Weight / Fat loss

Can you enlightened us? personally I figure that a natural diet and decent exercise is all that needed, but would like to hear what you have to said.

For all practical purposes, that's pretty much all you need to know. Eat well, keeping moving about, get some rest. if you need to lose weight, reduce the food a bit, up the exercise a bit. Within those simple parameters, do whatever works for you.

There's no need to focus on magic bullets or special techniques because a) there are so many variables it's never a simple cause/effect and b) the gains from little specific tricks (like upping your caffeine intake) are usually negligible compared to the effect of just eating a little bit less or doing a little bit more.

Our research could loosely be described as trying to answer the question "where does food end up in your body, and what are the factors that influence this?" The clinical link (gotta have that in grant applications these days) was that some patients who've suffered major trauma or infection can waste away, even though they are being fed all the nutrients they could possibly need*. Clearly, it's not as simple as "good thing go in, good things happen".

I'm glad people are interested in how they tick, but there's so much bullshit out there. The best weight loss "programme" is the one you can stick to without being miserable.

• we looked at healthy subjects too. Fed them radioactive cakes.