Exercise Vs. Active Living
Most experts speak of how exercise is less important than diet in the weight loss battle, and that’s true in the short term. You can’t outrun a poor diet. In 30 minutes of running, you can burn about 400 calories (depending on your pace and weight), which only amounts to a single Burger King cheeseburger.
Athletes Michael Phelps (swimming) and J. J. Watt (American football) both train for several hours on some days. They have something else extraordinary in common. Both of these athletes have been said to consume more than 9,000 calories a day while training! Despite eating more than three times as much as a typical person, they don’t get fat, because their metabolism burns through those calories like a bonfire burns through Uncle Jesse’s marshmallow. If you were to try to calculate the calories burned from their training, you’d get a number well under 9,000 calories, because many of those calories are burned at rest. Metabolism matters more than calories, which is why these guys can eat like horses and not get fatter, while another person starves herself on 800 calories a day and gets fatter soon after, because of increased appetite and decreased metabolism.
Phelps and Watt have a lifestyle of training, but the average person needn’t adopt such an extreme exercise plan—we can make big strides with incrementally more active lifestyles than we currently have. The lesson isn’t that we need to exercise for seven hours a day, it’s that our general lifestyle determines our metabolism. While it is important to exercise for overall health, it’s not as important as being active for weight loss. Today, we seem to think a healthy lifestyle is to remain motionless for 23.5 hours, and then run for 30 minutes on a treadmill. A 30-minute session on the treadmill counts for a lot, but so do the other 23 hours and 30 minutes of the day. According to juststand.org, 86% of Americans sit all day at work. This can easily change.
The Mortality of Sitting
In 2003, 6,329 study participants over the age of six were given an activity monitor. On average, participants wore the monitor for 13.9 hours. Here’s what they found: “Overall, participants spent 54.9% of their monitored time, or 7.7 hours/day, in sedentary behaviors.”140 Estimates for daily sitting range from 8 hours to as high as 15 hours for some people.
Studies on prolonged sitting:
A 2014 study found that prolonged sitting is a major health hazard for older women (93,000 participants).141
A 2010 study found that prolonged sitting increased mortality rates and decreased life spans across the board (120,000+ participants).142
Another study published in 2012 had 222,497 people answer a questionnaire. It also found that “prolonged sitting is a risk factor for all-cause mortality, independent of physical activity.”143
Basically, studies show that sitting for long periods of time is lethal. But it’s also a missed opportunity to lose weight. In 2005, 10 lean and 10 obese volunteers were given underwear that tracked their body position every 0.5 seconds. (Who comes up with these ideas?) The magic underwear data showed that obese people sat two and a half more hours per day. Researchers said, “If obese individuals adopted the NEAT-enhanced behaviors of their lean counterparts, they might expend an additional 350 calories (kcal) per day.”144
The acronym NEAT stands for “non-exercise activity thermogenesis.” It represents all of the calorie burning your body does outside of intentional exercise. You are constantly using energy, as it takes energy to breathe, think, move, and circulate blood. How much energy you use outside of exercise is highly variable. Athletes like Michael Phelps and J. J. Watt might burn more calories at rest than some people do while exercising.
I believe that NEAT is an underrated key to weight loss. People are prone to devalue small improvements, such as the calories burned standing as opposed to sitting, but the theme of this book is how small but consistent improvements always create better-than-expected results.
The typical American worker sleeps, wakes up, and immediately begins resting in a chair for the entire day. A small change like standing up for part of your work day could make a big difference, not only in your metabolism, but in your productivity.
Dr. John Buckley, a researcher at the University of Chester, put sitting and standing to the test. He found that standing participants’ hearts beat at 10 more beats per minute. “That makes a difference of about 0.7 of a calorie per minute,”145 Buckley says. I did the math, and that is 42 more calories burned per hour, and that’s only if you don’t dance while standing. If you go beyond standing and lightly exercise on the job, Dr. James Levine says of the various methods of active desk enhancements, “[The obese can] burn about 150 extra calories an hour.”146 The effect is even greater than these calorie numbers, as it will likely improve your baseline metabolism over time (if done consistently).
Sitting isn’t precisely the problem; it’s the fact that most people remain motionless when they sit. There are products out now like the Deskcycle, an exercise bike that fits under your desk so you can pedal while sitting. There’s also a stepper you can place under your desk.
A NEAT Idea
Most NEAT activities take up none of your time. These are alternate ways of living that simply involve you using your body rather than relying on machines and chairs. Standing instead of sitting. Stairs instead of the elevator. Walking instead of driving.
The first focal point should be your job lifestyle, as we spend so many of our waking hours at work. As a writer, I spend a majority of the time at my desk, so I use a product called the Varidesk, a platform you put on top of your existing desk that extends to standing height and back down to desk level. It’s very fast and easy to lift it into standing mode or put it back into sitting mode. While this product is nice to have, it isn’t cheap.
