The question seems almost non-sensical, like asking if you know how to blink. But, the way you breathe while sitting at your desk is much different than how you should breathe while on a run, or when you squat with 300 pounds on your back. And, we’re not just talking about breathing heavier as you get tired.

Your breath is far more powerful than you think because breathing is so deeply tied to many essential structures of your body, including your spine and ribcage. It might seem impossible, but the way you breathe can do everything from preventing back pain to make you significantly stronger on squats, deadlifts, presses, and almost every exercise imaginable.

Before you complete another workout, it’s time to find out if you’ve been breathing the wrong way, and what you can do to make a small change that leads to incredible results.

The Power of Your Breath

Most fitness tips do not provide instant gratification. It takes a lot of reps and sets, sometimes across a span of years, to change your body.

And while no workout will instantly slash fat or make you more muscular, there are a few techniques that, like magic, can have an immediate impact on how well you train and feel. The Valsalva maneuver, which is a way of breathing, is one of those techniques.

Part of the reason it has such a dramatic impact is that for the majority of people, how to breathe when you exercise is completely overlooked.

When you learn about training, almost everything focuses on the usual suspects:

• How much weight you’ll use
• The reps and sets
• The exercise selection
• What equipment to use

All of these are important parts of training and exercise. But, all of these cover what you do. They tend to avoid how to do it.

While there’s no shortage of exercise explanations you can find online, it’s rare that tips on correct form provide a detailed explanation of how you should breathe.

But, the way you breathe on different exercises can make all the difference between staying pain-free and seeing more progress. Enter the Valsalva maneuver.

To understand how and why this technique is the key to no back pain and lots of strength gain, it’s time for a quick test.

The Soda Can Test: How to Know Your Spine is Safe

To understand why learning how to breathe properly is important, all you need to do is think about a soda can. When it’s pressurized and sealed, it’s very strong. You can stack several bricks on top of it and it won’t budge. But, if you open the can and let that pressure escape, the weight would crumple the can underneath.

Think about breathing in the same way: do it right and you’re unstoppable, do it wrong and you get crushed.

Correct breathing can make every exercise a safe and effective movement. Think about it: No one argues whether exercise is “good” for you, but plenty of people debate whether certain exercises should be avoided because of the risk of injury.

For example, you might know the squat as one of the best exercises for developing strength and building muscle. Or, you might think of it as an exercise that causes back pain. That alone means that plenty of you avoid squats (or avoid doing them with added weight) when, in reality, it’s not the exercise that’s the problem; it’s how you’ve been taught to do the movement.

“Everybody tells you to inhale on the way down, and exhale on the way up,” says Mark Rippetoe, owner of the Wichita Falls Athletic Club and author of Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training. “That is complete and utter BS. If you do that, you will hurt yourself.”

Now, Rippetoe isn’t suggesting you shouldn’t breathe. What he’s saying is that the typical breathing cue is incomplete and leaves out many vital details. And that if you’re just breathing — and not practicing the Valsalva maneuver — then you’re at risk.

“When you Valsalva, you’re protecting your spine,” says Dr. Belisa Vranich, clinical psychologist and author of Breathe: The Simple, Revolutionary 14-Day Program to Improve your Mental and Physical Health. “Most people don’t understand that you have to take a big breath in to be able to protect your spine [when you lift].”

When you inhale deeply, you create what’s called intra-abdominal pressure. The term describes forces within your abdominal cavity or the area surrounded by the muscles on the side of your abs (your obliques), your pelvic floor (on the bottom), diaphragm (on top), rectus abdominus (the area known as the six-pack), and several back muscles.

When you have a heavy load on your back, this pressure is your friend. It’s no different than the soda can.

WIthin your abdomen, the pressure you create with a deep inhalation helps keep your spine rigid and stable.

“Air is support to the back,” Rippetoe says. So the way you should lift when you squat is to inhale deeply and brace your torso, hold that breath (and bracing) on the way down, then either continue to hold it on the way up or exhale through pursed lips when you hit the most challenging part of the lift.

Before you try the Valsalva maneuver, there’s something you should know: in order for it to work for you, you first have to master an even more fundamental skill.

Are You Breathing Well? (Here’s How to Find Out)

Consider this Breathing 101. Because you know how to breathe, it will be quick. But, if you want the Valsalva maneuver to work, then you need to make sure you’re breathing correctly.

To understand how you breathe, it’s important to visualize your diaphragm as two separate parts.

Your diaphragm divides your insides into an upper (thoracic) cavity and a lower (abdominal) cavity. Think of it as the muscle that powers breathing. When you inhale, your diaphragm pushes downward against your abs, drawing air into your lungs and creating more space for them within your body.

“The lungs will fill like a vacuum once the diaphragm drops downwards,” explains Dr. Kathy Dooley, a chiropractor and anatomy instructor based in New York City.

However, a number of things, such as bad posture, can prevent your diaphragm from doing its job effectively.

“When your abs are gripping your diaphragm, it will not let you take a big inhale,” Vranich says. “If you go to take a big inhale, you’ll have to take it with your shoulders because your diaphragm is being squeezed.”

So what should it look like? If your belly moves outward when you breathe in, it’s a sign that your diaphragm is working correctly. It might make you feel self-conscious because it will look like you’re creating a gut, but you’ll feel and perform a lot better.

On the flipside, consider what happens when you don’t breathe correctly. The result looks something like:

This is known as “vertical breathing.” And it achieves the biologically necessary goal of getting you oxygen (because, ya know, you still need to breathe and your body won’t let that not happen). But, it creates a host of other problems.

The Risks of Poor Breathing

If you’re a vertical breathing, it can be a literal pain in the neck. That’s because this type of breathing tightens the muscles in your neck and shoulders. If you have your massage therapist on speed dial, vertical breathing may be why.

This style of breathing doesn’t deliver oxygen as well as a diaphragmatic breath, so you’ll have to inhale more frequently, which can elevate your blood pressure, pulse, and level of anxiety.

Even crazier? Your diaphragm attaches to your spleen, liver, and small intestine, and doing it wrong can cause a domino effect of health problems.

“If you’re breathing up with the chest, you may not be creating the ‘massage’ for your lower organs to encourage your smooth muscle (tissues in the gut) to act like it should,” Dooley says. “You’d be surprised by how much breathing affects your gastric emptying, and how much breathing affects things like IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).”

And then, of course, there’s how bad breathing affects your ability to use the Valsalva maneuver.

If you’re breathing “up,” using your chest, shoulders, and other muscles to pull air into your body, you can’t create the type of intra-abdominal pressure that will protect your spine when you lift—even if you took in the biggest breath you possibly could.

“If you’re building good intra-abdominal pressure, you don’t necessarily need to raise your chest upwards [when you inhale],” Dooley says, who adds that the reverse is also true: If you’re raising your chest upwards, you’re not building good intra-abdominal pressure.

Here’s a simple way to tell whether you’re using your diaphragm well. Look in the mirror and watch yourself breathe. If your chest and shoulders are moving up and down in a way that looks like the illustration above, you have some work to do.

How to Breathe Better (And Lift Weights Better Than Ever)

Here are 3 exercises that can help you breathe better and keep your shoulders down.

Breathing Exercise #1: Diaphragm Extensions
While Vranich teaches several techniques, perhaps the simplest method is an exercise that requires you to lie on your back and just breathe. (Yup, it’s really that simple.)

To perform the move, lie flat on your back and place any light object—it could be a book, a pillow or whatever you have handy—on top of your belly button. Rest your hands at your sides and cast your gaze slightly downward, so you can see the book somewhere in your field of vision.

Inhale deeply into your belly, raising the book as high as you can. When you exhale, watch the book lower. Keep breathing in this manner for a few minutes.

