Brad Pilon Why Diets Stop Working Page 1 of 20

Brad Pilon

Why Diets Stop Working

The Transcripts
By: Brad Pilon
www.EatStopEat.com
www.Nutritionhelp.blogspot.com

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Copyright © 2008 by Strength Works, Inc.

All rights Reserved

No portion of this manual may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including fax, photocopy,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system by anyone but
the purchaser for their own personal use. This manual may not be
reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Brad
Pilon, except in the case of a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages for
the sake of a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or
journal, and all of these situations require the written approval of Brad Pilon
prior to publication.

The information in this book is for educational purposes only. The

information in this book is based on my own personal experiences and my
own interpretation of available research. It is not medical advice and I am
not a medical doctor.

The information within this book is meant for healthy adult

individuals. You should consult with your physician to make sure it is
appropriate for your individual circumstances. Keep in mind that nutritional
needs vary from person to person, depending on age, sex, health status and
total diet.

If you have any health issues or concerns please consult with your
physician. Always consult your physician before beginning or making any
changes in your diet or exercise program, for diagnosis and treatment of
illness and injuries, and for advice regarding medications.

Brad Pilon, Strength Works, Inc.

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Why
Diets
Stop
Working


Welcome to Eat Stop Eat audio files. I’m Brad Pilon and this audio file explores what

could be the most overlooked area of research in all of weight loss science.

If you’ve ever wondered why sometimes diets just stop working, then you’re going to

love this audio file. All right, there’s a lot of information to get to, so let’s get started.

I want to talk to you about the idea of diets that don’t work or diets that stop working.

Now, you’ve probably heard this kind of rhetoric to some degree and it goes something

like this:

“I dieted and dieted and dieted, but all of a sudden, I wasn’t losing any more

weight. My metabolism had slowed to a crawl, and I looked like I was actually

getting fatter, then I started eating again and I started losing weight.”

Okay, this almost seems to be a dieter’s credo. And because of this everybody jumps on

the “fix your metabolism” bandwagon, treating your metabolism like it’s a physical thing

that can be broken or fixed (like the parts of a car). This however does not happen as we

know that weight training while dieting preserves metabolic rate.

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So what is happening?

After all, who am I to call someone a liar if they tell me that they’re dieting, but they’re

not losing weight?

So we have here a situation where something is obviously happening to affect their

weight loss progress, but the explanation for why it is happening is wrong.

Scientifically, the explanation of this phenomenon - the idea of metabolism slowing

down to a point where massive caloric deficit doesn’t cause weight - is incorrect. Again,

it doesn’t mean these people that are reporting these facts are liars, it just means they are

making a false assumption about what is causing this impaired weight loss.

In fact, I can remember being at a conference last summer, where I was sharing a cab

with a trainer who I thought very highly of. This particular trainer works very closely

with a lot of top-level female fitness athletes. He was convinced that fat loss slowed

down as they got closer to being contest-ready. The only way he could keep weight loss

progressing was to sporadically increase the amount of calories in these women before

their contest.

I told him that from all my experience and education that his explanation of their

metabolism slowing down simply didn’t happen. I wasn’t about to say that he was lying

about what he saw, after all he did weigh his clients and their weight loss was in fact

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stalled. This person is a very, very good trainer, so if he tells me that he has people who

are dieting and not losing weight, then it’s probably true. So what was going on?

Let me point out that in most weigh loss research, people never get down to the low

levels of bodyfat that a figure competitor hits for a show. Weight loss research typically

takes people from being ‘obese’ to being ‘normal’.

We very, very rarely take normal people and make them ultra, super-shredded lean like a

bodybuilder or fitness competitor. To be perfectly frank, making people lose that much

weight is just not ethical. You’d never get a review board to allow you to say, “Hey, I

want to take a group of people who are perfectly healthy at 15% body fat, and I want to

see if I can get them down to 6% body fat.” You’re not getting approval or funding for

that kind of study and hence there is little or no research on it. So this slowing of weight

loss may happen in the very extreme of weight loss, outside of what we can study in

research.

