Dr Parr Says…

Now that spring has arrived you may have noticed that your eating and exercise habits over the winter (or past several winters!) haven’t been kind to your body. For some people this comes as a surprise, and they wonder where their beach body from last summer went. For others, their beach body may be long gone, but they want to lose some weight and get in shape before summer.

Obviously, this will mean making changes to what you eat and your exercise habits. If you want to lose 5–10 pounds and get back in shape, this means small changes to your diet and exercise designed to meet your fitness goals. If you have more significant weight to lose you will need a stricter diet and an exercise program that will help you to burn calories and build your strength, endurance, and flexibility.

This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.

While diet and exercise can help you get back in shape, staying in shape requires making lasting behavior changes. Here are some questions that will help you find your missing beach body now and not lose it again in the future.

When did you last see it?

Many people can identify a time in their life when their lifestyle changed and weight gain began. Commonly, this is getting married, starting a new job, or having children. Other people notice that they have gained weight, but can’t point to any specific reason why. In both cases, healthy eating and exercise routines get replaced with other less beneficial habits. The result for most people is gaining weight, either very quickly or slowly over time. Understanding what led to your weight gain is important for making changes to fix it.

How long has it been gone?

The longer you have been inactive and eating poorly, the longer you have been developing these unhealthy habits. The consequence is that it will be more challenging to undo the damage these habits have caused and teach yourself new habits that are consistent with better health. Your task is relatively easy if you have just gained a few pounds since last summer. Trying to reverse years or decades of inactivity and unhealthy eating is a bigger challenge, but one you simply must take on!

Where did you last see it?

The environment has a huge impact on our health, largely through influencing our activity and eating behaviors. In many cases, weight gain may be at least partly a consequence of where we spend our time. For example, a new job that involves long commutes by car and workdays spent sitting can make gaining weight almost inevitable. Quitting that job probably isn’t reasonable, but knowing how it has affected your health allows you to focus your efforts on increasing your activity outside of work. For many women, weight gain occurs after graduating from college, getting married, and having children. While there are many contributing lifestyle factors in this case, the change from an active college campus to a more sedentary environment certainly plays a role.

Once you figure out when and where you last saw your beach body you will have an idea of what you need to do to get it back. Keep in mind that the type of behavior changes you need to make to lose weight and get back in shape are difficult and will take time to adopt. While you shouldn’t expect any miracles in the next month or two, developing healthy eating and activity habits can have a miraculous effect on your weight, your health, and how you feel in the years to come!

If you follow nutrition news you have no doubt noticed that recommendations change over time. Foods you thought were good for you can suddenly show up on a “never eat” list and foods you had learned to avoid are now recommended. This makes it challenging to follow a healthy diet, for sure. It may also make you question the advice of nutrition experts, who seem to change their minds periodically.

This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.

There are several reasons for this. First, carefully designed long-term studies of food and health are difficult to conduct. This means that small differences can appear to be more important than they really are and meaningful effects may not be statistically significant. Additionally, it is unreasonable to carefully control what people eat over years or decades, so “proving” that a food is either beneficial or harmful to health is almost impossible. This leads to health claims that probably shouldn’t be made as well as missed opportunities to make useful recommendations.

There are also political reasons why nutrition advice can change over time. The long-held belief that eating fat causes obesity and heart disease was largely based on decisions made by politicians. Importantly, these decisions were not based on good research. This led to a recommendation to eat more carbohydrates instead, something the food industry embraced.

Low-fat foods that were high in sugar became known as health food, despite evidence to the contrary. Even as evidence linking sugar intake with poor health accumulated, Congress forbid U.S. dietary guidelines to include an “eat less” recommendation. Only now are we changing our thoughts and behaviors to consume less added sugar and be less fearful of fats in our diet.

Here are two examples of nutrition advice that was well-meaning at the time but hasn’t worked out in the long run. In fact, these recommendations may actually have made us less healthy.

Low-Fat and Fat-Free Foods

The recommendation to eat less fat resulted in foods that normally would contain fat to be reformulated to have less, or no, fat. The fat was replaced by sugar and other additives leading to ingredient lists that read more like a chemistry experiment than food. We know now that these highly processed foods were no healthier and are thought to be a major cause of the obesity epidemic.

Sugar Free foods

Now that we have embraced the idea that we should eat less added sugar, there are sugar-free alternatives to most foods and beverages. The problem is that foods containing sugar are meant to taste sweet, so something must be added to replace the sugar. More often than not, the sugar is replaced by artificial sweeteners that contain no calories but still add sweetness.

There are two problems with this. First, although these foods tend to be calorie-free, they are still associated with weight gain. Second, they may be sweeter than the food they replace and alter our expectation of what food should taste like. This is especially true for children, who learn to expect that all food should be sweet. Furthermore, the alternative sweeteners used to replace sugar may not be as safe as we initially thought.

The bottom line is that all nutrients—carbohydrates, fat, and protein—are healthy within relatively broad ranges. And getting these nutrients, fats and sugar included, from real food is always preferable to eating processed foods. The key to good health is to balance what you eat with daily physical activity at work, at the gym, or at home. And remember that nutrition researchers and experts are doing their best to bring you reliable recommendations, even if it doesn’t come across that way in the news!

