Podcast #55: Is It True That Exercise Won’t Make You Thin?

In this podcast episode, is it true that exercise won't make you thin? How to get rid of the extra little bit of flab in your midsection Whether testing really improves performance running during your period More on magnesium and the formation of a local Spokane Coeur D' Alene Area HCG Fat Loss Group.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and you may have noticed that in last week's podcast episode number 54, some of you encountered a simple little two minute video on magnesium. A great video, but it actually wasn't the featured podcast. I don't know why itunes actually did that, but what you should have gotten was a fantastic interview on the book the magnesium miracle with Dr. Carolyn Dean. So for some reason you had a real short video appear in your iTunes subscription last week for this podcast. Then go back and listen to that interview because that was a great feature topic and last week I know that we primarily featured a featured topic and not much else. Well, this week we are featuring a listener Q and A with our featured topic being my response to the article in Time magazine, why exercise won't make you thin. So what we're going to do is start off with today's special announcements. We're going to move on to the listener Q and A and we're going to finish with my response to that very interesting, rather controversial article by John Cloud about why exercise won't make you thin.

Special announcements.

Okay, announcements are going to be pretty brief today. The main thing that I wanted to go over with you was a we have a brief survey over on the show notes to this podcast where you can click and kind of give your input on what you think of the podcast and it will actually help us get a better idea of how to make a better podcast for you. And then a couple of other announcements. The first is that we do put a lot of time into this show and in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com you'll notice at the very bottom of the show notes there's a way for you to donate to the show and to get a BenGreenfieldFitness.comT shirt. I've sent out close to about 50 of these now and I have yet to actually be walking around and in a foreign city outside of Spokane and seen someone wearing these. But I look forward to that day. Either way. If you would like to get your hands on a T shirt, all you got to do is go to the Show Notes and donate to get a free shirt. You'll also notice that when you go to the Show Notes for today's podcast. You know, I kind of wanted you guys to see how I look when I'm podcasting to you. I primarily record these podcasts. Not from my office, not from some guru peak of a mountaintop somewhere, and not in a yoga studio seated cross legged on a mat. Usually I'm hanging around my house, taking a break every now and then as I'm recording to go grab a snack from the refrigerator or to help take care of little babies that are running around my home. However, I did snap a picture of myself recording the podcast today while I feast on one of my favorite snacks, if you want to call it that, Pellegrino Water. I'm addicted to this stuff. San Pellegrino Sparkling Water. Highly recommend it. So if you want to see what I look like recording the podcast from the comfort of my own home, taking down my San Pellegrino Sparkling water, then just surf on over to the Show Notes for this episode. Now, before we get into the listener Q and A, I did want to mention that that the woman who I was helping lose weight via online consulting, who I've mentioned a few times in this podcast, she actually just finished her HCG diet for fat loss and I've explained a couple times what that is, but essentially it's a daily injection of something called human chorionic gonadotropin that she receives. I work with her physician to get her a prescription for it. And I actually have five or six women right now, although men can take it, but five or six women across the country right now doing this program. And she just finished and what ended up happening was she started the program at a weight of 216.6. I remember when she, when she first started out with me, she was at 225, had been having a very difficult time losing weight. So we got her down to 16.6 and then started into the HCG fat loss protocol. And over 40 days she lost an average of 0.7 pounds a day. And for those of you who have ever tried to lose weight, that's pretty significant. She dropped from 216.6 down to 191.2 following the special diet and the daily injection. And you can actually get it also as a nasal spray if you don't like injections. And all of her circumference measurements that I was having her take on a daily basis were down significantly. She lost several inches all across her body. So I want to say congratulations to Farrah for that 0.7 pound of fat loss over 40 days, which is significant. But I wanted to mention that I'm going to actually start up a local group that I will Support through this 40 day program in the Spokane or Coeur d' Alene area. So if you're a listener and you are in the Spokane Coeur d' Alene area near either of my offices in either one of those cities, just shoot me an email BenGreenfieldFitness.com or give me a call at 1-877-209-9439 and I'll tell you how you can get to be part of that group. We're going to start up that group on September 1st, so you're going to need to contact me sometime in the next two weeks if you want to be part of that weight loss group. Now the other special announcement that we have for today is for you triathletes and cyclists out there. I had mentioned a couple weeks ago that we were going to be putting together some jerseys that feature Ben Greenfield Fitness as well as Pacific Elite Fitness, my online coaching and consulting business for endurance athletes. And I will be making an order of cycle shorts and jerseys that are customized with the Ben Greenfield Fitness and Pacific Elite Fitness logos next week. So if you contact me sometime over the next six days and you would like to get one of those, all I need from you is your cycling jersey size and your cycling shorts size. And these are some high quality kits that we're getting from a company called Epics Gear. And again, all you got to do is contact me with the size that you would like and I'll make the order. It's a hundred and thirty dollars for the entire kit. Kit. I'm going to go ahead and ship it for free. And so essentially what you're getting, I believe the top is 70, the bottom is 60, but we need to order them together. And so I need to get all the orders together over the next week. So if you hear this podcast, you want to get a cool jersey with the Ben Greenfield Fitness and Pacific Elite Fitness logos, then go ahead and shoot me an email and I will hook you up and you can just send that to Ben BenGreenfieldFitness.com so we're gonna go ahead and move on to this week's listener Q and A.

