Another reason exercise is essential for fat loss....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 6-6-2012

There are many reasons why exercise is essential for fat loss.

True, you have to eat right and likely add a bit of extra calorie cuts in ways that avoid triggering your famine response to lose any fat at all unless you can exercise for 12 to 16 hours a day.

1.  The biggest reason to exercise is that vigorous exercise both adds muscle which burns more calories than fat. And even the few minutes a day most people have to do vigorous exercise will cause extra calorie burning for up to a few hours after you exercise.  That’s critically important since you can then eat a bit more and still lose fat.  And that in turn makes losing fat without excess hunger or triggering your famine response doable and sustainable.  That results in permanent fat loss.  (You do have to keep eating right.  Eating twice the calories in treats that you burn from the exercise will prevent this effect.  You may get away with one treat a month of this kind; but several a week or each time you exercise has dreadful effects.) 

2.  The other huge main reason to exercise for fat loss is that the exercise begins to immediately or with a few weeks to deliver many of the benefits people lose fat to get!  Your health and your heart health risk markers will improve.  You will look better and be more optimistic and proactive.  And, if you have a sex life, it will often get better.  Then if you keep eating right and exercise as a lifestyle upgrade, you get the fat loss and permanent fat loss too.  That will take longer, but these initial effects make it MUCH easier to do. 

That’s why exercise is a keystone habit.  It literally makes upgrading your eating habits easier also! In fact, I posted a few days ago on how researchers found that people who began to exercise were then much more likely to begin to eat right too,

3.  Here’s yet another critical reason exercise is essential for fat loss and permanent fat loss. 

This is the one this post is about.  And, it’s not one I’ve seen discussed much elsewhere. 

(Dr Al Sears did send out an email recently mentioning the effect which is what suggested this post topic to me.)

People who are sedentary or who only get some exercise on occasion a few times a month have been found to lose 3% of their lean bodyweight every decade.

Guess what? 

If you don’t add back or keep that much weight in your bones and muscles from strength training or interval cardio every week, getting fat is automatic. And every year you get fatter. 

You eat the same but the calorie hungry lean tissue you lose is replaced by more fat since it burns less calories.

Experts differ on how much this difference is but the lowest calories burned per pound of muscle in the range I saw was 6 calories per pound.  (For people just getting into exercise and those who do vigorous strength training and interval cardio each week, it’s likely more -- maybe even triple or quadruple that; but 6 calories per pound for sedentary people sounds about right.

Meanwhile fat burns about 2 calories per pound.

So if you start with 100 pounds of muscle at age 20, by age 50 you will have about 91 pounds of muscle left without exercise to prevent losing that 9 pounds.  (I picked the 100 pounds to keep the math simple. Larger men may have more and smaller women likely have a lot less to start with.  But, for this post, I wanted a clear way to show the effect.)

That means you will burn 4 calories per pound per day of muscle lost and thus 36 calories less for the nine pounds of muscle lost. So simply by eating just the same number of calories each day, you’ll gain 3.75 pounds of fat each year.

Without any changes over 40 years that could be up to 150 pounds of fat.  Mercifully in practice it’s less than that and more likely to be in the 25 to 75 pound range.

But this is an almost invisible and non-detectable effect except for getting fatter and heavier.

The much better news is that you can entirely prevent this effect and enjoy slower aging and MUCH better health if you build up gradually to doing vigorous strength training and interval cardio each week and then simply keep doing it each week.

Similarly, if you lose fat, doing vigorous strength training and interval cardio each week will prevent this effect from causing you to gain some of that fat back!  That’s precisely why it’s essential for permanent fat loss.

(By the way, studies show that doing vigorous strength training and interval cardio each week gets better results for both health and fat loss than doing twice as much of only strength training OR twice as much of only interval cardio. 

Doing both is also more interesting and less likely to cause injury than overdoing one or the other. Plus you are also more fit than folks only doing strength training and stronger than people only doing interval cardio.)