It was because of the lack of scientific research in this area that the conversation in cab

ride bothered me, because I knew that this one trainer wouldn’t lie to me, but I knew

what he was telling me didn’t jive with what we scientifically knew to be correct.

I was at a complete loss for an explanation. It started to tweak my interest and over the

last year, I began to see numerous weight loss programs promoting the idea of metabolic

slow-down and the inability to lose weight even during massive caloric deficits.

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Something is obviously going on here. These same programs all recommended periods

of refeeding as a way to combat this supposed metabolic slow-down and through

testimonials, and surprisingly, people are saying these programs worked.

Whenever faced with a problem like this, I do what any good scientist would do, I

investigate it. From my research, I knew that with Eat Stop Eat that metabolism wasn’t

the culprit here. Your metabolism isn’t slowing down, and it’s not getting damaged, so

something else must be going on. So I dug deep into the research and by deep, I mean I

went way back into the research. What I uncovered is probably one of the biggest

oversights in weight loss history, one that I think will absolutely revolutionize the way

we view weight loss.

It turns out that what I found is a very simple and well researched explanation to this

phenomena and it doesn’t include anything nearly as complicated as mysterious

metabolic slow-downs or down-regulation of fat-burning enzymes.

No, the answer has to do with the way your body handles water. Right now, you may be

thinking, “Water? What’s the big deal about water?” Well, think again. Remember the

largest component of your body is water. Water makes up between 45% and 75% of

your body weight, just rough numbers, and the variability between 45% and 75% is

primarily due to differences in body fat. Most tissues like muscles, skin, and your organs

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are all over 70% water, even adipose tissue, which is almost all fat, is still 10% to 14%

water in healthy people.

In medical terms, your body water is all the water content of the human body and it’s

typically broken down to different compartments within your body. There is your

extracellular fluid, ECF, usually meaning all of the body fluid outside of cells and the

remainder is called “intracellular fluid.” Intracellular fluid is also called “cytosol” or

“cytoplasm.” It’s the internal fluid inside the cell (which, coincidentally is where most of

metabolism actually occurs).

So the fluid balance in your body, all this water, is under constant flux. It’s moving

around. It’s changing and it’s maintained through many different mechanisms and

balances, some of which, I’m pretty sure, we still don’t even fully understand yet.

Nutrition and even the amount of fluid you drink, and your electrolyte balance are all

linked, and through ingestion, digestion and absorption, your body learns how to handle

the water it holds.

Studies show that humans are not the best at maintaining our water. We have limited

ability to excrete excess salt and that’s just under normal conditions. It gets worse when

we’re starving or when we’re injured. (Allison, et al, Clinical Medicine, 2004).

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So in any given day, there’s a lot of water in your body and it’s constantly moving in and

out of different organs and areas of your body. If you’re still not convinced that water’s a

big deal, think of it this way. For a lean 180 pound man, water makes up over 100

pounds in total body weight. Imagine that 100 pounds shifting around or changing

slightly. It’s a lot of water and it can make a big difference in the way you look. And

water has a big effect on the way you look.

If you go back through research, there isn’t much information about the phenomenon I’m

about to describe to you, but once you hit the 1950s, the ‘40s, the ‘30s, and even into the

late 1800s, you begin to see a startling amount of research on a condition known as

“dieter’s edema.”

Now, classically, the condition is called “starvation edema” or “famine edema,” which is

why it doesn’t show up in a lot of research during this era. We simply don’t do a lot of

research these days on starvation and famine. Nowadays it’s not ethical to starve a bunch

of people just to study what happens to them. But when you go back to a time when it

was ethical to study people during famines and starvation, starvation edema was a

rampant condition.

Back then, starvation edema happened when people were starving, usually in war-torn

countries. These days, it seems like people trying to get super lean, like bodybuilders and

fitness models, who are purposely putting themselves into a situation of semi-starvation,

are dealing with ‘dieter’s edema’ or ‘self-inflicted starvation edema’.

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Let’s investigate the condition known as dieter’s edema.

