Time magazine just ran a piece called “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” by John Cloud. While most fitness professionals are incensed by Cloud’s piece, DC Fitness Advisor, Josef Brandenburg says, “Cloud’s piece was far more right than wrong. People in my profession are mad because they see this as a threat to their livelihood.”
“If Cloud had said, ‘exercise done for the sake of burning extra calories will not make you thin,’ then he would have been exactly right. Traditional exercise done for the sake of burning extra calories does not really work. We don’t have any scientific evidence to say that it does, and about half of my clients come to me after they get to the point that they are doing aerobics for 6 hours per week without making any progress” says Brandenburg.
According to Brandenburg fat loss is not about calories in vs. calories out. He offers an alternative model: “All tissue growth is regulated by hormones – that’s fundamental biology. When a kid is getting taller, he’s growing because he’s secreting growth hormone. To get taller he has to overeat. He isn’t getting taller because he’s overeating, he’s overeating because he’s getting taller – growing.
“Fat cells are fundamentally regulated by the hormone insulin. If you have more insulin, then you have growing fat cells and vice-versa. Exercise done just to burn extra calories – like jogging – ignores insulin, and therefore gets little to no results.”
Brandenburg says that there is smart exercise like metabolic resistance training and very intense interval training that can make your body produce less insulin, and therefore actually make you leaner. The DC Fitness Advisor also adds that this smart exercise takes less time to do and is usually more fun.
