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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Alright, Welcome back to the podcast. As we say, living until now until bedtime. That's when you can act. Okay? So just a reminder, if yesterday wasn't great or whatever, blah blah blah blah blah, come on now.
Speaker 1:Today's the day, let's go. So I want to cover a study today, a recent one, and the title is about basically skip exercise if it's just for the calorie burn. So a lot of people start exercising because they think it's going to help them lose fat. It's fine because obviously the benefits of exercise go way beyond calorie burn, we know that. But why does exercise help some people lose weight but virtually do nothing for other people when it comes to fat loss?
Speaker 1:And that's what the researchers wanted to know. And kind of looking at the research, like why is it that probably most people they do more exercise, it doesn't actually result in more weight loss? For some people it does help them in the weight loss journey, so what's going on? And first of all we have to understand calories in calories out. This is fact, this is laws of thermodynamics.
Speaker 1:Calories in versus calories out is a very simple equation. It's very simple written out, but there's a lot to go behind that. So what does calories in mean? What influences calories in? So some people will say, I've started on antidepressants or started on certain hormonal pills, and they cause me to gain weight.
Speaker 1:Now, the pills themselves don't make you put fat on there's no calorie in the pill that makes you put weight on, put fat on. But it does impact the energy in part and also the energy out part of the equation. So energy in, what impacts energy in? Your appetite. Now this is influenced by your hormones to regulate your appetite and satiety.
Speaker 1:This is why severe deficits don't work, a lot of people start the app and go, the calories are too high, I'm going to drop them by a thousand. And what's going to happen very quickly is that the hormones that are associated with appetite go down or go up, there's two, leptin and ghrelin. Basically what happens is you start not feeling full from your meals and you start getting really hungry because those hormones are out of balance, so your appetite goes up through the roof and then you eat a lot of calories and you're back to square one because you have a binge for a weekend and you don't understand what's happened. That's part of the thing, you haven't understood the process that's happened. Again, I'll put it in, food consumed.
Speaker 1:Obviously this is influenced by your availability of food, what food you like, energy density, your sleep quality as well. We know in research if you are sleeping five hours a night versus seven hours a night, the people that slept five hours a night were consuming more calories after their dinner in the snacks. So we know that sleep quality goes down, likelihood of snacking later on that day goes up. Education is an important part of your socioeconomic status, culture these all impact food and part of the energy equation. Now we look at calories absorbed.
Speaker 1:Calories absorbed is influenced by your macronutrient intake. So for example, high protein. So protein, in terms of digestion, it takes about 30% or 20% to 30% of the energy. So say now you consume 100 calories of protein, it's going to take 30 calories just to digest that and then the absorption stuff as well is based on food prep, age, health, energy status, stuff like that. So that can vary as well.
Speaker 1:And then you've got psychological factors, your stress levels, we know that if you're stressed like, for example, here's the key thing about stress and it's very important to know this, if you are not chronically stressed and chronic just means long term, so if you just get stressed out at one part of the day, what you typically notice is that your appetite goes down, your appetite goes down, you don't feel hungry at all, your adrenaline is pumping, you're basically ready to run or fight, that's what's happened to your body. Your energy, your digestion stops, sends the energy to your big muscle groups ready to fight and run. That's what's happened. So your appetite goes to nothing because you could die, so let's protect, let's run, let's fight. If you're always stressed and turning on the stress response all the time, and some people do this, and not all of you do this, you catastrophize, you stress out about the weigh in you see in the morning, you stress about if someone said something to you, you stress about it again when you tell your friend at work, you stress about it again at lunch when you start gossiping about stuff maybe, you stress about it again, you stress in eight, nine, 10 times a day and you're turning on the stress response each time.
Speaker 1:You do this for long enough, weeks go by, months, you're chronically stressed. What happens here is because the stress response is so energy demanding, so if you think about it, stressed and your body stops digestion and it sends or lowers it down, sends the energy to your big muscles, your big muscles are getting ready to fight, adrenaline is pumping through, your blood pressure goes up, your blood is circling, your heart rate's going faster, you are ready, that's the demanding process. So when you're turning that on all the time, the body needs the energy back, it's used a lot of energy, That's why when you're chronically stressed, instead of your appetite going down and you don't feel like eating, your appetite actually shoots up, because it needs that energy back, and it needs it back now, because that process was so much energy. So that's why hunger goes through the roof. Now energy out part, what impacts this?
