Mention the term ‘Facebook’ to someone and it immediately conjures up thoughts of looking at photos, scanning through a sea of status updates and generally finding ways to waste time.

In fact, I can recall my initial reaction back in 2006 when a couple of my friends suggested I join Facebook: hell no.

Frankly, I considered the whole idea of Facebook to be a little silly and I refused to jump on the Facebook band wagon. Whether this stance was one borne out of principle, naïvité, or out of the belief that Facebook did not offer anything that email and instant messaging could not, my refusal to join the Facebook crowd lasted for an entire year.

Then sometime in 2007, I caved. And as anyone who uses Facebook will attest, once you get started, it’s tough to get out.

From that point in 2007 until today, I’ve gone through the entire 5 Stages of Facebook:

1. Trepidation

2. Exhilaration

3. Stabilization

4. Infuriation

5. Acceptance

Now, after having experienced all 5 stages, I can comfortably say that I’ve arrived at a place where Facebook and I understand each other.

Although I must confess to having used Facebook’s innate voyeuristic feature to look up people I once knew (“oh my God they’ve let themselves go…”) and can’t say that I don’t spend more time on Facebook than I should (one of the perks of being able to work from home quite often), I’m proud to report that I’ve refrained from becoming one of those Facebook junkies who feels the need to communicate my every thought and action through my Facebook feed (and really, isn’t that what twitter is for?).

But irrespective of my Facebook habits, I’ve come to embrace Facebook as much more than just an avenue to waste time. Facebook is a tool that allow us to reach an audience of like-minded individuals faster than ever would have been possible even 5 years ago.

Whereas I once loathed Facebook for the amount of time it occupied in my day, I now consider Facebook a nearly fundamental communication tool in today’s world.

Is Facebook for everyone? No. But just as email or cell phones would have seemed bizarre 20 years ago, learning how to Facebook properly has become integral to 21^st Century communication.

For someone whose true passion in life is helping people lead healthier, more productive lives; the ability to spread the good word through the social-net that is Facebook is a truly wonderful thing.

This is why I’m launching one (potentially the first of many) e-classes to be taught through Facebook. My first class, slated to begin September 15^th, 2010 on Calorie Cycling for Rapid Fat Loss, will tackle many of the short-comings of conventional diet approaches and teach you how to manipulate your caloric intake to overcome certain limitations in your innate physiology.

Click the image to join the group.

These classes are not the pass or fail type, where someone stands up and lectures at you. Rather, these classes are designed to feed off social interaction and the only course requirement is that you participate. By harnessing the power of group think, we’ll develop the best strategies to tackle the problems facing many of us in our day-to-day lives.

And the cost for this class? Free. All that I ask is that you invite anyone who might be interested in the material to join us.

Now instead of viewing the time you spend on Facebook as “time you aren’t getting back”, you’ll be able to take what you learn and apply it to dramatically improve your own situation in life.

Well, what are you waiting for? Head over to the “classroom“, join the group and leave a comment. Your comments helps shape the direction of the material, so let your voice be heard.

Till next time, train hard and eat clean!

Related posts:

1. Weight Loss Motivation: Money vs. Mastery
2. Plateau Busting: Keys to Restarting Weight Loss
3. 3 Minute Fat Loss?

Calorie blindness is the condition where people exclusively base their weight loss efforts on a strict accounting of the number of calories they consume compared to the number of calories they burn through exercise.

You can easily spot someone who is calorie blind by their exclamations of “I only eat ___ amount of calories and whenever I exercise I burn at least ____ calories. I should be losing weight but the scale never moves! What am I doing wrong?”

What is wrong is that these individuals are listening to the countless fitness experts, doctors and dietitians who base the bulk of their diet advice around two fundamental constructs of fat loss math:

• 1 lbs of fat = 3500 kcal
• calories in = calories out

As the theory goes, as long as you create a 3500 kcal deficit each week, you will lose 1 lbs of fat. Yet ask anyone who has tried this approach how effective it is… to put it kindly: not very.

Fat loss math: So simple… and so ineffective!

Despite the woeful track record of calorie-counting based fat loss approaches, there are still far too many equally calorie blind practitioners who accuse individuals struggling with fat loss of cheating on their diets or failing to exercise. While this occasionally may be true, it often isn’t the case. In reality, the reasons for fat loss failure are far more complex than a failure to understand the basics of fat loss math.

