March 28, 2023 – A new analysis gives a promising answer to the weight loss question: Is it better to have lost and gained, than never to have lost at all?
People who lost weight but regained some of it experienced sustained health improvements for at least 5 years after the initial weight loss, a new study says. The prolonged benefits included lowered risks of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, as well as improved blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
“Many doctors and patients recognize that weight loss is often followed by weight regain, and they fear that this renders an attempt to lose weight pointless,” said University of Oxford professor and researcher Susan A. Jebb, PhD, in a statement. “This concept has become a barrier to offering support to people to lose weight. For people with overweight or obesity issues, losing weight is an effective way to reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”
The results were published on Tuesday in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. The researchers analyzed data from 124 previously published studies in which people lost weight in what are called “behavioral weight loss programs.” Those programs focus on lifestyle and behavior changes such as eating healthy foods and increasing physical activity.
The average participant was 51 years old and considered obese based on body mass index (a measure that combines weight and height). On average, people lost between 5 and 10 pounds and typically regained less than 1 pound per year.
People who participated in the most intensive programs had significant long-lasting benefits, compared to people in less intensive programs or who followed no formal weight loss program at all. Programs that were considered intensive had features such as partial or total meal replacement, intermittent fasting, or financial incentives contingent on weight loss.
Specific average benefits included:
Systolic blood pressure was decreased by 1.5 points one year after program participation, and by 0.4 points lower at 5 years.
The level of HbA1c, a protein in red blood cells used to test for diabetes, saw a sustained 5-year reduction.
A cholesterol measure that compares total cholesterol to “good” or HDL cholesterol was 1.5 points lower at the 1-year and 5-year marks after participation in an intensive program.
The benefits of weight loss did diminish as people regained more and more weight, the researchers found.
Obesity affects 42% of U.S. adults, according to the CDC, and is known to increase the risk of many dangerous health conditions, including heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the U.S. Obesity is defined as a body mass index of 30 or higher.
The new findings could play a particularly important role in addressing weight gain that often happens after people stop taking weight loss medications, wrote Vishal N. Rao, MD, MPH, and Neha J. Pagidipati, MD, MPH, both of the Duke University School of Medicine, in a letter published alongside the new study. They called the reported risk reductions “favorable, although modest,” and said data showing longer-term results are needed.
And no, I wasn’t born this strong (that would be strangely awesome). It’s only after discovering a love of strength training that I learned how to handle weight like this.
Obviously, we won’t start you out lifting that much at first. But we will set you up on a path that if you want to, one day you’ll be able to.
Before we get to it, if you’re in a hurry, I want you to know we’ve compiled all our strength training material into a friendly guide so you can read it at your leisure (I’m picturing you reading the guide poolside, sipping a lemonade).
Download Strength Training 101: Everything You Need to Know when you enlist in the Rebellion (that’s us!) below:
Download our comprehensive guide
Everything you need to know about getting strong.
Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.
How to find the right gym and train properly in one.
#1) When you’re stronger – life is easier. No need to call for help to get that 50lb bag of dog food off the top shelf, or carrying an air conditioner unit up a flight of stairs. LIFE is easier when you’re stronger.
#2) Less injury risk – when you build strong muscles, you’re also building stronger bones, ligaments, and tendons, making you less prone to injury doing things you love (like playing in a quidditch league).[3]
#3) Helps combat age-related muscle loss,[4] allowing us to remain independent longer as we age:
#4) Muscle is harder to maintain, which means you need to eat more just to hold on to it.[5]
#5) Reduce pain – having a strong body makes living easier on your joints, as well as allows you to hold a better posture and reduce back / hip pain.[6]
#6) Appearance – this is a personal preference! Some women like to have a lot of muscle, and some don’t. While you can’t spot reduce fat, you can choose to build more muscle in specific areas, changing your body shape. Growing up, I was an extreme pear shape, but due to strength training, I now have more of an hourglass shape.
#7) Live longer – want to spend more time on Earth? Strength training and growing muscle will help you do just that.[7]
Boom!
Although strength training is one of the best things you can do for your health, it’s estimated that only about 20% of women do it, far below that of our male counterparts.[8]
That sucks.
It’s part of my life’s work to reverse this trend and to do so, I’m going to need your help.
Here’s something that may shock you: there’s no reason everybody – of any gender or sex – shouldn’t strength train the same way!
Yep, you don’t need 3-pound pink dumbbells, unless you like 3-pound pink dumbbells! You can train with free weights and barbells just like everybody else at the gym.
Sure, there are biological differences between the sexes. For example when strength training, people with typical male anatomy will produce more type IIa fibers than people with typical female anatomy, who will in turn produce more type I fibers than men.[9]
The American College of Sports Medicine doesn’t differentiate between sexes in their strength training recommendation.[11] So neither shall we.
So what exactly is strength training, you may be asking?
“Strength training” of any kind can be explained by two things:
#1) Movement of any weight (including your body weight) – Doing ANY exercise that pushes your muscles outside of their comfort zone, forcing them to rebuild stronger to prepare for the next challenge.
#2) Progressive overload: exerting slightly more effort than last time (lift a heavier weight or do 1 more rep) consistently. Your muscles will constantly have to adapt and will constantly be rebuilding themselves to get stronger.
Coach Jim walks you through different strategies for progressive overload in this video:
Before we get into the ins and outs of strength training, I need to address a question we get over and over from the women in our coaching clients:
Will I get bulky if I lift weights?
If you see a woman who is incredibly muscular and at an extremely low body fat percentage, I guarantee she has been working her butt off for a very long time with the very specific goal of building muscle and looking that way.
It’s not something that happens overnight, or by mistake.
We simply don’t have the same amount of testosterone as people with male anatomy to get there easily.[12] It’s something we cover in great detail in our guide on How to Build Muscle as a Woman.
If you’d like to build muscle, but not as much as a professional bodybuilder – don’t worry, it’s not something that happens by accident.
It’s something Rebel Leader Steve brings up in the video below:
So strike “I don’t want to get bulky” from your vernacular.
Alright, let’s talk about how to actually get started strength training.
If you’re just starting your strength training journey, our first stop will be a bodyweight workout.
Bodyweight training is simply doing an exercise in which your own body is the “weight” you are “lifting.”
Duh.
This is the BEST place for anybody – regardless of weight or age – to start their strength training journey.
Why is this the best place to start?
Here are two big reasons to do bodyweight training:
#1) You always have your body with you (unless you are a ghost, in which case, this is awkward). This means you can work out ANYWHERE with bodyweight training:
#2) Using your body for resistance training is the most “human” thing ever! By learning to push and pull and hang and squat and lunge, you are doing what your body is literally designed to do.
By getting strong with bodyweight movements, you’re making yourself antifragile and less injury-prone.
Bodyweight training isn’t as easy to ‘scale’ the difficulty as some of the other strength training methods (“put more weight on barbell”), but you can get REALLY strong with just bodyweight training.
For example…
You can start with knee push-ups:
Then go to regular push-ups:
Then elevated push-ups:
Then even up to things like handstands:
And even handstand push-ups:
You just have to know HOW and WHEN to scale up (we can help there too).
Want a sample bodyweight workout you can try? You got it:
This is the Beginner Bodyweight Workout (3 Circuits):
20 Bodyweight squats.
10 Push-ups.
10 Walking lunges (each leg).
10 Dumbbell rows (use a milk jug or other weight).
You made it! It’s now time to start training with barbells!
This is going to help you become ultra-powerful and strong.
It’s how I transformed myself into the person I am today.
The reason barbell training is so important is that it allows you to pick up heavy weights and do movements that recruit every muscle in your body. This is great for building powerful, strong muscles in your core, legs, glutes, and so on.
Show me somebody that’s strong at both of these movements, and I’ll show you somebody that’s in better shape than most of the human population.
But wait!
Even an empty barbell can be heavy (normally 45 pounds or 20Kg), so before we jump into the deep end, let’s make sure you are strong enough to proceed.
You’ll need to be able to complete a goblet squat with a 45 pound dumbbell (shown earlier) and the Romanian deadlift with 20 pound dumbbells.
Here’s how to perform the Romanian deadlift with dumbbells:
Our test to see if you can handle barbell training will be the Level 4 Gym Workout: Dumbbell Division C (taken from our Beginner’s Guide to the Gym).
You’ll need to be able to go through the following before you start training with barbells:
10 goblet squats – 45 lbs (20Kg dumbbell),
10 Romanian deadlifts with 20 lbs dumbbells (9-10 Kg)
10 push-ups (on knees or regular)
10 dumbbell rows with each arm – at least a 20 lb dumbbell
Can’t do those movements at that weight? Stick to the Level 4 Gym Workouts until you build up the strength to progress to barbells.
Once you CAN do the above, the real fun is going to start!
We’re gonna replace the goblet squat with a back squat and the RDL with a barbell deadlift.
Here’s a video demonstration on how to perform the barbell back squat:
I would also encourage you to read How to Squat Properly for a full tutorial, especially if you’re just learning how to squat.
Here’s a step-by-step video on how to do the deadlift:
Once you get the handle of these two moves, it’s time for a full-body workout using barbells!
We’ll give you two different days to alternate between.
NF BEGINNER BARBELL STRENGTH WORKOUT: DAY A
Do 3 rounds of:
NF BEGINNER BARBELL STRENGTH WORKOUT: DAY B
Do 3 rounds of:
5 barbell Romanian deadlifts
10 push-ups
10 dumbbell rows per arm
That’s it! Do each of these once a week and you’ll be rocking an awesome strength training practice.
Are you doing the workouts correctly?
A good way to tell would be to record yourself doing the movement and then match them against the gifs and videos in this guide. If they look close you’re doing great!
We also provide form checks in our 1-on-1 Online Coaching Program. Through our snazzy app, a Nerd Fitness Coach (like me!) will review your movement to make sure you are training correctly and safely!
The simple to learn but tough to implement answer: lift enough so that you can get through the set, but not too much that you have NO fuel left in the tank at the end.
And then, try to lift sliiiightly more than last time.
How much weight should I start with?
If you are using dumbbells or a kettlebell, always err on the side of “too light” versus “too heavy.” You want to learn the movement correctly and build correct form.
If you are training with a barbell, ALWAYS start with JUST the bar, no matter the exercise (as a reminder, a standard barbell weighs 45 pounds).
“How fast should I add weight to the bar?”
Here’s what we teach all of our coaching clients: add the minimum amount of weight each week you can, even if you THINK you can lift more. It’s better to finish a workout full of momentum and say “I can do more!” than defeated and saying “that was too much, crapola.”
Think of it this way, even if you are adding just 5 pounds per week to the bar, within a year you would be lifting 300+ pounds!
So go SLOW. Team NF’s Steve even bought little half-pound weights and increases many of his lifts by just 1 pound per week.
And if you are looking for this content in an easily digestible form, make sure you download our free Strength 101 Guide when you join the Rebellion below:
Download our comprehensive guide
Everything you need to know about getting strong.
Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.
How to find the right gym and train properly in one.
We get questions relating to weight loss and strength training all the time, and it’s something we cover throughout our Strength Training 101 series.
Let me quickly address it here:
Fat and muscle are two different things – one can’t transform into the other.
We all have plenty of muscle right now (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to move, walk, sit upright, etc.), the muscle is just hiding underneath a layer of body fat.
In order for us to lose weight and look better, we want to do two things:
Build our muscles stronger and tighter.
Reduce the fat covering those muscles!
And luckily, both of those things happen simultaneously through strength training!
So NO, you don’t need to lose weight first before you start strength training.
You will lose weight BY strength training (and keep the muscle you have).
You do NOT need to do hours of cardio for weight loss – weight loss is 90% a result of your nutrition. So honestly, you don’t need to ever set foot on a treadmill again (unless you WANT to).
Strength training will help you lose weight and look better IF you do two key things for effective weight loss:
As we cover in our “Why can’t I lose weight” article (full of fun Harry Potter references), combining a caloric deficit and strength training is magic:
You’re not consuming enough calories to carry out your body’s daily functions.
Your body needs to use lots of calories to rebuild the muscle that was broken down during the strength training workout.
Your body has no choice BUT to pull from fat stores to get stuff done!
Just by doing those two things (get strong, reduce calories), all sorts of wizardry and witchcraft takes place in your body:
Get stronger and keep the muscle you have.
Build tight dense muscle.
A revved-up metabolism while rebuilding muscle.
Burning of body fat to get things done.
Yeah, you’re hearing me correctly.
Lose the body fat that sits on top of your muscles and you’ll make your muscles tighter and denser = look better without clothes on.
So how do you put this into practice?
Pick one of the strength workouts we covered earlier (start at the Beginner Bodyweight Workout if you feel unsure where to begin).
Oh, what’s that? You just want somebody to tell you exactly how to train for your body, and how to eat for your goals?
Fine!
Check out our 1-on-1 Coaching Program – it’s helped hundreds of women lose weight through strength training – and proper nutrition. We work with you on habit-building and lifestyle design to actually get stuff done!
The best strength training exercises are universal. No matter your size, shape, sex, gender, age, or whether you love Star Trek more than Star Wars, these are the best exercises to build a great physique.
I’m going to share with you the exercises that every beginner should master (scroll down for full video and explanations!).
The 9 Best Strength Training Exercises for Women are:
Push-up: uses every push muscle in your body (chest, shoulders, triceps)
Bodyweight squat: uses every muscle in the lower body (quads, hamstrings, glutes, core)
Bodyweight row: works every “pull” muscle and helps prepare you for a pull-up!
Pull-up or chin-up: the best “pull” exercise in history! Everybody should have a goal to get their first pull-up.
Bodyweight dip: advanced “push” movement that targets your push muscles (chest, shoulders, triceps) in a different way than push-ups.
Barbell squat: the best bang for your buck on muscle building. Recruits nearly every push muscle in your whole body, and a great core workout.
Barbell deadlift: the favorite exercise of every coach at Nerd Fitness. Uses every “pull,” leg, and core muscle in your body.
Barbell benchpress: as basic and powerful as they come. Uses every “push” movement in your upper body and can get you strong as heck!
Barbell press: press the bar above your head! Targets shoulders and triceps more than the chest.
Click on any of these exercises to get a FULL explanation of the movement, step-by-step:
1) The Push-Up: The best exercise you could ever do for yourself when it comes to using your bodyweight for push muscles (your chest, shoulders, and triceps):
2) The Bodyweight Squat: This exercise serves a dual purpose as it’s the foundation for building strength AND helps build proper mobility. If you are going to ever do barbell squats, you need to work on hitting proper depth with a bodyweight squat first!
3) The Inverted Bodyweight Row: Until you can get your first pull-up or chin-up, these exercises are GREAT to start building your pull-muscle strength (back, biceps, and forearms).
4) The Pull-Up and Chin-Up: Once you can support your bodyweight above the bar, the world becomes your playground. No strength training routine should be without pull-up or chin-up work! (Click here if you can’t do a pull-up or chin-up yet?)
5) The Bodyweight Dip: As you start to get stronger with push-ups and need to find a way to increase the challenge, consider doing dips. Warning: these are very advanced, but incredible strength-building exercises.
And now we’re into the best weight training exercises:
6) The Barbell Squat: Probably the best exercise when it comes to building strength and muscle throughout your whole body. It also burns crazy calories and makes life better. This is a MUST:
7) The Barbell Deadlift: Maybe the best exercise of all time. Actually no, it IS the best exercise of all time. It’s certainly the most primal: “pick the weight up off the ground. Done.”
This is a very technical lift, so make sure you read our article on how to do it with proper form:
8) The Barbell Press: Press a barbell above your head. This recruits all of the muscles in your chest, shoulders, and arms in order for you to lift the weight over your head.
As a bonus, you need to really flex and brace your core, which gets those muscles working too.
9) The Barbell Bench Press. Lie on a bench, and lower a barbell until it almost touches your chest. Pause, and then press it back up towards the sky. Repeat! And get strong.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: commit to trying ONE of these movements in the next week. Use 20 seconds of courage, recruit a friend who has lifted or trained before, and try your best.
And if you want somebody to help you put these into a workout program, teach you HOW to do these movements properly, and have the confidence to know you’re training correctly for your goals…
(Note: we have used The Mifflin-St Jeor Equation to create this calculator! [14]).
If you want to bulk up and gain weight, take your TDEE and add 250 calories to it to get your daily goal. This should result in gaining half a pound per week.
Want to lose weight? Take your TDEE and subtract 250 calories to receive your daily goal. This should result in losing about a half-pound a week.
The other piece of the equation outside of a caloric surplus/deficit is protein.
Since you will be strength training and building muscle, you’ll need to make sure you are eating protein at every meal. It’s the number one macronutrient for creating new muscle tissue.[15]
Protein can come from any number of sources, including:
As we cover in our “How much Protein do I need?”, claims for the amount of protein required for muscle growth vary wildly from source to source (and woman to woman).[17]
Here is our recommendation:
If you’re of healthy weight, active, and wish to build muscle, aim for 1 g per pound of bodyweight (2.2 g/kg).
If you’re an experienced lifter on a bulk, intakes up to 1.50 g/lb (3.3 g/kg) may help you minimize fat gain.
Let me simplify it for you:
“To build muscle, target at least 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight (2.2 grams per kg).”
If you’re curious, from our healthy eating article, this is what a portion of protein looks like:
Here’s how much protein is in a serving of food:
4 oz (113 g) of chicken has around 30 g of protein.
4 oz (113 g) of salmon has 23 g of protein
4 oz (113 g) of steak has 28 g of protein.
Want to get more protein? Consider protein shakes. Rebel Leader Steve and I both supplement with shakes daily to meet our protein goals.
Whatever you do, make sure you’re getting enough!
Whenever we speak with new Online Coaching Clients, protein is the macronutrient we begin every discussion with! It’s THAT important when it comes to either weight loss or building muscle. I’m not kidding when I say it should make up a portion of every meal you eat.
You get to pick how you want to look, so you do you.
Just remember that women who compete as bodybuilders didn’t start looking like overnight:
They have eaten, trained, and potentially taken supplements specifically so they can look like that! Which is great. Good for them.
They’ve been working towards that goal for years, probably decades.
Here’s the truth: when you pick up heavy things (like barbell training), your muscles get STRONGER (but not necessarily bigger).
If you actively eat for the goal of building muscle and getting bigger, you CAN build muscle and size.
Again, if you want bigger arms or stronger glutes, AWESOME. You do you.
Let’s talk about the reverse: If you pick up heavy things and eat a caloric deficit, your muscles will get stronger and denser; you will burn the fat on top of your muscle, and you will lose weight and get that “toned” look that many women are after.
Sir Mix-A-Lot was wrong. Don’t do side bends and sit-ups, because you’re wasting your time!
Side bends don’t get rid of love handles. They will simply strengthen your side muscles without actually reducing any fat there, potentially making you bigger around the waist unless you change your diet as well.
Sit-ups will not remove belly fat. They can also wreak havoc on your lower back, and are an incomplete exercise.
Your body cannot spot reduce fat in specific locations. If you have flabby arms or a big stomach, doing thousands of bicep curls and thousands of crunches won’t help.
Your body is genetically predisposed to storing fat in certain locations in a certain order.
When you start to lose weight, your body will lose the fat you currently have in a certain order as well – it might come off your arms first, then your legs, then your belly, then your chest, and THEN your butt.
Or in a different order, depending on your personal genetic makeup.
No amount of targeted exercise will change how that fat disappears.
Want to lose weight? Reduce your caloric intake in a way that doesn’t make you miserable:
Big compound movements that recruit lots of muscle (and thus force your body to rebuild lots of muscle, which requires extra calories burned, even after the workout is done). Our section on the best strength training exercises for women would be good examples of compound movements.
#3) How many days a week should a woman lift weights?
Unless you’ve been strength training for years and know what you’re doing, we recommend that you pick a full-body routine that you can do 2-3 times a week.
You build muscles while resting, not working out, so you generally want 48 hours before engaging the same muscle group again.
If you made it up to our “The Wide World of Barbells” section, you can do the DAY A workout on Monday and the DAY B workout on Thursday. That’ll give you plenty of time to recover.
Want more? Maybe on the weekend, you sneak away for a short hike.
Don’t worry if this doesn’t seem like a lot at first. We are interested in building the habit of strength training initially. We can up the frequency once you’re rocking and rolling.
Learning to meal prep would also be a good use of your time between training sessions.
4) Can I do strength training at home?
You sure can!
Many of our coaching clients have gotten in great shape simply by doing bodyweight exercises at home.
Here are a few resources to get you strength training in your living room:
We can also build you a custom workout for your exact situation, whether you’re stuck at home or in an office, we can create a solution that fits your busy life!
