In Burbank, I lived in a two-story townhouse and shared walls with neighbors on either side, so I was always self-conscious about making noise.  Not anymore.  I’m in a stand-alone house now, with plenty of yard space separating me from my neighbors.

So after getting my Mac set up in my new home office earlier this week, I waited until my wife and kids were gone, then fired up iTunes and cranked the Kplisch speakers all the way to seven.  Man, I was rockin’ out.

Strange thing, though … after an hour or so, I couldn’t hear the music quite as well.  So I cranked the speakers to eight.  That helped – for awhile.  Then, once again, the sound mysteriously began to fade.  So I cranked the speakers to nine.  Two hours later, the sound faded yet again. 

Dangit!  I’ve never had problems with my Mac before, but something was obviously wrong.  I could still feel the bass from the woofer thumping in my chest – my glass of fizzy water was also rattling across my desk – but the volume just wasn’t there.

So I cranked the system to all the way to ten.  That helped, but only for awhile.  Frustrated, I called the local Mac repair guy.  However, something was also clearly screwed up with my new Comcast phone system, because I could barely hear anything on the other end.  I ended up shouting into the phone, “IF YOU CAN HEAR ME ON YOUR END, I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU MY ADDRESS!  CAN YOU PLEASE GET OVER HERE NOW?!”

Well, apparently the phone could at least transmit sound, because the repair guy showed up an hour later, by which time I was really having trouble getting full volume from my Mac.  I told the guy what was wrong:

“I’M HAVING A HARD TIME HEARING MY MUSIC!”

“Geez, Pal, stop yelling at me!”

“WHAT?!”

“STOP YELLING AT ME!!”

“OH, OKAY!  I mean … oh, okay.”

Turns out the guy is what Seinfeld would call a low-talker.  His lips moved, but hardly any sound came out.  (I’m pretty sure I didn’t agree to wear a puffy shirt during my next standup show.)  I managed to explain that my sound was fading and I wanted it nice and loud again.  He listened to the system and mumbled something.

“WHAT?!”

“Your sound system is fine.”

“WHAT?!!”

“I SAID YOUR SOUND SYSTEM IS  FINE!  I THINK MAYBE YOU’RE GOING DEAF!”

“HOLY CRAP!  WHAT THE HECK COULD CAUSE THAT?!”

“MAYBE YOUR MUSIC WAS TOO LOUD!”

“WELL, IT DOESN’T SOUND VERY LOUD TO ME!  CAN YOU FIX THE SYSTEM SO IT WILL GO TO ELEVEN?!  NO, WAIT … I WANT IT TO GO ALL THE WAY TO FIFTEEN!”

“IF I DO THAT, YOU’LL BE CALLING ME NEXT WEEK TO MAKE IT GO TO TWENTY!”

“OH, I SEE … WELL, HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST?!”

“STOP YELLING AT ME!”

Okay, none of that actually happened.  I am a tad hard of hearing thanks to some nasty childhood earaches that caused my eardrums to tear, but the Kplisch system can still knock me across the room if I turn it up to five.  But I thought about the ever-increasing volume scenario when I saw an ad online for Januvia, a Merck medication designed to control blood sugar for Type II diabetics.

Most of you probably know this already, but diabetes comes in two forms.  Type I diabetes produce little or no insulin, often from an early age.  They usually need insulin injections to keep their blood sugar normal, and to keep from wasting away – without insulin, they can’t store fat.

Type II diabetes do produce insulin.  In fact, they tend to produce lots of insulin – but it’s not enough to keep their blood sugar under control.  Why not?  Simple:  they’ve become resistant to the stuff.  When the body’s insulin receptors are constantly flooded with insulin, they become damaged and stop working … just like the cilia in your ears can become damaged by too much noise.  Worse, the beta cells in the pancreas can become overworked from constantly cranking out the insulin and burn out.

So what do drugs like Januvia do?  Here’s a quote from official website:

JANUVIA works differently from other medicines to lower blood sugar in 2 ways. It’s a once-daily prescription pill that, as part of your type 2 diabetes treatment plan, helps your body

• Increase the insulin made in your pancreas
• Decrease the sugar made in your liver

Okay, let’s see … you’ve become insulin-resistant from eating too many high-carb foods that jacked up your insulin.  So what’s the obvious solution?  Well, you must need a drug that horsewhips your body into producing even more insulin.  You need to crank those speakers up to eleven.  Then twelve.  Then fifteen.  Then of course you’ll suffer all the effects of elevated insulin, such as a higher cancer risk, thickening arteries, high blood pressure, excess damage to billions of cells in your body, etc. – but at least your blood sugar will be under control.

I’m not blaming Merck.  They’re a drug manufacturer, so they produced a drug.  It apparently does what it was designed to do.  But if the high priests of The Holy Church of Accepted Advice For Living A Long and Healthy Life hadn’t scared people into cutting back on fat and eating more carbohydrates, a drug like Januvia wouldn’t be necessary. 

Dr. Mike Eades once described to me how people end up on these toxic drugs:

1. Patient goes to Well-Meaning Doctor with a variety of health problems:  elevated triglycerides, weight gain, insulin resistance, etc.
2. Well-Meaning Doctor puts Patient on a lowfat diet, as he was trained to do in medical school.  This of course means the patient will be eating more carbohydrates to satisfy his appetite.
3. Patient returns for a follow-up.  The symptoms haven’t improved or have gotten even worse.
4. Well-Meaning Doctor scratches his head and says, “Well, the diet doesn’t seem to be working.  We’ll have to put you on (insert wonder drug here).” 

The Well-Meaning Doctor probably learned about the wonders of the drug at a seminar sponsored by the manufacturer, by the way.

I referred to these drugs as toxic with good reason.  Here are the possible side-effects of Januvia, once again from their own web site:

• Hives
• Rash
• Swelling of the face, lips, tongue and throat
• Upper respiratory tract infection
• Stuffy or runny nose
• Sore throat
• Headache

Awesome!  Scratch your rash, wipe your runny nose, wheeze to your wife that you’d like another serving of mashed potatoes, spoon them over your swollen lips, and enjoy the flavor on your swollen tongue.  Swallow carefully, though, because that sore throat is getting serious.  Maybe the aspirin you take for the headache will help your throat, too.

Here’s another possible side-effect not listed on the site:  in rat studies, sitagliptin (Januvia’s chemical name) led to an increase in pancreatic cancer.  Gee, you’d almost think a body doesn’t like having a drug do a beat-down on its pancreas. 

There is, of course, a natural alternative:  stop forcing your body to smack down your blood sugar several times per day.  Then you won’t need so much insulin.  Many Type II diabetics have been able to stop taking insulin and any other blood-sugar medications simply by eliminating sugar and starch.  That’s how it worked for Dr. Jay Wortman, the medical expert behind the wonderful documentary My Big Fat Diet.

And here is the list of unpleasant side-effects from giving up sugar and starch:

• You won’t be able to eat sugar or starch.

That sure sounds like the better treatment to me.

A note about my hearing, by the way:  Sometimes people speak to me and I don’t respond because (duh) I don’t know they’re speaking to me.  This generally leads to one of two reactions:  1) They try again, with extra volume, or 2) they decide I’m aloof and give up. 

I’m not aloof.  I like pretty much everyone I meet unless they give me a reason to change my opinion.  If you happen to see me onboard Jimmy Moore’s low-carb cruise and I don’t respond if you talk to me, try again.  But don’t crank it up to eleven … I’m a little hard of hearing, not deaf.

Downtown Franklin

We’re finally settled into our new home in Franklin, Tennessee.  My office is now on the ground floor of the house, in what was designed as a bedroom.  Franklin is a charming town, and we already love it here.  I plan to write more about that topic on my other blog later this week.

During the move, I made some mental notes on diet, exercise and obesity based on observations and two articles I read online – both of which were brought to my attention by readers.  So, in no particular order:

Exercising doesn’t make you thinner.

Okay, as Josef Brandenburg pointed out, the right kind of exercise can certainly help by influencing your insulin levels.  But the theory that you can burn off your body fat simply by expending calories just isn’t true.  The guys on the moving crew spent eight hours carrying heavy boxes and furniture out of the house and into a moving van – 12,500 pounds, according to the truck scales.  And we were their second pickup of the trip.  In Tennessee, they did it all again in reverse, including countless trips up the stairs.  These guys were strong as gorillas and worked hard.  They do this all the time.  But a couple of them were also significantly overweight.