Edema, which is American English, and edema with an “o” in front of it (Oedema),

which is British English, used to be called “dropsy” or even “hydropsy.” Edema is the

increase of interstitial fluid in or around any organ. While this sounds really complicated,

an easy way to think of it is this: edema means swelling.

Anyone who has ever dealt with swelling or bloating knows that this extra water can look

a lot like fat. In fact, just ask any women during her time of the month, and she’ll tell

you how noticeable bloating is.

Throughout history, edema has been associated with prolonged semi-starvation, which is

a fancy way of saying ‘a long period of time without a lot of calories’. If you consider

what today’s strict, strict diet is, it’s simply self-inflicted semi-starvation. From famines

to hunger strikes to starvation in war-torn countries, wherever there is starvation, there is

edema. Sometimes, this edema can be severe.

This research and these findings go back really far into our history. It’s been reported of

conditions of edema as far back as 1915. Even more interestingly is the fact that this

starvation edema can conceal the loss of body fat. People can lose body fat without

losing weight or appearing to be leaning out because water is hiding the changes.

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This is worth repeating. The retention of water has been observed to conceal the loss of

body fat repeatedly throughout the course of obesity treatment. This exact quote (or

almost exact quote) can be found on Page 103 of The Biology of Human Starvation,

which is a text from the 1950s by Ancel Keys about the great Minnesota Experiment.

In fact, for more evidence of dieters edema hiding fat loss we can take a quote from the

Minnesota Experiment that was found in The Great Starvation Experiment, a book by

Todd Tucker. The quote goes like this, “Henry, who was a subject in the trial, along with

many others, saw his weight loss begin to plateau around the 20th week of starvation.

Henry and the other men were suffering from edema. The condition was, as researcher

Ancel Keys would put it, ‘One of the chief stigmata of starvation.’”

So there is some pretty solid evidence that we knew of starvation edema or dieter’s

edema back in the 1950s and that this was highly correlated in people who were on semi-

starvation diets.

In Another quote from the same book it was pointed out that “the edema occurred chiefly

in the ankles and knees, but also in the face, and when the subjects in the study pressed

their fingertips against their shins, the indentation stayed.” You can imagine the type of

water that you’re dealing with when you can press your fingertips into your shins and

leave marks!

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For any woman who has ever tried to compete in a fitness contest, you know how hard it

is to get your legs truly lean and “dialed in,” as they say. Dieter’s edema could play a

large role in this issue. To me it seems clear that you are dealing with something very

similar that’s being described in the Minnesota Experiment, of people retaining a lot of

water in their legs.

Ancel Keys would point out in his experiment that edema greatly complicated the weight

loss calculations he needed to make. As the body retained water, it made weight loss

slow, even as the affected subjects continued to lose fat.

So in the Minnesota Experiment it says right on Page 103 of Volume 1 that it was edema

that was preventing weight loss and it hid the loss of body fat. Incidentally this is the

research most nutrition guru’s point to for proof of metabolic slow-down (obviously they

haven’t read it).

This research is readily available. You could probably find it in any major University

library. It shows us, quite clearly, that one of the principle problems with a semi-

starvation diet is dieter’s edema.

Even better, in the exact same experiment, it states that in a surprising development at the

end of the research trial, when they begin to refeed the subjects, many of the subjects

began to lose weight even more rapidly than they were early in the recovery period.

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Again, we now have evidence that the whole bodybuilding trial and error method of, “If

you stop losing weight when you’re dieting, you have to eat more,” is actually correct.

The only difference between modern bodybuilders and a world class researcher like

Ancel Keys is that the bodybuilders got the reason wrong. Bodybuilders assumed it had

something to do with their metabolism, but in reality it was simply a method to stave off

dieter’s edema. Despite this mistake it is evident that through trial and error, a lot of

bodybuilder’s methods are right.

Okay, so we know that dieter’s edema exists. This is a very real phenomenon that can

cause drastic, unwanted effects while someone is dieting. Though we know it happens,

we’re not really sure WHY it happens.

So we can first look at blood for a clue, and during the famous Minnesota Experiment,

there was a slight absolute increase in the amount of plasma volume, but this doesn’t

account for the dieter’s edema.

