When is a calorie not a calorie? To get to the other side (Yup, just another bad joke.)

By Gary Larson

This one gets bandied around a lot: “A calorie isn’t a calorie.” It’s a clever gimmicky catch-phrase because it a) challenges the reader to re-evaluate what they think is a set-in-stone rule and b) gives them the hope that the reason why they’re not making progress lies in the fact that their “truth” is in fact a lie. Read More...

Don’t fix what isn’t broken

I’ve talked about information overload before, as well as information dieting (yes, before the book came out.)

Today while I was changing in my gym, I overhead two guys talking. Both were built like brick you-know-what’s and neither (though fully clothed in workout gear) looked “fat-big”. Read More...

Burn the boats: Why you’re going to fail. Or not.

I’ve been studying and reading health research for decades, and this post is just a bit of my biased gestalt on the state of affairs on obesity, obesity research and the new hope that arises within a TON of people every January.

The preponderance of obesity research indicates that most of you will fail at achieving your goal of weight loss this year; and that of those of you who succeed at achieving the goal within this particular year will ultimately fail because the data generally shows that the weight comes back, resulting in a net effect of zero. What we don’t fully understand still, is why this failure happens; and I’m not sure that we’re going to truly unearth it anytime soon enough to make a difference in your resolution this year. Read More...

The Information Diet

The New Year season is full of resolutions to diet for weight loss. It’s also one of the most fruitful seasons for merchants who produce weight-loss products to add to their bottom line. They’re easy to find and getting more and more clever with each passing year. They’re on Google Ads, banner ads, Facebook, Twitter, youTube, and infiltrate virtually every other on-line media you use on a daily basis.

This easily leads to information overload, as well as fear-based marketing: How do you choose from all of the products available? How do you sift through the inundating assault of those massively lengthy webpages that have PARAGRAPHS of text and testimonials? And worse yet, how do you know that one of those products isn’t better than the one you’re going to buy? Read More...

Fear of loss: How the fitness claims get you

All through my undergraduate “career”, I worked in labs. Just as there are gym rats, I was a lab rat. Great experience for me. Okay pay for a student. But when I finished my undergrad, I already knew I was going to start my Masters in the fall. And at the time, I also felt that I had never really earned an honest dollar. I had never set foot outside the Ivory Tower and so I wanted to experience what a “joe job” might be like. My first choice was to be a waiter–pretty social, they seem to have a lot of fun for the most part, and the pay was probably better than my lab stipends. But in Toronto, getting a job as a waiter is tough competition. In the end, I lucked out, but there was a period of a month or so where I hadn’t found that job.

So what’s a 23 year old, freshly graduated biology major to do? Hit the want ads, of course. What happened next is a story unto itself, but the crux of the story is that I ended up doing a short stint as a door-to-door salesman with a franchise of one of the largest direct sales companies in the world. Read More...