Inspiring?

yeah maybe.....



I was the fat kid at school.  I remember doing the 1500m in a school sports day and coming dead last by a long way, each of those laps taking forever.

Lets be realistic though.  It is diet that will get rid of this kid's fat gut.  Activity is great and he should be out there moving....but diet is a lot more efficient.

Also Nike will have nothing to do with his greatness.  If he loses weight and gets fit then that will be fantastic.  But shoes or kit will not do it.  His diet and activity will.

I will quote Mike from Facebook

Weight loss is 85%+ nutrition, exercise does have a complimentary role. Time and time again exercise (esp just cardio) promoted as a solution to weight loss yields little long term results. 

Same can be said for fad diet, as people stop at some point. 

IMO kids need to learn (and actually enjoy) eating more real foods as a sustainable solution (as they will tend to eat less overall calories as well). Perhaps it needs to start at home with more cooked meals, or involving kids in cooking. 

Kids should also be told what my mom told me as a kid when I got home from school "Just go outside and play". Being active doing something can also take away from just mindless eating tendencies.  

However promoting cardio (higher HR) based exercise as the solution without attention to diet is temporary results at best...weight gain/yo-yo for years to come most likely...and chronic stress issues to hormones at worst. 

Kids should be "active"...not in "running" as cardio, but just going out to play. We can all just go be active with activities that are "fun"...or "go play". 

This comes from a person who on occasion does like to go for a trail run/hike or mountain bike ride (but it's more just to enjoy being in nature than worrying about calories burned). No HR monitors and I just go a pace I enjoy.  

Nike could have easily just encouraged kids to go be active in a playground or kicking a ball around...not push them towards endurance running as a solution...and for that reason, I disagree (that's the nice way of putting it).

Yes, I used to be the fat kid.  But it was not jogging that got me where I am today:

That hunter/gatherer diet / activity study...not what it seemed

There was a lot of reporting in the last week about a study which many interpreted as saying that because it looked like a certain hunter gatherer population had activity levels similar to those of modern people then the modern obesity epidemic must be all about diet....

Dr Briffa certainly interpreted it that way - this evidence points away from differences in activity and energy expenditure as being a major explanation for why hunter-gatherer populations tend to be much lighter than those living a more Westernised existence - as did the Daily Mail.

It is not as straight forward as that of course....it never is.  Health Uncut point out three flaws in the paper, "sealing its place in the realm of fiction"

1)    The study was a population of only 30 people, and of these 17 were women, who had NO statistically significant increase in physical activity levels versus Western women. That’s right in a study comparing the effects of high versus low activity levels of two populations; there was no actual difference in the levels for over half the group. Makes it interesting to wonder how they could expect to find a difference.
2)    The average BMI of the Western population was just over 25, so not an obese population, and depending on fat distribution, not an ‘overweight population’ either. Basically, we are comparing apple brands, and asking which makes the tastiest orange juice.
3)    Lastly, the study does not describe the calorie intake of the Hunter Gatherers. What we do see is a small population bordering on underweight status. So most likely they have low caloric intake. And, what does low caloric intake i.e. dieting do, it lowers total energy expenditure (hence the flaw in dieting). So are we surprised with these inconsequential findings?

As we describe in The Health Delusion, such is the age of sloth we live in, that in order to match our 1950s counterparts when it comes to physical activity, the average person would need to run a marathon each week.
In a world where there are already too few hours in the day, the last thing we want to hear is that we need to set aside more time to being more active, when we could actually free up time by just skipping a meal. And, so the market is open to all the diet gurus’ to pander to what interests us, instead of what is in our interest. But nature is a strict mother of principal, and does not cave in to our whimsies, whinging and tantrums to get what we want on our own terms. When you sooner or later join the 99% of people who find out dieting is ineffective for weight loss ask yourself this; if you don’t have time to be physically active now, how will you make the time for all that disease and illness in later life? 

The NHS Choices website also has a good analysis of the study:

Independent of its role in weight management, physical activity is also important to keep the heart healthy and to promote mental wellbeing. 

It should be noted that the study had some limitations:

• its assessment of energy expenditure and other factors was based on only 30 Hadza adults

• its assessment was also short term, carried out over an 11-day period

• the data it used for comparison of the Hadza with Western and other populations was taken from several different sources, including some small studies of individuals (one such study included just 68 adults)

As the authors point out, this study only measured energy expenditure between different populations. This study does not examine the effects of changing levels of physical activity on obesity and did not report the long-term dietary patterns or calorie intakes of the people studied. It therefore cannot answer the question of which is more important, a calorie-dense diet or lack of physical activity as a cause of obesity. 

It does not address the important public health question of how best to combat rising overweight and obesity levels 

It is well recognised that weight loss may be difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain. Research on the most effective way to address this issue is urgently needed

Another interval study

Just for completeness, I thought I'd point to this one:

Two Minutes of Sprint-Interval Exercise Elicits 24-hr Oxygen Consumption Similar to That of 30 min of Continuous Endurance Exercise

Eight male students did either 30 minutes of endurance exercise or two-minutes of sprint intervals (it is not clear from the abstract what this was), three times a week for six weeks. 

Their oxygen consumption (VO₂) during and after 24 hours of exercise was measured and while it was 150 percent higher during endurance exercise than during the sprinting intervals, after 24 hours the overall amount of oxygen consumed between athletes was nearly identical.

There is a lot of debate about EPOC and what it means for calorie burn.  Here is another one to through in the mix

Eat fat for endurance

Here is an intriguing one:

Significant effect of a pre-exercise high-fat meal after a 3-day high-carbohydrate diet on endurance performance

These results suggest that ingestion of a HFM (high fat meal) prior to exercise is more favorable for endurance performance than HCM (high carb meal). 

So maybe bacon and eggs would be better than that pasta party before the marathon.....

Exciting - exercise makes your muscles produce substances that fight cancer....

This is exciting.  A mechanism of how exercise really is good for you in fighting cancer

A novel myokine, secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC), suppresses colon tumorigenesis via regular exercise

Conclusions These findings suggest that exercise stimulates SPARC secretion from muscle tissues and that SPARC inhibits colon tumorigenesis by increasing apoptosis

Don't stress over your post workout nutrition

I thought this was interesting.  After a workout it seems to be calories that are more important to recovery than stressing about the carbohydrate / protein ratios of your post workout meal:

Recovery from cycling exercise: effects of carbohydrate and protein beverages

Beverages containing similar caloric content but different proportions of carbohydrate/protein provided similar effects on muscle recovery and subsequent exercise performance in well-trained cyclists.

Who invented these sports?

Given the current  Olympic excitement, I thought this was interesting


Source: sportsbettingspot.com