Vranich recommends you don’t worry about your pace of breath at first, just notice how breathing into your lower body feels. You may find that performing the technique slowly brings a sense of calm.

That’s because slow, controlled breathing initiates a “rest and digest” response from your body called the parasympathetic nervous system. For this reason, you may want to try breathing in this manner before bedtime, or even at the end of your workouts (when it can help bring your heart rate and signal to the rest of your body that it’s time to chill).

To start, try using it for a minute or so at the front of a training session to teach (or remind) you of how diaphragmatic breathing feels.

Breathing Exercise #2: The 90-90
As the name suggests, the “90-90” indicates that you’ll have a 90-degree bend in your hips, and a 90-degree bend in your knees. And you’ll need a Swiss ball.

Lie on the floor, place your heels atop the ball, and adjust your feet so that you have those right angles at your hip and knee. Dooley shows you how to set up for the exercise in this video:

The object is to inhale into your lower abdomen. Rather than just trying to press upward with the belly, think about filling the whole abdomen in every direction. When you inhale, your abs, your obliques, and the muscles in your lower back all should press outward.

“What we’re looking for is for the abdomen to fill in 360 [degrees] on the inhale,” Dooley says. “These muscles all around you are muscles of exhalation, therefore they need to expand when you inhale to build proper intra-abdominal pressure.”

Stay in the 90-90 until you feel like you’re getting the hang of breathing with all of those muscles, or for as long as your workout will allow. If you typically don’t have a whole lot of time to train, don’t worry about it. Even a minute will be helpful.

Breathing Exercise #3: The Dead Bug (AKA Dying Bug)
This exercise takes the good intra-abdominal pressure you’ve learned and applies it to moving your arms and legs.

To set up for the move, you’ll lie on your back with your hips and knees bent 90-degrees. (No Swiss ball for your heels this time.)

You can hold your arms straight overhead, or press them against your abdomen to feel the pressure you’re creating. Inhale, then exhale slowly as you lower the heel of your left leg to the floor, lift it back to your starting position, then lowering and raising the heel of your right leg.

You’ll do all of this (moving both legs down and back up) on a single exhale, maintaining stiffness in your core as you move. Once you’ve completed the movement with both legs, inhale and repeat. Perform 5 to 10 reps, where moving your left and right leg is one rep.

“This is a fantastic drill for learning how to build intra-abdominal pressure and build core stiffness but ambulate the limbs,” Dooley says. “It has a lot of carryover into things like squatting and deadlifting because you’re trying to maintain core stiffness and abdominal stability while you’re trying to ambulate the limbs.”

How to Valsalva Maneuver Like a Pro

If you know how to breathe deeply into your lower abdomen, then the first cue of the Valsalva is pretty simple.

“Big breath in,” Rippetoe says. “Before every rep, take a big breath.”

Just as you did when you performed the Supine 90-90, the breath should fill your lower abdomen in every direction. That’s half of the battle.

The other half is bracing properly. Here’s where the work you did in the Dying Bug comes into play. You want to engage your abs, your obliques, and the muscles in your back, holding them all stiff as you start your descent downward. Exhale when you reach the top. Then inhale and repeat.

As with anything, the little details matter. The Valsalva maneuver is not something you want to hold throughout a set. Exhale after every rep. Then, inhale and reset before your next rep.

One of the knocks on the Valsalva is that it elevates your blood pressure, which most of us tend to think is a bad thing. And it is, but only if your high blood pressure is chronic. In other words, if you walk around every day with a systolic/diastolic combo that’s well above 120 over 80, then you’ll want to consult with your doctor.

But, the blood pressure lift from the Valsalva is temporary—when you perform it, the pressure goes up. When you stop, it returns to baseline.

However, if you have a known risk factor like an intracranial lesion, then yes, you should speak with your doctor before trying the Valsalva maneuver. Same if you have hypertension that you haven’t addressed. As with anything, exercise common sense and communicate with your doctor if you have any concerns.

READ MORE: 

How Low Should You Squat, Really?

The Truth About the 7-Minute Workout

The Tension Weightlifting Technique: How to Make Every Exercise More Effective

The post Valsalva Maneuver: This Technique Will Fix Your Back Pain appeared first on Born Fitness.

• No, you don’t have to ditch alcohol to lose fat…
• BUT, if you do cut out drinking, it might help.

Alcohol And Weight Loss: It’s Complicated

Let’s start with the first point here. From a metabolic perspective, alcohol and your body have a weird relationship. There’s actually been a lot of research into it over the years because it’s so surprising.

Numerous studies, both observational and in controlled settings, have shown that people can consume light to moderate amounts of alcohol and not necessarily gain weight. (Moderate drinking is defined as 1 drink a day for women and no more than 2 drinks a day for men.)

Part of this may be due to alcohol’s unique effect on the body. Your body can’t store alcohol and the 7 calories per gram it delivers. (Yup, it does have calories — more per gram than carbs and protein, but less than fat.) So instead the body fast-tracks that booze through your system.

Additionally, a high percentage of calories from alcohol get burned up by your metabolism through a process called the thermic effect of food (TEF). The thermic effect of alcohol is about 22.5%, which puts it on par with protein (which has a TEF of 25-30%) and well ahead of carbs (6-8%) and fat (2-3%).

All of which is to say: Alcohol on it’s own won’t necessarily make or break your weight loss goals.

“If you enjoy a few drinks during the week, it is still possible to have a highly successful fat loss journey,” says Born Fitness Head Nutrition Coach Natalie Sabin.

Now for the but…

Why Alcohol Might Make You Fat

Just because your body doesn’t store alcohol’s calories, it doesn’t mean you (and your fat cells) get off scot-free.

When your body is processing those calories from all those hoppy IPAs, or just one more glass of wine, they take the place of other calories you could be burning — like the bacon double cheeseburger you had on the way home from the bar. With beer calories taking its place in the metabolic line, the burger’s calories become part of you (and your belly).

In fact, some research would lead you to believe that the problem isn’t necessarily the alcohol itself. It’s what can come along with drinking. You know, like nachos. Or two dozen wings. Or a box of Totino’s Pizza Rolls if it’s 2 a.m. and you’re in college.

“Many folks who drink alcohol also have a tendency to eat more,” Sabin says.

A review published in Physiology & Behavior backs her up on this. It found that, sure enough, drinking before or during a meal tends to increase food intake.

Also, note that even though your body can’t store alcohol, it can (and does) store the calories mixed with it — like the 83g of sugar in a frozen margarita.

So What Should You Do?

1. Examine how much you’re drinking currently. For some this can be very eye-opening on it’s own. You might see that the “beer or two” you have “now and then” is actually “a couple drinks every night, plus about a dozen on the weekend.” Remember, the studies mentioned previously involved light to moderate drinking — i.e. one drink per day for women, two for men. Drinking more than that is conclusively not good. Heavier drinking is associated with weight gain and increased waist circumference, as well as poor health. Excessive alcohol consumption is the third-leading cause of premature death in the U.S. If your drinking exceeds that one to two drinks per day guideline, then yeah, cutting back (or going dry) likely will help you lose fat.

2. Pay attention to what else you do when you drink. If your occasional cocktail with friends is just that — a cocktail — then the caloric load probably isn’t all that significant. But if your drinks seem to come with a late night pizza chaser, you might have an issue on your hands. Here again, cutting out drinks might help your fat loss.

3. Let’s say your drinking (and appetite) is under control, but you still aren’t losing fat. And let’s say your drink-per-day is a must-have. If that’s the case, you could try and offset the calories by trimming elsewhere. For example, a glass of wine is around 120 calories. A typical beer is about 150 calories (although those heavier microbrews that are so popular nowadays can be double that). Cut out 30 to 40g of carbs from somewhere else, and pay attention to any changes. “Remember, to get rid of fat you need to create a calorie deficit,” Sabin says. “That means burn more calories than you are consuming — whether that’s eating OR drinking.”

