So often we are told by the mainstream media to starve ourselves with diets that promise to shed pounds right away. Then, we are pushed to exercise as hard and as much as possible to achieve instant muscle tone and a ‘better body’. In truth, I believe that intense workouts and extreme dieting can be dangerous for your health and can lower your metabolism. Starving your body and intense workouts are actually harmful to your body. My goal is to help my clients (and my friends) re-gain their health by speeding up their metabolic rate. This article will center around the serious health issues that arise from yo-yo dieting and extreme exercise, as well as offer a few tips as to how to have a truly healthy exercise and nutrition regimen.
Diets don’t work
From Atkins to Weight Watchers, there have been a vast number of fad diets to come along in the past few years. While most of them are different on paper, they produce similar results. By shocking your system into a new form of eating, essentially depriving the body of specific nutrients, these diets cause your physiological systems to think that you’re starving! Therefore, even though you do lose weight quickly because your body is underfed, the body thinks it has to prepare for long periods without food, and therefore tries to store as much energy as possible. Yes, hard core dieting can actually slow down your metabolism. So,while you might weigh less on the scale, overtime you regain your weight, your health can suffer, your mood can suffer and your hormones may even change.
This storing of energy has a two-fold negative effect. One, storing energy means holding onto the fat cells you were trying to lose in the first place, making it harder to shed the pounds. Two, when you stop or give up on the diet and return to normal eating levels, the body still is in starvation mode, which is one of the main reasons why so many (about 80%) of people regain more weight than they lost after a fad diet.
Over exercising is dangerous
These issues with diets are actually well known, but an aspect of this unhealthy cycle that is often overlooked is how these diets affect the outcome of hard exercise. In order to exercise hard, you need fuel. If you are depriving your body of the fuel it needs, but still pushing it exceptionally hard, it is similar to running a car off of only fumes. Overtime, instead of building better muscle, the structural tissues such as joints and bones begin to feel the impact, resulting in degeneration and chronic health problems. Instead of burning fuel, you are living off of adrenaline. Instead of burning fat, your body burns muscle and it eats away at your tissues and your bones. What does you body eat without proper fuel: YOU!
So when you wake up after fasting all night long and you go for a run in the morning (our bodies are actually most stressed first thing in the morning), what do you think you are doing to your body? Placing too much stress on an already unstable and starving body can be extraordinarily harmful, and certainly won’t lead to a healthier you. I find that people that tend to over-exercise come to me with health and hormonal issues and have a very difficult time maintaing their weight. Stress hormones cause inflammation. Overtime, stress in the body causes disease. Stress in the body actually causes our body to age instead of becoming healthier. Bottom line, intense workouts and extreme dieting can cause our bodies to shut down.
In my recent interview with integrated health specialist, Sam Visnic, we talked at length about how this kind of intensity may cause a negative stress feedback loop. For simplicity, there is an “adaptive reserve” the body draws from in order to accommodate to stressors. This adaptive reserve does not have an infinite capacity, so its ability to serve us is based upon the total amount of stress we have at any given time. Imagine the damage caused by severe emotional stress coupled with intense exercise?
With this knowledge in mind, here are a few tips on how to properly maintain a healthy and fit figure.
Balance. The more often you eat in small amounts, typically the faster your metabolism will be(Think of how you build a fire!). Become a frequent eater and balance your blood sugar! Low blood sugar means stress in the body. Since depriving the body sends it into starvation mode, it only makes sense that feeding the body often conditions it to process food at a faster rate. Focus on eating foods that are as free from processing as possible, and try to hit every food group. If you are hungry after you eat, re-evaluate what you are eating. Perhaps you are not giving your body what it needs or perhaps your ratios are off. Your goal is to eat through the day so that you have energy and you are calm. Don’t starve yourself! People that go all day without any food tend to overeat at the end of the day and put on weight. People that go for a long time without eating become adrenalized. Adrenaline makes you feel stressed instead of tired- Adrenaline is also damaging to the cells themselves. When blood sugar drops the brain isn’t getting the food it needs. When the brain isn’t fed the result isn’t pretty. Think balance! Our body needs proper carbohydrates, high quality protein, and saturated fats!
My moto is: Eat Real food! If your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, normally I say don’t eat it.
Walk. While over-resting is healthier than over-exercising, the important thing is to find a nice balanced routine. Try to vary your workouts and focus on improving flexibility, moderate cardio, and some light weight training to tone muscles. Work out at your own pace. Instead of running: walk! If you are starting a workout routine, start slowly and build up as you increase your strength. If you are starting yoga, find a studio that is non-competitive and teaches you to respect your body. What ever workout you choose, respect your body and the signals it gives you. If you find you are getting stressed during your work out, back off!! Don’t judge your health by how far you can run or how much weight you can lift. Love yourself enough to slow down when you know you aren’t feeling well. Check into your body often and protect yourself! Instead of judging yourself by how far you can run, make your goal optimal health.
Dr Raymond Peat states:”Incidental stresses, such as strenuous exercise combined with fasting (e.g., running or working before eating breakfast) not only directly trigger the production of lactate and ammonia, they also are likely to increase the absorption of bacterial endotoxin from the intestine. Endotoxin is a ubiquitous and chronic stressor. It increases lactate and nitric oxide, poisoning mitochondrial respiration, precipitating the secretion of the adaptive stress hormones, which don’t always fully repair the cellular damage.”
So, again, if you are exercising strenuously and our dieting continuously, you are damaging your cells and that’s not healthy.
Rest. Many of our daily health issues, including being overweight, come from inadequate or irregular sleep. Try setting a bedtime and healthy wind down routine at the end of the day to prime the body for a restful night. If you have trouble getting a good nights rest I suggest looking carefully at your diet and your lifestyle to figure out why. Sleep is important, it is the time when your body heals. Without a good nights rest, our brain (and our cells) can’t function properly. I find that stress plays a huge role in weight loss. People that live on adrenaline may have a tough time with weight loss and weight gain. Look at your life and see where you might minimize your stress. If your workout routine is causing you stress, back off! Instead, sleep and rest to lose weight.
Meditate. Meditation may also be a great tool in lowering stress and losing weight. By calming the mind and the body, meditation can help with weight loss. Meditation has been shown to lower stress hormones and can even help the body to heal at the cellular level. Even just taking time to sit and breathe can lower stress hormones. Some people will say that they don’t have the time to meditate.
There is a Old Zen saying that I love: You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour. See if you can start today by finding a quiet place to sit and get really quiet. Notice the breath as you breathe in and out. When you find yourself stressed, simply breathe. Let your body be calmed by your breath and then see how you get energy from your breath. We all think of pushing ourselves every minute of the day. We starve ourselves to be thin and we get on the treadmill and run when what we really need is rest. We need to take some time to heal.
It’s time to de-stress and simplify. Take care of yourself, nourish your body, and allow yourself to Be.
So remember, under eating and over exercising do much more harm than help, and never work long term. For lifelong weight loss, overall body health (Optimal Body Health) is the way to go! Take care of your Mind, your Body, and your Spirt. Time to Tune in.
Instead of going for an intense run (and activating the stress hormones), take a nice walk and breathe!! Enjoy the world around you. Take some time and walk. While jogging became popular for preventing heart disease, we were frequently told by experts how many miles a person has to run to burn off a pound of fat. However, in Russia, physiologists always remember to include the brain in their calculations, and it turns out that a walk through interesting and pleasant surroundings consumes more energy than does harder but more boring exercise. An activate brain consumes a tremendous amount of fuel.- Dr Raymond Peat