Basic Pursuits

A hundred or so years ago in the Midwest, a man was arrested, tried and imprisoned for bilking rose growers. He sold them a pill with instructions to put the pill in a bucket of water and pour it on the rose bush every day. Turns out that the pill was just compressed dirt. The cad!

The rose pill swindler was able to keep his scam going for a long time. Why? Because it seemed to work. People did enjoy healthier, more vibrant rose bushes. Experts determined it was the water all along and not that worthless dirt pill. This guy was just tricking people into watering their roses and getting paid to do it. The cad!

People love magic pills. One that makes the rounds all the time is the idea that by exercising, you are revving up your metabolism and thereby burning fat like a blast furnace. My favorite: burn more fat while you sleep. Many people use this delusion to eat more, rationalizing, "No problem. my revved up metabolism will burn it up."

The truth of this concept is that if people are indeed losing weight, it's mostly because of the exercise, not the "revved up" metabolism.

Here are some facts about your basic metabolism:

• Your base metabolic rate, the energy consumed to keep your body going internally, is actually higher when you're heavier and drops when you are fit. Think about the heart alone. A conditioned person will have a sleeping heart rate of about 55 beats per minute. An overweight, unfit person will have a much higher rate, say 75 beats per minute. Over the course of eight hours of sleep at night, the fat person's metabolism has to support 9600 more heartbeats. His metabolism is sizzling.
• As your become more fit, your body has to work less, not more to maintain the functions of life. Basic metabolism drops.
• Fit people burn more calories because of exercise, not because of some inner reactor that gobbles up every brownie and every latte.
• It is true that muscle requires more metabolic energy to maintain than fat, but without the exercise, you won't have the muscle.
• Your choices to control the amount of energy you burn are essentially two. First, control what you eat. If you eat more than you need, your system will not burn it and the energy will be stored as fat. If you eat less than you need, fat stores will be reconverted to energy and you will lose weight.
• Your second choice is exercise. The more you move, the more you burn. But the ability to burn is limited. Doing moderate exercise, an average person might burn 300 calories an hour over and above basic metabolic functions. That's just a little more than a coke and an ounce of potato chips. It takes a lot of exercise to overcome excessive, junky food.
• Real control over calorie burning is a combination of eating less and moving more.

Do what you can do. Log your eating and take control of it no matter how many years that takes. Develop an exercise habit that you enjoy and noticeably makes you feel better. Your metabolism will take care of itself.

Photo by Tony Luong