I bet you’ve heard this one before – a calorie is a calorie. So eating 100 calories worth of Cheezy Poofs is the same as eating a half-cup of cottage cheese, because they are both roughly 100 calories, according to this logic. Well, as I have mentioned before, nothing could be further from the truth.
In a 1957 (!) study, three groups of people were put on low calorie (1000 calorie) diets. The first group ate 90% of their calories in fat, the second group ate 90% of their calories in protein, the third group ate 90% of their calories in carbs. Guess which group actually gained weight, despite only taking in 1000 calories per day? Yep, the carb group. The other two groups lost between 0.5 to 1.0 pound per day!
Several studies have been done since, all coming to the same conclusion – low carbohydrate diets result in significantly greater fat loss than low fat or low calorie diets. In fact, in several of the studies, the low carb groups were consuming more overall calories than the high carb groups and losing more fat.
So low carb diets become the next entry on the list that we started last time of most effective fat burning techniques:
- Eating more often (shooting for 6 small meals per day)
- Resistance training
- Interval cardio
- Low carbohydrate diets
One last item on the list to be added next time…
