The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

Author:Peter Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00


The right message

The message thus seems fairly clear. Unless you are able to clear your diary for the foreseeable future to incorporate a pretty extreme activity regime, should your goal be to lose a lot of weight then you will need to address your diet as well as physical movement. Again, I’m not about to get into how weight loss can best be achieved, but it is worth stressing that it tends to be pretty challenging, as is maintaining the loss. Numerous studies have examined the issue of weight recidivism, and the consensus seems to be that over a period of year or so, the majority of dieters regain some or all of what they lost. Much of this seems to be the body’s innate resistance, built up over millennia of coping with food lack rather than excess, to oppose repeated negative energy balances, fighting back with metabolic changes, for example to boost the appetite.

Tom Watson’s book is a useful chronicle of the sheer effort required to shed significant amounts of weight in a fairly brief time. A self-professed borderline obsessional character, Watson read endless scientific studies on diets, completely cut out sugars, and bought a set of electronic scales which he synchronised with his mobile phone to get the satisfaction, as he put it, of ‘watching the graph going down over time’. As well as completely reshaping what he ate, his activity regime included not just walking, but increasing amounts of cycling, and visits to a series of gyms. For one particularly rigorous period he lifted weights three days a week in what he calls ‘an extraordinarily expensive’ gym. ‘The results were amazing,’ he says. ‘I described it as getting a body I didn’t deserve in a gym I couldn’t afford. But for those two months the whole world revolved around the gym and nutrition in the gym. And that wasn’t my goal.’

Watson’s gym regime also highlights the increasing focus on weights-based activity, as well as aerobic exertion, as a way to combat excess weight, even though the results seem to happen more on reducing waist size and body fat percentage rather than lowering BMI. There is another potential benefit. As some studies have noted, aerobic exercise like running or cycling, even brisk walking, can be difficult for people who are overweight or obese, whereas lifting weights might appear more feasible.

Some form of lifting weights, whether in a gym or as part of everyday life, also appears especially important in the management of type 2 diabetes, with numerous studies noting that the effects can be as beneficial as those of aerobic activity. Much of this appears to be linked to the importance of our mass of skeletal muscle in bodily health. It is in skeletal muscle where the bulk of glucose uptake after meals takes place, and insulin resistance here appears to be one of the very beginning elements of type 2 diabetes. Working your muscles is also linked to better functioning mitochondria, and the improved processing of fats, both of which reduce the risk of diabetes.



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