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2007/03/27, 07:08 PM
If that didn't get you to look, I don't know what will!
I found this article here (http://wwwneilmctcom.blogspot.com/) and it seems to make a lot of sense to me so I thoguht I'd share.
Comments from the experienced folks more than welcome!
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Why exercise doesn't burn many calories
Go to the health club and climb on a stair stepper or treadmill. Program the machine by plugging in your weight, select your speed or program and begin your workout. As you plod along on the apparatus you are driven along by the ever-increasing number on the screen that indicates the number of calories that you have burned. Eventually you go long enough to burn 300 calories and you are left with a feeling of accomplishment. Now, as you wipe the sweat from your brow and catch your breath, let me ask you a question. Why did the machine ask you to program in your weight? If you answered to calculate how many calories you burn you are right. What you most likely failed to consider is the main reason it needs your weight is to calculate your basal metabolic rate. The average male will maintain his weight on about 3200 calories a day. That is about 140 calories an hour at rest. So the 300 calories burned are not calories burned above your basal metabolic rate, they are calories burned including your basal metabolic rate. So for your time on the treadmill, you burned about 160 calories above your baseline. If you eat just 3 cookies, you have completely undone about an hour's worth of work. Think about it...if we were so metabolically inefficient as to burn 300 calories at the rate the exercise equipment says you do, would we ever have survived as a species. The calories burned hunting and gathering would have caused us to die of starvation before we could ever have found anything to eat. At that rate of calorie burn, we would barely have enough metabolic economy to survive a trip to the grocery store. Most people have accepted blindly the information displayed on exercise equipment and as such have turned exercise into a form of guilt absolution. Have dessert (600 calories of pie) and feel guilty? Just go to the health club and work on the stepper until 600 calories tick by on the screen. Other than the fact that this simply seems pathetic, it also just doesn't work.
Let us assume that you have the determination and time to do such a workout 7 days a week. If we take the 300 calories burned and subtract out your basal metabolic rate of 140 calories, we are left with 160 calories burned. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. If your appetite is not spurned by the exercise (as it commonly is) and you keep a stable calorie intake, it would take you 21.875 days to burn off a pound of fat with the extra activity. This is assuming that no other variables are present. Unfortunately there is a big variable that almost no-one accounts for...muscle loss. In order to exercise long enough to reach the 300 calorie mark on the stepper or treadmill, you have to perform low intensity steady state activity. Steady state activity does not place much demand on the muscles, that is why it can be carried out for so long. Rather than demanding use of a large percentage of your muscle fibers, you are actually using a small percentage of your weakest, slow-twitch fibers over and over. When you perform this type of exercise your body can adapt by actually losing muscle. Since you use such a small percentage of your muscle mass to do the work, additional muscle is perceived as dead weight, useless and burdensome. If a person persisted in 7 day a week steady state training they could easily lose about 5 pounds of muscle tissue. Muscle tissue is the most metabolically expensive tissue we have; it takes between 50 and 100 calories a day just to keep a pound of muscle alive.
Let's assume the lower number of 50 calories a day. If you lose 5 pounds of muscle over time as you perform your calorie burning exercise that will result in a loss of 250 calories per day that would be used to keep that muscle alive. The 160 calories you burned would probably now be more like 100 burned because with practice, your running or climbing economy improves and requires less effort (most of the perceived conditioning in steady state activity is actually the exercise getting easier not because of improved cardiovascular condition, but because of improved economy of motion. This is why if you take a runner and have him perform another steady state activity such as cycling he will be gasping for air. Indeed, runners who train on treadmills in the Winter notice a large decrease in perceived condition when they hit the road in the Spring). So now if we do the math we will find that you burned about 100 calories above your baseline per day, but we must subtract out 250 calories due to muscle loss. For all your effort you are now 150 calories in the wrong direction. Furthermore, the stress hormones that result from such overtraining also stimulate fat storage. Anyone who has attempted such a program of weight loss can confirm...you will end up feeling washed out, moody, and (worst of all) fatter. The truth is this: you cannot use physical activity to negate excess caloric intake.
Muscle: the real key to burning calories
Remember when you were a teenager and could eat everything in sight and not get fat? Somewhere in your 30's things changed. Now it seems like just looking at food can make you fat. What happened?
The main difference for most people is that they have less muscle in adulthood than they had in their late teens and early twenties. As we age there is a natural tendency to lose muscle and we also are less vigorous in our physical activity, which results in further muscle loss. This loss of muscle tissue results in a decreasing metabolic rate. Lose 5 pounds of muscle and your calories burned per 24 hours decreases by about 250 calories. While this may not sound like much, it adds up. If you continue to eat like you did when you were younger, you will gain a pound of fat in about 14 days. Over a 20 week period you will gain 10 pounds.
The key to getting rid of accumulated body fat is to get back your youthful metabolism by getting back your muscle. You have probably heard people say that "muscle has memory". Well, this is one popular saying that is actually true. With a proper exercise stimulus that dormant muscle can be reclaimed. When you get back the muscle that requires 250 calories a day to keep alive, what used to be an insidious weight-gain problem will become an insidious weight-loss technique. As you become stronger you will have a natural tendency to partake of more vigorous activities. This situation will allow you to lose weight with less attention paid to calorie counting and food selection. The more reasonable your diet can be, the greater your chance to stick with it. As you ride this spiral of success, you may be able to eat more like you did as a teenager. Putting just 5 pounds of calorie burning muscle on your body can really turn things around for you.
Proper exercise and discriminant weight loss
SuperSlow inventor Ken Hutchins was the first person to ever explain the idea of discriminant weight loss to me. He told me to picture the human body as a corporation that is run by a board of directors. He told me to assume that a body operating on a calorie deficit is like a corporation running at a budget deficit. Each of the body tissues could represent a different department within that corporation. He then presented two scenarios. In the first scenario there is a budget deficit and no department has any unusual demands. In this scenario layoffs can occur in all departments. So your body lays off some fat, some muscle, some bone and connective tissue, as well as nervous tissue . Your corporation (or body) becomes a smaller version of its former self. In the second scenario, there is a large demand placed on the muscle department. In this scenario, no layoffs can occur in the muscle department. Indeed, more muscle has to be hired on. This results in a larger layoff in the fat department. We cannot produce cutbacks in the bone or connective tissue department because we need their support because muscle is not helpful unless it is attached to strong bone by strong connective tissue. This means more fat has to be let go. We cannot lay off any nervous tissue, because our new muscle is useless unless it is innervated by new nervous tissue. This means more fat has to be let go. Under this scenario, all weight loss is shunted toward fat loss. In this scenario, your corporation (body) takes on a dramatic shape change. You have added a modest amount of shape-improving muscle and jettisoned a large amount of shape-ruining fat.
Don't put that in your mouth
It should now be evident to you that the easiest way to create the calorie deficit you need to lose bodyfat is to simply avoid putting the extra calories in your mouth in the first place. Even a very modest calorie reduction of 150 calories will result in significant fat loss over time. In the long run, the self-discipline required is much easier to produce than the effort of running on a treadmill for an hour every day (which is a losing proposition anyway). A calorie intake deficit of 500 calories a day is still fairly easy to achieve, and if you have added some muscle to your body the shape change you can produce in 6-12 weeks can be amazing. Initially, you may have to be very compulsive about counting calories, but within a few weeks you will probably learn to manage simply by controlling the portion size of the foods you eat.
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