READ MORE

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Why Did I Gain Weight On My Diet

4 Week Fat Loss Transformation

The post Should I Cut Out Alcohol to Get Rid of Fat? appeared first on Born Fitness.

Less than 20 years ago, I used to drive past billboards warning against the use of marijuana. Use it or possess it, the signs warned, and you’ll go to jail.

Two weeks ago, I was in a health food store with a 60-year-old relative who bought a (perfectly legal) cannabis derivative known as CBD Oil. Why? Because he thinks it’ll help his heart.

Hype usually moves faster than science, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be curious about what might work for you.

Given the CBD explosion, we thought it’d be helpful to look at:

• What we do know about CBD, according to research
• What we don’t know
• If you’re considering CBD, what you should do

But first, a little background.

What is CBD Oil?

The acronym “CBD” is short for cannabidiol, which is a non-psychoactive component of the cannabis plant. From a chemical perspective, CBD looks almost exactly like it’s more famous sibling, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. THC is what gets you stoned. CBD doesn’t.

Potential Benefits: Why are people so interested in CBD lately?

There have been studies in recent years that show CBD may be beneficial to your health. The most established (so far) is treatment for severe seizures. The research is so compelling that the FDA recently approved a CBD-based drug called Epidiolex, which will be available by prescription for those with rare forms of epilepsy.

There are a few other areas where CBD has shown some promise. Chronic pain is one. Anxiety is another. It may also be useful for decreasing inflammation. In a recent video, Dr. Mike T. Nelson said he thinks CBD could be useful for those in contact sports because of its potential effect on maintaining the blood-brain barrier after impact. So, from a scientific perspective, the compound is worth examining further.

CBD Oil Risks: Are There Any?

Well, now let’s talk about what we don’t know.

For nearly all of the other claims people make about CBD nowadays – i.e. that it will ease glaucoma, or help your sleep, or battle cancer — the honest answer is: No one knows yet.

Despite all of the excitement around CBD, data on its long term effects are lacking. A big reason why? It’s part of a Schedule 1 narcotic, which means that studying it can be enormously complicated.

That uncertainty hasn’t stopped a legion of new CBD oils from coming to market, however. And that’s where consumers like us face an even bigger unknown: What’s actually in the bottle?

Nelson describes the situation as follows:

“There are a couple companies working to do it the right way and a piss ton of ‘fly-by-night, let’s-put-ditchweed-in-a-bottle-since-most-people-won’t-know’ companies too.”

Marcel Bonn-Miller, an adjunct assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, echoes those sentiments.  He told HealthDay News the following about the explosion of CBD oils in the marketplace.

“It really is the Wild West,” Bonn-Miller said. “Joe Bob who starts up a CBD company could say whatever the hell he wants on a label and sell it to people.”

Bonn-Miller backs up his point with data. He recently conducted a test of various store-bought CBD Oils. His team found that about 43 percent of the products had less CBD than advertised. And if you work at a job that drug tests employees, take note: Bonn-Miller also found that about 1 in 5 CBD products contained THC.

Bonn-Miller’s study isn’t the only deep dive into publicly available CBD that’s come back with dubious findings. An investigation by NBC 4 in New York found that every over-the-counter CBD supplement they purchased contained less than half of the CBD advertised on the label. A few contained none at all.

More concerningly, NBC found that some samples contained high levels of pesticides. One had potentially harmful levels of lead.

What’s more, with the most recent Farm Bill in the U.S. making hemp production legal, there will be more CBD products coming to market in the future. (Hemp is a cannabis plant that contains less than .3% THC). And unless the FDA changes its stance toward supplements (something that has been in discussion lately), these products will make it to market with little to no oversight.

Simply put: For anyone who does want to buy CBD oil, the Wild West is about to get wilder.

So should you take CBD Oil?

If you’re considering using CBD Oil, first ask yourself “why.”

If the answer is “to address one of the data-backed concerns that the compound can potentially address,” then fair enough. We recommend speaking with your doctor first.

But, if the answer is “because a bunch of my friends, people at my gym, or a person I heard on a podcast said I should try it,” you may want to hold off. The data likely isn’t there to support their claims.

The next question to ask: Is CBD Oil legal for me to own? No matter how beneficial you think it is, there’s no supplement worth going to jail over. Here’s a state-by-state breakdown showing if its legal where you live. (Note: U.S. States only.)

So if you do go shopping for CBD Oil, you’d want to look for…

• CBD sourced from therapeutic hemp rather than industrial hemp. The therapeutic strands are richer in CBD, and therefore require fewer chemicals to process.
• Proof that the product came from a registered lab that follows cGMP standards and AHPA guidelines.

Nelson says, “If it’s really cheap, I don’t know that I would trust it. If the company only makes CBD, that makes me nervous. (<-Editor’s Note: A brand that makes CBD only could be problematic because it’s easier to set up shop, make one product, and then just go under if they get into trouble.) Ask the company for their traceability.“

You can ask by calling or emailing the company’s customer service line directly. “A big part of what I do personally is to see how cooperative they are,” Nelson says “You can ask about their COA, or Certificate of Analysis put out by their Quality Assurance department that shows the product meets its specifications.”

Nelson adds that you can tell a lot by how the manufacturer responds.

“Legit companies are more than willing to help you out and show that they are different,” Nelson says. “Non-legit companies will try to talk you out of specific request, give you the runaround, or just won’t answer emails or phone calls. There is not a 100% foolproof way to know for sure, just steps to hedge your bets as best you can.”

The post CBD Oil: Should You Take It? appeared first on Born Fitness.

Let that statement settle for a moment. It might be difficult for you to read. Especially after all of the research that has suggested, “fat doesn’t make you fat.”

That statement is still true — up to a point. The role of any macronutrient in your diet — whether protein, carbs, or fats — all walk a delicate balance between being good for weight loss and being good for your general health.

Just because you can go high-fat and lose weight doesn’t mean it’s great for your general health.

In the case of fat — or more appropriately, “healthy fat” — that balance has been lost. Some research has twisted an important fact (you need to eat fat in your diet) with a twisted version of reality (eat lots of healthy fat, from many different sources, and you’ll lose fat and never have health issues).

The reality: there’s a very simple way to know if you should be eating more or less fat in your diet (more on that in a moment). More importantly, many foods that have been recommended as a “healthy fat” aren’t actually that healthy. 

So where does that leave you? Let’s start with a few essential facts about your diet.  

If you prioritize calories and protein, then the amount of fat or carbohydrates you eat is a secondary concern. That’s based on the latest research shows, which shows calories are still king when it comes to weight loss.

In other words, figure out how many calories you need, prioritize protein (usually somewhere between .7g – 1g per pound of your goal bodyweight — although it can be less for some diets, such as if you follow a ketogenic plan), and then fill in the rest with carbs or fats. This is why research shows that both low-fat and low-carb diets help with weight loss. Because both can.

But, where does that leave you when it comes to eating healthy fat? In most cases, you’re probably still confused about what you should eat.

Should you load up on nuts? What about coconut oil, olive oil, and butter?

Just because you can go high-fat and lose weight doesn’t mean it’s great for your general health. After all, we have professors following Twinkie diets and losing nearly 30 pounds.

To understand the “healthy fat” debate, you need to hit refresh on the extremes (“Fat is bad!” “Fat is amazing!”) and take a different perspective. Not only will this new approach give you peace of mind, it’ll also help you understand what you can eat often, what is OK in moderate doses, and what you should completely avoid.  

What is a Healthy Fat?

The thing about the term “healthy” is that everything is relative. The answer will differ from person to person and depend on context.

For example, take the question of whether or not coconut oil is healthy. Start with the baseline: Healthy compared to what?

