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Rethinking Exercise: The Workout Paradox
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The notion of running a caloric deficit (i.e., expending more calories than we consume) to reduce bodyfat is appealing in its simplicity, but… we’d say “it doesn’t actually work outside of a lab”, but honestly, it doesn’t actually work outside of a calculator.
Why?
For a start, exercise calorie costs are quite small numbers compared to metabolic base rate. Our brain alone uses a huge portion of our daily calories, and the rest of our body literally never stops doing stuff. Even if we’re lounging in bed and ostensibly not moving, on a cellular level we stay incredibly busy, and all that costs (and the currency is: calories).
Since that cost is reflected in the body’s budget per kg of bodyweight, a larger body (regardless of its composition) will require more calories than a smaller one. We say “regardless of its composition” because this is true regardless—but for what it’s worth, muscle is more “costly” to maintain than fat, which is one of several reasons why the average man requires more daily calories than the average woman, since on average men will tend to have more muscle.
And if you do exercise because you want to run out the budget so the body has to “spend” from fat stores?
Good luck, because while it may work in the very short term, the body will quickly adapt, like an accountant seeing your reckless spending and cutting back somewhere else. That’s why in all kinds of exercise except high-intensity interval training, a period of exercise will be followed by a metabolic slump, the body’s “austerity measures”, to balance the books.
You may be wondering: why is it different for HIIT? It’s because it changes things up frequently enough that the body doesn’t get a chance to adapt. To labor the financial metaphor, it involves lying to your accountant, so that the compensation is not made. Congratulations: you’re committing calorie fraud (but it’s good for the body, so hey).
That doesn’t mean other kinds of exercise are useless (or worse, necessarily counterproductive), though! Just, that we must acknowledge that other forms of exercise are great for various aspects of physical health (strengthening the body, mobilizing blood and lymph, preventing disease, enjoying mental health benefits, etc) that don’t really affect fat levels much (which are decided more in the kitchen than the gym—and even in the category of diet, it’s more about what and how and when you eat, rather than how much).
For more information on metabolic balance in the context of exercise, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Are You A Calorie-Burning Machine?
- Burn! How To Boost Your Metabolism
- How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
- Lose Weight, But Healthily
- Build Muscle (Healthily!)
- How To Gain Weight (Healthily!)
Take care!
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Team’s Personal Health Practices Disagreements?
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You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
Q: I’m curious how much of these things you actually use yourselves, and are there any disagreements in the team? In a lot of places things can get pretty heated when it’s paleo vs vegan / health benefits of tea/coffee vs caffeine-abstainers / you need this much sleep vs rise and grinders, etc?
A: We are indeed genuinely enthusiastic about health and productivity, and that definitely includes our own! We may or may not all do everything, but between us, we probably have it all covered. As for disagreements, we’ve not done a survey, but if you take an evidence-based approach, any conflict will tend to be minimized. Plus, sometimes you can have the best of both!
- You could have a vegan paleo diet (you’d better love coconut if you do, though!
- There is decaffeinated coffee and tea (your taste may vary)
- You can get plenty of sleep and rise early (so long as an “early to bed, early to rise” schedule suits you!)
Interesting note: humans are social creatures on an evolutionary level. Evolution has resulted in half of us being “night owls” and the other half “morning larks”, the better to keep each other safe while sleeping. Alas, modern life doesn’t always allow us to have the sleep schedule that’d suit each of us best individually!
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Inverse Vaccines for Autoimmune Diseases
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Inverse Vaccines for Autoimmune Diseases
This is Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell. He’s a molecular engineer, with a focus on immunotherapy, immune response, autoimmune diseases, and growth factor variants.
He’s held 88 patents, and was the recipient of the Society for Biomaterials’ Founders Award for his “long-term, landmark contributions to the discipline of biomaterials”, amongst other awards and honours that would make our article too long if we included them all.
And, his latest research has been about developing…
Inverse Vaccines
You may be thinking: “you mean diseases; he’s engineering diseases?”
