Ep. 177 - Exercise for health, NOT weight loss! | Should you work out fasted or fed? | Alternate Day Fasting (ADF) & exercise burn visceral fat, lower liver enzymes, increase insulin sensitivity 40% | Free Intermittent Fasting Plan Blueprint for Fat Loss
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In today’s episode, Dr. Scott and Tommy discuss why movement is the key to life, if exercise without weight loss improves insulin sensitivity, the effect of alternate day fasting with aerobic exercise on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and so much more.
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Reference Links to Articles:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16225477/
https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/pa-health/index.htm
Fasting For Life Ep. 177 Transcript
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Hello. I’m Dr. Scott Watier.
[Tommy Welling]
And I'm Tommy Welling. And you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
This podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health, achieve ultimate wellness, and live the life you truly deserve.
[Tommy Welling]
Each episode is a short conversation on a single topic with immediate, actionable steps. We cover everything from fat loss and health and wellness to the science of lifestyle design.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
We started fasting for life because of how fasting has transformed our lives and we hope to share the tools that we have learned along the way. Hey everyone, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast from Dr. Scott Walker. And I'm here as always, and my good friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good afternoon to you, sir.
[Tommy Welling]
Hey, Scott, how are you?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Doing fantastic, my friend. Today is going to be a fun conversation. We're going to pull something out of current events, something that we saw on the social media platform that we found interesting and thought could lend to a good conversation today around weight loss, health exercise, and just really apply it to a fasting lifestyle in a way that should hopefully simplify the process for you and also get you what we always talk about.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Those long term sustainable results. So it's a little, little vague opening there, but it's going to touch on a lot of different things around the conversation about exercise and we're going to talk about it in a little bit different way, share some of our personal experiences, and then give you some specific things that you can do or try on your weight loss in Health Journey.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Now most of us come to fasting for weight loss, but we found that it's much more than that. If you're new to the podcast, we want to welcome you in. If you want to learn more about Tommy and I and our journey and why we do this and how we ended up here, then head back to episode one.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
We asked for a little bit of grace as our first recorded podcast episode. Didn't really know what we were doing, but we we knew we had something really powerful to share. So head back, check it out, give it a listen. And thank you for joining us and giving us a shot on your fasting and health and weight loss journey.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So for you, oh geez, out there long term listeners appreciate you guys tuning in. Keep dropping those five star reviews. Those are obviously our favorite kind of feel so inclined that then tells the podcast world and the powers it be that we are delivering value each and every week and we want to deliver some value to you today as well.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So Tommy, we're going to talk about exercise, and this comes from the weird facts dot org posts that have been posted recently that I've seen people kind of grabbing and then going into conversation about. And what they say is exercise does not actually contribute much to weight loss. MM Okay. So some of you going, okay then what does it contribute to?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And what they say is simply eating better has a significant, greatly bigger impact even without much exercise. Hmm. And here's the truth. They're right. Okay. They're right. Weird facts. Dot org is not weird. They are actually right now. What I did not say is that exercise is not important and that you shouldn't exercise. And we get the question often, what about in your fasting programs and challenges do you talk?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
What about exercise? What should I be doing? And it's been a very long road for me on my own journey in learning to compartmentalize exercise and also think about it in a way that is exciting and or sustainable. Because if you tell me that I got a treadmill it or stair, step it or ten.
[Tommy Welling]
Thousand steps it.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, 10,000 steps in a day to get a benefit, I'm going to be like, Wow, that doesn't really sound like a sustainable, fun thing to me, right? So if you hate running, don't start running to lose weight. And the big picture is benefits of exercise are probably innumerable, but if you just look at some of the information that's out there, I mean, you got brain health.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
They help manage weight loss after you've lost it, they decrease the risk of disease, strengthen your bones and muscles, prevent osteoporosis, increase your ability to do activities of daily living like, you know, live your life pain free, like have a high quality of life. And I mean, you can all the way go down to help prevent diabetes, help reverse diabetes, decrease heart disease and strokes, decrease the chance of some cancers chances of living longer.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
It also helps manage diseases and conditions like arthritis and those types of things if you already have an established condition. So exercise is incredibly important for overall health, but it's not the magic bullet to get the scale moving and lose the weight.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, true. He just reminded me of the book. Did you ever read the book Spark from like ten years ago? Okay. The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
This is a range of things that come up on episodes that we didn't talk about prior to the episode. So this is.
