Exercise Is Not a Primary Means For Weight Loss

By: Randy Goodman, B.A. Kinesiology, Onnit Foundations Certified Coach, Health Science Academy Advanced Sports & Exercise Nutritional Advisor

Disclaimer

STOP! Before you continue, here are the obligatory disclaimers that seem to accompany anything that can be looked at as diet advice:

1. This is a post about exercise, diet and how to lose weight. I understand, for many these are the most annoying posts around, so if your ego does not allow you to accept information that contradicts the way to stuff your gaping maw or you're just not into this shit then don’t read it.

2. This is an opinion piece that is based on my own personal research and experimentation. Any advice I give on what to eat or not eat is based on books and studies I have read and personally applied to my body. I’m not a doctor or a scientist and this is not medical advice.

If you’re still here, read on my sweet child.

I Workout So I Can Eat What I Want and Not Get Fat

How’s that working out for ya, there, Big Chief? Is health's common saboteur, visceral fat, increasing in volume and smothering your beloved organs more and more year after year? If so, your approach of working out to offset your poor dietary choices isn’t working and you're not alone.

You ever hear the phrases "you can't outrun a bad diet" or "abs are made in the kitchen"? Well, research is showing that there may be some truth to those statements. Well credentialed Canadian author, Timothy Caulfield (Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy; Professor, Faculty of Law and School of Public Health; and Research Director, Health Law Institute), has gathered a pile of research in his book, “The Cure For Everything,” supporting the idea that exercise is more effective for maintaining your weight as you age rather than exercise as a primary means of weight loss. Diet undoubtedly takes the role of a primary means of weight loss. There are thousands of ways that exercise contributes to health and longevity so definitely do indulge in some deep, glorious bicep curls on the regs. Just don’t use it solely for weight loss without consideration for diet. Exercise as a primary means of weight loss is simply one of the biggest health myths out there!

Think about it. How hard is it to burn 500 calories in a short amount of time? Most people need to work out vigorously for close to an hour to accomplish that feat. Now, how many calories are in a Starbucks beverage and blueberry muffin? And, how fast do you think those calorie packed treats get in your belly, knock off one third of your recommended daily caloric intake (RDI), and spike your blood sugar and consequently, insulin which initiates fat storage? One of those things is way easier and way yummier than the other. Unless you think a one hour slog on the treadmill or a half hour HIIT session is yummy then I believe the list of folks that thinks like you is longer than the list of folks that think like me. In other words, in reality most people, for many reasons, don’t or can’t stick to a regular exercise practice, never mind one that can actually offset their current diet.

Evolutionarily Programmed to Eat Like an Asshole

Yeah, if you want to get rid of any unwanted fat, you're gonna have to harden up and face your unhealthy food addictions head on. It can be a battle because you are dealing with the same opiate receptors that drugs like heroine, morphine and oxycontin play on. Only, instead of making you high, the opiates from some “food products” make you hungry. In other words, they begin to control your behavior by calling you hither towards the cookies, ice cream and doughnuts- an evolutionary survival trait that made our hunter-gatherer ancestors eat as much as they could when they came across a rare calorie rich carbohydrate source. Just seeing the words “ice cream” and “doughnuts,” you probably want to have some right now lol! I can feel it as I spill this ink. We still have the evolutionary trait that tells us when something is sweet or rich, “EAT LOTS OF IT” because, as a hunter-gatherer, we may not come across a calorie source like that for a long time. The problem is, we barely have to get off our ass to have access to rich calorie sources in our soft new world full of treats scientifically designed to play on the chemical reactions in your brain.

In my opinion, the best way to lose weight through diet is to begin eating foods that are as close to their natural state as possible and completely give up refined simple carbs in order to stop the ridiculous, uncontrollable cravings. 

A good rule of thumb for shopping is to stick to the perimeter of the grocery store. Fill your cart with fruits, vegetables, grass-fed meats, free range eggs and foods that don't come in a package. Stick it to the man and get punk-rock about your diet by staying out of the middle isles where all the fancy food-like products are! We don’t need your packaged food, maaaaan! 

Socially Unacceptable to Eat How You Want to Eat

One major problem with doing this is looking like a complete weirdo in public gatherings. People are gonna bust your stones because you don’t eat “normal.” You’re going to have to find food choices on the menu or at social events that suit the way you eat. The way you deal with this is to harden the fuck up! If you are so sensitive that you can’t take a dig or two from your buds about not eating bread or pasta, then you may need to look into talking to a mental health professional. I’m kidding of course, but it is something you encounter and need to have a plan for. 

The way I deal with it is to stay low key and not bring any attention to how I eat. Don't preach about your diet! I stay reasonable and flexible in how I approach avoiding unhealthy foods. For example, if beef on a bun and coleslaw is the meal for a work meeting, it’s beef on a giant pile of coleslaw for me. If we’re at a restaurant and the salad I order comes with breaded chicken, I just deal with it and eat it. In the grand scheme of things, a couple pieces of breaded chicken aren’t going to derail what I’m trying to accomplish. I’m not celiac; I’m just a dude trying to keep visceral belly fat from taking me out early.

The Glycemic Index

The glycemic index (GI) compares how much a food spikes blood sugar levels compared to a standard food, which is glucose (sugar) or white bread. It uses a scale of 1-100, with the standard sugar getting a GI score of 100. Stay away from foods that are high on the GI like packaged snacks, cookies, breads, pastas, candy, etc. Simply explained, the higher a food is on the GI, the more it spikes your blood sugar. Many fruits score high on the GI, but they are packed full of fibre and other vitamins and chemicals that affect their GI load. I don’t find they affect my body like refined sugars and other high GI wheat products do. You aren’t going to get fat eating fruit, you silly goose.

