There are a number of gum products over the year that have claimed they can help you lose weight. In fact, there has even been some research hinting that gum chewing can help you lose weight. And this article from WebMD concludes the same about gum chewing and weight loss.

Gum and weight loss

Anyway, here is an interesting study published in the November 2011 issue of the peer reviewed journal Obesity.

Researchers did a randomized controllwed trial of chewing gum for weight loss. It was an 8-week study that aimed to determine whether there would be any significant weight loss in people who chewed gum for a minimum of 90 min a day would lead to greater weight loss.

Unfortunately, the researchers end the study saying “We conclude that chewing gum on a regular schedule for 8 weeks did not facilitate weight loss in these overweight and obese adults.”

Bottom line as Obesity Panacea points out, can gum chewing help you lose weight? No.

Joggling and chewing

Incidentally, I personally love to chew gum. Once I chewed a piece of gum for 13 days straight because I was curious to see how long I could do it. How I did it is the story for another time.

Also, as a joggler one of the most frequent comments you’ll hear is the question, “Are you chewing gum too?” Joggler Michal Kapral was prompted by these comments to chew gum the entire time he was joggling the Toronto marathon en route to breaking the world marathon joggling record.

While I’m not overweight, my BMI is a bit high and I would like to lose a few pounds (about 10).  The primary reason is that people with lower BMIs live longer.  The secondary reason is that I’d like to run faster and to be a faster joggler, you have to be a skinnier joggler.

Secret to weight loss

Despite what the $400 billion diet industry in the US tells you, there is a simple equation for weight.

If calories in > calories out you gain weight
If calories in < calories out you lose weight

There is no good evidence that the type of food you eat matters much when it comes to weight, it is all about calories.  Of course, when it comes to health the type of food matters so don’t take it as me saying you could live your life on candy bars and soda.  You can’t.  You need a good balanced diet with a mix of fruits and vegetables.

Losing weight

The above equation shows us that there are two ways to control your weight.

1.  Reduce the calorie in – AKA eat less
2.  Increase the calories out – AKA exercise more

It’s that simple.

I’m pretty good with #2 having logged 1300 miles or more every year since 2004.  It’s #1 that gets me.  I’m not good at controlling what I eat.

Losing weight in 2012

Since I already run and exercise a lot, I’m not going to be able to significantly increase the amount to lose more weight.  It will just make me more hungry and prone to injury.  So, to lose weight I’ve got to cut down on the amount of food I eat.  And also implement some of these tricks that are suggested in a recent issue of Runner’s World.

1. Eat more protein.  A recent study found that athletes lost more weight when they consumed a diet of 35% protein.
2. Eat within 1 hour of exercise.  The body will burn it off faster
3. Don’t skip meals.  This causes snacking and snacking is a calorie builder
4. Stay hydrated.  Thirst is often mistaken for hunger.
5. Eat food, don’t drink it.  Juice, soda, and sports drinks are more calorie dense than food
6. Stay away from fast food.  These pack on calories pretty quickly.  Especially French fries
7. Eat less.

And here is my bonus tip….

Try fasting once a month.  This will help you get used to the feeling of ingesting no calories.  It’s really not that bad once you get used to it.  And if you can get used to operating with a slight feeling of hunger, you’ll more easily lose weight.  Just don’t do this more than once a month!

Anyway, right now my weight is 194 pounds.  Let’s see where it goes in the next couple of months.  A less weighty joggler is a faster joggler.

Yesterday I referenced a study about how the type of food you eat matters as far as weight loss goes.

Well, there was one bit of information that I overlooked. This story about the study on NPR had a graph that made me think of it.

Some years ago I used to drink a lot of sode. Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi were my choices. But somewhere along the line I got this idea that soda wasn’t so great and was adding too many calories to my diet. So I switched to the diet versions of these.

Now, there have been some recent studies indicating that diet sodas mess up your body’s natural ability to figure out if you’ve eaten too much and there is even a suggestion that diet sodas make you gain weight. Well, this study suggest that that conclusion is wrong.

If you look at the graph (click on it to enlarge) of weight change, it looks like diet sodas are associated with a reduction in weight gain over time. Just like they theoretically are supposed to.

So, I wonder. How does this data jive with studies that say diet sodas can lead to weight gain?

I wonder if researcher and joggler Travis Saunders over at Obesity Pancea would know.

