Tag Archives: fitness

Overheating Is A Serious Barrier To Exercise

Posted by apt46 on March 14, 2012 None comments

A study done by Stanford had two dozen middle-aged obese women walk on a treadmill for a mile and a half. Half the women got their bodies cooled by sticking their palms in a device that runs ice water through itself — kind of like a car radiator cools the engine. The other half also had their hands in the device, but water at room temperature ran through it. After three months: the cool women shaved five minutes off their walk, lost 3″ off their waist, and were more likely to not quit the study early.

 

Avacore Rapid Thermal Exchange

 

Walking 1.5 miles should take somewhere around 27 minutes, give or take, so shaving off five minutes is a pretty big deal: almost 20% faster; three inches thinner is also nothing to sneeze at. The NPR article on the study implies that overheating is mostly a psychological problem, possibly because if you overheat too much you’ll likely just faint. Elite athletes also overheat, but they push through it. Novices on the other hand, especially fat ones, think it’s the end of the world. It also doesn’t help that fat is an insulator, so the feeling of overheating gets worse the more of it there is.

The bottom line is that psychological or not, overheating is a significant deterrent to working out, and the more weight you need to lose, the more of a deterrent it is. As such, it’s important that measures are taken against overheating, because the less barriers there are in front of exercising, the better. The ice-water device used in the study is a non-starter because it costs 4,000$. But there are less expensive workarounds:

  • When working out, always wear clothing made out of moisture-wicking technical fiber. These fabrics use capillary action to make the sweat evaporate faster, which helps you sweat more, which helps to cool down more.
  • Run outside when it’s cool (around sunrise, after sunsent, in the winter) or work out indoors, with serious air conditioning
  • Put a lot of ice in your water bottle
  • Hold something cold in your hand and touch it to your face when overheating — ice pack, bottle of ice water, etc
  • Go swimming instead of running: the 80° pool water is like a giant cooler, and swimming is one of the best forms of exercising due to the use of the whole body and its low-impact nature
  • Go biking instead of running: even when it’s hot out, the breeze generated at 14mph does a lot to both cool you down and evaporate sweat; and it’s also a low-impact sport

Via NPR

Why Crash Diets Don’t Work

Posted by apt46 on October 28, 2011 1 comments

Your body is really not a fan of quick weight loss — or maybe it’s just the more primitive parts of your brain. In any case, a new study shows that you need a lot of will power to lose weight fast and keep it off, because even a year later, your body still remembers it used to be fatter. In its infinite wisdom, it will try to make you eat more, because it feels less secure in its ability to survive… in case you got stranded somewhere with no 7-Elevens. (Apparently this need to survive in unlikely scenarios trumps more likely concerns, like the ability to not get heart disease, the ability to be attractive, and the ability to go up stairs without wheezing and having people stare.) Metabolism was also down.

So that’s why people usually gain all the weight back, and then some. Which just reinforces what the fitness community’s been preaching for years: eat healthy, eat less calories and exercise — for the rest of your life. You’ll end up losing weight slowly (you also gained it slowly, since you probably didn’t gain 30 lbs in 3 months), and your body, like the frog in boiling water, will get used to being thinner and not raise alarms about it.

Details of the study? Sure: the (Australian) researchers put 50 fat people on a crash diet (550 calories/day, meaning a quarter of normal) for 2.5 months. They lost about 30lbs each, or 14% of their body weight; they also tested their blood for levels of hormones dealing with appetite and hunger, and they were in “eat more” mode. Then they went back a year later, and the people had gained back about 13 lbs each and were now down to 8% weight loss. They also measured their hormones again, and they were still telling people to eat more. For example, leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite, was low; ghrelin, which says you’re hungry, was high.