If the question is coconut oil vs. nothing – i.e. the alternative is starving – then yes, by all means, coconut oil is the better choice.

But if the question is coconut oil vs. another fat source, then you have a debate—one that will have different outcomes depending on the opponent. That’s because some fats are more beneficial than others.

For example, the PREDIMED study, which followed thousands of people over several years, showed that olive oil and nuts were linked with better overall cardiovascular health. By definition, both would be considered healthy fat.

“That was a landmark study because it showed hard events,” says Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, a physician and online health coach based in North Carolina. “Not just some little experimental data showing mechanistic changes in sensitivity, cholesterol or endothelium function. So, at the very least, you can say that olive oil and nuts are probably pretty healthy.”

Nadolsky says the same is true for avocados (and avocado oil), fish, and nut butter. They contain beneficial health properties over and above the presence of fat.

“Olive oil has polyphenols in it and cardioprotective properties, and so do nuts,” Nadolsky says. “We have data on olive oil, nuts, fish oil, and omega 3s.” So those fats are, in that sense, “good” for you.

So what are you to make of other supposed healthy fat sources like coconut oil?

The Coconut Oil Debate (And What it Teaches You About “Healthy Fat”)

The recent controversy about coconut oil started with small studies showing some benefits, which were then taken out of context.  

One study kinda-sorta suggested that coconut oil might inhibit the growth of certain bacteria.

Media translation: “Coconut oil is antimicrobial! Use it to clean your bathroom!” (<-Not true. Don’t do that.)

Another study showed that men who ate more medium-chain triglycerides, a type of fat present in coconut oil, lost a whopping one pound more than those who followed a “regular diet” over a 28-day period.

Media translation: “Coconut oil will make you skinny! Put a shovel of it in your coffee!” (<-Listen, you can do this if you want. But don’t expect anything special to happen.)

You get the idea. The nutrition industry consistently exhibits “irrational exuberance” about the benefits of certain foods. Combine that with marketing hype and a little myth, and before you know it, you have a “superfood.” 

In coconut oil’s case, the superfood train had well left the station in many people’s minds. And it was picking up steam until the American Heart Association released a report advising against the consumption of coconut oil. Suddenly, EEEERT!

The onslaught of ominous headlines denouncing coconut oil was immediate and ubiquitous. It’s a knee-jerk reaction that says if a food isn’t good, it must be bad.  That’s freaking out about a food’s supposed risks.

By and large, no single food is going to make or break your diet. You’ve been taught to view foods as “good” or “bad,” but that’s a gross oversimplification.

The biggest concern cited in the AHA report is that coconut oil is high in saturated fat. But anyone who’s even casually glanced at a coconut oil nutrition facts label would know that—it’s stated right there. And while saturated fat has been blamed wrongly for a lot of health problems, it’s also not something you can eat in any quantity. 

So what’s your move? Start with a better understanding of saturated fat.

“There are all sorts of different types of saturated fatty acids. It’s not just one molecule. Just as there are multiple polyunsaturated fatty acids—omega 3s, omega 6s, and so on—there are multiple types of saturated fatty acids, and they all have different effects on the body in the body,” says Nadolsky.

So saturated fat on its own isn’t a problem. Neither is cholesterol, necessarily. Whether or not a problem arises depends on the condition of your body—and especially your arterial walls—and how many lipoproteins you have in your system.  

“How does atherosclerosis (the hardening and narrowing of the arteries) actually happen?” Nadolsky asks. “Think of your arteries as a canal, the lipoproteins as boats, and cholesterol as those boats’ cargo. The more lipoproteins you have, the greater of a risk you run that the boats will go crashing into the canal’s walls. And when that happens, it causes the beginning of atherosclerosis or plaque build-up.”

Even if you don’t have a lot of “cargo” (cholesterol), you can still run into trouble if your canals are full of boats (lipoproteins).

So if you really want to know how much saturated fat you can have, go see a doctor and test your lipoprotein levels (apoB/LDL-P).

This will indicate how much eating saturated fat affects your body. Yes, that requires a visit to the doctor. But it’s worth it. And a lot better than playing a guessing game.

Healthy Fat vs. Available Fat (The A-Ha! Moment)

But what about this “MCT” everybody talks about when they discuss coconut oil? These are the “medium-chain triglycerides,” which people tout as a fat-burner because of the way the fat is broken down in your body.

To be clear: MCT can have health benefits as a healthy oil, but its reported benefits of melting fat from your body are significantly overstated. As we mentioned, when you look at the data from the study that is used as evidence of MCT’s fat-burning power, it shows that MCT oil led to just one pound of additional fat loss.

Second, the oil used in that study had a far greater concentration of MCT than what you’ll find in coconut oil. When researchers examined whether coconut oil had the same effect, they found that it did not affect fat oxidation in the same way. Bottom line: If you want to burn money (MCT ain’t cheap) for an extra pound, that’s your choice.

As nutrition researcher Alan Aragon pointed out in his research review, a curious detail about the studies cited in the recommendation is that some of the most damning studies of coconut oil used a hydrogenated version of the stuff. That’s an important point because hydrogenated anything isn’t healthy for you. “Hydrogenation of vegetable oil is a well-established way to [turn] a relatively neutral oil into a threat to cardiovascular health,” Aragon writes.

But it’s pretty easy to avoid this problem: Simply buy the extra virgin version of any oil you buy, coconut oil included. (If you stop reading this article right now, that’s a tip that will provide some insurance to upgrade your shopping behavior.)

So where are we left? Is Coconut oil good for you? Is it bad for you? The answer is: It’s neither.

“You will not receive any magical benefits from eating coconut oil,” Nadolsky says. “Coconut oil is not going to kill you, either, so long as you’re not eating gobs and gobs of it.”

That answer holds true for a lot of other fat sources, too. Most of them are what they are: a source of fat, the most calorie-dense of all macronutrients. (Proteins and carbs have four calories per gram, while the same unit of fat packs nine calories.) They can be helpful for greasing pans when you’re making eggs or pancakes. And, it’s fine to consume them in moderation.

Fat is an essential nutrient. Your body requires it in order to survive. 

“Butter and coconut oil are not ‘bad’ for you,” Nadolsky says. “They are perfectly acceptable fat sources. But you shouldn’t go out of your way to eat more of them. There’s no proven benefit to doing so—and there are some documented risks.”

There are really only two fats you should avoid all the time: Trans fats (but you already knew that), and nuts — if you have an allergy (you knew that too).

For nearly everything else—butter, coconut oil, grapeseed oil, corn oil, and so on—you can feel free to eat them within moderation, and without guilt. These are the “available” fats. You’re not bringing your body one step closer to death by eating them. You’re also not doing it any big favors. You’re simply supplying it with an essential macronutrient.

Are there “better” or “healthier” sources of fat? Yes.

Olive oil, nuts, and seeds contain polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats with demonstrated health benefits that have held up in studies. But that doesn’t mean you need to only eat them.

You should also know that simply adding a “healthy” fat source to an otherwise crappy diet (one that’s high in calorie-dense packaged foods and low in fruits, vegetables, and whole foods) will not make you healthier. In fact, it could make you less healthy if the additional calories you pile onto that crappy diet take you over your daily caloric intake, and lead to fat gain.

“If you do it in the extreme, you could see extreme changes,” Nadolsky says. “And not in a good way.”

The Quick Guide to Healthy Fat (AKA What You Should Eat)

READ MORE: 

How Much Fat Should I Eat?

Do Carbs Actually Make You Fat?

Winning the War on Hunger: Practical Solutions to Overeating

The post Healthy Fat: Which Foods Should You Really Be Eating? appeared first on Born Fitness.

You know what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to spread a tablespoon of peanut butter on some apple slices. The reality: you wind up spooning it—and almost half of the jar—directly into your mouth. Then you wash it down with a bag of trail mix.

