Eat Meat And Stop Jogging: 'Common' Advice On How To Get Fit Is Keeping You Fat And Making You Sick (9 page)

“W
hile the endurance athlete has a need to maintain a high submaximal intensity for long periods to be successful, the vast majority of athletes, and certainly humans in general, have no need for this type of activity.”

― Mark J. Smith, PhD

Mistake #9

Exercising To Burn Calories

As mammals, if caloric intake is chronically low (during a diet) or output is chronically high (from exercise) our body naturally seeks homeostasis using a combination of hormones and an adjustment to our metabolic rate.  We are able to function on less calories per day because we’re storing more and burning less, while attempting to access more calories by elevating our hunger hormones.  This is why exercising to burn calories is just as ineffective of an approach to getting fit as attempting to eat less.

The New England Journal of Medicine published research in 2011 on the long-lasting negative physiological effects of a caloric deficit. The reason this research is mentioned here, and not in the calorie restriction section, is because the participants consumed only 550 calories/day.  This is characteristic of many extreme weight loss protocols that combine inadequate input (food) with excessive output (exercise). Participants were middle-aged obese men and women that consumed only a ‘special’ shake and two cups of low-starch vegetables for 10 weeks…

…
hmmmm this sounds an awful lot like those MLM Meal-Replacement Shake Diets. 

As expected, the men and women lost a lot of wei
ght.  However, for the next 42 weeks they gained nearly half the weight back on a maintenance plan that was still restricted and their hormone levels remained damaged for an entire year afterwards!  Leptin went down, meaning hunger (ghrelin) increased, metabolism decreased, and fat storage was elevated and remained elevated.  Their threshold to gain was now significantly lower, and their threshold to burn, higher.  As illustrated in Mistake #1, this altered hormonal state continues far beyond the restriction or reduction period, so one can only imagine the effects from a lifelong deficit.

When your solution for weight loss and maintenance is caloric reduction, through more exercise or less eating, you fail.  The results are short-lived, and unfortunately the damage is long lasting. Constantly fighting hunger is difficult, and trying to push through workouts with no energy is exhausting.  The body senses the caloric imbalance and seeks homeostasis.  This is why the energy-in/energy-out philosophy is extremely flawed. If you won’t adjust your energy output (exercise) or energy input (food) to match the demands of your body, your complex hormonal system will do it for you.  Unfortunately, those attempting to lose ‘weight’ are misled into believing that they need to consume less calories, burn more calories, or do both.  When you’re below a caloric homeostasis you cannot consistently overpower the natural regulators in your body.

It seems harder and harder every year, and every time, because it is! 

Usually when your workouts focus on burning calories, your sessions revolve around moderate intensity endurance exercise, or cardio.  People select cardio as their method for training because they’ve bought into the calorie reduction method to losing weight.

“It must be January, all the treadmills, elipticals, and recumbent bikes are booked up at the gym.”

Just like a calorie restriction eating strategy, this approach will help you lose ‘weight’ in the short-term provided you can withstand the exhausting workout sessions and extreme battle with hunger.  However, as a long-term approach it’s not sustainable as our hormones are far too powerful.  Aside from an increase in fat storage hormones and decrease in muscle and metabolism that you would expect from a caloric deficit, frequent and prolonged endurance exercise increases the stress hormone cortisol.

Chronic = Elevated Cortisol

Our body possesses the unique ability to adapt quickly to a new challenge.  The more we perform the same challenge, the easier it becomes, until it’s almost second nature.  This phenomenon, known as muscle memory, is especially evident in exercise as weights begin to feel lighter and distances don’t seem as far.  In order to experience continuous improvement from exercise, we must consistently change the stimulus or make it more difficult (the overload principle).  With resistance training, there’s more variables, as the exercise can be altered, weight raised, or repetition and set scheme adjusted.  Each minor alteration, even in grip, produces a different stimulus that recruits new muscles that need to adapt. With steady-state aerobic training your body adapts to the stimulus and it requires faster speeds or longer distances to experience the benefits that come with adaptation.  The longer durations and increased intensities necessary to experience the ‘training effect’ initiate higher levels of damaging stress hormones.  This results in more fat, less muscle, and a progressive decline in health.

