Cheesecakes and exercise

My friend Gianfranco, a man who has lost over 50 kg and completely changed his lifestyle, was kind enough to be my guest and tell us more about weightloss, excercise and how anyone can become the person they wish to be. He is that person that is always either cycling, swimmig, running, climbing and ocasionally playing tennis – annoyingly healthy, I know! *takes a bite of cheesecake*

Now, his advice might seem a bit extreme, he used to weight 135 kg so you can imagine what kind of effort that kind of weightloss requieres – most people don’t need to follow a strict diet or excercise that much but it’s great motivation and I’d consider myself accomplished even if I’d do half of what he does. Right, I’m off to the gym now, I’ll let you read his great post.

~
A few years ago, I was a completely different person.

The way you look influences deeply the way you feel, and the way you feel interferes with the way you connect with other people. This is a vicious circle, because acceptance seems to be the base of many other aspects of our everyday relationships. The way you look impacts on your work, the trust other people have in you, and other people’s expectations. Some books say “oh, don’t bother about what other people think, just live your life” – this is a misleading message. Being social animals we cannot just detach ourselves from the community and – sorry to say – being healthy, fit and possibly good looking is a facilitating factor in every single aspect of life.

The good news is, no matter how you are feeling now, and how you look, you can change yourself. This problem has a solution. OK, this is not a pill or a magic diet. And it’s not even a secret!

In 2011, I weighed 135 kg (almost 300 lbs). Because of some wrong choices in my life, I entered the tunnel of food addiction. When you break some kind of equilibrium, nature simply decides that you are not good enough to preserve the species, and tries to make things worse for you – essentially to get rid of the malfunctioning unit (you) quicker. I mean, sport for a 300 lbs man is a very dangerous activity. You can’t simply start jogging 10km/day when you’re that heavy! From a medical perspective this is a contraindicated activity. And if you’re used to swallowing 4,000 cal/day, you can’t simply switch to eating 1,200 from one day to the next! So you feel depressed, and start thinking that there must be some easy way to lose weight and the evil thin people are not telling you. The easy escape is to keep eating crap, be lazy, be considered the nice fat person (because fat people are always very nice – I’d say “harmless”) and read books that say “you’re perfect, people must accept you as you are, if they don’t it’s their problem.” Bullshit.

Man up, son!

Now I weigh 87 kg (190 lbs) and I am quite happy with my life. The first advice I dare to give you is very easy. I was looking myself in the mirror and thinking “Who’s this guy? Can’t possibly be ME”. All I wanted was to see an immediate visible change in the disaster I was seeing in the mirror. So I decided to cut my hair completely.

There might be a thousand reasons why you are overweight now. A strict rational approach would say “cure the causes, and you’ll fix the symptom (weight)”. Thank God, this is not really necessary and not totally true. Being a vicious circle, the solution tends to be much easier, and nature will help you a lot when you start doing the right thing! So we cure the symptom and we will be simplifying the overall situation.

OK, the right thing.

To lose weight, the balance (calories-intake)-(calories-burned) must be negative.

This problem apparently has two possible solutions:
a. I eat less calories – Diet
b. I burn more calories – Sport

(Oh, come on, there’s nothing new in this. My daughter is 9 and she knows it. Are you kidding us?)
Nope, let’s evaluate the pros and cons of both approaches.

Diet
For biological reasons, our body considers fat as a precious resource. Far more precious than muscles or bones. When you start a diet, you limit the calories you introduce. Generally changing your dietary habits impacts your mood and puts your body in “starvation mode”.

You know what does your body do?
1. lowers your metabolism to a minimum, to spare “precious resources” aka fat.
2. reduces the feeding of your muscles (making you feel tired and lazy)
3. gets rid of water, dehydrating your body – (fat burning is a chemical process that would require water, but we are saving fat here, so no water is necessary)
4. muscles are the first consumers of calories, so in order to spare fat your body starts cannibalize your own muscles to get the calories you’re not eating any more

What is the effect of a diet on your body then?
You lose weight, which is essentially water in the first week and muscles in the following weeks.

