Mainstream calories counting diets do not cause successful long term weight loss. Part of the reason for this is that weight gain is not caused by eating too much food, but by eating the wrong types of foods. Restricting these wrong foods is not therefore helpful at inducing weight loss because the metabolic poisons and toxins they contain are still present and can still adversely affect the regulation of metabolism. Another reason that the typical calories counting diet is not successful at causing long term weight loss is because not all fat is the same. Most people, including medical experts are unaware that fat varies not only in its location but also in its metabolic regulation. Following a regiment of fat loss that does not specifically target particular types of fat is therefore unlikely to yield good results. On the outside fat all looks unsightly and similar, but internally the fat in different locations can have very different metabolic regulation and purposes. The key to successful long term fat loss is to target the various types of fat is specific ways.
The distribution of fat has been extensively investigated in the last few decades thanks to advancements in scanner techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging. Such techniques make it possible to accurately internalise the fat within an individual and provide detailed mapping of its location and type. For example, in one study1, researchers assessed the fat distribution of a group of fat fit and fat unfit men using magnetic resonance imaging. The results of the study showed that while total fat was similar between the two group, that men who were both fat and aerobically fit, has less visceral fat but more subcutaneous fat than those men who were fat and sedentary. This pattern was repeated when the assessment was performed on slim fit and slim unfit men. The visceral to subcutaneous fat ratio in the slim fit and fat fit men was both lower than the slim unfit men. As disease is predicted not by total fat but by visceral fat, the slim fit men were at a greater risk of chromic Western disease compared to the fat fit men in this study.
These results are interesting because they show that being slim does not reduce the risk of chronic disease, because being slim does not necessarily reduce the levels of the disease causing internal visceral fat. Such fat is indicative of insulin resistance and is caused by a poor quality diet including high amounts of metabolic poisons. While the results from this study may seem to indicate that exercise is able to reduce the amount of visceral fat, care needs to be taken in assigning cause and effects. The study authors were careful to exclude naturally fit men who performed no exercise in this study, so that they could ascribe the cause of the reduction in visceral fat to the exercise. However, people who perform exercise tend to eat higher quality diets as they are more concerned with their health. In addition, those who exercise tend to have more muscle mass, and this increases the resting metabolic rate and is protective of weight gain because it improves insulin sensitivity and prevents visceral fat accumulation.
The assumption that exercise causes improvements in body composition is a half truth. Anecdotally everyone has stories about individuals who lost weight because they started at the gym. However, such individual nearly always make other changes to their life. In this way they change their environment and this changes their internal milieu and biochemistry. This is key because it is by changing their environment that an individual will be successful in their long term weight loss goals. Exercise is very good at removing subcutaneous fat in the very physically fit. But to be able to to perform exercise at the required intensity, you must first overcome the obesity disease and reduce the abdominal fat that signifies illness that includes energy utilisation dysfunction. This dysfunction is caused by poor quality foods. Eating a high quality diet to reverse this dysfunction makes you beautiful on the inside, and this then allows the necessary exercise intensity to be reached in order to make the body beautiful on the outside.
Dr Robert Barrington’s Nutritional Recommendation: Successful long term weight loss should include some adherence to an exercise regimen. However, performing exercise in the presence of a poor quality diet will not allow the biochemical changes that are necessary to achieve long term weight loss nirvana. Removing the metabolic dysfunction that is manifest outwardly as abdominal obesity requires adherence to a high quality diet, and only when this dysfunction is reversed can the required exercise intensity to remove subcutaneous fat be achieved.
RdB