Standing desk solutions don’t have to be expensive. When I first wanted to trying standing up to work, I stacked cardboard boxes on top of my desk. (It didn’t look stylish, but neither do sweatpants.) It was free and it worked fine. I’d move my laptop up and down to switch between sitting and standing.
Consider buying a stand-up desk, treadmill desk, or creating one yourself. Warning: don’t try to stand up the entire work day on day one. You will regret it the next day. Start with an hour or two per day and work your way up to half of the workday. A fatigue mat is very helpful. Talk to your employer; they might be willing to accommodate your needs (it is increasingly common these days, given the startling research on sitting’s dangers and the productivity boost gained from standing).
Standing advice: When at a standing desk, don’t lock your knees and stand still. Move, dance, shift, and change it up. Standing in the same spot for a long time is better than sitting, but it’s not great if you don’t move at all. (This can also be made into a mini habit, as you’ll see at the end of this chapter.)
One of the greatest benefits of a standing desk is how easy it is to walk away from it and come back. If you work in a creative field, then you know the difficulty of creating things. The answers don’t always just “come to you.” Sometimes you need to take a step back. At a standing desk, you can literally do that. I can’t tell you how powerful this subtle freedom has been. While sitting, you could conceivably do the same, but the small extra amount of resistance from having to get up is enough to keep us in our seat on more occasions.
When using a standing desk, I’ve had more energy, my mental sharpness has increased, and my productivity has been effortless at times (something I hadn’t experienced before). Increased productivity while standing is counterintuitive in a way, because standing uses more energy, theoretically leaving less energy for the brain to use. But the way our bodies work is quite different than that surface-level idea. Sitting slows metabolism and standing stokes it. Higher metabolism means higher energy, which is why I’m dancing as I’m typing this. Light activity doesn’t wear us down as much as it jumpstarts all of our systems. For this reason, walkers and joggers often remark that some of their best ideas come during their workouts. If you’re all-out sprinting, then you won’t b
e able to think about much else, because your body is putting all of its resources toward that action.
When I sit down to work, I feel lazier and waste more time. Sometimes I’ll fall asleep in my chair. Sedentary behavior generates sedentary behavior! While standing, I’ve found my motivation and energy to work are at least double what they are while sitting.
If you’ve explored all avenues and it’s somehow still not possible for you to stand up sometimes at work, set an alarm or chime to go off every hour or half hour, and then get up and move around when it goes off. You can do jumping jacks, push-ups, pace, or even perform a quick jig for the pleasure of anyone nearby. Just a few seconds is enough to awaken your sleepy metabolism from its resting state. While this is simple and easy to do, the impact will not be inconsequential.
However you accomplish it, the goal is to get to a situation in which you aren’t motionless for most of your day. Make it a priority, because it’s important for your health and may help you lose weight. One of the key ways I stay active in my sedentary occupation is my penchant for listening to music throughout the day and dancing to it often.
In the next section, I’ll give you additional (but optional) “mini challenges” if you want to increase your NEAT and raise your resting metabolism. This is the introduction to the strategy we want to pursue. We want to move, and not just while we’re working out, and not in the high-pressure way that weight loss programs prescribe (because that makes people hate being active).
Exercise Type
After I moved to Seattle, for the first time in my life, I gained a noticeable amount of fat in my abdominal and love handle area. (Getting fatter while writing a weight loss book was not the plan.) I thought the fat gain was especially odd, as I had been going to the gym more than ever before in my life since moving here! I was, however, trying to eat a lot to gain muscle mass. In addition to eating more, I had stopped playing basketball regularly for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Since I already had an exercise habit in place and I wanted to decrease my body fat, I asked the question that everyone asks when attempting to lose fat: What type of exercise should I do? Should I focus on endurance, continue to lift weights, or go for high-intensity interval training (referred to as HIIT from this point forward)?
Not all exercise is equal for weight loss, and the most popular type might be the least effective. When beginning a new weight loss plan, what do most people do first? They get on the treadmill for endurance training. This sort of moderate exercise has shown to be an inferior way to trigger fat loss.
The Science on Exercising for Weight Loss
A 1989 study looked at the body composition of 18 men and 9 women after training for 18 months to run a marathon. At the end of one year, the men saw a modest 2.4 kg decrease in body fat, but the women were unchanged. Can you imagine running for a year and a half without any fat loss? It wouldn’t be very encouraging!
Exercise physiologist Mary Kennedy ran a pilot study consisting of 64 marathoners, comparing their weight before and after training. Their training was three months of running four days per week. About 11% gained weight, 11% lost weight, and 78% stayed the same.147 This suggests their marathon training had no effect on body weight.
Did these people waste their time? Absolutely not. The benefits of exercise extend far beyond fat loss. But if fat loss is your goal, there are better-suited types of exercise than running at moderate speed on the human version of a hamster wheel.
