If late night eating interferes with fat loss, why do people who eat more in the evening lose more fat than people who don’t?
If carbs become fattening after 6 PM, how come people who eat more carbs after 6 PM lose more fat than those who eat them earlier in the day?
If we should “eat breakfast like a king, lunch a queen, dinner like a pauper”, then why does breakfast skipping and nightly feasts lead to fat loss and improved blood lipids?
If eating late is bad for you, why does almost every controlled study show that eating later in the day is better than eating earlier in the day?
And if the above statements are true, why do people still believe that late night eating is bad for you…?

The Late Night Eating Myth

It’s commonly believed that it’s better to eat more earlier in the day and less later in the day; eating […]

Original post by Martin Berkhan

Ideally, the introduction of a novel stimulus to our environment would be preceded by rigorous safety studies conducted by independent researchers. Applied to industrial seed oils, wheat, running shoes, and office chairs, this protocol could have saved us a lot of pain and suffering. If you wait until way after the fact to wonder whether they might be bad for us – as we tend to do – these admittedly inexpensive/addictive/profit-reaping stimuli become entrenched. They become part of the culture. Wheat and soybeans? Much of the world depends on both or either, for food, livestock feed, and cooking oil. Most runners, walkers, and orthopedists think barefooting is suicidal, and you’ll pull something trying to pry chairs away from our tight, stiff hips.

Some would include the cell phone on that list of toxic stimuli deserving closer scrutiny. The cell phone certainly satisfies the “entrenchment” criterion. It has become ubiquitous. Everyone has […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

There’s an unofficial but infamous season this time of year in New England (my native homeland, for those of you who don’t know). In the weeks roughly between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day is a period the locals call black fly season. For those of you unfamiliar with these creatures, there’s no overdramatizing their menace. They’re deceptively minuscule but ubiquitous, and their bites can mutilate. I remember a couple from the Midwest moved to our neighborhood just before the school year. Come spring, they’d heard the many jokes and well-intentioned warnings but scoffed when they first saw the flies themselves. “Those gnats?” they asked incredulously. About a week or so later they were both covered in welts after spending the weekend doing yard work with no protection. The woman’s hairline was chewed to oblivion. (These things tended to get around the neighborhood.) I still think of black fly season after […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

If you had to subsist on ten foods for the rest of your life, which ten would you choose? That was essentially the question posed to me by a reader email. In it, Jamie made an elaborate setup: having been chosen to man a mission to Mars in the near future, I have to program my Food Machine for the trip. The Food Machine is a wondrous piece of technology that can create any Earth-based food from scratch, but the catch is that it can only store ten “recipes” and the programming has to take place before we leave. Once I’m up in the shuttle, I can’t change my mind. I’ll have to live with these foods for ten years (and maybe longer – who knows how things will go down). More than simply survive, I’ll have to thrive on these foods. I’ll have to get all the essential vitamins, […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

I haven’t gone to the rapid fire question-and-answer format in awhile, and you guys seem to dig it, so let’s do one today. We’ve got questions regarding a popular bodybuilding supplement, whether bean sprouts are Primal or not, the fatty acid composition of backyard rabbit meat, the old protein-leaches-calcium-from-bones myth, and my opinion on the new government food plate. As always, if you’ve got any questions about (almost) anything, send them my way and I’ll do my best to answer them. Not every topic deserves a full post – and, let’s face it, I don’t always have it in me to produce a full-length post. This way, we cover a lot of ground and I get to give myself a break. So, yeah: keep ‘em coming.
And yes, I was also pleased with the opportunity to post a cute bunny photo.

Hey Mark,
It’s been a while since I’ve written. I’ve been training harder […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

Artichokes are not the most welcoming food in the produce department. With their odd shape, dull green color and layers of prickly armor it’s a wonder humans started eating them at all. Luckily, some poor soul a long time ago was hungry enough to try them and since Roman times the artichoke has not only been embraced, it has had a reputation of being a gourmet delicacy.
There is something oddly decadent about artichokes, even though they descend from the lowly thistle family, the flavor is quite mild and there isn’t an ounce of fat to be found. Maybe it’s because artichokes seem so difficult to cook (and eat, for that matter) that people save them for special occasions. But don’t be intimidated and definitely don’t relegate artichokes to the “special occasion” category. First of all, they’re not that hard to cook. Secondly, artichokes contain almost as many antioxidants as berries […]

Original post by Worker Bee

 
So the recent push of emails for the Shape Shifter Workout Program has re-kindled my interest in body weight exercises.
On the one hand, I love body weight training because it just feels right. On the other, I do not think you can build as much mass with body weight training as you can with traditional weight training – but of course this is just my opinion.
I’ve done a quick lit review and was unable to find any direct comparisons between body weight exercises and weighted exercises, so we’re really left to ‘logic’ are way though this process.
So logically – I see no reason why a muscle would react differently to different sources of resistance.
Acceleration is Acceleration, Force is Force and Work is Work, these classic definitions don’t change just because we’ve changed the source of the resistance.
So based on this it seems fair to say that the only thing limiting […]

Original post by Brad Pilon

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about fasted state exercise lately. Specifically, people want to know if it’s OK to exercise while they are doing their Eat Stop Eat fasts.
I’m still of the school of thought that it doesn’t matter WHEN you train, as long as you’re training consistently, but for the sake of argument I’d like to explore this concept.
The general idea is that by performing exercise at the end of a fast, you are burning more fat (This is the main idea behind fasted state morning cardio).
From this the general premise we seem to get the following idea – Use your fasts to optimize the fat burning of your exercise.
Based on this I would suggest that we have the entire concept backwards.
As a conservative estimate an hour long cardio session may burn an additional 500 Calories..so fasting to optimize this calorie burn seems a little silly considering […]

Original post by Brad Pilon

You count the days. You spend weeks planning and hours packing. Your friends, family, and every citizen within a 20 mile radius knows you’re leaving and exactly where you’re going. Are you looking that forward to the destination or to leaving behind all the – well, you know? Maybe it’s the sheer novelty more than anything else. You’ve needed something new. You’re ready to check out, break out, get away, forge ahead, and dig in. Just how long has it been since you up and left last time? How long has it been since your last great vacation?

Too often (especially in the United States), we forgo vacation. Although Americans tend to get fewer days off than many in other parts of the world, we’re infamous for passing on the vacation days we do get. Recent statistics show a mere 57% of us actually take advantage of our full vacation allotment. […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

A couple of days ago I made the statement on Facebook that I thought fitness E-books were dead..or at least dying.
My reason was simple – with no barriers to entry pretty much ANYONE can whip together an E-book and start selling it.
Now, I’m not saying that e-information is dead, and I’m a big fan of the written word, my thought was/is more along the lines that the on-line fitness industry will soon be ready for a brand new medium.
Books like Eat Stop Eat will always be a book, because it’s content based…but workouts – they could be so much more than a PDF and some youtube videos…so sooner or later, someone was going to raise the bar
Turns out I was right…or at least I could be.
I want you to take a look at this site ==>
(Sorry for the Bad Screen Capture, click the pic to see the site)

This is a […]

Original post by Brad Pilon