Listener Q and A.

The first question this week comes from listener Scott. And Scott says, I train really hard and have a pretty clean, healthy diet, yet I still have a layer of flab at the bottom of my stomach. Like the skin is not tight at all. I had my body fat tested a few weeks ago and I am at about 3 to 4% and have been as low as 1 to 2% in the past. So why is this fat or skin still there? Do you have any suggestions to get rid of it or am I just being vain? I'd appreciate the feedback, Scott. First of all, let me say that your body fat percentage is not only incredibly low. If it is an aesthetic appearance that you're going after six pack abs, a cut, look, whatever the case may be, it's actually pretty dang close to too low. Meaning that your body has essential fat reserves that must be in place for proper energy levels. Hormone formation, testosterone formation, the ability to boost your metabolism to maintain adequately muscle. And you are really on the verge. The layer of flab at the bottom of the stomach is likely apparent to only one person, and that would be you. I would imagine if you had your shirt off and you were, you know, say, walking down the beach, that no one would think that you had a layer of flab in your stomach. And it's common for many of us to look in the mirror and feel like our bodies don't look exactly how we would like them to look. That's natural. But you can get carried away with, I believe the name of the disorder is body dysmorphic disorder. When you're looking at yourself and you just can never seem to get that perfect body that you want. It's okay to like perfection and to want perfection until it becomes unhealthy. I would caution you not to attempt to lose any more body fat than you're currently losing. Now, I'm going to throw this out there. Let's just say that that layer of flab that you're seeing is not really fat, but is actually some type of inflammation, some type of bloating, some type of water retention. Well, if that is the case, then there may be a fix for it. I had a guy come to me in my studio a couple of years ago and he was in a similar situation as you, in fantastic shape. And he just, you know, he pulled up his shirt and he showed me his abs and he did have A little bit of extra kind of right above his hips. And what we did with him was we completely eliminated any processed sugars from his diet, specifically the trail mix that he was consuming on a daily basis that had the added kind of fructose powder on it, if you know what I'm talking about. Like the pineapple, papaya, kiwi type of trail mix with the dried fruit, but. But the type that has added sugar, not just dried fruit. Within about two weeks, his abs were completely flat and that small amount of what I would call swelling in the abs had disappeared. So if you do have a processed sugar in your diet, that is what you would consider a staple, something that you eat every day that really is a sugar, even if it's coming from something healthy. And the way that you describe yourself, I would imagine that any processed sugar in your diet probably is coming from something healthy, like a trail mix. That's one of the most common things I see, but with the people I'm working with, then eliminate it and see what happens. But know that you're pretty low in body fat already and you need to be careful. So. Good question, Scott. Okay, the next question is from listener Al. And listener Al basically asked me to comment on a post that he took from the website of someone named Paulo Sousa, who's a triathlon coach over in Europe. And this is going to be especially interesting to those of you athletes out there because here's what Paulo says. When there is some sort of test that improves performance, I will do it. Most of those tests only serve to either be another service that you can charge athletes or a way of justifying pseudo scientific work or jobs. If I thought that lactate tests were helpful, I would do them myself. I stopped doing them back in 2003. VO2 max tests are interesting, but with little value to the training process. Not to mention that there is research that found no correlation between lactate test results and performance. What happens is that everyone is so happy to do that kind of testing, they feel good about the pseudo scientific side that adds to training. My personal favorite is doing tests at the beginning of the season. So when you repeat the test a few weeks later, there is so much improvement, you feel so good about yourself. So it's not that I'm old school or ignorant about these matters. It's just that when it comes to training, I am only interested in performance. Well, here is my response to Paulo. As many of you know, I actually do have a little bit of skin in the game. I have a lab in Spokane, Washington, where we do not only bike fits and swim analysis and running gait analysis and sweat sodium tests, but we also do these tests that he's talking about, specifically the blood lactate test, where you give a drop of blood at every few intervals. As exercise gets more and more difficult to figure out where your body starts to produce lots of lactic acid. And we also do this VO2 max test where you measure the amount of oxygen that your body is consuming during exercise. Now, the whole idea behind these two tests is for the blood lactate test, your body will get to a point where it's producing a lot of blood lactate. And when that begins to happen, it indicates that you're using a lot of fast twitch muscle. It indicates that you're using a high amount of carbohydrate as a fuel. So if you are doing an aerobic event, the heart rate at which your blood lactate levels tends to rise quite significantly would be a heart rate that you would want to avoid so that you don't burn through your carbohydrate stores too prematurely. Remember, lactic acid is not bad. Your body loves it. Your body needs it for exercise. It takes lactic acid that you produce in the muscles and shuttles it back up to the liver, converts it into sugar, and then brings it back down into the muscle for you to use for energy. So lactic acid is good. It's just that when it's being produced in high amounts, it's indicating, indicating that something's happening on the muscular level that's not conducive to being able to exercise for a lot longer than 60 to 90 minutes. So when we find out the heart rate at which that occurs, we can turn around and tell the athlete, okay, well, when you're doing whatever 100 mile bike ride in Ironman Triathlon, you need to be cautious if you're getting up close to this heart rate where your lactate levels are going up. Now, I don't know about these studies that Paulo refers to that says that there are no studies that are. There are studies that show no correlation between this type of lactate testing and the actual performance in the athlete. Well, I have plenty of case studies with the local athletes that I work with, and I've seen plenty of heart rates that were given to me after Ironman Triathlon, and I've correlated those to lactate tests in the laboratory. And I can tell you that the athletes who went above lactate threshold over and over and over again, especially on a hilly