The Truth About Exercise And Weight Loss

Exercise and Weight Loss Basics 0:00

Dr. Francavilla here. And we are going to talk about the importance of exercise to your health and your weight loss journey. One of the things that surprises my patients the most is that the first thing I do is not tell them to exercise more. In fact, when it comes to losing weight, exercise is very important to your health. It is very important to maintaining your weight, but it is not the way that most people are going to lose weight. I want to tell you a story about one of my patients. We're going to call him Steve and Steve and I met at the CrossFit gym.

He had been working out for a long time, and he actually had a really active job as well. But he was struggling to lose weight as well as with some other health problems. So he came to see me in clinic and we did a really comprehensive approach to his weight. He did lose about 10 or 15 pounds with our interventions, but he really wasn't making the progress he wanted with his weight. So a new mat came on the market that bound and we utilize that medication. He finally lost a fair amount of weight.

I think he lost about 70 pounds, but the most remarkable thing was the effect it had on his fitness.

Steveu2019s Weight Loss and Fitness Transformation 1:24

Instead of sort of jogging and shuffling, he was now able to run at CrossFit and run fast. And what I was most blown away by was the fact that he was now able to do pull ups for the first time in his life, at age 50. He was actually able to stop his medication, but he was dedicated to continuing to work out every day for at least an hour and continue with his nutrition goals. So he serves to me as a really wonderful example of how everything can work together. Exercise is a really important piece of the puzzle, but it's not the whole piece.

And let's talk about what that piece of exercise looks like. So one of the things I like to emphasize with my patients is how important exercises to all of us, regardless of weight, exercise improves our metabolic health and improves our cognitive function the way our brain works and improves our muscles and our skeletal health. It improves our blood sugar, cholesterol, our blood pressure. It improves mood, depression, anxiety, and stress. It improves sexual function. And most importantly, it lowers the risk of all cause mortality, meaning people live longer when they exercise more.

And this is regardless of weight. Those benefits go for all of us, regardless of what our weight is. So even if you don't lose weight from exercise, it's still really, really important to do for your health. And in fact, I recommend separating exercise from weight loss and doing it because you feel good. It's good for your health. It's good for the way your body functions and is able to move. It's good for how you age and it has this bonus of helping you maintain weight if that is a goal of yours.

When it does come to weight loss, you can have a little bit of an increase loss of that visceral fat, which is that fat that affects your metabolic health.

Health Benefits of Exercise 3:25

And it can also increase your muscle mass, which is going to decrease your body fat percentage. And when you add it to nutrition, you get about a 20% more weight loss using exercise. So it certainly has some impact on your weight, but not as much as you think really. Nutrition and the other things you do are going to have a much bigger impact on your weight than exercise, especially when you're in the weight loss phase. Now, when you are in the maintenance phase, exercise becomes really, really important.

So whether you're already where you kind of want to maintain or just lose a little weight, maintain or you're thinking ahead, you're going to lose weight, how do you keep it off? Exercise is the secret sauce here. You really need to increase the amount you're moving. The National Weight Control Registry, which is a database of people who've lost 30 pounds or more and kept it off for more than a year so that the vast majority of those people, 97%, increased how much they move and 90% were moving an hour a day, most of them by walking.

So I always set that as my threshold out in the future for exercise for my patients. Some days we need to get to the point where we are moving about an hour a day. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. It can be CrossFit if you want. It can be running, but it can be as simple as walking. And you don't have to do it all at once. But if you want to maintain weight loss, you're going to have to increase the amount of movement you're doing. But it doesn't have to be the first thing you do. You can layer it on top of nutrition, medications, surgery, supplements, fasting, whatever your approaches are going to be, you can layer that exercise on as you go, knowing that a year into your journey, you're going to be shooting for about an hour a day.

Our guidelines for Healthy Exercise Guidelines for Americans say that we should be moving more and sitting less. So if you're not doing any movement right now, anything is better than nothing.

Exercise for Weight Maintenance and Guidelines 5:21

We also recommend 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate activity. So that should be your heart's feeling a little racing. You're sweating a little bit. Might be hard to keep talking nonstop during that exercise. And it also recommends two days a week of muscle strengthening activities or resistance training. You'll hear about that in the summit as well. Now, I like an approach where you really focus on that muscle strengthening when you're losing weight, because if you are really aggressively losing weight, one of the risks is you could lose too much of your lean muscle or your body fat is not going down as much as your muscle mass is.

We really want you losing body fat, not muscle mass. Eating protein and resistance training is going to be your key there. So that is one of the tools I have at my GLP Strong Program that's just at GLPstrong.com is a really simple strength training program you can do in your home with very little or even no equipment. You really need to have very basic ability to move to start this program. There's three levels in every video and it is a great way to get started with resistance training. It's two days a week for about 20 minutes.

Again, you do it in your home and then you just combine it with something like walking to get that aerobic training and get to that total of 150 minutes a week. So if you want to check out the program that I made for my patients, you can find that at GLPstrong.com. And as you move forward, just remember anything is better than nothing. With movement. We're shooting for 150 minutes minimal a week or two. Days of strength training and exercise is probably not how you're going to lose weight, but it is an essential tool if you are trying to maintain weight and improve your overall health.