Article on walking from Obesityhelp magazine July 2003

[Guest guest]

My scanner is broke but here it goes!!! Please excuse any typos's. It took me

a whole 6-7 minutes to type this and wasnt going back to look for

errors...LOL Hope this helps someone. I found it VERY interesting!!

Walking as a Primary Form of Exercise

by Betcher, M.D.

ObesityHelp July 2003

The goal of going through surgery for weight loss is to become healthy and to

lose the morbid porblems caused by your obesity. This can only be reached by

losing the excessive fat that you carry and improving the quantity and quality

of your lean tissue, primarily muscle.

The determination of your weight is a simple formula: (volume/type) minus

calories out (basel metabolic rate and activity).

The surgical bariatric procedure is a means of input control only. Voume

that you are able to take in is decreased and certain types of food are not

tolerated any further. The result is a forced reduction in total calorie intake

if you utilize this took appropriately.

Just as much emphasis needs to be placed on the calorie output part of

thie equation. If you only do one or the other part of this equation, you will

always fail. Therfor, emphasis need to be placed in your ability to

consistently perform activity that maintains adequate basel metabolic levels and

overall activity. What does all this mean?

When you decrease caloric intake for the body, it has to find other

sources of calories to make the engine work. If this is not supplied externally

by eating, then the body will respond in two ways to decrease its metabolic

rate. First, it will decrease its muscle mass, primarily by convertinc much of

that protein into glucose, which is then unitlized as a fuel source by the

body. The second thing is that the remaining muscle that you have will end up

with less activity because there is no longer a fuel source to drive it. Think

of your muscle mass as an engine. If it is only running on one or two

cylinders, it will hardly move down the street and there will not be enought

heat

generated to keep the inside of the car warm. The same thing happens with your

body.

So, how do you make your body go after only your body fat? This is

accomplished by the use of muscle in an adequate aerobic activity on a daily

basis.

Muscle is made up of muscle fibers that can be separated into slow,

intermittent and fast-twitch fibers. The slow-twitch fibers are the primary ones

that

we are concerned about. When adequate size and enzymes are present, the

slow-twitch will very aggressively go agter fas as a fuel source. The other

muscle

fibers are less likely to do that. The location you find these slow-twitch

fibers are primarily in your weight-bearing, walking muscles in your leg and

gluteal areas. NASA, in an effort to determine how to maintain normal muscles

mass for its astronauts in space, found that the single best excercise for the

lease amount of time was approximately a two mile non-stop walk, at earth's

gravity. No other exercise can come close to doing that. This is not a

surprise when you consider that the act of walking is basically lifting a weight

of

250 pounds or more, depending on what you weight and continueing the exercise

for the time period it would take to cover two miles. No other muscle grou pin

the body can maintain that level of activity. Try taking a bar bell of 200

pounds and doing a curl for a solid hour, most of us would not get through the

first repetition.

What we find happening with this two-mile walk is that the slow-twitch

muscle fibers of the biggest muscle groups we have, start to thicken, to develop

more mitochondria. The mitochondria is the furnace that converts fat into

something the muscle can use and develop the enzymes that make fat metabolism

occur more easily. It is then just a matter of turning it on every day.

Unfortunately, every morning you wake up , fat metabolism is again shut

off. It requires a daily, effor to get it turned back on and that is

accomplished again by a tw0-mile walk. Also, covering less distance does not

get it

started. Your body needs to sense enough continuous stress activity that the

walk produces to finally turn on that part ofthe metablolism. In other words,

if you only walk one mile, you are only burning glucose. By the time you get

to two miles, your body starts to change its metabolism and it starts to

consume fat. That fat metabolism continues on after the walk is finished from

anywhere from four to eight hours. Much of the other activity you have during

the

day will continue to have fat metabolism tied with it and you will continue

burning the one material you most desperately need to get rid of.

In following the lead body mass of our patients over many many years we

have found that many people preent themselves with thirty to fourty pounds of

muscle deficiendy from becoming very sedentary because of the obesity and other

problems associated with it. The only way to get the muscle back is to do an

adequate amount of excercise to replenish those thirty to fourty pounds. Our

bodies have a basel rate of metabolism that occurs daily. This is your muscle

contracting in what we call fasciculations, which are miniscule contractions

that produce body heat. Without these fasciculations, you could not maintain

a body temperature of 98.6. The amount of calories consumed and the maount of

body heat produced is directly proportional to the amount of muscle.

Are you a one-cylinder engine? If you are thirty to fourty punds of

muscle deficient, you are obviously running on one cylinder. By getting all the

cylinders working, you will be able to burn more calories, even at rest, than

someone who refuses to do any activity and maintains a very low lean body mass.

We have found that a daily two-mile leisurely, continuouswalk will

usually lead to between thirty and fourty pounds of muscle gain and over 100

pounds

of fat loss in one year. We use electrical impedance to determine the amount

of lean body mass and find it very sensitive for this measurement. If we see

muscle mass dropping in the later months and years of follow-up, it is clear

indication that this person has slowed down the frequency or even stopped his

walking. Our patients have become accustomed to knowing that we already know

if they are keeping up their excercise by looking at this body tissue analysis

even before we come in the room and ask them if they are maintaining activity.

It is also a great tool to visually show people what happens when they again

become sedentary. What these patients find is that any drop of activity from

walking two-miles a day, seven days a week will lead to very quick loss of

muscle mass and even stopping of the burning of any fat. Weight loss of your

lead body mass tissue is not what you want to see.

In summary, your final weight is not determined by just having the

surgery but also combining it with a daily exercise program. Walking, when is

is

done at a two-mile distance at any pace you are comfortable with, accomplishes

significant muscle gain, daily burningof just fat, preservation of other lean

tissue and in the end, helps you accomplish the goal that you are really after.

[Guest guest]

thanx a million! great article, thanx for taking the time to type it

out! i worried & worry about losing muscle, that can go, just like

fat cells. every once in a while i get a body fat analysis to make

sure i'm on track, making sure that lean body mass is preserved & to

see just how many lbs of fat i'm carrying. pretty interesting.

lori h.