Jamie Hale--

I was at the bookstore looking at some magazines when something caught my eye.  The subtitle read Hot Bodies Best Diets. I can’t remember exactly which magazine featured the subtitle but it was one of the popular tabloids.  I had two questions immediately.  What do they mean by Hot Bodies?  What do they mean by Best Diets?  According to the magazine Hot Bodies means skinny and Best Diets means diets that make you skinny.  I looked through the magazine and I found that celebrities use all kinds of different diets just like non-celebrities.  There was a common factor with all the diets in the magazine, calorie deficit.   A diet that results in calorie deficit does not necessarily mean a quality diet but it does mean weight loss.  In my opinion all quality diets share some characteristics.

The key factors in quality diets are:

Calorie intake (matters whether you’re consciously counting or not)
Consumption of sufficient quantity of essential nutrients
Consideration of individual likes and dislikes
Consideration of metabolic abnormalities
Occasional breaks from the diet
Recognizing that you don’t have to stick to the program
100% of the time to see the benefits   

Junk Food

Does consuming junk food (highly processed foods) make you fat?  That depends on how much junk food you eat and your average daily metabolic rate.  Isn’t junk food bad for your health?  That depends on how much junk food you eat and whether you have any metabolic abnormalities.    

Supplements

Do you really need to spend hundreds of dollars per month on supplements if your nutritional practices are optimal? I doubt it.  Let me re-word that…no, you don’t.

Supplements add to the program. They do not replace sound training and nutrition. Legendary protein researcher, Kevin Tipton, says, “There is no reason to recommend protein supplements per se because there is no evidence that supplements work better than foods.”

Coach Jamie Hale is a sports conditioning specialist, fitness author of 10 books, independent researcher and nutrition consultant. His scientific and critical thinking approach has led him to be nicknamed, “The fitness skeptic,” as he is well known for tackling fitness myths and encouraging critical thinking and debate on all matters of diet and exercise.

Jamie Hale is the author of Knowledge and Nonsense: The Science of Nutrition and Exercise. Visit him online at www.maxcondition.com

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