Hey Coach: I am desperately trying to lose ten pounds. I’m not obese, and I do like to exercise. I also eat pretty well. I just want to drop some weight, for athletic advantage and—I admit it—just to look better. Tell me what to do! Debunk the myths: let me know what will waste my time, and then give me some general guidelines and some little-known tips for peeling off those stubborn last ten pounds.
Scott Saifer responds: First, it’s great that you only have ten pounds to go (and I’m assuming you have a realistic view of how light your body can and should become). Congratulations on getting so close. The final ten pounds are, of course, the hardest … but they can be lost without doing anything unhealthy.
By now pretty much everyone knows that losing weight is a matter of calories in and calories out. If you eat fewer calories than you expend, you’ll lose weight. Eat less, exercise more, and you’ll end up skinny. Unfortunately for you and many others, this makes weight loss sound much simpler than it really is. If you try to eat less, you get hungry—so it can take inhuman willpower to continue to eat less. If you exercise more, you can get hungry as well, at least from most types of exercise. It turns out that the calories-in/calories-out idea is correct, but only the beginning of the story. Here is some information on what kind of calories you take in, and what types of exercise you use to expend your calories out.
The full explanation of calories out is relatively simple: your body uses two primary forms of fuel, in different ratios, depending on the type of exercise. The two types are fat and carbohydrate. (You also always use a small amount of protein). When you use fat as fuel during exercise, you don’t necessarily need to replace it, so that can count as weight lost. When you use carbohydrate as fuel during exercise, it must be replaced before the next session of exercise, or the next session will not go well.
While you can use both fat and carbohydrate as fuel, and you can use carbohydrate alone, you can’t use fat alone—so becoming carbohydrate-depleted can end your exercise session. This means that in order to lose weight day after day through exercise, you have to choose exercises that stimulate fat utilization—which mostly means keeping the intensity low enough that you can chat as you exercise (see my article Sing Yourself Lean)—and that you can exercise longer and lose more weight if you continue to eat small amounts of carbohydrate during longer exercise sessions. My position here opposes the idea that harder exercise is better for weight loss since it uses more calories during a shorter amount of time. And, obviously, restricting calorie intake during exercise is counterproductive.
One way to use a lot of calories without setting aside time to exercise is to incorporate more movement into everything you do. Believe it or not, talking with your hands, pacing when you talk on the phone, shifting positions frequently in your work chair, impatiently tapping your toes while waiting, and similar small movements performed over the course of a work day can use up as many calories as a daily hour of “exercise.”
The full explanation of calories in is a little more complicated. Your body will make fat from any excess calories it finds around—whether they came from fat, protein, or carbohydrate sources. One specific thing that has a huge impact on fat formation, however, is blood sugar level—so foods that boost blood sugar more rapidly and to higher levels encourage fat formation and are not good for weight loss. Therefore, if your total calories consumed are less than the total of those you expend—but these calories are acquired from sugars and starches—you will still form fat, but burn away muscle, all while experiencing low energy and enthusiasm. This physical state is not conducive to weight loss. (The secret behind the success of some “diet” foods is in causing you to lose weight while also decreasing your metabolism: you’ll buy more of the product since you seem to be losing weight; but you also become fatter—so you buy even more). On the other hand, if you eat the same total number of calories, but get them from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates that are slowly absorbed (fruits, veggies, and whole grains) you can remain in a weight-losing mode and continue exercising indefinitely (see my article The Glycemic Index: Eat Your Veggies).