 

Ghrelin is not the same thing as Gremlin

 

From The New England Journal of Medicine, via NPR

Eat Healthy To Lose Weight, And Other Myths

Posted by apt46 on October 20, 2011 None comments

Livestrong has an excellent slideshow about the most common dieting myths. The biggest one they address is the myth that you can lose weight by doing something other than eating less calories than you burn — which is unpossible. In order to lose weight, the only thing that matters is calories in minus calories out. This includes the following dieting “tips” we hear often:

  • Eat smaller, more frequent meals to boost your metabolism. Your basal metabolic rate will stay pretty much the same as long as there’s enough food. This method might help you eat less calories per day, in which case it’s great — but eating six 300 calorie meals a day is the same as eating three 600 calorie meals.
  • Unprocessed foods will help you lose weight faster. It doesn’t matter if you eat 600 calories in apples or in twinkies; the only thing that matters is that you burn more of those calories than you eat. The nutrition professor that lost 27 pounds on a Twinkie diet proves this. Eating healthy is good for you in other ways, like disease prevention, but for weight loss only calories matter.
  • Eating fatty foods makes you fat — as if the fat from pork somehow bypasses your mouth and goes straight to your thighs. All food is processed by the digestive system and turned into energy; leftover energy is turned into fat. If you eat 2,000 calories a day, all from fat, but you burn 2,500, you’ll lose weight. If you eat 2,000 calories a day in proteins and carbs but you only burn 1,500, you’ll gain weight. The source of the calories is irrelevant.
  • Eating carbs makes you fat. Same idea as above — the number of calories is the only thing that matters, not where they come from.
  • White bread, rice, etc makes you fat. See the pattern? Whole grain bread may be healthier for other reasons, but eating a truckload of it will make you just as fat as eating a truckload of white bread.
  • Dairy makes you fat. Hopefully the overarching message has sunk in by now; if it hasn’t… wow. The interesting thing about dairy though, is that yogurt has actually been proven to help with weight loss, but the reason isn’t known — maybe it’s a mild appetite suppressant, since dairy should be disgusting.

    This is the guy that lost 27 pounds by eating Twinkies. TWINKIES.

  • You can trick your body into losing weight without decreasing calories. The reason diets like Atkins work is exactly because people reduce calories. How much meat and cheese can you eat without washing it down with a coke? Most diets that have a gimmick like that actually trick you into eating less calories, by removing high-calorie foods like sugar from your diet. So they trick the mind, not the body. As long as it works, kudos to them — but it’s not because they figured out some secret of getting the body to burn fat.
  • The Paleo diet will help you lose weight. If you eat less calories it will, otherwise it won’t do a thing. See above.
  • Eating late at night makes you fat. The idea here is that your body uses a tiny amount of energy while asleep, so all the food you eat before you go to bed will be turned into fat. In reality, you use just a slightly smaller amount of energy while sleeping, because you don’t move around as much. But your body still burns calories at a high rate, since it’s still making you breathe, keeping you warm, digesting food, etc. And it takes about 6 hours for it to digest a meal — unless you go out for a run after dinner instead of watching TV for a few hours, you’ll burn roughly the same calories as when you’re sleeping. Not to mention that what matters more is the calorie deficit on a longer time scale, like a few days or a week; not per meal or per day.
  • Diet sodas trick your body into getting fatter, because it makes your body crave more sugar. They (and regular sodas) may make your tolerance for sweets higher, but sweets aren’t crack.
  • Weight loss supplements work. Research shows that any effect they have is minimal. The only thing that is proven to work is diet and exercise.

A protein (myoglobin)

 

The article also sets us straight about protein, salt and sugar:

  • Sodium is not really that bad for you. It was another one of those things the government got wrong in the 1980s, like that fatty foods are bad for you. For people with high-blood pressure sodium is bad, but for the rest of us, it’s fine.
  • High Fructose Corn Syrup, or corn sugar, is not worse than regular sugar. It would be like saying a punch in the face is worse than a kick in the face. They’re both just awful for you, and you should cut them out as much as you can.
  • There’s no 30 gram limit of protein that your body can digest from a meal.
  • Protein shakes don’t make you bulky. It depends how much protein shake you have, because per serving, they don’t have many calories.
  • Protein bars are really unhealthy, because they’re packed with a ton of sugar to cover up for the awful, awful taste of protein and make the bars palatable.
  • You don’t have to eat right after a workout just because your body burns protein like a champ about 2 hours after working out. Like in most cases, listen to your body and eat when you’re hungry. If you don’t have enough protein, you’ll suddenly crave meat or nuts or whatever — your body is magic like that.
  • Protein is not bad for your kidneys, and has never been proven to be.