So if you’re tired of the same ole same ole and you’re ready to start strength training, you’re in the right place!
Not sure what to do or how to get started?
1) Check out our 1-on-1 Coaching Program! Our philosophies help women like Leslie above and they can be the philosophies that help you become strong inside and out.
Click on the image below to schedule a call and see if we’re a good fit for each other!
2) If you want a daily prompt for doing workouts at the gym (or at home), check out NF Journey. Our fun habit-building app helps you exercise more frequently, eat healthier, and level up your life (literally).
Try your free trial right here:
3) Join the Rebellion! Our free community numbers in the hundreds of thousands scattered throughout the globe, and we need good people like you!
You can join by signing up in the awesome yellow box below, and I’ll send you a bunch of free guides and printable workouts, including our Strength 101 guide!
Download our comprehensive guide
Everything you need to know about getting strong.
Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.
How to find the right gym and train properly in one.
4) Do a strength training workout this week! The most important step you can do is to actually start.
You got this. You can do it. I know because we’ve seen it countless times here at Nerd Fitness.
Enough from me though, now it’s your turn:
Are you just starting your strength training journey?
Do you strength train at home or the gym?
Any weight lifting tips or tricks we missed?
Let us know in the comments!
-Staci
PS: Make sure you read the rest of the articles in our Strength Training 101 series:
The needle the doctor was holding was about the length of my forearm. He was right, I shouldn’t have looked down. I was standing in his office in Glendale, California, my shirt off and my pants pulled down to my ankles. My belly was on full display to every doctor, nurse, assistant and attending that came by and peered in to see the procedure up close. It was 2010 and the lap band was still considered an exciting “miracle cure” for obesity running rampant around Los Angeles. You couldn’t drive down any highway and not catch sight of the “1-800-GET-THIN” billboards.
Gastric band surgery is like putting a rubber band around your stomach. There’s no internal cutting (a big pro), and your stomach remains intact, unlike in a gastric bypass, where the stomach is cut, and intestines rerouted. The lap band sits snugly in the upper curve of your stomach and creates a small upper pouch. Basically, it tricks your body into thinking you have a stomach the size of a pigeon. You eat a lot less and get fuller faster — all of these were big selling points. Of course, my body would need to be tricked. I knew that by that point in my life it wasn’t going to let a single pound go easy.
I was only 19 when I got the band, but I had been put on diets as early as 7. I was tired of being fat, tired of spending my life trained on one single goal and nothing else, tired of waiting for my life after fat to start. So, I let the doctor push a needle into the port behind my ribcage and inject a full cc of saline solution. I felt the sides of the band swell and close my stomach entirely. Slowly he pulled the plunger back and my stomach opened the smallest bit, enough for water or other liquids. I had already lost 30 pounds ― only 80 more to go. Only 80 more until my life could finally be mine.
I didn’t know then that the lap band would not be a portal to a new life. It was just a trap, sold to me for $6,000 ― an eating disorder I bought and now cannot escape.
I got the lap band because a girl was mean to me. OK, that’s the short version. But it’s not untrue. I moved to Los Angeles at 18 years old and 320 pounds. I fell in love with my roommate, who didn’t mind the attention, but never took me seriously as a dating prospect. She didn’t mince words on the subject either: I was too fat. Not too fat to fool around with, but too fat to be seen with, too fat to fall in love with.
The long version is a lot longer. My mother obsessed about my weight and put me on diets throughout my entire childhood. By the time I was 18, I had been to fat camp three times, was a hardcore Weight Watchers member, and could recite to you the basics of every fad diet that had existed from 1997 onwards. I drank cabbage soup, avoided carbs, cut out lunch, had a liquid breakfast, and had a personal trainer two, three, five days a week. No expense had been spared and still I was fat. (One night, when I was at my thinnest, my dad decided over dinner to calculate how much every pound of my weight loss had cost him. It was meant to be a joke, but I don’t think I laughed much.)
The author three years after his lap-band procedure.
We paid out of pocket for the lap band and I qualified based on the BMI requirement ― I was at the far end of the chart in the “why aren’t you dead yet” section. I didn’t need a letter from a therapist or more than one consultation with the surgeon I chose. One down payment, some blood, piss and a CT scan of my insides and I had a surgery day booked. I drank only liquids for 10 days before surgery. I spent them chain-smoking Marlboro Reds and chugging orange juice. I lost my first 10 pounds.
Under anesthesia, I dreamt I was kissing Catherine Zeta-Jones. When I came around, the pain was thick and undulating, pulling my chest in and collapsing the top half off me. It took weeks to walk fully upright again and days before I slept comfortably. It was worth it to me then. I felt myself shrinking and reveled in the compliments that came thick and fast.
I’ll always remember those first few days post-surgery. I lay in bed eating only handfuls of ice chips, popsicles and thimbles of chicken broth. The world felt empty and strange without the ritual of food ― coffee at breakfast, drinks with friends. But it also felt open, new, possible. I didn’t need food anymore. I had beaten it. I would kill every memory of my fat self and start new, with a svelte shining body that everyone would love.
The first thing I puked was an apple. That’s not on the billboards ― the puking. Neither is the potential hair loss or dental damage or symptoms of general malnutrition. The lap band is an actual physical barrier ― it literally stops food from entering the larger part of your stomach. If you don’t chew slowly enough or often enough? Vomit. Things that are too fibrous? Eating too quickly? Or in bed? All of those are going to make food come right back up. And sometimes it would happen if I drank water too fast or ate things that are too cold or too spicy. Sushi, Pizza, and hot dog buns were all a no-go. I’ve puked in trash cans, out of car windows, mid-stride on a date behind a tree, and on the corner of Notre Dame cathedral when I couldn’t help it. But the very first time was an apple.
After I had my band filled with saline (it’s called an adjustment), I was put on an entirely liquid diet. Adjustments started to happen about two months after surgery, once the band had loosened from the initial implant. Saline was injected through a needle into a port behind my ribcage in a humiliating ritual that I then had to repeat every 30 pounds or so. Adjustments were essentially resets ― they closed my stomach to everything but water and broth.
Weeks of broth and prune juice (to try and keep my bowels working) eventually gave way to a soft-food-only situation. As the saline in the band evaporated, the band became looser, and I could try food that a toddler might be able to handle. The sheets that I was given suggested cottage cheese, a plastic-tasting baby food, and sugar-free pudding that gave me the shits. Some nights I would go to a deli and order a side of hot gravy and sip it slowly with a spoon, careful to work every morsel onto my tongue.
I soon ignored the suggestions and devoured anything with flavor, getting creative with the word “soft.”
I decided “soft foods” included Whole Foods homemade pico de gallo with crumbles of fancy blue cheese for punch. I sliced fresh avocados and doused them in sweet soy sauce to stop cravings for sushi, ate smoked salmon with lemon juice and a thin spread of cream cheese when I wanted a bagel. I drank miso soup like it was water and obsessed over young Thai coconuts with their delicate flesh and vitamin-packed juice.
Eating at home wasn’t the problem though ― it was going out. Every social event seemed to suddenly revolve around food. It was everywhere ― everything I couldn’t have. At first, I sipped lattes while friends enjoyed cheeseburgers. I reminded myself I was beyond food now. Above cheeseburgers. Months passed and I was starved (literally) for something with bite, with texture. I was losing weight rapidly, new clothes falling off of me just weeks after purchase. Eventually, I stopped buying new jeans and just got a belt that I punched my own holes in when I ran out. I felt like I was constantly under siege ― everywhere watching people eat and drink and live normal lives while I carried bottles of Pedialyte and protein shakes to school so I wouldn’t pass out. Eventually I figured out I could eat what I wanted and then put it all back in the toilet.
I was starving and vomiting. I got used to the vomiting. I got good at the vomiting. I couldn’t do it before the band ― not by myself. Now I knew exactly what would come back up and how fast. I could cock my head back like a pigeon and let a whole meal go. I started eating things I knew wouldn’t stay down. Why not? What did it matter? I was still losing weight. No one cared how it was coming off as long as it kept coming off.
I lost 100 pounds and then about 20 more. And then I stopped getting adjustments. And then I gained 50 back ― and they won’t budge.
The lap band isn’t as popular as it was. No more billboards. Thegastric sleeve is now the most commonly performed weight-loss surgery in the U.S., (a procedure that just cuts out a large part of the stomach and leaves a smaller stomach intact). Though other people may have had success and be entirely happy with their banding experience, it reportedly results in less weight loss than other bariatric procedures and, as of 2019, it accounted for only 0.9% of all bariatric procedures performed in the U.S. With injectables like Mounjaro and Ozempic flooding the market, weight loss surgery might soon be a thing of the past all together.
I get the appeal of a silver bullet. At my heaviest, I would have given a whole limb to be thin, and I mean that literally. But the miracles aren’t real because humans need food. We have to eat. It’s non-negotiable. When I was my heaviest, I was lonelier than I had ever been or would ever be. Life felt like it was happening around me ― to other people. I was stuck on an island, trying hard not to take up so much space. I want to tell you I wouldn’t get the band again, but I can’t promise that. I was so desperate.
The world wants fat people to be desperate, to be apologetic, to be invisible. The body positivity movement may have changed things a little, but we’re still relentlessly searching for the “cure” to obesity. It took me a long time to understand that I didn’t need to be cured. That my body and my belly were doing what they had evolved over centuries to do — to hold weight and keep me alive. No plastic band was going to change that ― not really.
I don’t judge anyone taking these new “miracle” drugs. I wanted that miracle too. I just know now that miracles aren’t real. Your body is, though. And it’s worthy of love, no matter what.
William Horn is a writer living in Boston. You can find him on Twitter @WillsHorn and read everything he’s ever put on the internet here. He’s currently working on a memoir and a book about being a professional fat guy.
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Bad things happen to a human body in zero gravity. Just look at what happens to astronauts who spend time in orbit: Bones disintegrate. Muscles weaken. So does immunity. “When you go up into space,” says Saïd Mekari, who studies exercise physiology at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, “it’s an accelerated model of aging.” Earthbound experiments mimicking weightlessness have revealed similar effects. In the 1970s, Russian scientists immersed volunteers in bathtubs covered in a large sheet of waterproof fabric, enabling them to float without being wet. In some of these studies, which lasted up to 56 days, subjects developed serious heart problems and struggled to control their posture and leg movements.
Weightlessness hurts us because our bodies are fine-tuned to gravity as we experience it here on Earth. It tugs at us from birth to death, and still our intestines stay firmly coiled in their stack, blood flows upward, and our spine is capable of holding up our head. Unnatural contortions can throw things off: People have died from hanging upside down for too long. But as a general rule, the constant push of g-force on our body is a part of life that we rarely notice.
Or at least, that’s what scientists have always thought. But there is another possibility: that gravity itself is making some people sick. A new, peer-reviewed theory suggests that the body’s relationship with gravity can go haywire, causing a disorder that has long been a troubling mystery: irritable bowel syndrome.
This is a rogue idea that is far from widely accepted, though one that at least some experts say can’t be dismissed outright. IBS is a very common ailment, affecting up to an estimated 15 percent of people in the United States, and the symptoms can be brutal. People who have IBS experience abdominal pain and gas, feel bloated, and often have diarrhea, constipation, or both. But no exact cause of IBS has been pinned down. There’s evidence behind many competing theories, such as early-life stress, diet, and even gut infections, but none have emerged as the sole explanation. That is a problem for patients—it’s difficult to treat a condition when you don’t know what to target.
Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, has a different idea: People with IBS are hypersensitive to gravity as a result of any number of factors—stress, weight gain, a change in the gut microbiome, bad sleep patterns, or another behavior or injury. The idea came to him after watching a relative confined to a nursing-home bed develop classic symptoms of IBS. “We’re upright organisms,” he told me. “We’re not really supposed to be lying flat for that long.” The hypothesis, published late last year in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, is just that, a hypothesis. Spiegel hasn’t conducted any experiments or patient surveys that point to a “mismatch” in our body’s reaction to gravity as the cause of IBS, though the mechanics are all based in firm science. But part of what makes the theory so alluring is that it might encompass all of the other conventional explanations for the disease. “It’s meant to be a new way of thinking about old ideas,” he said.
So exactly how would someone’s relationship with gravity get off-kilter? Consider serotonin, a chemical that carries messages from the brain to the body. Spiegel sees serotonin as an “anti-gravity substance” because of the role it plays in so many important bodily functions influenced by g-force, such as blood flow. Serotonin can cause blood vessels to narrow, slowing circulation. It can make certain muscles contract or relax. It’s also crucial to digestion, helping with bowel function, getting rid of irritating foods, and regulating how much we eat. Without serotonin, gravity would turn our intestines into a “flaccid sac,” Spiegel writes. Because 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, if levels spike or plummet from factors such as stress, then the chemical’s possible handling of gravity would be thrown into chaos, affecting digestion. The result, he theorizes, is IBS.
Other parts of our body that respond to gravity can also be in on the problem. We are hardwired to react negatively to situations in which the pull of gravity might harm us; walk to the edge of a cliff and your body will tell you something. The amygdala in our brain is key to fear responses, and stress of various kinds can cause it to go into overdrive. Spiegel thinks that when stress taxes the amygdala, a person begins overreacting to potential threats, including from gravity. The digestive issues that make up IBS are a manifestation of that overreaction. Sure enough, people with IBS have been shown to have a hyperactive amygdala.
That is hardly anything close to proof. The thought that this painful and prolonged condition could be a gravity disorder is a major stretch, relying on a renegade interpretation of basic biology. “People just think I’m crazy,” Spiegel said. Many of his fellow doctors are not sold on the idea. The gravity hypothesis is another in a long parade of unconvincing theories about IBS, Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist at UCLA, told me. He’s heard them all: “It doesn’t exist; it’s a hysterical trait of neurotic housewives; it’s abnormal electrical activity in the colon.” He added, “I don’t think there’s any other disease that has gone through these peaks of attention-grabbing new theories.”
Spiegel’s idea has clear holes. If a faulty reaction to gravity triggers IBS, says David C. Kunkel, a gastroenterologist at UC San Diego, then you would expect to see higher rates of IBS among populations living at sea level versus at high altitudes, where g-force is slightly weaker. But that doesn’t seem to be the case: About a quarter of Peruvians live high in the mountains and most Icelanders live at sea level, yet both countries have high rates of IBS. Likewise, IBS rates appear to decrease with age, “which would not be expected if the disease was caused by a constant gravitational force,” Kunkel told me.
Spiegel is aware that the gravity hypothesis has little support in the field and no proof. But the gravity hypothesis has some logic behind it. The fact that the weightlessness of space travel can drastically change the body lends credence to the idea that other shifts in our relationship to gravity could do the same, says Declan McCole, a biomedical scientist at UC Riverside.
And the gut may be particularly sensitive to gravity changes. McCole has found that weightlessness made epithelial cells—which line the gut and stop invaders from entering the body—easier to evade. So if our internal chemistry can change in a way that makes us hypersensitive to gravity, then, to McCole, it stands to reason that such a shift could hit the gut hard. He’s less sure of whether that hypersensitivity exists. If it does, then why haven’t we identified any chemicals that help handle gravity, as we have for fear or sex drive or hunger? That molecule may indeed turn out to be serotonin, but right now there’s no proof.
The gravity hypothesis really matters only if it is meaningful for people with IBS. And that’s not guaranteed. Tying the very real pain of IBS to such a fantastical idea may seem closer to mythology than medicine, leaving patients feeling dismissed or belittled. Or they may throw up their hands in despair and prepare for a lifetime of pain: If the immovable force of gravity is the enemy, then why bother fighting?
But if there is some truth to it, then the hypothesis could also provide a possible starting place for treatments. Some of Spiegel’s suggestions are already common, such as weight loss and medications that decrease serotonin, but he also advocates for some gravity-specific therapies. “I do talk about it with my patients,” Spiegel said. “I recommend certain yoga poses; I recommend tilt tables.” People who have IBS may balk at his more radical ideas, such as moving to a higher altitude or farther from the equator.
The gravity hypothesis may never be anything more than a hypothesis. We have a long way to go before truly knowing whether the human body can develop a hypersensitivity to gravity that can make us ill, or whether some of us are better equipped to handle gravity than others. But the weight of evidence is enough to make us think twice before ignoring the idea that our body’s relationship to gravity can go awry—including for those of us not coping with IBS. If gravity might contribute to IBS, why not other ailments too? And then, why can’t it also be harnessed for good? Mekari and his colleagues recently found that lying at a six-degree downward angle sped up response times to cognition tests—pointing to a possible link between gravity and executive functioning. Antigravity treadmills, which help astronauts prepare for weightlessness, are being studied for the treatment of cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, and sports injuries.
All of these unknowns about gravity can feel haunting. Life on Earth has changed a lot since its first forms appeared about 4 billion years ago, but through it all, gravity has seemingly remained constant—perhaps the single thing that connects every organism that has ever lived. What if there’s still much we have to learn about what it’s doing to us? After all, right now your body is coping with gravity, just as it has been for every other second of your life. Perhaps it would be weirder if gravity wasn’t doing anything to us over time. “Every fiber in our body is straining to manage this force,” Spiegel said. You don’t need to spend 56 days in a bathtub to figure that out.
March 7, 2023 — If you think the biggest risk factor to good health is smoking or genetics, think again.
According to Stephen Kopecky, MD, a preventive cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, “nutrition is now the number one cause of early death and early disease in our country and the world.” Moreover, he says that while having genes for disease will increase your risk by 30% to 40%, having a bad lifestyle for disease will increase your risk by 300% to 400%.
About 20 years ago, Kopecky says, the cause of death worldwide changed from infection to non-infection (like non-communicable diseases). “In those last 20 years, that’s grown in terms of what kills us and what gets us sick,” he says. “The three big non-communicable diseases are heart disease, cancer, and rapidly rising is Alzheimer’s. But there’s also diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure — all those things are also related to diet.”
Forty-eight-year-old James, of Fredericksburg, VA, knows this all too well. James asked that his last name not be printed, to protect his privacy. For the last 30 years, he’s been managing type 1 diabetes and complications of insulin resistance, along with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, and low testosterone. As a former Division 1 college athlete, James exercised regularly and ate what he believed to be a responsible diet.
“Those weirdos in the gym at 5 a.m. who eat chicken salads for every lunch? Yeah, that’s me,” says James.
But he went from a playing weight of 202 pounds to 320 pounds, despite continuing to lift weights and do cardiovascular exercise at least 5 days a week. “Whenever I went to the doctor and stepped on the scale, I got skeptical looks when I made claims of ‘exercising and eating right.’ In all honesty, I thought I was,” says James, noting he followed a low-carb, high-protein diet. “But I didn’t count calories or consider the impact of fat on my already insulin-resistant body,” he says.
After visiting many health professionals, James finally found success with Nancy Farrell Allen, a registered dietitian nutritionist.
Previous doctors applauded his diet, but Allen explained that his insulin resistance was linked to the amount of fat James consumed. “The more fat in my system, the more insulin I needed to inject,” he says. “The more insulin I injected, the more weight I’d gain. The more weight I’d gain, the more insulin I’d inject, continuing this regrettable cycle.”
Allen suggested he shift his diet to a more balanced approach, with a strict eye on fat. “She completely changed my way of thinking about food, broke my belief that all carbs are bad, helped me identify my daily caloric needs, and focused me on eating a balanced diet enriched with fiber,” says James, who then lost 45 pounds in 3 months. “I found myself having more energy, sleeping better, focusing better, and taking less insulin than I had in nearly 20 years,” he says.
Another patient, Sheila Jalili of Miami, took a proactive approach to her health when she turned 40, getting some tests and lab work done for a baseline comparison. “My BMI was around 20, I exercise every day, and I don’t have any diseases in my family,” Jalili says, noting everything checked out fine.
She continued her annual checkups and tests, noticing her triglycerides and cholesterol numbers increasing. When her cholesterol reached alarming levels and her triglycerides skyrocketed to 1,230, she met with Kopecky, the Mayo Clinic cardiologist, who prescribed fish oil and asked about her diet. Jalili started tracking what she ate and did an exhaustive review of her fridge contents, noting the sodium levels, cholesterol levels, and fat levels in the foods.
To her surprise, she discovered she ate a lot of unhealthy carbs and fats. “I went into overload. I changed everything. I did so much research,” she says. After 42 days of eating extremely healthy, she dropped her total cholesterol by about 100, halved her HDL, and reduced her triglycerides from 1,238 to 176.
A bad lifestyle often starts with what you eat — and what you don’t. Even if you think you’re eating healthy, you might want to revisit your diet. In particular, reconsider ultra-processed foods (like doughnuts, hot dogs, and fast-food burgers). Though convenient and affordable, they’re inflammatory and, over time, can cause many health issues.
