Fit Communications

I had breakfast with a good friend this morning, and the conversation turned to weight loss and exercise: specifically, why do people who know what they need to do not do it–and how can they motivate themselves to do it?

Well, it was a long conversation, and I recommended Tom Venuto’s e-book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (see a description under the heading Books for the buff in the left frame), as I’ve so often done. My friend and I talked about the importance of setting goals, how to carve out gym time, how often to eat, the importance of protein, the necessity of healthy carbs for people who exercise, how to cultivate satiety (see Barbara Rolls’s book Volumetrics, also briefly described in my book list), and so on.

My friend knows more or less what she needs to do; she just needs a little help in getting started again.

When we talked about calories, I was horrified to hear what she thought a low-calorie daily intake should be: about 700 calories. That’s terrific if your goal is to reduce your metabolism, slow your weight loss, burn off muscle tissue, and guarantee that the rebound weight gain that follows leaves you fatter than ever, with less lean body mass (and thus a reduced ability to burn calories).

Never, never, never reduce calories more than 20 to 25 percent from normal unless you’re doing a medically supervised fast.

Okay, I’m off the soapbox now.

No, this isn’t about one of those ludicrous diets that proclaims “Eat all you want of your favorite foods and still lose weight!”

U.S. News & World Report’s cover story for March 7 is about “Volumetrics”–the eating plan developed by Dr. Barbara Rolls of Penn State. In a nutshell, Rolls discovered that people tend to eat about the same weight of food every day, and that equal weights of food tend to produce equal satiety. In other words, eating a certain volume of, say, potato chips, produces about the same satiety as eating an equal volume of fruit, vegetables, whatever. But as you already know, the portion of chips has a whole lot more calories and many fewer nutrients than the fruit.

Foods can be categorized by their energy density–calories divided by weight. Water and fiber reduce density, so, for instance, 100 calories’ worth of raisins (a dry food) is much more dense than 100 calories’ worth of grapes. The portion of grapes is also much larger, hence producing greater satiety.

The concept is simple but explaining it is tough. Read the article.

I read Rolls’s original book, The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, several months ago and thought it made a great deal of sense. I’ve tried to incorporate her principles, which merge nicely with my other dietary goal of eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

The funny part is that the aforementioned book was published in 2000 to–as far as I can tell–little or no fanfare. It certainly never reached the levels of publicity enjoyed by Atkins or the Zone or the South Beach diet books. I suspect it wasn’t well publicized. When I borrowed the hardcover from the library, I almost didn’t open the book because (embarrassing confession here) the cover was so ugly. Obviously, not much effort was put into marketing the book.

Just recently Volumetrics has begin getting lots of publicity because Rolls’s second book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan: Techniques and Recipes for Feeling Full on Fewer Calories, was just published. I’ll buy it. And I highly recommend the first one.