Keep in mind, I believe exercising is great for your health and sense of well-being.  I enjoy my long walks, even though I know they’re pretty much useless for losing weight. 

Diet (the right diet, that is) does make you thinner.

By the end of the trip, my clothes were a little looser, even though my only exercise was driving and rolling a couple of suitcases into our hotel room each night.  But I skipped the carbs almost entirely. 

Road food is 90 percent carbohydrates.

Every time we stopped at a gas station/mini-mart to fill up the tank and buy some snacks, I was appalled at the food offerings.  Nearly everything on the shelves was some kind of sugar or starch concoction, often with Frankenstein oils mixed in for good measure:  corn chips, potato chips, candies, ice cream bars, sodas, pastries and pizza by the slice.  We ended up buying a lot of nuts for the girls.

Sugar makes you cranky.

We also let the girls splurge a few times and buy ice cream or cookies.  Bad move.  They were good travelers most of the time, but when they had a meltdown, it was always after eating sugar.

Obesity is regional.

One of the articles someone sent me was a Time magazine piece, Why Are Southerners So Fat?  I definitely saw a disproportionate number of huge bodies as we made stops in the south.  If you’ve seen Fat Head, you’ll recall that in the first scene, I said it took me several hours of shooting in three different locations to find all those big bodies walking by, and that if obesity was such an epidemic, it should’ve taken me ten minutes.

In southern Arkansas, it would’ve taken me five minutes.  We took a side trip there to a state facility where you can prospect for diamonds – a fun little outing for the girls.  At the same facility, there was a water park where the girls went swimming and splashing and sliding.  Sitting near the pool, I tried to spot some adults with well-toned bodies.  (This was purely for research purposes, you understand.)  I didn’t see any – seriously, not one.  The teenage lifeguards were in good shape, and that’s it.  A depressing number of kids were already fat.

So why are southerners fat?  If you read the Time piece, you’ll notice the author chalks it up to a lack of exercise – you know, not enough walking to the bus stop, too many hot days when it’s no fun to play outside and all that.

That’s nonsense.  And if you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe Time magazine – because in a different article titled Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin, they actually get it right.  The author notes that exercise makes him hungrier and even quotes Gary Taubes.

It’s about the food, period.  The earlier Time article mentioned that Tennessee has a high rate of obesity.  That may be true for the state overall, but during the week we’ve spent in Franklin, I’ve hardly seen any rotund people at all.  If not for the modern cars, you’d think you’d stepped into the 1950s.

So what’s different here?  As Gary Taubes pointed out in Good Calories, Bad Calories, obesity and poverty often go together.  Carb-heavy foods are generally the cheapest, so poorer people eat more carbs.

But this is a prosperous area.  We’ve had a few of our new neighbors stop by to offer advice on the local attractions … southern hospitality and all that.  When they got around to recommending restaurants (usually after I confirmed that I will indeed be rooting for the Titans), they all asked the same question:  “Do you like a good steak?”

Yes, I like a good steak.  I also like a good town, and I’m glad to be living in one.

I’ve still got plenty of unpacking ahead of me, but the office is pretty much set up, so I’ll be resuming the twice-weekly posts.

Franklin countryside - the picture is obviously from the autumn, but this is what it looks like when we drive about two minutes from the house.

(I’m still on the road with the family.  We’re somewhere in Arkansas tonight, and I’ve got internet access for the first time in a couple of days.  That gives me a chance to post a guest column by Josef Brandenburg, who I first heard about when Jimmy Moore interviewed him for a podcast show.  Josef’s column follows …)

Exercise Bologna – The Single Biggest Exercise Myth

by Josef Brandenburg

Pretty much everything that you’ve been told about exercise is bunk.  (Everything beyond the fact that you need to do it.)  It’s this misinformation in your head that is killing your results and probably your motivation too.  Who likes doing something when you don’t actually get rewarded for it?

Tom Naughton Does Something Stupid (Besides Letting Me Write for His Blog)

In the movie Fat Head (which rocks), Tom steps up his workouts by walking for an hour every single day because he thinks that this will actually do something to accelerate his weight loss beyond his reduced carb all fast-food diet.  Tom’s walking was probably a complete waste of time.  Time he could have spent working on his stand up act – which he desperately needs .