The idea that you should warm up before exercise is common knowledge. Even if you don’t always warm up before a workout, you probably know that you should. What is less well understood is why a warm up is so important and how you should warm up before your next exercise session. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.

The main purpose of warm-up is to increase muscle temperature to enhance the activity of enzymes that produce energy during exercise, so your muscles are ready to go. Also, pre-exercise activity will increase blood flow to the muscles so more oxygen and other nutrients needed to make energy can be delivered. The elevated blood flow also removed wastes from the muscle, including lactate, a by-product of energy production during intense exercise that can contribute to fatigue.

It’s not all about performance, though. Warming up also increases blood flow to the heart which can help reduce the chance of developing chest pain or having a heart attack at the onset of strenuous exercise. This is especially important for people who may have heart disease.

A good warm up should include the muscle groups that will be used during exercise, so focusing on legs for walking, running, or cycling and arms for rowing or other upper body exercise. In sports, the warm-up should be specific to the movements in the game. For example, a basketball player may warm up by doing some running and jumping as well as practicing passing and shooting. For most of us, simply walking or jogging for 5-10 minutes at a light-to-moderate intensity is a good general warm up for most activities.

While some athletes can spend an hour or more preparing for a game or event, the warm-up shouldn’t be so long and strenuous that it depletes stored energy or causes fatigue. It should also be done shortly before an event so the benefits of the warmup are still present at the start. Athletes who warm up too long before an event can get “cold” and may need to warm up again before they compete.

Two controversial topics related to warm-up include stretching and injury prevention. First, despite what your high school gym teacher or coach told you, stretching alone is not a sufficient warm-up. Increasing range of motion through stretching and other exercises can be part of a warm up, but they should not be the only activity. Furthermore, stretching to improve muscle and joint flexibility should be done after the muscles are warm, either after a good warm-up or exercise session.

It is also widely believed that warming up can reduce the risk of injury during exercise. While that makes sense intuitively, there is no consensus in the research. This is likely because many injuries result from extreme muscle and joint overloading or contact with the ground or other athletes that no amount of stretching can prevent. The bottom line is that warming up probably does reduce the risk of injury at least a little, so it is still worth doing.

The benefits of warming up go beyond the physical. Recreational and competitive athletes get psychological benefits from warm up, including improved focus, motivation, and confidence. For team sports, warming up together can enhance team dynamics. Warming up can put you in the right mindset for your typical workout, whether that is a challenging session in the gym or a walk around your neighborhood.

The winter Olympics start later this week so we will soon be seeing some remarkable athletic performances. The competitors are among the fittest and most highly trained athletes in the world, both in terms of laboratory measures of fitness and in subjective evaluations of skill. Competing in the Olympics requires years of focused, intense training, and some good luck. This is the topic of my Health & Fitness column in the Aiken Standard this week.

First, let’s look at the fitness. This is most evident in the endurance events like cross-country skiing and speed skating. The key to performance in long-duration events like these is for the muscle to contract repeatedly and forcefully without fatigue. In order to do so, the muscle must have a steady supply of oxygen and nutrients. These nutrients are delivered through the blood, which is pumped by the heart. The muscle takes up and uses these nutrients to produce ATP, the form of energy used by the muscle.

After months and years of endurance training the heart gets bigger resulting in the ejection of more blood to the muscle. Within the muscle there is an increase in the number of capillaries, the small blood vessels that deliver blood to the muscle, and mitochondria, the part of the cell that produces most of the ATP. Together, these adaptations allow the muscle to produce more ATP without fatigue, allowing the athlete to sustain a higher intensity (skiing speed, for example) for a longer time without fatigue.

While all Olympic athletes are very physically fit, some events rely more heavily on skill, including figure skating and freestyle snow boarding. For example, in figure skating completing a triple axel involves leaping into the air, spinning three and a half times, and landing backwards. On a 4 mm wide blade. On ice. Or think about the triple cork 1440, a snowboarding trick that involves flipping three times in the air while doing four 360-degree turns.

The athletes who are able to successfully complete these maneuvers have practiced for years to develop the skill and confidence needed to perform them consistently in competition. These are some of the most obvious displays of athletic skill, but all events require good technique. The development of skill in addition to fitness is the main reason why athletes specialize in one area and you don’t see people competing in both downhill skiing and speed skating, for example.

Of course, there is a psychological aspect to Olympic performances. The motivation to put in the training time alone is remarkable. Even more impressive is the ability to focus on an event despite the distractions of the crowds, media, and pressure of competition. This combination of physical and mental preparation is rare—as rare as Olympic gold medalists!

But is training alone sufficient for Olympic-level performance? Could anyone who trains enough make it to the Olympics? The answer is no, because there is another important factor in athletic performance—luck. Luck refers to genetics, which determine potential for attributes like heart size and muscle characteristics. As much as 50% of performance in some events is attributed to genetics. One sports physiologist famously answered the question, “How do I become an Olympic champion?” with “pick different parents!”

Even though most of us will never become Olympic champions we can still experience many of the same benefits of training. All athletes train to develop strength, endurance, and flexibility, which is exactly what we should do, too. And those attributes will help us perform better at work (and play) and help us live a longer healthier life. It will also help us appreciate the training, dedication, and good luck that the athletes bring to the Olympic games.