Ron Cain | Contributed
North America is exploding in an epidemic of adiposity that has never been seen before in human evolution. The automotive industry has even increased the weight of the crash test dummies and baseball stadiums have replaced thousands of seats with wider ones.
Roughly every second adult in North America is overweight and many of those are obese. So the big question we should all be asking is why?
Why can you find a hundred books on dieting at a book store and there are more gyms than ever, and yet as a society getting fatter by the decade?
Do obese persons eat more than lean persons? The answer is not always. Now I am generalizing here but I am talking about statistics and large populations, not the obese person who eats healthy and exercises a lot.
Research shows that obesity is not generally associated with excess calorie intake but a combination of eating too much food of poor quality and little or no exercise and sedentary occupations.
How we came to get into this mess requires going back to the 1980s with the low-fat movement. There was a lack of understanding about good fats being very valuable in our diet and the focus was on low-cholesterol /low-fat diets.
At the same time, the food industry began flooding the market with refined carbohydrates, highly processed foods and massive advertising budgets. Food that was very unhealthy was labelled low fat to push sales and it worked. Gradually our North American diet drifted to a steady increase in high sodium, high sugar refined foods.
This leads me to the critical issue regarding two very different theories about diet and obesity.
The oldest theory is the energy balance theory: weight gain is strictly an issue of an intake of more calories than you need and since a pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories a person taking in only 100 calories a day more than they need could gain a pound of fat every 35 days. This explanation has been popular for more than 100 years.
The second popular and somewhat more current theory is the carbohydrate-insulin model. Eating highly processed refined foods such as low fibre bread and junk food snacks etc that are broken down quickly triggers the rapid release of insulin while suppressing glucagon secretion, signalling fat cells to store more calories, leaving fewer calories available to fuel muscles and other metabolically active tissues. The net effect is you have a lack of energy and feel hungry two hours after a meal.
The implication of this model is a radical shift in how we approach eating for either weight loss or maintenance from low calorie to quality calories.
As a trainer, I have seen clients of every imaginable diet and believe that low-calorie diets leave people tired, not likely to exercise, and very likely to be unable to adapt to a long-term healthy eating pattern.
I encourage clients to eat three healthy meals plus three snacks of fruit and veggies between meals, while maintaining a consistent exercise program.
It is a challenge however to get people to shift their thinking from short–term rapid weight loss to one or even two-year goals with health and fitness being the main focus and body weight as a secondary emphasis.
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Ron Cain is the owner of Sooke Mobile Personal Training. Email him at sookepersonaltraining@gmail.com or find him on Facebook at Sooke Personal Training.
