For those of you who watch that scale day by day just aching to see the number reduce in size… here is a little reality check for you. Let me first state that this article is primarily for those people who are already at or near a healthy bodyfat level for their age and height. Fat reduction for people who are really obese is very different than the rest of us.

Fat loss is a slow, not fast process. Let me assure you that the fat on your body is resistant to burn off and subject to come back very easily at the slightest sign of weakness. In simple terms, a single pound of fat accounts for 3500 calories consumed above what your body needed for other functions. So if you see that scale jump 2 pounds in one day and you think it was all fat then that would require a calorie deficit of 7000 calories for the previous day. This means that if you ate 2000 calories the previous day then you would have had to do 9000 calories of activity to account for the deficit. Professional athletes who train all the time don’t burn this many calories. The only thing in your body that can so drastically change in weight and volume in such short periods of time is water. To illustrate what I’m talking about, weigh yourself first thing in the morning and then at various times throughout the day. You will soon notice that the scale change can easily jump around plus or minus 3-5 pounds. I’ve had mine jump as much as 8 pounds in a single day.

So remember the next time you jump on that scale that your body is made up of many different things, most of which is water, and much less of which is fat. This is the reason that body fat specific measurements are taken by professional trainers to rely on progress rather than the scale. The scale is a very crude and unreliable instrument for measuring small incremental changes in body composition. I recommend weighing yourself no more than once per week.

How many times have you heard that if you buy bread, pasta, or any kind of baked goods made from wheat you should buy whole wheat or whole grain varieties? Of course you have and of course you should. But there is something else I bet you haven’t heard. With bread and other baked goods made from flower you are essentially getting the same glycemic index effect that you would get with white bread. This means it has the same effects on spiking your insulin as white bread or other sugar laden foods without much in the way of nutrients. This is because the flower, even whole wheat flower is still pulverized and turned into powder making it pass through the system much faster and hitting the blood stream.

For most people this won’t be a big deal if you have a healthy balanced fiber and nutrient rich diet but if you are insulin sensitive or insulin resistant then this could be a big deal.

There is a silver lining to this cloud. If you look around you can find bread products that aren’t made from flour. Ezekial bread is one such product. Here in the northwest there is a fantastic bread maker named “Dave’s Bread” that sells a product called “Good Seed Bread“. This bread is made from sprouted wheat. No flour. It may be hard to find products in your area, but if you look hard enough you might just be able to find something that doesn’t reduce the whole wheat kernel to flower instead sprouts the wheat retaining it’s low glycemic index properties.

Ya know I’m getting tired of all the misinformation being circulated about food and it’s time to take a look at one such bit of information. Ranch Dressing. I love Ranch dressing. I love it on sandwiches, salads and hamburgers. I love to dip vegetables in it and use it on pizzas. I also hear all the time from so-called nutrition experts and doctors to stay away from the creamy dressings for your salads and use an olive oil/vinagrette dressing instead. So I decided to take a closer look at both of these to see what is really going on nutrition-wise:

Lets compare 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil with 1 tablespoon of regular Lighthouse Ranch dressing.

The olive oil has 120 calories and the Ranch dressing has 60 calories. Interesting. Each of them is made up from primarily fat calories with olive oil being 100% and the Ranch about 90%. The other 10% are sugar sources from dairy and maltodextrin. So lets take a closer look at the fats in these 2 products since we know that olive oil is almost all the ‘good’ fat we always hear so much about. The Ranch dressing must be mostly saturated fat right? WRONG.

1 tablespoon of Ranch has 6 grams of fat, and only 0.5 of that is saturated fat. 1 tablespoon of the olive oil has 14 grams of fat, 2 of which are saturated. That means 14% of the olive oil is saturated fat and 8% of the fat in the Ranch is saturated. Neither has any trans fat by the way.

So in the end I can put double the amount of Ranch dressing on my salad as I can olive oil and still get less saturated fat and about equal the number of calories. If I put 4 tablespoons of Ranch dressing on my salad I’m also getting 4 grams of carbs which equals 16 calories. WOW. I think my heart is going to explode with all this unhealthy stuff going through my system.

Just in case Lighthouse isn’t reflective of standard common Ranch dressings on the market I decided to check the most common brand I could determine which was Hidden Valley Ranch. The numbers are very similar but the Hidden Valley has about 17% of its fat being saturated which is only slightly higher than olive oil but still nowhere near the runaway health hazard that the media and experts would have us believe.

I’ve been hearing a lot of rumbling lately about this diet so I wanted to summarize the truth for those who might be wondering. Lets begin by stating that HCG is NOT a diet. It’s the acronym for a hormone called Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin. This hormone is only naturally occurring in pregnant females. The idea of the “HCG diet” is that an injection of HCG will suppress appetite so that you can eat 500 calories per day with minimal hunger. There is absolutely no scientific evidence proving that injections of HCG will suppress appetite or, as some web sites claim, increase the uptake of body fat as energy. Plenty of double blind studies were done where placebos were given to half the participants and hcg to the other half with no differences in appetite or fat loss occurring on the same 500 calorie diet. HCG injections are only available by prescription (about $800) and tongue drops sold on the internet only have trace amounts of HCG and ingested forms of HCG that can’t survive the digestive system anyway. So any source of HCG that doesn’t come from a doctor is a scam on top of a scam.

So DUH, of course 500 calories per day is going to yield weight loss. But here is the problem. Eating such low levels of calories subjects your body to hardships that will result in health problems you want to avoid. Weight loss DOES NOT NECESSARILY EQUAL HEALTHY! The idea to losing weight is actually to lose FAT. The problem is on a 500 calorie per day diet you will also lose muscle and deprive your body of the nutrients it desperately needs for normal healthy function. You cannot make up the difference with bodyfat alone. The ADA (American Dietetic Association) does not recommend anyone go lower than 1200 calories per day. Most people burn more than 500 calories when they are asleep at night! The fact of the matter is that most people who try 500 calorie per day diets suffer many problems such as fainting, headaches, hair loss, loss of energy and mood drops. Yes I understand there is a small minority of people who can go on 500 calories per day and not have side effects, but I’m willing to bet that if those people had a full medical checkup and blood test they would indeed see problems what were not apparent otherwise. There is plenty of information on the web about this silly excuse for a diet and I encourage anyone interested to seek it out. But a word of caution; many of these sources of information are bought and paid for by companies trying to sell HCG.

So my recommendation is don’t do this diet unless you really don’t care about your health. There is a much better way to achieve proper body composition with healthy habits like exercise and the proper nutritional support.