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!

Lose more fat & build more muscle....

Today's Post: Thursday, 8-13-2009

Last week TIME posted an essay by a man who was doing a LOT of exercise and who still had more fat on his belly than he wanted. He raised the question whether exercise really helped fat loss.

And, on Monday this week, I posted on this: The truth about exercise & fat loss....Monday, 8-10-2009

I listed quite a number of things we know about why this might be so and, of much greater importance, what you might be able to do to make the exercises you do to lose fat more effective.

But there are 3 things I could have covered better: How to succeed with fat loss if what works for other people hasn’t worked so far for you; How exercise that builds muscle effectively makes fat loss work dramatically better, particularly in losing belly fat; & How to succeed in using exercise to build muscle when what seems to work for others had not yet worked for you.

Then, the very next day, virtually the whole issue of Total Health Breakthroughs covered those exact points. And, I thought they did an excellent job.

So, here it is!:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com ."

"A Fitness Trainer Who Can't Build Muscle?

By James LaValle, R.Ph, ND, CCN

Are you a person that works out but still has trouble losing body fat and/or gaining muscle?

If you search the web for how to build muscle, you are likely to find a lot of talk about eating plenty of protein. But I have found that while boosting protein intake may be needed and is sometimes helpful, if you do not respond well to exercise, very often there is a metabolic imbalance somewhere.

One factor that people almost never think about when it comes to building and maintaining muscle is SLEEP.

A few months ago, I had a fitness instructor ask me if I might know why he wasn't able to build muscle. Despite the fact that he used protein shakes, had a very regular workout routine and had worked out for years using the best of equipment, he just couldn't build muscle. He was also a little overweight with too high a percentage of body fat. A 30-something male fitness instructor can't put on muscle? Something is desperately wrong!

The first question I asked him was "Do you sleep well?" His answer was no; in fact he told me had sleep apnea. Strike one! When you lose sleep, you lose growth hormone production. In childhood, growth hormone makes you grow in every way. In adulthood, it's most important function is to make you build and maintain your muscle.

If you aren't sleeping well as an adult, your growth hormone production will be reduced and your ability to gain muscle from exercise will be greatly compromised. So make no mistake, getting your zzzzzz's is very important for your fitness.

If taking simple measures like reducing your caffeine intake and trying a natural sleep aid like melatonin or Seditol (an herbal extract we really like) are not effective, the most likely suspect is elevated evening cortisol, which most often occurs from chronic stress. To get the full benefit of a sleep aid, you also need to down regulate your daytime stress response, or address any other potential sleep confounders.

For sleep apnea, food allergies can be involved. So, we find switching to an elimination diet (low in common food allergens, especially wheat and dairy) is helpful. And it was for this trainer. So, first things first to improve his muscle mass -- we got him sleeping better.

The next thing we did for this trainer was look at his fasting blood glucose. It was on the high end of normal indicating he had some insulin resistance. Insulin is an anabolic hormone, so it can help muscle building. But if it elevates too high for too long after meals, it also builds fat stores.

To address that we advised changing to a low glycemic index/glycemic load diet. We also recommended blood sugar supportive nutrients like alpha-lipoic acid, chromium and magnesium (which also helps sleep).

It wasn't very long at all and he was losing body fat like crazy and building lean mass.

Had these measures still not worked very well, I would have dug deeper. Other problems I might typically find in a person who doesn't respond like they should to exercise are things like sex hormone imbalances and suboptimal thyroid hormone levels.
For instance, this trainer could have been low in testosterone. Testosterone is not only supremely important for muscle building, it also influences insulin and glucose regulation. Thyroid hormones drive the rate at which cells burn fat and glucose for fuel, so they profoundly affect a person's ability to burn fat.

We also evaluate GI health because it can be a source of inflammation and very disruptive to metabolism. In some instances, when people are just not responding well to anything we do, we test for heavy metal levels, which can affect thyroid function and insulin resistance.

So you see we have a whole host of things that could be involved in the inability to lose fat and gain muscle:

Thyroid levels
Sex hormone levels
Food allergies
Neurotransmitter levels
Chronic stress
Blood sugar and insulin regulation
GI health
And possibly heavy metals

Why is this important to understand? We are told that to lose weight and become fit, we need to eat less and exercise more. But it is not that infrequently that I see people doing just that, but it doesn't work like it should for them. They struggle in vain, exercising hard and often, and still they don't respond appropriately to the exercise.

These people need to realize it's a sign that something is wrong. If this is you, get to a practitioner that can help you evaluate possible underlying causes. It may take some digging, but you can get to the root of the problem, and not only help your fitness, but improve your overall health and vitality.

