Weight loss – part 8
This is the eighth part in a series about weight loss including diet, exercise, measuring your success and keeping the weight off when you stop.
This is the final post of three about exercise for weight loss, wrapping up a couple of final thoughts, ideas and studies before we move onto some of the more practical aspects of weight loss.
Program choices
As a go-to resource for Figure Athlete advice (and subsequently female-specific weight loss advice) I often have a browse on Terry Stokes’s blog. Terry is a Figure Athlete coach and as such has plenty of experience of what works and what doesn’t work.
Terry wrote part one of a series about Figure Competitor Training on how changes to training can improve fat loss. In particular, one of the biggest errors he sees people make is using machines for most of their workout or doing most of their exercises in a seated position.
What he is getting at here is that you want to use as many muscles as possible for each exercise. From Terry’s perspective, more muscle involvement equals higher calorie burn which in turn equals greater fat loss. Machines or seated variations tend to take a lot of the stabilising muscles out of the equation and therefore reduce the amount of effort needed by the body.
Exercise re-educating the body to metabolise food differently
Exercise alone is not a great tool for weigh loss. It is certainly a necessary part of the equation but it isn’t going to get you to your goals on its own. However, Brian St. Pierre did a brilliant article about how exercise can help change your metabolism so that, once you lose the weight you can maintain your lower weight better.
The study that he refers to took some rats that had an inbred propensity to gain weight. They were made as rotund as possible through a high-fat diet and no exercise. The rats were then put on a calorie-controlled low-fat diet so that they shed about 14% of the fat before being put on a weight maintenance diet.
At the same time as going onto the weight maintenance diet the rats were divided into two test groups. One group were made to run on a treadmill for 30 minutes each day (the things we force rats to do in the name of science…) while the other half remained sedentary. After eight weeks of this, and after maintaining the weight of the rats at this lower body weight for the eight weeks, the rats were let off the leash. They were allowed to eat as much food as they liked.
Those rats who had been sedentary quickly regained the lost weight and added more. Meanwhile the rats who had spent eight weeks doing enforced exercise metabolised their food differently. They started burning the fat immediately after meals (the sedentary rats were burning the carbohydrates and sending the fat in the high-fat diets off to storage cells). The exercised rats also ate less, suggesting that their bodies were able to send messages that they were full sooner, perhaps because they were able to utilise the fat in their food better.
Not only is this a good example of fat-adaption at work, but it is also a test case in how exercise, when used alongside diet, can be an effective tool in weight management as well as weight loss.
This is an excellent place for me to stop today as this study brings us into the topic of weight maintenance, how to measure your success and the other related wrap up issues on weight loss. I’ll save those for a final post next week. In the meantime, if there is anything that you would like me to cover but which seems to be missing from this series please let me know.
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