Speaker 1:Of course energy being addressed this is influenced by your body size. A lot of it is influenced by your body size, your weight, your hormonal status, diet and history, genetics, factor in health status, sleep quality, age they all have varying levels of impact on energy out, your calories burned. Energy burned through exercise this is influenced by your exercise ability, your intensity, duration, frequency, type, environment. Again, sleep quality comes in. Energy burned by non exercise activity Again, is like walking, fidgeting, moving.
Speaker 1:This is also impacted by your health status, stress levels, hormonal status, your occupation, your leisure activities, your mindset about walking, for example. And then energy burned by metabolising I can't say it, God. Been speaking to us today. Metabolising good God, we got that in the end. Energy burned by metabolising food influenced by macronutrient makeup and how processed the food is, stuff like that, if it's liquid or whatever.
Speaker 1:So we've got the two factors in energy in, energy out. Still comes down to energy in, energy out, but different things impact them both. Okay, so we've covered that just to make sure we know what's going on. So what they wanted to look at was this, people think this happens when you do exercise, and I want you to visualise this. So you've got your calories burned, your day to day life you're burning 2,000 calories, okay.
Speaker 1:Now people think if they add in 500 calories burned through exercise that they now burn 2,500 calories a day. They think that the physical activity is an additive to the total calories they already burn. Does that make sense? So you think, well I'm burning 2,000 calories as my normal self now but I'm not working out so if I work out I will burn an extra 500 therefore I should lose weight. What happens is, isn't a gradient up, what happens is when you add in physical activity your calories or your energy out from the other parts of the things go down.
Speaker 1:So whilst for some people when they add in exercise they do burn more calories that day but it's not the add on. 2,000 calories I burn, I go to work, I'm just living my life, I don't work out. I now start working out. For some people they actually might burn 2,200 calories but they actually now consume more calories because the activity has made the hunger go up and now they eat more calories as a consequence. Other people, they gym sessions in or exercise and because it makes them so tired, they lay down for the rest of the day, their body down regulates other processes and they actually burn the same or less calories overall because now they're not moving off the couch all day because they've done 45 of spin.
Speaker 1:But forty five minutes of spin doesn't burn as many calories as being up and about for five hours, up and about having energy there. So Whilst for some people it can be a decent add on to their day, for most people it's a slight add on, but it can also increase your hunger levels to the point where you're eating more calories than you've burned and then you're not going to lose weight. So the study wanted to look at what type of person sees the benefits of adding excess in fat and what doesn't. So the group says 29 participants, 20 were female, nine were male and it lasted for twenty four weeks. So one group was assigned to burn eight calories per kilogram of body weight, the other group was assigned to burn 20 calories per kilogram of body weight.
Speaker 1:So they did this on a treadmill stationery bike and at the end of the study period researchers tracked what was effective exercise had, so calories outside of the equation. So basically what happens here is you can see that there's people who aren't compensators, so they expend about three zero eight calories less than expected per day on average, and then the non compensators are people without EXEC expend an average of 94 calories more than expected. So basically, most people expended about less calories on average per day, but there were some people that did, when they did add exercise, they did burn slightly more calories than expected. So to put this into perspective, the average compensator burned three zero eight calories less than expected. That means that you think you're going to burn more calories because you are in workouts, but actually you're burning 300 calories less than you expect.
Speaker 1:The range across participants though, some people burned 600 calories less some people burned 180 calories less, so there is a range guys, it's like we're all different in our sense. But the non compensators, the ones that actually have the additive effect, they burned 94 more calories than expected, But one individual skewed the data because they burned 400 calories more than expected. So there is a lot of variation. So what is the difference between these people? Why are most people compensators, which means they're burning less calories than predicted if they add in workouts and why are there some people that actually burn more?
Speaker 1:And the reason for this is the people that burned more calories than expected were people who really haven't done any exercise for a long time, what we call newbies. And you see this in weight training and strength training, newbie gains. When people do strength training for the first time, in the first four to six weeks, they see a huge amount of gains. Muscle mass gains, strength gains, it's very rapid, and as you become more of an advanced weight lifter, your gains become less and less and less and it takes a lot more energy and time to get the better gains. And it's the same here, for most of you, once you start doing a workout for the first time maybe in a long time, yes for the first few weeks you might be burning more energy in total and maybe your hunger's in check, but as a long term thing you're not going to be burning more calories than you think, you're actually going be burning less calories than you think when you add an exercise.