And no, it’s not that. Here’s how it works:
Normally in the case of vaccine, it’s something to tell the body “hey, if you see something that looks like this, you should kill it on sight” and the body goes “ok, preparing countermeasures according to these specifications; thanks for the heads-up”
In the case of an inverse vaccine, it’s the inverse. It’s something to tell the body “hey, this thing you seem to think is a threat, it’s actually not, and you should leave it alone”.
Why this matters for people with autoimmune diseases
Normally, autoimmune diseases are treated in one or more of the following ways:
- Dampen the entire immune system (bad for immunity against actual diseases, obviously, and is part of why many immunocompromised people have suffered and died disproportionately from COVID, for example)
- Give up and find a workaround (a good example of this is Type 1 Diabetes, and just giving up on the pancreas not being constantly at war with itself, and living on exogenous insulin instead)
Neither of those are great.
What inverse vaccines do is offer a way to flag the attacked-in-error items as acceptable things to have in the body. Those might be things that are in our body by default, as in the case of many autoimmune diseases, or they may even be external items that should be allowed but aren’t, as in the case of gluten, in the context of Celiac disease.
The latest research is not yet accessible for free, alas, but you can read the abstract here:
Or if you prefer a more accessible pop-science approach, here’s a great explanatory article:
“Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases
Where can we get such inverse vaccines?
❝There are no clinically approved inverse vaccines yet, but we’re incredibly excited about moving this technology forward❞
~ Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell
But! Lest you be disappointed, you can get in line already, in the case of the Celiac disease inverse vaccine, if you’d like to be part of their clinical trial:
Click here to see if you are eligible to be part of their clinical trial
If you’re not up for that, or if your autoimmune disease is something else (most of the rest of their research is presently focusing on Multiple Sclerosis and Type 1 Diabetes), then:
- The phase 1 MS trial is currently active, estimated completion in summer 2024.
- They are in the process of submitting an investigational new drug (IND) application for Type 1 Diabetes
- This is the first step to starting clinical safety and efficacy trials
…so, watch this space!
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The Energy Plan – by James Collins
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There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there about how we should maintain our energy levels, for example:
- Eat fewer carbs!
- Eat more carbs!
- Eat slow-release carbs!
- Eat quick-release carbs!
- Practise intermittent fasting!
- Graze constantly throughout the day!
- Forget carbs and focus on fats!
- Actually it’s all about B-vitamins!
…and so on.
What Collins does differently is something much less-often seen:
Here, we’re advised on how to tailor our meals to our actual lifestyle, taking into account the day we actually have each day. For example:
- What will our energy needs be for the day?
- Will our needs be intense, or long, or both, or neither?
- What kind of recovery have we had, or do we need, from previous activities?
- Do we need to replace lost muscle glycogen, or are we looking to trim the fat?
- Are we doing a power-up or just maintenance today?
Rather than bidding us have a five-way spreadsheet and do advanced mathematics for every meal, though, Collins has done the hard work for us. The book explains the various principles in a casual format with a light conversational tone, and gives us general rules to follow.
These rules cover what to do for different times of day… and also, at different points in our life (the metabolic needs of a 13-year-old, 33-year-old, and 83-year-old, are very different!). That latter’s particularly handy, as a lot of books assume an age bracket for the reader, and this one doesn’t.
In short: a great book for anyone who wants to keep their energy levels up (throughout life’s ups and downs in activity) without piling on the pounds or starving oneself.
Click here to check out The Energy Plan on Amazon and fuel your days better!
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What is pathological demand avoidance – and how is it different to ‘acting out’?
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“Charlie” is an eight-year-old child with autism. Her parents are worried because she often responds to requests with insults, aggression and refusal. Simple demands, such as being asked to get dressed, can trigger an intense need to control the situation, fights and meltdowns.
Charlie’s parents find themselves in a constant cycle of conflict, trying to manage her and their own reactions, often unsuccessfully. Their attempts to provide structure and consequences are met with more resistance.
