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.)

The many reasons exercise is essential for fat loss....

Today's Post: Friday, 5-6-2011

Why would people think it wasn’t!?

A. Actually, there are three good reasons why some people believe exercise isn’t essential.

The conclusion is incorrect.

But here are the three reasons it can look that way.

1. Eating fattening foods is a bigger force for most people than burning calories from exercise.

So, if they exercise and still eat junky foods with a lot of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and refined grains and drink soft drinks, exercise looks ineffective. That’s because that stuff is so fattening, it overpowers the effect of exercise.

2. People who don’t do enough of the right kind of exercise don’t lose as much fat, so they may not notice the fat loss.

Exercises that build muscle or cause you to burn calories for hours after you exercise in addition to what you use while you exercise are far more effective for fat loss.

So, even if you do a good bit of exercise, if you only do moderate exercise, you often get much less effect on your fat loss.

The good news is that the kind of vigorous exercise that builds muscle or causes you to burn calories for hours after you exercise actually can take LESS time to do each week than doing a lot of moderate exercise. So it actually burns MORE calories in less time.

It also is more effective at lowering high blood sugar and keeping your insulin effective. And, it also lowers your average insulin level so your body deposits fewer of the calories you eat into fat storage.

What kind of exercise does this? It’s either fast enough to cause you to concentrate and make a strong mental effort or you make a very strong effort even if you move slowly.

Interval cardio such as these examples is one way to do this:

Several sets of fast jump rope or running four 220 yard or 200 meter sprints or even doing a mile walk and alternating race walking with brisk walking several times during the mile all work. Doing four kinds of abdominal exercises as fast as you can with a very brief rest in between the four parts also works.

Strength training can also be interval cardio of it’s done fast. But medium speed or even slow motion strength training works when you have to exert enough force each time.

Take one simple example I use. I do pushups with my upper body exercises 3 alternating days each week.

On my first set, I only go most of the way down but NOT all the way down and make a very strong effort to do them fast until they get hard and then I go all the way down for the last 5 to 7 times. I do them until I just barely can do the last one.

After I skip a day, I do my pushups briskly but touch my face to the mat to be sure I go all the way down each time. I do them until I just barely can do the last one.

Lastly, after I skip another day, I do my pushups in slightly slow motion so I not only go down and touch my chin each time, I take at least a full second for each pushup. I do them until I just barely can do the last one. (The armed forces are beginning to experiment with using this last kind as a fitness test.)

But on each of these three days, I exert a lot of effort and fast or slow they all have these extra calorie burning effects.

Strength training also builds more muscle. Since muscle burns more calories than fat, you burn more calories even when you are resting once that happens!

3. The flip side of the fact that food can input so many more calories than most people burn up with exercise is that few people have time enough to do enough exercise to use moderate exercise alone to lose fat.

In World War II General George Patton won several battles and lost fewer men by having them arrive earlier than expected by having them march 50 or 60 miles a day for several days.

The Amish who farm as people did before 1900 also burn something like 10,000 calories a day.

Such people do NOT often stay or get fat!

But people who work or have families or other interests just don’t have that much time. Exercising ten or twenty minutes or a bit more a few times a week is often doable. Eight to twelve hours a day for exercise alone usually is not!

And, there are two other kinds of reasons why exercise is essential for fat loss.

B. People who get too hungry give up on their fat loss efforts. The only fat loss success is when you lose the fat and keep it off. But giving up prevents that!

When you do the right kind of exercise and eat the right things, the calories you burn allow you to eat more food. That makes it far easier to keep up your fat loss efforts because the more food makes you less hungry.

C. But the possibly most important reason to exercise is motivational.

WHY do people want to lose weight or lose fat?!

1. They want to stay or get into better health.

Eating the right things, slamming the door on fattening things at least 95% of the time, and making your body lighter and easier to move all make massive improvements in your health.

But regular exercise is perhaps even MORE effective at helping you stay or get into better health. Even better, research shows that you begin to get significant health benefits from exercise even well before you lose a lot of your fat.

Since better health is a long lasting and important motivation for fat loss and eating right. This is a very large benefit.

The tests your doctor does for your heart health will already begin to improve which can also help your motivation.

2. People want to feel better about themselves and look better to other people.

Exercise, particularly the kind that works best to lose fat, begins to make people feel more able and happier with themselves within just a couple of weeks of starting.

Shortly after that, people begin to move better and with more control. So they look happier and healthier and begin to look better to other people.

That’s also critical to fat loss. Because that feeling better enables people to work harder and more consistently at eating right.

3. Lastly, many people want to improve their sex live by losing fat.

It’s not as widely known as it should be, but regular exercise improves the sex lives of BOTH men and women.

Your body releases more testosterone, other growth hormones, and neurotransmitters.

Your circulation is far better too.

So you feel better, you feel sexier, you feel all of your body better, and the sexual parts of your body get better blood flow.

So when you do regular exercise, when you have sex, it works better.

Conclusion:

In short, if you exercise and do the right kinds, you lose more fat; you are far more likely to keep it off; & you get less hungry from your fat loss.

You also will feel better, look better, be dramatically healthier; and have a better sex life!

I read that as an essential thing to do for fat loss!