course, that most of the values I looked at were from Ironman, Coeur d'. Alene. These athletes had poor marathon run performances afterwards. They just didn't have enough legs to run on. So I as a coach find a lot of values in those tests. I don't know about results, I don't know about studies, but I know with the athletes that I coach that blood lactate value is an important value to me. If I have a local athlete who's coming into my lab to get that test done, it's not pseudo scientific. It's just a coaching tool that I use. Now with the VO2 Max testing, I do have a little bit of a bone to pick. With the VO2 Max testing, most people get it just to find out how big their lungs are, to essentially give themselves a number to brag about. I wrote an article in Triathlete Magazine back in May about this. But the only thing that I use that VO2 max test for when I bring somebody into my lab and I hook them up with a mask and a tube that they breathe in and out of, is to figure out how many calories they're burning during exercise. I don't really care how big their lungs are. That's not that important to me. I suppose that if they're doing a training session, I could or series of training sessions, I could find out if it actually improved them. But I really don't use that test as a marker to test improvement. I'd rather send somebody out and say, okay, you can bike five miles faster, so you've improved. What I use that test for is to find out how many calories someone is burning during exercise so that we can figure out how many calories is going to be necessary to refuel their muscles after they work out, or to help them lose weight, or to help them gain weight. And the other thing that we can find out with that test is if you take the number of calories that they're burning, most people can replace during exercise, especially during endurance exercise, about 30 to 40% of what they're burning. And this was based off research done down in South Africa by one of the world's most well recognized and respected physiologist, Dr. Tim Noakes. And so if you find out that you're burning a thousand calories during a training session, then you could potentially replace 300 to 400 of those calories per hour during exercise. So there's a lot of value to these tests. And I would disagree that they are just pseudo scientific ways for coaches to make money. I mean, I do these tests to myself and I use the numbers and I wear a heart rate monitor during any event that lasts longer than about two and a half hours because these tests do show you what's going on inside your body. So that is my response to the statement, Al and I would thank you for asking me to comment on that. And if you would like me to comment on something or you have a question, remember you can email ben greenfieldfitness.com now listener Lindsay asks I'm currently training for a marathon and I try to stick to a pretty healthy and efficient diet for my training. But my question is, how do you suggest I combat my monthly woman issues without binge eating and feeling like absolute crap all the time? Now she does have a two part question. She goes on. She says, also, do you know of good SI joint stretches? I happen to have been diagnosed with sacroilitis due to two car accidents. And being a former college soccer player turned endurance athlete, I listened to your podcast regarding strengthening the glutes. But some days I am in a heck of a lot of pain. Let's go ahead and address the first part of Lindsay's question first. And that is how do you suggest I combat my monthly woman issues without binge eating and feeling like absolute crap all the time? First of all, let's talk about it from an exercise standpoint. And I do realize that I'm obviously not a woman and you have issues that I probably could never comprehend having. Lindsay and I don't pretend to be able to understand exactly what it is that you go through each month when you're trying to train for a marathon. I do have a wife. I do run with her on a regular basis, both during her time of the month and not during her time of the month. And I've seen the cramping and I've seen the desire for binge eating and I've seen it all. I've at least been there. So the main inconvenience with the running is of course the pains and the cramping, etc. And I'm assuming that's what you're referring to when you're saying combating, when we're not talking about the actual binge eating, which we'll talk about in a second. But running and physical activity in general has been shown to actually help women cope with the physiological changes that happen during your periods. Because running lifts your mood and it lifts that kind of lazy, slothful state that you have to overcome. It can help to stop cravings like binging on chocolates, and it can help Just to get you out the door and distract you from thinking about your physical state. You know, some women will feel heavy with their periods and physical activity. Just the sweating that you're going to experience during it, that can help with combating some of the water retention. Now the problem is that a lot of times running can be very uncomfortable. I would suggest that you be very open to some of the cross training methods that are non impact that can help to maintain your cardiovascular status so that you can still train for the marathon. Of course the top one would be bicycling, whether indoors or outdoors. That's a great cross training mode that you can use during that time of the month to still get a good workout in the elliptical trainer would be another. Aqua jogging would be another. But there are alternative methods that can help you with some of the cramping. But know that stopping exercise during your period is probably one of the things that is going to most contribute to your food cravings, grumpiness, etc. You know, yoga is another great activity that you can do just to help restore balance to your body and your mind, protect you from stress, protect you from illness. There are poses in yoga that can be effective in relieving cramps and easing tension and easing anxiety. And you know, one of those, for example, would be the downward dog. But there are, there are many others such as the plank pose, the cat pose, the cobra pose. So if you're not doing yoga, that would be another exercise or activity that you could look into. And then just from a supplement standpoint, my wife has two that she keeps around. One is called Ener Essence, One is called a PMS Relief Formula. The Ener Essence is essentially just a women's multivitamin and it's designed to support you during your reproductive years, to help you maintain a normal cycle. And it's just got a custom herbal blend, things like red raspberry leaf and cranberry. It's got some probiotics in there, a nettles leaf, full spectrum of multivitamins. But I'll put a link to that in the show notes Lindsay. The other one that can really help is called PMS Relief Formula. It's things like Wild Yam, St. John's Wort, Vitex, Jinko, but essentially that also contains just a blend of ingredients, natural ingredients. It's not a pharmaceutical drug or chemical, but that can help with anxiety, depression, fluid retention, bloating, breast