From Livestrong

Hungary Introduces Misguided Fat Tax

Posted by apt46 on September 8, 2011 None comments

At the beginning of the month, a new law went into effect in Hungary which adds a 10 Forint tax (about 5 cents) to junk food, “products with high sugar, salt, and/or caffeine”. The stated reason for this tax is their appalling 18.8% obesity rate (which is still lower than the lowest American state), so the extra millions this tax will generate will go to the state health care system, because according to their Prime Minister, “those who live unhealthily have to contribute more”.

 

Hungarian dobos torte, from the Café Gerbeaud in Budapest

 

All of which would be well and good, if not for the fact that healthcare for fat people is cheaper. The biggest healthcare costs are associated with old age, when regardless of how healthy you are, you’re on all kinds of pills and in and out of the hospital more than the movie theater. And while fat people do cost more in healthcare up to old age, the fact is they die at a younger age than healthy people. The result is that over their lifetime, healthy people cost about 420k$ while obese people only cost 370k$. So what the Hungarian government is doing via this tax is exactly the opposite of what they want: they’re adding more costs to their healthcare system by creating an incentive to be fit.

Now, is it bad to be healthy and fit? Of course not. It’s just their reasoning that’s backwards. If they were actually being altruistic and said “we don’t want our population being fat because… ewww. And we’re willing to pay higher healthcare costs for it”, that would make perfect sense. But taxing fat people because they cost the healthcare system more is like putting an air travel tax on housewives instead of business men.

Hungarian Parliament Building on the Danube

 

To be fair to Hungary, it’s not the only country that taxes junk food — it’s just the newest, and their law is the most comprehensive. But Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Austria and other countries tax things like soda and candy and ban trans fats.

And on a different note, this kind of story is a big part of why many Americans are against a national healthcare system: once the government is responsible for the costs of healthcare, it can also pass laws to lower those costs. At least half of Americans don’t like their government also doubling as their nanny and telling them they can’t eat Pringles because trans fats have (erroneously) been banned to keep their health costs down.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. (Gerald Ford)

Not that the lack of a healthcare system is much of a deterrent — New York City, Philadelphia and other places in the US already ban trans fats. And the federal government has been wrongly banning things for a century; for example, absinthe was banned from 1912 to 2007 because it caused epilepsy or hallucinations or madness, depending on who you asked, when in reality it does none of those things, or anything particularly bad.

From Spiegel Online, via Reddit and Neatorama

Personality Traits Of The Fat And Skinny

Posted by apt46 on August 12, 2011 None comments

The National Institute on Aging did some very interesting analysis on a group of people they have been following for 50 years and tied a few key personality traits to measurements of adiposity: BMI score, waist size, body fat and hip size. They found some interesting, if not unexpected, correlations: impulsive and extroverted people tend to be fatter; and conscientious, disciplined, organized people tend to be skinnier. This makes sense because people who are impulsive tend to eat more, as do social butterflies since so many social events are based around eating and drinking. Disciplined people however, will have either the will power or coping mechanisms in place to navigate their daily life without over-indulging in calories or exercising enough. Note however, that the two sides aren’t mutually exclusive: disciplined people can be extroverted, and vice-versa.

The traits were taken from the Five Factor Model in psychology, which describes human personality by scoring subjects on each of five areas. From Wikipedia:

  • Openness – (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
  • Conscientiousness – (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
  • Extraversion – (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
  • Agreeableness – (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
  • Neuroticism – (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

What the researchers found was that people who scored high on the Neuroticism and Extraversion traits were fatter, and people who scored high on the Conscientiousness trait were skinnier. They went a little deeper though and made finer measurements of ‘facets’ in each of the five main  personality traits, which gave them even more insight. These facets are more practical concepts to grasp, so here are the ones that had significant correlation to higher body fat — 0 means no correlation, 1 means complete correlation:

  • 0.26 – Impulsiveness, the only facet of Neuroticism that was significant
  • 0.13 – Warmth, part of Extraversion
  • 0.12 – Assertiveness, part of Extraversion
  • 0.07 – Positive Emotions, part of Extraversion
  • 0.06 – Gregariousness, part of Extraversion
  • 0.05 – Competence, part of Conscientiousness
  • 0.05 – Excitement-seeking, part of Extraversion