“It bothers our tissues, our heart, our arteries, our brains, our pancreas, our liver, and our lungs, and that leads to disease,” Kopecky says. “It could be in the brain with Alzheimer’s, the heart with coronary artery disease, or cancers elsewhere.”
Ideally, you’d immediately overhaul an unhealthy diet. But that’s not a reality for most people. Making sweeping changes all at once can feel overwhelming. Take small steps instead.
Baby-Step Your Way to a Healthier Diet
Before making any dietary changes, Selvi Rajagopal, MD, MPH, advises having a conversation with your health care provider to figure out your specific health status. Rajagopal, assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, says that, generally speaking, everyone will benefit from eating a balanced, healthy diet filled with a variety of nutrient-rich foods.
That includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, low-fat/fat-free dairy, and healthy fats. However, talking with your doctor can help you identify any specific nutrient deficiencies, health issues, and lifestyle factors that need to be addressed. Then you can devise a healthy eating plan that works specifically for your needs.
Revamp how you organize your refrigerator. Most refrigerators put two opaque drawers labeled “Fruits” and “Vegetables” at the bottom, where you’re least likely to see them. Kopecky advises moving your produce to eye level and put the less-healthy options in those bottom drawers. “When we open the fridge, that’s what we see, and that’s what we tend to eat,” he says.
Change your perspective. “There isn’t one healthy weight or one healthy size,” says Rajagopal. Don’t aim for a number on the scale or a certain BMI or certain clothing size. Every body is different, not only in shape and size, but in health risk factors. Also, many people feel really overwhelmed trying to “be healthy.” Rajagopal says, “Healthy is just trying to do something to improve your health, and that improvement can be really small.”
Understand how to read food labels. Allen takes every patient to the grocery store to read and understand food labeling and to highlight different foods. She shares the guidelines below with her patients.
Fat: Low-fat foods contain 3 grams of fat or less per serving.
Sugar: Four grams equal 1 teaspoon. When a serving of sugar lists 12 grams of sugar in a 2/3-cup serving, that means it contains roughly 3teaspoonsof sugar.
Fiber: A naturally high-fiber food can contain about 5 grams of fiber per serving.
Sodium: A low-sodium food contains less than or equal to 140 milligrams of sodium per serving.
Protein: Seven grams of protein equal about 1 ounce of protein.
This approach is particularly important as the FDA is exploring a change in which foods can be labeled as healthy. The agency in September unveiled a proposed rule to try and counter the fact that, as the agency claims, more than 80% of people in the U.S. aren’t eating enough vegetables, fruit, and dairy. And most people consume too much added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium.
Under the proposed rule, in order to be labeled “healthy” on food packaging, products must contain “a certain meaningful amount” of food from at least one of the food groups or subgroups (e.g., fruit, vegetable, dairy, etc.) recommended by the agency’s dietary guidelines.
They must also stick to specific limits for certain nutrients, such as saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars.
Breakfast cereals, for example, would need to contain 0.75 ounces of whole grains and contain no more than 1 gram of saturated fat, 230 milligrams of sodium, and 2.5 grams of added sugars to qualify, the agency said.
Don’t fear carbs or fat! Your body needs both to survive, as carbs help fuel your body and fat helps your body absorb fat-soluble nutrients like vitamins A, D, and E. But not all carbs or fats are equal. Choose complex carbohydrates found naturally in plant-based foods (like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains) over simple carbohydrates often found in processed foods (like white bread, enriched pasta, and white rice).
Similarly, strive to include healthy, unsaturated fats (including polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats) found in foods such as fatty fish, vegetable oils, avocadoes, and some seeds and nuts. Avoid foods with unhealthy saturated and trans fats found primarily in animal products (such as meat, eggs, high-fat dairy) and highly processed foods (frozen pizza and microwave popcorn). “Having a baseline understanding of what this means makes you a much savvier consumer,” says Rajagopal, who suggests going to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website to learn about these food components.
Adopt healthier cooking methods. Maybe you’re buying healthy foods but preparing them in unhealthy ways. That lean, skinless chicken breast just got a lot less healthy once you breaded it, deep-fried it, and smothered it with cheese. Allen suggests lighter, leaner techniques such as baking, roasting, grilling, and steaming. “Frying, sautéing, breading, au gratin, buttery, and Alfredo all add additional calories to burn off,” says Allen.
Start small. Eliminate the all-or-nothing thinking, such as, “I want to cut out all sugar” or “I want to cook all my meals at home.”
If you’ve been eating sugar your whole life or eating dinner out 5 nights a week, eliminating this bad habit at once is a huge undertaking. Instead, start small. For instance, reduce one sugary food item you frequently eat.
“Maybe it’s soda,” says Rajagopal. “Maybe you go from four cans of soda a day to two cans. Make one change and see how it goes for a week or two.”
Ditto for cooking — aim to add one more home-cooked meal a week rather than trying to cook at home 7 days a week. She also advises bringing in an accountability buddy to help you stay on track.
Take one bite. “If you take a bite of a ground meat or sausage and replace that with a bite of something that’s a little healthier — like black beans or a vegetable — then, after doing this for a couple of years, that actually reduces your risk of heart attack and reduces your risk in the long-term of cancers and Alzheimer’s,” advises Kopecky. “Literally one bite difference.”
By making small, consistent changes, they can have a big impact over time. Pick one tip that resonates most, implement it, and stick to it until it becomes second nature. Once mastered, move on to another tip, building on that foundation of success.
Newswise — As a popular diabetes drug takes social media by storm as a quick fix for weight loss, experts warn, not only is there no magic pill when it comes to losing weight, but this off-label use can actually backfire, possibly doubling the weight that was lost, once the medication is stopped.
According to the National Institute of Health, more than 2 in 5 adults are obese. With obesity linked to a number of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancers including breast and colorectal, these statistics are a major cause for concern.
But there is hope according to a new study published in the journal Obesity that found people with severe obesity, who underwent bariatric surgery, were significantly less likely to die from heart disease, diabetes, or cancer, compared with people with severe obesity who didn’t have the surgery.
“Bariatric surgery alters the digestive system to help people lose weight,” explains Dr. Hans Schmidt, chief, Bariatric Surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center. “The benefits of bariatric surgery can far outweigh the possibility of any complications.”
Dr. Schmidt says when multiple attempts at weight loss fail, bariatric surgery is often the best option because it actually reduces the stomach’s storage capacity, limiting food intake to help people feel full, faster.
Nobody knows this better than 38 year old Alex Monteleone, a detective with the Palisades Park Police Department, who underwent bariatric surgery in 2018. Alex not only lost nearly 100 pounds, he’s also no longer on the verge of diabetes or high blood pressure.
Alex Monteleone
For more information on this life saving procedure or to book interviews with Dr. Schmidt and his patients, contact .
London — Major drug store chains in the United Kingdom plan to start selling the weight loss drug Wegovy, a different version of its hugely popular Ozempic brand, this year, as the company that makes both says it’s working to expand supplies of the popular semaglutide medications to Europe.
Semaglutide works by mimicking the action of a hormone that makes people feel full, blunting their appetites so they eat less. Ozempic is marketed and prescribed to treat Type 2 diabetes, but its side effect of dramatic weight loss has made it popular among celebrities for that purpose. Wegovy, made by the same Denmark-based pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, is marketed specifically for weight loss and comes in higher doses.
Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has issued draft guidance recommending Wegovy for people living with obesity, and its final guidance is expected on March 8. That guidance will serve as a formal instruction to Britain’s National Health Service to start providing the drug to patients who need it, a NICE spokesperson told CBS News.
“We know that management of overweight and obesity is one of the biggest challenges our health service is facing with nearly two thirds of adults either overweight or obese. It is a lifelong condition that needs medical intervention, has psychological and physical effects, and can affect quality of life,” Helen Knight, program director at the center for health technology evaluation at NICE, said in a statement.
Jo Dent, an NHS worker who visited a private doctor to obtain a prescription for Ozempic late last year after struggling to lose weight, told CBS News that semaglutide has helped her reshape her relationship with food. She said making it more readily available would be a good thing for the country’s health service.
“I do think it would support people to be less of a burden on the NHS, in terms of the challenges of obesity and what that means for other health conditions,” she said. “It’s not a quick fix and it’s not the only answer, but actually it will help you if you’re serious about wanting to lose weight.”
Wegovy, an injectable prescription medicine, can help obese or overweight adults with weight-related medical problems lose weight.
Novo Nordisk
At least one major drug store chain in the U.K. plans to start prescribing and selling Wegovy privately through its online doctor service this year. Boots, the biggest national pharmacy chain, is already offering an online prescription service for the medication, while competitor Superdrug has set up a waiting list.
Declining to offer specific countries or timings, a spokesperson for Novo Nordisk said the company was “really looking to make sure that we only launch if we can provide the product. So obviously, we have ramped up our supply chain. We’ve invested quite a lot, where our manufacturing is now running 24-hours, seven days a week.”
The spokesperson said even after the NICE guidelines in the U.K. are published next week, Wegovy will only be available to the NHS once the company has sufficient supplies to offer it to the market.
“We don’t have concrete launch timings,” the spokesperson told CBS News. “We’re just looking to make it available as soon as possible.”
Novo Nordisk launched Wegovy in Norway and Denmark at the end of last year, and the spokesperson said the company expects to launch in a number of additional European countries in 2023.
“We’re just focused on, obviously, production for Europe and continuing to supply the U.S.,” the spokesperson told CBS News.
NICE said the list price of Wegovy in 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg and 1.0 mg doses was 73.25 pounds (about $88) per pack of four pre-filled injection pens, but that if it becomes available on the NHS, it will either be free or cost patients the standard prescription fee of about $10 per order, depending on the cost structure.
In the U.S. the same pack of four Wegovy injection pens has a list price of $1,349, but some health insurance plans will cover at least some of that cost.
In the U.K., Wegovy will only be available to obese adults who have at least one additional condition, such as heart disease or high blood pressure. It must be prescribed by a doctor or someone with specialist qualifications.
Feb. 22, 2023 — After the American Academy of Pediatrics’ new guidelines for treating obese kids came out, I wrote “What Parents Should Know” for WebMD. It included insights from several experts and two moms of overweight children. The guidelines have proven controversial due to the recommendations of medication and bariatric surgery for older kids — but also because a growing number of people question whether telling a child to lose weight is ever a good idea.
One of the most prominent voices reaching parents about kids and weight belongs to Virginia Sole-Smith. A journalist and creator of a newsletter and podcast focused on fatphobia, diet culture, and parenting called Burnt Toast, she’s also the author of a forthcoming book on the subject. Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture will be published in April. I spoke with her about the AAP guidelines and how to parent a fat — or thin — child in our seemingly inescapable diet culture.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: This is probably due to my own history as a fat kid, but when I read the new AAP guidelines, they struck me as thoughtful and empathetic, though the idea of medicating or operating on teens made me uneasy. But you point out that encouraging weight loss in the first place is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
A: We don’t have a ton of evidence that high body weight itself is the problem. There are reasons to be concerned about weight-linked health conditions, but pathologizing body size brings with it a whole other set of complications. When you do that, you start telling kids their bodies are problems to solve, you start focusing on food in ways that can raise their risk for disordered eating and eating disorders. There’s a whole ripple effect to this that the guidelines aren’t reckoning with.
Underpinning this whole conversation is anti-fat bias. We live in a culture that believes fat bodies are less valuable, less lovable, and less attractive than thin bodies. Our whole world is built to celebrate and welcome thin bodies and push out larger ones. This is just another way we’re doing that.
Q: People may wonder why the AAP would put out guidelines that might be harmful for kids since this is an organization that clearly cares about children’s health.
A: It’s really tricky. Officially, in their paper, they say, “We have no financial disclosures to reveal, everything’s on the up and up.” But the AAP itself receives donations from pharmaceutical companies, including Novo Nordisk, which is the manufacturer of two of the biggest weight loss drugs. A lot of the authors on this paper have received research funds, speaking fees, consulting fees, etc., or they’re employed by centers that do bariatric surgery. That doesn’t need to get disclosed because it’s just their job. They’re considered an expert because of it, but they’re financially entangled with weight loss being a thing we push for. (Editor’s note: WebMD reached out to the AAP for comment. This is their reply: The AAP has a strict conflict-of-interest disclosure policy and process for all authors of policy statements, clinical reports and clinical practice guidelines. The authors include medical experts with a wide range of perspectives, medical specialties and professional experiences, including some who have conducted research on weight and obesity and others who have devoted their careers to this aspect of medicine. Their knowledge and expertise was important in the development of these evidence-based guidelines. The guidelines also underwent an extensive peer-review process among many other groups of pediatricians and pediatric specialists, and ultimately were approved by the AAP Board of Directors.)
Q: Is trying to lose weight always bad? The moms I interviewed for that article, both of whom use the new injectable weight loss drugs, said they found it reassuring to have a medical solution to their weight problems. It removed a lot of the shame to know it was a physiological thing. And doctors point out that if your child had diabetes you wouldn’t hesitate to give them drugs. So why is this different?
A: Why is because body size in and of itself isn’t a medical condition. Doctors have pathologized it and made obesity a diagnosis, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it shouldn’t be. So it’s not the same as giving your kid an inhaler for asthma or insulin for diabetes. That’s what I want — I want doctors to medicate the actual medical conditions.
The moms you spoke to are being told over and over that their kid’s body is a problem, and they are to blame. Parents in general, but moms especially, get so much judgment if they have a fat kid. And if you’re a fat parent with a fat kid, doubly so. They’re being told if you don’t get this problem under control, your child will have lifelong health consequences. Your child will be bullied. Your child will be unpopular, unlovable, less employable, and so on. All of that is driven by bias. That’s not medical.
I empathize with parents — they’re terrified for their kids so making kids smaller feels like the answer. But when we choose that, we reinforce anti-fat bias and we make it more powerful. And we say to these kids, yup, the bullies are right, your body is the problem, you are the problem. We need to change you. We don’t need to change this whole system.
Q: The AAP guidelines say that the treatments they’re recommending statistically don’t lead to eating disorders. You argue that in reality, they do.
A: Eating disorders are really underdiagnosed in fat people because we assume they only happen to thin white girls. But we know they happen to people of every age, every gender, every race. There’s a lot of evidence to show that fat folks, by the time they do get treated, are much sicker because doctors have been reinforcing that disordered behavior along the way. They’re so happy to see weight loss, they don’t question how the loss was achieved. But you absolutely can have an eating disorder, you can be experiencing the physical complications of eating disorders, the heart issues, the fainting, all of that, in a larger body. You don’t have to be emaciated to deserve treatment.
As for the AAP saying these programs don’t cause eating disorders, the research they used to determine that didn’t follow kids long enough. Often studies only follow people for 1 to 2 years. If you put a 10-year-old on a diet and follow them until they’re 11 or 12, that eating disorder may not onset until age 14 or 15.
And then when they did check for eating disorder symptoms, they looked for things like binge eating, overeating, purging. They looked for the symptoms they expect fat people to show, but they did not look for restriction, skipping meals, cutting out food groups, because No. 1, they don’t think fat people do that, and No. 2, that is exactly what they’re teaching the kids to do: to restrict.
Q: There are diseases with clear correlations to excess weight. I was just diagnosed with arthritis in my hip, and I suspect it has to do with the fact that I was 100 pounds overweight for years. How should we be talking about that?
A: We often rush to say weight is legitimately an issue without investigating. Might a thin person with the same habits have the same risk for the condition? Just focusing on making body size smaller won’t necessarily affect whatever lifestyle factors are at play.
There’s also the fact that people in larger bodies receive significantly worse medical care, so a thin person reporting symptoms might get treatment faster than a fat person. I remember interviewing a weight-inclusive doctor, and I asked about knee issues. I’m fat and I have knee problems. And she said, “I have knee problems, too. I get physical therapy, I’ve gotten surgery, I’ve been prescribed all these different treatments.” But fat people get told to lose weight to take pressure off your knees. They don’t get referrals to physical therapy and things that might help these issues. The bias becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, there are conditions where weight may play a causal role. I’m not disputing that. I don’t think anyone is disputing that. What we’re disputing is treating fat people like it’s their fault — if only they’d had more willpower, they wouldn’t be in this situation. Denying them care in a punitive way. That’s the harder thing for the medical community to wrap their heads around. Even if you’re fat and unhealthy, your body is still worthy of dignity and respect and health care.
The last piece is that sustainable weight loss doesn’t work most of the time. Dieting has a huge failure rate. Medications and surgery may be starting to change that, but they come with significant side effects. The surgery is going to be lifelong, and the medication you have to stay on for life to sustain the weight loss. You’re looking at a lifetime of consequences.
Q: Let’s talk about the more positive side of things. In your book, you write about fat positivity and how to instill it, telling your child, “Your body is never the problem.” What does a kid get out of hearing that?
A: It’s not the doctor’s fault, but doctors always see bodies as problems to solve — why is this symptom or behavior happening? For a kid sitting under the microscope, what a gross feeling that is, knowing someone has to invest time and money into fixing them. And with weight, it reinforces this whole larger bias.
But you can’t necessarily control what the doctor says in an appointment. You can ask not to discuss BMI or weight, you can try to set boundaries, but you can’t guarantee how the conversation will go. The only thing you can control is what your child hears you say. If you say to the doctor, “I don’t view their body as a problem,” at least your child comes away with the knowledge that my body is safe in my home, with my family. My parents don’t see me this way. It feels like an important foundation that so many fat kids don’t get.
Q: What about parents of thin kids? What should they be doing?
A: I really want parents of thin kids to be talking about this, for two reasons. One, thin kids aren’t immune to the harms of anti-fat bias. Not every thin kid will grow up to be a thin adult. I say this as a former thin kid who’s a fat adult. It’s really important that thinness not be so interwoven with their identity, that if they can’t maintain that thinness, they feel like they’re failing.
Thing two is, parents of thin kids need to talk about anti-fat bias the same way parents of white kids need to talk about racism. If we don’t have these hard conversations, if we don’t teach our kids to name and unlearn this bias, the rest of the culture is going to teach them instead.
It’s not that I want parents to try to keep their kids in a fat-positive bubble with no exposure to diet culture. I want parents to be naming these things, to be learning alongside their kids, to be having conversations so that we can help kids develop critical thinking skills. Then they can start to point out diet culture to us, they can say, “Hey, this is a really messed up way to talk about bodies in this TV show or this book I’m reading or this person I’m following on TikTok.” That is going to do more to buffer kids against these influences because we’re giving them the option to disagree with it. We’re giving them the option to think about going a different way.
Below is a brief roundup of news and story ideas from the experts at UCLA Health. For more information on these stories or for help on other stories, please contact us at [email protected].
Body composition, not BMI, may signal risk for cardiovascular disease Body mass index has long been a measure of a person’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease, but body composition and its role in the disease have not been well studied. In a new study, UCLA researchers predicted higher fat mass would be linked to higher levels of coronary artery calcification (CAC) — a marker of subclinical cardiovascular disease – and higher fat-free mass would be linked to lower levels of CAC. Using computed tomography scans and bioelectrical impedance analysis to study CAC and body composition in 3,129 non‐Hispanic Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Chinese patients, the researchers unexpectedly found that higher fat-free mass and, to a lesser extent, higher fat mass were linked to high levels of CAC. The researchers cautioned that bioelectrical impedance analysis could not identify the quality of fat or fat-free mass. Given these findings, the researchers say measuring body composition rather than using BMI to assess obesity may be a better approach to evaluating cardiovascular disease risk. Read the study published Feb. 8, 2023 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Bariatric surgery reduces risks of hospitalization for heart failure Bariatric surgery has been found to reverse the ill effects of diabetes and may be protective against obesity-related cancers. Because obesity rates are on the rise across the globe, UCLA researchers set out to study other health benefits weight loss surgeries confer, in particular the link between the procedures and acute heart failure hospitalizations. After analyzing data from the Nationwide Readmissions Database from 2016 to 2019, the researchers found bariatric surgery was associated with lower odds of being hospitalized with acute heart failure. Among patients hospitalized with acute heart failure, prior bariatric surgery was associated with lower risks of death, prolonged ventilation, and acute renal failure. Beyond the health benefits, those who had undergone surgery stayed one fewer day in the hospital and incurred about $1,200 less in hospital costs compared to age matched cohorts. Read the study in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases.
