The philosophy of diet vs. exercise for weight loss. There are many schools of thought on this and more recent research is showing that diet accounts for 90% of weight loss/fat loss success, while exercise really only accounts for about 10% and should be viewed as more of part of a maintenance plan.
My thoughts on diet modification only as a means of weight loss as absurd. As I stated in my last post there are many different paths to health. I believe and I have seen over the course of my clinical medical training that most people who want to lose weight can only accomplish it in the long term with many different methods. If I can steal the words from Dr. D’Adamo, “you need to ditter the system on many different levels to gain the response you want.”
I can believe that diet is a huge part of weight loss, after all its something we do 3-6 times a day. Time spent on exercise, however (for the most part) doesn’t occur at this rate. Most diet plans, that I have seen work over the years have involved lifestyle changes i.e. trying to get to the underlying cause of why a person can’t lose weight. The pathology of this can be from a disease or syndrome (hypothyroid), or even a traumatic life event (PTSD) or another mental or emotional experience. I believe that if the disease pathology is not in the physical and is in the emotional and neurological realms it can be harder to reach the set goals. These areas need to be corrected in order to accomplish ease instead of dis-ease.
Other Professional Opinions
If you talk to physical therapists, massage therapist, chiropractics, real osteopaths, and naturopaths who do soft tissue work they will tell you in their own words of experience while they were working on a patient who had some kind of emotional release while on the table. For most of these instances, the practitioners will tell you that they didn’t do anything besides work on their tissues. These doctors will say that their patient’s emotions and feeling where stored in their adipose tissue. These feeling that are stored in adipose tissue can be comfortable for the patient and can be the real reason why people can’t lose weight.
So I believe that any good practitioner should first give the body what it needs to accomplish its goals. I hence believe that nutrition plays a huge role (over 51%) in weight loss and muscle gain in the long term. With that being said I also feel that exercise is extremely important. From our evolutionary past, we are not meant to lead sedimentary lives. We are meant to go hunting, plow the fields, etc. This, however, is not the course of events that unfolds on a daily basis in America; hence we need physical exercise daily to accomplish this goal.
Personalized Planning
But just like I stated in my last post it should be individualized for each person. Some people might benefit from heavy weight lifting while others from aerobic exercise, while others yoga and light walking might be best. Of course, if your profession requires you to be big and strong then you are kind of forced to follow more of a rigorist exercise and diet program.
In regards to my last entry, I discussed a little about epigenetics and its roll in exercise. One of the articles that I found interesting in regards to weight loss has to do with 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) super-tasters being able to reduce weight easier and keep it off when compared to non-tasters. I think it is interesting that this small subset of people (I always think of Gordon Ramsey) have an easier time losing weight than others. This study makes me wonder why this is. Most likely it has to do with epigenetic factors that have gotten turned on/off during the gestation period from their mother’s nutritional intake.