You’re supposed to eat a serving of hummus with some veggies. But now the whole tub of Sabra is empty, and after the veggies disappeared so quickly, you broke out a bag of tortilla chips to help finish it off. [After all, it’s a snack, right?]

Did you know: people struggle with overeating more in response to boredom than any other emotion.

The healthy snack slide results in two emotions:

1. You’re not quite sure why you’re gaining weight (or struggling to lose) because you’re not technically eating anything bad.
2. You’re swimming in guilt with bouts of overeating that you can’t control. You think, “Why can’t I just snack like a normal human being? Why am I so weak?”

The problem is not uncommon. In fact, you’re no different than most people that can’t quite figure out how to make healthy snacks work for their meal plan or reign in overeating. While snacking can be a good solution to fixing broken diet plans, willpower is an exhaustible quality for everyone. And there are certain situations where you’re set up for a fall and you don’t even recognize it. These situations are called triggers, and they can lay waste to your best-laid plans.

Everybody has triggers. You see them commonly with people that battling binge eating disorder (BED), but overeating is not just a problem for people with a clinical diagnosis.

[Note: Binge eating disorder, a diagnosable condition characterized by eating abnormally large amounts of food even when you’re not hungry, feeling embarrassment or shame as you do, and having this recur at least once a week for three straight months, is a serious problem. If these symptoms describes you, we encourage you to speak with a qualified medical professional with a background in disordered eating.]

Food triggers can be physical (like when you’re tired), mental (like when you’re stressed), or have to do with the foods you eat (some contain a sugar-salt-fat combo called “the bliss point” that’s actually engineered to make you want more). The trick to breaking free of overeating is learning your triggers and understanding why they set you off.

If you’re not sure if your lifestyle is causing your overeating, then read part 1 to understand what might be causing your struggles. If you already know your problem but are not sure how to fix it, then fast forward to part 2 and read all about the different solutions. They will put you in control, so you can finally master using healthy snacks as a way to lose weight effectively without feeling deprived and hungry.

Part I: Snack Triggers—And Why They Set You Off

The Trigger: Feeling sad, down, or depressed

Why it sets you off:  People crave sweets when they are feeling down, says Brian Murray, former Born Fitness Head Coach. At least that’s what he has seen repeatedly in his work with hundreds of coaching clients.

“I’d say that a majority of people experience cravings as a coping mechanism for emotional reasons,” Murray explains. Research supports this idea. For example, a set of studies found that people ate larger amounts of hedonic foods—popcorn and M&Ms—when they were in a sad state, and ate more of a less gratifying option (raisins) when they were feeling happy.

Feeling depressed, meanwhile, can lead to what psychologists call “negative urgency.” The term describes when people get more impulsive as they feel worse. A study of more than 600 women showed that those who did impulsive things when they were depressed also had dealt with binge eating episodes at one point or another.

The Trigger: Stress and anxiety

Why it sets you off: Your body responds to stress by kicking off a “fight or flight” reaction that causes the hypothalamus to produce corticotropin-releasing hormone. That’s a fancy way of saying it shuts down your appetite. That sounds like a good thing, but that’s only in the short term.

When that stress becomes chronic (as it does when you’re worried about things like money, your job, or your marriage), then your body’s response changes. Your adrenal glands release another hormone, called cortisol, which increases your appetite. Your body will also secrete insulin, which promotes food intake and fat storage. That’s where things go from bad to worse and overeating kicks in. Studies show that stress not only causes you to consume more food, it also leads the desire to select higher-fat (read: higher calorie) foods. Over time, persistent stress can reinforce this habit and make food cues more rewarding to your brain. Thus, the vicious cycle of not wanting to eat certain foods but feeling like you don’t even control what your mind tells you to crave.

The Trigger: Lack of sleep

Why it sets you off: Ever wonder why you seem to crave cheeseburgers more after an all-nighter? Contrary to popular belief, overeating from a lack of sleep is not the result of having more available hours to eat. It’s because the desire for unhealthy snacks becomes hard-wired into your circuitry.

Your body tends to produce more ghrelin—the “hunger hormone”—when it lacks sufficient rest. And studies have proven that you’re driven to want higher-calorie comfort foods when you are tired. Even a single night of poor sleep can induce these effects, but over time the cumulative effect is even worse. Numerous studies have indicated that people who get fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night are more likely to be obese.

The Trigger: Boredom

Why it sets you off: This scenario will probably feel familiar: You’re at home, there’s nothing going on, so what do you do? You pop into the pantry and search for some “entertainment.” (Then eat it.) Why does this happen? Because people will do anything to escape monotony. Want proof? Check out this study where study participants inflicted painful electric shocks on themselves to break up a long period of boredom. What does that have to do with your appetite and overeating? The same study found that bored people who had access to M&Ms consumed much more of the candy than those in the control group. Another study found that people struggle with overeating more in response to boredom than any other emotion.   

The Trigger: You’re distracted

Why it sets you off: There’s a reason why a bag of chips disappears so much faster when you’re in front of the TV: memory influences consumption. This meta-analysis of 24 studies found that when people aren’t looking at the food they eat—you know, in the same way that those Pringles don’t spend a whole lot of time in front of your eyes while Game of Thrones is on—they eat much (much) more food.

The visual cues we receive when we pay attention to what we eat can help us keep our consumption in check. And while distracted eating, in general, causes an increase in immediate food intake according to the review, the effect grew even larger as the day wore on. People who were distracted during their first meal ate more at their next one. Conversely, a different study found that women who were instructed to pay more attention to their food at a meal snacked less later in the day.

The Trigger: Dehydration

Why it sets you off: If you’re the type of person who finds salty foods irresistible, you may want to try a glass of water first. Researchers have found that your thirst and appetite for sodium share a lot of the same neural mechanisms. Again, you might not care about “neural mechanisms,” but it means that your craving for something (anything) salty might be a sign that you haven’t been drinking enough. and if you’re even slightly dehydrated, your brain will send stronger reward signals in response to salty food when you’re dehydrated. So when you feed your dehydrated body salty snacks, you crave more and more. That’s why it’s best to cut off the process before it’s out of control.

If you want to know if you’re dehydrated, head to the bathroom. Athletes are probably familiar with the “pee test,” in which you simply check out the color of your urine. The more clear it is, the better hydrated you are—although if you are taking vitamins, that can give you colorful pee no matter how well hydrated you are. In which case, you could try option #2 (no pun intended). Our friends at Precision Nutrition created a guide that shows how you can learn about your hydration level (and more) from your stool. Not something to brag about to your friends, but if you’re already in position, doesn’t hurt to take a look.

The Trigger: Hyper-palatable foods

Why it sets you off: Reward cues—what your brain tells you about the foods you eat—are major influencers over what and how much you consume. Researchers have observed that when people are given unlimited access to highly rewarding foods like cheeseburgers, Doritos and M&Ms, they will overeat by about a thousand calories per day. Keep that in mind now as you consider food manufacturers will test hundreds of combinations of their foods in order to find what’s referred to as “the bliss point,” or the perfect reward cue.

What they’re adding isn’t riboflavin (or any other vitamin)—it’s sugar, salt, and fat. This is how you end up with Prego spaghetti sauces that have more sugar per serving than two Oreo cookies. “The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring, but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating,” writes Michael Moss, an investigative reporter and New York Times-bestselling author of Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. The bottom line: Certain processed foods are designed to make you want to eat them—and keep eating them.

The Trigger: Non-satiating foods (foods that never quite make you feel full)

Why it sets you off: Science has shown that protein, fiber, and water are positively associated with satiety. In other words, they make you feel full, which helps you eat less. Foods low in those nutrients but high in fat do not provide a feeling of fullness that’s on-par with the number of calories they deliver. That makes them a whole lot easier to overeat. Here’s a list of just some examples of foods researchers have tested for their ability to deliver satiety, using the feeling of fullness provided by plain white bread as it’s baseline. As you’ll see, boiled potatoes are very filling relative to their calorie quotient, while a croissant most definitely is not.

