Combining Daily Exercise With Diet Gives Far Better Results For Lasting Weight Control...

This weeks question comes all the way from Kazakhstan, via the blog, www.YoMaxFitness.com.

Yo Max,

When you turned 40, did you find your metabolism slowing at all?  Was there a certain point when you began to gain weight and realized the need for different kinds of food? I find as I approach 40, I need to work out two times a day just to keep the weight gain in check.  I see the proverbial paunch developing on my friends and wonder how to avoid this, seeming, inevitability… Help!

John, Almaty, Kazakhstan

Yo John

For most American men the ‘proverbial paunch’, as you put it, actually starts to develop at about thirty years old. Typically, beginning around that time, a guy will gain about 2 pounds per year and at forty find himself 20 pounds overweight - and it’s all ‘front loaded’ in the form of a big, round belly. Many will continue at this pace, and in another ten years have a gut big enough to rest their beer on and make simple tasks like lacing up sneakers or picking their kids toy off the floor seem challenging.

Why does this happen? Simple really. They’re eating too much and exercising too little.

When you were a kid and you had to get somewhere, what was your mode of transportation? You walked, ran, or road your bike, right? In fact, you probably ran around for a lot of the day – at school, in gym and at recess, to and from bus stops, up and down the stairs, 30 or 40 times, and although you might have also ate a ton of high calorie, junk food, you were active enough that you could afford such an excessive eating pattern because you were in ‘caloric balance’ – meaning you burned about the same amount of calories as you consumed.

Then we start to grow up - the bike turns into a car, recess gets replaced by a power lunch, and you get smart enough to slow down and think before heading up and down staircases, cutting your trips in half.

But, are you eating less to compensate for your new, less active, or even sedentary lifestyle? Not likely - in fact, probably more because eating is a big deal for us grownups. We love to cook, we love the social gathering of big meals, to try new things, eat at restaurants, combine our newfound culinary delights with alcohol, and we LOVE TO EAT! Kids like it too, sure, but they don’t typically take the time to make it a long, drawn out, and complex project – they jam something into their mouths and go, go, go…

It is entirely possible to lose weight, (body fat) with diet alone, but the problem with this approach is two fold. First, by not combining your restricted calorie consumption with exercise you’ll be losing fat AND muscle. This presents a big problem because maintaining or even increasing your ‘lean mass’ is critical to long-term success and is exactly why diet tragedies alone fail, statistically, a staggering 90% of the time. They work at first, but eventually people gain all the weight back and more because they did not understand this critical principal. Muscle is very active tissue and helps to keep your metabolism fired up, thus burning more calories both during the day and even while sleeping. So, the goal is to lose fat, not muscle, and to do this you must exercise, ideally, with the use of strength training. Second, you can’t always eat properly. By having daily exercise as part of your routine you’ll have a second system in place to offset the occasional slip up.

I must add that strength training has many other advantages, including increased bone density, greater tensile strength of tendons and ligaments, greater range of motion and function of your joints, reduced low-back pain, and on and on.

My work is very physical but to stay lean and fit I still find it necessary to train upwards of two hours per day - six days a week. That’s right – 12 hours of moderate to high intensity exercise every week and in the warmer seasons I add cycling and it’s more like 20. Now, you might not have the time for that but I can assure you if you’re willing to dedicate serious time and effort to daily training and commit to eating a healthy diet, you can maintain that 20-year-old physique all the way to the grave. And that grave might just come around several years later because you kept the weight off and thus reduced your risk, significantly, of disease.  

Everyone is different and I would have to know more about your lifestyle to give sound and responsible advice, but if your work involves a lot of sitting you’re going to have to find time to do at least 60 minutes of high intensity exercise, five days per week, (assuming you’re a reasonably fit and healthy person, the optimum use of that hour would be with weights in a circuit format). Make sure you’ve had a recent health check up and clearance from your doctor before you begin.

As for eliminating certain foods and adopting a healthier diet, designed to compensate for a lower caloric demand, yes, you should absolutely rethink how, when, and what you eat.

I could easily write a long series of columns about this part of your question but with my limited space I’ll try and just give you some guidelines to help you avoid the impending gut.

1. Avoid refined sugar. Sugar, excess calories, and the sedentary lifestyle just described, are the reasons for our obesity epidemic. Simply put, sugar spikes insulin production, making you store more fat and it increases your appetite for more of the same. Get off it and stay off it!

2. Drink a gallon of water per day, (or as close to it as you can). Replace all those other drinks, (soda, coffee, juice, etc.) with water.

3. Never let your self be too hungry or too full. Both extremes put your body into a storage mode. Plan your meals and snacks so that you don’t get caught without food and don’t eat large meals. Live by this rule!

4. Don’t skip meals. You want your metabolism to stay fired up so try to eat small meals frequently throughout the day.

5. Eat a diet that includes as many plants as possible. Vegetables and whole fruits – as much and as often as you possibly can!

I’m finishing up this column while flying home to Philadelphia from San Francisco. The flight attendant just came buy and offered me the following choices for purchase -minnie Oreos, Twizzlers, apple cinnamon trail mix, Pringles chips, Pepperidge farm chocolate chunk cookies, sliced salami in a bag, and a can of Blue Diamond almonds. Which of these would you chose?

The almonds are the best choice – it’s not even close. They’re high in fiber, vitamins and minerals, protein, and ‘good fats’. And, the other choices are mostly ‘hollow calories’ in the form of sugar, additives, saturated fat, high fructose corn syrup, etc.

As for my drink, having already consumed a lot of water, I went with the Tomato Juice. It contains some healthy stuff too, has only 12 grams of sugar in the whole can, and is a much better choice that soda, diet soda, or even juice.

Please visit, www.YoMaxFitness.com, ‘Your Blog For Fitness Information’, and email your fitness/health/nutrition question from the ‘Ask Max’ page.