Podcast 36

How Fitness Might Help You Live Longer

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SHOW NOTES

The effect was more potent. And so when he did his meta -analysis of 200 studies, what they found was that improving fitness could lower the risk of premature death by 30 % or more.

Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. I’m exercise coach franchisee, Amy Hudson, along with my co -host, exercise coach, co -founder and CEO, Brian Sagan. What we are going to do today is kick off a series of episodes in which we pull an article out there that we’ve come across related to health, exercise, fitness, things like that, and have Brian respond to it. And what we think is helpful in the series will be, you know, there’s so much information out there related to health that comes out all the time. And sometimes it can be hard to navigate competing information. take an article or headline you see and digest it and understand what that might mean for you.

And so our hope is to help you digest new concepts out there and understand how to evaluate that information and apply it to your life. So without further ado, we’re going to kick off this series with an article from the New York Times. And this article came out December of 2021. The title of the article is Why Exercise is More Important than Weight Loss for a Longer Life. The sub headline here says, people typically lower their risks of heart disease and premature death far more by gaining fitness than by dropping weight. And the article is by Gretchen Reynolds.

This article was published September of 2021. So Brian, welcome today to the podcast and we would love to have you jump in. I know you’re going to share a little bit about the thesis of this article. So, um, and then some of your responses to it. So I’ll have you jump in. and share what this article had to say, and we’ll start there.

Well, thanks, Amy. We’ll, and we’ll make it a conversation. I’m sure that our listeners are just as interested in hearing what you have to say and your takeaways from reading this article as they are hearing from me. So the thesis for this article, I would say Gretchen Reynolds states right up front. And that is that exercise is more important than weight loss, especially if you’re overweight or obese, for improving the prospects of longevity. Exercise is more powerful than weight loss for people who are overweight or obese than losing weight is for longevity, which is maybe somewhat surprising.

And I think in some ways, pretty exciting, and hopefully our conversation will bring that out, what is so exciting about this thesis, if indeed it is defensible. And I do think she makes a few arguments and shares some research to support the point.

Yeah. So what I just heard you say is that the behavior of exercising matters a lot more statistically than losing weight for somebody’s longevity.

Is that true? Yeah, I’m going to be a little bit nitpicky when I hear that, whether it’s this article or someplace else. I think what we’re really seeing and what we should really be saying is that achieving a higher level of fitness is more important than weight loss. And in fact, I think even when we look at this article, we’ll see that activity has its limitations related to both weight loss and also to really impacting longevity. So as we’ve often said at The Exercise Coach, activity itself isn’t really the answer, but exercise, intentional, intelligent, purposeful, effective exercise is a means to an end.

What we’re really trying to do is change all the systems of the body for the better in terms of how they function metabolically, chemically, mechanically, and this increased fitness is really, I think, what researchers are seeing when sometimes they talk about various behaviors related to exercise. Yes, I know. I’ve heard in the past that muscle quality or the strength in one’s body is one of the number one predictors of mortality. So studies just show that the weaker you are, the closer you are to mortality. And so, yes, exercising, specifically exercise that improves muscle quality in the body, directly relates to longevity. And it’s not just about activity.

It’s not about taking more steps, moving around more, but it’s exercise that truly activates muscle in the body to an extent to cause it to change and adapt to that workout that build that strength in your body that then changes every physiological system in your body for the better.

So yes, that is something we are excited about and it’s the underlying paradigm of our program at The Exercise Coach. Right. And one of the points that Gretchen Reynolds makes very quickly in the article is that she’s been writing for a while about how people can be healthy at any weight. And this is if they improve their fitness enough. And so then she also makes the point as to why this is so relevant. And it’s really, to sum up what she’s saying, that weight loss is hard.

It requires nutritional changes and it’s challenging. And so if you’re is to be thinner, you know, that can be a little bit discouraging or a little bit overwhelming to think about making those changes. And if your goal is to be thinner, we would say to be clear, the best approach is going to be to combine exercise that maximizes muscle health with intentional whole food nutrition and combining those things for the synergistic effect.

is going to be really the only path to optimal and long -lasting weight loss.

But what she goes on to talk about, again, is the health impact that can be had independent of significant changes in diet and independent of weight loss. Yeah, so what are those changes? Well, she talks about eventually a few results that come from this researcher, Dr. Gasser, who looked at overweight and obese individuals with significant health problems. And so he looked specifically at blood pressure, cholesterol profile, and insulin resistance, which is a marker of type 2 diabetes, and saw that people who exercised effectively saw great results in these areas, whether they dropped any weight or not. And he also looked at studies that involved activity for trying to lose weight and found that activity wasn’t a real effective way to lose weight. And so that just led him to look further and eventually do a review of more than 200 studies looking at this idea that exercising and improving these various biomarkers could lead to better

longevity, even independent of weight loss. And what he found was actually that the effect was more potent. And so when he did his meta -analysis of 200 studies, what they found was that improving fitness could lower the risk of premature death by 30 % or more.

And then on the other hand, overweight individuals that just lost weight by dieting, not by illness, but by dieting instead of those people that got results from exercise, they dropped their risk by about 16%. So again, in summary, Dr. Glasser found that it was just more potent to improve fitness for longevity than it even was to lose weight for purposes of longevity. That’s really, really important. You know, oftentimes when you go to the doctor, sometimes it’s just a quick, like you got to lose weight, you know, but truly these markers, these biomarkers that we’re talking about, blood pressure, cholesterol, insulin resistance, or measuring that as a marker for type two diabetes.

Those are the measures that truly indicate the quality of somebody’s health and predict their longevity more than their weight. It just is true. And they do also, Amy, factor into someone’s ability to lose weight, which also is important and can contribute synergistically to better long -term health.