Pesticides may also worsen Parkinson’s symptoms: While researchers have consistently found an association between pesticide exposure and higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, there has been little study of whether such exposure can accelerate the course of the disease. In a new study of 53 pesticides associated with Parkinson’s onset, researchers led by UCLA assistant professor of neurology Kimberly Paul, PhD, identified 10 pesticides that are associated with faster progression of motor and non-motor symptoms. Furthermore, exposure to six of those pesticides was associated with worsening of multiple endpoints researchers measured. Two pesticides, copper sulfate (pentahydrate) and MCPA (dimethylamine salt), were associated with all three endpoints measured: motor function, cognitive function, and depressive symptoms. Read the study in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
Repurposing an old drug for a rare disease: A drug used to treat epilepsy, retigabine, may help manage episodic attacks of paralysis in patients with the rare inherited muscle disease Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis (HypoPP), according to a new study that tested retigabine in genetically engineered mice. There’s a strong need to identify new HypoPP treatments since existing ones only improve symptoms in about half of patients and have considerable side effects. HypoPP is often marked by reduced potassium levels in the blood during episodes of muscle weakness. While it was known that retigabine affects a potassium channel that plays an important role in the heart and brain, the channel wasn’t previously known to exist in skeletal muscle. However, the new study led by Dr. Stephen C. Cannon, chair of the physiology department at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, found that retigabine helps stabilize the membrane potential of skeletal muscle, thereby protecting against attacks of muscle weakness. Read the study, published online Jan. 30, in the journal Brain.
Women treated with thrombectomy for pulmonary embolism fare worse A new study led by UCLA researchers analyzed the different outcomes in men and women with a pulmonary embolism who are treated by a percutaneous pulmonary artery thrombectomy- a procedure in which a catheter is placed in a patient’s lung to dissolve or remove a blood clot. After analysis of a national cohort of US patients from an inpatient claims-based database, researchers reported that women had higher rates of procedural bleeding, vascular complications, and needed more blood transfusions compared to men. They also found that women had higher in-hospital death rates and were more likely to go a nursing home or an assisted living facility instead of returning home after discharge. Given these disparities in outcomes, study authors are calling for more sex-based research. Read the study in the January 1, 2023 issue of CHEST.
A new clue about Parkinson’s progression The transmission of misfolded proteins in the brain is a key mechanism for the progression of various neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Chao Peng, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology, found a novel mechanism that regulates the transmission of one of these pathological proteins, misfolded alpha-synuclein, which leads to disease progression in Parkinson’s. This mechanism is the discovery that many modifications that a cell makes in these proteins alter their ability for transmission in the brain and disease progression. This discovery not only provides critical insights into disease mechanism but also facilitates the development of novel therapy for neurodegenerative diseases. Read the study, published Jan. 23, in Nature Neuroscience.
Urban heat islands, redlining and kidney stones The persistent rise in kidney stone prevalence in recent decades has prompted much speculation as to the causes. There has been some discussion about the effect of heat on nephrolithiasis. A review of recent data suggests that heat may play a role in stone formation on a large scale and among African-Americans in particular. A new UCLA-led study led by Dr. Kymora B. Scotland states that African-Americans are the race/ancestry group with faster rates of increasing incidence and prevalence of kidney stones. Researchers also found that urban heat islands in the United States have resulted in part from the effects of redlining, a practice of systematic segregation and racism in housing that led to the development of neighborhoods with substantial disparities in environmental conditions. Dr. Scotland and her team hypothesize that the increased temperatures experienced by residents in redlined communities, many of whom are African American may contribute to the 150% increase in the prevalence of kidney stones in African Americans in recent decades. Read the study in the January 1, 2023 issue of Current Opinion in Nephrology and Hypertension.
Gender-affirming hormones tied to mental health for transgender youth Transgender and nonbinary teens who receive gender-affirming hormones experience improvement in body satisfaction, life satisfaction and less depression and anxiety than before treatment. These findings are according to newly-published research by a four-site prospective, observational study and co-authored by Marco A. Hidalgo, PhD. Dr. Hidalgo is a clinical psychologist and Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Read the study published January 19, 2023 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Health Sciences
WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Mila Clarke started taking Ozempic in 2020 to help manage her diabetes, but was pleasantly surprised to find herself soon shedding pounds.
“I was like, this is really weird because I’m not having to try very hard to do this,” said Clarke, who has been diagnosed with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes and chronicles her diabetes journey on her Hangry Woman blog. “And as I kept going on, I kept noticing that the weight was falling off.”
Then the side effects started — most worryingly, a racing and palpitating heartbeat.
“I could be laying down in bed and my heart rate, like resting heart rate, would be 120 beats per minute,” the sort of rate associated with exercise, Clarke said in an interview with HealthDay Now. “It was really having an effect on my heart rate, and that was really terrifying.”
First approved to treat diabetes under the brand name Ozempic, the drug semaglutide received federal approval in June 2021 to also be prescribed as a weight-loss medication — with the brand name Wegovy.
People interested in dropping pounds — either for their health or for vanity’s sake — flooded the market for semaglutide, making it difficult to impossible for people with diabetes to fill prescriptions needed to manage their condition.
But semaglutide comes with some troubling side effects that people might not have considered in their search for the perfect body, experts say.
These can range from nausea and vomiting to premature aging of the face, as well as heart problems.
The drug is a synthetic form of a naturally occurring gut hormone, Dr. Holly Lofton, an obesity medicine specialist with NYU Langone Health in New York City, told HealthDay Now.
“It goes to different areas of the brain and blocks hunger signals, it goes to your stomach and slows down the rate your stomach empties, and it hormonally helps your body be more sensitive to the insulin that you produce, thus helping your fat cells shrink,” Lofton explained.
Because of the way it works, semaglutide’s most commonly reported side effects involve the gastrointestinal system, Lofton said.
Those were the first that Clarke experienced.
Scary side effects, like a racing heartbeat
“You start out on a very low dose to have your body get used to it,” Clarke said. “You can get a lot of nausea, diarrhea, you can feel dizzy.”
When Clarke advanced to the therapeutic dose of semaglutide, she developed heart palpitations and tachycardia (racing heartbeat).
“It got to a point where it was like I could feel my heart beating out of my chest,” Clarke said. “It would wake me up in the middle of the night, and I was kind of panicking because I was like, this doesn’t feel right. It feels very scary.”
Clarke didn’t mention it, but other people who take semaglutide appear to develop what’s becoming known as “Ozempic face,” in which rapid weight loss causes a person’s face to look gaunt, saggy and prematurely aged.
“When you lose weight so acutely and quickly, you see more of a global facial wasting,” Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank, a New York City dermatologist, told NBC’s TODAY show.
“It’s not just a wrinkle we’re seeing in one area or a heaviness around the eyes,” Frank continued. “We’re seeing it in the temples, the jaw line, around the mouth, under the eyes.”
Despite her side effects, Clarke stuck with Ozempic for about a year because the drug was very effective in controlling her diabetes and helping her lose weight.
Clarke dropped about 10 pounds within a month. By the time she decided to stop taking Ozempic a year later, she’d lost 35 pounds.
“It was really tempting to continue it because it’s such an easy medication to take,” Clarke said. “It’s once weekly, it’s an injection, it does not hurt that badly at all, barely feels like a pinch.”
“I just felt like, I kind of want to continue this because I’m seeing really good results on it. But then for the flip side, it was like, even though I’m seeing these great results, I feel awful all the time,” Clarke added. “I don’t feel good, I don’t have any energy, I feel sick and nauseous. And that’s not quality of life.”
Clarke was worried that she’d regain the weight she lost after she stopped taking Ozempic, but that wasn’t what happened.
“I actually ended up maintaining my weight for a little while and then even losing a little bit more. So total, I lost about 50 pounds,” Clarke said.
As demand exceeds supply, some with diabetes go without
Clarke has described the semaglutide shortages as “really frustrating” on her blog, particularly for people who need the drug to manage their diabetes.
Wegovy contains a higher dose of semaglutide, because that’s the dose needed to treat obesity as approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ever since Wegovy arrived on the market, manufacturer Novo Nordisk has struggled to meet demand, prompting off-label prescription of Ozempic for weight loss.
“There are people who are using it for weight loss for health purposes, and I think that is amazing,” Clarke said. “Especially with my own experience, I know how helpful it can be.”
But social media has spurred demand by promoting semaglutide as a miracle weight-loss drug, Lofton said.
Wegovy is meant to help people with weight problems so bad that the extra pounds are harming their health, but semaglutide is instead being used to help people achieve the “perfect body.”
Clarke noted an “Ozempic challenge” circulating on TikTok.
“It’s people who are at a pretty normal weight,” Clarke said of the TikTok videos. “Maybe they have like 10 pounds that they want to lose because of some reason. From what I’ve seen, it’s usually vanity purposes.”
“And so they’re using Ozempic, and I think that has a really big impact on people with diabetes because we’re not able to get the drug at this point,” Clarke said. “There are so many shortages, and there’s a lack of production for Ozempic with this increased demand because people are seeing that it works for weight loss very well.”
Lofton said that both uses of the drug are legitimate, and what’s really needed is for Novo Nordisk to resolve its production bottleneck and for insurers to cover semaglutide treatment.
Novo Nordisk has promised to resolve the semaglutide shortages within the first few months of 2023, Lofton said.
“We have about 40 million people with obesity/overweight, and we have about 11 million people in the U.S. with diabetes,” Lofton said.
“If the companies can’t meet the demand — which I’m glad the demand is great and people know about these drugs — then we really need to reevaluate how these pharmaceutical companies are allowing us, as well as insurance companies are allowing us, to have access to these much-needed drugs for multiple conditions,” Lofton said.
More information
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has more on shortages of Wegovy and Ozempic.
SOURCES: Mila Clarke, blogger and activist; Holly Lofton, MD, obesity medicine specialist, NYU Langone Health, New York City
Today we are going to teach you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about body fat percentage but were too afraid to ask.
We’ve been helping thousands of people get their body fat percentage to their desired level through our 1-on-1 Online Coaching Program, and I’m pumped to share with you our strategies in this guide.
Plus, lots of cute animal videos as rewards for reading each section.
Fair warning: lots of half-naked people of all different shapes and sizes in this guide!
In this Body Fat Measurement Ultimate Guide, we’ll cover:
If you have been struggling with your weight (and having too high of a body fat percentage) for a while, I know how frustrating that can be.
It’s why we built our popular 1-on-1 Online Coaching program, so this time things can be different. Your NF Coach will help you track the right metrics (like body fat percentage) and set the right goals.
In its simplest form: body fat is the amount of fat in your body, compared to everything else:
your organs
muscles
bones
tendons
water
any demons currently possessing you
and so on
Both men and women carry different amounts of body fat percentage due to…you know…being different.
A super ripped male bodybuilder who is minimizing body fat percentage could have a percentage down as low as 3-4%, while a super ripped female bodybuilder who is minimizing body fat percentage would only get as low as 8-9%.
A male athlete could be in fantastic shape and have 10% body fat, while a women at a comparable level of athleticism and appearance might be at 18-20% body fat.
To take the comparison to the other end of the spectrum, an overweight male at 30% will look vastly different than an overweight woman at 30%.
Feel free to take a break with this video of a lion cub hanging out with a puppy and a rabbit.
Below, you’ll see images of what people look like with different amounts of body fat.
Some Examples of Body Fat % for Men:
Some Examples of Body Fat % for Women:
A quick note: your body fat percentage is just the amount of body fat you have.
It has nothing to do with the amount of muscle mass you have, which means you can have two people with the same amount of body fat percentage that look WAY different from each other.
Are you surprised about what you thought and what the actual percentages look like?
If so, don’t worry about it – most people have no idea what their body fat percentage is, and will often over or underestimate it pretty dramatically.
We’ll get into what’s a good number to AIM for, and how to measure it next.
We work with both men and women in our Online Coaching Program, and help them reach a level of body fat that they’re happy with.
More importantly? We do it sustainably, and without making you only eat chicken and broccoli.
You have unlocked this video of a baby sea otter trying to sleep on mom:
Here is the “generally accepted” (yeah, I don’t like this term either) chart for women and men when it comes to body fat percentage:
Women
Men
Essential fat
10-12%
2-4%
Athletes
14-20%
6-13%
Fitness
21-24%
14-17%
Acceptable
25-31%
18-25%
Obese
32% plus
26% plus
In what I’m sure is news to nobody, body fat is essential to survival – fat protects your internal organs, provides you with necessary energy stores in times of peril, and more.
“Essential fat” means the minimal amount of fat required for survival – Anything less than this amount would mostly likely result in organ failure, but even approaching this amount of body fat is dangerous.
It’s for this reason that bodybuilders, who can minimize their body fat to the “essential fat” level only do so when prepping for a show – during the rest of the year they maintain a higher body fat percentage so that they can stay healthy and function properly.
If you are looking to have that “ripped” or “toned” look, you’ll want your body fat percentage to hover in the “athletes” section.
If you’re just looking to get healthy and look in the mirror with pride, aim for the Fitness range.
Once you get into the upper ends of “acceptable” and “obese,” a decrease in body fat percentage would benefit your health.
Now, I’m going to GUESS you’re reading this article because you’re interested in reducing your body fat percentage.
For starters, you need to determine what’s an optimal goal for you:
If you are trying to look like Ryan Reynolds or Jessica Beil in Blade III, good luck! You’ll need to aim for a body fat percentage of 6-8% (men) or 13-15% (women). Note: your athletic/strength gaining performance will most likely suffer at this percentage, and can be really really challenging to maintain. Your call.
If you are interested in getting that coveted six pack, drop your body fat down to the 8-11% range for men and 15-17% range for women.
If you are an athlete and interested in optimal athletic performance, aim for a body fat percentage around 15% (men) or 20% (women). NF team member Staci trains much better at 20% body fat than at 15% body fat.
If you are just interested in looking pretty good and feeling pretty good, anything less than 18% for men and anywhere in the 20-23% range for women should get you the “hey, lookin pretty good!” response from your friends.
Ladies: if you are concerned about menstruation or fertility, it has been said not to drop below 15% body fat. Studies are conflicted on this, your results may vary, but I thought it was worth mentioning!
Want a step-by-step plan to follow that will help you lower your body fat percentage safely and permanently? Great!
There are seven main methods that you can use, each with varying levels of accuracy and cost:
Here’s How to Calculate Your Body Fat %:
1) Take a Look – This might be my favorite method, although it requires a trained eye and isn’t exact. By having an accurate progression of pictures from week to week and comparing a picture of yourself, you can determine somewhat closely what your body fat percentage is.
Make sure to note the difference in the two men, both at 10% body fat further down the page.
2) Body Fat Calipers – Pick up a set of calipers for $5. Pull the fat away from your muscles, pinch them with the caliper, take the measurements, and look at a chart to figure out your body fat percentage. Some recommend using one test site, some multiple.
In my experience, I have found that these calipers tend to slightly underestimate body fat percentage (mine tell me that i’m 9 or 10% when I’m really 12%, and Staci’s say she’s 17% when she’s more like 20%), but are surprisingly accurate considering how cheap they are.
However, the accuracy isn’t as important as the fact that you pinch and measure the same area, under the same conditions, from week to week. By doing so, you can track overall trends in how the measurement changes to make sure you’re on the right path.
3) The measurement method – By taking measurements (like the US Navy measurement or the YMCA measurement), you can calculate your body fat percentage. I have found, as have others, that this method isn’t incredibly accurate as it can very easily overestimate your body fat.
Considering it only takes a few points of data, this is not surprising.
4) Body fat scales and monitors– An electrical current is sent through your body and uses “biometrical impedance analysis.” I don’t really like this method, as I find the number that it spits out can be horribly inaccurate.
Because they send an electrical current through your body, the amount of water you are carrying can drastically adjust this number too.
5) The Bod Pod – The method calculates your body fat percentage by using air displacement to measure your body mass, volume, and density. This is also pretty darn accurate, but also pretty darn expensive at usually around $75 per session. Find a bod pod location by putting in your location in the right hand column.
6) Water displacement – Although very accurate (within 1-3% percent), it’s expensive, tedious, and a huge pain in the butt. If anybody has any experience with a water displacement test, please share your story in the comments.
7) DEXA Scanning– This is considered the most accurate method, as it actually takes a full dual X-ray of your body composition and gives you numbers. You can get this done at a health facility, and involves you lying on an X-Ray table for about 10 minutes. It’s typically expensive, anywhere from $50-150 per session depending on where you are located.
VERY IMPORTANT: If you are going to start testing your body fat percentage, do whatever you can to test yourself under the same conditions each and every time.
For example: every Monday morning, on an empty stomach, while drinking a single glass of water. This way, even if you’re not getting the correct body fat percentage (due to user error), you’ll at least get a consistent incorrect body fat percentage and can calculate how much you lost or if you are progressing in the right way.
“Steve, just tell me the best method!”
If you have the money, and you have a Bod Pod center close to you, then I’d say this would be the best combination of practicality and accuracy.
If you don’t have the money, then I would go with a simple body fat caliper, along with the “take a look” method of taking weekly photos. Take a photo of yourself each week and compare the photos week to week to see if you can notice more definition in your muscles (which happens when you start to reduce your body fat percentage!).
Here’s the thing with body fat percentage: although it’s fun to know and fun to see it getting lower as you get leaner, methods to track it can often be inaccurate.
Take multiple tests with your preferred methods and understand that even then it might be off by 1-3% in either direction. So, track overall TRENDS and go off how you look, and that will get you 95% of the way there.
It comes down to this: Look in the mirror, and compare your progress photos: do you like how you look and are you moving in the right direction? Awesome.
DON’T like what you see?
Let us help!
Our Online Coaching Program is changing people’s lives every day. We help folks like you make better food choices, follow the right workout program for your goals and keep you accountable!
Another section, another reward.
You’ve unlocked the “baby otter attacks a stuffed animal walrus” video:
Alrighty! Let’s say you’re interested in dropping your body fat percentage, like my childhood friend Saint above.
Staci (follow her full success story) also followed the principles of Nerd Fitness to get her results and significantly reduce her body fat percentage:
I’m sliiiiiightly biased, but both Saint and Staci, along with 35,000+ other students, reduced their body fat percentage by following the methods we teach all clients in our 1-on-1 Online Coaching Program.
Not only that, but Staci is now one of our Lead Coaches!
As you’ll read below, the biggest piece of the puzzle to getting to a low body fat percentage is having the right nutritional strategy of consistent caloric restriction, the right mental attitude, a supportive network of people to help you, and a plan to follow.
We know how tough it can be to change your diet. If you’re not sure what to eat, or you’re sick of trying a diet only to give up a few weeks later, I got you covered.
It’s something I’m really proud of, and I know it’s helped a lot of people: our 10-level Nerd Fitness Diet Cheat Sheet. Pick the level you’re comfortable with, stick with it for at least 2 weeks, and then level up when ready and follow the next level! Simple.
Grab your cheat sheet free, along with 4 other free guides, when you sign up in the box below – I’m confident it can help you reduce your body fat percentage permanently.
Download our free weight loss guide
THE NERD FITNESS DIET: 10 Levels to Change Your Life
Follow our 10-level nutrition system at your own pace
What you need to know about weight loss and healthy eating
3 Simple rules we follow every day to stay on target
I can’t teach you everything in a quick article, though I can absolutely give you some overall tips and tricks below to get you started.
Here are the Nerd Fitness methods we recommend to all coaching clients get down to a lower body fat percentage.
Note: these are JUST suggestions, your results may vary!
If you only want to drop a few percentage points (to a healthier weight), you can start with the advice at the top, and work your way down towards the bottom as you get lower and lower – the closer you get to single digits (dudes) or low double digits (ladies), the more strict you need to be with your diet and training.
Don’t forget to calculate your daily caloric needs first! If you are not strength training while eating a caloric deficit, you will most likely be losing muscle along with fat, which is not optimal but will help you lose body fat.
Do this consistently and you’ll start to lose body fat.
2. Lift heavy thingsand move frequently – When you strength train with heavy objects (or with intense bodyweight training), you get stronger and keep the muscle mass that you already have.
3. Incorporate sprints into your off days – When you run sprints, you create a similar afterburner effect with strength training, meaning extra calories burned after the completion of your workout.
4. Consume enough protein, experiment with lower carb or lower fat – Set your caloric intake to be low enough that your body must pull from fat stores to fuel itself, resulting in fat loss.
I’d recommend consuming enough protein to keep your muscles growing and rebuilding, while determining what’s best for your body to make up the rest of your calories each day: many people work better on a low carb diet.
5. Work out in a fasted state, consider intermittent fasting – Although advanced techniques to get to super low body fat percentages are beyond the scope of this article, here’s another tactic if you want to drop the last few percentage points:
Strength train in a fasted state, and don’t consume your first meal of the day until AFTER your workout.
Added bonus: by skipping a meal occasionally, you’re more likely than not to end up in a caloric deficit compared to when you were eating 6 meals per day.
