How energy flow affects fat burning and calorie consumption

For decades, the policy of experts on exercise and weight loss was simple: do as much, lose as much. But recently they have changed their tone: If exercise is great for both physical and mental health, they should not expect that this necessarily gives the first result desired by most guys when 39 they join a gym.

Why the switch? More than anything, it comes down to the piss of Hadza.

The Hadza are hunter-gatherers from East Africa who do more exercise in a day than many of us in a week. When scientists began measuring the caloric cost of all these hunting and gathering activities (as well as everything else that required energy), they made them drink water containing two rare isotopes. . After checking the extruded isotopes and comparing the ratio between them, they were able to determine the amount of CO2 produced by the Hadzas during this period and, by extension, the total number of calories burned.

"I went into this research on the premise that the greater the physical activity, the more calories you burn," says Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., anthropologist at Hunter College and one of the artisans of this research that changes the paradigm. He also thought that the more time you spend sitting down, the less calories you burn. So when he led a piss match between lean and hungry Hadza and sedentary employees, the results shocked him. After taking into account the size of their bodies, office slugs had the same energy expenditure as the guys chasing giraffes to make a living.

Pontzer says it's the same thing from one species to another. The daily caloric expenditure of a caged zoo animal is the same as that of its Serengeti counterpart. Apparently, the more active you are, the better your metabolism adjusts to balance the big book of calories.

This means that no matter how many calories a normal guy burns with exercise, his body will find a way to limit the number of calories that it burns the rest of the day. When researchers compared sedentary people to moderately active people, the active group burned only about 200 extra calories a day, even at high activity levels. It's far from the numbers you see on your fitness monitor. Pontzer calls this "limited energy expenditure". And your metabolism has a lot of leeway, since 50 to 70% of energy expenditure is used for basic functions to stay alive, 10% to digest food, and the rest (20 to 40%) is for Physical activity.

Depressing? Yes, especially for the millions of Americans who probably would not think it would not help them not to think it would help them lose weight. But is this really the last word? Not necessarily.

What is a flow of energy?

Mick DiMaria is a small art director and writer of 5 "7" based in Southern California who has kept his weight steady for most of his adult life, without much effort, earning about 10 pounds during the holidays and losing after the beginning of the year. "But in my 40 years, it was not so easy to lose it," he says. At 174 pounds, he was well below the national average of 196 pounds. Still, he says, "I was pushing hard, so he hired a coach, and although his initial goal was to develop muscle, he started losing weight, on average half a pound a week." Year, there were 147 left.

If you watch DiMaria today, you would never have guessed that it's 24 pounds lighter. And if you did, you would badume that it was because he had radically changed diets. But he says these changes were modest, like eating more whole foods and preparing lunches instead of being take away. "I have never skipped meals," he says. "I have never abandoned anything. I've just had less.

DiMaria is hardly the only one. Each coach has at least one client like him, a person whose body has never received the note regarding ineffective exercise to lose weight. You probably have already seen it yourself: the cousin who started working in his basement and lost his bowel, the neighbor who lost 10 or 20 pounds walking around the block.

"The exercise itself will not work for the majority of the population. But there are smaller subsets where we see it, "says Brian St. Pierre, M.S., R.D., director of performance nutrition at Precision Nutrition. What is the rarity of these subsets? What do these people have that makes them exceptions to the new research? And for your needs, can you turn into an exception or should you be born this way? At least one researcher says we can have more control than we think.

"I strongly believe that exercise can contribute to weight loss," said Clemens Drenowatz, Ph.D., professor of physical education at the University of Upper Education. -Austria. One of the reasons is a concept called "energy flow" or the rate of renewal of energy in the body.

How does the flow of energy

Imagine three guys with a stable body weight. Two of them have the same daily energy expenditure, for example 3,000 calories. They are both "high flux", which means that they absorb a lot of calories and burn them. But their bodies burn the energy very differently. The first moves more, both intentionally (by exercising) and involuntarily (moving and spending more time standing). The second guy is rather sedentary; he has an office job and does not exercise much. However, the heavier body of the second guy needs more energy to move and stay alive. So, at the end of the day, baduming that their caloric intake remains the same, neither of them takes or loses significant weight.

Now consider the third guy. It has a low flow, that is, it absorbs and burns fewer calories per day than the other two, but it has also established a balance and its weight remains stable.

Early research dating back to the 1950s suggests that people who move the least can consume more calories than they spend. The more a person is exercising, the easier it is to avoid weight gain.

