<p>The counter-theory on this – and believe me, it hurts to even consider it – is that exercise does absolutely **nothing **for fat loss. The theory says that, if the body is seeking a particular level of fat storage for whatever reason, it will automatically adjust to exercise by:</p>
<p>a) increasing appetite and consuming more calories to offset</p>
<p>b) reducing the expenditure of calories the rest of the day to compensate</p>
<p>Exercise is almost certainly beneficial to our overall health and fitness. I believe that it is important to make us picture ourselves as “fit” people, which carries over in how we approach food. It is, however, possible, that exercise makes absolutely no difference on fat loss as far as the calorie in/calorie out equation goes.</p>
<p>Not likely. I have seen plenty of people who exercised a lot for sports, but later exercised much less. The result is that they became fatter than when they were playing sports all the time.</p>
<p>As far as PE courses in schools go, many of them are not of very high quality, with little skill instruction, so that they basically became time when the ones who were already good at the sport got more practice beating the ones who were not very good at it to begin with (and get uninterested after losing all the time).</p>
<p>Run 3.5 miles and felt no interest at all in hitting the weights afterwards. At a certain distance, I think that the body is in run mode and doesn’t want to switch to weights mode for a while. So maybe some weights tonight at the YMCA. Knees feel fine too. I think that it is tennis that kills my knees.</p>
<p>I think that those exercising 15 to 20 hours a week have more trouble replacing the calories burned. I used to be in that category and could eat 4K+ calories per day and stay skinny as a rail. Right now I’m working out about maybe five hours a week. It might be interesting to see what happens at ten or fifteen hours per week.</p>
<p>Those workouts a long time ago were fairly intense too - a lot of tennis drills and some matches.</p>
<p>I do know guys that spend a lot of time doing cardio at the YMCA while they never lose any weight. The intensity levels are pretty low. I also know guys that play one to two hours of tennis per day and they are usually in the thin crowd.</p>
<p>Nobody has any idea why, but the research is pretty conclusive that high intensity, even for very short intervals, handily beats long-duration cardio for weight loss. One recent study compared interval training with 30 second sprints and a whopping four minutes recovery in between, to running (for an hour, if I recall). The intervals produced more fat loss.</p>
<p>If I had to take a total guess, I would consider that something about high intensity exercise triggers the kinds of hormonal/systemic propensity changes that Taubes is talking about. In other words, perhaps there is something about very high intensity exercise that makes the body less likely to store fat. It’s more than just calories. When you match calorie expenditures, high intensity interval exercise beats steady state cardio for fat loss.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s a hunter/gatherer thing - if you need to regularly do high-exertion stuff, it’s better not to carry too much fat.</p>
<p>It would be difficult for me to crank up my tennis because it’s something that has to be scheduled and at a particular location and then there are court costs. On the other hand, when I lost a lot of weight in my late 30s, it was mostly due to running. I may have been playing one or two times per week of tennis but I was running almost 30 miles per week. It maybe that there is some threshold on running (mileage, not time) where you shed fat and keep it off.</p>
<p>idad, thank you. Hopefully I can stay there. I figured prior to starting my job I was 120 lbs, I walked every day on campus, I also worked summer jobs that were rather labor intensive (lots of walking, hills, lifting, etc)… so sitting on my butt at work the past 6 years has really made me look and feel different. (not that I was even close to over weight, but just those couple of pounds more made me have to buy one size bigger clothing size and when it starts effecting my money then it’s time to do something about it!) Now that it says 120 again, that is a start! I usually try things and get tired of them after a week or so… I hope I stick with it this time around.</p>
<p>I had to smile the other day at work because an older woman that I’ve known since I started working there told me I looked wonderful and asked if I lost a few pounds. I think part of it was I had a new haircut which makes me look different but I felt happy to hear her compliment!</p>
<p>Ah. Got my NROL4ABS workout in. First one since Friday. Sailed thru in 65 minutes using the same weights I’ve been lifting:</p>
<p>2 x 30lb split squats
1 x 50lb one-arm row</p>
<p>2 x 45lb DB deadlift
2 x 35lb alternating bench press (head/neck on stability ball)</p>
<p>Felt good. Overall, most of the weights seemed a little more in my wheelhouse. The mountain climbers with hands on the stabilty ball may be the most intense ab exercise in the book. Wow, there is some burn in the abs doing 12 on each leg. The Valslide “painful pushaways” are no walk in the park either.</p>
<p>This is what I’m trying to recover from right now. I played sports all through high school and then quit doing anything through college. I put on about 40 pounds during that 3.5 years. Now I am doing what I can to put things in reverse…</p>
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<p>Could this be because they are given zero equipment and have one teacher for 50+ students? The education system has made it a complete joke.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for pointing us to the lecture by the Stanford Med School nutrition researcher. He was terrific. His research is right on point. And, I agree – that’s probably the best 75 minutes you could spend if you want to cut through the clutter on this diet stuff. </p>