I’ve been training in a fasted state for 5 years with zero issues on energy, but your results will vary.
6. Not losing weight? You’re eating too much! Get more accurate with your tracking. Consider a cheap food scale to make sure you’re actually eating the number of calories each day you think you’re eating.
Example: I eat 1 serving of oats each day. If you look at a container of oats, it says “1 serving = 1/2 cup, or 40 grams.” I then put half a cup of oats on a food scale, and it weighed 60 grams. This means that every day, I was eating 1.5 servings of oats, not 1 serving.
7. Hire a Coach! Doing all of this stuff alone is absolutely manageable, it just requires a lot of trial and error. If you are somebody that wants to work with a trainer, here’s how to find a good trainer!
Oh what’s that? You want a coach you can take with you everywhere, that will check your form AND help you with food and essentially do everything except the actual heavy lifting of weights?) Sure!
Along with the above, keep reading Nerd Fitness articles, join our community, and start to implement the philosophies here and you’ll be on the right track.
The important thing to remember: this is NOT an overnight process. The best thing you can do is start treating yourself like a science experiment.
Implement the suggestions above, track your bodyfat and see how it changes, and then course-correct and adjust based on results!
And another big thing to remember:
TEMPORARY CHANGES GET TEMPORARY RESULTS.
If you starve yourself to get shredded but then rebound aggressively by eating buckets of ice cream when you’re “done,” say goodbye to those abs!
When you go to a doctor, they will most likely ONLY calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI).
Body Mass Index looks at your height and weight; based off this ratio, it tells you whether you are underweight, normal, overweight, or obese.
Seems pretty straightforward right? Obviously, as your weight increases disproportionately compared to your height, you are more likely to be overweight.
Notice I just said “more likely.”
Here’s why: Your BMI isn’t directly correlated to your body fat percentage – it only factors in your height and weight. It will give you the same reading if you’re made of 180 pounds of pure muscle, or 180 pounds of pure Cheetos.
For example, if I was six feet tall and 185 pounds with a body fat percentage of 10%, I would be put in the same “overweight” category as a guy who was six feet tall, 185 pounds, and a body fat percentage of 25%.
If two women have the same amount of body fat, and one tends to carry more water weight or have bigger bones than the other, one woman could be considered “overweight” while the other might be “average.”
For example: LeBron James is considered borderline obese when measured on the BMI scale, at a height of 6’8″ and 250 pounds.
Of course, unless you look like LeBron James, or you can see your abs, disregarding BMI is missing the point.
I do believe BMI can be helpful if you are above 20% body fat (men) or 25% (women). Both your BMI and your body fat percentage would tell you that fat loss can be a worthwhile goal.
HOWEVER, as soon as you start to get serious about your body weight and training and drop down to flat stomach levels of body fat percentage, then BMI becomes less of an accurate indicator of health.
If you like our style here with cute animal videos and fun content, let us help you reach your body fat and BMI goals with our 1-on-1 Online Coaching Program!
You’ve unlocked the final reward: “the hedgehog boat”:
What Other Questions Do You Have on Body Fat Percentage?
And that concludes today’s lesson on body fat percentage, friend!
I do most of my work in coffee shops these days, so I hope you understand the amount of work and the ridiculous number of awkward Google searches that had to happen in order to bring this post together.
Now, I know this is one of those super complicated topics, so I’d love to help any other way than I can.
You’ll work with our certified NF instructors who will get to know you better than you know yourself, and program your nutrition and workouts for you.
If you are fired up and want to start reducing your body fat percentage in a healthy, sustainable way, consider trying our 10 Level Nerd Fitness Diet – we’ll send you a cheat sheet telling you exactly how to change your diet each week so you don’t get overwhelmed!
Grab your NF Diet sheet along with four guides to help you reduce your body fat percentage when you sign up in the box below:
Download our free weight loss guide
THE NERD FITNESS DIET: 10 Levels to Change Your Life
Follow our 10-level nutrition system at your own pace
What you need to know about weight loss and healthy eating
3 Simple rules we follow every day to stay on target
We’ve helped tens of thousands of people transform into real life superheroes.
Either way, continue to poke around Nerd Fitness – all of our content is focused on helping you get results in a fun, non-condescending, supportive, and (most importantly) effective way.
Also, if you’re willing to put in the time, you WILL get the results you’re after.
Okay, time to watch more cute animal videos 🙂
-Steve
PS: Admittedly this article took 10 hours longer than it needed to, because I kept getting lost in YouTube watching cute animal videos!
Jan. 13, 2023 — The American Academy of Pediatrics last week issued their first new guidelines in 15 years for evaluating and treating kids and adolescents with overweight or obesity.
If you only saw the headlines, you might think that when a youngster is a few pounds overweight, their pediatrician will prescribe a weight loss drug or bariatric surgery. The reality is much less alarming. The guidelines take a deep dive into evidence-based treatments at various levels.
“It’s a misunderstanding, it’s being sensationalized,” says Lori Fishman, PsyD, a child psychologist who specializes in pediatric weight management. “There’s so much more to the process. It’ll be a small percentage of kids who’ll even qualify for these treatments.”
Treating the Whole Child
Before writing the guidelines, the AAP’s Subcommittee on Obesity spent years analyzing and synthesizing information from nearly 400 studies.
“We now have more information than ever that supports that obesity is a chronic, complex disease that requires a whole-child approach,” says Sarah Hampl, MD, one of two lead authors of the guidelines. “And many kids will not outgrow it, so it’s important to identify children with obesity early and offer them evidence-based treatments.”
In the new guidelines, treatment of overweight and obesity doesn’t mean putting a kid on a diet and expecting their parents to manage it. Instead, multi-pronged approaches might include nutrition support, physical activity specialists, behavioral therapy, medications for adolescents 12 and up, and surgery for teenagers with severe obesity.
Before starting any of these evidence-based treatments, the guidelines remind pediatricians to consider each child’s individual circumstances — their living situation, their access to healthy food, and more.
“As pediatricians, we ought to be especially mindful of the influences that child and family are surrounded by,” Hampl says. “We should help guide them, whether it’s to local resources for healthy food or support for a child who’s being bullied.”
Because obesity is often stigmatized, the pediatricians’ group also included guidance for pediatricians to help them examine their own biases. It calls on them to acknowledge the myriad genetic and environmental factors that contribute to obesity and treat children and their parents with respect and sensitivity.
The Rise of Childhood Obesity
For kids 2-18, obesity is defined as having a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for a child’s age and sex. Rates of pediatric obesity have more than tripled since the 1960s, from 5% to nearly 20%. Just last month, the CDC released updated growth charts to take into account how many more children and adolescents now have severe obesity, well beyond the 95th percentile. By 2018, more than 4.5 million kids qualified, but the old charts didn’t go high enough.
If these trends continue, researchers estimate that 57% of children aged 2 to 19 will have obesity by the time they hit 35. And the pandemic has only made things worse.
“It’s about much more than what we eat and drink or how physically active we are,” Hampl says. Risk factors for obesity include genetics, socioeconomics, race and ethnicity, government policies, a child’s environment, neighborhood, and school, and even their exposure to unhealthy food marketing. Because each child is so different, these factors combine in unique ways.
You can see an example of the variability in Jill’s family. She’s a New Jersey mom with two teenage sons. For privacy reasons, we’re using only her first name.
“I have two children who I raised the same way, who were offered the same foods, and yet one weighs 80 pounds more than the other,” she says. “My 16-year-old is happy to choose fruit over a cookie. He’s able to stop, to not eat another bite. The 14-year-old will eat cookies until they’re gone.”
No More Watch and Wait
The last set of guidelines, from 2007, called for pediatricians to monitor kids with obesity via “watchful waiting.” It would give children a chance to outgrow their excess pounds before being treated. Research conducted since then shows that’s not effective.
“The risk of watching and waiting, in my experience, is that a 10-pound-overweight child a year later might be 30 pounds overweight,” says Fishman. “That’s a lot harder to tackle.”
In the new guidelines, the AAP stresses the urgency of treating children with overweight and obesity as soon as it’s diagnosed. Instead of hoping a growth spurt might take care of the problem, pediatricians should move quickly, “at the highest level of intensity appropriate for and available to the child.”
By guiding children and their families to adopt healthier habits early, it may help to reduce some of the weight-related health issues that have also increased in the last few decades. Just within the 21st century, diabetes rates for children and teenagers have skyrocketed — between 2001 and 2017, the number of kids with type 2 went up an astonishing 95%.
“Now we understand the consequences of untreated obesity, especially severe obesity,” says Mary Ellen Vajravelu, MD, a doctor-scientist at the Center for Pediatric Research in Obesity and Metabolism in Pittsburgh. “That includes type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It’s important to treat obesity in childhood to avoid the complications we’re seeing in young adults.”
Also important: Reversing the trend while a child is young can help them avoid the emotional impact of growing up with obesity.
“I saw the recommendations and thought, ‘How different would my life have been for the past 35 years if they had treated my obesity when I was a child?” says Heather, the mother of a 10-year-old in Florida. She’s been carrying shame and limiting herself since childhood, for instance by avoiding activities where her size might prove embarrassing. “For kids who are struggling, I think it’ll be life-changing.”
What the Guidelines Really Say
In a world where fat-shaming is rampant, parents often want to protect their children by encouraging them to lose weight — but parental pressure adds another layer of bad feelings. The AAP advises against putting a child on a diet or restricting their access to food without professional help. Guidelines recommend that pediatricians:
Treat obesity as a chronic disease. That calls for long-term care strategies and ongoing monitoring.
Implement a model known as the “medical home.” It takes treatment beyond the exam room to shape behavior and lifestyle changes. Pediatricians should build partnerships with families in their care and serve as a care coordinator, working with a team that may include obesity treatment specialists, dietitians, psychologists, nurses, exercise specialists, and social workers.
Use a patient-centered counseling style called motivational interviewing. Rather than a doctor prescribing changes for a child’s family to figure out, the process guides families to identify which behaviors to adjust based on their own priorities and goals — that might mean cutting back on sugary drinks or walking together after dinner. Research has shown it takes less than 5 hours of motivational interviewing with a pediatrician or dietitian to help bring down BMI.
Opt for an approach called intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment (IHBLT) whenever feasible. As the name suggests, it’s an intense treatment that calls for at least 26 hours of face-to-face, family counseling on nutrition and exercise over a period of 3 to 12 months. More sessions produce larger reductions in BMI, with 52 hours or more over the same duration having the greatest impact. Unfortunately this treatment program isn’t available everywhere, and for many families the time and financial demands put it out of reach.
Offer approved weight loss drugs to adolescents12 years and older who have obesity. Medication should always be used together with nutrition and exercise therapies.
Refer adolescents 13 and up with severe obesity for possible weight loss surgery. That referral should be to a surgical center with experience in working with adolescents and their families, where the teen would undergo a thorough screening process.
Medication and Surgery
Those last two recommendations have garnered most of the headlines, and it’s understandable. Medicating a child — or performing an operation that would permanently change their body — might seem extreme. But the research shows that for children with obesity and severe obesity, these treatments work.
“This isn’t for a kid who’s a little overweight,” says Fishman. “It’s obesity that’s limiting this child’s ability to function. When we face something this disabling, we want to attack it from every direction we can.”
Right now, only a handful of medications are approved to treat obesity in adolescents. Some are taken orally, while others, like the recently approved Wegovy, are injected.
Jill, the New Jersey mom, is using Wegovy herself.
“The fact that I’ve had success with it makes me more comfortable about approaching it as an option for my son,” she says. “And ultimately, it’s his choice. If he wants to see if he can just do things differently first, we’ll try that. A nutritionist’s guidance will be part of this for him regardless, so he can understand what’s involved. It’s not like he’ll get the shot and all of a sudden magic happens.”
Losing weight with medication can help remove some of the shame that often comes with obesity. Heather, the Florida mom, is also using an injectable drug.
“It’s all the morality stuff like, if you had more self-control, if you worked harder and really tried, if you just made the choice,” she says. “This pulls all the morality out of it. Obesity is a medical condition. It’s so clear. In the same way I take thyroxin because my thyroid doesn’t work well, this makes my insulin receptors work properly.”
For kids 13 and older with severe obesity — a BMI over 35, or 120% of the 95th percentile for age and sex — metabolic or bariatric surgery may be recommended. Of course, surgery is much more invasive than medication, with a greater risk of complications. The guidelines acknowledge this and stress the need for thorough screening before proceeding.
“The pediatrician would refer a child for evaluation. They wouldn’t say, ‘You definitely need to have surgery,’” Hampl says. “They’d say, ‘As your pediatrician, I feel that you would benefit from a comprehensive evaluation at a pediatric bariatric surgical center.’ These types of centers do a very thorough pre-op evaluation over at least 6 months, and then careful monitoring is done for years afterward.”
Weight loss surgery for adolescents does have certain drawbacks. Any surgery has the risk of complications, and some surgical patients do gain back a significant amount of weight. Some research suggests that adolescents who have the surgery are more likely to have alcohol problems later in life.
Even with those risks, for some teens surgery may prove life-saving.
“We know much more about the complications of obesity in adults, we know those are devastating,” says Hampl. “If we can prevent heart attacks, stroke, sleep apnea, diabetes, and other really serious medical complications, that in itself is a huge benefit to the person’s health.”
The Question of Equity
The guidelines point out that obesity has inequities baked into the condition. Risk factors increase depending on your economic status and your race. Access to treatment is lopsided. Some of the most effective treatments, like intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment, aren’t available everywhere. Providers may not be in-network or even accept insurance.
If the family of a child with overweight can’t access effective programs to help them build healthy habits, the child’s odds for developing obesity grow. As they get older and their BMI reaches the level of obesity or severe obesity, treatments like medication and surgery become an option. But they’re even more costly, which leaves many families with no help at all.
That’s why the guidelines also include policy recommendations aimed at covering comprehensive obesity prevention, evaluation, and treatment. They call attention to the ways unhealthy food is marketed, the effects of limited resources on a community, how socioeconomic and immigration status factor in, and the challenges posed by food insecurity.
“We hope the guidelines will serve as impetus to help improve access to care for all children with obesity,” Hampl says. “That includes everything from infrastructure and policy to systems change as well.”
For parents who struggle to help their children with overweight and obesity, having such an authoritative resource can pave the way to getting real help.
“It’s good that they issued these guidelines. I’m hoping, for my son and all the kids out there who are struggling, that it will help to have it recognized as something worthy of clinical, medical management,” Jill says. “It’s validating.”
Today, we’re answering both of them (and much more).
Walking is a great form of exercise and something we often recommend to folks starting our coaching program. Some have had great success walking, including Megan, who has a daily practice to maintain her weight loss journey.
In true Nerd Fitness fashion, we scienced the crap out of this, and even created a handy calculator for you – simply put your stats in the calculator here:
A few things to remember about the above equation:
There’s a difference between gross calories (total calories) expended and net calories (additional calories) expended! Your body burns most of its calories every day JUST by existing.
Gross calories: calories burned while walking PLUS the calories burned just existing
Net calories: ADDITIONAL calories you burned thanks to exercise.
Also, our calculation is an ESTIMATE. You’re a unique snowflake, and no box or formula can capture your awesomeness/uniqueness. This equation below is JUST a starting point!
Also, if you don’t feel like playing with our calculator (boo), here’s how many calories you burn walking:
On average, a mile burns about 100 calories when walking.
Another point: ANY exercise pales in comparison to a much more important part of the weight loss equation: nutrition.
We are designed to walk. It’s in our DNA, and it’s a huge part of our emergence as the dominant species on this planet (along with opposable thumbs, big brains, and Nintendo).
Let’s get the basic stuff out of the way:
Every day, it’s recommended by the CDC that we walk around five miles, or 10,000 steps.[1]
Hence the reason why your Fitbit – which I’ll get to shortly – has that 10k step goal as its default number.
Unfortunately, we Americans tend to average HALF that: 2.5 miles or 5,000 steps.
And I’d imagine that people who work outdoors or have more physically active jobs drag that average wayyyy up.
Which leaves us desk jockeys, who don’t walk nearly enough.
We use our feet to get us from the front door, to our car, to our desk, to our car, to our front door, to our couch… where we put them up while watching four hours of TV before going to bed.
Not walking enough can be a big factor in the creep-up of weight gain over the years.
You might have questions like:
Can I walk more to lose weight?
Is walking REALLY good for me?
Do I need to do more intense exercise?
Long story short:
You should walk more and it can help you lose weight and be healthier.
Short story long…
Here’s why walking is important:
#1) Walking burns calories without exhausting you.If you walk the recommended mileage each day (5 miles instead of just 2.5), it can lead to a tremendous amount of weight loss over time.You’ll burn an extra 100 calories walking just ONE more mile each day than normal: When that’s multiplied out, it’s an extra 700 calories burned per week, which results in approximately a pound of fat lost every five weeks, or 10 pounds in a year. You can scale up your distances to get your desired results!
#2) Walking doesn’t add to training stress. If you are strength training regularly, adding in more weight training or running can lead to burnout, breakdowns, and injuries. If you are trying to look like a super-hero, extra cardio sessions (or long-distance cardio sessions) might kill your gains. But you can just walk. You can walk great distances, provided you’ve built up your body’s physical ability, and not get tired or sore – walking (especially outside while soaking in some sunlight) can make you feel better, not worse.
#3) Walking is low impact. Unlike running, which can wreak havoc on people’s joints if they run improperly or are severely overweight, walking doesn’t have those impact issues. If you go for a walk and your feet or joints hurt, you’re doing it wrong – read the next section!
#4) Walking can burn fat. Because walking is low impact and low intensity, your body doesn’t need to pull much glycogen and glucose stores to fuel itself, which happens when you strength train or push yourself into “aerobic training” with higher intensity cardio. Proponents of intermittent fasting suggest walking in a fasted state in the morning before eating anything in order to help burn extra fat. It’s a little controversial, so this will have to be something you attempt and measure for yourself.
#5) Walking relieves stress. Seriously! Put on your favorite playlist, and go for a pleasant walk around your neighborhood or through the woods as the sun is going down. It’s a recipe to forget the worries of your day.
Bonus points if you can get someone to follow you with a boombox:
#6) Walking improves mental health (especially in older hobbits). Walking can improve mental health, increase brain size, improve memory, and is correlated with improved, longer lifespans.[2]
If you are severely overweight and can’t run or strength train, walk on.
If you are building muscle and bulking up, walk on.
If you are trying to lose weight, walk on.
If you struggle with following a routine, or have failed in the past with weight loss, walk on.
Why? I’m a HUGE fan of small habit change and tiny victories – walking is the PERFECT habit builder. If you’re brand new and starting out, go for a walk TODAY and begin your journey to Mordor.
This afternoon, go for a five-minute walk. Tomorrow morning before work, before breakfast, as SOON as you wake up, put on your shoes, and go outside for a five-minute walk. No snoozing, no lying in bed, no checking email or Twitter. Put on your headphones, pick your favorite song, go outside, and start walking.
Here’s Why Walking Can Change Your Life:
Walking for just five minutes a day is the start of a new habit.Every morning for a few weeks, you’ll have to force yourself to walk. Initially, it will take effort and willpower to walk instead of snoozing. However, with each passing day of success, you’ll need to use less effort and willpower to get out the door. After all, it’s only five minutes, right? Once it’s something you do automatically without thinking, you can add on to it by increasing your walk time.
Walking briskly outdoors in the fresh morning air can be a great caffeine-free wake up call! If you make walking the FIRST thing you do in the morning, especially if you’re doing it before anybody else is awake, there will be zero distractions and no reason to say “sorry, I didn’t have time.” Of course, we like caffeine too (in moderation).
Walking will give you a chance to gather your thoughts and clear your head before the day begins. We’re constantly distracted at home: TV, iPads, smartphones, etc. Walking is so primal – no gadgets, just walking. Many people cite walking as the impetus for their creative or intelligent breakthroughs.
Walking and successfully building a habit will give you a habit blueprint to follow for anything else you’d like to accomplish: “Hey, I was able to make walking a habit, what else can I tackle in the same way?” Slow and steady wins. One foot in front of the other, my friend.
“Uhhh, Steve, I know how to walk. I do it every day!”
Welp, if you’re starting from only walking from your car to the office, we need to make sure you’re walking the right way for when you push that mileage up.
Let’s start with your feet, provided you’re not gonna glue hair to your feet and go barefoot to become a hobbit.
I recommend walking in shoes that have a wide toe box and minimal drop (height at the heel vs height at the toes), as we discuss in our monster post on healthy feet and footwear:
You might not be used to walking with minimal cushioning under your heels, so walk slowly and land softly. Walking on softer surfaces to start isn’t a bad idea either.