Allow me to elaborate.

Calorie Counting = As Productive as Following a Rainbow to a Pot of Gold

While it is true that when you burn 1 lbs of fat in a lab setting it gives off ~3500 kcal worth of energy, knowing this fact doesn’t really do a whole to help us understand how to produce fat loss in free-living humans.

Distilling fat loss into a simple “calories in = calories out” equation is akin to telling someone the secret to getting rich is knowing that 1 lbs of gold is worth $19 252 Canadian dollars.

While this may be true and each of us can acquire a bit more gold or a few more dollars over the years, just knowing the conversion doesn’t provide us with any real blueprint for producing life-long wealth now does it?

Fat loss is really no different than wealth creation: just because you know food contains calories and that exercise burns calories, doesn’t mean you understand how to produce fat loss.

Unfortunately, the elephant in the room about the “calories in = calories out” equation is that there is a critical clause missing. What is missing is the fact that this equation only holds true at the level of cellular metabolism. In other words, creating an environment for fat loss goes way beyond the food you put into your mouth or the number flashing across the screen of your treadmill.

Which leads me to today’s critical take-home point:

The greatest reason why so many people fail at losing weight isn’t because they suck at math, but rather because they have zero understanding of biochemistry.

The “calories in = calories out” equation only works in a closed system, and human physiology is anything but closed.

Before I get too far into this, I’m not suggesting that calories don’t matter, because obviously you need to create a caloric deficit in order to produce weight loss. However, the extreme variance in endocrine and metabolic responses to diet, exercise and stressful situations will always make calorie-centric weight loss guidance of limited value.

Therefore, you can dutifully count all the calories you want that are coming into your mouth, but if energy uptake is impaired in any fashion in the digestive system or at the level of the cell, then you have NO IDEA of how much useable energy is actually in your body at any given time.

Do you know your diet and exercise program this intimately?

Remember, when you have food sitting in your stomach, it still remains OUTSIDE of your body. We only consider it inside the system once it gets absorbed from the intestine and gets to the blood stream, where it has a chance to be taken up by the cells.

NB: keep in mind, just because nutrients get into the blood stream, doesn’t mean they will be taken up by the desired cells. Case in Point: diabetics and blood glucose.

A similar spate of problems exist with how we estimate energy expenditure. While it is possible to calculate energy expenditure through indirect calorimetry, this approach is fairly invasive and cost-prohibitive. As a result, most of our assessments of energy requirements in humans are based on predictive equations.

When it comes to predicting energy expenditure and resting metabolism, both approaches are based on regression equations derived from population averages. For people without much of a background in stats and to whom the term “regression” means absolutely nothing, just accept that when you perform a regression analysis, there are always a significant number of outliers on both sides of the trend line.

Which one of these dots represents you?

What too many practitioners fail to acknowledge are that predictive regression equations are only really of value when applied to large populations. When regression equations (such as resting metabolism equations) are used with single individuals, significant errors will occur. These errors are compounded when the individual does not share important characteristics with the group of people from whom the equation was developed in the first place (age, sex, ethnicity and body composition).

Most of the equations used today were developed in white, non-obese individuals, so how well they generalize to other segments of the population is likely limited. In fact, a recent review¹ suggests that even the best predictive equations have an error rate of up to 20% (i.e. if you think you need 2000 kcal a day, you might require anywhere from 1600-2400 kcal, which is a huge range).

Hopefully, you are all starting to appreciate just how pointless a practice of micro-managing your caloric expenditure truly is.

Incidentally, I will be doing a full hour long interview on IronRadio.org expanding on the shortcomings of the calorie counting approach next Thursday from 2-3 PM.

Title: Iron Radio With Graeme Thomas
Topic Flaws of calorie counting and how modern society makes us fat
Time: Thursday, September 9th at 2:00pm Eastern
Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast
To attend, visit: http://attendthisevent.com/?eventID=14551707

You can actually visit this link and write in any questions you’d like me to answer on air. I highly recommend that you do.

Actually Useful Fat Loss Advice

I could go on all day giving reasons for why calorie counting doesn’t result in meaningful fat loss for most individuals, however, I think you have a fairly clear picture by now.

Again, I must reiterate that I don’t want you to get the idea that calories don’t matter, because they do. It’s just that calorie counting should never be the central focus of a weight loss program.

Instead of continuing to rely on inadequate coaching advice like “calories in = calories out”, weight loss coaches would have far more success if they structured their diet interventions according to the following progressive approach.

Let me assure you, unless you satisfy each of the tiers in order, then long-term success almost never happens.

Tier 1: Sustainability

Hunger management is bar none the strongest predictor of long-term diet success.  Nothing drives poor food choices like hunger (real or imagined) so the initial focus for any diet coach must be on dealing with this issue.

Therefore, the primary concern of any diet approach has to be: will an individual actually follow it? I don’t care how “optimal” coaches believe their powers of meal plan design are, if a diet leaves someone miserable or hungry, it is NEVER going to work.

Tier 2: Metabolic Type

It’s only after adequately controlling hunger that there is any point to moving onto tier two. This level of intervention identifies whether an individual requires a higher carbohydrate, a balanced or a higher protein/fat diet.

Truth be told, tier 1 and tier 2 are often intertwined but occasionally you’ll need to initially transition someone out of tier 1 using foods that aren’t fully appropriate for their ideal metabolic type.

After you get an idea of what macronutrients someone deals with best (if you’d like to find out your own best approach click here: Metabolic Test), then it’s about helping them move into tier 3 and focus on food quality.

Tier 3: Food Quality

Most individuals thrive when they move from a diet high in processed foods to one containing far more natural, whole foods. For example, although bologna and pork tenderloin are both sources of protein coming from pigs, the pork tenderloin is going to have a dramatically greater impact in helping someone improve their body composition. Likewise, steel cut oats are far superior to Quaker maple brown sugar oatmeal when it comes to blood sugar management and suitability for fat loss.

Truth be told, once someone implements the first three tiers, it’s rare they’ll need to optimize their diets any further. The human body has a remarkable ability to regulate appetite and lose body fat once people revert to eating natural foods that are appropriate to their metabolic type, but on rare occasions more refinement is needed.

Tier 4: Nutrient Timing

At this level, manipulating meal frequency can result in further success. Certain individuals do better with smaller, more frequent meals (from observation: individuals who are more carbohydrate tolerant), whereas others do better with slightly larger, more infrequent meals (individuals who do better on higher protein, higher fat diets).

Optimizing nutrient timing can have a profound impact on body composition changes. However, obsessing about nutrient timing prior to establishing a solid base of the first three tiers will produce subpar results.

Tier 5: Optimization

It’s only after moving through all four of the aforementioned tiers and still not obtaining the kind of meaningful body composition change someone desires that I’d even think of incorporating a tier 5 intervention of calorie counting. In my experience, the only individuals who benefit from this level of intervention are those people trying to drop well below a normal level of body fat (under 8% for a male and sub 15% for a female).

When exceptionally low body fat is the goal, artificially fixing intake will be necessary (i.e. measuring each and every food item ingested) as will performing an exceptionally large energy output to counteract the body’s innate mechanism of downregulating fat loss.

While this approach works for brief periods (maybe several weeks in the case of a contest prep bodybuilder), it tends not to work for very long as it is exceptionally difficult to maintain.

Calorie Counting in Context

So there you have it folks, the sad reality of calorie counting. Although calories do matter on a cellular level, anyone believing that body weight will be effectively changed by telling people “calories in = calories out” is just naïve.

Before I leave, just a reminder that I’ll be going over this (and other topics) in much greater detail next week, so do tune in to my interview on Ironradio.org

Title: Iron Radio With Graeme Thomas
Topic Flaws of calorie counting and how modern society makes us fat
Time: Thursday, September 9th at 2:00pm Eastern
Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast
To attend, visit: http://attendthisevent.com/?eventID=14551707

Till next time, train hard and eat clean!

1. Frankenfield D., Roth-Yousey L. and Compher C. (2005). J Am Diet Assoc. 105:775-789

Related posts:

1. Plateau Busting: Keys to Restarting Weight Loss
2. Important Training Lesson: Go Hard then Go Home
3. 400 Calorie Frauds

Yesterday, I highlighted three major diet and exercise mistakes that contribute to the preponderance of skinny fat females:

1. An over-reliance on low-intensity physical activities.
2. Terrible exercise selection when they do resistance train.
3. Eating too many highly processed “diet” foods.

Unfortunately, simply acknowledging these behaviours as problematic isn’t enough. We need to dig deeper and tackle the root cause of skinny fatness: the fact that females seem to use body weight as the primary determinant of body image.

So sit down, grab a coffee and let’s begin.

Ideal Body Weight = Irrationality 101

Look, I hate to be the one to have to break it to you ladies, but most of you have a totally unrealistic concept of your ideal body weight. Not that I blame you, you’ve been fed a whole lot of half-truths your entire lives.

But the only way most females could achieve their theoretical “ideal body weight” would be to:

• diet in such a fashion so as to lose prodigious amounts of muscle mass
• perform ample amounts of cardiovascular exercise to make sure that muscle mass never returned

Now I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek, but sadly must acknowledge that these “weight loss” strategies are still the dominant ones being preached today. And it boggles my mind!

In a truly fascinating bit of gender psychology, body weight is one of those things that females obsess about constantly and most men don’t care about at all. As recent research highlights, women increasingly identify with a tiny, less curvy body shape as their ideal, whereas men continue to find thicker, curvier women, far more appealing.

In light of this disconnect, might it not be fair then to conclude that the bulk of the disordered body image issues and increased drive for “thinness at all costs” arises from how females judge each other, and not from any pressures placed on females by men?

And yes, this is a not so subtle jab at one of the excuses people use to justify the need for women’s only gyms.

So if the weak, waif look isn’t something men find particularly appealing, it makes you wonder why women have decided skinny fatness is a look they should strive for.

Of course, they don’t see it as striving for skinny fatness. Rather, they just see it trying to reach their “ideal body weight”.

Obsession: Not Just the Name of a Perfume

Being a nutritionist who specializes in fat loss, I have my fair share of female clients who have been, or are currently, in a state of skinny-fatness. Without fail, there comes a time when they’ll ask me, “How long will it be before I lose ___ lbs and get down to a body weight of ___?”

Since it seems that females are hardwired to obsess over these questions, I have now hardwired my answers.

To address the former: if you are willing to eat enough to fix your metabolism… a few months.
To address the latter: probably never.

Captain Compassionate, I am not. Well, better they hear the truth from from me than continue drinking the Chatelaine Kool-Aid!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a client come to me complaining that the scale isn’t moving. At times like these, I like to cheerfully volunteer that maybe they’ve set their scale atop a natural magnet… but when that doesn’t even merit a smile, I have to brace myself for “the talk”.

Ahhh the dreaded talk. There isn’t a nutritionist or personal trainer alive who enjoys having to explain to a client why they are not losing weight. But what really complicates the whole issue of weight loss is the fact that so few individuals seem to understand the significance or mechanics of body weight change in the first place.

To revisit a theme I introduced in earlier articles, the fitness industry predominantly operates in black and white. When it comes to the issue of body weight, there are two prevailing camps:

1. In one corner, we’ve got those coaches who stress that, “individuals who faithfully track their body weight are more likely to maintain weight loss over the long-term“.
2. And in the other corner, we have the practitioners who advise all their clients to “throw out the scale because it lies“.

Definitely two divergent and seemingly contradictory viewpoints, which helps explain why so many people are misguided and confused when it comes to the importance of body weight in the first place.

But which view is correct?

As with most things in life, both statements have some truth to them… but they really don’t paint a complete picture.

What is Wrong with Weight?

The first statement, that people tend to maintain greater weight loss if they track it on a semi-regular basis, seems like a no-brainer. It’s really no different than retirement savings: individuals who invest monthly tend to wind up saving more than those who invest “whenever they remember to”.

Clearly consistent tracking is required on some level if we hope to produce long-term success. But my issue with the regular weight-tracking crowd isn’t over whether they are more successful, because the numbers clearly show regular tracking results in greater weight loss.

Rather, my problem stems from the issue of whether championing weight as the primary progress variable carries much value.

Before I get too far into this, let me clarify one thing: What we label body weight is actually body mass but that’s a physics argument for another day. Since everyone calls it weight, I’ll continue using that term just so no one is confused.

When you step on a scale, the number you see is total body weight. Often researchers will track a person’s health status based on a personal body mass index (BMI), which is just a relationship between your height and weight.

However, as the “throw out the scale because it lies” crowd has correctly identified, scale weight often provides incomplete information.

Take the graphic above. Both of these individuals are the same height and same weight (therefore they have identical BMIs as well). However, their bodies are clearly quite different.

The gentleman on the left has excellent bone density, ample muscle mass and minimal fat mass: in effect he is the picture of health. Conversely, the gentleman on the right is all flabby and likely soon to have a heart attack.

