IT DOESN’T WORK!

That is the long and short of it. This, of course, might be a surprise to an entire industry that relies on selling exercise for weight loss. I am going to explain this in two ways: 1) the actual role of exercise; and, 2) the research that backs up what I am saying here.

Role of Exercise

In the overall view of health, exercise (i.e., physical activity) is certainly an important component of fitness. In the jargon of researchers, however, exercise is a dependent variable. In a simplistic way, this just means that the results of exercise depend on other variables (e.g., diet, health status, age, gender, weight, fat composition, lean body mass, genetics, basal metabolic rate, etc.).

The best way to understand my comments may be to take a look at one of the biggest myths regarding exercise and weight loss. It goes like this: You can lose weight by exercising to burn more calories than you take in from your diet. This concept treats the body like a furnace: calories in, calories out. Accordingly, if you drink a 300-calorie beer, all you have to do to cancel out its effects on your weight is to do some kind of exercise that burns up 300 or more calories.

No, no, and NO! The concept would be fine if you were a furnace. However, you have a complicated array of biochemical processes. There is no way that the calories burned by exercise can ever get to the calories from something that you just ate or drank.

The role of exercise, therefore, is to get you to a level of fitness for whatever exercise you do. And the consequence of being in better shape from exercise is to increase your basal metabolic rate – i.e., the need for more food. In other words, exercise creates demand for more calories, so you have to eat more to give your body what it needs to stay in shape by exercise. See how these two variables depend on one other?

By the way, the converse is also true. If you eat less, as during a restricted-calorie diet, you will slow your metabolism and reduce your ability to exercise. This is why calorie-restriction diets can never work for healthy weight loss.

The Research

Before I delve into this section, I want to point out that all of the best research on weight management over the past 200 years is explained in the best book that I ever read on the topic: “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” by Gary Taubes. It is heavy duty book, not a froo-froo diet book. You can probably get it at a good price at Amazon.

On page 298 of Taubes’ book, he cites the history of concepts known as “multiple metabolic control mechanisms” and the “set point hypothesis” for understanding why neither calorie-restricted diets nor exercise would lead to long-term weight loss. These ideas started in the mid-1960s at Harvard University and the University of Geneva. This thinking actually originated in the 19th century, based on research with laboratory animals.

The bottom line is that exercise causes the body to compensate by demanding more food, which shows up as hunger. The good news is that, since long-term weight loss does not depend on exercise, the opposite is also true. You do not get fat from lack of exercise.

Wow!

Gazillions of nutritionists, trainers, doctors, fitness gurus, etc., might be outraged at what I am saying here. My recommendation is that they dig into the research for themselves. They will discover the same that I have discovered: Weight loss myths and dogma undermine serious and thoughtful exchange of ideas about how to lose fat. There is good reason why exercising for weight loss is a hard way to get results. It doesn’t work!

All the best for fat loss,

Dr. D

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Weight is a function of gravity. Yup, scientists know this and most other people do not. What this means is that you can be weightless in the absence of gravity.

However, no matter where you are in the universe, your body will have some fat. If you have a 30% body fat composition on Earth, you will have the same percentage on the moon. Okay, this may be a fun way to look at this topic. However, when it comes to weight loss vs fat loss, pay close attention.

The following article does a great job explaining what is important, what you body optimum should be, and how to get your own body fat measured:

The Importance of Losing Fat vs Losing Weight:

Did you know… That two people can have the same height and weight, but very different percentages of body fat?

Did you know… That as we age, we tend to gain fat around our organs (“visceral fat”) that can’t be detected by measuring “skin folds” or even with a scale?

Did you know… That chances are that if you are losing weight, you will lose muscle as well as fat?

READ MORE HERE…

All About Fat

The bottom line is that your health and fitness depend on keeping your body fat composition in an ideal range. Beware of any weight loss strategy that does not specifically address body fat loss.

All the best in natural health,

Dr. D

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The whole business of calories for weight management is so misused that I am astounded. As a scientist, I understand the concept of calories as a measure of energy. Energy in this case specifically refers to heat.

Consider this regarding calories: they are not useful for metabolism. Once food or anything else is converted to heat, it is no longer useful metabolically. In fact, calories are only directly measurable as units of heat. For example, the calories that are stored in the chemical bonds of glucose are measurable when released in a device called a calorimeter (see figure).

When 1 gram of glucose is burned in a calorimeter, 4,000 calories are released. (Oh, by the way, reference to the potential energy of food is technically as ‘Calories’ – with a capital ‘C’ – one of which represents 1,000 lower-case ‘c’ calories. In other words, 1 Calorie equals 1,000 calories [also called a kilocalories or kcal for short].)

A calorie is the amount of heat that is required to raise 1 cc of water by 1 degree Celsius, at room temperature and at sea level. So 1 gram of glucose can yield enough heat to raise 4,000 cc (i.e., 4 liters) of water by 1 degree Celsius.

Now Here is the Kicker…

You will never, ever get all the energy out of a gram of glucose. The 4 Calories per gram statistic that has become dogma is only retrievable in a calorimeter. The efficiency of your fuel-harvesting metabolism is probably between 10 and 20%, and certainly never greater than 30%, of that potential. At least a dozen factors determine what the efficiency will be for you for any particular food at any particular time.

A Ridiculous Comparison

Consider this: in a calorimeter a gram of starch will yield the exact same number of calories as a gram of cellulose, which is indigestible fiber. As you and I both know, starch is a source of metabolic energy (i.e., food) for people. In contrast, cellulose is not.

I know that lots of folks want to focus on the concept of ‘available calories’ – whatever that means. So we can say that cellulose offers zero available calories. We can also say that starch offers available calories. We just have no idea how many. It is going to be in the neighborhood of 400 to 800 calories (or 0.4 to 0.8 Calories).

What’s Really Important

Instead of comparing the metabolism of food with a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.

By the way, once you understand those factors, you will be very clear on why calories have nothing to do with obesity. I hope you chew on that comment for a while (pardon the pun), because this is the kind of thinking that will guide you to success in any weight loss or muscle-building program that truly works for a lifetime.

All the best in natural health,

Dr. D

The metabolism of fat – how we use it and store it – is truly fascinating. One of the mythologies of modern dietary recommendations is that eating fat will make you fat. This could not be further from the truth. Indeed, I have pointed this out recently to readers of my HCG weight loss diet blog. In thi post I explain what I like to have for breakfast, as shown in the photo to the right.

See the whole post here:

Eating After HCG – My Favorite Breakfast.

The reason that I bring this up here is that this is the kind of food that, if you had been eating it right along, would have prevented you from getting any extra belly fat in the first place. Weight loss and fat loss would be a thing of the past, because weight gain and fat gain would be nonexistent. The obesity epidemic certainly wouldn’t have happened. See what I mean when you read what I wrote there.

All the best in natural health,

Dr. D