Hey Chillen,
Are those 3 listed items myths? I used to believe in that when I started last year. It helped me lose some weight but then that might be from mind-tricks. I thought cardio in the AM is good because the body doesn't have to burn threw as much energy that the body stores up throughout the day, no?
1. No eating Carbs after a certain hour in the evening.
Yes, this is a myth. However, you must leave room for people with varying needs reference some biological complications and health related issues (such as diabetes).
When I was dieting to lose about 40 pounds, when I first started, I could eat anything, at anytime, and lose tissue as long as a calorie deficit was present. Carbohydrate amounts (nor the types) simply had no effect on my weight loss. I would sometimes eat two servings of oatmeal and a banana before bed. While sleeping I wasn't especially active
This changed later (when BF got low), but for the bulk of my initial weight loss this was in fact true: It simply didn't matter when I ate carbohydrates. While I know we are speaking in terms of one person, I also know I am not the only one to fall into this category, and I also know that there others that do not (and stated some of the reasons above). We also have to consider the type of diet one is on of course, such as low-carb, where they had already reached there limit by evening, and shouldn't consume anymore.
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2. Frequent meals increase our complicated metabolisms.
Yes, this is a myth. Frequent meals
can have a host of benefits for the dieter, but increasing metabolism isn't one of them.
My point on making this post in this thread (besides being on topic), is that some tend to get too wrapped up and concerned on whether they are eating "often enough", and by doing this act, can hurt their fat loss. This simply is not the case. If your lifestyle allows you to eat multiple meals, and this assists in staving off hunger pains, then by all means eat multiple meals. If your lifestyle does not allow for it, (say only 2 or 3, but you are meeting your dietary goals), then do not sweat it. We have people from all walks of life on this forum, and with different jobs, etc, that need to know this basic understanding.
By Alan Aragon:
Meal Frequency (Lyle McDonald):
(see page 6 and 7, reference Meal Frequency)
Bellisle F, McDevitt R, Prentice AM.
INSERM U341, Hotel Dieu de Paris, France.
Several epidemiological studies have observed an inverse relationship between people's habitual frequency of eating and body weight, leading to the suggestion that a 'nibbling' meal pattern may help in the avoidance of obesity. A review of all pertinent studies shows that, although many fail to find any significant relationship, the relationship is consistently inverse in those that do observe a relationship. However, this finding is highly vulnerable to the probable confounding effects of post hoc changes in dietary patterns as a consequence of weight gain and to dietary under-reporting which undoubtedly invalidates some of the studies.
We conclude that the epidemiological evidence is at best very weak, and almost certainly represents an artefact. A detailed review of the possible mechanistic explanations for a metabolic advantage of nibbling meal patterns failed to reveal significant benefits in respect of energy expenditure. Although some short-term studies suggest that the thermic effect of feeding is higher when an isoenergetic test load is divided into multiple small meals, other studies refute this, and most are neutral. More importantly,
studies using whole-body calorimetry and doubly-labelled water to assess total 24 h energy expenditure find no difference between nibbling and gorging. Finally, with the exception of a single study, there is no evidence that weight loss on hypoenergetic regimens is altered by meal frequency. We conclude that any effects of meal pattern on the regulation of body weight are likely to be mediated through effects on the food intake side of the energy balance equation.
PMID: 9155494 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
There are other Related Articles/research I can locate.
What is important is that fact that if a lifestyle of a person is such that, they can only get about 3 meals per day in (versus getting 5 or 6) it isn't going to hurt their fat loss quest. There fat loss results, are not going to be much different (if any at all) if they spread the same calories from 3 meals to 6.
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3. Performing cardio in the AM is superior to any other time.
This question was posed to Lyle McDonald:
Q: I subscribed to your articles a month or so ago and I was wondering if you had written on the difference between fasted LISS and fed LISS and if one is better than the other for fat loss. If you could answer this or point me to your article on it, I'd appreciate it.
A: Yes, it's been beaten to death, I'm sure I've written stuff about it before but I'm too lazy to find it so I'll recap my feelings about it here. The whole idea that low intensity steady state fasted cardio is best for fat loss comes from a couple of misunderstandings:
#1. That, because you burn the highest percentage of fat during low intensity exercise, this is best for fat loss. This is simple idiocy. 100% of 5 calories/minute is the same amount of fat as 50% of 10 cal/minute even if 50% is lower than 100% (In both cases you burned 5 cal/minute of fat). And your total deficit over 30 minutes is higher at the higher intensity even if the relative percentage of fat burned is higher in the first case. Stupid people got confused between relative and absolute amounts and a myth was born. Quite in fact, the highest amount of fat burned (in absolute terms, g/min) is at a higher intensity. As high as the lactate threshold in trained individuals.
Related to this some studies also support the idea that you don't burn any less fat consuming carbs during training than doing them fasted anyhow. You can only burn about 1 g/minute of carbs (4 cal/minute) from exogenous (outside the body) sources. If you're burning 10+ cal/min during activity but sipping a carb drink, you're still burning 6 cal/minute from endogenous (within the body) sources. And, if sipping that carb drink means you can maintain a higher intensity, you can burn more total calories than someone trying to do cardio with low blood sugar first thing in the morning.
#2. That what you burn during activity makes a difference in terms of total fat loss. If one had to burn fat during activity to lose fat than interval training (which some studies show to be more effective in terms of fat loss than steady state) wouldn't work. Yet it does. Why? Because what you burn during the activity itself is only a small part of the picture. How the exercise impacts on both total energy balance as well as fuel utilization is important here too. When you deplete muscle glycogen (with higher intensity activity), this impacts on whole body fat utilization for the rest of the day and studies often find that fat oxidation is higher post-higher intensity exercise for the rest of the day. So what's more important, burning a little bit more fat for 1 hour (which may not be true in the first place), or burning more fat for rest of the day after the workout?
That said, one situation where I think fasted morning cardio might make a difference is for very lean individuals (sub 10% for men) trying to get rid of the last bit of stubborn fat. Given that this represents 1/10 of 1% of everybody working out,
this is an exception to be sure.
My take on fasted LISS, it's better than nothing for fat loss but not by much. Total calorie burn/what you burn after the workout/energy balance is going to play a much greater role in fat loss than burning a smidgen more fat by doing your cardio fasted at a pissant intensity first thing in the morning. You burn more calories and more total fat at higher intensities. For 99% of people (i.e. not competition bodybuilders near the end of prep), it's more important that they get their cardio than when they do it.
And, another opinion on it, which also includes Lyle McDonald and others:
Best wishes,
Chillen
