The Obese 98 Pound Weakling and How to Increase Your Brainpower!

Once again, the results of a lot of great research related to health and fitness have been published in the past couple of weeks, and I wanted to share the best of that research with you, so let’s get right to it. (I highly recommend that you click on the links associated with each story so that you can read the full details).

The first story comes from one of my favorite sources – the Wall Street Journal, and it’s titled “The Scales Can Lie: Hidden Fat“. The story is based on a recent report from the Mayo Clinic, which suggests that fat in your body can get you and your heart into trouble even if you don’t look fat and if the scale tells you you’re healthy. The researchers termed this phenomenon “normal weight obesity”. The study looked at data from 6,171 Americans with normal body size, as measured by body mass index, and found those with a high percentage of body fat were at significantly greater risk of future heart problems than those with low amounts of fat. The research also suggests that body mass index, or BMI, the tool doctors and researchers often use to determine whether a person is obese, may fall short in some cases as an indicator of good health. Actual body fat measurements can be calculated using bioelectrical impedence analysis, which is how we do it at Fitness Together. The findings of the Mayo study, which were published in November in the European Heart Journal, suggest that reducing heart risk requires increasing the percentage of lean muscle mass at the expense of body fat. This underscores the importance of exercise in maintaining cardiovascular health – including weight lifting and other resistance training, which helps build lean body mass. Eating a healthy diet is important in reducing body fat, too, but Dr. Lopez-Jimenez (the lead researcher) observes that if you only restrict calories, you risk losing an equal amount of body fat and lean muscle tissue and thus you could end up weighing less without significantly reducing the percentage of body fat.

The second study reinforces some of the findings from the Mayo Clinic study described above. This six-month study, conducted a the University of Wyoming, assigned 36 overweight men and women, average age 39, to one of three groups to look at the impact of diet alone or diet plus exercise on a variety of health outcomes. One group cut calories by 25 percent. The second group cut calories by about 12.5 percent and exercised enough to increase energy output by 12.5 percent. A control group simply stayed on a weight-maintenance diet. At the study’s end, both the caloric-restriction group and the caloric-restriction plus exercise group lost about 10 percent of their body weight. However, those who included exercise had better health outcomes. According to the lead researcher, the big improvement was related to blood pressure. The exercising and dieting group had greater blood pressure improvements, as well as improvement in cholesterol and insulin sensitivity. So hopefully the message is clear, you need to focus on both nutrition and exercise to achieve your health and fitness goals.

The next study, titled “Making Effective Nutrition Choices”, and recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, looked at how to get more people to eat the recommended number of daily servings of fruits and vegetables. As I have said many times, it’s hard to go wrong nutrition wise by adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet. The results of the study were quite impressive. The researchers created a website providing information on the benefits of eating more fruits and vegetables and ways to incorporate these healthy foods into their diets. After just three months of using the web site, 70% of the participants were eating the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables on an average day, up from 20 percent at the starting point! I believe this indicates that if you provide people with useful information and make it easy for them to access such information, then they are much more likely to follow the recommendations contained within that information. I also believe that if you create some form of accountability, such as a journal, to accompany such information, you will increase both the number of people that are willing to commit to such a change, as well as their level of commitment.

And finally, if the benefits mentioned above such as improved cardiovascular health, reduced blood pressure, and improved body composition aren’t enough to convince you to start an exercise program, then perhaps this story in yesterday’s New York Times will do the trick. Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises. A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration – 0.5 percent! The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.

I hope you find the results of these research studies interesting and useful. Like the one study above indicates, if you provide people with useful, easily accessible information, they will respond favorably. That is what I try to do with these newsletters, and what we try to do at FT through our workouts, nutritional advice, and accountability.

To your health and happiness,

P.S. Just wanted to give a quick Happy Birthday to our youngest son – today is his 20th birthday! We are heading up to Bear Creek Mountain to do some skiing for a couple of days (actually my wife and son will be doing the skiing, I’ll be hanging out by the pool…)