Time to get real about weight loss and fitness
U of A prof goes on an information odyssey and debunks diet and exercise myths
Timothy Caulfield’s conversations at social gatherings are a lot more animated since he wrote a book that says the health benefits of yoga, long runs and stretching, among other things, are highly overrated. Devotees of such activities are understandably disappointed at his findings and often vigorously defend what they’re doing to be healthier.
Caulfield understands their response completely.
“I think of myself as an evidencebased person. I’ve been hugely into fitness and working out my whole life and I couldn’t believe the number of myths that I was sort of embracing,” says the University of Alberta health law professor and author of The Cure For Everything! Untangling the Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness and Happiness.
In an interview, he explains that somehow, good scientific information about how to get healthy keeps getting twisted by a health industry that values profit over real health.
“Everyone benefits from that twist in the short term, but in the long term, everyone loses.
“We live in a world that is constantly trying to get us to eat, it’s constantly trying to sell us some easy fitness routine that doesn’t require work, and so if we kind of recognize that it’s tough, perhaps we can be more realistic about our (health) goals and what we’re going to achieve,” Caulfield says. “I don’t see it necessarily as a negative thing, I think it is sort of simplifying the ethos.”
Knowing that the market plays on “our biologically ingrained dispositions — our desire to be sexy, our need to eat — is very liberating ... because whether it’s genetics, remedies, fitness or diets, it’s just a massive industry that is constantly trying to market stuff to you and you can largely ignore that noise,” he says.
Caulfield notes that almost no one’s diet is healthy (with the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables) yet people worry they’re not eating organic.
“Are you kidding me? Don’t worry about the details, man, just get the big picture right, then you can start worrying whether you’re eating Mediterranean or not,” he says. “Stick to a few simple things that we’ve known for a long, long time.”
Eat healthy, be active (do vigorous exercise because moderate exercise isn’t intense enough), don’t smoke and you’re 90 per cent to 95 per cent to achieving your goal of a healthier lifestyle, Caulfield says. It’s the simple truth.
In the year spent finding that truth,
Don’t worry about the details, man, just get the big picture right, then you can start worrying whether you’re eating Mediterranean or not. U of A professor and fitness author Timothy Caulfield
Caulfield signed up with a Hollywood personal trainer, went on a diet, had his genes tested, tried various naturopathic and homeopathic remedies and consulted with health experts all over the world.
The take-away lesson of his journey, he says, is that basically nothing — diets, fitness or remedy industries — actually does what it promises to do.
You can’t lose weight through exercise alone — 80 to 90 per cent of weight loss depends on eating healthful things and in small portions. In other words, you must take in fewer calories than you burn.
Muscle may burn more calories than fat, but only six calories per pound. So if you’re fortunate enough to be able to put on 10 pounds of pure muscle you can consume only about 60 more calories a day.
Most alternative remedies work no better than placebos.
And some new research, around genetics, for example, is hyped, making it difficult to tell what information you can trust.
Caulfield lost 25 pounds while researching his book and has kept almost all of it off, by resistance training (the single best exercise is the deadlift, he says) done as a circuit (moving from one exercise to another without stopping), substituting fruits and vegetables for junk foods such as cookies and his once beloved M&M candies, and eating smaller portions.
Although he doesn’t do yoga or stretching because there are more efficient ways to get fit and healthy, if you do like those things, “that’s awesome,” Caulfield says.
“I would never want to be responsible for stopping people from doing physical activities they enjoy, but if efficiency and fitness are your goals, we’re learning more and more how to do that and those things are often twisted to sell health products.
“What I naively hope is somewhat unique about my book is that I try to bring those twisting influences together with what really works, to constantly remind ourselves and society about the forces that exist that twist what we’re told about health … and hopefully, avoid that pitfall,” Caulfield says.