Fat Loss, Exercise, and Food

From a note I received from http://www.precisionnutrition.com/:
Outside of the 3-5 hours you exercise per week, what are you doing with a good chunk of the other 165 hours?  You’re eating. 

That’s why an exercise program is never enough to see real, honest-to-goodness body transformation - and why knowing how to change the way you eat is so vital to changing your life.

And here’s the exciting part: fitness professionals are finally figuring this out. And as a result, we’re seeing some welcome changes in the fitness industry.

In five years, knowing how to help change a clients’ eating habits will be what separates the "personal trainer" from the person who changes lives.

I was first exposed to this idea about four years ago via a discussion board post from CrossFit's founder, Greg Glassman.  Alwyn Cosgrove repeatedly says "You cannot out train a bad diet."  Many folks have a hard time believing this, because the opposite idea has so often been stated, it is believed, despite being unproved:  "Just exercise enough and you will lose weight."  That this strategy can work for some makes it all the more confusing for the many - who find they do not achieve their body composition and/or health goals via exercise alone. 

While it is not debatable that body fat accumulation reflects the First Law of Thermodynamics - energy cannot either be created or destroyed - therefore, if one accumulates a pound of fat, then one must have ingested more calories than one has expended.  What the "first law" does not account for is "why". 

Human behavior is complex and defies any simple analysis which might invoke will power, calories-in-calories-out, or "just burn a few more calories daily".  In complex systems, causality is rarely linear. 

An example goes as follows:

I propose fat accumulation is the result of a complex series of interactions between external demands on the human (do you have to work ten hours a day in the fields to grow/harvest/store/process your food?), internal hormonal signals (high carb consumption requires a series of responses to prevent damage to the organism from excess blood glucose), and information available to the human in question (do you know how to avoid hormone disregulating foods?  Do you know how to associate pain instead of pleasure to your unconscious mind's response to foods you think you should avoid?  Have you learned which foods result in satiety, and supress hunger for long periods, and which result in rapid return of hunger?). 

Restated - there are external circumstances which result in weight loss which are not related to human choice at all - for example, once you are in boot camp, you'll eat what you can and do your best to keep moving as directed.  There are internal responses which are not directly related to calorie intake which still result in fat accumulation.  And the more a human knows, the more likely they are to be able to impact the variables that result in fat accumulation.  Due to these variables and others, human fat accumulation is complex and not likely to be the same for most of those who suffer from either too much fat or too little.

This is a very, very general model, and the details could be worked out in a number of ways.  Hopefully, science will work its way through those details in my lifetime!  In the near term, we have to rely on human experience, which works much more rapidly than science, though is plagued by superstition, and about a million other truth distorting tendencies towards bias.

While short, intense exercise is therapeutic in a variety of ways and worth doing for its own sake regardless of weight loss intentions, I am not one who believes it is a requirement for fat loss - at least not for everyone.

If you would like to jump start your body recomposition effort, or have determined it is time to take your health into your own hands, call me today!  Like CrossFit, I will help you achieve faster results with less frustration!

901-517-0085, ask for Paul