Research shows that HIIT exercise is the best form of exercise for burning off fat, especially in the abdominal area. So perhaps my problem was that I stopped playing basketball. Full court basketball is similar to HIIT, with its alternating periods of sprinting and active rest.
As a general rule, if you can handle high-intensity exercise—almost every person can handle some form of it—choose that over moderate-intensity cardio. Studies show that high-intensity exercise is very effective for fat loss, especially around the abdomen.148
When a 15-week HIIT program was compared to a 20-week endurance training (ET) program, they found that “the HIIT program induced a more pronounced reduction in subcutaneous adiposity compared with the ET program.”149 The difference was enormous: “The decrease in the sum of six subcutaneous skinfolds induced by the HIIT program was ninefold greater than by the ET program.” If you could get nine times the results in less time, and with less energy expenditure, would you? For less than half the amount of megajoules (an energy measurement unit) expended, HIIT produced nine times the fat loss.150 This means that, for the same amount of energy expended, HIIT was actually 18 times more effective than ET at decreasing fat. Wow.
Another study divided 45 women into three groups: steady state, high intensity, and a control group. Both exercise groups improved their cardiovascular fitness level. “However, only the HIIE [high-intensity intermittent exercise] group had a significant reduction in total body mass (TBM), fat mass (FM), trunk fat and fasting plasma insulin levels.”151
Not convinced yet? (I am.) This next study is the most shocking. Ten men and ten women were split into two groups. One group ran 30-60 minutes on the treadmill three times per week. Another group ran four to six 30-second sprints (that’s only two to three minutes of exercise time) with four minutes of recovery time between sprints, and they also did it three times per week. Fat mass decreased 5.8% in the endurance training group, but in the sprint interval group, fat mass decreased a whopping 12.4%!152 That’s more than twice as much, and in far less time spent exercising. If that’s not enough good news for HIIT, another small study found that intense interval training reduced the appetite of male participants.153 (See the footnote for more details.)154
Lastly, Google “sprinter body vs. marathon body.” Look at the difference in body type between these athletes. Sprinters, male and female, generally have much greater muscle mass than marathoners, who sometimes look emaciated and frail. Brief high-intensity exercise torches body fat without taking your lean muscle with it.
Personally, if I’m going to be pounding my joints for miles at a time, there had better be a payoff. Basketball isn’t easy on the joints, but I love to play it and it keeps me fit. Marathons aren’t fun to most people, and, if you don’t enjoy them, they aren’t worth it. Some studies have even found negative cardiac implications from endurance training,155 including heart scarring.156 For example, a study found that 50% of a group of 12 lifetime marathoners showed signs of heart scarring, while none of the age-matched control group did.157 This is not definite proof that endurance training is harmful. For example, the heart scarring study was about lifetime marathoners, which most of us are not. I do think it’s a good example of how endurance training in extreme amounts wears down the body, rather than making it stronger.
It’s common to assume that time is the most important factor in exercise, but all these studies show that intensity matters a lot more than time does, and that recovery time is a smart idea. This happens to be a very mini habit-friendly data point, as we’re aiming for activities that initially only require small amounts of our time. Intense activity is somewhat intimidating to someone not accustomed to it, but much less so when it’s for seconds.
Before we get into high-intensity training considerations, there is a very important caveat to this information. High-intensity exercise is not the best form of exercise. The best form of exercise is the type you’ll actually do. You may have heard this before, and it’s true. I believe most people will prefer high-intensity exercise because it takes less time and gives much better results, but if you will only run for 30 minutes on the treadmill while watching your favorite TV show, then you should absolutely do that. Exercise of any kind will help your health and possibly your weight. If you want to try high-intensity exercise, here are some considerations.
High-Intensity Training Considerations
1. Consider the safety of high-intensity exercise. I’ll try not to sound like a pharmaceutical commercial, but talk to your doctor
about high-intensity exercise, especially if you have any doubts or pre-existing health problems. If you are able to do it, intense exercise has been found to produce greater cardiovascular capacity and cardioprotective benefits than moderate exercise, but it “could acutely and transiently increase the risk of sudden cardiac death and myocardial infarction in susceptible persons.”158 Here’s some data on that last point to ease your concerns.
A study tracked 4,846 coronary heart disease patients performing all types of exercise. In 129,456 hours of moderate exercise, there was one instance of exercise-induced cardiac arrest. In 46,364 hours of intense exercise, there were two instances of exercise-induced cardiac arrest. You can see that both rates of occurrence are extremely low, but higher with more intense exercise. These incidence rates were low even with heart disease patients, who are at the highest risk for a cardiac event. Since higher-intensity exercise produces greater benefits for heart health and weight loss, and cardiac events are rare even in heart disease patients, it’s almost always the better choice.
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 18