SSP 36. EPOC, Dieting for a Wedding, and Diet Sustainability - a podcast by Scott Abel, Mike Forest

Getting back on topic, we started with EPOC and exercise, but moved into a kind of “case study” of how to read biofeedback when you’re dieting for a wedding or some other specific date. Using an average female dieter (average age, height, weight, athletic background, etc.) as a kind of “case study” we talked about how much lethargy and hunger and so on is “safe” and how do you read that kind of thing safely?



This is an interesting question, because the Coaches can talk about “sustainable dieting” all they want, but if someone has a super important date coming up that they’re preparing for — and if it’s a wedding, then it’s one of the most important dates of many people’s lives — in the real-world people just are going to risk some metabolic compensation to look good. That’s totally reasonable, assuming you’re intelligent and you don’t go all out with an extreme very low calorie diet for your wedding, and instead you rationally balance your desire to lose weight and look good with an acknowledgment that your body needs to be treated well, and there will be more or less metabolic compensation down the road, depending on how you diet.



? MEASURING FAT LOSS & WEIGHT LOSS PROGRESS ?



How will I know I’m making progress in getting lighter if I don’t have an objective measurement?



Scott actually pasted this in to our list of questions at the last minute from an email — he wanted to emphasize again that many people need to forget the scale. As an indicator it’s often not as reliable as many people think.



Other things that matter more: having a reasonable amount of hunger but good energy, how do your clothes fit, how the mirror looks, etc.



Also, the danger of the scale is that it turns into a tool of self-judgment. It’s no longer being used rationally to lose fat.



? EPOC, OR EXCESS POST-EXERCISE OXYGEN CONSUMPTION ?



“Is EPOC [excess post oxygen consumption] really a significant factor of an exercise program?”



How much does EPOC really matter? Not that much.



Kevin: If you really want a yes/no answer, the short answer is basically, “No, EPOC is ‘not’ a significant factor.”



The longer answer has to do with “well, what’s the program? What are the trainee’s goals?” and is much more focused on long-term metabolic optimization than it is on counting the number of calories burned during some arbitrary number of hours after the workout.



A huge factor is the trainee: a young high-performance athlete with all their hormones revving is going to experience a different “bump” than someone who’s training to lost a bit of excess fat, by going to the gym for 40 minutes three times a week. This isn’t just “well the high performance athlete trained more intensely so they got a bigger bump.” No. It’s a total look at their athletic background, age, their hormone levels, their entire lifestyle and approach to diet. These things matter. Reducing your calorie burning to a single number, once you think of it this way, is absurd.



“EPOC” is often a longer-term thing.



?SITUATIONAL HYPER-METABOLISM?



There is such a thing as situational hyper metabolic environment, but often people discount the fact that, yeah, you’ll get this, but you’ll also see an increase in hunger.



As a coach you can’t let hunger run rampant, either, because that will lead to a rebound of some sort. (Coax the body and it responds… etc.)



A sign of this would be the client starting also to dream about food, or losing sleep over their hunger, or losing energy and having issues with hormones (i.e. lack of sex drive).



A good sign of hunger being too high is that there is no sense of satisfaction even immediately after eating.



Mike’s question, though, is what if someone is staying in that hyper-metabolic state?

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