Beyond
Walking

By Ronda Gates, MS

Ronda Gates, MS, is a pharmacy grad who traded her white coat for a pair of athletic shoes and never looked back. Her health promotion business, LIFESTYLES, provides motivational speaking, program development, and fitness assessment services to support people making a lifestyle change. She has developed health promotion programs for many organizations nationwide.
Visit www.rondagates.com for a complimentary subscription to Ronda’s weekly email newsletter.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

— Henry David
Thoreau

Smart Metabolism?

From Scarsdale to Beverly Hills, the Mayo Clinic to Hilton Head, Americans are cutting carbs, taking pills, adding fiber, combining foods and buying nutraceuticals in a desperate $40 billion-dollar plus a-year effort to find a short cut to weight loss.

Dictionaries define diet as “a way of choosing food.” Because many authors tie their names to choosing foods for quick weight loss, “diet” has become synonymous with “weight loss plan.”

The goal of any weight loss plan must be to lose weight as body fat only. When someone reports a 10-pound weight loss in two weeks, you must ask, “ten pounds of what?” because it’s impossible to lose more than two pounds of fat a week.

A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. Exercise sufficiently to use 500 calories more than you eat every day, and you can use up to one pound of stored fat a week. Subtract another 500 calories from your daily diet, and your body is short another 3,500 calories. That’s only two pounds of stored fat loss a week. If simple math can explain fat loss, what’s behind the diets that claim quicker results?

When your body is challenged by a low calorie or unbalanced diet, it goes into a metabolic tailspin to survive. Biochemically, your body “prepares for the famine.” Quick weight loss plans suggest this crisis triggers use of stored body fat. That’s only partly true. When calorie intake is low, your body burns some fat, but it also converts stored protein (muscle, antibodies, and fat-burning enzymes) into the sugar/glucose (carbohydrate) your body needs to function. This “making new sugar,” or gluconeogenesis, removes nitrogen from the protein converting it to a toxic, urea-like product. Body fluids shift to temper demands on the kidneys and liver, protein-laced water is purged from your body as urine, and the numbers on your scale drop. However, you’re actually fatter given your body’s fat to non-fat ratio.

Recently, recommendations by the best weight-loss authorities have been challenged by self-proclaimed “experts” who assert they have the secret to permanent weight loss. When these diets do succeed, detective work reveals the calorie balance has changed.

Few diets address the emotional and psychological factors that influence overeating. Long-term success requires attitude and behavior changes coupled with education and support. The diet you create must be one you can live with and thrive on –– for the rest of your life.

To evaluate popular diets, ask yourself: Does the weight-loss promise seem too good to be true? Must I spend extra money over a period of time to gain results? Must I buy a product, book, or service that promises this approach alone can cure being overweight? Does the diet rely on testimonials and case histories rather than scientific data to support claims? A “yes” answer to any of these questions raises a red flag.

Finally, the most important advice adopted by all reputable diet counselors is this: Without exercise, even a balanced diet attacks just half the problem. The only safe and effective way to lose fat is to eat smaller quantities, maintain a balanced and varied diet that is lower in fat and sugar, exercise aerobically to burn stored fat, and strength train and exercise anaerobically to increase metabolism. That’s the only thing that works for a lifetime.

If you’re already walking, you’re half way there. Add fueling yourself for health, rather than weight loss, and the rest will fall into place.