[Ed. Note: James LaValle is the founding Director of the LaValle Metabolic Institute, one of the largest integrative medicine practices in the country. Dr. LaValle is the author of 14 Days to Less Stress and Better Sleep, a revolutionary program to improve your sleep and banish stress for good….]”

The same issue had this article also:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com ."

“Weight Loss: The Real Secret to Weight Loss and Optimum Fitness

By Laura LaValle, RD, LD

Just as there are many "miracle" exercise products which deceptively promise an Atlas-like body in just a few minutes a day, in the food world there are promises of weight loss from super foods or "miracle" juices (think acai berry).

Unfortunately, there is no one food that will magically melt away unwanted pounds. However, the overall quality of our diet IS crucial to our success with weight management, and can make or break our fitness level.

So what dietary measures should you to take to support weight loss and overall fitness?

1. Reduce calories, especially from carbs. Studies continue to show that when it comes to losing weight, diet is by far the most important factor. To put it another way, studies have found that physical activity produces only minimal weight loss when calories are not also reduced.1

If you are a regular THB reader, you know that when it comes to calorie reduction, we believe that the most important calories to reduce are from carbohydrates. When compared head to head, diets that are lower in carbs and higher in fat and protein, outperform every time on weight loss.2,3

And it's especially critical to reduce your intake of sweets. Studies have indeed shown that calorie for calorie, high glycemic index foods (sweets and refined carbs) lead to less appetite control, greater calorie intake, and even reduced metabolic rate.4

The simple sugar fructose, which comes from fruit and fruit juices, is also associated with weight gain and increased appetite.5 The studies show that good weight loss and metabolic health are achieved with about 25 to 35% of your calories from carbs. That's about 110 grams of carbs on 1800 calories per day and 75 grams on 1200 calories per day.

2. Take in plenty of potassium. Believe it or not, potassium helps us preserve muscle. A recent study found that people who ate 3,540 mg of potassium per day or more preserved almost 4 pounds of muscle over a 3-year period compared to people who took in half that much potassium.6 This is enough to offset the natural losses of muscle that tend to occur as we age (called sarcopenia). It should also help us retain the muscle we work so hard to build with workouts!

Foods are highly variable in their potassium content, but the best sources are fruits and vegetables -- a ½ cup serving of beans averages about 500 mg of potassium. A 1 cup serving of fruit and vegetables averages about 400 to 500 mg. So ½ cup of beans, 1 cup of fruit, and 5 cups of vegetables per day will get your intake where it needs to be.

3. Take in enough protein. As long as you don't have any metabolic disruptions like lack of sleep, protein really helps support a healthy metabolism. For one, it provides the amino acids necessary to build and repair muscle. Resistance training in particular causes micro-tears in your muscle fibers, and the more you do, the more protein you probably need to build and maintain muscle.7

But even for people who don't work out as intensely, there's another reason to eat a diet that's higher in protein -- hunger control. Studies have shown that diets that are higher in protein lead to reduced appetite, reduced calorie intake and more weight loss than lower protein diets.8 The amount that achieved those goals was 30% of the calories as protein or 90 to 135 grams per day on 1200 or 1800 calorie diets, respectively.*

Having some protein for each meal and snack is a good goal. And if you exercise strenuously, you may want to add a post-workout snack such as a whey protein shake.

As several THB articles have pointed out, it's also important to choose organic protein foods as often as possible to reduce your intake of pesticides that can interfere with thyroid hormones and induce insulin resistance.

As you can see, it's not just the amount of food you eat, but the types of foods you eat that can have a huge impact on weight loss, muscle retention, and your overall fitness. This can take some planning, but the benefits are well worth it!

For help on implementing a diet that is lower in carbs, but still high enough in potassium and protein, I recommend our recent e-book, The Metabolic Code Diet: Unleashing the Power of Your Metabolism for Lasting Weight Loss and Vitality.

* Caution: Anyone who has failing kidneys should consult their doctor before increasing protein intake.

References

1. Fabricatore A and Wadden T. Clin Diab. 2003. 21(2): 67-72.

2. McCauley KA, et al. Diabetalogia. Jan 2005. 48(1):8-16.

3. Gardner C, et al. JAMA. 2007. 297(9):969-77.

4. Agus M, et al. AJCN. Apr 200. 71(4):901-07.

5. Teff KL, et al. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2004. 89:2963-72.

6. Dawson-Hughes, B, et al. AJCN. Mar 2008. 87(3): 662.665.

7. Lemon P. J Am Col Nutr. 2000. 19(90005):513S-521S.

8. Weigle DS, et al. AJCN. Jul 2005. 82(1):41-48.

[Ed. Note: Laura B. LaValle, RD, LD is presently the director of dietetics nutrition at LaValle Metabolic Institute. Laura and her husband, Jim LaValle, R.Ph, CCN, ND have developed the powerful and life-changing Metabolic Code Diet – containing step-by-step, easy to follow recommendations for harnessing optimal metabolic energy and turning your body's chemical make up into a fat-burning furnace….] “


X* X* X* X* X* X* X* X*

So, if your exercise routine hasn’t helped you to lose fat or build muscle yet, here are some ideas and strategies that can help in addition to those we listed on Monday.

