Tony K's Blog

BMI is such a bad metric for measuring obesity. Better would be FMI which instead of the weight/ht^2 is weight*body fat%/ht^2 or BMI * body fat %. Or how about simply body fat percentage. It is a lot more relevant to the measure of obesity. There has been some recent press about how people with high BMIs might be healthy and people with low BMIs might be unhealthy. Well duh!!! The following article talks about people who are "skinny fat." Normal Weight Obesity: An Emerging Risk Factor For Heart And Metabolic Problems More than half of American adults considered to have normal body weight in America have high body fat percentages -- greater than 20 percent for men and 30 percent for women -- as well as heart and metabolic disturbances, new Mayo Clinic research shows. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic s...

Here is my current weight loss progress. It has been going great, but in early May I hit a bit of a plateau, so I decided to shock my system with a PSMF diet as outlined in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook . You can see from the chart that it restarted my weight loss and I hit 200 in the first week of June. I am now tapering off that diet and I will work towards a more moderate loss of about 0.5 - 1 lb per week while working harder on my fitness regimen. I hope to get down to about 180 by the end of the year. I think a good target weight range for me is 180 to 185 lbs. I had a physical about a month ago and had a lot of good news. My blood pressure had been in the high range, pushing hypertension for several years. It was in the 140-150 over 90-100 range. In early May it was 124/70. That is darn close to good on the systolic and the lowest diastolic I have ever had. I also did the full blood workup and those results were very encouraging too. My triglycerides, which had been extremely hig...

Previously, in January 2008, I reported that I was at 219 lbs and about 20% bodyfat. Last week I weighed in at 211.8 and somewhere around 15% bodyfat. My rate of weight loss is not huge, but the decrease in bodyfat is really encouraging. Given the inaccuracies of bodyfat measurement, it is really hard to know if I went from 20% to 15% of 19% to 17%, or some other combination, but the main thing is to see the decrease over time. I am hoping to be down around 13% by mid-year. I recently read Good Calories, Bad calories by Gary Taubes. It is hard to read, but has led me to believe that the US Government guidelines for low-fat eating are completely out of whack. I have been following a regimen similar to what is laid out in Emotions for Engineers . I am continuing to work hard at the gym and my weightlifts are actually increasing (very slightly), rather than decreasing with my weight loss. This is really sweet. The good news is that I appear to not be losing my hard-earned muscle mass. I...

Seth Roberts of Shangri-La diet fame interviewed Gary Taubes who wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories . Fascinating stuff. http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhm4f3rg_36gg4956dm&pli=1 GARY TAUBES Interviewed November 30, 2007 by Seth Roberts [part 1] INTERVIEWER I just spoke to someone who reduced the carbohydrate in his diet, for various reasons, including your book. He found that his performance on mental problems started improving again. It had stopped improving; it had been constant for a long time, and then he started getting better. So it may be that when you reduce the carbohydrate in your diet, your brain starts working better. TAUBES Well there is evidence that your brain works more efficiently on ketones, as does your heart. So if he reduced his carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, he probably increased the level of ketones in his blood. But I'm just speculating here. INTERVIEWER: The book seems to have had an unusual beginning. You’d been writing about salt, and ...