We were designed before the invention of big clunky shoes… thus, we should be able to walk without big clunky shoes.[3] If you are interested in going barefoot as a runner, get started by walking short distances first. Your feet will toughen up (though they probably won’t grow hair quite like Frodo and Sam), your joints and muscles around your feet and ankles will strengthen, and your knees will deal with less stress.
When going for a lazy stroll, focus on landing softly, which is much easier when you don’t have thick-soled shoes to cushion your stride: land softly with your heel barely touching before rolling onto the middle (ball) of your foot, and then push off. You might need to take shorter strides than you’re used to if you were a big heel striker with a long stride.
If you’re aiming to walk quickly and up the intensity, shorten your stride and aim to land in the middle of your foot while pumping your arms. This is more easily done when walking uphill (which is also a great way to burn extra calories).
The above photos are from Don, one of our coaching clients. Don credits his daily walking practice with helping him lose 85 pounds!
He’s not our only example of walking for weight loss:
Megan, who I mentioned earlier, is another client who walks daily to maintain her weight loss.
Case closed?
Of course not!
Both Don and Megan also made adjustments to their nutrition to reach their amazing results.
One of the Rules of the Nerd Fitness Rebellion is that we know “you can’t outrun your fork.” No amount of exercise can counter a bad diet, as your nutrition will be responsible for 90% (not an exaggeration) of your success or failure.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you go for a 5-mile walk, which takes you 90+ minutes.
If you then consume a 20 oz Gatorade and a small bag of Fritos (a typical snack for many here in America), you will have already undone all of the calories burned while walking.
Depending on your nutrition and love/hatred for exercise, this is either great news or bad news!
The BAD news: you can’t eat very badly in mass quantities and then expect to lose weight with a bit of exercise every week, even if it’s strenuous.
The GOOD news: Even if you dislike exercise, you can avoid exercise and still lose weight! Instead, put ALL of your focus instead on fixing your nutrition, and then go for a walk every once in awhile.
I’d also consider reading the following:
Oh, and if you want to see if a Nerd Fitness Coach can build you a program to lose weight while doing movements you enjoy (like walking), click on the button below:
#1) Focus on posture! Head up! Shoulders back! Walk with a confident stroll – practice this one in the morning if you’re not used to walking like this. It’s also a great way to appear instantly more confident; we nerds and hobbits need all the confidence we can get! Look around at your surroundings with your head up, arms swinging in rhythm.
You can also do some well-placed neck swings and jacket removals:
#2) Walk uphill to burn more fat. If you are walking on a treadmill, set it to an incline to increase the intensity and thus increase the amount of fat burned. Just don’t be that person who sets the incline way up, then holds onto both sides and leans their body back to be perpendicular with the incline. Keep good posture, lean forward into the incline, shorten your stride, and pump your legs.
#3) Hiking is a great way to practice walking, enjoy the scenery, and play Lord of the Rings in the woods with plastic swords and capes. Not that you should do that (you totally should). Here’s a beginner’s guide to hiking!
#4) When walking downhill, especially while barefoot (or wearing minimalist shoes), keep that stride short and be careful on how you are walking. Make sure your knee is bent when you land and absorb the impact rather than jamming the impact through your heel, knee, leg, hips, and lower back.
#5) Consider going for “fasted walks” in the morning. When you wake up first thing in the morning, your body has burned through most of the carb-fueled energy stores during the night. This means when you go for a walk first thing in the morning, your body is more likely to have to pull from the only fuel source available to it: fat! This is the entire philosophy behind things like Intermittent Fasting or really low-carb diets like the Ketogenic diet.
#6) Get yourself a sturdy walking stick, if only so you can use it to battle imaginary ogres, goblins, cavetrolls, etc. It can also make you feel far more adventurous than if you’re just walking, and help you get up hills and land softly when going back down.
#7)Try Temptation Bundling. Load up an audiobook or your favorite podcast, and tell yourself that you can ONLY listen to the book or podcast while walking.
If you’re somebody who has been interested – or is getting interested – in walking, you’re probably familiar with step-tracking devices:
Personally, I’m a huge fan of fitness wearables, but not for the reasons you’d think.
For starters, you’re wearing a constant reminder that you are prioritizing movement, which can only be positive. You can even trigger it to remind you to get up and move every hour.
It can also allow you to see how many steps you normally take, and thus allow you to prioritize moving MORE.
Although Fitbit has a history of being sued for the inaccurate heart-monitor portion of its devices, I’m less concerned about heart rates and 100% accuracy of step distance, and instead think in terms of personal improvement.
Just like with tracking your bodyfat percentage or your weight, “that which gets measured gets improved,” and that carries over to your total steps. The fact that you’re tracking it means you’re going to be more aware of it, which means you’re going to be more likely to be able to improve it.
And that’s why, in a weird way, I’m not very concerned about the total accuracy of these devices. Even if your scale is off by 5 pounds, or your body fat caliper is inaccurate by 1%, as long as you use the same device and measure in the same way under the same conditions, you can track trends and paint the picture of your health and whether or not it’s improving!
And that’s what these fitness trackers should be used for: a reminder and a trend tracker!
What you SHOULDN’T do: take your fitness tracker as gospel, and use that to calculate down to the calorie and macro how much food exactly you can consume.
What you SHOULD do: track your trend over time, and see if you can improve your average. Use the technology to aid your fitness quest. Use the community portion of the band to compare your stats against friends and get some positive friendly peer pressure to get you off your ass.
Okay, if nerdy fitness technology isn’t nerdy enough for you, let’s go full-nerd.
Did you know it’s 1779 miles between Hobbiton to Mount Doom? [4]. We can actually determine how far Sam and Frodo walked, and then set out on the journey ourselves! It’s one thing to go for a stroll around your neighborhood. It’s another to know that, “If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”
So let’s take a look at how far we need to walk first:
458 miles: Go from Hobbiton to Rivendell.
462 miles: Set out with the Fellowship from Rivendell, through Moria, to Lothlorien.
389 miles: From Lothlorien, down the Anduin, to Rauros Falls.
470 miles: Follow Frodo and Sam on the quest from Rauros to Mt. Doom.
535 miles: From Minas Tirith to Isengard
693 miles: From Isengard to Rivendell.
397 miles: From Rivendell to Bag End.
467 miles: (bonus!) Follow Frodo to the Grey Havens and return home with Sam.
Following this path, you need to walk a total of 1779 miles to get from Hobbiton to Mt. Doom. Then it’s time to destroy the ring and get carried to Minas Tirith by the Great Eagles.
Then you’ll walk 1625 miles back to Bag End (and an additional 467 miles if you’re interested in doing a round trip to the Grey Havens).
Obviously, you don’t need to move at the same speed as the hobbits (18 miles on the first day is no joke! Damn, those hobbits covered some ground!), but it’s still fun to track your walks and your total miles to see where you’d be on your journey.
However, like Frodo and Sam, it starts with the first step.
I’ve created a Google Doc that you can copy for yourself to track your distances to follow Frodo and Sam on your journey to destroy the One Ring.
Here’s how to do it:
Open the document, and then click on “file,” “save a copy,” and then you can edit your own copy of the document.
Track your distances with a pedometer, Fitbit, your iPhone or Android phone.
Input your distances and work towards completing each section of the journey over months. As you input your distances, it will automatically let you know when you reach each destination so you can get you started on the next one. 5 miles a day on average will have you destroying the Ring within one year.
Oh, and if you’re curious, according to my rough gorilla math, Frodo burned at least an additional 61,0000+ calories (100,000+ gross calories) by walking “there and back again” – you’re welcome[5].
What’s that?
You want some help getting out the door?
You got it – but only cause you asked nicely.
Here are three ways to level up alongside Nerd Fitness.
#1) Our Online Coaching Program: a coaching program for busy people to help them make better food choices, stay accountable, and get healthier, permanently.
You can schedule a free call with our team so we can get to know you and see if our coaching program is right for you. Just click on the image below for more details:
#2) If you want an exact roadmap on how to get in shape, check out NF Journey. Our fun habit-building app helps you exercise more frequently, eat healthier, and level up your life (literally).
We even have fun missions that will help you walk more, all while you earn XP! Righteous.
Try your free trial right here:
#3) Join the Rebellion! We need good people like you in our community, the Nerd Fitness Rebellion.
Sign up in the box below to enlist and get our Rebel Starter Kit, which includes all of our “work out at home” guides, the Nerd Fitness Diet Cheat Sheet, and much more!
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The 15 mistakes you don’t want to make.
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Alright, your turn:
What questions do you have about walking?
How have you incorporated it into your daily routine?
As Coach Lauren mentions above, the “circuit” in circuit training comes from the fact that you do a sequence of exercises back to back to back, and then you repeat the sequence.
And then again.
You cycle through the planned sequence of exercises, or circuit, multiple times.
That’s circuit training.
Generally, you hit each major muscle group during one full circuit. You may do a lower body for one exercise. Then the upper body the next.
You’ll find all sorts of different circuit training sequences. Here are some things most will have in common:
Several different exercises. A normal circuit will have five to ten different movements per circuit. You’ll often hear these referred to as “stations.” Overhead press station, squat station, etc.
Little to no rest in between.The goal of circuit training is to keep your heart rate up. Ideally, if you’re physically able, you go from one exercise to another without stopping. Maybe you rest after the whole circuit. Maybe.
Rinse and repeat.Generally, you’ll run through your circuit a few times. Three rounds are common.
Make sense?
The point here is to work different parts of your body with different exercises, and then while those parts are recovering, you’re working on your other movements! This helps build cardiovascular health, while also improving muscular endurance and strength.
More importantly, for somebody with limited time, doing a strength training circuit is more effective at building strength and burning fat than an equivalent amount of cardio.
In other words, if you are trying to lose weight, you should be doing circuit training.
Our Beginner Bodyweight Circuitwould be a great place to begin, and you can download a worksheet to help you get started right here:
Grab Your Beginner Bodyweight Routine Worksheet. No Gym Required!
Complete this workout at home, no equipment required
Avoid the common mistakes everybody makes when doing bodyweight exercises
Learn how to finally get your first pull-up
Why Should I do circuit training?
Generally, you’ll hear exercise divided into strength training or aerobic exercise (cardio).
What’s the difference, you wonder?
Strength training. Strength training is also referred to as anaerobic exercise, which would be a short burst of energy for movement. Think of a push-up or pull-up. These exercises help build and tone muscle.
Aerobic Exercise.“Aerobic” means “needs oxygen.” Your heart rate increases to get oxygen where your body needs it, thus the word “cardio.” Running, biking, or jumping jacks would be examples of aerobic exercise.
The thing about a circuit is, you actually do both categories. Presses and lunges fall into strength training. Jumping jacks are cardio.
And since you aren’t stopping much in between stations, you’ll need more oxygen, and voila. Even more cardio.
With circuit training, you build muscle and burn fat WHILE building stamina.
As Michael Scott would say, “that’s a win, win, win.”
There’s some debate on what kind of exercise is better for weight loss: aerobic or anaerobic.
My thoughts?
If you’re limited on time and only can pick one, I would pick strength training: when you strength train, you break your muscles down, and your body needs to work extra hard over the next 24-48 hours to rebuild those muscles (with increased calories burned).
We work with our 1-on-1 Coaching Clients to create programs that combine both strength and cardio in a fun way – it really comes down to a program that you actually WANT to do.
Before and after your circuit training: Warm up and stretch
No matter which circuit you pick, I want you to start with one important thing:
Warm-up!
I cover why you should always warm up in an article found right here. It doesn’t have to be much though, give it about five minutes to get your muscles active and your heart rate up.
This will help you do exercises properly and help prevent injury. You can run in place, do air punches and kicks, or some jumping jacks.
Here is NF Senior Coach Staci (you might know her incredible story) showing you many beginner options you can use to warm up as well:
Did I just tell you to prepare for circuit training, with a circuit?!
If you’re curious, here’s my personal (advanced) warm-up:
THE NERD FITNESS ADVANCED WARM-UP:
Jump rope: 2-3 minutes
Jumping jacks: 25 reps
Bodyweight squats: 20 reps
Lunges: 5 reps each leg.
Hip extensions: 10 reps each side
Hip rotations: 5 each leg
Forward leg swings: 10 each leg
Side leg swings: 10 each leg
Push-ups: 10-20 reps
Spider-man steps: 10 reps
Our goal isn’t to tire you out. Instead, we want to warm you up.
That’s step one.
Completing your chosen circuit training routine would be step two.
Below, you’ll find 15 workouts you can follow along with! And if you like our style of workouts, you might like our new app, Nerd Fitness Journey!
Our fun habit-building app helps you exercise more frequently, eat healthier, and level up your life (literally).
Right now, you can try it for free for a full week (no credit card required). Jump in below:
Once you’ve done the above three times, go ahead and put your kettlebell away for your final step: stretches.
If you want a kettlebell worksheet for this workout, grab one by signing up in the box below:
Grab Your Beginner Kettlebell Routine Worksheet!
Complete this workout at home or gym with 1 kettlebell.
Avoid the common mistakes everybody makes when doing kettlebell exercises.
Build strength, burn fat, level up your life!
We also have a fun new adventure in our app that will allow you to train with your kettlebell right alongside Hack Morris (this will make sense more sense when start).
Jump in right now for your free trial:
Beginner Gym Circuit Training
If you have access to a gym, you have a lot of circuit options.
If it’s your first time stepping foot in a fitness facility, check out our Beginner’s Guide to the Gym. The gym can be a scary place, but we’ll give you a strategy to get comfy.
We’ll also walk you through each movement for both Days A and B below. I would recommend picking one of our 5 Beginner Gym Workouts, going through the leveled progressions, and working your way up to the circuits below:
Alternate your circuits on different days. Rest in between. “Day A” could be Monday. Rest Tuesday. Wednesday could be “Day B.”
We LOVE helping people get started in the gym, as we’re huge fans of barbell training and helping beginners build confidence with weight training! If that sounds like you…
And you can download our full Strength 101 guide too, which has this routine along with other circuits to help you start building strength today:
Download our comprehensive guide
Everything you need to know about getting strong.
Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training.
How to find the right gym and train properly in one.
The Hotel Workout Circuit: For Travelers that Train
Sometimes, you just plain find yourself stuck in a hotel room. Maybe you can find the hotel gym, but I bet it’s terrible! It probably has 2 machines, a broken treadmill, and no free weights.
Ugh.
Instead, how about a workout circuit you can do in the room itself! Utilize the furniture to its full potential.
Level 1
Level 2
Set the alarm clock to 15 minutes from now and see how many circuits you can do!
Check out our full post on hotel circuits if you want Level 3!
We have a LOT of business travelers in our 1-on-1 coaching program, which is why we create workouts for both their home gym and while traveling!
If you need worldwide accountability, workouts for home and the road, and want expert guidance…
Nerdy Circuit Training Exercises
If those workouts above don’t tickle your fancy, we have these other nerdy circuits you can do too!
Gimli “Shall I get you a box?” jumps: 7 box jumps – REALLY explode
Helm’s Deep-Squats: 9 bodyweight squats – get your ass to the ground
Tower of Orthanc Holds: 1 minute (Kick up against a wall and hold a handstand for as long as you can until 1 minute is complete, in as few as sets as possible. Check out our Guide to Handstands.)
Superset 3: The Return of the King
If you can get through a superset three times, consider yourself an honorary Ranger. Nothing found in Mordor can faze you.
Barbell Deadlift / Dumbbell RDL / Banded Good Morning / Regular Good Morning: 10 reps
Medicine Ball Slam / Quick Downwards Bodyweight Squat: 10 reps
Push-up to Renegade row (push-up, row left, push-up, row right, repeat): 5 Rows per side
Transverse Lunge and Chop: 5 reps each side
How many times do you do this circuit? AMRAP, or, As Many Rounds As Possible. I suggest setting a 12-minute timer and getting to work. Be careful though, because only Wolverine can heal automatically.
You’ll need actual rest.
Boom!
There are your nerdy circuits. Feel free to rock the soundtrack of the referenced movies during your workout. If you own a cape, now’s the time.
Complete List of Circuit Training Exercises
You can do any of the workouts in this article and get a great workout, but if you want to build your own workout, you can totally do that too!
Here is a list of exercises you can use to create your workout.
Simply pick a few, and do one after the other in as many circuits as you want!
Do 3 circuits with 10 reps of each exercise, one after the other!
Have fun and keep things interesting. And if you don’t want to build your own workout, that’s cool too! We have 15 free workouts in this article, and we can also do all the heavy lifting for you.
(Well, not literally DO the heavy lifting, but you know what I mean.)
We create custom workout solutions for busy people just like you in our 1-on-1 Coaching Program. Let us create a workout and help you make better food choices.
It’s like having a Yoda in your pocket (again, not literally).
How to Stretch After Circuit Training
Once you finish your workout, the final step (three) would be stretching and cooling down. No matter what circuit you go through, stretch after a workout. It can help a lot with muscle recovery.
Scope this video for an awesome stretching sequence to follow:
You could also do some yoga poses. For stretching, find what feels good and take your time. Let your heart rate come down while you stretch.
You could even do some foam rolling too if you’re a glutton for punishment!
There are all sorts of different ways to do circuit training. We just showed you fifteen.
YOUR MISSION: Complete one of the above circuit training workouts! If you don’t know which one to pick, start with the Beginner Bodyweight Circuit. It’ll get you used to the idea of hustling from one exercise to the next.
And you can do it in your living room!
If you’re looking for more hands-on instruction and customized guidance, check out our 1-on-1 Coaching program. You’ll work with our certified NF instructors who get to know you better than you know yourself, and then build a workout program that is specific to your exact goals.
Simply put, we tell you exactly what to do every day, and how to eat. And then, we check in with you regularly to make sure you’re doing it!
If you got this far in the article, I really want you to try one of these workouts. Right NOW. I always mention the most important step in a fitness journey is starting it. Today, start circuit training.
Once completed, I’d love for you to share your story with the community in the comments:
How’d it go?
Did you get through three full circuits?
Which routine did you pick?
Find a circuit you’re comfortable with, and do it.
So you want to lose weight and get in shape, but don’t want to leave your house?
Well, as your fitness Yoda, I will teach you a great bodyweight workout routine that you can do ANYWHERE: In your living room, at a park, or in a galaxy far, far away…
These are the types of workouts we build for our busy Online Coaching Clients, and I’m pumped to share it with you today!
Let’s dig into the different parts of this workout and get to the action:
Make sure you also download the Beginner Bodyweight Workout PDF so you can track your progress and level up at home.
I’ll send it on over when you join the Nerd Fitness Rebellion in the box below:
Grab Your Beginner Bodyweight Routine Worksheet. No Gym Required!
Complete this workout at home, no equipment required
Avoid the common mistakes everybody makes when doing bodyweight exercises
You just need to make sure you have the right program to follow.
Enter the Beginner Bodyweight Workout.
I’m going to take you through a basic home workout today that can be completed anywhere – in your house, apartment, out at a park, in your basement, on the moon, wherever.
In a circuit routine, you’ll do each exercise in succession without a break in between (if you’re able).
Once you’ve finished all exercises in the circuit, do it again.
If you’re still able after the 2nd run through, go for a third.
Because all of these exercises come one after another, you’re bound to get tired – and that’s okay!
It’s better to stop and take a break than to do an exercise incorrectly.
Before you start, don’t forget to do a Dynamic Warm-Up – Make sure to get your heart rate pumping and get your muscles warmed or you’re just asking for injury.
You can run in place, jump rope, do a few push-ups, pedal on a stationary bike, do some punches and kicks, jog up and down your stairs, and/or twist and swing your arms and legs to get them moving!
“HOW OFTEN SHOULD I DO THE BEGINNER BODYWEIGHT WORKOUT?”
Do this routine 2-3 times a week, but never on consecutive days.
You don’t build muscle when you’re exercising, you build muscle when you’re resting, so try not to do a strength training routine (of the same muscle groups) two days in a row.
In addition to checking out our Online Coaching Program, make sure you download the worksheet for this workout by joining the Rebellion (our free online community)!
I’ll send it to you right away when you sign up in the box below:
Grab Your Beginner Bodyweight Routine Worksheet. No Gym Required!
Complete this workout at home, no equipment required
Avoid the common mistakes everybody makes when doing bodyweight exercises
Note: We have helped hundreds of 1-on-1 Coaching clients get started with strength training and other awesomeness – but EVERYBODY starts with bodyweight training like these movements and this workout!
You have two options here to dial in your nutrition:
We’ve actually developed our own 10-level nutrition system and mindset blueprint in Nerd Fitness Prime, but let me break this down into some basics:
Eat natural, whole foods whenever possible.