tenderness, food craving. So those are two that I would look into. My wife takes both of them and I'll put A link to those in the show notes the nurses you take on a daily basis. The PMS relief formula you would take during your period. So hopefully that's helpful. And then the second part of your question. Do you know some good SI joint stretches? Well, basically, Lindsay, your sacroiliac joint is such that there aren't really good ways to stretch the actual ligaments around the SI joint itself. The flexibility that's going to contribute to helping your SI joint feel better would be essentially the four muscles that surround the pelvis itself and that contribute to a forward tilt of the pelvis, a posterior tilt of the pelvis, or a tightening of the pelvis. That would be your hip flexors, your hamstrings, your abdominals, and your lower back. Now, yoga is fantastic for improving pelvic mobility. Dynamic stretches, leg swings are very good improving pelvic mobility. I'll tell you the exact stretches that I personally utilize because I have had to fight SI joint pain quite a bit, and I do these exercises each morning and I've been very successful in eliminating my SI joint pain. I did go through prior to incorporating these stretches. The program that I outline in my book Run with no pain over@runwithnopain.com but once I got everything under control by using those methods, I just do this every morning. I do a lunging stretch where I just hold myself in a lunging position with my arms outstretched over my head to stretch my hip flexors. I do a lying hamstring stretch where I lie on my back and pull my hamstrings or my straight legs up towards my chest. I'll even do a little what's called pnf, where I press out against my hands real hard for about six seconds, then relax that leg and pull it back in. To improve the hamstring stretch that occurs, I will do basically what's called a cobra stretch, which I actually just mentioned, which is a yoga stretch, where you're lying on the ground, stomach first, pushing yourself up off the ground as high as you can while keeping your hips down in contact with the ground and looking up almost the way that you would see see a cobra rise up off of the ground if it were coiled. And then the last one that I'll do for the abdominals is real similar to a hip flexor stretch. I'll stand on one leg and I'll pull myself up into a quadriceps stretch, but then I'll lean over and by doing that, you can actually feel it in the abdominals. But as far as the SI joint goes, that's a collection of pretty tight ligaments down there in the SI joint. It's really not that flexibility that you should be concerned with as much as some of the major muscles that surround the hip joints themselves. So great question Lindsay. And then we're going to move on to the final comment. It's really not a question, it's a comment from listener Eric. But his comment showed that I needed to mention something kind of important. So first I'll read his comment. It says, Ben, I want to thank you for the magnesium info. A while back I purchased the ancient minerals magnesium bath flake mentioned on your podcast and started using them on semi weekly basis in the evening before a triathlon. As you know, in between races I started having muscle spasms and cramps and even started having spasms wake me up at night. About two weeks ago I added a magnesium supplement called magnesium gluconate since taking a magnesium bath every three days or so would be too expensive for me. I sweat profusely when I work out and after listening to your podcast and doing some reading last night, the light bulb went off. Even though I use Infinity Nutrition products and take the magnesium flakes bath, I was probably not replacing magnesium as quickly as I was depleting it, which I realized last night was probably the culprit to another issue I developed sometime this spring when the temps started to climb, which was asthma like symptoms, especially when I swam. I was getting that hypoxic feeling way too easily when I was swimming, in combination with shortness of breath more than earlier in the training season. In an open water workout this past Tuesday, somewhat rigorous, I noticed I was not getting that hypoxic feeling in my chest that I grew to extreme, I believe. I credit that and the lack of muscle cramping to my increased supplementation of magnesium. So thank you Ben. Well, if you've been listening to this podcast for any period of time, you know that magnesium is kind of the ultra sexy supplement that we've been talking about for a while. And it's, it's the new secret power, secret weapon of endurance athletes. And I've got almost all my athletes using it now and seeing results similar to what Eric describes. However, Eric, the magnesium bath flakes, those, those work well. But your strategy with the bath flakes is you want to use those after a hard workout. So like if I have a real tough weekend workout, I will do a bath in those bath flakes. Not a real hot bath because it actually can inhibit absorption, but I'll get those magnesium Flakes. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes where I get those and I'll take a bath in those. But I don't use them very regularly, especially not every three days like you mentioned, only after a real tough workout. What I use is the oil. I mean, it's way more practical than taking a half hour bath. You just spray a little bit of oil where your muscles tend to be sore. It's called transdermal magnesium oil. I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. But that is magnesium chloride. Magnesium gluconate that you mentioned, whether for oral supplementation or topical supplementation, is kind of outdated. It's not as effective. It's not what I would recommend. The nice part about that transdermal magnesium oil is not only is it magnesium chloride, which is some of the best absorbed form of magnesium, but you can't or you don't have to just spray it on your muscles. I talked to Dr. Mark Serkis about this, the author of transdermal magnesium supplementation. And the guy literally nebulizes it into his lungs. He takes this spray and I have some sitting in my bathroom right now, and he'll spray it about 10 times just straight into his lungs and breathe it in as a form of magnesium supplementation, oral magnesium supplementation. And so then you're killing two birds with one stone. From a financial standpoint, you only have to get the magnesium oil. You use it transdermally, just spraying it on your skin, in sore spots, but then you also just spray a few sprays into your mouth. So how do you know when you're getting too much? Very simple. The body has a very simple red flag. If you use too much of it, you get loose stool, you get diarrhea, and then you back it off to the point where you don't have that happening. And that's how much works for you. So topical magnesium and especially magnesium chloride oil is far better absorbed than that magnesium gluconate you mentioned. So I would recommend that you utilize that and I will put a link to it in the show notes. So we're going to go ahead and move on to this week's featured topic on why exercise won't make you thin.

