Diet and Exercise Not the Most Important Weight Loss Factors

For a while they told us losing weight was all about exercise. Then we learned through the Paleo/Primal and low-carb communities that in fact it is all about diet, but exercise can help - perhaps 80% diet, 20% exercise.

Over the years I have, in a modest way, spent a lot of time gaining and losing weight (you can see this by scrolling my body composition graph to the left.) And finally I have realised what might have been obvious to others. In fact it's 10% diet, 5% exercise and 85% desire.

You could lose weight on a diet of Skittles and a pogo-stick exercise regime. You would almost certainly need more desire for the Skittles and Pogo plan than for a Paleo/Primal and Interval plan... but for anyone with plenty of desire, that doesn't matter.

I touched on the idea that really wanting it is the important thing in a post last year about exercise and weight loss.

Paleo and Interval Training Failure

What triggered my epiphany was coming home a stone heavier from an epic two weeks of bad living on a business trip, whereupon I decided it was time to lose weight. So I ate Paleo/Primal and did regular interval training.

And nothing happened.

Sometimes I would do well during the week, then overeat at restaurants when out with friends. At other times, I would gorge on Paleo/Primal treats after meals. Then there were full-blown lapses, usually alcohol triggered, in which I would blow a week of effort in one night.

Too many internal conversations resulted in victory for the little red guy with horns. In short, I didn't care enough about losing to make the sacrifices. I lacked the desire.

How Terrible Wisdom...

Alas, Johnny...

After a time, this became frustrating. I knew exactly what to do but apparently lacked the ability to do it. I was reminded of De Niro's line in Angel Heart, paraphrasing Sophocles - "...how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise..."

Then something changed about 7 weeks ago. A clear and compelling set of reasons for getting my act together emerged.

Until then, my reasons had been 1) health and 2) weight. Apparently not enough.

Then, two new reasons emerged, and everything changed.

Mountain Running

First, mountain running. This has been a hobby for a number of years and I have always been able to run up mountains easily enough to make it fun. This year I have entered some challenging races. One of them is 17 miles and involves going up and down several of England's highest peaks.

My new layer of fat and reduced fitness were becoming a problem. It was no longer easy.

Proving the Doctors Wrong

The second reason came after a visit to the hospital.

I have been seeing a haematologist since 2005. It's a long story you can pick up here if you are interested. To summarise, my blood readings are low. They think I have a condition called aplastic anemia, which implies immune problems. I think their normal ranges are wrong because they are based on a population who've overstimulated their own immune systems with the wrong food. They keep asking me whether I've had any infections recently and I keep telling them I've had one, three-day cold since 1996.

At the end of May, my blood readings were 'better' than they have been in years; but the smile of approval on the specialist's face did not fill me with hope. The previous few months had been the most unhealthy of my life since going Paleo/Primal in 2007.

I realised this was my opportunity to prove (to myself, at least) that my hypothesis holds water. If I could go perfectly Paleo/Primal for the 4 months until my next tests, and my bloods went back to their usual 'worrying' levels, it would be compelling.

Losing a Stone in 6 Weeks

Armed with these new motivations, I suddenly made rapid progess. The change was profound. Here is an exerpt from my body composition graph to illustrate.

From May to July

In about 8 weeks I appear to have dropped 17 lbs and 5% body fat; but in reality that initial steep dive included flushing out the post-binge inflammation and water retention.

The real progress was between "blowing it for the last time" (mid June) and today. That's still 14 lbs and 3% fat in about 6 weeks.

Finding More

Clearly for me the health and weight motivations were not enough. As I noted in my post about the business trip, I was just not getting ill. It's hard to be motivated by health if you are having fun and not suffering the consequences. Okay, I didn't feel great, but I was functioning comfortably. And as you've probably noted, my weight and fat percentage, even after the business trip, would be the envy of some - so the vanity angle was not powerful enough either.

I needed more, and when I found more, things changed.

Conclusion

Everyone is different. What motivates me might not motivate you; but if you want to lose weight, I think the most important thing to do is consciously identify the reasons it's important to you, and make them the centrepiece of your efforts.

Yes, eating Paleo/Primal and doing interval-based intense exercise appears (from my experience and the research) to be the best way to achieve that, but if you don't have the desire, it might not work as well as you expect.

In 4 months I will report back on the blood test question - will my hypothesis be supported? Will I bother trying to explain it to my haematologist?

I sometimes consider my fluctuations in Paleo/Primal adherence in the context of Mark Sisson's 80:20 principle. I think that by the end of this 4 months I will have clawed back my percentage.... Read more

Exercise WILL Make you Thin - if You Really Want it to

For years we thought you needed to exercise to lose weight. Don’t exercise, you get fat. Exercise, you get thin. Simple.