What’s going on? What makes Charlie’s behaviour – that some are calling “pathological demand avoidance” – different to the defiance most children show their parents or carers from time-to-time?
What is pathological demand avoidance?
British developmental psychologist Elizabeth Newson coined the term “pathological demand avoidance” (commonly shortened to PDA) in the 1980s after studying groups of children in her practice.
A 2021 systematic review noted features of PDA include resistance to everyday requests and strong emotional and behavioural reactions.
Children with PDA might show obsessive behaviour, struggle with persistence, and seek to control situations. They may struggle with attention and impulsivity, alongside motor and coordination difficulties, language delay and a tendency to retreat into role play or fantasy worlds.
PDA is also known as “extreme demand avoidance” and is often described as a subtype of autism. Some people prefer the term persistent drive for autonomy or pervasive drive for autonomy.
What does the evidence say?
Every clinician working with children and families recognises the behavioural profile described by PDA. The challenging question is why these behaviours emerge.
PDA is not currently listed in the two diagnostic manuals used in psychiatry and psychology to diagnose mental health and developmental conditions, the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Researchers have reported concerns about the science behind PDA. There are no clear theories or explanations of why or how the profile of symptoms develop, and little inclusion of children or adults with lived experience of PDA symptoms in the studies. Environmental, family or other contextual factors that may contribute to behaviour have not been systematically studied.
A major limitation of existing PDA research and case studies is a lack of consideration of overlapping symptoms with other conditions, such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety disorder, selective mutism and other developmental disorders. Diagnostic labels can have positive and negative consequences and so need to be thoroughly investigated before they are used in practice.
Classifying a “new” condition requires consistency across seven clinical and research aspects: epidemiological data, long-term patient follow-up, family inheritance, laboratory findings, exclusion from other conditions, response to treatment, and distinct predictors of outcome. At this stage, these domains have not been established for PDA. It is not clear whether PDA is different from other formal diagnoses or developmental differences.
When a child is stressed, demands or requests might tip them into fight, flight or freeze mode. Shutterstock Finding the why
Debates over classification don’t relieve distress for a child or those close to them. If a child is “intentionally” engaged in antisocial behaviour, the question is then “why?”
Beneath the behaviour is almost always developmental difference, genuine distress and difficulty coping. A broad and deep understanding of developmental processes is required.
Interestingly, while girls are “under-represented” in autism research, they are equally represented in studies characterising PDA. But if a child’s behaviour is only understood through a “pathologising” or diagnostic lens, there is a risk their agency may be reduced. Underlying experiences of distress, sensory overload, social confusion and feelings of isolation may be missed.
So, what can be done to help?
There are no empirical studies to date regarding PDA treatment strategies or their effectiveness. Clinical advice and case studies suggest strategies that may help include:
- reducing demands
- giving multiple options
- minimising expectations to avoid triggering avoidance
- engaging with interests to support regulation.
Early intervention in the preschool and primary years benefits children with complex developmental differences. Clinical care that involves a range of medical and allied health clinicians and considers the whole person is needed to ensure children and families get the support they need.
It is important to recognise these children often feel as frustrated and helpless as their caregivers. Both find themselves stuck in a repetitive cycle of distress, frustration and lack of progress. A personalised approach can take into account the child’s unique social, sensory and cognitive sensitivities.
In the preschool and early primary years, children have limited ability to manage their impulses or learn techniques for managing their emotions, relationships or environments. Careful watching for potential triggers and then working on timetables and routines, sleep, environments, tasks, and relationships can help.
As children move into later primary school and adolescence, they are more likely to want to influence others and be able to have more self control. As their autonomy and ability to collaborate increases, the problematic behaviours tend to reduce.
Strategies that build self-determination are crucial. They include opportunities for developing confidence, communication and more options to choose from when facing challenges. This therapeutic work with children and families takes time and needs to be revisited at different developmental stages. Support to engage in school and community activities is also needed. Each small step brings more capacity and more effective ways for a child to understand and manage themselves and their worlds.