Featured topic.

So here's the deal. If you don't know about this article, then maybe you've been hiding under a rock or maybe you have better things to do. But I have received tons of questions from my listeners this week about it and I know that it's been talked a lot about on other blogs, on other podcasts. And I don't want to just kind of repeat what everybody else is saying, but I do just want to give you my honest opinion of it. And I have to tell you right now, take a sip of my San Pellegrino water here to wet my whistle. Did you hear that? Yeah, that's my sparkling water. Gotta love it. I gotta tell you right now, I haven't read the article. I don't know that much about it. I heard a couple people talking about it in a couple different podcasts and I've never read the article. I decided that to give you my honest opinion on this article, that I am going to read it and I am going to judge it and analyze it right here on this podcast in real time as you are listening. So you are going to kill two birds with one stone today. A, you are going to hear me actually read the article and B, you're going to hear me comment on the article as I read it. So honestly, I just printed this off from the Internet. I haven't read it and I don't know that much about it. I don't know that much about the author. I think he is the fitness author or maybe the nutrition author for Time magazine. So I know some of you are going to wonder why I didn't prepare better for this podcast. But ultimately I want you to hear this at the same time that I hear it. And I just want you to hear me think out loud about how to intelligently analyze something like this. Because just the title, why exercise won't make you thin is obviously going to raise your eyebrows and make you make you wonder a little bit. And so that's why I chose this article to talk about. So the tough part is that some of this is written in the first person when I'm reading it. That's not me talking. That's the author talking. So let's go ahead and jump right in as I write this. Tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the Versaclimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stairmill. On Wednesday, a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I'm dizzy, an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is body wedge class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. Friday will bring a 5.5 mile run, the extra half mile, my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week. I've exercised like this, obsessively, a bit grimly for years. But recently I began to wonder, why am I doing this? Except for a two year period at the end of an unhappy relationship, a period when I self medicated with lots of Italian desserts, I've never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time. And since I ended that relationship and cut most of these desserts, my weight has returned to the same £163 it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out? It's a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend 19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. A survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engage in regular exercise, grew in 2000 to 57%. Okay, I'm going to stop right here for a second. When I'm reading over his introduction to this, the first thing that comes into my mind is, well, if you're overweight or if you still have this gut fat that hangs over your belt when you sit, who's to say that you're even exercising properly? I mean, just reading over your description of what you do, I I don't really know if you are consuming a healthy nutrition plan. I don't know a lot about the exercise that you're doing, but from what you described to me, a lot of it is kind of just the stereotypical do what happens to be fashionable gym type of workouts that a lot of times aren't based on fat loss research. So just using the author as a case study, I have to say that just the fact that this guy exercises but still has gut fat that hangs over his belt does not mean that everybody who exercises is going to have the same problem. You know, those of you listening to my podcast know there's three things that I preach in an exercise program. You got to have high intensity intervals, you got to have a few long cardio sessions, and you got to do resistance training, and it looks like he's doing a good mix of stuff. But I don't know what his nutrition program is like either. So he continues. And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period of time. He's Talking about that 1980-2000 when gym memberships went up. A third of Americans are obese and another third count is overweight by the federal government's definition. Yes, it's entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercise less. But like many other people, I get hungry after exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don't. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight? The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today's doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many people. People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases, those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise and weight loss has been wildly overstated. In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless, says Eric Ravusen, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like the the Biggest Loser, or for that matter, from magazines like this one. The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect. It can stimulate hunger that causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us to lose weight. It may even be making it harder. I'm going to stop right here. If you're exercising to lose weight, you're only doing half of the equation. The whole idea is that exercise and nutrition go hand in hand. So if you are exercising and then you're just eating whatever you want, whether because you exercised or because you're not watching your nutrition, then yeah, of course you aren't going to lose weight and exercise isn't going to make you thin. To me, leaping out from this page right now is just a big so what? Or a yeah, duh, because exercise is about self control. But the nutritional aspect of it Means that you take that same self control that you're using to exercise and you actually apply that to your nutrition plan, your post workout plan as well. If you're exercising in order to eat, that's fine, but. But yeah, you aren't going to lose weight. I think that isolating exercise from nutrition you just cannot do. I mean, on the wall of both my studios are written the words fat loss, nutrition, human performance. Because all of it goes hand in hand. So he goes on. Earlier this year, the peer reviewed journal PLOS ONE published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Rasmussen's, Dr. Timothy Church, who randomly assigned into four groups 640 or 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72, 136 and 194 minutes per week, respectively for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical symptom questionnaires. The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight. But the women who exercised, sweating it out with the trainer several days