Leah:
Hi and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir. And today we’re picking up from where we left off next, next episode. And today we’re picking up from where we left off last episode around addressing myths around weight loss. So we’ve got five more myths for you today and we’re just going to go through one by one.
Aidan:
So the first myth we’re going to cover in this episode is no carbs after 5pm. This myth is based on the logic of the idea that people are not going to burn off those carbs because it’s not going to be moving as much after 5pm. Firstly, we are always burning calories. Glucose is still being used overnight, even while you sleep. I was like, that’s a long pause. I’m going do that one again..
Firstly, we are always burning calories. Glucose is being used overnight, even while you sleep, like your basal metabolic rate is still going overnight. So you could say that you’re burning less calories, but you’re still burning off some to speak. So you could say that you’re burning less calories, but you’re still burning calories overnight as well. Even the argument that we’re burning less, though, still falls apart a little bit when you realise that it is far more about the balance over time.
We know that carbs need to be either stored or utilised at some stage. They break down to glucose, it needs to be either stored or utilised. But we’re still burning stuff all over the time. Like the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you’re like, this just does not matter and total intake here matters way more. It’s a bit boring for me to always be like, total intake is what matters. But like, if you actually followed these glucose molecules over time, you would see that it balances out. And whether or not you care about my opinion on that, the research looking at this has got that same conclusion.
Research looking at carb front loading versus back loading typically find similar results for body composition. Once again, this is another area that you can find individual studies that make it look like there is a noticeable difference. But if you take one step back and you look at all of the studies on the topic, it finds similar results for body composition.
Leah:
The next myth is more of a misconception, but that is eat more fat to burn more fat. Technically increasing your dietary fat intake is going to increase fat oxidation. The body tends to burn what is most readily available and what is in abundance for energy. So if we have a lot of fat coming in, the body is going to go, awesome. We have a huge abundance of this. Let’s start burning it as a fuel source. But we care more about net loss of fat when it comes to actual weight loss.
So let’s say you ate an extra 100 grams of dietary fat in order to burn more fat, but you only burned an extra 40 grams of fat. That still leaves 60 grams left over to be stored as body fat, for example, if you were in a caloric surplus. So realistically, a calorie deficit is what is needed for fat loss. In research, low carb and low fat diets for weight loss have found very similar outcomes. So even in those higher fat, carb diets where more fat is being burned as a fuel source, that doesn’t necessarily equate to more fat loss.
Aidan:
The next myth is that you can spot reduce fat. The short version of this and arguably simplified version is that we can’t really spot reduce fat. Instead, you should just think about it as if you genetically store fat in certain places and just getting leaner overall and losing body fat overall is the answer for losing fat in those certain areas that you’re trying to lose it in. We can’t choose where it comes from, but getting leaner overall should help.
But if you want to dig deeper than just that, because I think just stopping there is probably what you should probably do. But if you want to dig deeper, there are two technicalities that are worth addressing. There have been some studies that challenge this idea. I’ve seen quite a few evidence -based people who have a separate opinion on this topic being like, no, recent research makes it look like that you can spot reduce fat a little bit. The biggest study that’s often cited in relation to challenging this is that there was a 2023 randomised control trial called Abdominal Aerobic Endurance Exercise Reveals Spot Reduction Exists. And that’s been discussed heaps now. The study involved comparing a program involving 45 minutes of treadmill running versus calorie -matched combined treadmill running, so 27 minutes of treadmill running, and abdominal endurance exercises, taking the total to 57 minutes.
So that group did 57 minutes of exercise, the other one did 45. But the calorie burn was meant to be matched there. And the abdominal endurance exercise was like, it was like high, high, high rep ab stuff. And it was done four days per week for 10 weeks. Looking at the results, abdominal fat mass decreased by an average of 700 grams in the group that was doing the abdominal endurance stuff versus no change in the other group. When we look at total fat mass loss, the group that trained their abs lost 6% of their total fat mass while the other group lost 5%. So the total fat loss was pretty similar, but the group that did the ab training lost way more abdominal fat mass. I would interpret this with caution for many reasons. It was a small sample size study. The research has never looked promising up until this point, so it’d be wild to entirely change your perspective based on this.
I don’t think I need to go further than that. Like I think a very solid conclusion would be, it seems unlikely that spot reduction is a meaningful thing that we should work towards. I’d be open -minded towards it, but even if it is, it’s not like this magical thing. Like even if we just go back and we’re like, okay, they did, what was it? 10 weeks or whatever. 10 weeks. Yeah. Even if you go back, like they did 10 weeks of training the abs for 700 grams difference.
Like it’s hard to say how meaningful that is over time. anyway, the other technicality that I would cover is that hormones influence our body fat distribution. And I think it would be silly to take this far and think that we’re magically going to influence our hormones heaps through diet, but it would also be very silly to take the complete opposite end of the spectrum and say that we can’t influence our hormones through diet because there are many things we can influence with our diet.
Even in the last episode, I was talking about how we can change our testosterone levels. we did extreme stuff, there’s things that we can do to influence this. And these things affect where we store body fat. So there is some component of us being able to influence our body fat distribution through diet as well. I think the practical takeaways, I probably wouldn’t worry about this much at all because even with the hormonal stuff, it’s like, well, I probably wouldn’t do things that take that too extreme in the negative directions or anything like that either.
Leah:
And I think with the abdominal aerobic endurance exercise, even if that turned out to be a game changer, I don’t know if you could convince me to do it. Sounds awful.
