By James Fell
Long ago I had one of those “choose-your-own adventure” books based on a James Bond movie, and I made bad choices; the poor British spy kept getting consumed in a vat of molten lava, impaled on a bunch of spiky things or became an appetizer for saltwater crocodiles.
But when it comes to the exercise-then-choose-your-food adventure that that I’ve lived my whole life, however, I have a far better track record.
Do you know the three mealtime words that can cripple weight loss? “Because I exercised,” said Dr Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity researcher in Ottawa, Ontario.
Burning off 300 calories on an elliptical trainer then rewarding your efforts with a 500-calorie piece of cheesecake is just bad maths. That’s the choice that leads to spiky, overweight crocodiles in lava. The other choice is realising that burning calories is the least important thing exercise does. This choice takes advantage of the cognitive-boosting effects of physical activity to resist food rewards and make healthier choices that fuel performance.
Obesity researcher Dr Sue Pedersen, a specialist in endocrinology and metabolism in Calgary, Alberta, explained, “The bottom line is that weight loss is 90% about diet.”
You cannot out-exercise a bad diet. So go ahead, choose your own adventure.
Adventure 1: “I exercise, so I earned this treat.”
So we’re a few months into this New Year, and you’ve resolved to get in shape and lose weight. You’re going to the gym — walking, jogging, swimming, cycling or whatever. After a good workout, you think, “I’m exercising now. I deserve this treat.”
This adventure is called the “reward mentality.”
Because you exercised, as Freedhoff explained, you believe you have leeway in terms of dietary choices. You can have seconds, drink extra booze, care less about what you consume.
The problem, professor Eric Ravussin, of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, explained to me, is that most obese people are incapable — both physiologically and psychologically — of the type of activity required to burn the calories required to achieve significant weight loss. They tend to overestimate just how many calories they burn via exercise then overcompensate with food reward.
It’s bad maths, but it happens all the time. The downside to choosing this adventure is numerous studies showing exercise alone doesn’t lead to weight loss.
Adventure 2: “I exercise, so I need healthy fuel.”
Because weight loss is simple caloric restriction, it can be done easily by eating less, but in an environment with 24/7 McDonald’s, rapid pizza delivery and doughnuts at meetings, it’s hard to resist the constant call of the cookie, cream puff or cheeseburger.
“Exercise is a critical component of weight loss and weight maintenance,” Dr Miguel Alonso-Alonso, a Harvard neurologist and specialist in how exercise affects the brain, told me. “We know that. It’s a fact.”
First off, stress eating is common, but exercise is one of the most powerful tools available for reducing stress. Beyond that, Alonso-Alonso says, it boosts your ability to stick to a plan. “Physical activity and eating behaviour are connected in the brain at the cognitive level. It’s the same mental processes.”
Alonso-Alonso explained we use goal-oriented systems in our brains to suppress those immediate impulses to eat junk food. “The resources for goal-oriented eating behaviour are greatly enhanced via physical activity,” he said. “Exercise improves eating behaviour through brain and cognitive changes.”
Healthy eating involves sticking to a plan. Exercise makes you better at sticking to a plan by enhancing “executive function” and decision-making ability. Every time you eat, good decisions plus higher executive function equals better decisions. Oh, and according to Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behaviour and nutritional sciences at Cornell University, we make more than 200 decisions about food every day.
“There is a dose-response effect,” Alonso-Alonso said. “A fitter person is going to have greater improvements in executive function and therefore better control of what they eat.”
Exercise also has the ability to help at the subconscious level. Although you may feel like you’re inhaling fire ants after a hard run, the reality is that physical activity has a rewarding effect on your brain. It elicits the same reward sensation as things like drugs, alcohol, gambling, and even junk food. A 2012 study of 30 people by researchers at California Polytechnic State University determined that exercise suppresses desire to eat by giving your brain an alternate, healthier fix.
But when it comes to appetite, not all exercises are created equal.
Another study from last year, this one by researchers at the University of Western Australia, used 33 sedentary people and found that those in the aerobic training group had increased satiety, but those in the resistance training group (such as weightlifting), did not.
“Exercise is good to control appetite,” says Nicole Avena, a research neuroscientist in the fields of diet and addiction at the University of Florida College of Medicine. “It releases hormones that are associated with satiety. You have a reduced desire to eat.”
And you can take advantage of the sweet, sweaty memories of exercise too. “When you exercise it creates a life perspective where you don’t want to undo it all with an unhealthy diet,” eating behaviourist Eric Stice of the Oregon Research Institute said.
Yale University obesity researcher Dr David Katz told me that when it comes to better eating, exercise is “the wind beneath your wings.”
“It helps you want to care more about yourself and make better food choices,” he told me. “You want to put better fuel in the tank.”
Despite all the benefits of exercise for making better eating choices, many people still mess this up. They allow the reward mentality to override.
If weight loss is your goal, choose the right adventure and turn Freedhoff’s caution on its head. Say to yourself: “I can make most of my food choices good ones. I can resist eating junk food. I can do this. Because I exercised.” — Chicago Tribune/MCT
**** (James Fell is a certified strength and conditioning specialist.)
A history of diets
By Emine Saner
Pre-20th-century diets
In Calories and Corsets: a History of Dieting over 2,000 years, Louise Foxcroft shows that worrying about our food habits, and trying to change them, isn’t a modern phenomenon. “Hippocrates understood that the underlying principles of health were food and exercise,” she writes. From early Christian asceticism to the 1558 “bestseller” The Art of Living Long, Lord Byron’s “fad diet of potatoes flattened and drenched in vinegar” and the French physician Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s low-carb diet in the 19th century, the desire to lose weight has been a constant. “One of the earliest low-carbohydrate diets to reach a major audience,” Foxcroft points out, was published by William Banting, an undertaker, in 1863. “It soon became so well-known that “Banting” — as in “I am Banting” — became a synonym for dieting in the UK and America well into the 1920s.”
Fletcherism, early 1900s
At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, Horace Fletcher, an American entrepreneur, gained the nickname the Great Masticator. His diet, which Foxton called a “chewing craze”, involved eating as much as you liked, but each mouthful had to be chewed a minimum of 100 times (the idea being that the food would become liquid, and weight gain could not result from undigested food).
Calorie counting, 1920s
The fashion for thin, boyish figures for women took hold in the 1920s, and so did fad diets, such as the cigarette diet (one Lucky Strike advert read “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”). Numerous products, such as diet pills, chewing gum, laxatives and contraptions made outlandish fat-reducing claims. But the idea of counting the number of calories in food took off after Doctor Lulu Hunt Peters published Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories, in 1918. It sold millions of copies throughout the 1920s, becoming the first diet bestseller. She urged women to view food as calories, and not to consume more than 1,200 a day.
Hay diet, 1930s
The diet established by William Hay, an American doctor, became one of the most famous early fad diets. It was based on Hay’s idea that food was either protein, starch or neutral — protein and starch, he believed, should not be eaten in the same meal. Famous followers included Henry Ford.
Cabbage soup diet, 1950s
The creator is unknown, but its popularity has continued to the present day, even though it appears to be nothing more than a recipe for flatulence. Usually a seven-day diet plan, consisting of mainly cabbage soup, supplemented with fruit and vegetables and a small amount of meat. Other soup diets have become popular in the decades since, such as the watercress soup diet.
The Atkins diet, 1972
Robert Atkins devised the diet based on his own weight-loss experiments, and by the late 1960s it was gaining attention. In 1972 he published Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which would go on to sell tens of millions of copies. Thirty years later, his follow-up book, New Diet Revolution (2002), made the Atkins diet more popular than ever — it was made more famous by the number of celebrities supposedly on it.
The Beverly Hills Diet, 1981
The book, published in 1981, showed people how to follow a highly restrictive six-week food-combining regimen and turned its author, Judy Mazel, into a Hollywood diet “guru”. Mazel, clearly inspired by William Hay, believed that the order in which we ate food was the main problem, “confusing” the enzymes in our bodies that digest the food and leading to weight gain. She advocated the eating of rather a lot of “fat-burning” pineapple. For the first 10 days of the diet, only fruit was permitted; gradually other foods were introduced, but protein and carbohydrates were eaten separately. It sold more than a million copies and attracted celebrity fans including Linda Gray and Liza Minnelli.
Blood Type diet, 1997
In Eat Right for Your Type, Peter D’Adamo, a naturopath, claimed that people should eat foods compatible with their blood type. Under his regimen, those with the O blood group, for instance, should follow a higher-protein/lower-carbohydrate diet, while those in the A group should be mainly vegetarian. He claims his diet will “lead you back to the essential truths that live in every cell of your body and link you to your historical, evolutionary ancestry”.
The Dukan diet, 2000s
A French GP, Pierre Dukan, developed his diet in the 1970s as a way of treating obese patients. But it was only in 2000, when he published his book in France (it was published in the UK in 2010), that the Dukan diet took off, selling around 8mn copies to date. Like the Atkins diet, it involves four stages of weight loss and “stabilisation”, with the final stage being a diet for life, including eating protein only one day a week.
The fasting diet, 2012
Fasting, sometimes known as the 5:2 diet (eat normally for five days; restrict calories to 500 for women, and 600 for men, on two non-consecutive days), is the current diet trend though its supporters would describe it as advice for life rather than a fad diet and there are claims it can reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease. In the UK, the idea gained traction after Dr Michael Mosley took part in a BBC2 Horizon documentary about the health benefits of fasting in 2012, then published a book on the subject. Another book, The 2 Day Diet, also advocating two low-calorie days per week, has just been published. Written by Dr Michelle Harvie, a dietitian, and Tony Howell, a professor of oncology at Manchester University, and based on their research, it gives weight to the 5:2 diet. — Guardian News & Media