for six months didn't lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 pounds each. What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip licking anticipation of perfectly salted golden brown french fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they want to reward themselves, most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started their experiment, or they compensated in another way by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home. I'm going to stop again here because this is the second time that I've gotten the idea from this author, both in his introduction and in what he just said, that he thinks that people exercise so that they can eat more. He thinks that one of the reasons to exercise is, is so that you can eat more. I would caution you listening in that, yes, that's a cool part about exercise is that I can eat a big juicy hamburger and I can know mentally that if I want to go ride my bike 40 miles the next day, I'm going to burn off that hamburger. But that should not be the focus of exercise. I am a big proponent of exercise not being focused on weight loss as much as on some type of event. My most successful clients are the ones who exercise because they're going to do a 5k, or because they're going to do a 100 mile bike ride to raise money for cancer, or because they're going to do a triathlon. The people who exercise for exercise sakes, or the people who exercise just to keep fat loss off typically have a little bit more trouble and struggle a little bit more with these goals. And especially the people who exercise so that they can eat. Those are the people who do the worst. So yes, a side benefit of exercising is that you can eat more, but you should not have at the front of your mind the whole reason for you exercising being so that you can eat more. Because that is dangerous. And this author is kind of walking a dangerous line by exercising for that reason. He goes on. The findings are important because the government and various medical organizations routinely prescribe more and more exercise for those who want to lose weight. The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart association issued new guidelines stating that to lose weight, 60 to 90 minutes of physical activity may be necessary. That's 60 to 90 minutes on most days of the week, a level that is not only unrealistic for those of us trying hard to find or keep a job, but could also easily produce, on the basis of Church's data, ravenous compensatory eating. Okay, I gotta say I have to agree with the author here. In modern industrialized society, physical activity, not just exercise, but physical activity. Doing 60 to 90 minutes of that a day, when you're sitting in a car, sitting on a bus, sitting on the subway, sitting in work, sitting at your office, sitting at the computer, then sitting to go back home and sitting to eat dinner can be very tough. That is why I think some of the things that are coming down the pipeline in terms of standing desks. For example, I always stand when I record this podcast whenever I work. In general, I'm standing, walking around when you're working, walking on the treadmill when you're working, riding your bicycle to work. All of this stuff is harder to do in our modern society. But believe it or not, if you're just starting and stopping your watch when you engage in physical activity, and you're counting physical activity as walking to lunch, doing a short bike ride after work, standing up when you're working and walking around, all that stuff is physical activity. So that 60 to 90 minutes doesn't mean you got to do it at the gym. But yeah, it is tough to get in. I agree. You Got to reinvent your lifestyle. So he says it's true that after six months of working out, most of the exercisers in Church's study were able to trim their waistline slightly by about an inch. Even so, they lost no more overall body fat than the control group did. Why not? Church says, I see this anecdotally amongst my wife's friends. They're like, I'm running an hour a day and I'm not losing any weight. He asked them, what are you doing after you run? It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterwards. Says Church, I don't think most people would appreciate that. Wow. You only burn 2 or 300 calories, which you're going to neutralize with just half that muffin. You might think that half a muffin over an entire day wouldn't matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn't exercise turn fat to muscle? No, sorry, that's me. And doesn't muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does? By the way, people, exercise doesn't turn fat into muscle. Exercise utilizes fats by turning it into sugar. Muscle is produced via an entirely different mechanism. So he says this muscle fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research, a pound of muscle burns 6 calories a day in a resting body. Compare with the 2 calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 pounds of fat to muscle, a major achievement, you would be able to only eat an extra 40 calories a day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that. Let me remind the author that exercise boosts your post workout metabolism. It's not just the muscle that you put on, it's your post exercise metabolic rate that goes up. And that is the thing that burns the significant amount of calories, not the muscle. I don't think a lot of people preach, a lot of trainers preach that it's the muscle that burns more calories. It's the post exercise consumption of more oxygen that burns calories. That's why you get, you got to get your heart rate up when you exercise. So he says, fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark colored tissue called brown fat, which helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria. Which are the cells. Power plants. They help turn nutrients into energy. When they're switched off, animals don't get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn effortlessly. Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it's very difficult to make them obese, even when you force feed them in labs. But humans have so little brown fat that researchers didn't even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. Which is not true, dude, because in my exercise physiology classes at University of Idaho six years ago, we were talking about humans and brown fat. So I'm not sure what you're talking about. There's one reason that humans can gain weight. With just an extra half muffin a day. We almost instantly store most of the calories we don't need in our regular fat cells. All this helps explain why our Herculean exercise over the past 30 years hasn't made us thinner. After we exercise, we crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in sport drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20 ounce bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you're hot and thirsty after a 20 minute run in summer heat, it's easy to guzzle that body in that bottle in 20 seconds. In which case the caloric expenditure and caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight loss perspective, you'd have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting. Okay, the author makes a good point here. That is something that I see a lot people take. Something that was designed to replenish calories during a football game that lasts three hours with multiple high intensity intervals and they consume it after a 20 minute run. Okay, he does make a good point there. Hold on, I'm thirsty. That reminded me about my Pellegrino. Okay, he does make a good point there. You have to really take into account when you're eating that energy bar after workout. You better have done a workout that that energy bar was designed for and not just kind of, kind of walked around for a little while or done something real short. So he says that many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower. That we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution didn't build us to do this for very long. Self control is like a muscle. It weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad you'll be more likely to opt for pizza. Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic physiology, but most of us won't be very successful. The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure, says Stephen Gortmaker, who heads Harvard Prevention's Research center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more. Gortmacher, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast food restaurants. Why would they build those? He asks. I know it sounds like conspiracy theory, but you have to think if a kid plays 5 minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even a thousand. I don't think they built those playgrounds for kids to exercise in. I think they built them to get kids to go. Last year, the International Journal of Obesity published a paper by Gortmaker and Kendran Sonneville of Children's Hospital Boston, noting that there was a widespread assumption that increasing activity will result in and a net reduction in energy gap. But Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18 month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more, not just a little more, but an average of 100 more calories than they just burned. If evolution didn't program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn't exercise do anything? Sure, it does. Plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and your cognitive ability. But there's some confusion about whether it is exercise sweaty, exhausting, hunger producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health that leads to all these benefits. Or something far simpler regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym? Look at Kids in May. A team of researchers I'm going to tell you right now this is kind of long. But what he says about the team of researchers is that they studied kids who were engaging in lots of physical education classes versus kids who were engaging in a much lower amount of physical education classes. And what they found was that even the kids who were engaging in more physical education classes overall during the entire day, they didn't end up moving more. And he says once they get home, if they are very active in school, they're probably staying a little bit, staying still a bit more because they've already expended so much energy. The others are more likely to grab a bike and run around after school. Okay, I would tend to agree with that. And this is me speaking again, that kids who exercise more at school might not have quite so much energy when they get home, but I'm not sure what that has to do with weight loss. Let's see what he says. Another British study found that kids who regularly move in short bursts, running to catch a ball, racing up and down stairs to collect toys are just as healthy as kids who participate in sports that require vigorous, sustained exercise. Could pushing people to exercise actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles, but the brain's self control muscle as well. Many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back to from the gym. This explains why exercise can make you heavier, or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more sedentary during my non exercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such puritan fury. If I exercise less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab. I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook, and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito. Okay, the author makes a lot of really interesting stuff psychological observations here. What I would say is I disagree with him that exercise makes you more likely to feel entitlement to a bag of chips when you get home. I think that exercise teaches us better self control. I think that if you go on a hard 30 minute bike ride at the gym on your way home from work, you are going to really feel like you you're great at self control, you have buffeted your body and you're going to do it more and you're going to eat a healthy dinner. I find that in most of my clients they have an all or nothing approach. If they don't exercise, they're more likely to throw up their hands and have ice cream for dinner. If they do exercise, they're more likely to say hey, you know what, I'm awesome. I have self control and I can keep having self control. So just from what I observe with my clients, I would disagree with the author on that point. However, I would agree with the author that having that mentality that exercise is just some simple exercise in a bottle prescription where we go to the gym for a half hour each day to help us maintain a healthy weight. I agree with him that that is wrong. Exercise is about moving around all day long. That's why I'm standing while I record this podcast. That's why I walk as many places as possible. That's why I don't let myself stand sit down during the day in office chairs because you're more likely to just stay there with your butt planted. So the author does make some good points that you gotta move. The human body was designed to move, to farm, to hunt, to plant, to harvest, you know, to gather. It wasn't designed to sit around in these little office chairs devices. So I do agree with him. So he goes on. The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself, but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low level physical activity, the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented, may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles, says a neurobiologist at LSU's Picture Pennington Biomedical Research center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. The muscles will ache and you may not want to move after, but to burn calories. The muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day. For his part, bertud rises at 5am to walk around his neighborhood several times. He takes the stairs whenever possible, he says. Even if people can get out of their offices, out from in front of their computers, they can go someplace like the mall and then take the elevator, he says. This is the real problem. Not that we don't need. Not that we don't go to the gym enough. I was skeptical when Versaid said this. Don't you need to raise your heart rate and sweat in order to strengthen your