Weight management

The podcast discusses the importance of weight management for overall health and the prevalence of obesity in America. It highlights the benefits of maintaining a healthy weight, such as reducing the risk of chronic diseases and improving energy levels and mental health. Treating obesity costs a significant amount of money and underweight can also pose health risks. The podcast suggests incorporating physical activity and exercise to manage weight. It explains that exercise can boost metabolism, increase appetite, and contribute to weight gain for underweight individuals. For overweight individuals, aerobic and resistance training can help burn calories and promote weight loss. The podcast emphasizes the importance of maintaining weight loss and avoiding weight cycling. It also mentions the importance of balancing exercise and caloric intake. Overall, a combination of exercise, a balanced diet, and maintaining a healthy weight is crucial for long-term health. Welcome to Fluff to Buff, the show where we embark on a journey towards sustainable and healthy weight management. I'm your host, YC, and I'm thrilled to be your guide as we explore the diverse and ever-evolving world of wellness, nutrition, and fitness. Today, we got Aiden, Evan, and Zahas on our podcast today, and we're going to talk a little physical activity on weight management. So, hey guys, why don't you introduce yourselves. I'm Zahas, and I'm a kinesiology major. I'm Aiden, and I'm a kinesiology major. I'm Evan, I'm a public health major. Alright, nice to have you guys on. Today, I just want to talk about physical activity and its effects on weight management. Recently, I saw a statistic from the CDC. Apparently, obesity currently affects 4 out of 10 Americans. That's a pretty big amount, considering how big America is, right? So, I mean, what's the whole deal about weight management nowadays in 2023? Yeah, I think some important things to realize first is not just how much weight management and obesity problems affect America, but also realize why they're such a big deal to begin with. To begin with, they're very important for health maintenance, because maintaining a healthy weight often lowers your risk for chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer. It also just overall supports well-being and leads to a longer, healthier life. It also generally results in better energy levels and vitality throughout your day, as well as mental health benefits, sleep benefits, joint health, cardiovascular health, mobility, and on and on. Yeah, something to add to that. Treating obesity medically accounts for over $140 billion a year, and that represents roughly 9.1% of medical expenditures every year. That's almost 10% of all medical expenses treating obesity. So that's a pretty big issue in America. On the other side of the spectrum, a problem that's not really as prevalent today in America as it is in other developing countries is being underweight. Underweight can pose other significant health risks later on in your life, just like obesity can. Yeah, that's interesting. I never really thought about the underweight portion, because when you're talking about weight management, you're thinking about obese, trying to get the pounds down on the scale. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. But yeah, weight management's a huge issue. It costs a lot of money to treat, and also it comes with a bunch of benefits. So now that we know that weight management is crucial, what should we do to go about it? Some ways that you can gain weight pretty quickly if you are severely underweight, you can start putting full cream and milk, coffee, really anything. Start using milk, add some healthy fats to your meals, put some grated cheese on top of your dinner at night. Just eat as many healthy fats as you can, and then add in some light exercise, which will increase your appetite so that you can eat more, and then slowly you will start to gain weight back to what it should be, really. Yeah, adding fats into every meal is a great idea to help put on some weight. It actually has nine calories per gram in a gram of fat, so you can rack up some calories pretty easily if you're adding fats to every meal. Peanut butter is a great way to add calories. It's very caloric dense, so yeah, I agree with what Evan said. Yeah, and another way to also focus on getting a healthy weight, both on the underweight and overweight side, is to understand your metabolic profile. Your metabolic profile is sort of like a unique fingerprint to how your body processes and utilizes the food that you ingest every day. It's all the hormones, enzymes, and nutrients, and how they turn into energy, and then fat and muscle in your body. Everybody has their own. It's influenced by your age, your lifestyle, and your genetics. This is obviously what most people consider having a fast metabolism where you can eat a lot, and then you might never put on weight, or a slow metabolism where you can eat only a few things and it seems like you gain five pounds instantly. However, this is actually probably our strongest tool in order to manage our weight. If we have a healthy metabolism, that can lead to just, without even trying almost, having a better weight and being in a healthier range. One of the keys to that actually, to your metabolic health, is getting a lot of exercise and physical activity in, because when you exercise and when you get a lot of physical activity, your body releases a lot of hormones and a lot of enzymes that in return boost your metabolism, which makes your energy utilization much more efficient. Coupled with a balanced diet, you'll be well on your way to having a healthy weight. We're talking about folks who are underweight, right? They really want to get their pounds up. Wouldn't having a fast metabolism hurt their progress even more? Wouldn't incorporating physical exercise be the opposite of trying to cure being underweight? That's actually the best part of it. It's not necessarily making you have a faster or slower metabolism. It helps you have a healthier metabolism, which is, even if you're underweight, if you start exercising more, your body will start to utilize the growth hormone that your body produces when you exercise naturally and will help you put on pounds, in addition to just the calories you're ingesting. That's pretty interesting. The other thing about when your body releases the human growth hormone when you're exercising is it actually increases your appetite. Yes, they may still have a fast metabolism. By exercising, they are increasing their appetite, and it will make them want to eat more, which in turn will help them gain weight if they're eating right. That's pretty