Well done, dude! When you stop the diet, your body will think “oh, the famine came to an end, let’s store some fat here”. And you’ll get all of your weight back, having swapped muscle mass for “precious” fat.

Sport
If you go see your doctor because you want to lose weight, he/she will probably send you to see a nutritionist. Yes, he/she might tell you that you should increase your physical activity, but they assume that diet will be the thing that makes the difference. And some pills. And surgery maybe, first to reduce the size of your stomach, then liposuction.
Why are they saying this?
Because it’s what they know. And it’s not strictly wrong, it’s just a part of the whole thing.

Let’s see what happens when you start training 5 times a week (fewer is practically useless).
When you use a muscle, the fibers it is composed of break and need to be rebuilt with the material they are made of: essentially proteins.
Your body is the result of 300,000 years of darwinian evolution, where if you use an organ, nature will enhance it.
So if you start running, you are “damaging” the muscles of your legs a bit. And the body will think “we need better legs, we gotta go hunt rabbits, let’s build faster/stronger muscles here”. So your body produces fresh hormones (as an answer to lactic acid produced by your muscles) and your metabolism starts converting almost everything you eat into proteins to build better muscles. Including sugar (carbs) and fats.

Increasing physical activity has two big drawbacks, though. The first being an increased appetite. The second is that it is very dangerous for really overweight people.

The former is a false problem. Eating a bit more protein will not harm you too much as long as you train 5+ times a week. The latter is slightly more complicated: you need to plan your sport activities and increase your efforts gradually. In my case I started swimming, then added Mountain Bike and finally I decided to run. Now I enjoy doing Triathlons when I can.

What does your body do now?
1. we need more powerful muscles, let’s build them – they’re needed to hunt protein-based food which will be required for better muscles – this is a virtuous circle now!
5. we are currently eating valuable food (protein) – we are not in famine, we can spend a little bit more in heating (body temperature) and can afford to waste some calories not digesting everything – spendthrift mode on
6. bigger muscles need better veins, a more efficient heart, lungs, liver, kidneys (!) – refurbishing mode on
7. sorry for you, muscles tend to weigh way more than the same volume of fat, so you’ll look much better but not necessarily lighter. for a while. oh, but burning fat requires water, which gives your muscles a sexy ‘pumped’ effect – did you know that water is heavy, though?

Just for you to know, muscles burn 10 times more calories than the equivalent fat mass – even doing nothing. Even while you sleep (!).

What is the effect of a proper sporting activity on your body?
You lose weight in the first weeks (losing the “easy fat”), then you will see an increase of weight (building new muscles), after this you will be starting losing weight again (optimizing muscle/fat balance).

(OK, so your solution would be simply going to gym and use lat machine 5 times a week?)
No. It’s quite long to explain why, but to lose weight you have to make an aerobic activity for at least 40 minutes for 5 times a week. And possibly try to keep your heart beat rate around the result of this formula

aerobic rate = (200-your age)/100*70

to ensure that your aerobic effort is sufficient to condition your body to switch from a carb-based metabolism to a fat-burning metabolism.

(And not following any diet?)
I’m not saying you can eat 5 cheesecakes a day. But you can indulge with vegetables and protein without counting the calories anymore. I did it: it works.
Just limit carbs. Carbs are converted into fat very easily from your body.
But beware, don’t remove them completely from your diet: it is extremely dangerous. Limit them as much as you can. Carbs are necessary for your mood and your wellbeing and to feel ‘active’ and full of energy. You cannot have a proper workout without carbs. Eat carbs before you go to run/swim/cycle/play football. Professional trainers say “fats get burned under carbs’ fire”.

Metabolism is like economy, to be healthy it must grow. With diets (any) you condition your body to decrease all possible consumption. With sport you condition your body to increase its effectiveness at the expense of consumption (isn’t that what we want?).
What’s better, driving a tiny crappy old Trabant without optionals which reaches 15 mph and consumes 0.05 l per km or a powerful shiny muscular Ferrari which manages 200 mph and consumes 2.5 l per km?