Aidan:
When I was reading the study, like in my head, like at the start I was like, I assume they’re talking about just like doing some crunches or some sit ups and like resistance training. was like, no, this is like, yeah, like a full on over 30 minutes of like, ab work, super high rep.
Leah:
But moving on to the next myth, we’re going to cover apple cider vinegar. So people propose that apple cider vinegar can help with weight loss for a variety of reasons. Some people point to things like satiety. Others point to things like blood sugar regulation, metabolism, lots of other reasons that have been proposed. But this one is quite easy to dispute because we do actually have research looking at apple cider vinegar consumption and then its impact on weight loss. And realistically, there is minimal difference in weight loss for those that consume apple cider vinegar versus not.
Looking at one particular study that included 155 participants consuming vinegar, so not apple cider vinegar, but vinegar found there to be on average 1.7 kilo weight loss over the 12 weeks. You could interpret that as being absolutely better than no weight loss at all, but also 1.7 kilos on average over a 12 week timeframe is pretty small. And there are also a couple of other points to add here. So sometimes vinegar can cause nausea. So is it just that these people were eating just slightly less after consuming the vinegar because it did have this side effect?
Secondary to that, sometimes building in a habit of any kind can change our intake in general or change other habits that we do over the course of the day. So is there some kind of flow on effect for some people? Potentially. And then finishing off within four weeks post trial, this part’s important. Participants were basically back to their starting weight. So even though they lost that 1.7 on average kilos over that 12 weeks when consuming the vinegar on a daily basis, four weeks post trial, they’d stopped consuming the vinegar and that weight had come back on. So it’s clearly nothing magical, nothing special, and not something that I would recommend for weight loss.
Aidan:
I think my two cents onto that as well, with the reason like, why would we talk about vinegar instead of just apple cider vinegar? Like the reason is because there’s not many studies. There’s not many studies looking at apple cider vinegar and weight loss. And if you go on Google and you start looking at apple cider vinegar for weight loss and you start reading articles that are looking at from all angles, lot of the mechanisms, vinegar overlaps with this and it’s like, if apple cider vinegar is working, vinegar should get the job done as well. It’s just that apple cider vinegar is probably more palatable and more like people would be more likely to have that regularly.
There’s one exception to that, which is like, I believe they call it quote on quote, the mother, which is like it’s related to the gut health stuff, but vinegar wouldn’t have that. But we’re going to be talking about gut health in the next episode. So that’s probably a sneaky plug for that. We’re going to talk to potentially linking with weight loss. But I don’t know. I also think this is another reason why research is so valuable and so important because I spend more time on TikTok than I should. If I scroll on TikTok and I’m on nutrition TikTok occasionally, most of my feeds not actually nutrition related.
But when I do see these things pop up, I’m comments and like people are like, I lost 30 kilos because I added apple cider vinegar. And that’s crazy. Yeah, particularly because we know how the mechanisms work, particularly because we have just talked about starting with 155 participants with average loss was 1.7. And then that makes me go back to thinking about that individual, I don’t respond to comments or anything like that. I go back to that individual and I’m thinking there’s multiple explanations. Here for the episode of being it was magical. I probably don’t think it was that one, but they lost weight for other reasons. But regardless, it would be silly to be like, this is the secret.
Even if one person did have that and a study looking at 155, almost nobody had those results. Just the same as like, let’s say we found somebody who absolutely thrives on a ketogenic diet. They’re really enjoying it. It’s so much easier for them to stick to than any other dietary approach and they get really good results and they’re happy with it. Should they then tell everyone else that that’s what they need to try for weight loss or energy or like whatever? If we then looked at the stats on adherence, people stick to it long-term and all these things, how many people do stick to a ketogenic diet long-term? It’s so low. It’s so, so low. So even if it did work really, really, really well for one person, it still doesn’t matter when we have research looking at this stuff.
The final myth that we’re going to go through is the concept of eating too low calorie, putting you into starvation mode. So we have talked about this concept a fair bit. So I’ll try to be really brief here. I hate to pull the cliche, but if starvation mode existed, people wouldn’t starve. They were just told them to body fat, all of these things. We never see in controlled settings situations where people are on low calories and not losing weight.
Every single time that is done with all food provided people do lose weight. In the real world, it is obviously a different thing. There’s many explanations that I believe in a podcast that we release. I don’t know how many episodes ago, five, six episodes ago, we did do a podcast on what to do if you feel like you’re on low calories and not losing weight. So I would recommend listening to that one as well. But briefly touching on metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation is a thing, but there’s some quick caveats here. One is that it rarely accounts for massive reductions in energy expenditure.
Every time it’s been studied, we see these small reductions that are real, but it’s not the reason somebody’s not losing weight. There’s got to be many other variables involved in almost all cases. And the second one is it also reverses when you increase calories as well, which makes it far less scary, even if it was a bigger thing too. There are many reasons to not go too low calorie, but starvation mode isn’t one of them. Wouldn’t recommend doing it, but starvation mode isn’t the reason.
Leah:
And that wraps up episode 164 looking at different myths around weight loss and addressing them. I would highly recommend if you want to know more about this stuff looking in the show notes for this particular podcast episode where we have linked several of our blog posts as well as a ton of relevant podcast episodes including our three -part series on nutrition for fat loss. So again, if this is something you’re interested in, highly recommend checking that out. But otherwise, thanks for tuning in for this one.