Cut back on sugar and liquid calories wherever you can. The stuff is in everything!
Put vegetables and fruit on your plate!
Know your fats and carbs – these are the foods we can overeat without realizing it.
Make sure you get enough protein each day (meat, chicken, fish) – this helps with rebuilding muscles and things like that.
You can download a Free 10 Level Diet Guide too when you join the Rebellion and sign up in the box below:
Download our free weight loss guide
THE NERD FITNESS DIET: 10 Levels to Change Your Life
Follow our 10-level nutrition system at your own pace
What you need to know about weight loss and healthy eating
3 Simple rules we follow every day to stay on target
The raw honest truth:how you eat will be responsible for at least 80% of your success or failure.
If you’re doing bodyweight workouts because you’re interested in losing weight, know that training is only 10-20% of the puzzle!
If you need help figuring this all out, or you just want your own Yoda to tell you what to do, you’re in the right place!
We’ve been helping busy people like you train at home and make better food decisions without hating life! It’s our 1-on-1 Online Coaching Program, and it might be a great fit for you.
Schedule a call with us to learn more by clicking on the image below:
Do this Beginner Bodyweight Workout for the next 4-6 weeks and focus on getting better.
If doing just one circuit of the workout was really challenging, no big deal!
Write down how you did, and try to do just 1 more rep or exercise next time through.
The whole point is “do a bit more than last time.”
I also have MULTIPLE options for you to take for your next step too. Pick the option below that best aligns with your goals and timeline:
1) If you want step-by-step guidance on how to lose weight, eat better, and get stronger, check out our killer 1-on-1 coaching program:
2) If you want a daily prompt for doing workouts at home, check out NF Journey. Our fun habit-building app helps you exercise more frequently, eat healthier, and level up your life (literally).
Try your free trial right here:
3) Join the Rebellion! We need good people like you in our community, the Nerd Fitness Rebellion.
Sign up in the box below to enlist and get the Beginner Bodyweight Workout sheet so you can print out the sheet and train at home!
Grab Your Beginner Bodyweight Routine Worksheet. No Gym Required!
Complete this workout at home, no equipment required
Avoid the common mistakes everybody makes when doing bodyweight exercises
Learn how to finally get your first pull-up
I’d love to hear how this workout went for you, and how else we can help!
This is what we’ve dedicated our lives to, and you’re now part of a killer community.
Welcome to the Nerd Fitness Rebellion!
You can do this, we got your back!
-Steve
PS: If you’re looking for more workout routines to follow, I got you covered:
PPS: As a reminder, today’s bodyweight workout looks like so:
Click on it to pull up your own PDF of the infographic!
Jan. 3, 2022 – It’s officially 2023, and if history repeats, millions of Americans are likely vowing that this year will be one when they drop those unwanted pounds for good. After all, weight loss usually lands one of the top spots on New Year’s resolution surveys.
And just in time, there’s guidance to pick the best plan. Released today are U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of the best diet plans.
Once again, the Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes fruits, vegetables, olive oil, and fish, got the top spot, as best diet overall. It’s the sixth consecutive year for that win. But many other diets got top marks as well.
This year, U.S. News, with the help of more than 30 nutritionists, doctors, and epidemiologists, ranked 24 diets in several categories to help people find a plan that meets their goals, whether it’s finding the best weight loss diet, easiest one to follow, or plans for other goals, such as managing diabetes or heart disease. Two new categories were added: Best Diets for Bone & Joint Health and Best Family-Friendly Diets.
In previous years, the publication ranked 40 diets. Even if a diet is no longer ranked, its profile with detailed information remains on the site.
“Each year we ask ourselves what we can do better or differently next time,” says Gretel Schueller, managing editor of health for U.S. News. When the publication got feedback from their experts this year, they had requests to consider sustainability of diets and whether they meet a busy family’s needs, in addition to considering many other factors.
This year’s report ranks plans in 11 categories.
The winners and the categories:
Best Diets Overall
After the Mediterranean diet, two others tied for second place:
DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, which fights high blood pressure and emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, and low-fat dairy.
Flexitarian diet, which focuses on fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods but also allows occasional meat.
Best Weight Loss Diets
WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers, got first place. The plan emphasizes not only weight loss but healthier eating and regular activity. The Points program, which assigns specific points to foods, with a daily Points budget, is more personalized than in the past.
DASH got second place.
Mayo Clinic Diet and TLC diet tied for third place. The Mayo Clinic Diet focuses on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. It helps people improve their eating habits. The TLC diet (Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes) focuses on vegetables, fruit, lean protein, and reducing cholesterol levels.
Best Fast Weight Loss Diets
The keto diet got first place. It’s a high-fat, low-carb diet that aims to achieve weight loss through fat burning. Four others tied for second place:
Atkins, a diet created by the cardiologist Robert Atkins, which begins with very few carbs and then recommends progressively eating more until the weight loss goal is achieved
Nutrisystem, a commercial program that includes prepackaged meals and focuses on high-protein, lower-glycemic foods to stabilize blood sugar levels
Optavia, a plan focused on low-carb, low-calorie foods and including fortified meal replacements
SlimFast Diet, a plan of shakes, smoothies, and meal bars to replace two of three meals a day
Best Diets for Healthy Eating
Mediterranean
DASH
Flexitarian
Best Heart-Healthy Diets
DASH
Mediterranean
Flexitarian and Ornish tied for third. The Ornish Diet focuses on plant-based and whole foods and limiting animal products. It recommends daily exercise and stress reduction.
Best Diets for Diabetes
DASH
Mediterranean
Flexitarian
Best Diets for Bone and Joint Health
DASH and Mediterranean are in a first-place tie, followed by the flexitarian diet.
Best Family-Friendly Diets
This category has a three-way tie: the flexitarian, Mediterranean, and TLC diets.
Best Plant-Based Diets
Mediterranean was first, then flexitarian and the MIND diet. The MIND diet combines the DASH and Mediterranean diets and focuses on “brain-healthy” foods.
Easiest Diets to Follow
Flexitarian and TLC tied for first, followed by a tie between DASH and Mediterranean.
Best Diet Programs (formerly called commercial plans)
WW
There was a tie for second place between Jenny Craig and Noom, the latter of which focuses on low-calorie foods, with personalized calorie ranges and coaching to help meet goals.
Methodology
A variety of factors were considered, such as whether a diet includes all food groups, how easy it is to follow, whether it can be customized to meet cultural and personal preferences, and if it has a realistic timeline for weight loss.
Response from Diet Plans
Representatives from two plans that received mixed reviews in the rankings responded.
Jenny Craig was ranked second for best diet program but much lower for family-friendly, landing at 22nd place of 24.
“Our program is designed to address the needs of the individual through personalized experiences,” Jenny Craig CEO Mandy Dowson says. “We have many families that participate in our program together but are still evaluated separately to determine appropriate individual goals.”
Its high ranking for best diet program reflects feedback from satisfied members, she says. Among advances will be the new Jenny Fresh program, a line of entrées prepared fresh and delivered to customers’ doors.
Atkins got second place for best fast weight loss but ranked near the bottom for best overall, best weight loss, diabetes, healthy eating, and heart health. In response, Colette Heimowitz, vice president of nutrition and education for Simply Good Foods, which makes Atkins’s food products, says that low-carb eating approaches are a viable option for anyone today.
“There are more than 130 independent, peer-reviewed published studies that show the efficacy and safety of low-carb eating,” she says. “The studies have been conducted for several decades and counting.”
Expert Perspective
Samantha Cassetty, a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and wellness expert in New York City and author of Sugar Shock, reviewed the report for WebMD. She was not involved in the rankings.
“I think what this shows you is, the best diet overall is also the best for various conditions,” she says. For instance, the Mediterranean, the number one overall, also got high ranking for diabetes, heart health, and bone and joint health, she points out.
For consumers trying to lose weight: “If you see fast weight loss, that should be a red flag. A healthy diet for weight loss is one you can sustain,” she says.
She’s not a fan of the programs with prepackaged foods. “It takes the guesswork out, but the portion sizes tend to be unsatisfying. They don’t teach you how to deal with some of the challenges [such as realizing an ‘ideal’ portion size].”
How to Use the Report
Schueller’s advice: “Recognize that no diet fits everyone.” When considering which plan to choose, she suggests thinking long-term.
“Whatever we choose has to work in the long run,” she says.
Consumers should consider expenses, meal prep time, and whether the diet fits their lifestyle.
Ideally, she says, the best diet “teaches you smart food preparation and how to make healthy choices, allows the flexibility to be social and eat with groups, whether family or friends.”
Before choosing a diet to follow, consult a medical professional for input on the decision, U.S. News cautions.
Roughly a century ago, a new fad diet began to sweep the United States. Hollywood starlets such as Ethel Barrymore supposedly swore by it; the citrus industry hopped on board. All a figure-conscious girl had to do was eat a lot of grapefruit for a week, or two, or three.
The Grapefruit Diet, like pretty much all other fad diets, is mostly bunk. If people were losing weight with the regimen, that’s because the citrus was being recommended as part of a portion-controlled, low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet—not because it had exceptional flab-blasting powers. And yet, the diet has survived through the decades, spawning a revival in the 1970s and ’80s, a dangerous juice-exclusive spin-off called the grapefruit fast, and even a shout-out from Weird Al; its hype still plagues nutritionists today.
But for every grapefruit evangelist, there is a critic warning of its dangers—probably one with a background in pharmacology. The fruit, for all its tastiness and dietetic appeal, has another, more sinister trait: It raises the level of dozens of FDA-approved medications in the body, and for a select few drugs, the amplification can be potent enough to trigger a life-threatening overdose. For most people, chowing down on grapefruit is completely safe; it would take “a perfect storm” of factors—say, a vulnerable person taking an especially grapefruit-sensitive medication within a certain window of drinking a particular amount of grapefruit juice—for disaster to unfurl, says Emily Heil, an infectious-disease pharmacist at the University of Maryland. But that leaves grapefruit in a bit of a weird position. No one canagree on exactly how much the world should worry about this bittersweet treat whose chemical properties scientists still don’t fully understand.
Grapefruit’s medication-concentrating powers were discovered only because of a culinary accident. Some three decades ago, the clinical pharmacologist David Bailey (who died earlier this year) was running a trial testing the effects of alcohol consumption on a blood-pressure medication called felodipine. Hoping to mask the distinctive taste of booze for his volunteers, Bailey mixed it with grapefruit juice, and was shocked to discover that blood levels of felodipine were suddenly skyrocketing in everyone—even those in the control group, who were drinking virgin grapefruit juice.
After running experiments on himself, Bailey confirmed that the juice was to blame. Some chemical in grapefruit was messing with the body’s natural ability to break down felodipine in the hours after it was taken, causing the drug to accumulate in the blood. It’s the rough physiological equivalent of jamming a garbage disposal: Waste that normally gets flushed just builds, and builds, and builds. In this case, the garbage disposal is an enzyme called cytochrome P450 3A4—CYP3A4 for short—capable of breaking down a whole slate of potentially harmful chemicals found in foods and meds. And the jamming culprit is a compound found in the pulp and peel of grapefruit and related citrus, including pomelos and Seville oranges. It doesn’t take much: Even half a grapefruit can be enough to trigger a noticeable interaction, says George Dresser, a pharmacologist at Western University, in Ontario.
The possible consequences of these molecular clogs can sometimes get intense. “On the list of concerning food-drug interactions,” Dresser told me, “arguably, this is the most important one.” When paired with certain heart medications, grapefruit could potentially cause arrhythmias; with some antidepressants, it might induce nausea, vomiting, and an elevated heart rate. Grapefruit can also raise blood levels of the cholesterol drugs atorvastatin and simvastatin, prompting muscle pain and, eventually, muscle breakdown. One of the fruit’s most worrying interactions occurs with an immunosuppressive drug called tacrolimus, frequently prescribed to organ-transplant patients, that may, when amped up by grapefruit, spark headaches, tremors, hypoglycemia, and kidney problems. The citrus even has the ability to lift blood levels of drugs of abuse, including fentanyl, oxycodone, and ketamine.
The full list of potential interactions is long. “More than 50 percent of drugs on the market are metabolized by CYP3A4,” which inhabits both the liver and the gut, says Mary Paine, a pharmacologist at Washington State University. That said, grapefruit can really affect only intestinal CYP3A4, and will cause only a small fraction of those medications to reach notably higher concentrations in the blood (and sometimes only when fairly large quantities of juice are consumed—a quart or more). And only a small fraction of those medications will, when amassed, threaten true toxicity. Our bodies are always making more CYP3A4; stop eating grapefruit and, within a day or two, levels of the protein should more or less reset.
Professionals disagree on how to characterize grapefruit’s risks. To Shirley Tsunoda, a pharmacist at UC San Diego, “it’s definitely a big deal,” especially for the organ-transplant patients to whom she prescribes tacrolimus. Her advice to them is to indulge in grapefruit exactly never—and ideally, tacrolimus-takers should skip related citrus too. Tsunoda even advises people to check the labels of mixed-fruit juices, just in case the makers sneaked some grapefruit in, and she thinks twice when considering noshing on it herself. Paul Watkins, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is much less worried; his bigger concern, he told me, is that the fruit’s reputation as a nemesis of oral medications has been way overblown. He used to study grapefruit-drug interaction but abandoned it years ago, after “I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t very important,” he told me. Some concern is absolutely warranted for certain people on certain meds, he noted. But “I think the actual incidence of patients who have gotten into any kind of trouble or had serious adverse reactions due to taking their drugs with grapefruit juice is very, very small.”
Even the FDA seems a bit unsure of how it feels about the fruit. The agency has stamped the documentation of severalgrapefruit-sensitive medications with official warnings. But fact sheets for other drugs merely mention that they can interact with grapefruit, say to consult a health-care professional, or just counsel people to avoid drinking the juice in “large amounts.” And as Dan Nosowitz has reported for Atlas Obscura, several interacting drugs that bear warnings in Canada—among them, Viagra, oxycodone, the HIV antiviral Edurant, and the blood pressure medication verapamil—don’tmentionanyissues with grapefruit in the United States. (When I asked the agency about these discrepancies, a spokesperson wrote, “The FDA is continuously reviewing new information about approved drugs, including studies and reports of adverse events. If the FDA determines there is a safety concern, the agency will take appropriate action.”)
Very little solid data can precisely quantify grapefruit’s perils. Over the years, researchers have documented a number of isolated cases of citrus-drug interactions that prompted urgentmedicalcare. But some of them involved truly exceptional amounts of juice. And citrus stans aren’t constantly dropping dead in clinical trials or nursing homes. Even when Bailey first presented his findings to the greater medical community, “people asked, ‘Where are all the bodies?’” Dresser, who was mentored by Bailey, told me. The paucity of data, Dresser contends, stems in part from health-care workers neglecting to check their patients for a history of juice-chugging.
For now, the conversation has mostly stalled, while grapefruit has served up even more mysteries. In the years since Bailey’s discovery, researchers have found that the fruit might lower the concentration of certain drugs, such as the allergy med fexofenadine, perhaps by keeping the lining of the intestines from absorbing certain compounds. New drugs are a particularly murky area, especially because grapefruit interactions aren’t a typical first priority when a new medication hits the market. The popular COVID antiviral pill Paxlovid, for instance, contains the CYP3A4-susceptible ingredient ritonavir. A Pfizer representative told me that the company is not concerned about toxicity. But Heil wonders whether grapefruit could mildly aggravate some of Paxlovid’s irksome side effects: diarrhea, for instance, or maybe the sour, metallic taste that reminds many people of … well, grapefruit.
That said, most grapefruit lovers need not despair. The fruit is still healthy—chock-full of vitamins and flavor—and yet is often overlooked, says Heidi Silver, a nutrition scientist at Vanderbilt University. Silver and researchers have shown that consuming grapefruit flesh or juice might be able to slightly lower levels of triglycerides and cholesterol. Technically, it can even play a role in weight loss: Snacking on a small portion before a meal can help people feel full faster. Then again, a glass of water will too. Just as grapefruit is not a miraculous vanquisher of fat, it isn’t a ubiquitous killer.
Even people on certain medications may be able to enjoy it if they consult an expert first. Heil’s own father absolutely adores grapefruit, and also happens to take an oral medication that can interact. Swallow them too close together, and he risks dizziness and fatigue. But he and Heil have found a compromise: He can have small portions of grapefruit or its juice in the morning, spaced about 12 hours out from when he takes his meds at bedtime. A few weeks ago, Heil (who thinks grapefruit is disgusting) even gave her dad the green light to enjoy a dinnertime cocktail that contained a small splash of the juice. Maybe the smidge of fruit affected his meds that day. But “it wasn’t going to be the end of the world,” Heil told me. To say that, after all, would have been an exaggeration.
Dec 15, 2022 – Some people with type 2 diabetes may be able to lose weight, lower their blood sugar, and stop taking diabetes drugs, if they follow anintermittent fasting diet for 3 months, new research suggests.
Intermittent fasting – such as the 5:2 diet, which consists of eating few calories for 2 days followed by eating normally for 5 days – has led to weight loss in previous studies.
But it hasn’t been clear whether intermittent fasting might lower HbA1c levels – a measure of a person’s average blood sugar levels over the past 2 to 3 months.
And specifically, it was not known if intermittent fasting could let people revert to a non-diabetic state, known as diabetes remission – defined as having a blood sugar level below 6.5% for at least 3 months after stopping all diabetes medications.
This new study in 72 patients with type 2 diabetes in China showed that indeed, the 36 patients in the intermittent fasting group lost roughly 13 pounds and maintained this weight loss for 1 year, and close to half achieved diabetes remission. This compared with barely any weight loss for the 36 patients in the control group, of whom just 3% achieved remission.
The results show that “type 2 diabetes is not necessarily a permanent, lifelong disease,” senior author Dongbo Liu, PhD, from the Hunan Agricultural University in China, said in a news release. “Diabetes remission is possible if patients lose weight by changing their diet and exercise habits.”
“The large amount of weight reduction is key to continuing to achieve diabetes remission,” Amy E. Rothberg, MD, PhD, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan, said in an interview. Rothberg was not involved with this study.
The bottom line is that “lifestyle changes work,” she says.
Although these findings are specific for an Asian population, they suggest that a similar approach could be tailored to other populations.
People with type 2 diabetes who would like to try intermittent fasting need guidance from a dietitian, Rothberg says, to make sure their diet includes all the necessary micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals on fasting days. They also need to maintain a relatively balanced diet and not gorge themselves on feast days.
She also advises patients: “Try to reduce your calories by a method that you find sustainable, so that you can lose weight and maintain that reduced weight.”
The study was published Dec. 14 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
We’re going to take two widely accepted healthy eating “rules” and turn them on their head:
RULE #1: You HAVE to eat first thing in the morning: Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!
“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.[1]
RULE #2: Eat lots of small meals for weight loss. Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”
In other words, “eat breakfast and lots of small meals to lose weight and obtain optimal health.”
But what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) can help with optimum human performance, mental and physical health improvement, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?
That’s where an Intermittent Fasting Plan comes in.
Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.
In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.
By fasting and then feasting deliberately, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.
There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting, which I learned about from Martin over at LeanGains, a resource specifically built around fasted strength training:
#1) INTERMITTENT FASTING 16/8 PLAN
What it is: Fasting for 16 hours and then only eating within a specific 8-hour window. For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.
Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. This is the “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days and the most common form of Intermittent Fasting. It’s also my preferred method (5 years running).
Two examples: The top means you are skipping breakfast, the bottom means you are skipping dinner each day:
You can adjust this window to make it work for your life:
If you start eating at: 7AM, stop eating and start fasting at 3pm.
If you start eating at: 11AM, stop eating and start fasting at 7pm.
If you start eating at: 2PM, stop eating and start fasting at 10pm.
If you start eating at: 6PM, stop eating and start fasting at 2AM.
#2) INTERMITTENT FASTING 24-HOUR PLAN
Skip two meals one day, where you take 24 hours off from eating. For example, eat on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then you don’t eat again until 8PM the following day.
With this plan, you eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.
If you can only do an 18 hour fast, or a 20 hour fast, or a 22 hour fast – that’s okay! Adjust with different time frames and see how your body responds.
Two examples: skipping breakfast and lunch one day of the week, and then another where you skip lunch and dinner one day, two days in a week.
Note: You can do this once a week, twice a week, or whatever works best for your life and situation.
Those are the two most popular intermittent fasting plans, and the two we’ll be focusing on, though there are many variations of both that you can modify for yourself:
Some people eat in a 4-hour window, others do 6 or 8.
Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I will eat less than I normally eat on average (2 meals instead of 3), and thus I will lose weight, right?”
