“Eat Less, Move More” and other bad advice

At a recent OCR race we struck up a conversation with a nice woman near the finish line.  She was volunteering at the timing booth and was eager to run in one of the later waves.  She seemed very knowledgeable about not just the course we were running, but many of the other races on the national circuit.  In fact, she told us she had run about 50 races in the past calendar year.  That’s almost one a week!  If you thought we did a lot of these races, you clearly haven’t met this young lady.  Although I had big respect for her dedication and training, something else struck me as strange about this young woman: she was obese.  I don’t mean this in the derogatory way, but in the strictly medical sense—like her BMI was easily over 30.  Now, I obviously don’t know her whole story, or whether she’s dropped 100 pounds over the course of the past year on account of all the running, but I found it curious that a woman who was so active could be so overweight.

But she is not alone.  On another occasion we were at Disney on a marathon weekend and saw tons of folks walking around clad in their outrageous running outfits and adorned with medals commemorating their triumph over the finish line.  Again, I couldn’t help but think that so many of them appeared to be overweight and out of shape.  Now, the Disney marathon series isn’t exactly the Boston Marathon or Kona, but something seems amiss here.  How can it be that someone could spend all week training and every weekend running races and still be obese?

The answer is simple: obesity isn’t a “caloric balance” problem.  Thanks to bad advice that has become conventional wisdom, most people are under the impression that being overweight is simple and that if you could just eat less and move more the whole obesity epidemic would evaporate.  Surely you’ve heard it said in many ways:

“Eat less and move more.”

“Earn and burn”

“Calories in, calories out.”

It’s all BS.  While “calories in, calories out” may be true from a thermodynamic perspective, the human body is not a bomb calorimeter.  When you eat a handful of macadamia nuts, they don’t simply ignite in your gut and release 200 calories of energy.  Believe it or not, human physiology is a little more complex than that!  Beyond simply transferring energy from food into fuel for metabolic function, the digestive process entails a complex cascade of neuro-hormonal signaling and an incredible interaction between your body and its gut microbiome.

But the reason this simplistic myth has been perpetuated is because, in the short term, it more or less holds true.  Just ask anyone that been on “Biggest Loser.”  They all go into massive caloric deficits and lose equally massive amounts of weight.  Then the show ends and the winner is paraded around the morning talk show circuit emphasizing how easy the formula is: “Just eat less and move more.”  Of course, the TV producers leave out the interesting tidbit where nearly all of the contestants regain the astonishing weight they lost.

But it gets worse.  Not only does the “caloric balance” theory of obesity ignore physiology and our collective experience with dieting, it serves to vilify the overweight/obese as lazy or undisciplined, which only furthers the reach of this epidemic.

To say it another way, you can’t simply exercise your way out of a bad diet.  Likewise, you can’t just eat your way to optimal health.  It’s a balancing act between the two and the math isn’t simple.  Other elements factor in too—sleep, gut health, insulin sensitivity, stress—and the list goes on.

While I certainly believe exercise is important, its not the be all and end all: just ask the folks down at the Disney marathon.  To achieve better health, think of your exercise routine as the supplement to your diet, not the other way around.  To help lose/maintain weight I think of it as more an “80/20” balance of diet/exercise, where diet does the heavy lifting.  Studies have even shown that to maintain healthy weight and extend longevity it doesn’t have to be hard exercise, it just has to be movement.

In my first post, I talked about the importance of personal experience.  The greatest “N=1” experiment is your own.  Have you tried to follow this advice?  Is it working for you?  For many of us, the answer is an emphatic no.