There’s a fitness studio in my neighborhood that is known for putting Lululemon-clad exercisers through grueling, sweaty, hour-long “core” workouts. Across the street is a juice bar. A few doors down is a doughnut shop. It’s not uncommon to see those same Lululemon-clad exercisers stroll out the front door of the gym and head straight for the sweet stuff.
Not that you can blame them. A high-intensity workout will get your body burning glycogen — the storage form of glucose (aka, sugar) — in a big way. And after an hour of this, the body’s natural reaction is to want to refill that tank. In other words, you work hard, you crave sugar.
All of this has caused many in the low-carb community to question the value of exercise as a weight loss tool. “You can’t outrun a bad diet,” they say. This is because low-carb is founded on the hormonal theory of obesity: the idea that eating lots of carbohydrates causes your hormones (insulin, ghrelin, leptin) to react in such a way that the body goes into storage mode, converting those carbs into trigylcerides and storing them in the adipose tissue.
hormones v. calories
In other words: eat carbs, store fat. This hormonal theory is distinct from the old “calories in, calories out” (CICO) theory, which treats the body like an abacus. The hormonal theory says it’s more complicated than that. In fact, many low-carb luminaries will go so far as to say that calories don’t count — just mind your carbs and the pounds will melt right off.
What, then, is the role of exercise in a weight loss program? You hear “diet and exercise” lumped together so often, like “fruits and vegetables” or Forrest Gump’s “peas and carrots.” But what’s the right proportion? How much of it is diet, and how much of it is exercise?
I’ve heard lots of different answers: 50/50… 80/20… as much as 95% diet vs 5% exercise. I’ve even heard that exercise doesn’t matter at all!
I took the question to my good friend Dr. Vincent “Ben” Bocchicchio. With PhDs in both exercise physiology and obesity, and over 200 academic publications in the field, he seemed the exact person to give the final word on this vexing question. So what’s the answer? Well, it’s complicated.
But it’s also interesting! So much so, that I’m making it the first official episode of The Unremarkable Brain Podcast. I’m kicking off the pod with a series of short interviews with Dr. Ben, who has 50 years worth of knowledge in the area of diet, exercise, and metabolic health. Tune in below to hear what he has to say. (And spoiler alert: even though he believes in what he calls a “controlled carb” approach, the good doctor believes that calories actually do matter.) Click on Goofy to listen to the episode on Substack:
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