Eating right AND Exercise are both needed for successful fat loss....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 8-2-2011

There are people who say that exercise is not needed for successful fat loss. Eating right is all you need according to these people.

And, there are those who say exercise is critical for successful fat loss.

Which of these is correct?

They both are!

1. People who upgrade the foods and drinks they take in and include some careful but small amounts of calorie restriction can lose fat without exercise.

That’s particularly true if they are now eating a lot of packaged snacks, packaged desserts, commercial baked goods, and junk foods AND are drinking lots of soft drinks or diet soft drinks now. (Many severely obese and really fat people can lose a majority of their fat by eliminating these foods and drinks and eating real foods instead. It also helps to eliminate eating refined grain foods and gradually eat more and more nonstarchy vegetables each day.)

And there are people who do relatively well with exercise and what they eat who are still fat! (I should know as I was one of them until I added a bit of further food and drink upgrades and some calorie restriction.)

So the people who say that eating right is all you need for successful fat loss are correct or partly correct depending on how you evaluate it.

But there are some flaws too in the argument some of them make that exercise is not needed.

People who only use food and drink changes to lose fat usually find that they lose muscle and other lean body mass in the weight they lose.

Even worse, they are prone to overdoing the food restriction which triggers their bodies’ famine responses or they think of these changes as temporary until the fat is lost.

Then they not only gain the weight back but may gain back even more fat!

What about the reasons why they are trying to lose the fat?

Do they look better?

Do they feel better?

Do they have better self-esteem?

Is their health better?

Too often they don’t achieve these things with just eating better.

2. So the people who believe or say that: “Exercise is critical for successful fat loss.” are also quite correct.

There are several reasons this is true.

a) Starting with the last points first, these are important to know.

Consistent research shows that fat people who exercise are healthier than those who don’t. They even test as healthier in many ways than normal weight people who do no exercise at all! Best of all, that starts happening within a week or two – well before they lose that much fat.

As they keep exercising, they begin to have better and better protection from heart disease, type 2 diabetes (see our last post), some cancers, and both Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of mental decline. Their rate of aging slows down too!

Once people begin to improve how much exercise they do and how well they do it, they immediately have better self esteem. And, in addition to that, as they develop better circulation and neurotransmitters, they begin to feel better physically too.

And, they look better. They are more alert and move better even before all the inches of fat come off. Then too as they continue to exercise and they age more slowly, they begin to look better and younger than the people who don’t exercise.

b) Because exercise builds muscle and bone, strength training and interval cardio and moderate exercise done standing up like walking or tai chi mean that all or most of the weight you lose will be fat only!

c) Because such exercise reduces insulin resistance, leptin resistance, and elevated insulin levels, you will gain better appetite control and your body will store less fat.

d) The vigorous exercises and those that add some muscle mass cause you to burn more calories even when you are not exercising. They also burn a lot of calories directly even in short sessions which makes fitting in the exercise more doable. (See our last post for ideas on getting into exercise.)

e) Although exercise does not burn enough calories to allow you to pig out or eat the wrong things much more often, exercising most days every week DOES allow you to eat more and still lose fat.

That is a HUGE advantage in permanent fat loss.

It makes it far more doable for you to keep eating right when you aren’t too hungry all the time.

And, of even more importance, eating that much more because more exercise allows it -- tends to eliminate having your famine response get triggered.

Why is that important?

The number one cause of failure at fat loss is too much excess hunger. And, if that hunger is driven by your famine response, keeping off the fat can be like trying to hold back a building that is falling on you.

Why go there?

If you eat enough of the things that make you healthy AND exercise AND keep your calorie restriction relatively low, you can avoid excess hunger and the famine response. That makes your upgraded lifestyle sustainable and doable.

Then the fat you lose stays off!