[Tommy Welling]
All I know you.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So you need to be something. I do it all the time. Teach me it's your it's your friend again.
[Tommy Welling]
So yeah, Spark the revolutionary new science of exercise in the brain. But this is back from 2013, from John Ratey, M.D., Just a really cool book. So if you're not sure why, if we're saying, you know, literally that exercise is not the key to fat loss, however, there are innumerable benefits to exercise. This was a really cool book to be like, Well, what are some of those benefits?
[Tommy Welling]
How is my brain impacted? Because the neurochemistry and the stimulation of the brain and keeping you sharp, especially going into older age, is incredible. And that the book just lays out just so many of the best reasons why exercise should absolutely be high on your priority list. And regardless of of your age or your fitness level or needing to lose weight or anything else like that.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, movement is really key, right? So if you look at some of the studies of the centenarians over in Japan and you look at their activity levels, they walk everywhere. They get leaner as they get older, they've got tens of thousands of these folks living into the into the the the 10th decade. Right. 100 plus years of age and their movement.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So you hear the cliche, it's cliche for a reason. Movement is the key to life. Right. So there's been studies recently that sitting is the new smoking rate, that we are more sedentary than ever before. We know the obesity and overweight statistics here in the United States are staggering 70 plus percent of the population. We know that the majority of the chronic lifestyle induced illnesses that our health care system deals with on a daily basis from back pain all the way to, like we just mentioned, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers, all of those lifestyle mediated or lifestyle induced health concerns that our system is being weighed down on or down by are related
[Dr. Scott Watier]
to this excess weight. So at any given time, 50 to 60% of the population is trying to lose weight. Right. We have, you know, 70 million Americans undiagnosed with pre-diabetes. We've got 30 million Americans with diabetes. We've got these Alzheimer's epidemic, the obesity epidemic. You know, all of these things are going on. It's like, okay, well, we are programed.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
I was programed to always exercise, to lose weight. So it's, you know, eat less right and move more. Okay. So we're going to talk about a few different groups today. We're going to talk about 18 to 24 year olds. We're going to talk about alternate day fasting and exercise for reducing liver fat, which is incredibly important. Different types of exercise for reducing visceral fat in young people.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
With obesity. We talk a lot about visceral fat because it's a metabolically active tissue that literally shortens your lifespan. So we want to get rid of that visceral fat that lives around our internal organs, not the stuff beneath the skin, which is a potato is fat, but the starting point for today. I really want to before we go into some of the different types of exercise and what these studies show is does exercise without weight loss because we want to separate and make these two very related things, exercise and weight loss, right.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Improving your diet, improving your food choices and exercise, because I was always trying to, as you said, tell me, make it fit into the equation. Right. So right from American Diabetes Association, there's an article does exercise without weight loss improve insulin sensitivity? Because the reality is if we're going to be really focusing on the drivers here are the underlying causes of weight loss resistance and metabolic disease.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And we need to talk about insulin and the weird facts. Dot org statement was that yeah, exercise really doesn't help in weight loss. Well, we know that we can improve our health outcomes by getting the weight off. Exercise, however, only contributes to about 5% of our total daily energy burn. So we have all of this energy. We have a certain amount of energy that's required to our basement a ball.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Great to make sure our heart's beating and our lungs are breathing and our blood is flowing right and cells are growing. And we have all of this stuff, right? That's our neurons are firing. Yeah, basic metabolic function. Right? Then we have our non exercise activity thermogenesis group, which is the second largest group. Right. Which is up to about 15%.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Then we have our thermic effect of food category, right. Which is about 10%. And then we have exercise activity thermogenesis. So calorie burn from exercise.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, so deliberate, deliberate movement in addition to what we would need to do throughout the day.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. Non exercise of daily living, not taking the trash out, not walk into your car, not now. Like deliberate, increasing your heart rate exercise, going to the gym five days a week. Right. So the problem is, is that we have a lot of people that come to us and say, hey, you know, the scale is not moving. I started fasting.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
I'm hungry all the time. Do I put my fast after my exercise or before, should I exercise fasted or fed? Doesn't matter.
[Tommy Welling]
Or I'm doing everything right, including exercising like a madman or like a madwoman, you know, which is actually sometimes part of the problem or can accelerate getting into a plateau. Counterintuitively. I mean, this can be a very frustrating part of the process for sure, but it can also be one of those big like question marks. So like like you just alluded to a little bit ago.
[Tommy Welling]
I mean, I remember I was I was like 13, probably like about seventh grade going into like the first time I really exercised, trying to lose body fat, you know, like I, I had a little too much and I wanted to decrease it. So I wanted, you know, better health, better weight. And I was using exercise as as part of that, I was also using some protein powders and things like that.
[Tommy Welling]
But this was like the beginning of that relationship. I'm like, when I'm exercising, I'm going for health, I'm trying to improve my weight. You know, like you had something similar to. Right?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, I start at a very young age. I was always the big kid, right? I was always the never look like I play basketball, But people are like, Do you play basketball? I was on steroids for my asthma. I was always puffy, 20, £30 overweight, right. Already developing insulin resistance and didn't know it. So exercise does not actually contribute much to the weight loss part, but it contributes a lot to overall health.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, so it can be frustrating when you're doing the things you think you're doing right, yet the scales not moving. So the quote we started with or the comment from weird facts dot org was really focusing on by simply making better food choices. Well, I would like to add to that simply by being more consistent with fasting.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. Your meal time for sure.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. The meal timing as well. And so much of the research we've talked about recently in the last probably 30 or 40 episodes, right over the last six to 8 to 10 months is really starting to show and prove that as well that it can be a viable solution for so many folks. So, yes, we want to we want to exercise.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And this article from Diabetes American Association says, you know, it's long been established in a single exercise, can increase insulin, stimulated glucose in previously sedentary adults. So a single bout of moderate intensity exercise can increase glucose uptake by 40%.
[Tommy Welling]
Wow.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Never mind the leisurely, moderately leisurely walk after dinner, which can decrease your blood sugar by 30 to 35%. Right. But now we're getting a moderate activity. So we're talking moderate zone to zone three, anywhere from 65 to 70, maybe 75% of your heart rate. So, you know, you can have a conversation, you can do it for a long time.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
You should be able to do it for a while, but you can get a 40% increased glucose uptake and not have to be like killing yourself on the stair step or like I used to do, trying to to get my extra 300 calorie burn on those calorie trackers, which can also be 90% inaccurate. Yeah, I know. Some people are like, okay, what's the point of this and how is this good?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Okay, we're going to talk in just a minute.
[Tommy Welling]
So but even even just knowing that the 40% change and then also the afterburn effect of that, the quote unquote after burn rate. So not on the metabolic activity side of that, but the increased glucose uptake and increase insulin sensitivity in the last 48 to 72 hours as well. So if you're talking about putting in those kind of exercise belts, you don't have to be necessarily doing it every single day to find a big benefit.
[Tommy Welling]
If it was two, three times a week that you were doing that as well as as adding those post-meal walks, this is an incredible lever to pull for balancing out blood sugar, insulin spikes, and then leading to better fat burning without feeling like, oh man, I'm just I'm I'm living in the gym, but I'm at this plateau. Well, yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of good physiological reasons for that.
[Tommy Welling]
And more working out, more exercise or more intensity is not necessarily the answer. It might actually lead you even farther away or keep you in the plateau longer. Counterintuitively.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
A lot of the stuff said here. Yeah, we'll see a short term insulin uptake or glucose uptake, insulin sensitivity, but then in the long term it really hasn't been proven out. Right. So they looked at different studies, 12 weeks and exercise in lean, obese and type two diabetic men. You know, in Swanson 70 measures were obtained four days post exercise did not significantly alter insulin sensitivity.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So you know daily exercise performed for 60 minutes at 70% of maximum heart rate is not associated with significant improvement in insulin sensitivity in the absence of weight loss. So the take home message here is the observations appear to suggest the impact of exercise training on insulin sensitivity is mediated by diminished body weight and or adiposity.
[Tommy Welling]
So so get the weight off.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Get the weight off. And how do you do that? What works for you? So fasted versus fed exercise? Well, there's benefits to both, but over a 24 hour period, it's a net zero. You burn more fat during a faster workout in less after. Yeah, and you burn less during a fat workout, meaning you've eaten within the last 60, 90 minutes or so than 2 hours.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
We still have digestive processes taking place.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, we've got sugar to burn, right? Yeah.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
You got the process right. Then you burn more after because the body's inherently smart. So when we look at a couple of cool subgroups or subtypes of how exercise can benefit, I want to mention that the biggest bang for your buck in terms of fat loss is going to be and I had a previous experience, a recent experience with a Peloton challenge, a zone based Peloton Challenge app.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
My wife talked me, forced me lovingly guided me into doing. I'm not one of the spousal pressure along the way. Hours and hours and hours and hours of rowing. I was on a virtual rowing team like concept to rowing right? Yeah. She never rode on the water, but I used to do hours and hours and hours right in that in that math equation struggle of let me burn more calories so I can get into your calorie deficit right.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
But it's only 5% of your core daily birds.
[Tommy Welling]
It's a small lever to try to maintain a hunger.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. It's like, oh, I want to put all my money in that lever. Right. Well, let's let's weird facts, sort it and make some better decisions about our fasting and our food. Right. We want to you the biggest bang for your buck is staying at like 60% of your maximum heart rate. And lower. The simplest equation to figure that out is to 20 minus your age times the percent.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So to 20 minus your age times 0.6 will give you your max heart rate in this zone, this lower intensity zone, let's call it zone one, 85% of your calories are fat. Mm. The downside is you're burning fewer calories overall than you would if you're at higher intensity.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
But we know the clock burn percentage is so small that I'm like, oh, okay, so let's walk a few times a week. Cool, Right. Got it in after a meal. Better blood sugar spike now the moderate zone. So now we're going zone to zone three. Or when we get into zone three, four, we're going to be in the aerobic phase, right?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So we're going to be higher heart rate intensities. When you're at the 60 to 70%, about 60 to 65% of those calories are fat. Okay. Now we're talking. All right, I can I can do that shorter duration, higher intensity type workouts rather than just the slow slog on the treadmill or the stair stepper. And then when you get into the higher aerobic ranges, you're actually going to have about only like 35 to 45% of your calories are actually burning fat.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So once your heart rate increases, you're not taking in as much oxygen. So you can't oxidize the fat as much. And it also then turns to turn glycogen into glucose. You can get a short term energy, right? So you're going to need more short term energy supplies. Your body's going to dump glucose into the bloodstream, which is something that we see with folks say, Hey, I did a workout, but my blood sugar went up.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, should okay. If you're in the blood sugar, reversing blood sugar, lowering blood sugar management portion of your weight loss journey or disease reversal, let's say you're working on pre-diabetes, then we're going to want to keep that in check.
[Tommy Welling]
So it's interesting because if you stimulate a lot of muscles, the cool thing is that those muscles are going to require some sugar. So like you can you can get a cool like glucose uptake, which leads to an increase in insulin sensitivity. But one of the things that you mentioned there reminded me of the fact that hunger can be an issue too, right?
[Tommy Welling]
So like so those longer, more intense workouts, if you're not careful or you're not cognizant, you know, there's there's plenty of good data that shows we we tend to overconsume after things like that. So we hear from a lot of people who who workout fasted, but they'll do it right before their their nutrition window opens up. Right. And then so, so I'm almost like ending my, my workout, my intense workout with an eating opportunity that's going to tend to be bigger, more calorically dense.
[Tommy Welling]
I get this, I might be dealing with some of that ravenous kind of behavior, and that can be very kind of counter counterproductive because it can it can bring in things like like momentary thinking versus longer term thinking. I'm eating some things that I wouldn't necessarily or I might have like a subconscious justification, like I like I earned it a little bit.
[Tommy Welling]
And then that can be, you know, very much lead to like an energy balance which can create a plateau, too.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, 100%. I want to be really clear in what I said about hard. I left out a part of the equation. Now there's more accurate ways. If you're an athlete, to get a maximum heart rate calculation, but just for simplicity, your maximum heart rate is to 20 minus your age. Okay, so a 40 year old guy, me. So my maximum heart rate would be 180.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Okay, then you multiply that by the range you want to be in. So the lower range 60, 65% bone, multiply it by 180 and then you've got your target heart rate range. Right? So if I did the 50 to 60% range, I'd multiply 180 times 0.5 and then 180 times point six. I'm going to get a range of 90 to 108.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So if I'm out walking, I know that I'm going to be burning fat. If I'm doing a 30 to 45 minute walk because my heart rate is going to be in that range. Now I have a WOOP because I track my sleep for my health benefit, so I know I can just look down and turn on my app and know where my heart rate is.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So most people have some form of that, but you can just count the beats per minute if you wanted to do it the old school way. But I just want to land in place. I forgot about that. I left out the part of taking the maximum and then calculating it. So I want to talk about a couple of these studies dummy.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
One is alternate day fasting, right? So this is where you're going to have an ad libitum day of intake, right? And then you're going to have a day of no intake of calories, so no food. And on those days there's also modified alternate day fasting where you can have five or 600 calories. But does that kind of defeats the purpose?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And this study looked at the effect of alternate day fasting combined with aerobic exercise on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. So a place that your body stores fat that is detrimental to long term metabolic health is in your liver. So this is a randomized controlled trial that looked at we did a whole couple of episodes of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in the past.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
But the cool thing about this was Nafld followed an intermittent fasting plus exercise protocol for three months and there are four different groups, right? And the outcomes are pretty, pretty cool.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. And just to go back a step to the fatty liver disease is, you know, one of the first steps towards visceral fat. You can kind of start with like an overstuffed liver. And then we get this upticks in our liver enzymes that aren't necessarily outside of the normal blood range. You know, you might see those tick up.
[Tommy Welling]
I did. And it can kind of be one of those things. Oh, we'll keep an eye on it, you know, that kind of thing. But all the while perpetuating some of the the the slow weight gain and accumulation over time. And so, you know, seeing the study and and putting together like it wasn't a very big study. I think there were there were about 80% participants.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. Divided into four groups. So in order to see a substantial significant actual effect of any one of the groups, it would have had to be it has to be a very big difference, you know, And so it lacked some of the statistical power. But even even then, without limitation, we did see the fact that when you combine the exercise with the alternate day fasting, we do get a a statistically significant effect and a reduction in exactly what we're looking for, the fatty liver markers, which is which is fantastic, whether you have, you know, pre-diabetes or or not.
[Tommy Welling]
Either way, it's it's a substantial health improvement marker and kind of one that's like under the radar for a lot of people as well.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, I love the like you said, small sample size, but I love that they compared fasting and fasting with moderate intensity, aerobic exercise. Right. Which is five sessions for 60 minutes a week, which is actually a little bit more than we initially recommend If you're starting out fasting. Right, or restarting your weight loss journey. And then they had the two groups, the exercise group alone and then the nonintervention control group.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So obviously the core part was that that body weight, fat, mass waist circumference and alt levels of the liver significantly decreased, while insulin sensitivity the good side of insulin, meaning how effective your insulin is significantly increased in the combination group. Yeah, but it didn't change in the other groups. So the combination of the fasting with this moderate level of activity or moderate level of movement was the biggest bang for your buck.
[Tommy Welling]
It's really cool because if you actually time out, the fact that, okay, I know which days I'm going to be fasting, which days I'm going to be eating, like if you are if you are following an alternate day fasting type schedule, what, what I would do is I would, I would just take it like a few days at a time.
[Tommy Welling]
We've seen a lot of like weekly calendars and monthly calendars and stuff like that where you can put all this kind of time into a into a plan because we're kind of getting into the into the nitty gritty. When you start talking about ultimate day fasting and then and then like how many exercise sessions am I going to have?
[Tommy Welling]
But this can be a nice bridge going from calories in, calories out and tracking your stuff over into a more effective method of doing this, you know, using fasting. But then also, you know, exercising to to optimize my results too. So planning that out just a few days at a time, I'm just going to encourage everyone progress over perfection.
[Tommy Welling]
Don't be a perfectionist here, because that can be the trap sometimes. And I'm going to raise both of my hands going to say, I've fallen into that trap thousands of times. But you can you can avoid it, too. So don't get don't get lost in the details of what we're talking about here.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So just again, to go back to why we thought this was an encouraging thing to talk about in terms of exercise is because of the biggest of the misconception. Right. Most of our brains, it's like I get to eat less and move more. I going to work out more to get the scale to move, but it's just not honestly true.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Now, for this article, it's really important to us as hepatic steatosis has been shown or fatty nonalcoholic fatty liver disease has been shown to be only secondary to insulin resistance and not vice versa. In a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease state. So we need to know that insulin resistance, weight loss resistance, right, carrying the excess weight, the excess fat cells around with us could potentially lead to hepatic steatosis or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, which is directly linked to metabolic syndrome, triglycerides being off, blood pressure being elevated, type two diabetes risk increasing, cardiovascular risk increasing.
[Tommy Welling]
Etc. visceral fat going on.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Visceral fat going up. Right. We know the direct correlation there. So moderate exercise, moderate, moderate, moderate.
[Tommy Welling]
Moderate, nice, because then that leads to consistency.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
It leads to.
[Tommy Welling]
Sustainability that yeah.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
[Tommy Welling]
Dial it up, you know look like.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
You need a stress release started go on the long run. Totally cool go go on the hike get the the mental that's another thing and we don't talk a lot about what exercise do is for my wife specifically for her it's it's like a mental health day right? Like sure she sure loves to do it. Yeah. Because it's therapeutic.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right? It gets that stress release out for me. Know, for me. Like, I don't I just don't feel it that way. For me, it's like I need to go do something as a stress reliever. So, like, I need to go weed the garden. I need to go run an errand. I just go, Yeah, I need to I need to check a box somewhere.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
That. That's. Yeah. Like, go take the dogs to the park. Right. For me, exercise is I need to. I need to know that I'm doing this for a very specific health reason and not just because I need a break. Right. So it really depends on the sustainability pieces. Is what what does exercise look like for you? And you're not going to exercise your way out of a bad fasting habits or bad nutritional habits because it's such a small percentage.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Now you're still going to get the health benefits right? Just like this study showed. So the second study we want to mention was actually in different exercise types because, goodness gracious, there's aerobic activity, there's cardio, there's HIIT, there's Tabata workouts, there's CrossFit, there's met cons, there's, you know, your standard swimming, running, jogging or jogging soft gym right out there, right at 45 hot works, you know, all of these different type boot camps, right?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
All of these different types where you're going to be in a higher, higher heart rate state, which can lead to less growth hormone excuse me, depending on the heart rate, could lead to more cortisol levels being elevated, which could be potentially slowing down your progress, even though it's it's fine and and you love doing it every day because it's stress relief like my wife.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So sometimes I'm like, okay, you got it. You're worked out in road on your horse today. Do you really need to get a peloton right in like three workouts a day? I'm like, okay. And you wonder why you want to go to bed at 9:00 on a Friday. So anyway, that balance piece is is key here as well.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So this article is talking about different exercise types for reducing visceral fat in young people with obesity. So if this doesn't speak to one of the fastest growing problems that we have, which is the obesity epidemic in our younger age groups. So we're going to talk specifically about adolescents age ages 12 to 18 and 18 to 24.
[Tommy Welling]
That's first of all, just seeing the title, it makes me just want to spread the message and do something like, I hate the fact that ten years ago, 20 years ago, this would have this wouldn't have even been like a cohort that was studied because they wouldn't have had enough subjects in there. But like you said, the the rate of increase for young obesity and then young visceral fat is is alarming.
[Tommy Welling]
And so what you can take away here is the fact that a young adult body especially is like it's still it's coming off of that that rapid growth mode. But the way young bodies or young adult bodies process things like you can you can see data and you can you can see results much faster than you can, you know, with an older body studying the same kind of thing.
[Tommy Welling]
So, so looking to make correlations between these activities and what it did. The visceral fat is, is a really cool like lens to see it through.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah and they they looked at they even say, you know the risk risk bias was high. There weren't the best studies. It was hard to look at the studies in the younger categories right. And the point really being just highlighting the fact that they looked at Arabic exercise, concurrent Arabic and resistance, exercise, resistance, exercise alone and then high intensity interval training over the course of a few trials.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And what they found was the frequency range anywhere from 2 to 6 sessions and anywhere from 12 to 10, 12 weeks to ten months. And we really wanted to mention this just because of that concern from parents that we hear often, which is, well, can my kids fast? And there's really my person I can only speak from my personal experience with the kids that I have.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Is that my kids inherently fast. Sure. Six four. While the one year old doesn't fast either constantly breastfeeding or snack eating because right is a 14 months. But my other two, they inherently see fast like one loves to eat breakfast and doesn't really like to eat dinner and one loves to eat dinner and doesn't really like to eat breakfast.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
No, we could literally serve them cake for breakfast and they won't eat it. Yeah. Their favorite food, right? They won't eat it. So yes, kids can fast. If you are in an over calorically induced state and you are carrying excess weight, then my heart goes out to it because that was me. Yeah, right. Like mine was steroids and lack of knowledge and pop tarts for breakfast.
[Tommy Welling]
Antibiotic.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, antibiotics and all the stuff that I was on there was, was a component of it because we know that those things stimulate insulin resistance. But the study here was really cool because it just spoke to the bigger picture again of what's going to be healthy and sustainable for that individual. And as a parent, we need to make that decision for our kids, right?
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Because I don't know about you. I didn't start making good decisions when I was like in my mid twenties. Better decisions I suppose I should set, right so that what they found here for this age group of 18 to 24 was that the biggest reduction in visceral fat, right? Which is the stuff you don't want to be carrying around for decades of your life.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. Was found in aerobic exercise and high intensity exercise. So short duration, high intensity bursts and then lower and slower, more lower end of the moderate to low aerobic type exercises. So not so much in the resistance exercise or in the concurrent aerobic and resistance exercise groups. The reality here is just like as an adult, we just want to encourage you that the benefit of exercise for blood sugar, stability, glucose utilization, insulin sensitivity and reduction of visceral fat or fat hepatic steatosis fat in your liver is individualized, but you got to try some things and see how your body responds.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And most importantly, like what's fun to you, especially in this younger like what's fun to the individual, right? For me, I really don't like running. I've done it. I've trained for half marathons. It's not my favorite. So that's not going to be my preferred long term solution to maintaining the weight that I've already lost.
