Dr. Jonny Bowden

Tag: active lifestyle

  • Exercise: The News You Don’t Want To Hear

    Exercise: The News You Don’t Want To Hear

    My mentor, the late great nutritionist Robert Crayhon, used to say this: “The two great dangers with nutrition are thinking it does everything, and thinking it does nothing”.

    The same can be said of exercise.

    This article is about exercise. And about weight loss. And about the relationship between the two.

    Which, sad to say, is probably a very different relationship than you might think.

    Now before we get started, a disclaimer. I exercise regularly. I think you should too, no matter who you are. I think exercise is the greatest anti-aging activity on the planet. And the data are clear: exercise can help with depression, lower the risk for heart disease and cancer, reduce the risk and complications of diabetes. It can even grow new brain cells.

    What it can’t do is cause you to lose weight—at least not if you do exercise in the traditional way.

    (I told you this was news you didn’t want to hear.)

    For every person who managed to make the annual weight loss issue of People magazine, for every healthy guy smilingly holding up an old pair of pants twice the size of Cleveland, for every 100-pound lighter winner of “the Biggest Loser”, there are thousands more who lose, regain, lose, regain, give up and essentially look the same year in and year out. If exercising the traditional way could produce weight loss, we’d be a whole lot skinnier as a nation and those “success” stories would be far more common.

    A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association followed the exercise habits of over 34,000 women and concluded that it took about an hour a day of moderate (3mph walking) exercising to maintain weight. This research confirms the findings of the National Weight Control Registry which reports that 90% of people who have successfully lost weight and kept it off exercise on average for an hour a day.

    Now that sounds like a lot. But remember that nearly all of this research focuses on moderate intensity exercise like walking. And walking is fine—for all the health benefits mentioned above—but it’s pretty inefficient for weight loss.

    A much better and more efficient way to exercise—and one which research is clearly showing works a lot better—is to do high intensity circuit training. Put the beauty bells down and lift some iron. Shorten your rest periods. If you’re doing “aerobics” do some interval training where you sprint for a while then jog to catch your breath. (This is exactly what programs like Metabolic Aftershock do! )

    So here’s the strategy:

    One: Revamp your diet, concentrating on carbohydrates. Carbohydrates- particularly sugar, soft drinks and starches like potatoes, rice, pasta, bread, cereals and crackers—drive levels of insulin, your “fat storage” hormone, through the roof, which makes it brutally hard to lose body fat. Eat more protein and fat, get your carbs from vegetables and fruits, and eat less of everything.

    Two: Exercise regularly, but exercise smart. Increase the intensity and shorten the time. Circuit and interval training are the modalities that have trainers and exercise physiologists the most excited these days when it comes to both health benefits and fat burning. Pay attention—they’re right! (My current favorite exercise program is Jade Teta’s Metabolic Aftershock.)

    Three: Recognize that fitness and six-pack abs aren’t the same thing. Exercise for fitness and for health, and to maintain your gains. But don’t expect your morning walk to create a complete body transformation, especially if you don’t take serious aim at your diet.

    Eric Ravussin, professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA and an expert on weight loss put it best: “In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss”.

    That’s certainly true—if you’re doing exercise in the conventional way.

    But with a brilliantly designed, scientifically based, high-intensity interval program like Metabolic Aftershock—which takes just 15 minutes three times a week—it’s a whole different story. Combine that program with a controlled carbohydrate diet like New You in 22, and you’ll be on your way to a body—and a state of health—that you’ll be proud of for the rest of your life.

  • A Better Exercise Routine for Fat Burning?

    A Better Exercise Routine for Fat Burning?

    Exercise scientists have recently been turning to interval training as the protocol of choice for maximum fat burning.

    But many experts are now advocating a combination approach that may have even more benefits than either interval training or weight training alone.

    In one set of studies(1,2), a typical, standard gym routine—60 minutes of weight training followed by 30 minutes of cardio- was compared with an “integrated” workout.

    The “integrated” workout alternates weight training exercises with something the researchers called cardioacceleration—high-intensity sprints on a treadmill.

    This integrated approach outperformed the typical, standard (separate weights, separate cardio) approach on every measure including muscle strength and endurance. It also produced an almost 10-fold reduction in body fat compared to the group doing the conventional workout.

    “Exercise science is undergoing a revolution”, commented Jade and Keoni Teta, two naturopathic physicians who are also certified strength and conditioning coaches. “The weight-based interval approach offers the benefits of both aerobic and anaerobic training all within one compact integrated workout.”