<p>Now I know why Dean Ornish got so prickly when Gary Taubes brought up the “Stanford study” in one of their joint appearances. The thing that is most eye-opening is that the people on the low carb diet not only lost more weight than the people on the government recommended low-fat diet, but they also showed more improvement on every health marker from cholesterol to blood pressure and so forth – all the stuff used as the rationale for the low-fat jihad in the first place. This study basically blows up the policy of the US government, the American Heart Association, and so on across the board.</p>
<p>The differences among people with insulin resistance and not certainly lend credence to Taubes’ argument – that there is a physiology/hormone factor driving obesity.</p>
<p>For those who want the executive summary on the Stanford study, here’s the original press release announcing the results of the study as published in the Journal of American Medicine:</p>
<p>Looks like some Members of Congress are really trying to keep fit. It will be interesting to see if they can keep it up.</p>
<p>As have thousands of insomniac former couch potatoes, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and a crew of young Republicans have taken to the P90X workout routines with an ideological intensity. For the lawmakers, it’s a get-tough fitness dogma that mirrors their promises to pump up job growth and chisel away flabby federal programs.</p>
<p>They may think like Gingrich and Reagan, but “we want to look like Tony,” says P90X devotee Rep. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.).</p>
<p>In a nutshell, the hormone insulin makes fat stop circulating in the bloodstream where it is burned as a fuel and forces it to be stored in fat cells so that glucose is burned instead. Without insulin, fat is not stored in fat cells, but is in constant circulation. </p>
<p>What causes the production of insulin? Eating simple carbohydrates, which immediately spike glucose levels in the blood stream. Without eating sugar and simple carbohydrates, there is no mechanism for the body to store fat in fat cells. </p>
<p>Thus, by cutting sugar and refined flour carbs out of the diet, there is no insulin release, you reduce your calorie intake, you stop the storage of fat in fat cells, and you force the body to burn fat as the primary fuel.</p>
<p>Wow. Lots of interesting stuff to “digest” tonight.</p>
<p>Just finished dinner after my 5-mile run (managed to maintain 8:35 miles). Tomorrow I will have to squeeze a 5-mile run into my busy schedule that includes a mammogram, 8-hr work day, and a trip to the airport to pick up DD. Oh, and laundry. Lots of laundry, because I was busy tasting wine last weekend instead of doing housework.</p>
<p>The government / AHA recommended diet is not really that low fat, even though “low fat” seems to be the common descriptor. The recommended level of fat is 30% of calories, only a little below the more typical 35-40% of calories in American diets. And it leaves too much leeway for consuming junk carbs, junk fats (e.g. hydrogenated oils), and junk food that is high in both carbs and fats (and typically the junky types of both).</p>
<p>Ornish is one of those promoting a more extreme low fat diet, with less than 10% of calories from fat, and selective carbs and fats.</p>
<p>What is odd is that “Atkins” seems to be the name most associated with extreme low carb diets, even though it tends to be associated with “eat all the bacon, fried pork rinds, and butter you want, as long as you avoid carbs”. Other low carb diet advocates tend to be more selective with fats and emphasize healthier protein and fat choices, and Atkins’ more recent revisions became more selective as well.</p>
<p>Of course, extreme diets, whether low carb or low fat, tend to have high failure rates because many people find compliance too difficult.</p>
<p>BC, I always save the best part for D: she will be folding the undies and sorting those pesky little socks that always come out of the wash in odd numbers these are the laundry-related jobs I hate.</p>
<p>The goverment recommends a **maximum **of 30% fat and 10% saturated fat.</p>
<p>BTW, the government statistics show that average fat consumption fell from 45% of calories in 1965 to 34% of calories by 1995. The anti-fat jihad was working! The only problem is that obesity and heart disease went through the roof during that time frame. Heart disease should have gone down since smoking rates declined steadily over that 30 year period (smoking rates stopped declining with the widespread avialability of pharmceutical nicotine in the mid-1990s.)</p>
<p>However, total calories per person went up. So instead of reduction in fat consumption, what likely happened was that carbs/protein went up while fat stayed the same. Meanwhile, junk food companies got increasingly creative with new types of junk food to offer to people…</p>
<p>Also, it would not be surprising if exercise went down as people stopped walking around cities or doing farm labor and moved to car-centric suburbs during that period.</p>
<p>I find that very difficult to believe. Walking the aisles of every supermarket in America, there are low-fat versions of essentially every product on the shelves from cheese to milk to ice cream to candy to snacks to ground beef. There are skinless chicken breasts, ground turkey, turkey sausage, turkey bacon and on and on and on. Obviously, these products are selling or they wouldn’t be taking up the shelf space. None of this stuff was prominent in diets in 1965. McDonald’s didn’t sell grilled chicken sandwiches.</p>
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<p>That fits with the popular notion that it’s all our fault. If we only lived cleaner, more in touch with nature, and had more willpower, we wouldn’t have a national epidemic of obesity. On the other hand, there’s been a fitness boom in the United States that began in the 1970s with the jogging craze and hasn’t let up one iota. Just look at the number of fitness clubs and gyms, none of which were around 40 years ago. Americans are fitness crazy.</p>
these are the laundry-related jobs I hate.</p>