose about .5lbs every week. This means I want to be at my goal weight of 200lbs in 30 weeks. That’s Mid 2008. Yep, that’s right, 15lbs in 7 months. Sounds slow to you? Well, if you’re used to reading ads about losing 30lbs in three days I suppose it might. Then again, how often have you seen these diets work in the long term? Where as my plan is sustainable, practical and healthy.
• Retune - I expect to review my results at the beginning of every month to see how I’m doing. That’s when I’ll make adjustments if necessary.

EDIT - here are the sites I used:

Calorie calculator - Click on the “calorie’s burned calculator” tab and then select the BMR calculator

FitDay - You might need to create an account to use all their features. However, once you do that and enter in some personal information, FitDay will also calculate your daily calories for you and display then in the activities section.

I also did some work on a few other sites that I found with a simple Google search for “BMR calculators”.  Just note that most of the other sites do not consider physical activity into their calculations so you’ll have to add that separately.

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Someone recently asked me what my thoughts on the lemonade diet are. Well, my answer was “I have no clue, never even heard of it.” Still, they were a friend so I did some research.

We’re off to a bad start

The first site I found was a commercial one claiming to be the official site of the lemonade diet. The site promised a lot but delivered very little. It seemed to be setup mainly to sell you stuff, which is not a good sign. However, here’s what this site and a few others claimed the diet can do:

The iet consists of fasting to rid the body of toxins, created by improper diet, lack of exercise and negative mental attitudes. The purpose of the Lemonade Diet is to dissolve and eliminate toxins and congestion; to cleanse the kidneys and digestive system; to purify glands; to eliminate waste and hardened materials in the joints and muscles; to build a healthy bloodstream; to maintain optimal blood pressure; and to what you all are waiting to hear... to lose weight. As a reducing diet it is superior in every way, reducing fat at a rate of about two (2) pounds a day for most persons, without harmful side effects.

I don’t know about you, but anytime I hear a list of benefits like this, I get a bit suspicious.  So I dig a little deeper.

The plot thickens!

Turns out that the lemonade diet consists of the following:

• Drink a lot of laxative tea
• Drink a lot of saline wash (water and salt)
• Drink a lot of lemonade

Are you kidding me?  This is your diet?

Wake up call

Yes, if all you consume is laxative tea, salt water and lemonade, you will lose weight.  Heck, you can reduce that to just drinking the lemonade and I bet you’ll still lose weight.  I just don’t see how this can possibly be beneficial.  None of the sites I found had any sort of science backing them.  They all just talked and talked about how this will “cleanse” and “reduce” and provided no real facts.  They also all tried to sell me something, which really tends to set off some alarm bells in my head.

Should you do the lemonade diet?

No, absolutely not.  Are you crazy?  Did you not just read the above paragraph?   I’ll be dead and insane before I even begin to think of a regimen of laxatives, salt water and lemonade as a healthy diet.  Hey, how about the heroin diet while you’re at it?  I hear heroin addicts are real thin!  I just don’t understand why people buy into these “insta solutions” without really looking at what they’re doing to their bodies.

You want a healthy lemonade diet?  Here’s one.  Eat healthy and balanced meals.  Exercise on a regular basis and drink some natural, unsweetened lemonade after your work out.  There you go, a healthy lemonade diet.  Of course, you could remove the lemonade and still have a healthy diet, but shush, no one needs to know that.  We’ll call that the “super duper 60 in 3 miracle lemonade diet.”  Maybe I could get Oprah to endorse it…

Summary

Stick to what you know works, healthy eating and plenty of physical activity, and stay away from “miracle” diets that promise the world and deliver only laxatives and overpriced maple syrup.

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