The truth about exercise & fat loss….

Today's Post: Monday, 8-10-2009

Last Thursday, TIME online news published an essay by a writer who does an enviable amount of exercise but still has more tummy fat than he’d like, titled:

“Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin.”

He said, “I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out?.”

But exercise does help some people lose fat AND abdominal fat.

So, what’s going on here?

It looks like a paradox; but it’s really not.

Here are the two seemingly opposed truths about exercise and fat loss.

1. What kind of food you eat and how much determines how fat you are and whether or not you lose weight much more effectively than exercise. Exercise is not necessary to lose fat. Starved concentration camp victims are NOT fat even if they get no exercise.

And, as TIME essayist found out, if you eat too much of the wrong kind of food, you can do quite a bit of exercise & still be fat. (That happened to me too. So he IS correct about that.)

Weight Watchers point system, based on their considerable experience, shows this quite clearly. Their system showed I WAS less fat because of my exercise. But to lose more, I had to eat less total food calories and points each week.

When I cut the amount of points I ate by eating MORE nonstarchy vegetables and drinking less beer and wine while continuing to exercise as I had been, I gradually lost 30 pounds and kept it off as long as I maintained those 3 things.

What kinds of food you eat also is critical. Lean protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables and some low glycemic fruit tend to keep off excess fat.

Conversely, high glycemic foods and drinks and artificial sweeteners tend to prevent fat loss, slow it way down, reverse it, increase belly fat, and create disease even if you exercise – although exercising too does help minimize these effects. So, one key to losing fat and keeping it off is to never drink soft drinks and never or almost never eat foods made from refined grains.

2. But whether or not you exercise, and if you exercise how much, and what kind of exercise you do, as a practical matter -- is critical in losing fat effectively, keeping it off, losing all of it, losing tummy fat, and whether or not your health and quality of life IMPROVE from your fat loss or actually get worse in some ways.

For example, if you lose fat by eating less alone, much of the weight you lose will be muscle, bone, and other lean tissue AND you will lose LESS fat than the same eating style and weight loss would have done had you also done the right kinds of exercise.

And, the track record is quite clear that your chances of keeping off the fat you lose drop like stone, if you don’t also exercise. Close to 95 % of the people who have kept off over 30 pounds of weight loss after five years not only exercise, they tend, like the TIME essayist, to do a good bit of exercise.

Similarly, the track record is also clear that people who also exercise get massive additional health benefits, including increased longevity and freedom from disease from fat loss plus exercise than people who lost the fat by eating less only.

Lastly, people who do strength training and interval cardio and do such vigorous exercise several days each week, lose more fat, lose it faster, and lose more belly fat than people who only do less strenuous exercise, even if it is a very large amount of running or walking alone.

The work of one man in particular really helps to understand the most accurate overview of this subject.

“Dr. Jean Mayer ….was a nutritionist whose work helped clarify the nature of hunger and obesity….”

What he found was so striking, everyone who wants to be less fat should know of it.

He found that if you exercise in what was a normal range for our original hunter-gatherer ancestors, between half an hour a day of exercise and a bit over 8 hours a day, your calorie intake tends to be virtually perfect, as you exercise more you eat more in very close balance while if you exercise less, you eat less, again in almost perfect balance.

And, to lose fat by exercising to the point you begin to be too tired to eat more and lose fat from just more exercise, takes over 8 hours a day.

BUT, and this is HUGE, if you are sedentary and get no exercise at all or too much below the half an hour a day level, you will be hungry for MORE calories than you burn and you WILL be fat.

That’s one of the main reasons that permanent fat loss is close to impossible if you don’t exercise at all.

And, as the dessert loving TIME essayist found out, some foods will tend to keep you fat even if you exercise.

Lastly, a lot of regular exercise CAN cause fat loss.

In his relatively new book, “The Skinny on Losing Weight Without Being Hungry,” medical obesity specialist, Louis Aronne, MD, tells of a woman patient who followed his eating advice as well as she could and lost 20 pounds. That was enough she was healthier and pleased. But it was all he thought she would lose. Then she came in a few months later for a follow up visit and SHE HAD LOST ANOTHER 30 POUNDS! She had NOT made ANY changes to her diet. Dr Aronne was really curious what she HAD done to cause this added fat loss.

