“CURE OBESITY WITHOUT “PLANNED” EXERCISE!”
Ken Dobberpuhl, CPT, MAT
Weight itself is not really the issue, people simply want to look better naked in front of the mirror. Most of you that receive this fitness tip are committed to exercise for the health and quality of life benefits available. You probably have a friend or loved one that struggles with diet and exercise. I’m going offer a solution for those that can’t or won’t perform “planned” exercise and have “failed” with “diets”.
Let’s start with a basic principle that I believe most of us can agree upon and those are the common denominators for childhood and adult obesity: inactivity and excess caloric consumption. A recent study by Levine, J.A., et al Interindividual Variation in Posture Allocation: Possible role in human obesity. Science, 2005, 307, January, 28, 584-586, studied the effect of “non-exercise activity thermogenisis” (NEAT). Thermogenisis is the production of heat by muscles burning calories. Remember calories are a measurement of heat, it takes 1 calorie of heat, to raise 1 kilogram of water, 1 degree Celsius. Every time we blink and eye, tap a finger, walk etc. our muscles are burning calories to perform the “work”. The BMI (Basal Metabolic Index) is a scale of how many calories a person burns just to perform essential metabolic tasks like digestion, circulation, breathing etc. on a daily basis. This study took 20 men and women. Five men and woman had
BMI’s of 23 classifying them as “lean” and 5 men and women with BMI’s of 33 classifying them as “obese. They wore very sensitive monitoring equipment which collected data every half second for 10 days! So every movement, postural change etc. created caloric expenditure data points.
The results showed that the OBESE subjects were SEATED 164 minutes longer each day than the LEAN subjects. If you extrapolate this out it represents an energy expenditure of 352 calories more per day or the equivalent of about 36 pounds per year! No one went to the gym or lifted a single dumbbell just standing instead of sitting and general movement.
So pass this study along to a friend or family member and encourage them to see how little they can use a chair throughout the day. This will help them address the inactivity portion of the weight loss equation.
The other common denominator for obesity besides inactivity was excess caloric intake. I have written about nutrition basics before but as a review: 1. Try to eat smaller meals 4-6 times during the day (every 3-3-1/2 hours). 2. Each small meal should have a lean protein, starchy carbohydrate, and fibrous carbohydrate in roughly equal proportions (size of a deck of cards). 3. Include healthy fats i.e. fish oil, flax seed oil, olive oil, avocado within this mix as well. 4. Reduce your intake of refined sugars and refined grains. The hardest part of eating like this initially is the planning necessary to make sure you have your food with you as much as possible.
Digestion as mentioned earlier is a “thermic” activity. It takes calories to process food. Here’s an interesting factoid regarding the energy required to break down each food type.
Fats require very little digestive work. If you put a drop of oil in a glass of water and agitate the water with a spoon you will have broken up the original fat drop into hundreds of smaller pieces. It doesn’t take much more than that for your body to breakdown fats. For every 100 calories of fat consumed it only takes 5 calories of energy to break it up (that’s not very thermic).
So the take away message is this. For sedentary people that aren’t likely to ever participate in planned exercise there is an effective way to reduce body fat by sitting less and eating supportively as outlined above. If they are willing to do those two things they will absolutely start to lose body fat. Again, for those of us that are active this may seem trivial but as the study showed just moving more each day can have tremendous long term benefits so encourage someone you know to give it a try.
Complex Carbohydrates require a little more energy to break down than fats. Carbohydrates are eventually broken down into simple sugar (glucose). In response, the pancreas produces the hormone insulin to transport glucose through the digestive wall and into the blood stream where it is either used directly for energy or stored in the liver or muscles (glycogen). For every 100 calories of complex carbohydrates you eat it takes about 10 calories of energy to process. This means you get twice the “thermic” boost from eating complex carbohydrate than fats.
Proteins require the most work to digest of the three food groups. They must be broken down into small chains of amino acids (the building blocks of protein). These small chains of amino acids (di and tri peptides) are used for protein synthesis i.e. muscle and cellular repair. 100 calories of protein requires a whooping 25 calories of energy just to break it down! This is another reason to make sure you have a lean protein with each meal, it has a great thermic effect and thus speeds up metabolism without lifting a finger.
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