Fat- Why We Need It To Lose It. By Kevin Richardson, NYC Personal Trainer

Fat-say the word and it makes everyone from bodybuilders to super models cringe. As a NYC personal trainer, I can hardly tell you how often I have heard this word used as a negative. Ever since the 1980’s low fat diets have become more and more popular as the years go by. Low carb diets come and go, but the ‘Low Fat’ label adorns the faces of so many products on the market today, serving as somewhat of a guarantee that the food product is indeed healthy and will help you stay lean and in shape. Sadly nothing could be further from the truth and every food product altered to lower its fat content should actually be viewed as something that you want to avoid. The truth is that fat is responsible for our existence today. Fat is not evil- on the contrary, it has helped the human race survive two ice ages and countless famines. For those living in underdeveloped countries where food is scarce, it continues to sustain life in the face of hardship and lack of food. Fat is not metabolically active, in that our body does very little to keep it on us and yet it can hold a tremendous amount of reserve energy, 3,500 calories per pound to be exact. Calories that can be used to support the body in the event of a food shortage. Yet, for all it has done to help us through nature’s adversities over the past 150,000 years, we still persist in the idea that it is unhealthy and misunderstand its crucial role in weight loss.

Fat And Energy Expenditure

On the evolutionary scale human beings have only recently been in a position where the superabundance of food is the rule rather than the exception. Being able to eat and store food for times when food was not available was and still is a sign of good health. It is a sign that resources are plentiful and that the body is functioning as it should. The problem occurs when there is more fat stored than there should be. This extra fat can lead to obesity- the precursor to our nation’s leading killers– heart disease, adult onset diabetes and hypertension. There are many theories why we are plagued by obesity at this time in history in a way that we never have been before. Some argue that we are not as active as we once were and that the relative inactivity of modern life is responsible for our epidemically increased waistlines. It seems to make sense - less activity equals less calories burned, however as definitive as this may sound, it isn’t entirely correct.

Firstly, if our energy expenditure was so great during physical activity our ancestors would not have had the energy to hunt and gather their food and would have succumbed to starvation long before they found something to eat. The body always does it's best to minimize energy expenditure, even during activity. But there is another important factor that invalidates this theory. Anthropologists studying primitive societies have found that the hunter/gatherer lifestyle that sustained humanity for thousands of years is actually less physically active than that of modern man! From the Amazon tribes to the Aborigines it has been borne out that hunter/gathers are actually a bit on the sedentary side when compared to our modern lifestyle of constant movement. This is significant since it proves without a doubt that increased activity is not the be all and end all solution to obesity. When put in context is becomes far more understandable as I am certain that we all know many people who spend hours of their working day on their feet and on the move and yet are overweight and never lose a pound.

Why Are We So Fat Today?

So what brought on our collective increased girth? The answer is simple- the modern superabundance of food. It is not that we are inactive, we simply eat more calories than we need, end of story. Biological set points and genetic predispositions are relevant to the extent of how easy it is for some of us to gain excess fat– (endomorphs are more prone to gain excess fat than their ectomorph or mesomorph equivalents) but genetic predisposition or not, it still places the blame on our eating habits.

It would be nice if we could just walk it off but consider that the average man will burn about 600 calories from an hour of jogging. That same person can eat twice as many calories in ten minutes after ordering a hamburger with fries at McDonalds. In fact anyone can easily consume several hundred calories in under 60 seconds given some cookies, soda, juice, donuts, bread, ice cream, beer or potato chips. See the problem? It is just too easy, especially with the calorically dense industrialized foods that have made their way into our modern diets. (See my Good Carbs vs Bad Carbs article.)

It would be wonderful if it we could eat dessert and go right to the treadmill to relieve yourself of the extra 700 calories and the guilt– (Stairmasters and aerobic exercise, it seems have replaced the confessional for many in a rather unhealthy way as a place of absolution) but it isn’t that simple. The more such aerobic exercises that you do the more likely you are to actually make fat loss harder. (See my article on Aerobics- A Bad Idea For Fat Loss-NYC Personal Trainer Article).

Click here for Part 2 of Fat- Why We Need It To Lose It. By Kevin Richardson, NYC Personal Trainer

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