If you wanna pack on pounds and go down a road of bad health and disease, then continually spike your blood sugar. Foods like refined wheat (which are what most packaged snacks contain) and foods with high refined free sugar content are extremely addictive and wreak havoc on your body by causing inflammation, fat storage and aging. After a week of not eating high glycemic foods, among other health benefits, from an aesthetics standpoint you'll feel less fluffy and your skin will literally feel thinner and closer to those rippling abs you've been hiding since your twenties.

2014- When I first began to experiment with a low GI, whole food diet. This is actually what happened after cutting out wheat products and simple sugars. My exercise didn't change. Just my diet. 

Go to Battle…For a Week or So

Remember, in the first week you will battle intense cravings, headaches, irritability and other symptoms after giving up processed carbohydrates. But, I promise you that will go away and you'll begin to become addicted to disappearing fat, decreased inflammation and arthritis pain, and an overall renewal of energy and vitality. Combined with keeping a casual eye on calories in verses calories out, keeping your diet in the bottom half of the GI allows for effortless weight loss and personal control over what you shove into your face. After a week or two staying low on the GI, you will be able to say no to desert without feeling deprived.

Experiment With Your Own Body

Challenge yourself to try giving up packaged food, wheat products and high GI foods for a week. It's hard, but you need to feel what it's like and how easy it becomes to not crush three doughnuts at the office or a bag of candy from the gas station- personal battles I’m currently winning.

2014- After a few months, I went from a swollen, inflamed, puffy guy to single digit fat percentage because of how I chose to eat. I exercised the same the whole time; HIIT of course.

Remember, don't let your education about what you should and shouldn't eat come solely from governments or large food corporations. Money, lobbying and economics influence what they tell you. One of the things "big food" and anyone they're in bed with tells the public is that you can offset your food choices by exercising regularly. "Eat the snacks and as long as you exercise you won't get fat." An obvious thing to tell people when you want them eating lots of food in order to fulfill their duty to their share holders. Pull nutrition information from a variety of sources-  pay attention to who is funding the study or article- and make up your own rational opinion about how you should eat.

Stay well and, as the kids say, stay woke!

RG

...Just Like Riding a Bike

If you remember back to when you first started riding a bike, you got on the bike and you began feeling it out until you were up and riding. Someone, maybe a parent or a friend provided some guidance, but for the most part you learned how to do it on your own. You weren't bombarded with conflicting, confusing, often intimidating information on how to do it. Nobody sat next to you saying that your form was all wrong or that you needed to ride longer to get real results.

We have been living in our current anatomical structure for  about 200,000 years. We should be very familiar with movement, but to so many movement and exertion has become a foreign concept. There is a large portion of the population that are very hesitant to begin a fitness program.  Much of the information we are fed through media and magazines leaves us thinking that beginning a program requires the guidance of an expert, special equipment in a fancy gym, or large amounts of free time. Many will go all in on something that isn't sustainable. People will often sign up for a program that is very time consuming. Get your gym stuff together, drive to the gym, hit the change room, lift like a beast for and hour and a half, hit the showers, hit up a Jugo Juice, drive home. All good if you have the time, but many try to make that work only to give into the fact that it just takes too much time, negatively affecting other aspects of your life such as family or social relationships.

Well guess what, your body is a bike! Get on and ride! You didn't need the big fancy gym membership and the stack of creepy supplements go ride bikes as a youngster and you don't need that stuff to start a fitness program as an adult.

The foundation of TheGoodsMethod is consistent, short duration, body weight workouts that include a variety of movement patterns. All you need is a small space, I use a timer app on my phone, and some creativity. Set the timer for 20 seconds on 10 seconds off (TABATA protocol) for a total of 15 mins and do a "choose-your-own-adventure" (I used to dig on those books) workout using your body. Pick whatever movements you want in any order you want. Maybe you choose one that makes you breath harder, the next movement you want a nice stretch, maybe the next movement you want a little pump. You get what I mean when I say choose your own adventure? Jump like a frog for 20 secs, take a break for 10 secs, do push-ups for 20 secs, take a break for 10 and so on. No equipment needed, no expert telling you that you're doing it wrong, nobody judging you because you can do it in the privacy of your own home. Your body WILL respond if you begin doing this 3 days a week. Your body composition will change, you're posture will change, you'll feel less achy, more energized, and your mental game will change for the better.

Take a short period of time out of your day and move your body in ways that you don't normally move it. If you step back and take a look at what a modern adult does as far as movement on a daily basis, you find the movements are very linear, often static and very repetitive. Our daily jobs and responsibilities keep us holding babies with the same arm, sitting at desks for hours at a time, walking in straight lines, looking down at cell phones. Our 200,000 year-old anatomy is not responding well to these new stresses and it's showing up as a huge burden on our medical systems.

I recently spoke with a health and safety rep of a large corporation and they told me that, per capita, there are more away from work cases among the office workers than there are among the field workers in the company. That says a lot to me. You'd think the employees that are working around dangerous equipment would be the ones getting hurt, but it's the employees that are in a more sedentary environment that are making up the majority of away from work cases.

So, getting back to my bike analogy. Get on it and ride it, maintain it, and enjoy it on a regular basis! If you just leave your bike sitting there it is gonna get stiff and rusty and when you do try ride it the chain is gonna snap or the brakes aren't going to work and you're not gonna have a good time! If you are "just digging your bike out of the shed," be gentle for the first little while. Take it easy and make sure the movements your are doing feel good. If it hurts in a bad way, don't do it. Before long, you'll have a large vocabulary of movements your body is capable of doing and your body will be ready to take on all challenges. When your buds call you up to do a scenic hike, you'll be the first one up the mountain!

And remember, if you want some guidance or a group to move with, give The Goods a shout. We've got your back!

Have a healthy week, kids!
Randy