Speaker 1:So the thing here to realise is exercise is to be added as a performance thing. Do not exercise to burn calories because the likelihood is it's going to burn way less than you think, but I should eat back my calories. No, you shouldn't. This study again proves what the science has been saying for a long time. Energy compensation, we're compensating.
Speaker 1:You think you burn 100 calories, you've net to burn 30 more calories. But because you think you've burned 100 calories, you eat a Mars bar or you eat food back and then you actually get eaten more energy. Does that make sense? So you're not in a calorie deficit, you're not going be losing fat then. So it's key to understand this, don't exercise for calories burned.
Speaker 1:It's kind of why I don't, I've never had an Apple Watch or stuff to look at, oh my active calories burned today. One, it's way off in accuracy, it's way off. So because it's way off there's no point really taking into consideration because it's like up to 91% off. And two, because it doesn't reflect the true fibre, those watches aren't taken into these studies into consideration, but we do take these things into consideration. When you answer the questionnaire and you say I work out three times a week or five times a week, we assume like the average workout time, we assume, 'Okay, probably going to burn this amount of calories for the body weight' and then we go, 'Energy compensation', 'la la la', probably a slight increase in activity overall for the week.
Speaker 1:But people come back and say, 'Scott, I'm working out four times a week. Surely my calories should change because of this. No way, it's a minuscule difference, there's no point worrying about it. And people think, Oh my God, you're not taking into consideration my personal workouts, you're not taking into consideration my personal lifestyle? Yes we do, we just take it in a way that's scientific and accurate as opposed to, Oh yeah, okay, you want to pull in your calories burned from Apple Watch, oh my God, did a spin class, Apple Watch said I burned 800 calories, oh my God, that means today that my maintenance is 800 calories higher.
Speaker 1:So if my goal is 2,005 or say my goal is 2,000 calories, today I can eat 2,800 calories because I burned 800 calories extra in the workout. That's what people think, it is inaccurate, it's not true, that's not how it works And if you follow that path, you're going to struggle and that's what MyFitnessPal does, another apps do by default. And we're saying no to it because it's not what the science is saying. We have to take a stand on these things. That's why we do many things in the app.
Speaker 1:We have to take a stand. We don't do this, we don't do this, we don't do this, because it doesn't work. We don't let you, oh yeah, want to lose two pounds, three pounds of fat a week. We don't allow that setting like many apps do because of the results from the research studies and the negative impacts of a severe calorie deficit are really not worth it and for most people who we understand are customers, it's not going to aid you in your life. I saw a comment earlier saying thank you so much for the app, I used to eat food with my kids and want nipples but didn't have enough calories and felt sad and all this about it, but now my calorie allowance is high, I've got more energy, I can have nipples with my kids, I can have food with them, I'm not stressing about it.
Speaker 1:We understand those wins from lifestyles, I understand there, I've spoken to tens of thousands of people face to face, Zoom, WhatsApp, email, all sorts of life stories and this is the big difference. It's not really your, know, let's be super thing about calories burned next to it and you're like, oh yeah, but you're just like not doing what other apps do. No because we know it's not benefiting you and we understand who you are. Does that make sense? I'm not going to have you worrying about calories burned from exercise and then syncing it into the app and then saying you can eat it back and stuff and just because other apps do it because you're used to it, you want to see it, I'm sorry but I'm saying no.
Speaker 1:And if you're not happy with it, you're basically saying I don't agree with the science, it's fine, but sometimes the customer isn't right. So that's kind of the main thing about that. So do exercise for the health benefits of exercise, please. Find something you love. I love Jiu Jitsu, I do it nearly every day, I love it.
Speaker 1:I'm not thinking, 'Holy hell, how many calories did I burn today rolling on the floor trying to choke someone out, or more likely they've choked me out and I've tapped out 10 times. I don't think, my god, burned loads of calories. I just think it's great exercise, high intensity sometimes, sometimes it's low intensity. I love it, my body's moving, stretching, happy days, and it's a mental break for now, I can't think of anything else. You find that for yourself and it'll add a lot to your life, but I for sure it's not going to add a lot to your life if you're worrying about how many calories you're burning playing squash or you're burning running or you're burning weight training, oh my god look at the calories I've burned, I think you're better off not going on that path.
Speaker 1:So that's it, have a good day, hope that covers the exercise stuff, see you all tomorrow.