By Yannik Wouts – Staff Physiotherapist

Being healthy is easy on paper, so why are there so many living such unhealthy lifestyles and why does it seem so easy for some people and harder for others? Unfortunately blanket statements like “eat less, exercise more” don’t help the majority of us to actually see results. There are infinite ways for us to live healthier but in reality, we are only limited to a finite amount of resources e.g. time, money and will power so unspecific recommendations that don’t take into account particularity can be as useless to us as the gym membership we never use.

Diet

A recent meta-analysis was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by (Johnston, et al., 2014) that looked at 59 individual studies that looked into “which diet works best?”. The outcome of that study was that there were no major differences between the diets, and success was completely dependent on what the individual could adhere to. In other words the diets that worked the best were the diets that both reduced the amount of excess foods that particular person ate (in Western society mainly carb’s and sugar) and ones that matched that persons personal preferences towards taste and how easy it was to prepare.

Many studies have looked into the rise in increased serving sizes around the planet, especially in Western world. In the U.S total energy from intake of food has increased 500 kcal/d per capita since the 1970’s. This is in part due to the increase in amount of food bought outside of the home which has increased 13% since 1970 (1), and what food do most people buy when they’re out on the go… the wrong kind. Not only have meal sizes increased but the amount of calorie intensive foods we ingest has increased, particularly in the past few decades. These two factors have created a perfect storm and are having a massive effect on the rising in obesity levels and weight related illness (2).

Exercise

Exercise is the other main variable to being healthy and maintaining a healthy weight. There is evidence to say global participation in sports hasn’t changed much in the last couple of decades but we are sitting a lot more, both at work and at home. This is having a negative effect on our health (3). The human body is designed to move, to locomote and engage in all manner of manual labour throughout the day. Movement is essential to our survival as a species and hence why exercise is so important. This shift from a physically demanding life to one with few physical challenges has been sudden in the history of our species and as a whole we are not coping with it well.

There has been some misleading research that showed exercise alone has limited effect on weight loss. This is in part due to the fact that when we first start to increase our exercise levels our body hasn’t yet adapted to the increased demand on the muscles and is still running relatively inefficiently (4). During this “transition” time which can change depending on how consistent you’re being with your exercise regime and mean we crave food more (4). Once our muscles are running more efficiently we require less fuel to do the same amount of work, so if we don’t cut back on our intake again we will see a plateauing out on the scales. Also as we exercise we have an increase in muscle which is heavier than adipose tissue (4). Let’s say that a 90kg man wants to lose 0.5kgs in a week. Through exercise alone, he needs to run about 5.5km per day. Through dieting alone, he needs to cut back 500 calories a day (the equivalent of two Starbucks Frappuccinos). Now let me make it clear that this does not mean exercise isn’t important although it is just a lot easier to not consume those extra calories than it is to burn them off later.

There are immeasurable reasons why regular exercise is beneficial but one I’d like to point out is it helps us to maintain a healthy metabolism (5). As stated above exercise alone hasn’t been shown to have a huge effect on weight loss but it does have secondary effects that will help you maintain a healthier balance muscle to fat and keep it there (5). Exercise has been shown to increase your resting metabolic rate (RMR) (5). The RMR is the total energy expenditure the body requires to function for 24 hours. This essentially means regular exercise helps to up-regulate and improve the function of all the organic material in our body. If you aren’t getting in your 30+ minutes of consistent exercise per day you won’t see the benefits. Taking the stairs or walking to work are two ways people can do to bring some regularity to exercise during the day. For a rough guide on how to work out the training zone that is appropriate for you just find your maximum heart rate which is (220-your age) and apply this model.

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Aerobic exercise (“relating to, involving, or requiring free oxygen”) has been shown to improve RMR better than anaerobic exercise like weight lifting (6). Like diet there is no particular benefit to doing specific exercise but there are a few points I will make. More intense exercise e.g. running will increase your heart rate more than less intense exercise e.g. walking. It will therefore take longer to burn the same number of calories walking than it would do running. So a 30 minute jog and a 30 minute dance lesson that takes your heart rate to the same level and keeps it there will burn the same amount of calories.

Keeping your heart rate in the training zone is another factor that can be easily over looked. Where the above example can break down is that maintaining a consistent heart rate while jogging is easier than dancing, as you are constantly moving when you jog. Any breaks in dance, to learn a move, talk or rest, will allow your heart rate to drop and you will fall down the ladder of training zones to the point where your exercise may not be having any effect at all. Sports is a really good way to help boost effort though competition and there is some research to say that having a personal trainer or buddy to motivate you to push harder than you would by yourself is beneficial (7). Not everyone is looking to test their physical capacity and may benefit from more relaxed forms of exercise like swimming or walking, again particularity is key.

Yannik’s Top Tips

Find some sort of exercise that you enjoy that gets your heart rate into the training zone,
Do it every day if you can and if not do something even if it’s a walk,
Cut back on the foods and drinks that you personally have an over representation of in your diet (most likely carb’s or sugar), you can eve replace those foods with healthier alternatives that you enjoy,
Make it easy on yourself so you don’t fall back into bad habits,
Use a buddy or trainer to help boost effort, motivation and accountability,
Don’t get into it with the mind-set that there is an end point to your health regime, always look to see how you can improve and incorporate things into your life so it becomes habit and not an effort.
Work Cited:

Nestle, L. R. (2002). The Contribution of Expanding Portion Sizes to the US Obesity Epidemic. American Journal of Public Health, 246-249.
Cara B Ebbeling, D. B. (2002). Childhood obesity: public-health crisis, common sense cure. The Lancet.
Hill J O, W. H. (2003). Obesity and the environment: where do we go from here? Science, 853-855.
Cris A. Slentz, Brian D. Duscha, Johanna L. Johnson, Kevin Ketchum, Lori B. Aiken, Gregory P. Samsa, :. J., et al. (2004). Effects of the Amount of Exercise on Body Weight, Body Composition, and Measures of Central Obesity. Archives of Internal Medicine, 31-39.
Zierath, B. E. (2012). Exercise Metabolism and the Molecular Regulation of Skeletal Muscle Adaptation. Cell Metabolism, 162-184.
Rania A. Mekary, A. G.-P. (2015). Weight training, aerobic physical activities, and long-term waist circumference change in men. Obesity, 461-467.
McClaran, S. R. (2003). The Effectiveness of Personal Training on Changing Attitudes Towards Physical Activity. The Journal of SPorts Medicine, 10-14.
Brownson R C, B. T. (2005). Declining rates of physical activity in the United States: what are the contributors? Annual Review of Public Health, 421-443.
Johnston, B. C., Kanters, S., Bandayre, K., Wu, P., Naji, F., Siemieniuk, R. A., et al. (2014). Comparison of Weight Loss Among Named Diet Programs in Overweight and Obese Adults. The Journal of American Medical Association.