I had lunch with some friends this week. We had BBQ ribs, which is not necessarily considered a diet food. One of my resolutions for the New Year was to lose some weight. I had to consider that the ribs were protein that is needed to build muscle. While this is not true that eating meat will build muscle unless the weight lifting that must be included as part of the diet. Unless the person works out very hard and long with resistance training a meat diet without vigorous exercise will more than likely end up as a layer of fat on the body somewhere. The talk between the friends mentioned how as we have made our way to an older age it seems we are a few pounds heavier than we were decades ago. The stories we shared of the different ‘sure fire’ foods and practices for exercise have changed.
At one time during a hot day with football we were told not to drink cold water as it will give the athlete cramps in the stomach. We had one 10 minute break in the two hour practice to drink some water. Now the recommendation is water every 15 – 20 minutes during a practice. The practice of keeping the water cool to warm to prevent cramps turns out that cold water is absorbed faster into the body than water that is only slightly cool or warm.
The other practice that older athletes will remember is taking salt tablets to replace the salt lost through sweating. It turns out the concentrated salt tablet sitting in a dehydrated stomach pulled water from the body’s tissues and dehydrated the athlete even more. No wonder many of us had a stomach ache after practice. Another practice was to wear heavy sweat clothes or rubber suits to lose weight. Many folks thought that the weight loss after a run or workout was burning fat. The actual loss was water weight and returned to the starting weight with a few cups of water later. Running or exercising without the extra clothes was actually better as the athlete could exercise for a longer period of time and burn some actual fat calories. For wrestlers or boxers that had to make weight, the sweating off of those water weight pounds is a standard practice. I had one wrestler that sweated down to 150 pounds at weigh in. When he walked out on the mat for his match he weighed 162 pounds after drinking water.
For women the big advertising push was to lose ‘cellulite’ with special exercises or machines. I remember watching women lean against a wide strap across their stomach as a machine pulled it back and forth across the stomach – rubbing the fat right off the body. Another was a machine that had wooden rollers around a rotating drum that the women straddled to rub the fat off their thighs. And now we understand that ‘cellulite’ is a made up term made up by marketers for fat that collects directly under the skin. The dimples are just fat deposits that look different. Along this same line of losing weight for a specific location on the body. The most common practice was doing extra sit ups to burn fat off the stomach. The muscles underneath the fat may look better and give an appearance of losing weight, but any fat loss comes from all parts of the body.
The one phrase that I heard frequently as a youngster lifting weights is that when you stop exercising all those muscles will turn to fat. The makeup of fat and muscle are two different cellular structures. What happens is the muscles get weaker and smaller when they are not exercised, but the calories you still eat will be deposited as fat on the body. The advice for getting older was that after 40 years of age a person needs to start slowing down and not exercising as much. Two research studies have found that people can still gain muscle mass when they get older. One study was on men between 60 years and 72 years that increased size and strength after 12 weeks of weight lifting. Another study had both men and women averaging 90 years of age gain 10% strength and went from lifting 17.6 pounds to 44 pounds. Some discovered they no longer needed a cane or walker to get around.
One practice I still see on occasion is drinking or eating an energy drink or ‘candy’ bar before exercise. They feel with this extra energy, they can work out harder. The body’s muscles have enough glycogen (carbohydrates) to provide enough energy for 90 – 120 minutes of vigorous exercise. That extra energy load before exercise is not of much value for the average exercise session.
Exercise works to lose weight without all the gadgets and fancy diets. Just keep moving more.