Many people will point to blood proteins, like globulin and albumin as a cause and this

doesn’t really pan out either. A classic answer always has to do with protein during

starvation – prolonged starvation leads to a lack of protein amino acids, liver is unable to

maintain blood levels of albumin, osmotic balance disturbed – blah, blah, blah. It turns

out this doesn’t really work either.

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In the world of dietary protein deficiency like kwashiorkor, it’s been shown that it’s not

lack of protein that is the cause of famine edema in adults. In 66 patients given a very

low-protein diet, but being refed from a famine (increased calories), they lost their edema

as fast as those given five times as much protein.

In fact, it’s suggested that protein deficiency is not the cause of edema in kwashiorkor at

all and that there is no need to try to figure out how protein affects edema because it just

seems to be related to total calories in. (Golden et al, Lancet 1982).

It’s also been suggested that maybe just extra salt while dieting is the culprit; however, a

paper in the American Journal of Physiology in 1952 by Hegsted, completely disproved

this theory.

We’ve also looked at potassium and magnesium and electrolyte balances. We looked at

the constituents of food and it just seems to be, in general, refeeding a starved person that

gets rid of dieter’s edema. That seems to be really the only true way we have to prevent

and or reduce dieter’s edema right now. There is one other way I’m going to get to at the

end of this audio file, but for now through traditional dieting refeeding is the only way

you can get around it.

What exactly is happening with this edema? Well, on a purely qualitative evaluation, as

you lose fat from your fat cells, the fat being lost is replaced by a water-like fluid. As fat

leaves your fat cells, it’s replaced by water.

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Remember I told you that a typical person’s adipose is about 10% to 14% water? Well

when we’re looking at people who are in a semi-starvation state, it could actually be

much, much higher. The key factor here is that your fat is being replaced by water in the

areas where there was fat. And, this wouldn’t be noticeable using very traditional

methods of measuring body fat, like skin fold calipers. It would take some pretty

sophisticated measures to be able to see through these changes of where that water is

being positioned. Again, this isn’t new research. If anything, this was lost research.

If you trace this research back through time, you’ll find a paper by Bozeraad published in

1911 and it quoted a paper from 1838 by Shozet talking about dieter’s edema. The

interesting thing is that with dieter’s edema, there is actually no change in the absolute

amount of extracellular fluid. The edema represents a disproportionate amount of fluid

moving in the adipose cellular tissue.

While other areas of your body are shrinking, (like specifically the amount of body fat

that you’re carrying), the amount of body water that you’re carrying isn’t shrinking. It

gets to a point where it starts to hide weight loss even though the body water isn’t

changing, per se; it’s changing in percentage and is localizing itself where your fat used

to be. Not a good thing. It also occurs very gradually.

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Dieter’s edema usually starts after the first month of semi-starvation. At first, it’s very

transient, it comes in later in the day, and it’s gone by the morning. As semi-starvation

continues, this edema becomes more apparent and more massive.

So the longer you diet, even when your weight loss starts to plateau, you’re still losing

fat, but it’s being hidden by this edema. While it’s great that we finally have the answers

to why this happens and we know it has nothing to do with some metabolic loss slow-

down or malfunctioning enzymes, it doesn’t change the fact it happens.

If you’re a person who’s dieting and trying to get really, really lean, you still really don’t

want this to happen.

So how do you prevent it? What are your options? Well, first, as I told you, if you’re

going to follow a traditional diet which is just semi-starvation to get ultra-lean, it looks

like you’re going to have to do periodic periods of refeeding because there’s not a lot of

new research on this, we really don’t know how long you have to refeed for, but it seems

like the effect is fairly quick. Once you start eating a larger amount of calories, your

edema will quickly go away to the point where it looks like you’re starting to lose weight

again.

While this is a good solution, there is another option and this option comes from research

published as early as 1890.

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It was documented that a full-day fast did not result in edema.

That’s right, while semi-starvation causes dieter’s edema, total starvation or fasting, does

not.

