By Dr. Michael Colgan
The Fat Follies - Part 2
Part 2 - Diets galore and gym workouts
Canada and the US are sagging in the grip of an overweight epidemic that has been growing rapidly for the last two decades. The US Centers for Disease Control now cite being overweight – in addition to metabolic syndrome and the long list of other diseases it causes - as the # 1 health problem in North America. Yet health policies and medical treatment have achieved little, either to prevent or correct it. The official US government guidelines for fat loss include a low-fat diet, calorie-restricted diet, and high-carbohydrate diet. These guidelines are tantamount to saying, "Not our problem." Controlling overweight issues is left largely to uninformed entrepreneurs, who fleece the desperate public with ever more outlandish programmes "guaranteed" to remove body fat.
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed prescription drugs for obesity and found that the best drugs are all addictive, and have been progressively banned over the last 30 years. There are now no effective weight loss drugs legally available. In Part 2, I will look at some of the alternative strategies that people adopt on the treacherous road to lean and mean.
The gym problem
Gyms are booming, but what happens in them has not improved since results were first measured in New York in 1981. The latest perusal in 2007 of gym records from one popular chain in Vancouver shows that most members turn up for workouts about once per week. A fair percentage just pay their memberships, attend a few times, and then hardly ever turn up again. They pay purely for the psychological crutch that they are doing something about their weight.
What about the hardier souls who do attend regularly? My colleagues and I surreptitiously held stopwatches on people working out in our own weight room. We clocked the actual time spent lifting weights in an average one hour workout, not the time changing, chatting, setting up, having a drink, stretching, standing about or showering. The average was 18 minutes and 20 seconds — that is not going to burn much body fat.
Aerobics classes are popular, but they don’t make much of an impression on fat either. We followed a group of women doing regular aerobics classes a minimum of twice per week at a San Diego gym for one year. On average, they gained 2.6 pounds. There were high hopes for another class where the women wrapped themselves in cling wrap and turned extremely pink, but the instructor fell of the stage one day and they decided to call it quits.
The chemistry of the human body tells you exactly why aerobics doesn’t work. Before the body can begin to use appreciable body fat for fuel, you have to do 15 to 20 minutes of light aerobic exercise. It is this mandatory increase in aerobic energy expenditure that enables you to make the hormonal and other biochemical changes that switch your energy system from burning mainly sugar to burning mainly fat. You can’t hurry it with greater effort because as soon as you start to feel exhausted and become anaerobic, the body gets stuck in sugar-burning mode.
So, with 15 minutes to get the fat going, a one-hour aerobics class yields only 45 minutes of fat-burning. Accurate measurements of fat oxidation during exercise show that the maximum you can use aerobically in 45 minutes is about 300 calories. One pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories of potential energy. Therefore, it takes 12 one-hour aerobics classes to shed a pound of fat. If you eat before training or drink an "energy" drink before or during your aerobics class, you can forget about fat loss altogether. Your body always takes the easiest biochemical route to energy. It will preferentially use the free sugar from the food or drink in your gut before taking the more difficult route to convert body fat to energy. And propping up the juice bar and having a drink after your workout eliminates any fat loss you may have sustained during it. Gym workouts yield other health benefits, but they do little to reduce body fat.
The diet debacle
Diets are all the rage. Over the last 30 years, I have seen them all, cycling in and out of popularity every decade or so. Most of them are useless for long-term fat loss. Many of them are disastrous for your health. Some of my favourite villains making the rounds again are the Masticating Diet, the Tapeworm Diet, the Hollywood Miracle Diet, the Sleep Diet and the Lemonade Diet.
The Masticating Diet was first proposed by Horace Fletcher in the early 1900s. Recent versions advocate chewing each mouthful of food, even liquids, 40 to 80 times before swallowing. How this helps anyone lose body fat is a mystery. It is supposed to relate somehow to wonderful enzymes in saliva predigesting the food, but high school biology will tell you that those enzymes do not digest proteins or fats, but almost exclusively carbohydrates. Your gut doesn’t have any trouble digesting carbs all on its own, and then rushing them straight to your hips.
The Tapeworm Diet is a deliberate scam, whereby naive people are persuaded to buy live tapeworms of the species Taenia saginata or Taenia solium and eat them, hoping that the worm will eat all their excess food. It is recorded repeatedly in the list of diet scams prosecuted by the FDA. Tapeworms are dangerous critters, growing up to 30 feet long and producing severe bloating and flatulence. The more sinister variant is to sell live tapeworm larvae, some of which may then burrow through the intestinal wall and get to the brain where they merrily eat you into insanity.
The Hollywood Miracle Diet goes by a variety of names, all with an instant fat loss theme. One of the current variants promises 10 pounds of weight loss in 48 hours. It is usually a multi-level advertising gimmick to sell a fruit drink, the main ingredients of which are sugar and water. It has no effect on body fat.
The Sleep Diet was made famous by Elvis Presley. When Elvis became very overweight, he turned to celebrity physician Elias Ghanem in Las Vegas. There were many facets to Ghanem’s treatment, but only the sleep part has remained buzzing around the celebrity network. Essentially, you are sedated for two weeks at a time, resting and sleeping, and fed by tube. It didn’t work for Elvis who gained 10 pounds in the two weeks. It’s not likely to work with anyone because while sleeping and resting your body turns energy use down to 50 to 60 calories per hour. Even if only body fat was lost in those calories, and you were kept unconscious the whole time, it would take three days to lose a pound.
The Lemonade Diet was invented by Stanley Burroughs in 1941. The current version was made famous by Beyonce who described her use of it on the Oprah show. Also called the Beyonce Diet, it is a variant of the very low calorie juice and diuretics group of diets. It consists of watered-down lemon juice 6 to 12 times per day, plus a modicum of vegetables and diuretics. In Beyonce’s case it included diuretic tea. This will certainly work for most people but it is disastrous for health. Fortunately, like fasting, it is very difficult to stick to this type of diet, surrounded as we are by the most delicious food. When you can’t take it any more and quit, the fat leaps right back on again. If you went to Zimbabwe to do the Lemonade Diet, I’m sure it would work. But then, in Zimbabwe, you probably wouldn’t need a special diet to lose body fat.
In Part 3 of this series I will examine the diets that succeed.
Dr. Michael Colgan
Dr. Michael Colgan, president of the Colgan Institute in San Diego and best-selling author on sports nutrition, also lectures and writes extensively on aging and is a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