(Note from Tom:  Mike Eades told me the same thing … the extra walking is fine, but it does diddly for weight loss.  Oh well; I listen to books when I walk, so it was extra reading time.)

When I was a fat guy – 236 pounds (at 5 foot 10) with a 40.25 inch waist, and 26% body-fat (technically obese) I worked out for 11+ hours per week.  (Sorry, I was too embarrassed to have anyone else take this picture.  I had to do it in the mirror.)

I would wake up at 5am, drive to the gym, hop on some machine and go hard for an hour.  Then I would come back at night do some body-builder weight lifting, and another 35 to 45 min of steady state aerobic exercise. (In case you’re wondering, that does NOT leave time for a life.)

The funny thing is that I got fatter doing these twice-a-day workouts, but the whole time I was thinking to myself, “Damnit, you fat bastard, you need to work out more!  You need to burn more calories!”

How could I have possibly exercised any more?

Jogging Is BS

The whole idea that endurance exercise, like jogging, will make you thin came from the observation that elite endurance athletes are thin.  Without any reason for doing so, folks in the exercise “science” community concluded that endurance athletes were thin because they did lots of slow, long distance work.

This kind of “logic” is like Tom’s post about his plan to start playing basketball until he hits 6 foot 5.  You know:  basketball players are tall, so if I play ball long enough I’ll get tall too.

The “endurance exercise makes people thin” is fine as a theory if you plan on testing it and then responding to the actual evidence, but not as religious doctrine.

So, What Does The Research Have To Say?

The USDA came out with their recommendation to do 60-90 minutes of aerobics for fat-loss in 2005. The first ever research study on the efficacy of their advice didn’t come out until late 2007. Do you know what the study said?

Men who did moderate to vigorous (think your target heart rate zone) exercise for over 60 minutes per day, 6 days per week, for an entire year lost only 6.5lbs of body fat! That is a half pound per month, for more than 6 hours of exercise per week.  Women barely lost 4lbs! (1)

So, if you’re a woman with 20lbs to lose, all you’d need is 20 hours of aerobic exercise per week and you’d be set in 12 months!

So, What About Getting Fat Folks To Run Marathons?

The Danish thought of this in 1989 – if 2 hours per week won’t fix ‘em, then we’ll make them run a marathon.  After a grueling 18 month training program to get their subjects ready for a marathon (26.2 MILES) here are the results:

•    The men dropped 5 pounds of body fat
•    The women dropped no body fat at all (2)

So, if you’re a man looking to drop 40 pounds, then you just need to work up to a leisurely 210mile run by quitting your job and abandoning your family.  And, if you’re a woman, it just seems hopeless – sorry.  (Actually, it seems ironic, but a good chunk of my female clients come to me after having done a marathon or two.  They usually end up fatter a few months after the event.)

Well, What About Real Life?

How well does endurance exercise work for regular people who are only going to go to the gym three days per week?  How well does “sensible” advice like “do 40 min, 3 days per week in your ‘target heart rate zone’,” work?

Not very well. Researchers in Australia had their subjects do 40min of steady-state aerobic exercise, 3 days per week (you know, 40min in your “target heart rate zone”).  Well, they gained a pound of fat on average over the course of 15 weeks. (3)

Is All Exercise Worthless For Weight Loss?

No. The good news is that there is exercise that works really well for improving body composition (less fat, more muscle), and it’s more fun, takes less time, and can actually enhance your ability to move.  Its called metabolic resistance training (MRT).  (Whereas treadmill jogging is actually horrible for your knees, messes up the way your muscles are supposed to function, and reduces flexibility.  But, that is another post.)

10 months after the above picture of me in my parent’s bathroom mirror I looked like this:

* 195 pounds
* 9% body-fat
* 31.5 inch waist
* same pair of blue Nike shorts

In addition to getting on a low-carb diet (on which I ate more calories), I also completely changed my workout program.  I went from aerobic (endurance) exercise twice-a-day to never doing aerobics at all.  My 11+ hours of gym torture turned into only 3 or 4 hours a week of relatively fun MRT workouts.

