Dr. James Pendleton : Exercise Goals for Stabilizing Body Weight

Want to end your type 2 diabetes, get off statin meds, AND increase your sense of well-being -FOR FREE? Walking 150 minutes a week will help make this happen!

Confusion Abounds Regarding Weight Loss and Exercise

So there's A LOT of confusion about exercise as related to weight loss. Many of the patients I see that desire to lose body fat are either not exercising, or engaging in inappropriate activities. Our bodies are designed to move, but our lifestyles tend to push us into sedentary roles where we sit in traffic, sit at desks, then sit on the couch watching TV. When people do engage in exercise they may go from those sedentary roles to intense workouts involving hot yoga, spinning, and aerobics classes. These patients have all kinds of gym memberships, buy flashy equipment, and try every kooky diet. When they don't lose the fat they get frustrated. I've found through personal experience and working with patients that weight loss does not have to involve heroic steps. It can be done effectively using easy, gentle, and enjoyable means. Just by incorporating movement and gracefully moderating the diet we can achieve powerful results!

Tailoring Exercise Programs for Weight Loss
After ruling out limiting factors like arthritis, back pain, and other challenges, we start with a baseline prescription of at least 20-30 minutes of a brisk walk each day... Most authorities like the World Health Organization (WHO) and American Heart Association recommend something like this:
150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic activity. Thirty or so minutes a day, five days a week. That means a good walk -at an intensity where one may hold a conversation with another while doing it... A lot interplay happens here and responses can vary if patients are on meds like beta blockers or corticosteroids.

Importance of Staying in Aerobic Zone
Starting out, unconditioned folks need to keep the intensity lower to stay in the fat burning range and not strain themselves. After a few weeks they'll naturally start to desire a faster speed and longer duration.
We keep the exertion at the level where one can still hold a conversation because we want to stay in an aerobic fat-burning mode. Increasing things too soon will push us into the anaerobic sugar-burning zone. Burning sugar may be ok when we are doing cardio, but won't help us that much in leaning up. Intense spinning, swimming, running, etc. are probably not appropriate now.

This isn't rocket science, and it isn't expensive -in fact it's free! But how many folks actually do this? We've been led to believe that we need this expensive gym management or that magical fad diet to shed those pounds of fat... when we can kick off the process and lose weight by getting moving!

Here are some links to relevant sites and papers