Why exercise alone is not enough

HANNIE’S large family had frequent cookouts and birthday parties complete with lots of chips, sodas and desserts. They are a happy family of heavy weights. When Hannie realized that she was gaining weight with each passing celebration, she went to me and decided to begin an exercise program to lose the extra pounds. Her goal was simple. She planned to lose weight through exercise so that she could continue to enjoy her family’s frequent calorie-laden celebrations without worrying about her weight. Since the family typically gets together twice a month, Hannie figured that exercising twice a week should more than enough to take care of the extra calories. Unfortunately, the math did not work in Hannie’s favor.

While starting an exercise program would certainly help her burn off some of the extra calories, her plan was not likely to result in the weight loss she anticipated. Between chips, sodas, burgers and her favorite ice cream desserts, Hannie was eating almost 5,000 calories at each family gathering. That translated into 10,000 extra calories a month! Since she was interested in a walking program on the treadmill machine twice a week or eight days each month, she would have to burn 1,200 calories in each exercise session to compensate for the extra calories.

Hannie was making two very common mistakes. She was underestimating the number of calories she was consuming at the family gatherings and she was overestimating the impact of exercise on  weight loss. To achieve her goal, she needed to trim some of the excess calories from her weekend celebrations and at the same time increase her caloric expenditure through exercise. Additionally, she had never given any thought to the nutritional content of the high-fat foods she was consuming. When I told her that she was consuming lots of fat and sugar at these cookouts, she said that if she began exercising and paying attention to how much she was eating what she ate wouldn’t matter. Like many women, she assumed hat exercise eliminates the need to monitor dietary content. This is a mistake. Exercise would lower her risk of illness, including heart disease but would not eliminate it. She still needed to pat attention to other disease factors like dietary fat and smoking. Realizing that her entire family was increasing their risk of diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, Hannie convinced her sisters to join her in planning some food choices that were heart healthier. We discussed to change her bad eating habit to good one. Now, they still enjoy occasional burgers and chips but have replaced the regular sodas with diet sodas, water, lemonade and juice and take turns bringing alternative offerings like grilled chicken, fish, fresh lettuce and cucumbers and fresh fruit.

Counting calories

I am personally not a fan of counting calories but quite a few people especially women feel that it is the best way for them to avoid overeating. For those who want to count calories, the current food labels provide plenty of information to keep those calculators humming. Just remember that gram for gram, carbohydrates and proteins provide the same number of calories whereas fat packs more than twice as many. Here’s an example:

One gram of this:    No. of calories

Carbohydrate ————-  4

Protein ——————- 4

Fat ———————– 9

Alcohol ——————- 7

The fat-free myth

One of my clients Levi jogged several days each week and monitored her food intake very strictly. She complained to me that although her diet was almost “100 percent fat-free.” She could not lose those last ten pounds. Although Levi’s situation was very different from Hannie, she also needed to learn about moderation. She was exercising several days a week and paying attention to her dietary fat intake. She had a great deal about the importance of eating low-fat diet but like many women she mistakenly believed that if low fat was good no fat was even better. So Levi had tried to eliminate all fats from her diet. This left her diet so restricted in scope so she was missing out a lot of nutrients needed for optimal health. And not getting enough fat or variety led Levi to overindulge in fat free snacks. What she failed to realized is the difference between fat-free and calorie-free. Many of the snacks she ate were high in sugar and empty of nutrients. Without realizing it, she was eating approximately 500 calories a day in fat free snack foods, which sabotaged her weight loss efforts and reduced some of the health benefits she was getting from exercise.

Fat. Such a small word to provoke a huge amount of negative thoughts and feelings. Levi, like many women equated dietary fat with body fat. She believed that avoiding the former would protect her from the latter. But excess body fat is formed when extra calories from any source are added to the body’s storage tanks. And both dietary fat and body fat are not always the villains they are made out to be.

Body composition

Listening to some of my clients especially women talk about their bodies, I realize that many don’t seem to understand that their bodies are composed of many tissues of which fat is just one type. During one of my fitness trainer who was a former Mr. Australia and now presently working with Nautilus   fitness company selling fitness machines, conducting fitness seminars, he talked about fat. He brought with him a sample of what fat looked like and its composition. That was the first time I saw how fat of a human being looks like. I really appreciated on how the way he explained to us the pros and cons of fat. That’s where I learned that not all fats are the villains. He said that even in very heavy women, fat is not the predominant tissue from which the human body is constructed. Ask anyone who has ever taken a science class especially doctors and they can tell you hat water accounts for roughly two-thirds of body weight. The bones that make up the skeleton, and the tissues of the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, skin and other organs also make a significant contribution to a woman’s total weight. But it seems that even though fat is not the predominant tissue, it is the predominant issue. Too many women think that there is no such thing as good fat but they’re wrong.

Fat is an absolutely essential part of our body. It helps to form the brain, spinal cord and nerves. It cushions the kidneys and other internal organs and helps protect us from the cold. I can  convert weak hormones into a usable form of estrogen. And it serves as a reservoir of energy that we can call on whenever we need it. Most women have no idea how convenient this really is. Your body routinely monitors available levels of energy and will start taking fat out of storage as soon as it needs  it whether to sustain you during an exercise  session, shopping or a life-threatening illness. The key is to have the right amount of body fat—not too much, not too little. Women need about three times the amount of fat as men primarily for hormonal and reproductive purposes. Expressed as a percentage of total body weight a woman’s body needs enough fat to account for a bare minimum of 12 to 13 percent of her weight or essential  body functions will suffer. Similarly, if the percentage of body fat is more than twice as high as it needs to be, the risk of diseases associated with being overweight (and over fat) increases. So either too much, or too little fat impairs your body’s ability to function properly and increases your susceptibility to disease.