Then we realised this advice may be wrong. Studies showed that exercise increased the appetite, so people ate more. Books like Good Calories Bad Calories dismantled the calories-in-calories-out hypothesis. Respected commentators stated that getting the diet right is by far the most significant contributor to weight loss.

Recently, an article appeared in Time magazine article, Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin. It was widely commented on in the health and fitness blogging community and touted as evidence that the mainstream might finally be 'getting it.'

Yet, one such commenter, Rusty Moore on Fitness Black Book posted an analysis of the article which contained a single, important phrase, challenging this new doctrine:

The biggest flaw in the article is his notion that exercise gives you no choice but to over-eat.

Bingo.

Key questions of health and fitness almost always get polarised. People want simple – and the there are those who exploit that for their own gain. The subtleties are brushed aside in an orgy of gourd following a lá Life of Brian.

Two subtleties that do discussed in health and fitness circles are:

• Intense, interval-based training may be more likely to create the conditions for weight loss without self-defeatingly stimulating appetite.
• The effect on appetite of exercise may vary according to the type of food eaten and the metabolic state of the subject (i.e. are they adjusted to a low carbohydrate diet or riding the high carbohydrate merry-go-round.)

Rarely is psychological state discussed in any depth. How badly does a person want to lose weight? How strong is their will power and self discipline? The research appears to treat people as machines. Get hungry, eat food.

I believe that if someone really wants to lose weight with exercise, then they will, regardless of the type of exercise they are doing or food they are eating.

I will admit up front that I am far too lazy to delve into the full detail of all the studies on exercise and weight loss - scientific papers make my eyes bleed; but I did look at the methodology section of a study referenced by the Time article. This is what it said about how the subjects were recruited:

… 464 postmenopausal women within the age range of 45 to 75 years, who were sedentary (not exercising more than 20 minutes on 3 or more day a week, and [less than]8000 steps per day assessed over the course of one week), overweight or obese (BMI 25.0 to 43.0 kg/m2), and had a systolic blood pressure of 120.0 to 159.9 mm Hg were randomized to 1 of 3 exercise groups…

Notice that the criteria here are mostly physiological. Machines. Get hungry, eat food.

Two things I would have wanted to know about the subjects:

1. What was their attitude to weight loss? Did they want to lose weight? We cannot assume that just because they were overweight or obese that they wanted to lose weight.
2. How strong was their willpower?

I am not pretending that either of these is easy to measure – but equally I think we can assume that the psychometric testing industry has successfully tackled them at some point.

The attitude to weight loss is especially important. The implicit point of studies like this is to evaluate how effective exercise is as a weight loss tool… a tool which one assumes would mainly be used by people who want to lose weight. So there’s not much point studying people who don’t want to lose weight, right?

I have not examined the results section of the study. For the sake of my eyes, I did not delve beyond the methodology; but what we can assume is that the average weight loss for the exercise group was no greater than the average weight loss for the non-exercise group.

Yet by the laws of natural variation there must have been exercisers who did lose more weight than the average non-exerciser.

In other words, for whatever reason, at least some people must have lost more weight through exercise. Why?

In my experiment, the subjects would be tested for attitude and personality characteristics:

• Do they want to lose weight? How badly?
• How much will power and self-discipline do they have?

We would then look for a link between these factors and weight loss. If there is a link, is it more pronounced amongst the exercisers? Perhaps people with willpower and self-discipline can lose weight through exercise.

Moreover, could actually knowing that exercise affects your appetite make a difference to the result? In a follow up study we might tell one group of subjects that exercise will increase their appetite and sabotage the weight loss benefits. Could that knowledge elevate those with less will power to a position where they, too, can lose weight though exercise?

Anecdotally, I know this to be possible. A few years ago I lost several pounds by religiously sticking to the types and amounts of food I consumed daily while increasing my weekly running mileage by 15 miles; and I witnessed my gym partner drop nearly a stone in weight over 3 months by the addition 30 minutes of post-weights cardio and a determination not to eat more food than usual.

I’ve nothing against people who want to issue advice that’s most likely to lead to success for everyone – after all, I advocate the Paleo diet, which takes the lowest common denominator approach to nutrition.

So if you have to chisel something onto a stone tablet, then yes,

Exercise is not the key to weight loss: it’s mostly about what you eat

…would be the best thing.

However, it would be nice to see more recognition by both commentators and researchers that humans can apply free will in this matter.... Read more