The weekend was a fun experience for me. When I’m not eating out or anticipating yet another three points for Manchester City only to be slapped in the face, I’ll try to get myself down to a health/nutrition/fitness seminar or course.
Not only is it great to have the wild amounts of available health information packaged and processed by world leading experts, it’s also a really refreshing and empowering experience to be surrounded by so many like-minded people.
Last weekend, I was in Gorton. Lovely place, fantastic surroundings. No, but seriously (and I can say this because I’m from Manchester, I think…), I don’t think you could place a building as beautiful as the Monastery in a less suitable environment. Jokes aside, it was a top location for an excellent lecture provided by a UK nutritionist called Martin Macdonald.
There are three major nutrition certifications that I can think of and Martin is the founder of one of them. His company, MAC Nutrition, offers an online university-style course for those wishing to practice as nutritionists. They’re an evidence-based enterprise meaning all content is delivered based on research, but they also strongly endeavour to minimise the bullshit that’s so prevalent in the industry. Front-manned by an incredibly intelligent but also very humorous Martin Macdonald, they’ve become a very reputable name in the UK that have worked with the likes of British weightlifting and Derby County Football Club.
Nutrition is a crazy domain. New research every day, and probably a thousands myths to go with it. Equipped with all the latest knowledge, Martin got down to what really matters and had this to say:
1. Your mentality around food accounts for the majority of your problems
Monday – Friday salad and tuna. Saturday and Sunday 20 doughnuts, two tubs of ice cream and 15 beers. The frightening thing is that this is normality for a lot of people, including health and fitness coaches.
The reality is this is disordered eating behaviour. Generally, as a population, we have a huge bias against foods. We have foods we consider as being ‘good’ and those we consider as being ‘bad’.
During the week when our working lives offer us structure and we feel a greater urge to be ‘on it’, those ‘bad’ foods are completely off limits. We don’t want to feel guilt or that we’ve poisoned our perfect five days of the week. But remove something from the diet or create a taboo around it and there’s research to suggest that we massively increase our desire to eat it.
The weekend comes around, we want to destress, and we’re swallowed by binge mentality. It’s then a case of guilt, ‘getting back on the band wagon’, and repeat. It’s silly, but very common.
2. Unconditional permission to eat anything
Martin mentioned this A LOT. And it follows on nicely from point 1.
We know that a calorie deficit is absolutely essential to induce weight loss. So if that’s your aim, that’s your number one in the hierarchy. It’s then a case of giving yourself unconditional permission to eat anything within that calorie budget.
Did you know that when one group told they could eat absolutely anything they like but within a restricted calorie range were compared to one group told they could eat absolutely anything they like apart from bread with NO calorie restriction, the second group had less adherence!
That’s crazy, but it goes to show just how detrimental banning foods can be for people wanting to lose weight.
Instead of eating 10 doughnuts at the weekend, why not just spread that consumption over a week? Chances are you’ll get to the weekend and that urge to splurge on doughnuts has significantly reduced.
3. Calorie deficit, regardless
Regardless of:
- Thyroid condition
- PCOS
- Somatotype
- Macronutrient split
If you want to lose weight, the same rule applies. Eat fewer calories than you burn over a consistent amount of time.
4. Reducing carbohydrate consumption categorically does not increase rate of fat loss
This was a funny one. Martin told us about a researcher who was absolutely convinced that insulin, not energy balance, was the absolute key to fat gain. By lowering insulin levels (something that carbohydrate consumption elevates), we’d be able to accelerate fat loss.
This researcher hired a number of the world’s leading nutrition researchers with one hell of a budget to test his theory. They proved him wrong, showing that low carbohydrate diets did not lead to increased fat loss when compared to low fat diets.
Awkward. Again, calorie deficit.
5. Reverse dieting may be a good idea
Instead of spending your entire life in a stressful calorie deficit, Martin advocates the use of intermittent periods of reverse dieting.
What this means, for example, is for three weeks of the month operating in a calorie deficit and for one week putting calories back up to maintenance. A calorie deficit will help you to lose weight, a calorie maintenance (which involves an increase in calories from the deficit) will help you to maintain the weight you’ve lost.
You’re two weeks into September, you’ve lost 6lbs but you’re hungry. You’re currently eating 1,500 calories a day and losing an average of 3lbs a week. You require 1,900 calories to maintain your current weight. That’s a lovely increase in 400 calories that will help you with your hunger levels, and you won’t gain any weight. Makes sense.
It’s makes even more sense for women at their time of the month when cravings tend to soar. It’s definitely something I’ll be looking at in the future.
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