Practical Solutions to Overeating Triggers

“Ok,” you are probably saying to yourself right now. There are a lot of different triggers out there. What can I actually do about them?”

Some answers are pretty straightforward—so much so that you probably already know them. Here’s a quick rundown of practical solutions to your overeating triggers:

Sleep: If a lack of sleep is your overeating trigger, make six to eight hours of shuteye (per night) a non-negotiable part of your routine. Go as far as scheduling a bedtime and wake time every day, so that you don’t fall into old patterns.

Dehydration: If you think dehydration might be an issue, drink more water.  That’s obvious, but the best way might be to buy 3 water bottles. Put one at your desk at work, one by your bedside table (or near the TV), and a third in your car. Not enough drinking is usually a result of not thinking about drinking. So by creating a visual reminder (the water bottle), you’re putting yourself in a position to drink more.

Distraction: To address distracted eating, avoid having your meals in front of a TV or a computer. Follow Harvard’s recommendation to look at the food you’re consuming. Also: Chew more. (Increased chewing has been shown to reduce calorie intake.)

Too much goodness: If a pantry full of hyper-palatable foods is like having a loaded gun in the house, then a kitchen makeover is going to be super helpful. Clean that junk out of your cupboards and you’ll be better positioned to succeed. Or, simply put the foods that you desire most (but don’t want to completely remove) in an area that you don’t visit as often (like a different cabinet in your home). The less you see it, the less likely you are to grab it in a pinch.

But here’s the thing: life isn’t always so simple. Let’s say you live in a situation where you share the pantry, and therefore don’t have 100 percent say over all of its contents. Or, perhaps you’re working two jobs right now, and the idea of getting eight hours of sleep seems downright impossible.

And that’s before we even get into stress, anxiety, and depression. It’d be pretty ridiculous for someone to try and tell you: Well, just don’t be sad.

The fact is, cut-and-dry solutions are rare. So while the usual things you read about in health articles—getting proper sleep, sufficient exercise, and maybe even trying meditation to help you stress less—are of course helpful, we’re not going to give you some big list of things you need to do to kick overeating to the side. Instead, we’re going to arm you with a process that will help you recognize when (and why) a binge is coming on, identify other options you can take, and then move on with your life.

The Awareness Answer to Overeating

Binges often follow some type of pattern—one that you don’t even recognize has been set in motion. “Finding a way to break the pattern is key,” says Jessica Robertson, RD at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training. “Then you can brainstorm alternatives and come up with a concrete plan for confronting the trigger, vs. ‘stuffing’ it with food.”

Step 1: The 3-Day Test

First, identify the real cause of the issue. There are two tactics you can use to do this. The first is to keep a journal. It’s not something you have to do for the rest of your life; three days can work.

“That’s where I have clients start,” Robertson says. “Record not only your foods and fluids but also your sleep and your feelings and emotions.” That can help you identify whether a bingeing episode is purely physical, like if too much time elapsed between last meals, or if something deeper and more emotional is at work.

It’s possible that your binge is simply a matter of bad timing. Some people will overeat if they go too long between meals. If that’s you, eating smaller meals more frequently (5-6 times a day in most cases) could be your answer.

Conversely, you may find that snacking itself is your trigger. If that’s the case, you may do better eating only 2-3 more substantial meals a day or even trying an intermittent fasting plan.

Another way to recognize problems as they arise is to use a tactic Precision Nutrition calls “noticing and naming.” In it, you simply call attention to what you are doing in the moment you are doing it, then name what is happening.

For example, Murray says that one of his habits is to make a beeline for the peanut butter jar when he’s mad or annoyed. When that happens, what he’ll try to do is stop himself and say—out loud—what’s going on: I’m pissed off and eating out of frustration. He’s even given himself a name for these times: “Miffed Murr.”

By calling out what’s going on as it happens, you achieve two things. First, you create awareness, which puts you back in control. Then, you can decide whether you really want to move ahead with that course of action, or recognize if you are simply acting out of habit and don’t actually want to do what you’re about to do.

The extra time lets you take a deeper look at what’s going on—and consider whether eating is going to help you solve the problem at hand.

“For example, if anxiety is a trigger, it’s good to explore that further,” says Las Vegas-based dietitian Andy Bellatti. “It’s important to understand that binge-eating in response to anxiety is problematic in two ways. One, it does nothing to change the condition that is causing the anxiety in the first place. Two, it often leads to add unhelpful feelings and thoughts, like ‘I shouldn’t have done that’ or ‘I feel guilty.’“

By recognizing what’s going on—and seeing that the course you’re on isn’t a real solution—you shrink the problem down to size and make it more manageable in the moment.

“Instead of expanding the anxiety and making it larger, focus on something else that makes you feel good,” Bellatti suggests. “Binge-eating may provide temporary pleasure, but it does not make someone feel good when, five minutes after doing it, it brings up a variety of negative emotions.” 

The thing is, it’s a whole lot easier to trade in your would-be binge session for a brisk walk when you’re not staring at a pantry full of chocolate covered pretzels.

Step 2: Eliminate and Replace

The two are paired together because we know that completely eliminating temptation isn’t possible. And in fact, it’s not even something we suggest over the long haul in most cases. A good diet should include your favorite foods—and that includes dessert. But sometimes it’s necessary to take a timeout from an item and set up your environment for success.

“We eliminate things temporarily until we can figure out a solution,” Murray says. “We’ll work with someone to understand whether a food is being eaten just because it’s there, or if maybe it’s being relied on because it provides something larger emotionally.”

Murray says that most of the time these temporary eliminations take place as part of a kitchen makeover, but it’s only half of the step. The other half is replacing the item with foods that are either “healthier” or easier to control. Here’s where a coach or journal is helpful because they can assist you in identifying foods and creating solutions.

Step 3: Change Your Mindset

The last step might be the hardest: Self-forgiveness.

We’re all our own worst critics. If you’re the type of person who gets upset by a binge, you probably also have high standards—especially when it comes to yourself.

“People who have these habits tend to be the most self-critical people,” Murray says. “They end up going through these cycles of ‘I’m not good enough, I might as well do this.’  Then they eat it, feel bad, and repeat that process over and over.”

All of that self-blame can feel like a warped form of discipline. (“I feel terrible about this, it must mean I want to be better.”) But in reality, beating up on yourself isn’t helpful; it’s counterproductive—especially when you consider the “negative urgency” idea discussed earlier. You’ll feel better—and be more able to stay on track with your eating—if you can show yourself a little compassion. This doesn’t always come naturally for people.

“With a number of clients, I have to tell them, ‘I can tell you’re a good person. But you don’t treat yourself as well as you treat everyone else,’” Murray says. A lot of times we’re harder on ourselves than we’d ever be on another person.

Would you go screaming at someone that they suck or they’re weak if you saw them eat more than they’d meant to? You wouldn’t. Try to afford yourself the same courtesy. With a mind free of self-blame, you can be more aware of what’s going on internally, and be better at deciding the healthiest course of action for you.

READ MORE: 

Big Meals vs. Small Snacks: What’s Best For You?

The Abs Workout: How to Transform Your Midsection

Why Running Doesn’t Always Burn Fat

The post Winning the War on Hunger: Practical Solutions to Overeating appeared first on Born Fitness.

It’s not about losing weight or gaining muscle, or even responding to warnings from medical professionals.

It’s your relationship with the number on the scale, a device that can be more misleading than it is insightful. 

The scale can be helpful — if you know how to make sense of what it says. But since you are more likely to stress, obsess, and be confused by the number — regardless of whether you are healthy, overweight, or obese — it’s time to take a stand and change your relationship with the scale. It’s vital to your weight loss (or muscle gain) success.