And the facets that had significant correlation to lower body fat, meaning a negative correlation higher body fat:

  • 0.12 – Order, part of Conscientiousness
  • 0.10 – Self-discipline, part of Conscientiousness
  • 0.09 – Straightforwardness, part of Agreeableness
  • 0.08 – Activity, part of Extraversion
  • 0.07 – Modesty, part of Agreeableness
  • 0.05 – Deliberation, part of Conscientiousness
  • 0.05 – Altruism, part of Agreeableness

So now we know why Paula Deen is fat and Michelle Obama is skinny. If you want to find out how much your personality puts you at risk for obesity, there’s a very good Five-Factor Model test here.

From The American Psychological Association

Burn Fat With Interval Training And Eating Healthy

Posted by apt46 on July 13, 2011 None comments

This week, Livestrong has more praise for eating healthy, interval training, and metabolic resistance training. First, they make it a point to say that if you eat junk food, there’s no way you’ll lose weight. It’s just impossible for people that have jobs and lives to exercise enough to burn off the just ghastly amount of calories junk food has; for example, you probably need to run for 45 minutes to burn off a slice of pizza or a couple soda or some ice cream cake. One study showed that people who did 300 hours of cardio in a year only lost five pounds, at the rate of 60 hours per pound. That’s ten hours of cardio per day in a week, just to lose one pound. A healthy diet will help that ratio become much more reasonable.

Second, the article emphasizes the right kind of exercise to burn fat. Both interval training and metabolic resistance training have been mentioned before, but the short of it is this:

  • Interval training: get your heart rate way up, then slow it back down to rest, and repeat. If you’re running, sprint then walk and do that for the duration. This burns more fat.
  • Metabolic resistance training: switch up between working out different groups of muscles; upper body and lower body, for example. The body gets used to routines pretty fast and get efficient at it, meaning less calories get burned for doing the same exercise. But if you keep switching what you do, it can’t get efficient at any one thing and therefore burns more calories.

So there you have it: eat smart and exercise smart and the weight will come off.

Via Livestrong

Burn Fat With Weights Instead Of Cardio

Posted by apt46 on July 6, 2011 None comments

We’ve heard before that if you want to be fit, lift free weights instead of — or in addition to — doing cardio like running. Livestrong this week has some more of that advice. Their reasoning:

  • More muscle means higher base metabolic rate. If you sit on the couch all day and you have 10lbs of muscle, you’ll burn less calories than if you have 15lbs of muscle.
  • Doing an hour of cardio means you burn extra calories for that one hour. Doing an hour of weight lifting means you burn extra calories for as long as you have those muscles.
  • When lifting weights, make sure they’re free weights like dumbbells and bars; these will strengthen your big visible muscles and small stabilizer ones. The weight machines in gyms on the other hand, will isolate the big muscles, leaving you more injury prone and moving like the Hulk.
  • Running a lot without having strong enough stabilizer muscles can contribute to running injuries.
  • Women should not be afraid of lifting weights: their low levels of testosterone mean bulky muscles take a LOT of work.

Photo by Fang Guo

 

From Livestrong

Also see Why You Should Quit Your Gym

Working Out Hungry Is Bad For You

Posted by apt46 on July 1, 2011 None comments

A new study tested cyclists who worked out after eating and while fasting. It turns out they burned the same amount of fat either way, but there were two downsides to working out on an empty stomach:

  • About 10% of the burned calories came from protein, not fat, including muscle. So you actually lose more muscle by working out hungry, but you don’t burn more fat.
  • Since you’re hungry and you don’t have fuel to burn, the intensity of the workout and therefore the number of calories burned is lower on an empty stomach.

So if you’re trying to lose fat, eat something good for you before working out. Cliff bars are pretty filling energy bars that are natural and kinda good for you and come in at about 240 calories — just make sure you burn more than that working out.