Is there even a question of which body type you would rather have?

Unfortunately, when you base your decisions solely on the scale, it is very difficult to determine whether you are becoming more like the buff guy or the chubby dude.

In light of this reality, we have to accept that progress on any diet and exercise program MUST involve tracking gains in fat-free mass (muscle, bone, etc.) separate from losses in fat mass.

When you do this, we call it measuring someone’s body composition because it allows us to estimate* the relative contribution of each component to the whole.

*always remember that no matter what body composition tool you are using, it is ALWAYS an estimate and subject to a varying amount of error. The only 100% accurate means of determining someone’s body fat is to kill and then dissect them… which tends to be bad for your renewal rate.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the limitations of relying on scale weight, let’s revisit the realities of conventional dieting.

Where Diets Go Wrong

I think most weight loss experts would agree that, in general, humans need to eat less and move more. That being said, the strategies preached by many popular weight loss programs are pretty pathetic.

Most calorie-restricted diets operate under a “the more weight you lose each week, the better” premise (Weight Watchers and The Biggest Loser, I am looking squarely in your direction).

In other words, no distinction is made whether you lose appreciable amounts of fat or muscle. Unfortunately, just cutting calories in the absence of resistance training tends to result in the condition where you also wind up losing a considerable amount of muscle mass. This is not good.

Not only does conventional dieting just make you a smaller version of your current self (i.e. going from 180 lbs and 25% body fat, down to 160 lbs, but remaining 25% body fat), it also leads to a condition where you end up with a significantly slowed metabolic rate.

This slowing of metabolic rate might not be such a dramatic problem if you could continue eating a low-calorie diet forever. Sadly, most humans become incredibly irritable and hungry when calorie deprived, which leads to them returning to their previous way of eating.

Only now they are eating more calories on top of having a sluggish metabolism to contend with… which leads to a delightful rebound weight gain!

And the creators of these programs grow rich with you having to sign up for another kick at the can!

If you didn’t understand this last bit, here are the Coles notes:

• Eating a little less = good.
• Eating a lot less = bad.
• Eating a lot less + no weight training = very bad.

Remember, if you haven’t optimized your diet and exercise program to protect muscle mass while simultaneously dropping fat mass, your plan will inevitably lead to failure.

You heard it here first people.

A Bit More on Body Composition

Although separating body weight into fat mass and lean mass is a big leap forward, the 2-component approach to body composition it still is a vast oversimplification.

A more accurate, and ultimately useful, approach would be to classify the human body into the following 6 components:

Six Component Model of Body Composition

• water
• fat
• protein
• bone mineral
• soft tissue mineral
• glycogen

I know by now you are muttering to yourself, “GT, I get it… weight alone doesn’t tell the whole picture…”, but there is so much more you need to appreciate than that.

Out of the six components I’ve listed above, some of them can change very, very rapidly whereas others can take months or years to change appreciably.

For example, water and glycogen levels can fluctuate significantly from day-to-day whereas protein and bone changes take months to meaningfully change.

Now why should you care? Because over the course of a day, depending on your diet and activity levels, your scale weight can easily swing up or down several pounds.

If you are someone who lives or dies by the scale, obsessively stepping on the scale at varying times of a day or even varying times of the menstrual cycle is a surefire way to give yourself an ulcer.

And depending on your method of assessing body composition changes, some of them (particularly bioelectrical impedance scales) are dramatically influenced by water shifts.

Remember, acute changes in water, glycogen status or even body temperature impact most methods of tracking body composition, so don’t assume that simply because you are using body composition and not weight that your methods are error-free, because that’s not at all the case.

Similarly, any “muscle” you think has cropped up only several days into starting a weight training program is not new muscle protein at all. Rather you are most likely observing increased muscle glycogen storage/water retention or potentially improved myogenic tone.

But new muscle? No. So don’t even bother trying to use that as an excuse for why you need to stop weight training… you are NOT going to get too bulky.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Weighty Issues

So where does that leave us on the matter of tracking success on a diet and exercise program? We saw that weight was an incomplete measure, but then again, so too is the 2-component approach to body composition.

Does this mean that body weight and body composition are both worthless?

No. Both body weight and body composition are worth tracking, but we do need to accept that they are just two out of more than a dozen important variables that need to be tracked as part of any diet and exercise program.

What people fail to recognize is that you can easily change body weight but cause a number of other health variables to deteriorate, which all but guarantees failure.