cardiovascular system? Don't you need to push your muscles to the max in order to build them? Actually, it's not clear that vigorous exercise like running carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories. But if you read the academic papers on which these stories are based, you frequently see that research subjects who were studied didn't clobber themselves on the elliptical machine. A routine example In June, the Association for Psychological Science issued a news release saying that physical activity may indeed preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning. But in fact, those who had better cognitive function merely walked more and climbed the stairs. They didn't even walk faster. Walking speed wasn't correlated with cognitive ability. There's also growing evidence when it comes to preventing certain diseases, losing weight may be more important than improving cardiovascular health. In June, researchers released the results of the longest observational study ever to investigate the relationship between aerobic fitness and development of diabetes. The result, being aerobically fit was far less important than having a normal body mass index and preventing the disease. So why does the belief persist that exercise leads to weight loss, given all the scientific evidence to the contrary? Let me interrupt for just a second here. I think it's interesting that he's saying that the intensity of the exercise doesn't matter when multiple studies have shown that it does. When it comes to boosting your metabolic rate and producing the effects of aerobic activity, such as an increase in capillary density, mitochondrial density, stroke, volume of the heart down, regulation in the resting heart rate, there's quite a bit to be said for the intensity of exercise. And especially it kind of flies in the face of what he was saying earlier about us, you know, not having the 60 to 90 minutes of time to exercise during the day. If you don't have 60, 90 minutes of exercise or time to exercise during the day, yeah, a brief, very intense bout of 30 minutes of exercise. If you control yourself nutritionally, the rest of the day still going to get you a ton of benefits and more benefits than just walking 30 minutes. So he goes on. Few obesity researchers promoted exercise as critical for weight reduction until the 1970s. As recently as 92, when a stout bill Clinton became famous for his jogging and McDonald's habits, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published an article that began recently. The interest in the potential of adding exercise to the treatment of obesity has increased. The article went on to note that incorporating exercise training into obesity treatment has led to inconsistent results. The increased energy expenditure obtained by training may be compensated by a decrease in non training physical activities, the authors wrote. Then how did the exercise to lose weight mantra become so ingrained? Public health officials have been reluctant to downplay exercise because those who are more physically active are healthier. Plus, it's hard for experts to renounce the notion that exercise is essential for weight loss. For years, psychologist Kelly Brownell ran a lab at Yale that treated obese patients with a standard drilled into your head combination of more exercise and less food. What we found was that the treatment of obesity was very frustrating, he Sundays. Only about 5% of participants could keep the weight off. And although those 5% were more likely to exercise than those who got fat. Again, Brownell says, if he were running the program. Today I would probably reorient towards food and away from exercise. In 2005, Brownell Co founded Yale's Rudd center for Food Policy and Obesity, which focuses on food marketing, public policy, not on encouraging more exercise. Some research has found that the obese already exercise more than the rest of us. In May, Walter Reed Army Medical center reported the results of a small study that found overweight people actually expend significantly more calories every day than people of normal weight. He isn't the first researcher to reach this conclusion. As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book, the Obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less. That also seems like kind of a no duh statement to me because of course they're moving around bigger bodies. So he finishes and he says, in short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health. But be warned, fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I'm really hoping that he's being sarcastic there. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the Versaclimber and skip the blueberry bar. That is my usual post. Exercise Reward the End. So I want to hear your comments on this article. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and leave a comment in the show notes about how you feel after reading this. My basic conclusion is that if what John Cloud says is true, then what the typical American needs to do is create a lifestyle for themselves that requires them to move as much as possible. Parking farther away when you go to the grocery store, taking the stairs everywhere, no matter what, even when you're on the eighth floor of a hotel, making sure that you stand as much as possible when you're at your office. And if you're not able to stand, you take walk breaks or quick breaks as often as you can. And then from a nutrition perspective, you shouldn't frame exercise as being something that you engage in so that you can eat. You use exercise to achieve a loftier goal, preferably something even beyond a weight loss goal, something like a performance goal, something that takes your mind off of the weight and the fat and the calories and focuses it more on something that's, that's more fun to pursue. Yeah, there's, there's, there's lots of stuff in here, but those are my thoughts. So you heard what I agreed with. You heard what I didn't agree with. Now I want to hear from you. So leave a comment in the Show Notes. Tell me what you think about the article why exercise won't make you thin. If you want to review it again, go to the Time website or just click on the link that I have in the Show Notes. Folks, that is all for today's podcast. Remember to go leave us a ranking in itunes so that we can get the word out about the podcast. And if you want to support the podcast then go to the Show Notes and click on the donation button that's there at the bottom and leave us a donation. I'll send you a T shirt if you do. Finally remember back to the special announcements. Email me if you want one of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Specifically Fitness Cycling jersey and short kits. And also if you're local in the Spokane Coeur d' Alene area. Email me if you want to be part of the HCG Fat Loss group that's starting up in September. Hey, coming up on the program we we've got an interview on hypnosis and fat loss. We've got an interview on a diet called the Paleo Diet and we've got a swimming super special for you swimmers and you triathletes out there. Until then, have a great and a healthy week. This is Ben Greenfield signing out.