[Tommy Welling]
Right? When you start thinking a little bit creatively, you give yourself permission to go, I don't have to be exercising for a calorie deficit and I don't have to be exercising to to necessarily hit my my, my weight goal or my fat law school. You know, like I can I can do a lot of that work without feeling forced to exercise.
[Tommy Welling]
I think that's a really empowering, you know, place to be mentally, especially if you're coming off of calories in, calories out and and tracking and just exercising to get that that calorie deficit, then you can start getting creative with it. Maybe rock climbing, swimming, cycling, like pick up a hobby that gets you moving that you look forward to.
[Tommy Welling]
That's a really cool thing because when you're not feeling like you just need to be in the gym, grinding it out for this calorie deficit, then you get to enjoy the process, which means that like during your next fast, you can put in a workout or an activity that you enjoy, which helps you enjoy the process and that that furthers your momentum and your sustainability of the process along with with the results as well.
[Tommy Welling]
Like, like that's, that's where we have power, right? We start putting all those factors together.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. And the steps thing too is changed over the years, right. Because that, that 10,000 steps thing was a marketing campaign out of Asia. I think it was Japan. If I remember correctly, we labeled the episode 10,000 Steps to Nowhere, right? Because it literally was not based in any science. Now we have so much more science in these fit fit trackers and all this stuff that we these wearable oils and all this.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. So even just 10 minutes a day would make a huge difference in the 40 plus age group. Yeah. So if you're younger than sedentary. Yeah. Especially if you're sedentary. So just park farther in the parking lot, take the stairs, walk to the mailbox. Right. Like instead of getting in your car and going down to the little mailbox thing at the end of the street.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. All right. So just increasing your non exercise activity, thermogenesis, which is that larger group. Right? So that is that 15% category where activities of daily living fall into. Right. So when we're looking at some of the benefits of steps, I mean, really, you know, 60 and younger, about 8000 steps, 7 to 8000, you don't really need more than that.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
And 6 to 7000 for that 60 year old plus. Right. So get your steps in. Right. Find some form of movement, slash low to moderate exercise that you enjoy and then add in some of the resistance training and maybe an HIIT exercise day where you get your heart rate up for short periods of time. But you got to play around with that and find something that you enjoy.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
That's the biggest takeaway here. It's just like, Hey, what's the what fasting window should I use? Well, I'm never going to tell you 48 to 72 hour fast because they're my least favorite, right? That doesn't mean I never do them, but that's not what I did. To lose the weight or to maintain the weight loss because it wasn't a sustainable practice for me.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
So if you're looking for guidance on your fasting windows, on what your plate should look like, head to the show notes. You can get the blueprint to fasting for fat loss. It's a free PDF, it's 20 pages. It gives you some of the why behind getting the weight off and why we believe it's important. But then also some of the sustainable sustainability pieces to to achieve a fasting lifestyle long term.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
It gives you some schedules how to ramp up, how to increase your times and it's really been a cool resource since we released it back here in January. Tell me final thoughts as we wrap up today.
[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, absolutely. Plan your next activity. Try something new, try something a little bit outside of your comfort zone and put in some new activity where you don't have to go. Yeah. Got to be part of a gym. Like I'm only on with my diet if I'm in the gym, because that was the mistake that I used to make time after time after time.
[Tommy Welling]
So planning another activity that you can do maybe during your next fast. So set the timer. Do an activity that you enjoy and and see how you feel and watch the momentum kind of build from there.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yep. Love it. Love it. Absolutely love it. All right. Another episode of the books. Tommy, appreciate the conversation as always. We will talk soon and we'll see you next week.
[Tommy Welling]
Thank you. Bye. So you've heard today's episode and you may be wondering, where do I start? Head on over to the FaceTime for life dot com and sign up for our newsletter where you'll receive fasting tips and strategies to maximize results and fit fasting into your day to day life.
[Dr. Scott Watier]
While you're there, download your free Fast Start guide to get started today. Don't forget to subscribe iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to leave us a five star review and we'll be back next week with another episode of Fasting for Life and.