Seriously – weight changes really are no more important than improvements in mood, digestive system health, complexion, VO2 max, pain, etc.

In fact, it’s only when you note concurrent improvements across all these domains that you are appreciably improving an individual’s cellular function, which is the real “secret” to fat loss, decreased risk of chronic disease, and improved well-being.

Imagine that: suggesting that we need to teach people about the importance of a multi-faceted approach to assessing their health and weight loss success.

I must be crazy!

So there you have it, an introduction to the issue of why so many females struggle to appreciably change their bodies despite following diet and exercise programs.

Obviously there is tons more that needs to be covered, but at least now you have an appreciation for some of the faulty assumptions built into so many popular approaches to weight loss.

For anyone interested in learning how to effectively change your own body or the bodies of people you work with, keep checking back in this space, as I’ll be making several announcements in the next couple of weeks about new coaching classes, online programs, and interviews that I’ll be involved with.

Till next time, train hard and eat clean!

Related posts:

1. The Role of Exercise in Weight Loss: Part 2
2. The Role of Exercise in Weight Loss: Part 3
3. Total Body Overhaul: Crush Your Goals Today!

Over the past 4 parts of this series, we looked at:

1. How the internet has created an army of pseudo-gurus and their universal truths.
2. How errors in interpreting science support the idea of universal truths.
3. Why “one-size fits all” does NOT work in nutrition from a global perspective.
4. How your underlying phsyiology can produce differential responses to foods.

All great stuff, but heavy on the theory.

Today, as promised, I’m going to provide everyone a resource that condenses a bunch of this science into a simple, practical tool. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find one of the tests I use with my clients. Well to be fair, I combined several tools but that just makes it even better!

Where do you fit in?

This metabolic questionnaire will help you identify what types of macronutrients you should be eating, as well as which foods might be best for your metabolic type.

As explained in part 4 of this series, there are 3 basic gentotypes:

• Carbohydrate intolerant: responds well to a low carbohydrate diet.
• Balanced: responds well to a mixed diet.
• Carbohydrate tolerant: responds well to a low fat diet.

When eating appropriately for your type you can expect to have more energy, fewer food allergies, lose more fat and experience an overall better mood.

You really can’t lose!

So without further ado, get started on your FREE assessment… it only takes 5 minutes and it might just be the most significant self-discovery you make all year!

Keep in mind, there is no one “perfect” formula. However, by paying greater attention to some of the factors outlined in the test, you might be able to finally have nutrition start working for you, instead of against you.

Till next time, train hard and eat clean!

Related posts:

1. Dumb things smart people do
2. Low Carbohydrate Diets: Science Continues to Show Support
3. Carbohydrate Restriction: The Numbers Don’t Lie

That being said, they aren’t the only green products that contribute to a great physique. Today I’m going to spotlight another great “green” product to boost your body transformation efforts: green tea.

Who says it isn’t easy being green?

What is tea?

Although many beverages are marketed as tea, most are actually “herbal teas” or tisanes. Real tea must come from the Camelia Sinesis plant. This means that only white, green, oolong and black teas are actually beverages that can be labelled as tea.

Since all teas come from the same plant, what makes them have different health properties and taste?

Basically it amounts to how the plant is processed. Leaves of the tea plant begin to wilt and oxidize, if not dried quickly after picking. Tea leaves turn progressively darker as their chlorophyll breaks down and tannins are released. This enzymatic process is a kind of quasi-fermentation. The next step in processing is to stop oxidation at a predetermined stage by heating the leaves, which deactivates the enzymes responsible.

In case you were wondering, each category of tea is made in the following fashion:

• White tea: wilted and unoxidized.
• Green tea: unwilted and unoxidized.
• Oolong tea: wilted, bruised and partially oxidized.
• Black tea: wilted and completely oxidized.

Although all varieties of tea have some similar properties (they do come from the same plant after all), each method of preparation results in a product with specific health benefits. And our interest today is to look at green tea.

Green Tea Composition and Health Benefits

First let me clarify a common misconception, a cup of tea DOES NOT contain more caffeine than a cup of coffee. A standard 8 oz. serving of coffee provides 80-120 mg of caffeine whereas a typical cup of tea contains 25-40 mg.

That being said, green tea does contain other caffeine-like compounds, theophylline and theobromine, that have properties similar to caffeine. However, in contrast to using caffeine, theophylline and theobromine ingestion tends not to result in the “crash” that can accompany caffeine ingestion.

