Lotta love on the Rob Wolf blog
Nick W
Posted December 11, 2009 at 2:31 am | Permalink
I posted the following on the Affiliate blog, I’m not sure if it’ll be approved or deleted so I’ll cross-post it here. The first paragraph is a quote from Glassman, the rest is my response:
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“Robb,
The difficult thing about sputtering infantile rage as a business tactic is that it serves no winnable strategy. You are still confused by the logic of quality and quantity in clinical nutrition, their remarkable interdependence, and our track record on the subject. Your claim that people have gotten results abandoning the starting proportionality makes my point (reread the parts about accuracy and precision and you’ll see that manipulating, massaging, or drifting (or “abandoning”) the starting proportionality is essential to clinical nutrition and dialing in a diet. We differ in that your public claim is that weighing and measuring do not work and are not useful. That you think you can do without weighing or measuring food and clients is proof to me that your claims about your education and being a scientist both need examination. BTW, I’ve seen your CV and so have a lot of other people.”
The problem here, Greg, is that this isn’t an accurate reflection of Robb’s position at all, and it’s a bit rich to snipe about “bad reading” on Robb’s part only to twist 5 years’ worth of Robb’s forum posts, nutrition certs, Journal articles and blog entries so badly.
This isn’t the message that Robb promotes at all. He disagrees with Sears’ (frankly ridiculous) assertions that exact portion control is more important than food quality, preferring instead to eat real food over ding dongs and McDonalds burgers. You know, kind of like the first part of the nutritional portion of “World Class Fitness in 100 Words” that you wrote way back when, which is: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.”
That doesn’t mean he says portion control is unimportant. It doesn’t mean that Robb is telling people never to think about portions, or never to WAM. It’s simply a difference in priorities, and his view of “quality first, quantity second” seems to be shared by a LOT of people and backed up by a LOT of real world data. But Robb also talks and writes about the Zone, portion control and balancing macronutrients a lot; the difference is that he isn’t tied into pushing a fixed macronutrient ratio because he hasn’t got a dozen books to sell based on a single premise. So he can discuss the Zone and the Athletes Zone, but also modifications to it (e.g. the “42 Ways…” article, deleting carb blocks etc.), Intermittent Fasting, VLC diets, unweighed Paleo, Paleo + dairy and more. His typical recommendation is to get lean by controlling intake and to use performance and how you feel as feedback; you know, kind of like the second part of the nutritional portion in 100 words, which is: “Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.”
And if you care to look, you’ll never see a rabid adherence to any of these approaches; you’ll see informed discussion of their benefits, drawbacks and potential uses, along with the regular advice to “try it for a while and see how you look, feel and perform”. Robb isn’t trying to ram anything down anyone’s throat, he presents options and asks people to work out what’s best for themselves (ironically, exactly the message in Dave Castro’s journal video a few days ago). The examples he cites of athletes moving from strict Zone to unweighed Paleo and seeing improvements are just that – real-world examples. Again, this is a far cry from telling people it “does not work and is not useful”.
It’s a real shame to see this level of obfuscation and misinformation. Your condescending tone towards Robb is also unnecessary and childish. Sadly, you’ve taken a situation that was already badly handled and bodged it a little bit more. And I’ll brush over the irony of you calling out Robb on his “claims” to have gone to medical school when you have enough unsubstantiated claims of your own to deal with (where ARE all the CF-built 500-750lbs deadlifters by the way?)
Better than fuckin tv
food is medicine. that's why i'm drinking dr. pepper.