So you could use the Eat Stop Eat protocol of flexible intermittent fasting and weight

training and you would not get dieter’s edema. What you’re essentially doing here is

periods of complete starvation, which don’t cause dieter’s edema, followed by periods of

refeedings. Even if, for some weird, crazy reason, you did get a little bit of edema, it

would go away.

So Eat Stop Eat seems to be the perfect answer to preventing dieter’s edema. But again,

if Eat Stop Eat isn’t your thing, and you want to follow a more traditional diet, then

research suggests that what you need to do is use short periods of higher calorie in order

to prevent or even decrease your dieter’s edema. What I love about this is a great

example of bodybuilders getting something right through trial and error.

A lot of bodybuilders know that if you’re going to diet for a long time, you have to do

periods of higher calorie eating. They got the reason why this works wrong, but they did

get the method right.

This brings up more questions, especially for bodybuilders. Bodybuilders always have to

use diuretics; it’s something that we often say is completely not needed, but for these

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people you now can see why diuretics become so popular in the bodybuilding and fitness

industry.

It also makes you question things like creatine and carbohydrate. Creatine is a very

widely used sports supplement that causes a very quick increase in body weight and we

believe that quick increase is mostly due to body water. For an average person who is

trying to get down from 15% body fat to 10%, it probably wouldn’t make a large

difference, but for someone trying to get down from 10% to contest-ready at 5% or 6%

bodyfat, creatine could be the difference, possibly from being very, very lean, shredded

and dry-looking, to maybe looking a little bit more watery. We don’t know. This

research simply hasn’t been done yet. And unfortunetly, outside of bodybuilding there

really is no reason to fund such research so it may never be done.

The phenomena of dieter’s edema also lends a bit more understanding to the popularity of

weight loss supplements. While we know that in true research, weight loss supplements

do little more than diet and exercise for weight loss, we do know that bodybuilders and

fitness models swear by them. They are convinced that leading up to their contest weight

loss supplements help.

Weight loss supplements right now are mostly caffeine pills, and we know caffeine is a

natural diuretic. You can now start to theorize why a diet pill may do the difference

between looking kind of watery and looking very dry for a person trying to get ultra lean.

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It also brings up the issue of what steroids do because we know through research that

during semi-starvation, not only does the water content of your fat change, but the water

content of your muscle also changes.

In well fed rabbits, water content is about 75% of muscle, but as they starve and lost

weight, the water content slowly and progressively increased to almost 80%. So we

know that the water level of muscle can also change and if that would happen during

semi-starvation, you can only imagine what would happen when you pharmaceutically

enhance the body with anabolic steroids.

Body water is a poorly understood area of human physiology when it comes down to

weight loss or specifically changing the way you look. There’s not much research on it

lately, but it’s an area that we know is something we have to pay special attention to

when we’re trying to get very lean. If you’re following a traditional diet, you’re probably

gonna need periods of sporadic higher calories if you see a slow down in your weight

loss. If you just ditch the traditional diet, and follow Eat Stop Eat using periods of fasting

combined with periods of normal eating you can ensure that you will never suffer from

dieter’s edema.

So there you have it, something that I believe is a complete oversight by the entire weight

loss industry, something that helps explain so many of the unanswered questions we’ve

had about weight loss in past 30 years, and something I believe can truly help anybody

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trying to get lean, make sure they get lean and not have the frustration of dieting without

losing weight.

I’m Brad Pilon, author of Eat Stop Eat. I hoped you like this special audio session. I

hope that the information in it helps you avoid dieter’s edema. Thanks for listening. If

you have enjoyed the information that I have just shared with you then please visit my

blog at www.nutritionhelp.blogspot.com.

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About the Author:

Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional from Ontario,

Canada. He received his Masters Degree in Human

Biology and Nutritional Science, where his main area

of interest was the effect of short periods of fasting on

human metabolism. His book Eat Stop Eat is the result

of this research.

To learn more about Brad’s nutritional philosophies please visit

www.nutritionhelp.blogspot.com

To learn more about Brad’s book, please visit www.EatStopEat.com

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