Posts Tagged ‘exercise’

Exercising to lose weight? Here’s why it may not be the BEST strategy.

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

In a classic study on weight loss, researchers discovered after six months:

  1. People who exercised 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week and did NOT change their diet lost two pounds. fit woman running
  2. People who reduced calories below their daily burn lost nearly 20 pounds.
  3. People who exercised AND reduced calories lost 23 pounds.

Why is that the case? Basic human physiology. To lose weight, your body must be forced to use its stored energy (meaning fat). This ONLY happens if you burn more calories than you consume. At my weight, 30 minutes of brisk walking burns about 150 calories. (The more you weigh, the more you burn.) If I do this 5 days a week without changing the number of calories I eat, it will take approximately 23 days to lose one pound. Here’s the math:

  • 3,500 calories are contained in one pound of body fat.  (Approximately 10% of fat tissue is water)
  • 3,500 calories per pound divided by 150 calories per day = 23.3 days.

If you’ve been gaining weight slowly over time, you may not lose anything but you may stop that creeping waistline. To lose one pound a week by just exercising, you’d have to walk for 2 hours, 7 days a week. (Yeah, you have time for that, right?) Compare this to shaving 500 calories from your diet each day. Do this and you’ll lose a pound every week. Add exercise and you’ll lose more, feel better, and get a myriad of other benefits. Bottom line, it’s time consuming to burn a considerable amount of calories through exercise.

If you don’t know how many calories your body burns, how do you know how much to eat? It turns out that most people don’t know. Surveys have shown that fewer than 2 out of 10 people don’t know how many calories they should eat to maintain their weight. And if we judge by results, most people are mismanaging their weight. (Seven out of 10 Americans are overweight or obese.) For the modern lifestyle of sedentary jobs and plentiful food, managing your weight is just like your balancing checkbook. You have to know what’s going in and out in order to avoid overdrafts and bounced checks. If you track your spending and deposit more than you spend, you save money. In the human body, when you put more in compared to what’s going out, you save calories, which turns into fat yet no one intends to become fat. For most people, it happens gradually over time. So to lose those extra pounds, reduce the calories you’re taking in, add exercise to speed up the process and to keep the weight off once you reach your goal. To find out how many calories you burn, take the Free Fitness Profile here www.dotfit.com. Tune in for next week’s blog where I share practical tips for reducing calories WITHOUT feeling hungry or deprived. Yes, it IS possible to lose weight without suffering.  YAY!

– Kat

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Posted in Dieting and Weight loss | No Comments »

Why exerspy?

Friday, September 18th, 2009

When you wear something that kind of looks like an MP3 player on your arm all the time, minus the headphones, you get asked the same question a lot.

“What is that?”

And invariably when I tell people what it is – a device that monitors your calories burned, steps, physical activity and sleep efficiency for the purpose of weight control – the response is always the same:

“But you don’t need to lose weight.”

You know what I want to say?  “EXACTLY! Wearing this little thing on my arm makes me aware of how many calories I burn so I know how many calories I can eat in a day without gaining weight.”

~

Like most people, I have a busy life. I commute 60 miles a day for work, I have responsibilities at home, and I don’t always have time to work out, or sometimes I just don’t want to. Using the exerspy doesn’t make up for exercising, but it gives me wiggle room. It keeps me informed and helps me make smart decisions about food – something that I didn’t learn from my parents or in school. The fact of the matter is that life – and weight control – is much harder without exerspy.

Before I had access to my calorie burn data, I struggled with my weight.  When I finished grad school, I got my first job and woke up 6 months later to find my pants too tight.  The weight gain seemed sudden and inexplicable. I went to the gym 4-5 days a week and did my best to eat healthy foods.  I didn’t know what else to do so I started skipping meals, thinking it would help me lose a few pounds, but all I got was frustrated and really, really hungry.

What had changed was my life.  I no longer walked to class two or three times a day or bounced up and down the stairs of my house to do this or that while writing papers.  Instead, I was stuck at a desk for hours and hours, only burning about 1600 calories a day and getting fat.  I had no idea what was really going on, and I started feeling like a victim of my own body.

A few years later I found bodybugg, which was created by the same team that now makes the exerspy. It changed everything.

The best thing about using a device like exerspy is how empowered you feel once you understand the relationship between calories in and calories out.  You realize you have complete control. It’s right there on the screen in front of you when you upload and log what you ate for the day – you burned X calories, and you ate X calories. The difference between the two is ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW to control your weight. Before exerspy, I didn’t know the difference between those two numbers or what it meant.