Yes.
By cutting out an entire meal each day, you are consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before. Overall, you’re still consuming fewer calories per day.
In this example, you’re eating LARGER lunches and dinners than you normally do, but by skipping breakfast you’ll consume 500 less calories per day.
And thus, weight loss!
This is highlighted in a recent JAMA study[2] in which both calorie restricted dieters and intermittent fasters lost similar amounts of weight over a year period.
That doesn’t tell the FULL story, as the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.
Intermittent Fasting can help because your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:
When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.
Because it has all of this readily available, easy-to-burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.
During the “fasted state” (the hours in which your body is not consuming or digesting any food) your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy.
Thus, it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as it’s the only energy source readily available.
Burning fat = win.
The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.
Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from a source of energy that it does have available: the fat stored in your cells.
Why does this work? Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.
The more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, and your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting[3].
These changes to insulin production and sensitivity can help lead to weight loss [4] and muscle creation [5].
Next: Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (aka during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can lead to increased insulin sensitivity.
This means that a meal following your workout will be used more efficiently: converted to glycogen and stored up in your muscles or burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.
Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting): With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores and enough glucose in the bloodstream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.
Back to fasting: growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep[6]and after a period of fasting). Combine this increased growth hormone secretion:[7], the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity [8]), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.
The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories to constantly pull from (if you eat all day long).
TL/DR: For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.
I know Intermittent Fasting can be overwhelming for many, which is why we sought to simplify the practice for our new app: Nerd Fitness Journey.
When you get started, we won’t have you jumping into the deep end. Instead, we’ll provide small missions so you can gradually grow accustomed to skipping meals.
If you want, you can sign-up for a free trial right here:
There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:
1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories [9] just to process that meal. So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.
Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food [10].
So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.
2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals. I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.
However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort. I know I do.
Also, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.
Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and generally only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).
If we think back to caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours. Do you think Joe Caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?
Hell no! He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.
A recent study (written about in the NYT, highlighted by LeanGains) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss [11]:
There were [no statistical] differences between the low- and high- [meal frequency] groups for adiposity indices, appetite measurements or gut peptides (peptide YY and ghrelin) either before or after the intervention. We conclude that increasing meal frequency does not promote greater body weight loss under the conditions described in the present study.
When you fast, you are also making it easier to restrict your total caloric intake over the course of the week, which can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.
#2) Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.
It’s one less decision you have to make every day.
It could allow you to enjoy bigger portioned meals (thus making your tastebuds and stomach satiated) and STILL eat fewer calories on average.
It’s a point that Coach Matt makes in this video on intermittent fasting:
#3) It requires less time (and potentially less money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.
Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice. Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice.
Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.
#4) It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain. Intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss and building a solid physique.
#5) It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia.
As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:
#6) Plus, Wolverine does it:
If adamantium-clawed superheroes do Intermittent Fasting, it can probably work for you too, if you can make it work for your particular lifestyle and situation!
If you’ve tried implementing something like this in the past and not had success, I hear ya!
That was the specific problem we set out to solve when we created Nerd Fitness Journey, our fun habit-building app. The tasks and missions we assign are small – like drinking a glass of water or taking a 5-minute walk – so the steps you take won’t be too scary.
You can try out the app (including our Intermittent Fasting missions) for free right here:
In my own experimentation with Intermittent Fasting since 2014, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent Fasting.
The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.
People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.
The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:
Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me.
However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.
Although I fast for 16 hours per day with no issues, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:
After 48 hours of fasting in a recent study[12], “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.” You’ll be fasting for far less time than that.
“So why do I feel grouchy and lethargic when I skip breakfast?”
In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of past eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, and normally eat as soon as you wake up, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it is now used to consuming food every three hours.
If you eat breakfast every morning, your body expects to wake up and eat food.
Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue. In addition, ghrelin (a hormone that makes you hungry [13]), is actually lowest in the mornings and decreases after a few hours of not eating too. The hunger pains will naturally pass!
Personally, I found this grumpiness subsided after a few days and now my mornings actually energize me.
It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a cure-all panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candy bars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.
If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, figure out your calorie goals and track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating.
If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with an intermittent fasting plan, you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.
Think about it in caveman terms again. We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. Imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active and alert: what would hungry cavemen do?
They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting [14] before our glucose levels are adversely affected. As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.
AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT:Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule. It also affects women differently (there’s a whole section dedicated to that here).
I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight-hour window.
11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.
7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.
8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.
In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays – so it is possible. [15]
I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.
Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.
I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:
There’s far less of a crazy swing to your weight. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.
You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it. Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.
There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right? When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (avoiding a miserable crash diet like the Military Diet). [16]
You can make small adjustments and stay on target. Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle-building process.
A note on BCAA consumption. Martin from LeanGains [17] recommends consuming Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA’s) as a supplement with regards to fasted training to aid your muscles through your workout.
Personally, I used BCAAs for about 6-8 months during my initial start with fasted training (consuming them before training), though haven’t used them in the past 2+ years. I didn’t notice any adverse effects to not taking them with regard to my performance. Your value may vary!
Now, it should go without saying that if you want to build muscle while fasting, you need to work out. Specifically, by lifting heavy.
If you want help building a workout routine designed to create muscle, I have 3 options:
#1) “Build Your Own Workout Routine” and get your hands dirty. Our guide will walk you through building a full-body exercise program in 10 simple steps.
#3) Try the workouts in our fun habit-building app, Nerd Fitness Journey!
NF Journey will guide you through a workout routine that can be done anywhere, all while creating your very own superhero! No guesswork needed, just follow the progression plan laid out in the app and grow strong!
By only eating fat and protein, your body must adapt to run on fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates. In the absence of carbs/glucose, your body converts fats to ketones and uses them for fuel.
This process is called “ketosis,” and there are two ways for a body to enter ketosis:
Eating in a way that induces ketosis (very low carb, high fat).
Fasting…Hey, that’s what you’re reading about right now!
We actually have an amazing success story here on Nerd Fitness, Larry, who followed our strategies, went Keto and start intermittent fasting. He ended up losing weight, getting stronger, AND overcame the challenges of rheumatoid arthritis (click on the image for his story)!
Here’s how the fasting portion of it works:
As your body enters a fast period when there are no sources of glucose energy readily available, the liver begins the process of breaking down fat into ketones.
Fasting itself can trigger ketosis.
Fasting for a period of time before kicking off a Keto-friendly eating plan COULD speed your transition into the metabolic state of ketosis, and fasting intermittently while in ketosis could help you maintain that state.
I personally love fasting for the simplicity: I skip breakfast every day and train in a fasted state. It’s one less decision I have to make, it’s one less opportunity to make a bad food choice, and it helps me reach my goals.
WHY KETO + IF WORKS = eating Keto can be really challenging. And every time you eat, it’s an opportunity to do it wrong and accidentally eat foods that knock you out of ketosis.
You’re also tempted to overeat.
So, by skipping a meal, you’re eliminating one meal, one decision, one chance to screw up.
Note: if you’re thinking “Steve, am I losing weight because I’m skipping 1/3rd of my meals for the day, AND eliminating an entire macronutrient?”, then you’d be right.
Both Keto and IF have secondary effects that could also be factoring in – physiological benefits which I explain in both articles.
Your value may vary!
You need to decide what works for you.
You probably won’t become “keto-adapted” (your body running on ketones) just skipping breakfast every day – your body will still have enough glucose stored from your carb-focused meals for lunch and dinner the day before.
In order to use fasting to enter ketosis, the fast needs to be long enough to deplete your carb/glucose stores, or you need to severely restrict carbohydrates from your meals in addition to IF in order to enter ketosis.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Experiment and try different strategies that will work for you.
By skipping a meal or minimizing carbohydrate intake, you’re more likely than not to lose weight:
You can do intermittent fasting without eating a Keto Diet and lose weight.
You can do a Keto Diet without intermittent Fasting and lose weight.
That’s actually why we designed Nerd Fitness Journey to be a step-by-step progression plan. Our nutrition adventure won’t have you abandoning all carbs on Day 1 (which probably won’t work), but instead will have you create small habits that you can follow permanently.
If this sounds like a winning strategy for you, check out our free trial of the app right here:
The quick answer is: “yes, Intermittent Fasting can affect men and women differently.”
Anecdotally, we have many women in our online coaching program that swear by Intermittent Fasting, while others have had adverse effects.
Let’s dig into the science and studies.
A recent PubMed summary concluded that “fasting can be prescribed as a safe medical intervention as well as a lifestyle regimen which can improve women’s health in many folds [18].
Now, in that extract, many of the studies cited are focused on specifically calorie restriction (and not just fasting), and they also say that “future studies should address this gap by designing medically supervised fasting techniques to extract better evidence.”
Digging into the PubMed Archives brought me to the following conclusions [19]:
One small study (with 8 men and 8 women, all non-obese) resulted in the following: “Glucose response to a meal was slightly impaired in women after 3 weeks of treatment, but insulin response was unchanged. Men had no change in glucose response and a significant reduction in insulin response.”[20]
Another small study (8 women) studied the effects on their menstrual cycles after a 72 hour fast – which is significantly longer than any fast recommended in this article: “in spite of profound metabolic changes, a 72-hour fast during the follicular phase does not affect the menstrual cycle of normal cycling women.” [21].
Yet another study tracked 11 women with 72 hour fasts (again, longer than we’d recommend) and it found that “Fasting in women elicited expected metabolic responses – included increased cortisol (a stress hormone) – and apparently advanced the central circadian clock (which can throw off sleeping patterns). [22]
Those studies above, in working with small sample sizes, and different types of fasting than recommended here, would lead me to believe that fasting affects men and women differently, and that many of the weight loss benefits associated with intermittent fasting (that affect insulin and glucose responses) work positively for men and negatively for women.
There are also a series of articles[23] out there that dig into the potential reproductive health issues, stress challenges, induction of early-menopause [24] associated with fasting (and calorie restriction) for women.
Precision Nutrition – a great resource – recommends not attempting Intermittent Fasting as a woman if:
The challenge associated with all of this is that there aren’t enough long-term studies, with large enough sample sizes, specifically targeting female humans, with relation to the different types of Intermittent Fasting.
ALL OF THIS TO SAY: It does appear that men and women will have different experiences with intermittent fasting; we’re all unique snowflakes (yep, especially you), and your body will be affected by intermittent fasting differently than the person next to you.
There is enough evidence as cited in the articles and studies above that would give me pause to recommend Intermittent Fasting for women, especially if you are considering getting pregnant in the near term.
If you are looking to attempt fasting for weight loss reasons, my research has shown me that Intermittent Fasting could be less effective for women than men with regards to weight loss, and thus you would be wise to keep your efforts elsewhere:
Now, if you’ve read the above warnings, you are still curious about Intermittent Fasting, and you want to give it a try as a female, that is your choice!
You know your body best.
So, get blood work done, speak with your doctor and get a check-up.
Give intermittent fasting a shot, track your results, and see how your body/blood work changes as a result of Intermittent Fasting and decide if it’s right for you.
Your mileage may vary, so speak with a doctor or find a doctor versed in intermittent fasting plans and treat it like an experiment on yourself!
1) “Won’t I get really hungry if I start skipping meals?”
As explained above, this can be a result of the habits you have built for your body. If you are constantly eating or always eat the same time of day, your body can actually learn to prepare itself for food by beginning the process of insulin production and preparation for food.
After a brief adjustment period, your body can adapt to the fact that it’s only eating a few times a day. The more overweight you are, and the more often you eat, the more of an initial struggle this might be.
Remember, your body’s physical and cognitive abilities most likely won’t be diminished as a result of short-term fasting.[25]
2) “Where will I get my energy for my workouts? Won’t I be exhausted and not be able to complete my workouts if fasting?”
This was a major concern of mine as well, but the research shows this might not be the case: “Training with limited carbohydrate availability can stimulate adaptations in muscle cells to facilitate energy production via fat oxidation.”[26]
In other words, when you train in a fasted state, your body can get better at burning fat for energy when there are no carbs to pull from!
3) “I like the idea of fasted training, but I work a regular 9-5 or a night shift and can’t train at 11AM as you do. What am I supposed to do?”
Depending on your training schedule, lifestyle, and goals, go back to the portion above where I talk about the 16/8 protocol and simply adjust your hours of fasting and feasting.
Don’t overthink this. If you can’t train until 5pm, that’s okay. Consume a small meal for lunch, or shift your Intermittent Fasting window to eat all of your meals in the 8 hours post-workout. Better to do that than abandon it as a lost cause and have 0% compliance.
If you are an elite athlete, speak with a coach or nutritionist about your specific concerns and expectations. Otherwise, make intermittent fasting work for you Consider trying the 24-hour protocol below instead of the 16/8 protocol.
If you train later in the day (say, 7pm) but break your fast before training (aka Lunch), make it a smaller meal focused around fats and protein – which should be a solid goal even if you aren’t Intermittent Fasting! Try to time your carb and big meal consumption to happen AFTER your workout.
If you exercise BEFORE work, but then don’t eat until lunchtime: consider a protein supplement immediately after your workout, or simply wait until lunch to start eating. See how your body responds and adjust accordingly.
Do what you can, and don’t psyche yourself out! Get started and adjust along the way.
4) “Won’t fasting cause muscle loss?”
We’ve been told by the supplement industry that we need to consume 30 g of protein every few hours, as that’s the most amount of protein our body can process at a time.
Along with that, we’ve been told that if we don’t eat protein every few hours, our body’s muscle will start to break down to be burned as energy.
Again, NOT TRUE! Our bodies are quite adept at preserving muscle even when fasting [27], and it turns out that protein absorption by our body can take place over many many many hours.
Protein consumed in a shorter period of time has no difference on the body compared to protein spread throughout the day.
5) “What about my body going into starvation mode from not eating?”
Now, the thought process here is that when we don’t feed ourselves, our bodies assume calories aren’t available and thus choose to store more calories as opposed to burning them, therefore eliminating the benefits of weight loss with fasting.
Fortunately, this is NOT true.
Starvation mode is significantly overblown and sensationalized these days. It takes a dramatic amount of starvation, for a long, long, long time, before your body kicks into “starvation mode”. We’re talking about 24-hour or 16-hour fasts here, and starvation mode takes significantly longer than that.[28]
In other words: starvation mode should not be factoring into your decision here.
5) How much should I eat while intermittent fasting?
If your goal is weight loss, you still need to consume fewer calories than you burn every day to lose weight. If your goal is bulking up, you’ll need to consume more calories than you burn every day. Intermittent Fasting isn’t a cure-all, it’s a PART of the puzzle.
To start, begin intermittent fasting and eat your normal sized meals and track your weight and performance. If you are losing weight and happy with the progress, keep doing what you’re doing! If you are NOT losing weight, you could be eating too much. It’s a message I really strike home in our guide “Why Can’t I Lose Weight?”
Lastly, if you want a plan for slowly “wading into the water” calorie restriction, check out our new app!
Nerd Fitness Journey has missions where you tally the calories you normally eat, keep a food journal, and plan your next meal. We do all of this BEFORE we recommend even taking any food off your plate.
To learn more on why, start your free trial right here:
#1) Don’t freak out! Stop wondering: “can I fast 15 hours instead of 16?” or “what if I eat an apple during my fasted period, will that ruin everything?” Relax. Your body is a complex piece of machinery and learns to adapt. Everything is not as cut and dry as you think.
If you want to eat breakfast one day but not another, that’s okay. If you are going for optimal aesthetic or athletic performance, I can see the need to be more rigid in your discipline, but otherwise…freaking chill out and don’t stress over minutiae!
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good when it comes to your intermittent fasting plan.
#2) Consider fasted walks in the morning. I found these to be very helpful in reducing body fat, and also gave my day a great start to clear my mind and prepare for the day.
Simply wake up and go for a mile walk. Maybe you could even start walking to Mordor?
#3) Listen to your body during your strength training workouts. If you get lightheaded, make sure you are consuming enough water.
If you notice a significant drop in performance, make sure you are eating enough calories (especially fats and protein) during your feasting window.
And if you feel severely “off,” pause your workout. Give yourself permission to EASE into intermittent fasting and fasted workouts. This is especially true if you are an endurance athlete.
#4) Expect funny looks if you spend a lot of mornings with breakfast eaters.
A few weeks back I had a number of friends staying with me, and they were all completely dumbfounded when I told them I didn’t eat breakfast anymore.
I tried to explain it to them but received a bunch of blank stares. Breakfast has become so enGRAINed (zing!) in our culture that NOT eating it sounds crazy.
You will get weird looks from those around you…embrace it. I still go to brunch or sit with friends, I just drink black coffee and enjoy a conversation.
#5) Stay busy. If you are just sitting around thinking about how hungry you are, you’ll be more likely to struggle with this. For that reason, I time my fasting periods for maximum efficiency and minimal discomfort:
My first few hours of fasting come after consuming a MONSTER dinner, where the last thing I want to think about is eating.
When I’m sleeping: 8 of my 16 hours are occupied by sleeping. Tough to feel hungry when I’m dreaming about becoming a Jedi.
When I’m busy: After waking up, 12 hours of my fasting is already done. I spend three hours doing my best work (while drinking a cup of black coffee), and then comes my final hour of fasting: training.
#6) Zero-calorie beverages are okay. I drink green tea in the morning for my caffeine kick while writing. If you want to drink water, black coffee, or tea during your fasted period, that’s okay. Remember, don’t overthink it – keep things simple! Although be aware that Dr. Rhonda Patrick over at FoundMyFitness believes that a fast should stop at the first consumption of anything other than water, so experiment yourself and see how your body responds.
If you want to put milk in your coffee, or drink diet soda occasionally while fasting, I’m not going to stop you. Remember, we’re going for consistency and habit-building here – if milk or cream in your coffee makes life worth living, don’t deprive yourself.
There are MUCH bigger fish to fry with regards to getting healthy than a few calories here and there during a fast.
80% adherence that you stick with for a year is better than 100% adherence that you abandon after a month because it was too restrictive.
If you’re trying to get to a minimum bodyfat percentage, you’ll need to be more strict – until then, however, do what allows you to stay compliant!
Track your calories, and see how your body changes when eating the same amount of food, but condensed into a certain window.
Sign up for Nerd Fitness Journey, where the Intermittent Fasting Adventure will help you track your compliance with skipping meals:
#8) Don’t expect miracles. Yes, Intermittent Fasting can potentially help you lose weight, increase insulin sensitivity and growth hormone secretion (all good things), but it is only ONE factor in hundreds that will determine your body composition and overall health. Don’t expect to drop to 8% body fat and get ripped just by skipping breakfast.
Intermittent fasting can potentially have some very positive benefits for somebody trying to lose weight or gain lean body mass.
Men and women will tend to have different results, just like each individual person will have different results. The ONLY way to find out is through a conversation with your doctor and self-experimentation.
There are multiple ways to “do” an Intermittent Fasting Plan:
Fast and feast regularly: Fast for a certain number of hours, then consume all calories within a certain number of hours.
Eat normally, then fast 1-2x a week: Consume your normal meals every day, then pick one or two days a week where you fast for 24 hours. Eat your last meal Sunday night, and then don’t eat again until dinner the following day.
Fast occasionally: probably the easiest method for the person who wants to do the least amount of work. Simply skip a meal whenever it’s convenient. On the road? Skip breakfast. Busy day at work? Skip lunch. Eat poorly all day Saturday? Make your first meal of the day dinner on Sunday.
After that, get started! Take photos, step on the scale, and track your progress for the next month.
See how your body responds.
See how your physique changes. See how your workouts change.
And then decide if it’s something you want to keep doing!
4 years later, I have no plans on going back to eating breakfast. Sorry General Mills and Dr. Kellogg!
If you’re worried about all of this stuff, or aren’t sure when to eat and stop eating, try out our new app!
The Intermittent Fasting Adventure within Nerd Fitness Journey was specifically designed for a beginner who is interested in experimenting with fasting.
Plus, if you learn fasting isn’t for you, you can follow along with other nutrition adventures for sustainable paths for weight loss.
You can try it for free right here:
But enough about me, let’s talk about you!
I’d love to hear what questions you have!
What are your questions about intermittent fasting?
What are your concerns?
Have you tried intermittent fasting?
Have you had success with it, either with muscle gain or weight loss?
Thanks for leaving your comment, I’m excited to get the conversation started.
-Steve
PS: Before you take off, grab our Intermittent Fasting Worksheet to help you start your fasting practice:
Download a free intermittent fasting guide and worksheet!
Complete outline of the Intermittent Fasting Protocol
Worksheets for tracking when you eat and how long you fasted
PPS: Make sure you check out the rest of our guides on losing weight:
