How Can I Become A Fat-Burning Machine?
Asked for just one recommendation for lifelong health, our experts all had the same answer: exercise. And there's one type of exercise that may bring the best benefit in the least amount of time.
Experts include: Wayne Westcott, Sal Di Stefano, and Jackie Shahar.
(Bonus: For more on exercise, listen to "The Magic Pill": https://www.wbur.org/magicpill)
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Wayne L Westcott, PhD is fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Mass.
Bio | Books
Sal DiStefano is a personal trainer and fitness podcaster for the show Mind Pump. Instead of seeing physical appearance as a main goal of fitness, Mind Pump cultivates self love and promotes holistic health through quality information and education.
Bio | Mind Pump Podcast | Mind Pump Instagram
Jaqueline Shahar MEd, RCEP, CDE
Jackie Shahar is a Clinical Exercise Physiologist and certified Diabetes Educator. She focuses on exercise and diabetes, sports performance and nutrition, weight loss for people with prediabetes, type 1, and type 2 diabetes.
Jaqueline Shahar | LinkedIn -
Speaker 1 [00:00:01]Coming in February from WBUR, last seen returns with a genre bending twist on true crime, a new anthology of stories about people, places and things that have gone missing. Don't miss out on season two. Follow last seen wherever you listen to podcasts. [16.2s]
Speaker 2 [00:00:20]Produced by the iLab at WBUR, Boston. [3.2s]
Juna: I think we need to do exercise before we do things.
Eddie: You're a little sluggish?
Juna: Oh yeah. Brrr brrr brr!
Eddie: What's, what's that?
Juna: Have you seen High School Musical? Before Sharpay goes on and sings, she is like, "Brrr brrr brr, mak mak mak."
Eddie: All right. All right. All right.
Speaker 2 [00:00:46]OK. I'm rolling. [0.4s]
Juna OK. In interviewing people for this podcast, there's a question that I asked every single person, which was: If you could tell people to change only one thing for the rest of their life that would have the biggest impact on their health, what would it be? And thus far, all the people we've interviewed have been like nutrition-y people who, you know, steady like fat metabolism or the way hyper-palatable foods affect our brain. So you would think their answer would be something like don't eat as much cheesecake or eat more vegetables or like, increase your protein, you know? What I found shocking was that the most common answer was --.
Paul Kenny: [00:01:26]Exercise. [0.0s]
Dana Small: [00:01:27]Exercise is good. [0.7s]
Bradford Lowell: [00:01:28]Exercise as much as I possibly can. [1.8s]
Wayne Westcott: [00:01:31]The best benefit for the least amount of time would definitely be a resistance exercise. [4.5s]
Juna: And the best place to learn about it? Food We Need To Talk, a.k.a. this podcast. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie: And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips from Harvard Medical School.
Juna: I'm guessing this isn't that surprising to you, Eddie, since this is kind of your whole shtick, right?
Eddie: Yes. In fact, the field of medicine that I chose, Physiatry, we’re the doctors of the body or physical medicine or rehab, we are the exercise doctors. We look at the body, we actually treat muscles. And it's really important because exercise is medicine.
Juna: For me, exercise and food were just kind of like two sides of the calorie coin. A donut was a 40-minute jog, or a bowl of kale was a ten-minute walk. And for my whole life, it was like that.
Eddie: So it was just to burn calories.
Juna: Yes.
Eddie It was just this transaction. You never developed a relationship with the exercise.
Juna: No.
Eddie: So Juna, of course, the exercise burns calories, and your math is just impeccable.
Juna: I was really good in calculus.
Eddie: I would say the most important thing is that it actually increases and maintains the muscle mass that you have.
Juna: Before I ever thought about the muscle mass. My exercise session sounded like this: [sound of treadmill]. But as I started to learn about how important muscle mass was, my exercise completely shifted and sounded a lot more like this: [sound of weightlifting]. So I asked Wayne Westcott, director of the Exercise Science Program and fitness research program at Quincy College, why is having high muscle mass so important?
Wayne Westcott: Great question. Muscle not only burns calories, uses energy, when you're active, but when you're at rest, muscle burns lots of energy. So much energy that it makes up about 30 percent of your resting metabolic rate. When you're sound asleep at night, your muscles burn 30 percent of your calories.
Juna: So your resting metabolic rate. That's basically all the calories your body burns when you're doing nothing, like just the calories you burn lying down, sleeping, breathing.
Eddie: Right, I mean, just keeping the lights on is what your resting metabolic rate is. And it becomes even more important as we get older, because the natural course of events is to actually lose muscle mass, our metabolism just slows down.
Juna: Wow. And that is not in my life plan to have a slower and slower metabolism and less and less muscle mass.
Sal Di Stefano It is a massive advantage to have a fast metabolism.
Juna This is one of our favorite resident fitness podcasters and 20-year personal training veteran, Sal Di Stefano.
Sal Di Stefano: In modern times, we don't move much. Food is everywhere around us, tastes really good. It's better to have a fast metabolism. It's a much better insurance policy. I can eat more and stay lean.
Eddie: So Juna, think about it. The food environment has shifted radically over the last maybe only 30 years, but our genetics haven't changed a bit. And the way that we raise our metabolism alert here is not green tea supplements or apple cider vinegar shots.
Juna: Ah shoot.
Eddie: Because there's no science backing them. There's lots of science, though, for good, old-fashioned exercise.
Juna: OK, so I want a faster metabolism.
Eddie: Yup.
Juna: Higher muscle mass.
Eddie: Yeah.
Juna: So therefore, I need to exercise.
Eddie: Yeah, yup, yup.
Juna: So i'm going to go...run on the treadmill, right?
Eddie: Um well, not so fast. Not all exercise is created equal. Cardiovascular exercise is really great for your heart, your lungs, your brain, and your stress levels and all that. But if you actually want to build your muscles, you've got to do what we call resistance training.
Juna: OK, I heard that word a lot. But what in the literal heck is resistance training?
Eddie: So the first time I ever heard the phrase resistance training, I had some toddlers at home and I thought it was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." That's not resistance training. It's actually the scientific term for lifting weights, using bands, your body weight, anything that stresses your muscle. So a lot of times we just hear people call it strength training and that kind of works as well.
Juna: But honestly, the reason that I never got into it was because it really doesn't look like it burns that many calories. Like what is the way that I can burn the most calories the fastest? Lifting weights just looked like, so chill. I didn't think it would do anything.
Eddie: So if you're just counting calories, Juna you are absolutely right. You're not burning a lot of calories to lift those weights. The cool thing, though, is that your body actually has to remodel itself after you've stressed it, and that takes even more calories.
Juna: So that was the coolest thing that I ever learned about exercise. And I guess the way that really made me understand it was when I thought about what the human body was meant to do. So basically, a human being is an adaptation machine, like we're meant to adapt to the stresses we put our body through.
Eddie: Mm-Hmm.
Juna: So that's why, like when you go out in the sun, for example, your skin gets tan, right, to better prepare for the next time you go out in the sun. Or if you're like doing really hard laborious work with your hands, your hands grow calluses so that you can better do the work next time. And that's exactly the way I've heard Sal talk about exercise, and it's what actually got through to me finally.
Sal Di Stefano: When you do lots of cardio, or you just get on a treadmill and jog, jog, jog or you get an elliptical and go forever, the body is getting a couple different messages. It's getting the message, we need stamina and endurance. It burns a significant amount of calories, so we probably want to become more efficient. We don't need much strength, so a great way to become more efficient at calories is to pare down muscle.
Eddie: So Juna, if you're picturing who's going to win the next marathon. I don't know, male, female, who's actually going to win, but you know what they look like. They're going to be slim. They're going to have like zero fat on them, small and just fast. They're not carrying a lot of extra muscle mass around.
Juna: Exactly. On the other hand, resistance training sends a pretty different message.
Sal Di Stefano: Resistance training doesn't burn a ton of calories when you do it, but it is sending the signal to your body that's saying, "we better build more muscle and more strength to be able to handle this stress." Because when you lift weights, that's what you're doing, you're stressing the body. That's why you get sore. So your body's OK with becoming less efficient with calories. It's OK with speeding up its metabolism because you're constantly telling your body, "we just need to be stronger."
Eddie: What's really cool, Juna, is that when you're doing that resistance training, it's not just building up the muscles.
Juna OK.
Eddie It's actually that the muscles that you have become even more metabolically active. Here's how Wayne Westcott describes it.
Wayne Westcott: People who don't strength train, if they run or walk or swim or bike, their muscles burn about six calories per pound per day, which is great. That's a lot. People who do strength training, their muscles burn at rest nine calories per pound per day. Resting metabolic rate increases when people strength train between five and nine percent. The average being seven in almost all the studies, seven percent. That's huge in terms of maintaining a better body weight sustaining your body weight.
Eddie: Seven percent it doesn't sound like a lot. Right?
Juna: Right.
Eddie: But it adds up to about 250 calories a day. Still doesn't sound like a lot.
Juna: Right?
Eddie: Over the course of a year, 20 pounds worth of calories.
Juna: That's basically all I need. I don't need to do anything else. So what's really important about this is that Wayne Westcott found in his studies, when people diet down and they're not doing any exercise, they're just dieting, they'll lose muscle and fat. So you're not just losing fat, you're losing muscle, too. Now, if you're anything like me, your natural inclination, if you're doing a diet, is to also run your little butt off on the treadmill.
Wayne Westcott: It increases the fat loss. But guess what? It also increases the muscle loss, significantly. So it's the worst thing they can do. It exacerbates the aging process of losing muscle. When they do strength training plus diet, they lose the least muscle and they lose the most fat.
Eddie: So it's like the resistance training is perhaps the best exercise to use if you're trying to both lose the fat and then what's the tough part? Keeping it off. So I like to say to my patients, "let's lift weights to lose weight."
Juna Wow, that's a catch-phrase we certainly won't forget. At least not during this short break.
Eddie Hold that thought.
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Speaker 4 [00:10:19]All the thieves in this story are very, very tan. Like, no SPF, no sunscreen, no morals. [5.5s]
Speaker 1 [00:10:25]OK? Don't let the new season of last season go missing on your podcast app. Follow the show wherever you listen. [5.3s]
Eddie: So Juna, from what we were hearing before the break, it seems like resistance training would be perfect for someone who wants to lose a little weight and then keep it off.
Juna: OK, Eddie, but I have a little bit of a problem with this because, although it may be fine and dandy for you to grow like a broad chest and huge delts and stuff like, I don't want big shoulders. Like I just don't want to be a bulky person, you know?
Eddie: Yeah, I don't quite get it, but I hear you.
Juna: OK, do you? So I found a female person who understands my plight to ask you about this instead of all you dudes.
Jackie Shahar: Hi, my name is Jackie Shahar, and I'm a Clinical Exercise Physiologist and a certified Diabetes Educator.
Juna: So here's the million dollar question, if I lift weights like Arnold Schwarzenegger, will I look like Arnold?
Jackie Shahar: That's really not going to happen. I mean, they have to lift extremely heavy weights and load up with so much protein in the body, which is really unhealthy. But if we think about exercise that is gradual and progressive, two to three days a week, or they either split muscle groups or do a full body workout, they could actually see great results. Toned muscles look better, get rid of fat tissue, and preserve or even increase a little bit the muscle tissue.
Eddie: So another thing, Juna, of all the patients I've seen, all the women coming in, I never actually saw one who complained about being too buff. In fact, I've had women come in and who started their resistance training, and they wanted to show me their Michelle Obama arms.
Juna: Eddie, I read somewhere online, I don't know how true this is, but -- He's already like, "uh-oh." But like one pound of fat is about the size of a small grapefruit, whereas one pound of muscle is about the size of a tangerine. I guess the idea is that muscles are a lot more dense, so it just takes up less room, right?
Eddie: True. I'm not sure about the exact fruit, but yes, you know, fat takes up more room and you're going to be slimmer even if you're at the same weight.
Juna: If you have more muscle.
Eddie: If you have more muscle, correct. Wayne Westcott describes that.
Wayne Westcott: In our studies, the average person loses about one pound of fat per month when they do straight training and they add about one pound of muscle per month, so the body weight tends to stay the same. And so people say kind of surprised, "well, I haven't lost any weight, but I'm wearing different pant sizes or dress sizes or, you know, or my waist is smaller and my hips are smaller." So, that's because muscle is more compact, more dense than fat. If we didn't have scales, and just had full-length mirrors, people would do a much better job of deciding what kind of exercise I should do or not do.
Eddie: So, Juna, we're talking about appearance a lot, which is fine because as we've established, if you lift weights, your muscles are going to be more toned, you're going to have less fat, you're going to feel better. But we're not just talking about resistance. We still want everyone to be doing their 150 minutes a week of exercise that raises your heart rate.
Juna: OK.
Eddie: It's going to take care of other problems, like your risk of diabetes, of osteoporosis, of cancer are all going to plummet the more active you are. You're going to live longer and you're going to live better. And in the meantime, psychologically, there's no medicine like exercise.
Juna That is what I found to be the best part about going to the gym for me, for sure. So the stronger I felt in the gym, the stronger I felt outside the gym, too.
Eddie: So you were actually feeling more self-efficacy.
Juna Yes.
Eddie: Like you were able to try something. You lifted the weight today and then come back three days later and now you're lifting a heavier weight.
Juna: Yes, that's why I love exercise, because it's a concrete physical portrayal of the way hard work works in real life.
Eddie: So what's cool also is that the physiologic effects of starting to lift weights actually come much quicker than just going on the treadmill. And you're, of course, you're going to get faster over time. But for patients that are obese, we start with resistance exercise.
Juna: I didn't know that.
Eddie: And just the psychological benefit, like you're talking about, comes very quickly when you realize that you can and will get better from a little bit of hard work.
Juna: Back to the whole psychology piece of all of this. I think Sal talks about this really well. When he was going through a really hard time where a very close family member of his was terminally ill, exercise became something completely different to him than just becoming stronger and bigger.
Sal Di Stefano: What saved me was exercise. And, you know, I wasn't going to the gym to build muscle. I wasn't going to the gym to get lean. I was going to the gym to get away from everything for an hour, to take care of myself, to help my body cope with the things that I was dealing with, to make myself more resilient to the stress that I was under.
Eddie: Wow.
Juna: Wow.
Eddie: And we have not even talked about the effect of exercise on your mood and on your productivity. Here's what Wayne Wescott has to say about that.
Wayne Westcott: Numerous studies that have been done in what they call corporate fitness have shown that productivity increases. People are much happier on the job. We've done several psychological studies ourselves showing that everything from engagement and tranquility, those occur when you do exercise.
Juna: OK, so we better get a big fat PR check from exercise because we're like wrecking the hell out of it right now.
Eddie: Who's the big pharma for exercise, right?
Juna: I don't know. I don't know. We'll have their contact their people. But basically what I've deduced from this is that everybody needs to drop everything right now. We need to go to a gym, sign up and start going seven days a week.
Eddie: Whoa. Whoa. You really don't have to do that much exercise to get the most results. And that's good news for a lot of us because the time intrusion of exercise is still what gets most people not to start and not to continue. And remember, what we're trying to do is get people to change small ways to commit to changes that they're going to enjoy, like you enjoy going to the gym, and to enjoy and do for the rest of their lives. It's not just like a 12 week beach body challenge. And the research shows that you really don't have to do a lot of strength training. Two times a week, three maybe, is all you need. And a half-hour at a time, you're going to see those dramatic results. It's almost like an inoculation is just enough to get your muscles moving.
Juna: So what exactly do we have to do at the gym?
Eddie: If you want a simple answer, listen to "The Magic Pill," season one. We cover this.
Juna Shameless plug.
Eddie: But it works. But if you only have like one exercise to do, I would say squatting. Get the proper form, up and down off of your chair, just to strengthen your legs. Get into your core. You’re also gonnawork your arms, a little bit of push-ups. If you can't do them on the floor, do them against the edge of a table and you're going to work your core. If you do that, your life is already changed. If you're overweight, the best thing you can do to carry that weight, until hopefully you lose it, is to get your muscles stronger. That then is going to take the stress off of your joints. Get some guidance. This is not something that everyone knows how to do, so if you could find a trainer or use a YouTube video or something like that.