    1)    Davis, et al “Concurrent training enhances athletes cardiovascular and cardiovascular measures” J Strength Cond Res 2008; 22(5): 1503-1514

    2)    Davis, et al “Concurrent training enhances athletes’ strength, muscle endurance and other measures” J Strength Cond Res, 2008; 22(5): 1487-1502

  • “Should I Eat Before I Exercise?”

    “Should I Eat Before I Exercise?”

    For as long as I can remember- from the first time I set foot in a gym, actually- I’ve been listening to folks debate the question…

    “Should I eat before I exercise?”

    Now a new study may finally shine some light on the matter. Researchers found that exercising on an empty stomach has several beneficial effects, including preventing weight gain and maintaining insulin sensitivity.

    Researchers in Belgium took 27 healthy young men and fed them all a horrible diet, high in sugar and fat and calories. The particular diet was chosen because it was just about guaranteed to create both weight gain and a reduction in insulin sensitivity.

    Insulin sensitivity, you may remember, is something good- it’s when the cells respond well to insulin, meaning that insulin does an excellent job of removing excess sugar from the bloodstream and getting it into the cells where it can be “burned” for energy. When someone is said to be insulin resistant on the other hand, this system doesn’t work well, and the person winds up with high blood sugar and high insulin and is on the path to either metabolic syndrome or diabetes. Most diabetics are insulin resistant, and most people who are insulin resistant are overweight, since insulin “shuts down” the fat burning process.

    In the Belgian study, the researchers divided the men into three groups:

    1. One group did nothing but eat the terrible diet (the control group). This group didn’t exercise at all during the study.
    2. The second and third group did exercise, and did the exact same workout;
    3. but the second group did it after breakfast and the third group did it before breakfast, exercising on an empty stomach.

    The results were both surprising and dramatic.

    The control group- not surprisingly- gained a lot of weight and also saw their insulin sensitivity plunge (meaning they became much more insulin resistant). The “exercise after eating” group also gained weight, but not nearly as much as the control group. And their insulin sensitivity went down, just as it did in the control group.

    But the “exercising on an empty stomach” group was a whole different story. This group- despite eating a perfectly horrible, weight-gain inducing diet- did not gain weight. Not only that, their insulin sensitivity remained high and the bad diet did not make them insulin resistant. “This study for the first time shows that fasted (empty stomach) training is more potent than fed training to facilitate adaptations in muscle and to improve…. glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity…” said the study’s authors.

    Conventional wisdom- which is not always so wise—has held that it’s always best to eat something before working out. Proponents of this way of thinking would always point out that you need “energy” for working out, energy which comes from—what else?—carbohydrates. “Fat burns in a flame of carbohydrate” they’d proclaim solemnly.

    Problem is, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

    It’s interesting that back in the days of “Stay Hungry” and “Pumping Iron” when the big meccas of bodybuilding like World Gym and Gold’s Gym in Venice were home to such legendary bodybuilders as Arnold Schwarzenneger, Lou Ferrigno and Franco Columbo, everybody exercised on an empty stomach. Bodybuilders of that era believed that you were more likely to mobilize your fat stores for fuel if you didn’t have to burn off a whole bunch of carbs that you just scarfed down for breakfast.

    We now know that they were mostly right.

    So should you forgo eating before working out? Not necessarily. “If you’re interested in performing better- like if you’re training for an event—you might want to eat first”, says my friend exercise physiologist Liz Neporent, MS, CSCS, author of “Fitness for Dummies”. “But for weight loss, evidence does seem to be trending towards not eating before working out”.

    Neporent points out that as a practical matter, there are going to be a fair amount of people who don’t do well when they don’t eat before working out. “They get dizzy, sick, and even faint sometimes”, she told me. “But I’ve also had people eat right before working out that have felt exactly the same way!”

    Bottom line, it’s going to be- like everything else- an individual thing and no one prescription is going to work for everyone.

    But for those who want to try it- and who don’t get lightheaded or dizzy- exercising on an empty stomach might be just the thing to stop weight gain in its tracks. It did in the Belgian study, and those folks were purposely eating a really bad diet. It should work even better if you also couple it with a diet designed to help you reach your goals.

    Watch this funny little video where I reveal my 5 favorite fat burning snacks that won’t trigger a high insulin response.