With access to this kind of info about your body, metabolism is no longer a factor, nor are carbs or late night eating or genetics or any other weight myth you’ve ever heard.  Diets don’t work because they require you to make drastic changes that you can’t maintain throughout the ups and downs of life.  With exerspy and dotFIT Me, your lifestyle is your fitness plan.  You eat what you want, you move when you want, and you make adjustments.  I don’t know about you but that’s a plan I can live with.

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Posted in Fitness and Exercise, Products | 3 Comments »

Cleansing and Detox: Fact, Fiction or Somewhere in Between?

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Every month or so, I get a question about the value of detox or cleansing products and programs. Before giving an answer, it is useful to differentiate between the most common methods used and what risks, benefits and scientific validity exists.

Purpose

All methods are based upon the same premise: over time, “toxins” accumulate in the colon and can adversely affect one’s health and well being.  What exactly are these toxins? They have never specifically been identified. Removing these “toxins” is said to promote a healthy internal environment and boost your immune system and energy levels and some even go so far as to say the practice can cure illness, allergies and other sinister diseases such as fibromyalgia.

Common methods

Detox and cleansing methods (going forward referred to simply as D/C) fall into two broad categories:

1. Oral supplements, shakes or dietary regimens (generally liquid- or juice-based)

2. High colonics, enemas, colonic irrigation

The first method uses special herbal preparations, fasting or special liquid-based diets. There are scores of products available online and in health food stores that claim to detoxify and cleanse. The one thing that is conspicuously absent is scientific evidence that either refutes or confirms their effectiveness.  So it is one of those if-you-think-you-feel-better-then-you-do scenarios. That is referred to as a placebo effect in scientific lingo. The one thing that is generally experienced is weight loss. Why? Don’t eat for a couple of days, add in some diuretic herbs and you may lose several pounds of fluid. Keep in mind that fluid is not fat, so it is often added back shortly after the cleanse is terminated. Most of these formulas are probably of little danger to the user; some may offer some healthy nutrients and some may contain potentially problematic laxatives.

Colonics (enemas or colonic irrigation) are where a solution is used to irrigate the colon, washing out the aforementioned toxins. Colonics are actually used as a preparation for colonoscopy and other medical procedures, but not for any health or medical benefit. There are regularly cases of infection brought about by unsanitary or reused equipment in nonmedical instances.

Things to Consider

Doctors point out that the body has a natural system of checks and balances and that the digestive tract and bowel naturally eliminate waste material and regulate bacteria. Adding a formulation that radically alters this internal balance can lead to dehydration and, at worst, seriously disrupt electrolyte balance and potentially cause serious problems in individuals with pre-existing medical issues such as kidney or heart problems. Most oral preparations used in D/C are likely safe, but it would be best to run them by your physician or health care provider if you are taking prescription medications or have medical issues. Better to be safe than sorry.

On the positive side, there is evidence that reduced calorie intake (and fasting will definitely do this) over time may have some anti-aging benefits. However, this may be offset by the nagging hunger and lethargy you feel due to a lack of food.

If you are using D/C due to constipation, consider using some less drastic remedies that you should be incorporating into your daily routines anyway:

  • Drink plenty of fluids, especially water
  • Get enough fiber from whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables
  • Exercise

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Getting Ripped

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

I overheard some folks at the gym the other day talking about abdominal training. They had just finished “torching” their abs and were discussing how different exercises affected their abdominal development. Most of the discussion centered on how one exercise or another was responsible for ripped abs. One of the fellows mentioned how they were amazed at a friend that has “shredded” abs, even though he doesn’t work out.

This scenario is a popular one, and a key to the mystery of great abs lies in their final observation of their non-working out friend. To have defined abs, or any muscle for that matter, requires low body fat. Everyone has muscle; it is just that there are varying amounts of body fat that people carry over that muscle. Shredded is a term that describes very low body fat levels. This is achieved by consistently eating fewer calories than you burn, while ideally meeting your nutrient and protein needs (so as not to lose muscle).  The point here is that it is not the specific exercise you do that makes you lean, it is simply that you exercise (calorie burning). But that is not enough; you must be in a calorie deficit as well. Exercisers who eat too many calories are quite common. They are the ones NOT seeing results consistently while  getting frustrated, leading them to seek out the magic exercise or system. The friend the gym members spoke of? He was obviously an active person who controlled his calorie intake, whether consciously or not. Obviously it wasn’t exercise that led to his ripped abs, right?

So, if you are stuck at a plateau and are not happy with your muscle definition, eat less. Or move more. Or both. You will begin to see results. As you lose the fat over your muscles, they will become more “defined”. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

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