interesting. Speaking for the other side of the spectrum, for those folks who are overweight, how can we go about managing that, and what are some specific things we can do to manage that? To start off, some specific types of physical activity you can start to do can include aerobic training, which is you're running, you're walking, jogging, those type of activities, or you could get into resistance training or strength training. The resistance and strength training isn't necessarily geared towards more losing weight, but the more you exercise in general, the more you tend to burn more calories, which leads to losing a little bit more weight. Another great benchmark for people with physical activity is that, according to a lot of studies, 35 to 45 minutes of physical activity of moderate intensity around three to five days a week should be encouraged for most adults. When you do that, at the end of the day, weight comes down to calories in and calories out, and that's just a really easy way to get a lot of calories out. Speaking on caloric intake, there was a study done a couple of years ago on rats, and they actually found that increased physical activity was associated with lower caloric intake. Basically, what the study did was they took rats, and they made them a specific type of rats, Sprague dolly rats, and they made them do a series of physical activities, and they found that the rats had lower cumulative caloric intake when involved in physical activity, so that suggests that physical activity may not only directly burn calories but also contribute to appetite regulation and overall reduce caloric intake. And touching back to Sahas' point about metabolism, the study also found that physical activity can contribute to energy efficiency. Basically, they found that physical activity can contribute to increased energy expenditure, further promoting weight management. In summary, although the study was done on primarily rats, it provides strong evidence that engaging in spontaneous physical activity can play a significant role in preventing fat mass gain and maintaining a healthy body composition. Rats numbers don't really work for humans, but I guess you could compare it to humans. But for humans, the average amount of physical activity you should be getting is around 150 minutes a week. And then once you lose the weight, obviously you want to keep that off, otherwise you're just going to keep gaining it back, and then you have to start the cycle all over again, and it's a lot harder to lose weight than it is to gain weight. So if you wanted to keep all of the weight off, you should either stick to the exercise routine that you were doing to get down to your target weight, or you could start doing 200 to 300 minutes per week of exercise. Yeah, that's important to note. Even if people are at a healthy body weight, they should still be engaging in physical activity because that's going to keep all of the health benefits going. I also read that obese individuals who have successfully lost weight still require a lot more amount of physical activity to maintain their weight after their weight loss. Tying back into that, it's also important to know that the practice of weight cycling, or what some people call yo-yo dieting, where you gain some weight and then you diet and you get it a lot, but then you don't maintain it and then you gain it again, or the other way around, too, where you lose a lot of weight and then you get back to healthy, but then you lose it again, you get underweight, that's very unhealthy for you and can cause high blood pressure, gallbladder disease, and high cholesterol. So it's really important to make sure you stay in the healthy range of weight for a long, extended period of time, ideally your entire life. So going back to what we discussed in the beginning, you know how when you go to the gym there's the cardio section and the resistance training section? If we're talking about weight management, where do you think I should be at the most? The weight room or the cardio room? Sure, so some people focus on just the amount of steps that they have, so it doesn't even require going to the gym. So if you were just focusing on a step-based goal to lose weight, it's likely to lose around one kilogram, but it's pretty unlikely because you're going to have to be walking a lot. If you go to the aerobic side of the gym, you are likely to lose around two kilograms maybe, possible, but it has to be at a high intensity level. If you were just doing resistance training, it's not very likely at all because most resistance training isn't at a very high intensity level. You're resting in between sets and stuff like that, so your heart rate is going to come back down from the max. If you are using both aerobic and resistance, that's where you're going to see some pretty significant weight loss if you are making sure your diet is on point. Now, if you are using caloric restriction and both aerobic and strength, that's where you're going to see the most weight loss. So just making sure you are at a healthy point of mixing all three of them in and you will be well on your way to a healthy amount of weight loss. Yeah, definitely the most important part is improving the amount of time you spend exercising and overall what you're eating in your diet. We can just start on Ozempic, right? What's the point of eating healthy and busting your ass in the gym when an injection or two can solve all your problems? Yeah, yeah. Jokes aside, any drug or pill or most things marketed as a fast way to lose weight generally don't work, especially when it comes to keeping the weight off because when you almost cheat your way out by taking something or doing some sort of practice that is an instant loss, generally that doesn't fix the reason why you were having weight problems to begin with, whether that means you were underweight or overweight. Also, it isn't necessarily healthy to do so. It's really not healthy to lose more than one to two pounds per week as a human. Otherwise, it causes a lot of hormonal problems as well as many other health issues. And the same is true for gaining weight, investing in mass gainers or things like that. Generally, those things don't allow you to gain muscle or lean mass and actually will just result in you putting on fat, which can help in the short term, but it's not what you want in order to promote healthy habits and a better lifestyle as a whole. Realistically, the only thing that will keep you healthy and happy for a long time, hopefully your entire life, will be physical activity and a healthy diet. Thank you guys so much for coming on Fluff to Buff today. Really insightful conversation we had today. Thank you and have a nice day. Bye.