I know that a lot of you reading this are thinking, “oh, that’s just anecdotal.  What if it was just the low carb diet?  I want references!”

You’re right, it is anecdotal.  I don’t have published references to support this theory.

However, I do have lots and lots of anecdotal experience with clients over many years.  I’d be living with my parents if I couldn’t deliver on my promises, so the fact that I can pay my mortgage has to be good for something.  I also know a lot of other coaches with 10 and 20 years of records with their clients who’ve come to the same conclusions.

For example, Alwyn Cosgrove has owned Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, CA for 10 years.  He’s got 300 members that are all doing MRT workouts based on his system, and he’s been tracking their results the whole time.  That is a lot of data.  If you consider the fact that most University exercise studies are done with 30 people for 12 weeks, its probably better data.

What Is MRT?

An MRT workout would look like this:

First do 12 squats with a weight you could only do 15 reps, then with no rest, go do 12 push-ups (pick a variation you could only do 15 reps of).  Rest 1min.  Repeat for 4 or 5 rounds.  That should take 10 to 13min.

Second do 12 lunges with a weight you could only do 15 reps, then with no rest go do 12 rows with a weight that you could only do 15 reps with.  Rest 1 min.  Repeat for 4 or 5 rounds.  This will take you about 13 to 17min.

Third, finish up with a nice interval workout:  Go outside and run really fast for 30sec, then walk for 1 min.  Repeat for 6 rounds.  This will take you about 10min.

Cool down, stretch, and you’re done.

Here’s my theory on how it works:  It’s not about the calories burned.  Your body is going to put them back by making your hungry, reducing your spontaneous movement, reducing your body temperature, and/or some other means or combination of methods.  (The 24 hour graphs of activity levels of overweight people on exercise programs are really neat – you can see their body compensate by reducing all other movement unconsciously.  Of course the ass@#$% who publish this stuff – who are all thin – interpret this by telling these fat people that they need to exert more conscious effort to move more all day long.)

Its mostly about carbs and hormones.  Your body has three energy sources – super-short, short and long term.  For over-simplification all we care about is the short term – anaerobic glycolysis – that is the zone in which your body just burns carbs for fuel.  Long term burns a lot of fat (not actually useful for fat-loss), and the super-short term uses up the ATP (energy) that your cells have on hand.

We want to do workouts that will drain the carbs (glycogen) out of your muscles.  When we deplete your glycogen stores you will have increased insulin sensitivity for the next 36 hours (or your next high carb meal).  Since body-fat is fundamentally regulated by insulin, if we can get your body to secrete less insulin for a day and a half, you will be leaner.  (4-7)

Short bursts of intense exercise that exhausts you in the 30-90 sec range will maximize glycogen depletion, and thus body-fat lost.

There is also some icing on the cake stuff – like that intense exercise will release fat-burning catecholamines like adrenaline and noradrenalin.  But, if insulin levels are high, then the catecholamines won’t do anything.

Low carb diets work really well alone, but low carb + MRT works really fast.

Josef Brandenburg is the author of The Body You Want and The Body You Want A to Z, and an award-winning Washington, DC based personal trainer who specializes in helping people create the bodies they want in the time that they actually have.  You can get a free copy of his new CD “Why ‘Eat Less and Exercise More’ Is The Worst Advice Ever” right here.

References

1. McTiernan, Anne, et. al. Exercise Effect on Weight and Body Fat in Men and Women. Obesity (2007) 15, 1496-1512

2. Janssen, G. M., et al.  Food intake and body composition in novice athletes during a training period to run a marathon. International journal of sports medicine, May 1989; 10(1 suppl.):s17-21

3. Trapp EG and Boucher SH. Fat loss following 15 weeks of high intensity, intermittent cycle training. Fat Loss Laboratory, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

4. Joslin. Elliot. Et al. Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. 13th edition, 1994

5. Nussey, Stephen. et al. Endocrinology: An Integrated Approach. Informa HealthCare, 1st edition, 2001

6. Kronenberg MD, Henry M. et al. Williams Textbook of Endocrinology. Saunders. 11th edition, 2008

7. Lehninger, Albert. Et al. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry. W. H. Freeman. 5th edition. 2008