Green tea also contains a number of polyphenols with contribute to its purported health effects. There is a body of research that suggest green tea can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, various cancers, kidney stones, while improving bone density and dental health as well as enhancing cognitive function.

An impressive list to say the least, although I’m not about to suggest that green tea is some magical “cure for what ails ya”. Obviously the impact of green tea consumption will vary between individuals but with so many potential benefits, green tea seems like a valuable addition to your diet.

The Mirror Test

Despite extolling the health benefits of green tea, many of you still won’t be convinced to start drinking the stuff. But what if I told you that green tea might help you drop a few extra pounds… would you suddenly take up a keen interest?

Although tea contains a number of chemicals, it is one of the polyphenolic compounds in green tea, epigallocatechin 3-gallate (EGCG), that may play a particularly potent role in fat loss.

In a study published recently, researchers investigated the potential for EGCG to produce fat loss. Over 12 weeks researchers compared the effect of a beverage containing 625 mg of catechins + 39 mg caffeine to a control beverage containing only 39 mg caffeine and no catechins.

Participants (generally healthy, sedentary individuals BMI ~32 m/kg²) were asked to maintain constant energy intake (which they did) and engage in ~180 min/wk moderate intensity exercise, including at least 3 supervised sessions per week.

Basically, they were asked to workout 3 times a week for about an hour, quite a realistic, albeit sub-optimal, amount of training for the average individual.

After 12 weeks of drinking one of the beverages every day, what did these researchers find?

Maki et al. (2009). J. Nutr. 139: 264–270.

Surprisingly, even with this modest amount of exercise and no instructions to reduce caloric intake, both groups lost weight, which was good. However, the catechin/caffeine combo was far more effective in helping people lose abdominal fat, which is viewed as the most dangerous fat from a health perspective.

Overall, the catechin/caffeine group lost 1.2 kg more kilos (2 ½ pounds) than did the caffeine alone group. This isn’t an earth shattering difference by any stretch of the imagination, but given how little effort it takes to add green tea into your daily routine is there any reason not to adopt this habit?

What was particularly intriguing is that this extra weight loss was produced despite no actual diet advice or intervention being a part of the study. Kind of comforting to know that adding a simple habit like drinking green tea can significantly enhance the benefits of even a poorly designed exercise protocol.

Frankly, given how challenging it can be to produce sustainable fat loss, incorporating regular green tea seems like one of those “small change, big benefit” lifestyle modifications that make a whole lot of sense.

Green Tea Recommendations

The 625 mg of catechins in the aforementioned study provided about 215 mg of EGCG. But how much green tea is that in real world terms?

Tough to say with any certainty, since within green teas there is a wide variety of types and processing methods. A cup (8 oz) of most loose leaf green teas should provide anywhere from 60-180 mg of EGCG. This makes drinking 2-4 cups per day seems like a reasonable goal to shoot for.

A word of advice: not all green tea is created equally. Loose leaf green tea contains far more EGCG than does the green tea found in tea bags. Frankly, the green tea found in bags is of a vastly inferior quality and taste and I recommend only using it as a last resort.

Your best bet: delicious and nutritious loose leaf tea.

The same avoid warning goes for decaffeinated green tea. It’s got about 1/3 the amount of EGCG per serving as does regular green tea, so unless you are extremely caffeine sensitive, I’d advise opting for the real deal and just making sure you consume it well before bed time.

One of the best ways to markedly increase your green tea consumption is to brew up a large batch of green tea, then chill it and drink it as iced tea. You can tote around a 1 L water bottle full of green tea and drink it throughout the day.

Although flavoured, bagged green teas are garbage, flavoured loose leaf is not. I highly recommend picking up a mango/lime/cherry flavoured green. These teas are amazing both hot or cold.

Another point in favour of green tea, a 100 g bag costs about $7 and will make at least 20-25 cups. This amounts to only $0.28-$0.35 per serving, which is far, far cheaper than a can of coke, cup of coffee or bottled water.

Give loose leaf green tea a try; your taste buds, wallet and waistline will thank me.

Till next time, train hard and eat clean.

Related posts:

1. The Role of Exercise in Weight Loss: Part 1
2. The Role of Exercise in Weight Loss: Part 2
3. Twinkies: Secret to Weight Loss Success?