What about Charlie?
The current scope to explain and manage PDA is limited. Future research must include the voices and views of children and adults with PDA symptoms.
Such emotional and behavioural difficulties are distressing and difficult for children and families. They need compassion and practical help.
For a child like Charlie, this could look like a series of sessions where she and her parents meet with clinicians to explore Charlie’s perspective, experiences and triggers. The family might come to understand that, in addition to autism, Charlie has complex developmental strengths and challenges, anxiety, and some difficulties with adjustment related to stress at home and school. This means Charlie experiences a fight, flight, freeze response that looks like aggression, avoidance or shutting down.
With carefully planned supports at home and school, Charlie’s options can broaden and her distress and avoidance can soften. Outside the clinic room, Charlie and her family can be supported to join an inclusive local community sporting or creative activity. Gradually she can spend more time engaged at home, school and in the community.
Nicole Rinehart, Professor, Child and Adolescent Psychology, Director, Krongold Clinic (Research), Monash University; David Moseley, Senior Research Fellow, Deputy Director (Clinical), Monash Krongold Clinic, Monash University, and Michael Gordon, Associate Professor, Psychiatry, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Only walking for exercise? Here’s how to get the most out of it
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We’re living longer than in previous generations, with one in eight elderly Australians now aged over 85. But the current gap between life expectancy (“lifespan”) and health-adjusted life expectancy (“healthspan”) is about ten years. This means many of us live with significant health problems in our later years.
To increase our healthspan, we need planned, structured and regular physical activity (or exercise). The World Health Organization recommends 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise – such as brisk walking, cycling and swimming – per week and muscle strengthening twice a week.
Yet few of us meet these recommendations. Only 10% meet the strength-training recommendations. Lack of time is one of the most common reasons.
Walking is cost-effective, doesn’t require any special equipment or training, and can be done with small pockets of time. Our preliminary research, published this week, shows there are ways to incorporate strength-training components into walking to improve your muscle strength and balance.
Why walking isn’t usually enough
Regular walking does not appear to work as muscle-strengthening exercise.
In contrast, exercises consisting of “eccentric” or muscle-lengthening contractions improve muscle strength, prevent muscle wasting and improve other functions such as balance and flexibility.
Typical eccentric contractions are seen, for example, when we sit on a chair slowly. The front thigh muscles lengthen with force generation.
When you sit down slowly on a chair, the front thigh muscles lengthen.
buritora/ShutterstockOur research
Our previous research found body-weight-based eccentric exercise training, such as sitting down on a chair slowly, improved lower limb muscle strength and balance in healthy older adults.
We also showed walking down stairs, with the front thigh muscles undergoing eccentric contractions, increased leg muscle strength and balance in older women more than walking up stairs. When climbing stairs, the front thigh muscles undergo “concentric” contractions, with the muscles shortening.
It can be difficult to find stairs or slopes suitable for eccentric exercises. But if they could be incorporated into daily walking, lower limb muscle strength and balance function could be improved.
This is where the idea of “eccentric walking” comes into play. This means inserting lunges in conventional walking, in addition to downstairs and downhill walking.
In our new research, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, we investigated the effects of eccentric walking on lower limb muscle strength and balance in 11 regular walkers aged 54 to 88 years.
The intervention period was 12 weeks. It consisted of four weeks of normal walking followed by eight weeks of eccentric walking.
The number of eccentric steps in the eccentric walking period gradually increased over eight weeks from 100 to 1,000 steps (including lunges, downhill and downstairs steps). Participants took a total of 3,900 eccentric steps over the eight-week eccentric walking period while the total number of steps was the same as the previous four weeks.
We measured the thickness of the participants’ front thigh muscles, muscle strength in their knee, their balance and endurance, including how many times they could go from a sitting position to standing in 30 seconds without using their arms. We took these measurements before the study started, at four weeks, after the conventional walking period, and at four and eight weeks into the eccentric walking period.