Weight and joggling

What does all this have to do with joggling you might ask? Well, this blog is about joggling but it’s also about running and being healthy. That’s primarily why I joggle anyway. I keep tabs on stories about weight, health, exercise, and living until 100 and beyond.

And now I can feel confident that having a diet soda daily isn’t going to torpedo my chances of making my goal to live until I’m 107.

For years I’ve held the following belief.

For weight gain, what you eat doesn’t matter as much as how much you eat.

That means if you ate nothing but French fries and pizza you would gain no more weight than someone who ate the same number of calories in yogurt and fruit. Food type doesn’t matter, it’s calories.

Of course, food type matters from a health standpoint because you get certain vitamins and phytochemicals from fruits that you don’t get from fast food, but if we just look at weight, it’s calories that matter.

Well, according to this research out of the Harvard School of Public Heath, I could be mistaken. These scientists looked at weight gain in adults over 12 to 20 years. They found on average adults gained 0.84 lbs per year. But the following foods increased weigh even more.

Foods correlated with weight gain

1. French fries = 0.83 lbs per year
2. Potato Chips = 0.42 lbs per year
3. Potatoes = 0.125 lbs per year
4. Sugary soda = 0.25 lbs per year
5. Unprocessed meat = 0.23 lbs per year
6. Processed meat = 0.22 lbs per year

Other foods led to less weight gain

7. Vegetables
8. Fruits
9. Whole grains
10. Nuts
11. Yogurt

People who ate yogurt gained an average of only 0.02 lbs per year.

Looks like yogurt eating is the way to go.

Correlation & Causation

Of course, this is just a correlation study. It also depends on the accurate reporting of the participants. So, I’m a little skeptical of their conclusions. The study doesn’t indicate whether people who ate French fries consumed more calories. I’m assuming they did. In fact, it looks like the 6 foods that led to more weight gain were the ones that had more densely packed calories. It could still turn out that the calories in / calories out model is valid.

The researchers suggest the following strategies to maintain a healthy weight.

1. Stay away from low quality carbohydrates (liquid sugar)

2. Eat more minimally processed foods (fruits veggies)

It comes back to the old adage.

Eat real food, not too much. Mostly plants.

One of my goals this year is to get down to 180 lbs.  Right now I’m at about 195 lbs but this is pretty standard for me at this time of year.  My weight seems to be higher at some points of the year (January) and lower at others (April).  If I do nothing different, I will be about 185 in April.  It must have something to do with my physical activity, the amount that I eat or maybe just the way my body works.

Anyway, I saw this bit of weight loss research which suggests that one way to lose weight is to write about it.  In the study, they weighed two groups of women.  One group was asked to list their values and then given the task to write about those values for 15 minutes.  The other group did not.  Four months later, the participants came in and were re-weighed.

It turns out the women who did the writing exercise lost 3.4 lbs during the time and the control group (non-writers) actually gained 2.8 lbs.  The conclusion was that women who were challenged to think about what they value were more likely to make changes and live a healthier lifestyle than those who weren’t.

I don’t know about this “science” but it is an interesting idea.  Can I lose the weight if I write about values that are important to me?  Perhaps I’ll try.

What do you think?  Leave a comment below.

I saw this article about some research that gives a good reason why diets don’t usually work.  It turns out starving yourself can cause your brain to eat itself.

This is a natural process because the brain needs lots of energy to function properly.  But what comes along with this self-cannibalization is the release of a fatty acid into your blood stream that causes you to feel hunger.

I guess this is what happens to me once a month when I don’t eat anything for 24+ hours.  I wonder if it is having any noticeable effect on my ability to think.  hmmm.  It does make me wonder, is living a long time worth it if you lose your ability to think clearly?  I don’t know but perhaps I’ll just have to build my brain in other ways.

So the lesson we learn from this science.

1.  If you are going to diet, don’t starve yourself, rather just eat less.
2.  If you don’t eat, your brain suffers.

Some time ago I read about some research that demonstrated drinking zero calorie sodas could actually lead to overeating and thus weight gain. This is the opposite of what we’d like to see especially if you are like me and are keen to live until 107.

It’s a fact that people who weigh less live longer. (I realize this is a gross generalization).

Fake Fat

Anyway, when I first heard of Olestra, the undigestable fat substitute, I thought it was going to revolutionize the potato chip and snack food industry. Imagine potato chips that tasted the same but had half the calories!

