If you’ve just finished the marathon, this post isn’t for you (but we do have massage appointments available today, which you can schedule here).
But if you’ve been on the yo-yo diet ride off and on for years and are frustrated, I suggest a different strategy: spend a year working on your fitness levels instead of your body fat levels.
The reasons are as follows:
1) Dieting hasn’t worked, so you should change tactics.
2) Building muscle through weight lifting gives you more places to park the glucose you eat and will make you more insulin sensitive. I wrote about insulin sensitivity here. And you don’t have to get huge to get the benefits. If you’ve never lifted before, you could go to any gym, do a full-body circuit twice a week, and reap the benefits.
3) Doing a lot of walking will improve your metabolic health. You will grow more mitochondria and improve their efficiency, and not do so at the expense of beating your joints up. Walking is a superpower, and for most untrained people, it will put you nicely into the zone 2 camp, which is where a lot of magic happens when it comes to health outcomes. I wrote about Zone 2 training here.
4) Increasing the amount of exercise you get often will have a ripple effect that leads to better food choices naturally. Often, people who are focused on their fitness will abstain from that extra plate of nachos or whatever, just to maximize the benefits of their efforts.
So, let yourself off the “dietary hook” for a season, and start walking more and lifting a little to see what that gets you. It’s nice to redirect focus away from constant restrictive eating. And the improved fitness will serve you better than just losing a bunch of weight, where much of the weight lost comes from muscle.
And if you enter into the world of GLP medications, the weight-lifting part of what I wrote above is super important. The research shows that people don’t lose any more muscle on GLPs than they do with calorie restriction without exercise in general. Send the signal for muscle retention, and the weight lost will be body fat stores, not the lean tissue we all want to keep.
