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

— Henry David
Thoreau

“I hate my fat.”

By Ronda Gates

I hear it all the time. Americans are so obsessed with their weight and their desire to lose it that they blame the fat itself. It’s as though the fat is some alien — not part of their body. The truth is that stored fat is the most efficient energy system that could be designed.

Your liver can make and store fat out of almost anything you eat. If you eat more carbohydrate calories than your body needs, those calories are converted to fat and stored in your fat cells. If you eat more protein calories than your body needs, your liver will convert those calories into fat then store them. Eat too many fat calories and the excess will pass through your lips and to your hips. Your liver is quite amazing. No other engine, anywhere, can convert ANYTHING into a storage fuel.

Nevertheless, when our storage tanks are bulging, we buy diet books that tell us to eat or don’t eat this or that instead of focusing on how we can mobilize that stored energy by converting it to useful fuel, pouring it into our muscles, and then burning it away.

If you’ve ever barbecued, you’ve seen fat-burning principles at work. When you pour lighter fluid over the charcoal in your grill and light a match, you get a brief burst of flame, but it’s not likely the charcoal will ignite. If you place some kindling under the charcoal and light, it provides a short steady source of heat that ignites the charcoal. You need the kindling and the charcoal.

Your muscles, which use both stored carbohydrate (blood sugar stored as glycogen) and stored fat for fuel, work very much like that charcoal fire. Like lighter fluid, blood sugar, stored as glycogen, provides the (kindling) energy necessary to recruit the fat (charcoal) energy for walks at a pace that supports the talk test — fast enough to get breathless but not so fast you get out of breath. Sugar reserves are limited but can be constantly replaced if you don’t exercise too hard. Fat stores are virtually unlimited. That’s why a balanced fat and carbohydrate intake is important to sustain fat-burning activities like walking.

You may be surprised to learn that even people who starve to death (including anorexics) never use up their body fat. This is hard to conceive since these folks look so emaciated. However, too few calories (or too few carbs) means body protein — usually muscle, hair, fingernails, or the immune system — is converted to blood sugar to feed the brain first, then fuel cell and muscle work. Folks look emaciated because they lack muscle, not fat. Meanwhile the irony is that fat stores stay mostly intact. The body is calling for fuel, but because there isn’t enough stored sugar, the fat never gets tapped.

Long distance runners call the byproduct of this phenomenon “hitting the wall.” No matter how lean they appear, these athletes with well-trained bodies perform efficiently — until they run so fast their blood sugar reserves get depleted. Hitting the wall is nothing more than the body saying, “I no longer have the kindling to fan the charcoal fat flame.” Before a race, many of them attempt to store more sugar by “carbohydrate loading,” a process where carbohydrate intake is decreased then increased in a prescribed way to increase glycogen stores.

Regardless, the goal is to condition our body to call on our fat stores for energy. Instead of blaming our fat for our problem, we need to set our priorities straight. Although folks who lose weight by dieting without exercise may say, “you don’t need
to exercise,” very few of them eliminate excess fat forever. On the other hand, regular exercise (6,000 to 10,000 steps/day) that kindles the stored fat with carbohydrate reserves can deplete stored fat forever.

We are in the midst of an obesity crisis. One healthful response to that crisis is walking. Walking off stored fat can not only change your life but also actually save it by dramatically reducing the risk factors associated with obesity. According to Heather Peña, MD, Medical Director of TRANSFORMATIONS, The Napa Valley Weight and Lifestyle Management Program, walking twice in a 24-hour period reminds the body to process fuel and the insulin-related processes that open cells so they can access the fat most effectively.

You simply need to change your mind to tap into the extraordinary esteem-building process of acknowledging fat is not the enemy. It’s the fuel you need to walk yourself to fitness.