Sadly, this never worked out. There was a problem with the initial products as they were required to put a warning on them about “anal leakage” possibilities. This pretty much killed initial sales. Even after they got that requirement removed, the damage was done. Olestra products never really got any significant market share.

I think one of the problems was that while they tasted pretty close to the real thing, they didn’t taste exactly like them.

Not a substitute

Well, here’s some fat substitute research that could put the final nail in the coffin of this fake food, weight control strategy. It turns out that low calorie potato chips may interfere with the body’s ability to regulate food intake just like fake sugars. Rats who were studied in this research by Purdue University scientists were found to gain weight when put on a diet of low calorie chips.

Weight Loss bottom line

On the joggler blog here we like to encourage exercise and reasonable weight loss. It turns out eating the fake foods might not be the best way to lose weight. You may be tricking your body and training yourself to eat more calories when you eat regular food. Of course, as needs to be pointed out with any study like this. Things are much more complicated when you’re talking about human behavior versus rat behavior. I say stick with the advice from Pollan’s book In Defense of Food.

‘Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants’

Last year I read 25 books. Most of them were classics but many were non-fiction. Perhaps one of the best in terms of improving my running and joggling was Richard Wiseman’s book 59 Seconds.

Basic book summary

The premise behind 59 Seconds is that most of the ‘self-help’ book industry is filled with non-scientific, unproven nonsense. This book was written to give you various things you can do that have been scientifically demonstrated to improve aspects of your life. It looks at research in 10 different areas including Happiness, Persuasion, Motivation, Creativity, Attraction, Relationships, Stress, Decision Making, Parenting and Personality.

Overall, I thought the book was great. It supported all of it’s claims/advice with links to the research and also gave enough details of the research to determine how useful the advice might be.

Useful Exercises for Runners

The most useful chapter for runners is the one on Motivation, but the chapters on Happiness, Creativity, Stress and Personality also were useful.

Here are a few tips on motivation.

To achieve the things you want to achieve, you need to create a plan for your goal, tell friends and family about the goal, remind yourself of the benefits of achieving the goal, and reward yourself as you make progress towards the goal.

Wiseman suggests that writing this stuff down in a journal is one key to achieving goals.

To lose weight
Slow down your eating. If you slow down your eating, you will eat less.

Store tempting foods in the higher cabinets. The harder a food is to find, the less likely you are to eat it.

Place a mirror in your kitchen. When you see yourself eating, you will tend to eat less.

To cut down on drinking
If you want to drink less, you should drink from tall, skinny glasses. Short, squat glasses make you drink more than you think.

There is lots of great stuff in the book and Wiseman is an entertaining writer. His book Quirkology is excellent also!

NPR is great and I’m proud to say that I’m a card carrying member.

Here is a story about weight research showing the people who logged on an Internet site frequently to track their weight were significantly more likely to actually lose weight.

I think it goes without saying that losing weight is a healthy thing for almost anyone to do.  Sure there are a few lightweights out there but they are definitely the minority.  If your BMI is in the overweight range (strangely mine is at the moment), then you might benefit from tracking your weight online.  You can check yours using this BMI Calculator.

Here is a free resource Fitday.com to do just that.  You can set up your profile, then start recording your weight.  I’m going to try but I’ve found just using a spreadsheet is the most effective thing for me.

Last year I ran over 1400 miles which is probably more than a large majority of the general population. On January 1st, I weighed 195 pounds. A year later on December 31st, I weighed 196 pounds. It seems all that joggling I did had no effect on my weight.

This is a bit surprising to me, however, according to this article in the New York Times about exercise and weight loss, it shouldn’t be. It turns out that “an overwhelming body of research shows (few people) achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits.”

In their study, they tested athletes for the “afterburn” effect. This is a phenomena that people commonly believe helps athletes burn calories even after they stop exercising. The exercising supposedly revs up their bodies making them bun additional body fat throughout the day.

But the “afterburn” effect doesn’t exist.

They could find no evidence of fat burning on days when they exercised.

So, the reason I didn’t lose weight after running and juggling 1400+ miles is because I ate enough calories to replace all the ones I burned.

However, my joggling hasn’t been in vain. Even if it doesn’t lead directly to weight loss, it does have benefits on my heart, blood pressure, and overall mood. And of course, it should help in my goal to live until I’m 107.

Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/noggin_nogged/485304838/