One of my new clients has been running 5 days a week for 45 minutes to an hour for about a year, before he approached me for help. He wanted to build more muscle, and control his blood sugar.  In my initial meeting with him it appeared that his diet was a little bit off. We tweaked this a little bit. I also gave him a fifteen minute dumbell workout (20 lbs each) that he did 5 days a week.

Six weeks later, he called me and reported that he lost 16 pounds (he’s now 135 pounds on a 5′6” frame), and most importantly also lost two inches off his waist. He’s extremely excited because his six-pack abs is in sight. Most importantly, his blood sugar is now normal – with no medication — simply from the slight diet modification and weight training routine I gave him.

Moral of the story: A high nutrient diet, plus an intelligently designed weight training program can really turbo charge your health and weight loss goals.

The quick summary: “Dieters ate different amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrate — but, after 2 years, most were still obese.”

Here’s some more detail: “While weight-loss diets claim unique nutrient compositions that guarantee unusually rapid and effortless success, comparative studies — usually with small populations and short follow-ups — have yielded widely disparate results. Now, a large long-term multisite study suggests that all these diets result in similar outcomes.

Researchers randomized 811 overweight adults (81% white; 62% female; 69% college graduates; mean body-mass index, 33 kg/m2) to four restricted-calorie eating plans:

* High fat, high protein
* High fat, average protein
* Low fat, high protein
* Low fat, average protein

Carbohydrate intake ranged from 35% (in the first plan) to 65% (in the fourth) of total calories. All meals were prepared at home, and participants ate from a single menu with each dish’s components adjusted to reflect each diet’s emphasis; all participants were offered weight-loss counseling.

Changes in weight and waist circumference at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months were indistinguishable among groups: At 2 years, only about 15% of each group had lost at least 10% of body weight. Attendance at group counseling sessions strongly predicted successful weight loss. At 2 years, hunger and diet-satisfaction scores were all similar. Food diaries and urinary nitrogen analyses indicated that the actual nutrients consumed might have been more similar among groups than had been planned.”

I think that this situation is to be expected. Deprivation, as a general rule, is extremely hard to maintain over the long haul. It’s better to gradually change by learning how to eat plant-based, whole foods. Bottom line: its not the macro-nutrient balance that counts. It’s the micro-nutrients (and of course physical activity) that ultimately determine health and fitness.

• processed foods
• sweets, and other “foods” containing sugar
• white bread and pasta (substitute whole-grain varieties instead),
• foods with a high percentage of calories from fat,
• alcoholic drinks.

In this approach you simply become more conscious of those items that change you body and brain chemistry, more aware of controlling portion sizes, while simultaneously adding more vigorous exercise (a total of 2 to 3 hours a week) to the mix.

In this moderate, “sensible,” watch-what-you-eat approach, you gradually replace poor food choices with healthy ones. You’re likely to decrease overall caloric intake, and with the addition of regular cardio and strength exercises several times a week, you’ll naturally enter into a caloric deficit.

In my opinion and experience, this conservative approach could be effective in slightly overweight people wanting to lose around 5 to 10 percent of their body weight. There is a tremendous payback for this strategy, since even a 10% loss of excess fat (especially if it’s in the abdominal area) yields tremendous health benefits.

Q: “When I shifted to eating healthier, i.e., eating vegetables, fruits, legumes, and nuts & seeds, eliminating sugar and fast foods altogether, I started feeling weak and nauseous. My uncle (who’s a third-generation butcher and a serious afficionado of high-fat variants of Philippine cooking and chicharon-bulaklak connoisseur), told me that’s what I get from not eating meat. He suggested I eat meat immediately to get stronger. I used to eat a minimum of 16 ounces of red meat and/or chicken a day, mostly from fast food restaurants and steak houses. This is excluding my three times a week habit of eating pork chops (or sausages) and five eggs twice a week for breakfast. I love meat (and Meat Lover’s Pizza), but I want to give a healthy diet a chance since my total cholesterol is at 387 and my pressure is 170 over 125.”

A: Your body has been used to processing a very high amount of protein and salt, so the shift to better food needs time to re-adjust. You have been subjecting yourself to a high level of metabolic stress because of the excess protein your have been consuming and fat. The readjustment to lower protein and sodium levels will take some time, so in the beginning you’ll actually feel worse when you shift to a high-level, nutrient dense, lower calorie healthy diet. This detox process is no different from the withdrawal symptoms one gets when quitting addictive substances.

Some authorities would argue for a phased-in change, tapering off your high meat consumption as you increase your greens and healthy whole food intake. Supposedly this minimizes the toxic dumping that accompanies a shift to a lower caloric (and conceivably, healthier) diet. Losing weight fast can potentially have harmful effects.

Other sources, e.g., Dr. Joel Fuhrman, argues that shifting immediately to a nutritionally excellent diet would be a more strategically sound approach, given your alarming profile.

My feeling is that it really depends on how sound the new diet can be, and how informed, disciplined and motivated you will be with your new regimen. Nausea is usually not a good motivator, so it will depend on how well you’re going to weather the detox storms coming your way…