The many ways exercise helps fat loss….

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-21-2009

Eating right in many ways is considerably more important to fat loss than exercise is.

If you eat badly and exercise, you’ll be healthier but still fat.

If you eat enough less and don’t exercise, you’ll be a bit healthier -- but not a lot -- and you may lose muscle and bone mass as well as fat, but you will become less fat.

However, you can’t lose very much fat and you are at a very high risk of gaining back the fat you lost.

To put it simply, without eating right, achieving fat loss is like trying to drive a car with no fuel. (Today, that fuel may be electricity, diesel, natural gas, or hydrogen instead of gasoline.)
You won’t go anywhere at all.

But losing fat without exercise is much like trying to drive with the brakes on. You won’t go very fast; you’re likely to need repairs; and it will be very hard to do. Worse, the second you stop pushing down the accelerator, your progress will stop.

Conversely if you eat right AND exercise right, you’ll lose more fat; you’ll lose it faster; you are much more likely to lose all your excess fat; and you are much more likely to keep off the fat you lose. Even better, you’ll be MUCH healthier; and your muscle and bone mass will stay the same or go UP. So, all of the weight you lose will be fat. You may even lose more fat pounds than pounds on the scale.

Here are some of the many reasons this is so.

If you eat (and drink) wrong, you’ll ingest a lot of high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, sugar, and refined grain foods and too much of health damaging fats. As a result, you’ll be hungrier for more calories and take in more calories than your body needs. Even worse, your insulin levels will go up and make sure the extra calories are stored as fat.

If you stop ingesting that stuff and eat health OK and lean protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables and savory spices and some health OK oils with some whole fresh fruit and a bit less whole grains or none as 95 to 98 % of what you eat, you will only be hungry for what your body needs after you get used to eating that way. Your insulin will have far fewer sugar surges get high enough you need your insulin to turn it down; and it will work much better when it does. That means on those days you do eat a bit too much, far less of the excess will be stored as fat since your insulin levels are less. (High insulin levels cause fat storage.)

Vigorous exercise makes keeping your insulin levels down easier and your insulin effective. By exercising, you can eat more calories and still lose fat without having to eat so much less. Even better, if you include vigorous exercise, even a little bit most days, from exercises like strength training, interval cardio, or jumping rope, your insulin will work even better and both your insulin and blood sugar levels will be lower still. That stops fat storage from happening.

Studies also have found that this kind of vigorous exercise burns calories for up to several hours after you stop doing it, not just while you are exercising. Even better, such exercise tends to burn your belly fat first! That effect helps you to look better and protects your health better than just losing fat in other places.

In addition, since you don’t have to starve to lose fat, and you only have to eat right or cut just a bit to lose fat instead of having to eat a lot less, it’s much easier to do. But of even greater importance, this effect prevents your body from going into famine response mode.

Famine response mode causes your metabolism to slow down and quadruples how hungry are.

That stops fat loss in its tracks. That keeps you from losing more fat even if you want to and need to. But even worse, for most people it causes them to regain all the fat they lost.

So, yes, it IS true you have to eat right to lose fat at all.

But if you also want to stay healthy, never have fatloss be too hard to do, lose all the fat you need to lose, and keep it all off, it will pay you well to exercise regularly and to do at least 60 seconds a day of vigorous exercise every day.