But something else is happening at the extremes, something that scientists still do not fully understand. Paradoxically, the higher the numbers (input / output calories), the leaner you are and the easier it is to control fat.

This is confirmed by a three-year study conducted by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on Adolescents and published in 2016. Scientists found that teens who ate a lot of calories and burned a lot of calories reduced their fat percentage bodily during these three years, while that ate little and burned little grew. This was despite the fact that adolescents in the high-flow group consumed several hundred more calories per day than necessary to maintain their weight at the beginning of the study, while low-flow adolescents ate with a minimum of maintenance. The combination of high consumption and high expense was somewhat more powerful than the two isolated variables, making them thinner than they should have been.

Why is your body moving?

As Drenowatz proposed in a research report of 2017, the amount of calories that people consume is independent of the amount of exercise that they get. An active person who becomes sedentary can eat the same amount as before (if it's not more than necessary) and gain a lot of weight. The extra body mbad then increases its metabolism because it takes more energy to maintain a larger body. This, in turn, leaves him with the same flow of energy as when he was smaller and more active.

Why would your body do that? Drenowatz thinks that the human body is looking for a preferred energy flow rather than a preferred weight. Indeed, studies of identical twins showed that they generally had the same flow, even when their body weight and level of activity were different. The higher body mbad of the less active twin allows him to burn the same number of calories as his lighter brother.

According to Pontzer, it is possible that the daily energy expenditure is high or low, but we do not know the exact mechanism. He noted that two groups seem to have high expenses: athletes and subsistence farmers. What do they have in common? They both tend to grow by moving a lot and eating a lot.

Whether it's about genes, the environment or a combination of both, high spending during childhood can stay intact for life, but Pontzer says that we do not we do not know for sure. Being at high energy levels may help some people to react quickly to workouts and to keep their weight steady through exercise, while for others, no amount of exercise hinders the loss of weight. weight. It turns out that this can be the key to a healthy weight.

Work Out or Flux It?

To find out if exercise could help you lose weight easily and without losing weight, ask yourself if you fall into one or more of the following categories:

• You have been extremely active as a child, but you are mostly sedentary now.
• Until recently, you could eat what you wanted without taking a lot of weight, if any.
• Like Mick DiMaria, you've spent most of your life in pretty good shape and only recently have you let yourself go.

If any of these elements sound right, your flow is likely to be high. This suggests that your body prefers to eat a lot of food each day, and until recently, your appetite corresponded to a high level of activity. And this suggests that your body can react quickly to structured workouts.

The best exercise (unsurprisingly) is the one you prefer and you will do consistently. No preference? Drenowatz likes bodybuilding. It increases the flow of energy in four ways:

1. As Drenowatz showed in a 2015 study, lifters develop more functional strength, which leads to more overall activity between workouts. Endurance training had the opposite effect, resulting in fewer movements between workouts.
2. The increase in overtime of muscle mbad increases your resting metabolic rate.
3. Challenging workouts raise your heart rate for several hours after, burning more calories as your body recovers. But unlike aerobics, strength training may reduce post-exercise fatigue. So, instead of relaxing on the couch, you can continue to be physically active.
4. Such workouts also increase protein turnover in your muscles. Higher rates of decomposition and accumulation add to the caloric burn.

In total, Drenowatz recommends more than 300 minutes of exercise a week at a moderate to challenging pace, which seems to be a less popular recommendation than, for example, "walk 10,000 steps a day". But this is not very different from the program used by DiMaria:

• Three full body workout sessions a week, using relatively heavy weights in order to increase muscle strength and size. (Check out this program for a taste.)
• Two or three sessions a week of running, walking or cycling or another endurance activity. Do not go so hard that you compromise your results in the weight room. Pounding your body can trigger the effect seen in the above study: you will end up moving less between workouts and neutralize the benefits.
• Diet is tricky because deliberately eating more is a terrible strategy when trying to lose weight. Try what DiMaria did: eat when you're hungry. But make sure that each meal includes at least 20 to 30 grams of protein, which strengthens the muscle, takes more energy to digest and satiates.

What happens if you do everything correctly and still do not see any significant difference on the scale? "The data clearly shows that exercise is extremely important for health," says Pontzer. "The health problems that people face as they get older [heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancers], exercise helps everyone. "

Drenowatz agrees, adding that the psychological benefits are also important. You feel better when you are more active, which motivates you to make better choices in terms of diet and lifestyle. Bonus: If you have already lost weight, exercise can help you keep it off.

So even though this basic workout model does not help you lose a lot of weight, you have nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is that you will become stronger, thinner and healthier, which is not such a bad thing to deal with.