Photo by Les Chatfield

 

Update: A particularly astute reader pointed out a possible contradiction between this study and another study from last year, which found that working out strenuously in the morning before eating breakfast (i.e., on an empty stomach) led to lower weight gain, more efficient fat burning and less insulin resistance. There are a few differences between the two studies though, namely that in the breakfast one:

  • they fed the healthy subjects a really bad high-fat diet: 50% more fat and 30% more calories than they were consuming before. The breakfast was rich in carbs and they had sports drinks during the workouts. The cyclists in this study on the other hand, were probably on a decent diet.
  • they focused on breakfast. It could be there’s something special going on right after we wake up: e.g., maybe the body has been turning fat into carbs all night to prepare fuel for the morning.
  • all of the subjects gained weight due to the awful diet, but the ones that exercised after breakfast gained a negligible amount. So it could be that they actually lost muscle mass and replaced it with fat, which would actually fit in with the cyclist study’s findings; it found that 10% of calories came from protein, and some unspecified part of that was muscle mass — that still leaves 90% that came from carbs and fat.
  • it didn’t test for hunger. Unless they hadn’t eaten in a long time, many people don’t wake up being hungry right away. In the cycling study, the group had been fasting, so they were presumably pretty hungry. It’s reasonable to assume that the body won’t signal hunger until it’s out of fuel, at which point it starts cannibalizing muscles. Therefore, if the people in the breakfast study weren’t hungry in the morning, it’s also reasonable to assume their bodies didn’t cannibalize muscle.

Perhaps one tell-tale sign is the intensity of the workout. The cyclist study found that the ones fasting didn’t have as intense of a workout. So if in the morning, you feel like you can easily have as intense of a workout before breakfast as after breakfast, then you probably have enough fuel in your system to not worry about burning muscle mass.

From The New York Times, via Lifehacker

Why You Should Quit Your Gym

Posted by apt46 on April 13, 2011 1 comments

Men’s Journal has a very interesting article on how gyms are mostly a money-sucking machine designed to keep people subscribed, but not really using the equipment — equipment which, by the way, doesn’t make you all that fit. At the same time, getting in shape is actually pretty easy to do on your own, for free. If you hire a personal trainer, that’s even worse: his whole job is to make sure he’s indispensable, not to give you the tools to work out on your own.

The article isn’t about losing weight, but rather about getting fit. You could say that one follows the other, and it’s true that getting fit will make you lose weight, but losing weight will not necessarily make you fit. For example, how fit are the starving Somalis, or prisoners in concentration camps? Cardio machines at the gym burn calories, but don’t do much else. The key to being fit is strength. The weight machines in gyms isolate muscles, which prevent injury right away, but actually increase your potential for injury later. Why? Because isolation of the “prime mover” muscles is bad for us: we need to use the whole body in order to also strengthen stabilizing muscles which prevent injury. The imbalance of having strong prime mover muscles and weak stabilizer muscles is like “ trying to fire a cannon from a canoe”. Free weights are excellent for strengthening both types of muscles, and gyms tend to hide these on the periphery.

This is because their business model is based around “new stuff”: new machines, new workouts, new advice on how to not injure yourself. But fitness isn’t rocket science, and pretty much all of the information and free weights have been around for a century. So gyms don’t focus on that. They also don’t focus on fitness fanatics, because they don’t want them crowding the gym working out all the time. So they target the typical office worker who might show up 3 times a week for a month, then quit coming but continue to dutifully pay the membership fee.

The rest of the article talks about advice he got from two people: Rob Shaul, who coaches Special Forces, and Kevin Brown, who fixed injured pro athletes before he died of cancer.

Rob Shaul says lifting weights is pretty much all you need, and only three exercises at that: squat, dead lift and bench press. That, and keep upping the ante: lift more weight the next time.

Even in 2010, picking up heavy things, throwing heavy things up over our heads, and pulling heavy things remain the very best ways to replicate our foundational movement patterns.

The other important thing is to avoid injury, which is done by strengthening stabilizing muscles. Here’s a handy chart:

 

By pressing and dead-lifting on even days, squatting and doing chin-ups on odd days, avoiding all other exercises, and adding a little to the bar each time, you’ll be stronger than you’ve ever been in only a month’s time.

Via Lifehacker from Men’s Journal