00:00 : What else do you get right away? Weight. If weight’s an issue, fitness is really, really important. Now, you’ve probably heard and you see all the ads on TV. “Come to the gym, do this and you’ll lose weight.” No. Turns out all those ads are wrong because, now there are always a few people who you know got fit and they lost weight and they didn’t have to diet. But that’s the tiny minority, that’s the tail of the bell curve. When people do studies, scientific studies of large populations who do fitness and try to lose weight, what they find is that people in fact do not lose weight just by getting fit. And the reason is simple. We have an appestat. The appestat tells us whether we’re hungry or not, and it’s absolutely fine tuned. And if we expend 100 calories more, 200 calories more, 300 calories more, okay? 100 calories, about 2,000 steps. We expend that extra energy our body notices. If I expend an extra 100 calories, my body notices and it says, “How about a couple of Oreos?” Well, a couple of Oreos is practically 100 calories. I can munch down those two Oreos, I didn’t even remember I did it.
01:18 : But now I feel good again, because I’ve compensated for the extra energy. Our body wants us to have an even keel. So for most people, just getting fit won’t by itself to get you to lose weight. But do you have to lose weight in order to be healthy? Well, the world tells us we have an obesity epidemic and we have to lose weight in order to be healthy. But turns out that’s not true either. Here’s an interesting study. 1999 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, prestigious journal. Followed 25,000 people for 24 years and what they wanted to do was they wanted to know how fitness and weight interacted. So these were people who had gone to the Cooper Center in Dallas for a complete physical and work-up. And part of what they did was, they had to get on a treadmill so that they knew what their aerobic fitness level was. So these weren’t what people reported that they did, this is we knew because you got on the treadmill. So you knew who was fit and who was not and then they knew what they weighed and then they follow them for 24 years. And here’s what they found; so we start out here and the green is the fit and the red is sedentary. And you all know what BMI is? Body Mass Index, okay.
02:37 : And basically, a lot of people say, “Okay, about 25 is good, actually 26, 27 is probably the safest weight.” But say 25 because that’s sort of in the parlance, and so if you look at people who were fit versus sedentary? People were sedentary but thin had more than twice the death rate from all causes, all cause mortality versus people who were thin and fit. Huge, right? Well then they looked at people in the 25 to 30 BMI and they were even a little worse up to 2.5, two and a half times more than the thin fit. And the people in the 30 and over, three and a half, 3.1 times the death rate of people who were thin and fit. But, it was such a large study, almost 25,000 people, that there were people in these two groups who were quite fit, okay? So what happened with them? In the 25 to 30 those who were fit had a death rate that was only a tiny bit higher than those who were thin and fit. And for the folks in the 30 and over? Still only a tiny bit higher, only a tiny bit higher. In other words, fitness practically totally compensated for weight. And so yes, being sedentary and heavy is a lethal combination, but you can overcome that by being fit.
Now, how many people here, anybody here ever dieted besides me? Anybody ever take on a diet? Okay.
04:18 : Okay. Has anybody here ever go on a diet, take weight off and then put it back on again besides me? Has anybody ever done that? Anybody ever do that more than once besides me? Yeah, right. So on a scale of one to 10 how hard is dieting?
04:36 : 10. Yeah. For me it’s 10, for you it’s five. For a lot of people, it’s 10, so it’s really hard but we’ve all done it, right? But it’s almost impossible to keep it off unless you are fit. And here’s why, let me show you a little study. These were people who went on a crash diet, medically supervised in two groups. The dotted red line, those were the folks who were sedentary. The solid blue line, they were on the same diet but they weren’t given a fitness regimen. Now they were all eating the same amount of calories so the people in the fitness regimen lost a little more weight than those that weren’t. Alright? ‘Cause they’re burning a little more calories. At the end of the weight loss period then they had a follow-up period, and here’s what happened to the folks who lost the weight. The folks who were fit and maintained their fitness regimen stayed the same. But folks who weren’t and stayed sedentary popped right back up again.
05:38 : This is sorta what the researchers expected, right? That confirmed their hypothesis but, sometimes in research the most interesting results come when the participants don’t follow the rules. And that’s what happened here. Because some of the people in the non-fit group started an exercise program or a fitness program, and here’s what happened to them. And some of the people in the fitness group stopped, either right then or later on, and here’s what happened to them. Wow, right? How come? Well, it again has to do with our appestat. Our appestat is powerful. It controls how much we eat. What does it take to put back on, say, three pounds in a year? What?
06:29 : One week.
06:29 : [chuckle] You could do it in one week. But let’s say you’re really trying hard not to put that weight on. What does it take? Well, three pounds. Anybody here ever eat potato chips, besides me? Great.
06:43 : Let’s say I eat three potato chips. That’s about 30 calories, right? About 30 calories. Three potato chips a day for a year. 30 calories times 365. Well, a pound of fat is 3,500 calories. So, one potato chip a day is a pound of fat. Three potato chips a day, three pounds of fat. I don’t care how well you count calories, you’re not gonna be able to manage that three potato chip control a day for ever and ever, when your body is trying to convince you to put the weight back on. Now, why is your body trying to convince you to put the weight back on? Because your body thinks that you just went through a horrific famine. It doesn’t know you have a supermarket down the street. It thinks you’re out there in the woods or on the plain. And so it thinks you went through a terrible famine, and it wants you to get that weight back on just as fast as it can. Whatever food there is it wants you to glom down so that you are protected if there’s another famine.
07:51 : In fact, people who do lots of dieting, sometimes end up higher, because after awhile your body says, “We live in a place where there’s lots of famines. I better put on extra to protect us against those famines.” So, why does that change? And it does. We know from physiological studies that things happen in your gut when you get fit, and there’s a change that causes this to happen. Why? Why does that happen? Well, because if your body notices that you’re expending energy but also eating enough food, there’s a switch. Bodies have compromises. Because the problem with putting on that weight again is that it’s harder to move it around. It takes more energy to move it around. There’s only one thing that’s more important than surviving the next famine, and that’s not having the next famine in the first place. And if you’re moving, and your body assumes that the only reason you’re expending energy to move is to find energy to eat, and you’re expending energy but you’re eating enough, then it’s gonna resist putting on that weight, and that’s what happens.
08:58 : And so, if you lose weight, enormously difficult to keep it off if you don’t have a fitness regimen. And if you don’t wanna lose weight or don’t need to lose weight or whatever, but you wanna stay the same weight, the likelihood is it’s gonna be very hard over time to do that, unless you have a fitness regimen. And I know for me, fitness has made it possible for me to stay the same, ’cause I was edging up, and then I got a little higher than I wanted to be, went down. I never would have stayed there had it not been for being fit. So, it really does work. And the nice thing about… Just like energy, the weight thing happens now, so you see immediate results from your fitness activities.