[bryony]

Three thoughts here.
3) Lastly, if weight is a problem, then I really have to urge you with all seriousness to consider discarding the following from your dietary intake:
Bread,
Rice,
pasta,
Root vegetables (potatoes, parsnips, beet, and more than a very few carrots)
Fruit, other than berries

If you get hungry between meals, snack on meat, cheese, or brazil or macademia nuts. (high fat, low protein).

The ONLY reason mammals put on fat is because they eat more carbohydrates than they need.

The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy when the carbs consumed is less than the energy expended.

Therefore, if you eat no more than 30-100g of carbs per day (not less than 30 or you won't be able to metabolize your fat) then you WILL burn your fat. But, if you eat 1 gram more carbs more than the energy you expend, you WILL NOT lose any fat.

Forget calories. They are a nonsense. The way metabolism works, the only thing that counts are carbs. (The doctors are as stupid as the "climate scientists")

The only solid way to lose fat is with a lifestyle change based on very, very, few carbs.

Good luck!

B.

I want to offer a different opinion on diet and weight lose. From the ongoing research I have done, I think Bryony is half (Well, maybe 2/3's but make up your own mind) right. Calorie counting is pretty frustrating and futile up to a point. Obviously, if you only need 2000 kcal's/D for your lifestyle and you are ingesting 4000 kcal/D then you WILL have a weight problem. But if you are talking differences of only a couple hundred kcal's per day, then I agree it makes little difference and it's not worth the effort.

From my research, it seems that processed foods, especially refined carbohydrates, along with low or no fat are the major problems with the modern diet. For optimum health, you should really focus on a high protein, low processed food/carbohydrate diet, without worrying about cholesterol and fat. These newer diet recommendations fly in the face of the last 50 years of dietary recommendations from most traditional authorities in the US, but sad to say, those previous recommendations apparently have little to no science backing them up. However, reducing your carbs while increasing your protein and fat (without increasing overall caloric intake) DOES have a substantial body of good research showing that it promotes optimum health of just about every organ system in the body. One of the big take home messages here is that dietary fat does NOT make you fat (overweight) when combined with a higher protein intake and low carbohydrate intake (especially refined carbohydrates.)

Some further believe that modern varieties of wheat that have been bred for mass production and long-term storage are further complicating the picture and need to be eliminated or at least severely reduced in our daily diets. This means little to no bread, pasta, baked goods and just about every food-like product (that isn't animal protein or dairy) that comes wrapped in plastic at your local grocery or convenience store.

Unfortunately, Bryony's understanding of human metabolism and the function of various tissues ("The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy..." is patently false as fat has other VERY important functions in the body in addition to energy storage) is as skewed as his understanding of climatic change. The idea that fat is utilized for energy production "ONLY" if you ingest less than a certain amount of carbohydrates is as wrong as thinking that there is a "fat burning" zone in terms of heart rate when doing aerobic exercise (interval training apparently has more overall health benefits than long duration low intensity aerobic training.) It is an over simplistic misunderstanding of energy metabolism in the body. But hey, don't take my word for it, check out this search (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fat+metabolism&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39) and in particular the following full-text sources:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2002.tb04278.x/abstract
http://www.springerlink.com/content/16n5nj6xqa819xc6/
http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/298/3/E449.full

The last reference in particular shows that it is the relative amounts of carbohydrate compared to fat in the diet along with metabolic adaptation that determines the relative amounts of body fat or carbohydrate utilization for energy metabolism.

Now, I can just imagine the flame attack Bryony is preparing for me, claiming an "ad hom" attack (the phrase is "ad hominem" by the way, which neither the last post that invoked one of his tirades nor this one is.) He will no doubt claim that he achieved quite remarkable weight lose on just such a low protein, practically no carbohydrate diet, and therefore his conclusions are Right. I agree, one can lose weight on a diet like that, but I submit that a preponderance of research suggests a diet like that neither promotes optimal health nor is sustainable on a long term basis. In my opinion, if you want optimal breast growth, you should promote optimal health. On a long term basis, aberrant/fad diets do not promote optimal health and therefore do not promote optimal breast growth.

Flame on Bryony!

Wow. What an outburst of snide bitterness. Didn't know you had it in you Chris (not so honey today). Was the comment on my supposed lack of knowledge about climate change really necessary? I think the worldwide disinvestment there speaks for itself.... where was Obama during Rio+20?

As for the pedantry about the uses of fat, yes, I was being simplistic in terms of weight gain and loss, and if you call a lifestyle change of over 2 years now a "fad" diet, then I think you are showing a bit of bigotry. The point I was making, as you probably know, is that the massive obesity we are suffering in the West is pretty much solely due to the medical orthodoxy promoting carbs over protein using as flawed a hypothesis about cholesterol w.r.t heart attacks as computer models failing consistently in their prediction about global warming over the past >10 years. How's your BMI lately?

You also must be well aware (since you are so fond of it) that ad-hom is as popular an abbreviation of ad-hominem as tv is of television.

As we are discussing fallacies, I think you are guilty of a straw man (misrepresenting an opponent's position so as to more easily refute it) here aren't you? What's with all the predictions of my future "tirades"?

That "preponderance" of research you refer to is probably as reliable as the "consensus" of climate researchers papers... you know the ones who have all their friends on the peer review groups rejecting the papers that they don't like, and getting the editor of a journal fired after publishing one that they disagreed with? Have you even read the "climategate" email leaks? I have.

Anyway... I think the hormones must be working... this sure looks like PMT to me!

B.