On Monday the Guardian published It’s not obesity that’s killing us – it’s the lack of exercise. Inspired by research presented at UKSEM (see also Blair Physical inactivity: the biggest public health problem of the 21st century, and BJSM Warmup 2011; 45), the Guardian exhorted us to focus less on obesity and more on physical activity. With 191 comments, 1000 Facebook likes, and 71 tweets (in 48 hours) it doesn’t take a social media expert to figure that this topic is hot.
A critical question is whether exercise is THE primary tool for weight loss (rather than just as part of a healthy lifestyle).
Does exercise promote weight loss?
King, Horner et. al’s have a great article – Exercise, appetite and weight management…in BJSM Online first.
Professor Timothy Noakes (and @GaryTaubes) add these insights to the discussion in this guest blog:
What astonishes me is the continuing failure of so many people, my medical colleagues included, to realize that the solution to personal obesity is so simple. The cause for most people is exactly as Gary Taubes described it – a diet too low in fat and protein and too high in carbohydrate especially sugar. If you are over forty, overweight, personally motivated, and not eating a high fat/high protein/low carbohydrate diet, then you are missing out – your life is passing you by.
The second key is also as Taubes describes it – obesity begets inactivity whereas leanness promotes activity. Trying to get lean by exercising whilst continuing to eat the “healthy” high carbohydrate diet will be unhelpful for most with an elevated BMI (and who are are therefore by definition, carbohydrate intolerant/resistant). You need first to lose the weight by changing to a high fat/high protein/low carbohydrate diet. As the weight falls of (as it does very dramatically at rates that most will not believe), the desire to exercise becomes increasingly overwhelming. In time the desire to exercise becomes addictive.
Trying to encourage overweight people to exercise without first changing their habitual eating patterns (not diet, please note) will never produce the same outcome as will one in which the initial focus is on changing to a high fat/high protein/low carbohydrate diet.
As Gary Taubes describes, this has been known since 1861 but was written out of the medical and popular literature after 1970 when Dr Ancel Keys essentially single handedly developed the global fear of fatty foods that mislead the world and led directly to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes that began to engulf especially people in the developed world especially after about 1977.
Until we rid ourselves of the ridiculous idea that carbohydrate foods are somehow “healthy” (for all) and fatty foods are unhealthy, and as long as we allow our eating patterns to be dictated by industries that aim remorselessly to increase global consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates, then we cannot solve the global problem of obesity and diabetes.
But at an individual level we can take control by realizing that obesity is a genetic/nutritional disorder caused by excessive carbohydrate consumption in those who are carbohydrate-resistant (and who are therefore unable to metabolize carbohydrates especially fructose, appropriately but who will store the excess calories in fat, rather than expend them in physical endeavor).
Dr. Timothy Noakes is a Sports Physician, Exercise Physiologist and Discovery Health Professor of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of Cape Town and Sports Science Institute of South Africa.