Scale weight should just be a piece of information. A number. Data. Whether your goal is losing weight (or more accurately, losing fat) or packing on pounds of muscle, the scale shouldn’t be your only way of measuring progress. 

There’s a big problem with thinking that a number on a scale will make you happy. It won’t.

For too many people, scale weight means so much more. Our emotions get involved. Certain numbers make us happy. Others make us feel awful.

The scale is so misunderstood that the device itself becomes another source for our emotional and psychological struggles with losing weight (or gaining). The numbers the scale reports turn into another reason why we have a hard time sticking to a plan. Why? Because we trust in the scale so much that it blinds us from success and can lead us down a trail of endless frustration.

It shouldn’t be this way—and not just because it’s unhealthy and counterproductive. Obsessing over weight is foolish because we are being fooled by the number itself.

In fact, when it comes to being an indication of our health, the scale is oftentimes (but not always) a bald-faced liar.

The scale can’t keep its story straight. Ask it the same question 15 times in a day and you’ll get 15 different answers.

The figure that the scale quotes to us creates more questions than it answers. But we rarely ask for more information. Instead, we just accept the figure as gospel. Our ego draws its own conclusions from there. My weight is going up. That’s bad. Or: My weight is going down. That’s good.

Both of those statements can be false interpretations of faulty information.

It’s time to fight back. Instead of being a victim of the scale’s dictatorship, you can:  

• Understand the many ways in which the scale gives you bad information.
• Discover a method for gathering better intel about the true state of your body—one that is less prone to the scale’s drastic swings. You’ll learn how to put what it tells you into context.  
• Learn real-world steps you can take today to help steer your body in the direction you want—and receive some tips to help you if you get stuck along the way.

The scale has wielded too much power over your life for too long.

It’s time to call it out for what it is: an oversimplified, misleading manipulator.

Losing Weight 101: The Many Lies of the Scale

How do you lie to us, o scale? Let us count the ways.

Scale weight changes constantly throughout the day. Any figure that the scale reports to you is merely a snapshot. A moment in time. The number doesn’t take a whole lot of time to change, and it doesn’t need a reason to shift. Dietician Alexandra Caspero showed you can gain almost two pounds in an hour without any apparent cause at all.

Scale weight is subject to the whims of water. Your intake of H20, or output of sweat, can cause your total body weight to shift up or down by nearly half a percentage point within any given day, according to John Castellani, a researcher at the U.S. Army’s Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.

Your water/salt balance can cause seasonal shifts in your weight, too. When the mercury climbs in the spring and summer, your body uses a hormone called aldosterone to retain more fluid. So what looks like a summertime backslide in progress might just be your body’s natural reaction to the warmer weather.

Lastly, if you’re not taking in enough fluids, then your body will hold on to more of them for you. “Mild dehydration may cause fluid retention, which can increase scale weight, “ explains Dr. Melina Jampolis.

Scale weight makes your stress an even bigger deal. Numerous studies show a relationship between elevated stress levels and higher weights. This 5-year long study of more than 5,000 people in Australia found that those who felt the most stress also gained the most weight during that time span.

Stress is also one of the main triggers of binge eating. Combine that with negative reinforcement from the scale and you have a damned unfortunate vicious cycle: Stress makes you eat. Eating increases your weight. Your weight makes you stress.

Making matters even worse, stress increases cortisol production, which has been linked to higher levels of abdominal fat in both women and men.

Scale weight can be downright dirty. Motility—the polite way of saying “how frequently you poop”—matters when you measure your scale weight. This rate varies from person to person. Your regularity can change based on what, and how often, you eat. (People with an extremely slow rate are said to have gastroparesis, or delayed gastric emptying.) How much you chew your food, whether or not you drink water with meals, and how much you are up and about walking can also influence it.

Scale weight is as subject to change as your flight schedule. Air travel can impact your weight by disrupting not only your circadian rhythm but also the rhythm of the bacteria in your gut microbiome.

A study published in Cell found when mice were subjected to jet-lag-like conditions, the bacteria in their digestive systems changed and the animals gained weight. The researchers found that similar changes took place in the microbiomes of two people who traveled by air from the U.S. to Israel.

In non-scientific terms, you might notice bloating when you travel, which regulates within 24 hours. Are you actually gaining weight while you’re in the air? Of course, not. But the scale might have you believe otherwise.

Scale weight rewards cheaters. You could hack your way down to a target number through crash dieting and stimulants. But you definitely won’t be healthier for having done it.

“You can technically lose weight by cutting your calories by half and eating minimally nutritious, highly processed junk food. But that misses the point,” says Las Vegas-based dietitian Andy Bellatti. “Sure, the number on the scale will be lower, but you probably won’t feel good and you won’t have much energy to engage in physical activity.”

Scale weight shows us trees but hides the forest. Your weight can fluctuate significantly due to a single meal, making you stress unnecessarily.

Say you’re on a weight loss plan and making progress. So you treat yourself to a heartier meal while you’re out with some friends. That’s a totally normal and healthy thing to do—reward should be part of a weight loss plan. But the next time you step onto the scale, the number you see could try to convince you otherwise.

“The scale plays a huge role in what we call ‘what the hell?’ weeks,” explains Born Fitness Head Coach B.J. Ward.  “People will retain water after an ‘off-plan’ meal, which tips the scale higher. Then they’ll have an emotional reaction.”

People wind up thinking that they aren’t making progress when really they’re just a little bloated. A similar effect can happen among people doing any type of carb cycling, Ward explains. You are going to weigh more after a high-carb day than a low-carb day. In either case, Ward says individual measurements aren’t what matters. The overall trend line is.

“Daily weigh-ins tend to produce mental static,” Bellati says. “Most people don’t know that a high sodium meal the night before can result in retention of 3 or 4 pounds of water the next morning, which most people mistake for true weight gain. They then enter an unhelpful and unnecessary spiral of frustration, guilt and self-blame.”  

Scale weight is blind to what really matters. The final—and biggest—nail in the “should I sweat over what the scale says?” coffin is this: The scale can’t tell you what you’re really made of.

Plenty of people can step on a scale and hit a low number but be far from healthy. There’s even a term for it: “skinny fat.” On the flip side, the scale—and its derivative BMI—is prejudiced against people who carry more muscle. Which is why BMI will tell you that every player on the Denver Broncos is overweight or obese, even though our own eyes can tell us that Von Miller is friggin’ jacked.

Muscle and bone are denser than fat. Stronger people may weigh the exact same—or more than—fatter, weaker people. The stronger people aren’t worse off because they’re heavier. In fact, strength is connected to longevity. The raw number on the doesn’t tell you the body fat percentage of the person standing on top of it.

Two people might both weigh 180 pounds. One is 10% body fat. The other is 20%. The first will be lean and muscular. The second will be soft and more prone to a variety of health problems (because of the higher body fat percentage). But the scale doesn’t know or tell you the difference.  

All of these reasons are why no good dietician or coach would ever suggest that you focus on scale weight alone. “I think of health as a 20-piece puzzle,” Bellatti says. “Scale weight is just one piece.”

Jessica Robertson, RD at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, agrees. “Weight is one tool, but never something that I focus on or set specific goals around.”

Overcoming the Scale Plateau

The first thing you should ask yourself when want to hit a specific weight is a simple, one-word, three-letter question: Why?

Why is that number important to you? Dig into the meaning behind it. Where did you come up with the number?

Sometimes people set goals that aren’t at all based on reality. You might set a goal of losing weight in an attempt to reach the weight you were in college. But your body has put on muscle since then. It’s possible that the only way to reach that figure would be to sacrifice lean mass (that’s not what you want). When you finally hit that number—if you hit it—it’s possible that you could wind up feeling awful, being quantifiably weaker, or not liking the way you look.