When our body is under stress, the hormone cortisol helps to increase the concentration of glucose in our blood so there’s readily available energy for our muscles to utilize.  Cortisol secretion is a favorable response when released infrequently and for short periods of time as it helps the body deal with stress. However, when the body is exposed to chronic and consistently elevated cortisol for extended periods of time it can experience unfortunate long-term consequences like cognitive decline, altered immune function, poor digestion, and increased fat storage. Again, this can be related back to the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.  They only experienced stress for brief moments in time to run from a predator or chase down prey.  This acute, ‘fight or flight’ response is beneficial, as the cortisol secretion supplies immediate fuel for the brain and muscles to react and function quickly.  However, this acute stress is nothing like the daily stress we experience today, and definitely nothing like the stress from prolonged endurance exercise.

The secretion of cortisol starts at the onset of exercise and continues as long as the stressful situation persists.  This makes the choice of exercise duration and intensity of extremely important. Prolonged endurance training causes the body to release an abundant amount of cortisol. For instance, research from 1976, in the Journal of Applied Physiology showed no increase in cortisol secretion after 10min of exercise (at 75% intensity), but after 30min it doubled. Another study analyzed the cortisol levels in 304 amateur endurance athletes, and the average additional secretion compared to non-endurance athletes (in white) was 42%.

By selecting cardio as your exercise method to getting fit, co
nsistent improvement requires longer distances and higher frequencies.  Those who run more kilometers per week, train for more hours, or take part in more competitions over the year consistently exhibit higher cortisol levels.

Lifelong endurance athletes are essentially bathing in cort
isol and as they continue to push the limits that water gets deeper and deeper.

Intensity plays an equally significant role in determining cortisol secretion as:

80% exercise inten
sity for 1hr raised cortisol, while 40% intensity for 1hr of exercise lowers it.

With an activity like walking, cortisol is removed faster than it can be se
creted.  However, as individuals looking to get fit we’re consistently told to train harder, run further, and burn more calories.  The longer cortisol remains elevated, and the more frequently it rises, the more difficult it is to bring it back to homeostasis.  When cortisol is chronically elevated, we can’t access body fat to burn and we add additional fat to our midsection (visceral or abdominal fat).  Research suggests that this is especially the case for women.

Add the stress of your job, kids, finances, and traffic, and is it any wonder we’re
prone to putting on belly fat?

Chronic Cardio = Testosterone & Muscle Loss

We eat to lose fat, and exercise to build muscle.  If your exercise routine revolves around losing, you will ultimately lose…muscle!  Muscle memory’s effect on endurance training leads to diminishing returns in muscle recruitment and stagnant results from training.  More importantly, any attempt to increase the stimulus for additional development will only lead to more cortisol, which produces muscle loss and lowers the hormones responsible for new growth.

When cortisol is secreted testosterone is inhibited. Cortisol is catabolic (muscle loss) and testosterone is anabolic (muscle gain), so a negative testosterone to cortisol ratio (T:C) promotes muscle loss. If we select cardio as our method for getting fit, any attempt to improve simply leads to more muscle loss. Research suggests that this muscle loss from a negative T:C ratio translates to a slower metabolic rate, higher risk of degenerative disease (like osteoporosis), and an increased mortality rate.

The other factor contributing to an undesirable T:C ratio is muscle fiber type.  The type-1 slow-twitch muscle fibers associated with aerobic athlete (distance runners) favor higher cortisol, while the type-2 fast-twitch muscle fibers associated with anaerobic athletes (sprinters) favor testosterone.  Other than genetics, you have a direct impact on the composition of your fiber type by your exercise habits. As illustrated in the chart below, this fiber shift can be significant in only 16 weeks of endurance training at 3-4 sessions per week:

Regular long-distance exercise results in a shift from type-2 to type-1 fibers, which is a continuous process if the activity is fr
equent and consistent.  Interestingly, someone who doesn’t exercise (non-athlete) has a better fiber composition than a distance runner.

Aside from the
information I’ve presented showing an increase in belly fat and decrease in muscle loss from chronic cardio, I recognize that women hear ‘testosterone’ and assume it means they’ll turn into a man.