He finally asked enough questions to discover the answer. It seems she had switched from driving to and from work each day to commuting by train. Each morning, she walked to the train and then from where it stopped to her work. Then she walked back each afternoon. Each day she walked 2 miles total going to work and another two miles going home. So she was walking 20 miles a week every week that she had not been doing before.

She both burned 2,000 new calories a week and guaranteed she got enough exercise to get into the healthy range that Jean Mayer found. Then, when she continued to eat health OK low glycemic food and NOT eat high glycemic junk foods, she lost the additional 30 pounds.

So, bottom line, if you want to lose any of your excess fat, you must do better at eating right and may well need to eat less, particularly in total calories.

But, if you want to have your fat loss help you be healthy, lose all your excess fat, and if you want to keep off the fat you lose, by all means exercise too!

Exercise and Fat Loss....

Today's post: Tuesday, 2-10-2009

Yesterday we posted the wonderful news that even one minute a day of really vigorous exercise has blood sugar lowering and other health benefits.

There is also evidence that vigorous exercise whether in a competitive sport such as playing soccer or basketball or in progressive strength training or in interval cardio or in faster dancing or in martial arts training done fast, all tend to help you lose fat best. This is because they boost your metabolism after you stop actually doing them, sometimes for several hours. Also, most of them, particularly progressive strength training, add to your muscle mass and how many more calories that muscle burns than fat. So, in both ways, such vigorous exercises are extra effective in helping you lose excess fat or prevent you from gaining it.

However, Weight Watchers and other experts in fat loss have found that to lose weight and keep it off, simply doing more total exercise each week is also important They found that it tends to take a lot more exercise to be effective in helping you lose fat than most people think. Exercise can help enormously in losing fat. And almost all the people who succeeded in losing fat and keeping it off exercised while they lost the fat and still exercise now. But for best results you do need a lot of exercise.

For example, today, Reuters online health news had a story titled:

“Thirty minutes a day of exercise? Better think 50”
They quote these two “updated guidelines issued by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).”


1. “…..evidence published after 1999 indicates that between 150 and 250 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity is effective in preventing weight gain greater than 3% in most adults but will provide "only modest" weight loss.”

2. “Greater amounts of weekly physical activity -- in the order of 250 minutes or more per week -- have been associated with "significant" weight loss, the ACSM notes. Overweight and obese adults will most likely lose more weight and keep it off with at least 250 minutes per week of exercise.”

And, the story adds this from those guidelines also.:

“The ACSM also recommends strength training as part of a health and fitness regimen. "Resistance training does not enhance weight loss but may increase fat-free mass and increase loss of fat ...and is associated with reductions in health risk," the writing committee notes.”

I find a more flexible guideline to be the number of calories directly burned by an exercise.

Walking is a “moderate intensity physical activity” at a 20 minute per mile pace which burns about 100 calories in that time. So, 150 to 250 minutes of walking per week translates into 750 to 1250 calories of exercise per week. That’s 7.5 to 12.5 miles of walking a week.

And, more than 250 minutes of walking is more than 1250 calories a week. That’s more than 12.5 miles a week of walking.

This correlates nicely with the research done years ago which found that the healthiest people were those who got 2,000 to 3500 calories a week of exercise. And, that even as little as 500 calories a week of exercise produces 40 % of the health benefits of doing 2,000 to 3500 calories a week of exercise.

In addition, many writers and fat loss experts have recommended about 3500 calories a week of exercise as ideal for the best results in losing fat and keeping it off.

You can get 3500 calories a week by walking 5 miles once a day. One person who was successful in losing well over 100 pounds did that or something very like it. Another person who lost over 100 pound to this day walks something like 3 miles a day for 2100 calories a week and does about 700 calories of strength training and 700 calories of interval training each week also. So his total is also about 3500 calories a week of exercise.

The second person is much stronger and more aerobically fit than the first one. But both were successful at losing over 100 pounds of fat. And, both have maintained that fat loss in part because they still eat right and in part because they still get 3500 calories a week of exercise.

(Note that while more exercise than 3500 calories a week does burn more calories, it also begins to be enough to produce overuse injuries and can overtire you or simply take too much of your time each week. So while something like 3850 calories a week of exercise may work well and be sustainable, 5600 calories of exercise a week may not be sustainable. That’s important since if you have much fat to lose, you need to plan on continuing to exercise both to do it long enough to lose all the fat and to keep off the fat you’ve lost after that.)