And then, of course, also to the aesthetic results someone might be looking for. These results that you get from exercise actually prime your body to lose weight if we combine those exercise efforts with some intentional nutrition, some whole food nutrition. Yes. And I always like to make the point, you know, if we think about weight loss as a thing that we want to do to get healthier, how easy is it to lose weight by a calorie deficit diet and in the process lose muscle mass and not end up being a healthier individual as a result of weight loss? There’s a lot of ways to lose weight that are extremely unhealthy and don’t make those health biomarkers move in a positive direction that we can do.

And are we better off?

Are we healthier after having lost weight just in general and period? Or are there ways to set our bodies up for optimum metabolic health while getting healthier versus just making it about losing weight for its own sake? Exactly. So that’s great to call out that unhealthy way to lose weight of just cutting calories and doing that separate from any strength training. That’s the most unhealthy approach to weight loss that you can have, as opposed to eating good whole food nutrition and combining it with effective strength training to preserve and even build muscle and directly impact those markers that we were mentioning. Insulin resistance, for example, which impacts you know, your hormones in the way your body stores fat.

Another study that Dr. Gasser conducted actually involved 81 sedentary overweight women. And so they started a walking routine. And so the idea was to kind of study the impacts on weight loss. So this is just back to activity for weight loss. And after 12 weeks, a few of them had lost some body fat, but 55 out of the 81 had actually gained weight. from taking up this walking program.

They increased their activity and 55 out of 81 of them actually gained weight at the end of the 12 weeks. And so again, this just keeps breaking down and really deconstructing the myths and the paradigm that people have that they can just get moving and that’s gonna make things better They’re gonna lose weight and they’re gonna get healthier if they just get moving and really just moving is By no means gonna cause weight loss. In fact Gretchen Reynolds in the article calls it futile Futile looking at what she’s written in the past and summing it up. She says activity for weight loss just doesn’t work and then we also know that activity itself is not actually going to change every system of the body for the better, change every system of the body maximally. What we need to target in terms of exercise for the aging individual, anybody over the age of 30 really, is the optimization of muscle mass or strength more specifically.

We lose strength as we age because we lose muscle tissue and specifically type 2 muscle fibers. And this loss of strength as we age and this loss of muscle mass that goes along with it, known as sarcopenia, really is the root cause of the deterioration of fitness as we age.

And so when we target muscle through exercise, we can actually maximize it in really short order. In just a few months, we can have a major impact on the health of someone’s muscles, their strength, and therefore improve their fitness level significantly, and also, as we said before, prime their body to actually lose weight if they combine it with some intentional, effortful nutrition strategy. For sure. I want to read one couple sentences here that I think just encapsulates the whole article and get your response, Brian, as we wrap it up here. I’m going to read from the middle of the article. When comparing exercise to weight loss as far as an indication of mortality and health, it says,

the contest they found was not close. Compared head to head, the magnitude and benefit of exercise was far greater from improving fitness than losing weight. As a whole, the studies they cite show that sedentary obese men and women who begin to exercise and improve their fitness can lower their risk of premature death by as much as 30 % or more, even if their weight does not budge. This improvement generally puts them at lower risk of early death than people who are considered to be of normal weight but out of shape. On the other hand, if people lose weight by dieting, their statistical risk of dying young typically drops by about 16%, but not in all studies. Some of the research cited shows in the new review finds that weight loss among obese people does not decrease mortality risk at all.

That’s pretty poignant. What is your response to that? It definitely is worth repeating because it is just, as you say, poignant. And I like the nuance here of improving fitness. Women who begin to exercise and improve their fitness. It’s not just about activity.

Exercise isn’t an end in and of itself. It’s a means to an end. And that’s what we’re all about, you know, at the exercise coach at these hundreds of studios around the country, where we help people get the health and fitness and weight loss results that matter most to them and do it with just a couple of 20 minute workouts per week. We don’t see exercise as an end in and of itself. We see it as a means to an end, and we want to optimize that means we want to make it as safe, as effective and as efficient as possible for people.

And so that means even people who literally can’t go out and and engaging conventional activity because their knees and their back or their schedule just don’t allow them to.

And what we’re saying and what we’re seeing in the research and what Gretchen Reynolds is pointing out here is that that’s not even the point. approach. It’s not the best approach for weight loss and weight loss isn’t actually most important for better health. And so even people who have found weight loss challenging can actually take up a new personal health initiative and they can make a huge difference in their future, a huge difference in their health and happiness by starting a safe, effective, time -efficient exercise program. The best way to do that is to start a program that is founded upon the science of strength because strength changes everything. It changes what’s required to get the results that matter most to you.

so that you can do it again safely, efficiently, and strength changes every system of the body for the better. You get complete total body results from strength training. And so that’s the takeaway I’d like people to hear, that they can take up an exercise program that will fit into their schedule, that will be safe, and that will impact their health in a huge way. In fact, a greater way than losing weight, which can be you know, so challenging. And again, that’s not to downplay weight loss. And we believe there’s a synergistic effect that happens when we combine the exercise results we can help people get with weight loss.

And so it’s not that it’s unimportant.

It’s just that it’s actually not necessary to get started and build momentum and see huge change in your life. But we can help people put exercise and nutrition together for maximizing health and changing the way they look and feel. Love it. So if you’ve listened to this episode and you want to get healthier and you’re wondering where the best place is to start, the takeaway from this episode is it starts with nutrition. exercise. You can check out exercisecoach .

com to find a location near you to get started with two 20 -minute workouts a week to improve your fitness and thereby improve your whole quality of life, including your longevity and all those other benefits. All right.

Thanks, Brian. And we will see you next time on the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Have a great day, everyone.