You may have felt and looked great at five pounds heavier than the goal number. But you were too focused on reaching a number that was essentially plucked out of thin air (or from the annals of history) to notice.

The bottom line is that there’s a big problem with thinking that a number on a scale will make you happy. It won’t. A target weight is an easy goal that we think we are supposed to set. But in most cases, we should ignore that urge.

“It’s more important to focus on how you feel, how your clothes are fitting, or on measurements such as your waist, hips, arms, or even your heart rate,” Robertson says.

In our Born Fitness online coaching program, we teach our clients to self-monitor using four techniques:

• Progress pictures: You can learn a lot from your selfies. Strip down to your skivvies and, without posing or flexing, take photos of yourself from the front, sides and back. Do it in a place where the lighting is consistent so you can get the same look the next time you shoot. (We suggest taking new ones about every four weeks.) Hang on to the pictures and watch what changes.

• Body Circumferences: Get a body tape measure (several options are available for as little as $6). How many spots you want to measure are up to you. At a minimum, we suggest recording the size of your waist above the belly button, hips and thighs. If you have certain physique goals, like building bigger arms, then you’ll want to measure those areas as well. Record your numbers. Check them again every 2-3 weeks.  

• Weight: Yes, you should record this number. But it’s just one piece of data. It’s not the be-all, end-all because losing weight is just one measure of progress and success. And most importantly, do not check it every day. Once a week at most. After all, you’re not really interested in weight, per se. What you’re interested in is weight and body fat, which allows you to measure lean body mass. If the scale isn’t moving much but your body fat is going down, that means very good things for your body.

• Subjective Questions: Examine hard-to-quantify but important aspects of your health and wellness with questions like: How do you feel? Are you energetic and upbeat, or tired and sluggish? You can also look at external indicators: How are your pants fitting? What about the rest of your clothes?

Having four ways to gauge progress gives you veto power over the scale’s lies. Now when it tells you “You’re getting fatter,” you can fire back with “Nah actually bro I’ve added a half-inch to my biceps and a quarter-inch to my chest.”

Whenever you see a drastic change in what the scale says, you’ll have the ability to put what it tells you into context.

“If we see a drop in weight, we want to corroborate that,” says online fitness coach Brian Murray. “The same is true if there’s an increase. In both cases, we’ll use the progress pictures and circumference measurements to see what’s really going on.”

Winning the Battle of the Scale

When you want to make a positive transformation with your body, start by letting go of the temptation to allow a single number to determine your success or failure. Then get a clear picture of your starting point.

The four-part assessment above will tell you a lot about your body. But you’ll also want to examine your habits: how well you are eating, sleeping and hydrating, and how much activity you get in a typical week.

For example, one of our new coaching clients will keep a food journal for a few days when they are first starting out. The journal itself is simple—you just write down everything you eat in a day—but admittedly time-intensive. Which is why we don’t require or even recommend that people continue to do it over the long-term (although some find that they like journaling, and do keep doing it).

The goal with these few days of journaling is just to learn what you are really taking in during a typical day. Sometimes you’ll be able to spot hidden sources of calories in unexpected places.

“I recall a situation where it turned out that a client was adding about 600 calories to a salad via a ‘healthy’ vinaigrette dressing,” Bellatti says. “Once we addressed that, the number on the scale started to move.”

You’ll want to learn about your sleep habits, too, because numerous studies have shown that people who get fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night are more likely to be obese.

When we cut our sleep duration short, our bodies produce more ghrelin—a.k.a. the “hunger hormone.” This happens after just one night of sleep deprivation. Making matters worse, when we’re tired, we’re more likely to crave high-calorie foods. So the more we can do to improve our sleep duration and quality, the better we’ll be able to reach our weight loss goals.

Just like it has with sleep, science shows that your hydration level strongly influences your overall body weight—and not just water weight. An examination of nearly 10,000 Americans spanning three years found a clear association between inadequate hydration and obesity. So yes, the old “8 glasses a day” rule isn’t a bad goal. But if you’re the type who doesn’t love the non-taste of H20, take heart: you can also increase your hydration levels by eating more fresh fruits and vegetables.  

We’ve talked a lot about your body and what influences it. But there’s one other critical aspect of sustainable weight loss we haven’t discussed: Your mind. Mindset is a key determinant of weight loss success. Bellatti says that one way to get your mind right is to start appreciating your body, no matter what state it’s in currently.

“When you appreciate something, you want to take care of it,” Bellatti says. “Something as simple as changing the thought process from ‘I hate my body’ to ‘I want my body to operate at its best’ provides an important shift.”

Why Losing Weight Fast Isn’t Always a Reason to Cheer

Let’s call this scenario #1. You start on a plan, check the scale after a week, and BAM! You’re down a whole lot of weight. You feel amazing.

“At that point, we say ‘Hey, good job.’ And then explain that while I don’t want to dampen the achievement, we don’t want to lose weight too fast because we’re actually trying to maintain muscle,” Ward says. “So then we take a look at the calories [a client] is taking in.”

While getting results is great, super drastic cuts can make you lose muscle as well fat. In a healthy weight loss plan, you ditch the fat but keep the lean mass.

Like Murray said earlier, anytime you experience a big scale shift is a great time to use the other three techniques to corroborate what you see. Do you notice a change in your progress pictures? How do you feel? What do the body circumference measurements tell you? They can help you see where those pounds are coming off.

You may find that your weight is changing but nothing else is. Sometimes it’s just your weight catching up with you. We call this the “whoosh” effect, and it can happen for a lot of different reasons. Perhaps your cortisol levels went down and your body released some of the weight it had been holding on to. It could be water weight. Maybe you’re just pooping more. Or the plummeting poundage could be due to a combination of those things. The point is that by having other tools at your disposal, you can get more insight into what’s really happening.

“We’ll take the progress pictures, circumference measurements, and any other metric we can to look at the big picture and assess if it’s something to get excited about,” Murray says. “Because it very well could be.”

What To Do If You Get Stuck

Now let’s talk about scenario #2. You’ve established your baseline, made some changes, and experienced positive results. You’re losing weight or gaining muscle—or at least it had been until these past few weeks. Now you seem to be stuck. The number hasn’t moved. What do you do?

Step #1: Don’t freak out. Not enough people will tell you that a plateau is part of weight loss. When the changes you’ve made appear to stop working, they’re actually still working. Your body does slow down its metabolism as you lose weight, but if you give it time to adjust to it’s new (slimmer) reality, it will adjust again.

Step #2: Check yourself. Are you still following the plan? That’s one question to ask yourself. But it might be even better to ask: Has anything come up in my life that might be taking me off course?

“What very often happens when people start seeing their results go in the opposite direction is that they’re stressed at work, or stressed about something,” Murray says. “They’re eating more than they think, and can come to that realization quickly when they look at their cravings, how hungry they are, or whether they’re eating before bed.”   

Step #3: Make adjustments if necessary. Sometimes you may need to reduce caloric intake a bit more to keep making progress. Do this in small increments, and give it time to take effect. A “small increment” may be between 300 to 500 calories, but the exact amount will depend on you, your goals, your body fat percentage, and how “stuck” you are.

Step #4: Go back to Step #1. If you have been staying true to the plan, and there’s nothing in your life that has you stressed or is causing you to backslide, then grant yourself some patience. You often have to wait for the “whoosh,” and do so for longer than you’d like.

Remember that good habits, not specific numbers, are what’s important. A number can’t tell you how you feel—unless you let it.

READ MORE: 

Winning the War on Hunger: Practical Solutions to Overeating

Do Carbs Actually Make You Fat?

Why Weights are Better Than Cardio for Fat Loss

The post Losing Weight and Your Sanity: Why the Scale Lies appeared first on Born Fitness.