We also tested their cognitive function using a digit symbol-substitution test at the same time points of other tests. And we asked participants to complete a questionnaire relating to their activities of daily living, such as dressing and moving around at home.
Finally, we tested participants’ blood sugar, cholesterol levels and complement component 1q (C1q) concentrations, a potential marker of sarcopenia (muscle wasting with ageing).
Regular walking won’t contract your muscles in the same way as eccentric walking.
alexei_tm/ShutterstockWhat did we find?
We found no significant changes in any of the outcomes in the first four weeks when participants walked conventionally.
From week four to 12, we found significant improvements in muscle strength (19%), chair-stand ability (24%), balance (45%) and a cognitive function test (21%).
Serum C1q concentration decreased by 10% after the eccentric walking intervention, indicating participants’ muscles were effectively stimulated.
The sample size of the study was small, so we need larger and more comprehensive studies to verify our findings and investigate whether eccentric walking is effective for sedentary people, older people, how the different types of eccentric exercise compare and the potential cognitive and mental health benefits.
But, in the meantime, “eccentric walking” appears to be a beneficial exercise that will extend your healthspan. It may look a bit eccentric if we insert lunges while walking on the street, but the more people do it and benefit from it, the less eccentric it will become.
Ken Nosaka, Professor of Exercise and Sports Science, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Procrastination, and how to pay off the to-do list debt
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Procrastination, and how pay off the to-do list debt
Sometimes we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the mountain of things we are supposed to be doing. If you look at your to-do list and it shows 60 overdue items, it’s little wonder if you want to bury your head in the sand!
“What difference does it make if I do one of these things now; I will still have 59 which feels as bad as having 60”
So, treat it like you might a financial debt, and make a repayment plan. Now, instead of 60 overdue items today, you have 1/day for the next 60 days, or 2/day for the next 30 days, or 3/day for the next 20 days, etc. Obviously, you may need to work out whether some are greater temporal priorities and if so, bump those to the top of the list. But don’t sweat the minutiae; your list doesn’t have to be perfectly ordered, just broadly have more urgent things to the top and less urgent things to the bottom.
Note: this repayment plan means having set repayment dates.
Up front, sit down and assign each item a specific calendar date on which you will do that thing.
This is not a deadline! It is your schedule. You’ll not try to do it sooner, and you won’t postpone it for later. You will just do that item on that date.
A productivity app like ToDoist can help with this, but paper is fine too.
What’s important here, psychologically, is that each day you’re looking not at 60 things and doing the top item; you’re just looking at today’s item (only!) and doing it.
Debt Reduction/Cancellation
Much like you might manage a financial debt, you can also look to see if any of your debts could be reduced or cancelled.
We wrote previously about the “Getting Things Done” system. It’s a very good system if you want to do that; if not, no worries, but you might at least want to borrow this one idea….
Sort your items into:
Do / Defer / Delegate / Ditch
- Do: if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it now.
- Defer: defer the item to a specific calendar date (per the repayment plan idea we just talked about)
- Delegate: could this item be done by someone else? Get it off your plate if you reasonably can.
- Ditch: sometimes, it’s ok to realize “you know what, this isn’t that important to me anymore” and scratch it from the list.
As a last resort, consider declaring bankruptcy
Towards the end of the dot-com boom, there was a fellow who unintentionally got his 5 minutes of viral fame for “declaring email bankruptcy”.
Basically, he publicly declared that his email backlog had got so far out of hand that he would now not reply to emails from before the declaration.
He pledged to keep on top of new emails only from that point onwards; a fresh start.
We can’t comment on whether he then did, but if you need a fresh start, that can be one way to get it!
In closing…
Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness, it’s usually a matter of overwhelm. Hopefully the above approach will help reframe things, and make things more manageable.
Sometimes procrastination is a matter of perfectionism, and not starting on tasks because we worry we won’t do them well enough, and so we get stuck in a pseudo-preparation rut. If that’s the case, our previous main feature on perfectionism may help:
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