A couple of weeks ago I came across an article by Nadja Hermann on the guardian website bringing a few excerpts from her new book - The Fat logic. They resonated with me and I bought the book. I’ve since read it and found it really refreshing in her approach to dispelling of the 1001 weight loss theories with meticulous research and just driving home the simple truths that I’ve trained my brain to ignore for years. None of it was rocket science but somehow it hit hard. I’d recommend it if you need a kick up the bum to get started / keep going ( although I’d say she could fit the book in half the pages - once I went past the half way mark there didn’t seem to be much new info)
The gist of the book is this :
- whether a person puts on weight or not is a zero-sum of whether the amount of energy one puts into one’s body is the greater or lesser than what we need.
- she dispenses of the myth of slow metabolism( lots of scientific sources backing her up there)
- all diets are just a shortcut - a method of effectively consuming fewer calories ( whether they be carbs or fats or proteins etc). They sell us on an ‘easy’ way to do just that, but the bottom line is that they all aim for the same.
- very low calorie diets are not harmful to an individual who carries more weight than they need
- being overweight is seriously bad for us. Robbing us not only of years of life, but more importantly - healthy years.
- how much weight we lose is not magical or mysterious. To lose 1lb of fat from our bodies we need to consume 3500kcal less than our body needs. If you lose more, it’s more than likely water. I think this one hit hard after many experiences with slimming world etc where a weekly weight loss of 10lb or more would be deemed fine where to actually loose that much FAT one would need to cut out 35,000 kcal ( with daily average for many overweight people being no more than 3000kcal)
There is a lot more there and I keep thinking on the bits I read so keen to compare notes. Anybody else read it?