Juna: Fun fact. This is exactly how I got into exercise and learned what to do at the gym was literally 100 percent through YouTube videos.
Speaker 1: [00:17:46]So today it's chest training 101. If you're a new person in the gym, this video is for you. [5.8s]
Speaker 1: [00:17:52]You guys want a back like this, I'm going to show you how to do a lat pull down. [3.5s]
Speaker 1: [00:17:56]Welcome back to fit tips with Whit. It's a beautiful day to be alive. [4.4s]
Speaker 1: [00:18:01]What's up, guys? Jeff Cavalier AthleteNext.com. Your training split is killing your gains. [4.7s]
Juna Just watch the video and then you just go copy and try and do it at the gym, and that's completely free. But before you chicken out because you're too afraid to look stupid at the gym,
Sal Di Stefano I'll tell you something right now. One of the most empowering things you could do is overcome a fear like that. Nobody knows what they're doing up first. Nobody cares. People who work out could care less that there's other people work out at the gym. And here's the last part, stop with the whole, "I'm afraid." Just go to the gym, put your headphones on, and go take care of yourself and don't let anything stop you, especially fear. Just go in there. You don't know what you're doing. Fine. Hire a trainer. Watch some videos. Start small. Go easy. Once you start to get used to going to the gym, you start to find yourself getting stronger. You're going to be a more empowered individual.
Juna: In the beginning, I looked so dumb, I'm sure, but when I think in retrospect, Eddie, I have never in my life been at the gym and look to other people and been like, "Ha ha ha, that person looks so stupid." Like everybody at the gym is focused on themselves.
Eddie: Right, right. They're just, they're lifting their weights, they're doing their exercise. And really,.
Juna: Nobody cares.
Eddie: They really do not care. So, Juna, what did we learn today?
Juna OK, what did we learn?
Eddie I would say that even though our genes, you know, want us to have a slow metabolism so that we could survive in the times when there was not enough food, in the last 30 years, there's too much food. So we want to actually speed up our metabolism.
Juna Right. And the way we do that is by increasing our muscle mass, which we do with --
Eddie: Resistance exercise, which doesn't take a lot of time, even twice a week, 30 minutes is going to actually give you more muscle mass. And I love this part: the muscles you have are going to become, as train muscles, even more efficient at burning calories.
Juna: So don't be resistant to resistance training. You have to lift weight to lose weight.
Eddie: I couldn't say it any better myself.
Juna: You already did. OK. Next week, I want to talk about something we may not be able to change, a.k.a. our genes.
Eddie: You mean like Levi's?
Juna: Umm no. I don't mean Levi's. I mean genetic genes. So are there genes that make some of us overweight and others not? And do we have any control over them?
Speaker 1 [00:20:24]Like, it's the genes that load the gun and the environment that pulls the trigger. [4.0s]
Juna: OK. I have like no idea what that means.
Eddie: We'll get into genetics and weight next time.
Juna: Big thanks to our guest Wayne Westcott, Sal Di Stefano, and Jackie Shahar. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram @FoodWeNeedToTalk. Eddie loves it. Icon Eddie, totally hooked.
Eddie: I am hooked now.
Juna: OK. And if you are liking what you hear, please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating and a review because it really, really helps us out to reach more listeners.
Eddie: And if what you're hearing leaves you with a burning question, send a voice memo to foodweneedtotalk@gmail.com and then we'll try to answer you in future episodes. Food We Need To Talk is a production of WBUR.
Juna: Our editor and producer is George Hicks.
Eddie: Our Supervising Editor is Elisabeth Harrison, our executive producer as Carrie Goldberg.
Juna: I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie: And I'm Dr. Eddy Phillips. I'll see you next time.
Juna: I'm going to go straight to the gym.
Eddie: And I'll see you there.
Juna: You don't have a membership at my gym.
Eddie: I'll break my way in.
