CHAPTER 11
Exercise Less, Lower Your Setpoint More
You’ve been told “do more exercise.” That’s about as helpful as being told “take more pills.” Which? When? Why? How much? For how long?
In order to achieve your health goals, first YOU must identify your specific goal, and only then can you specify which form of treatment is most appropriate. For example, imagine you went to see your doctor with the specific goal of healing your broken arm, and your doctor prescribed you cough medicine. That would be an inappropriate treatment for your desired outcome.
Type of Treatment: Cast
Goal: Repair a broken bone
Type of Treatment: Cough syrup
Goal: Reduce coughing
Type of Treatment: Metformin
Goal: Manage diabetes
Type of Treatment: Zoloft
Goal: Manage depression
Type of Treatment: Ibuprofen
Goal: Reduce inflammation
Type of Treatment: Cardiovascular exercise
Goal: Manage depression
Type of Treatment: SANE activity
Goal: Lower setpoint
Type of Treatment: Stretching
Goal: Relieve muscle cramps
Type of Treatment: Trendy workout DVDs
Goal: Make celebrity richer
If you want to run a marathon, there’s a specific form of exercise that will help you do that. If you want strong biceps, there is a specific form of exercise that will help you do that. And if you want lasting weight loss, there is a specific form of exercise that will lower your setpoint—which is the only way to do that.
Assuming that you are not already a SANE member, you likely have never done the specific forms of exercise that lower your setpoint. If you have exercised in the past, or are exercising now, perhaps you’ve aimed for other goals, such as strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, and so forth. That’s fantastic, and those are great goals, but this isn’t a program about those goals; it’s specifically designed to do one thing, and one thing only: lower your setpoint so that you can become naturally thin for life. That’s it.
If you have turned to this chapter, thinking it will be page after page of how to exercise more to lose weight, don’t worry. It is none of that. You are going to learn about a revolutionary form of physical activity that you can begin no matter what your current fitness level is, at home, with no expensive equipment.
WHY EATING LESS AND EXERCISING MORE DOESN’T WORK
Forget everything you’ve ever heard about exercise. Forget about “target zone,” “go for the burn,” “take it to the max.” Forget about exercising more to lose weight. For lowering your setpoint, none of this works—and that’s according to Journal of the American Medical Association (Ludwig and Friedman 2014) and many other scientific studies.
In the same way that you are focusing on the quality of what you eat instead of counting calories (quantity), you can lower your setpoint by focusing on the quality of your activity—and not the calories burned (quantity) or the time you spend working out (quantity). Simply looking at calories burned is harmful because it ignores how exercising more can hurt your hormones, metabolism, and setpoint—and ultimately your ability to stay naturally thin.
It’s time to talk about a new way to move your body—one that ignores calories in the short term and instead focuses on lowering your setpoint long-term: SANE activity. There are three forms of SANE activity, which I’ll cover in this chapter and the next: “eccentric” training, a type of movement that accentuates the lowering part of a movement; smarter interval training, which involves short, intense, but safe bursts of work followed by periods of lower-intensity work; and restorative activity, which can be anything from yoga to a nature walk and is designed to reduce setpoint-elevating stress hormones.
“Exercise more” is simply an unhelpful recommendation. What does this even mean? What is exercise? If you talk to a weight lifter, she might define exercise differently than your walking buddy, who might define it differently than an Olympic swimmer, who might define it differently than the mom down the street with five kids.
And how long is “more”? More than what? If you exercise more today than you did yesterday, does that mean tomorrow you have to exercise even more? And what about the day after? And the day after that? This is just as absurd as the advice to just eat less.
In fact, the theory that we have an obesity epidemic because people are not exercising enough is disproved by other data. In a July 2013 report, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that “as physical activity increased between 2001 and 2009, so did the percentage of the population considered obese” (Murray et al. 2013).
Because typical exercise advice focuses on burning calories, exercisers spend their time in the gym, staring at the calorie estimator on a piece of aerobic equipment ticking away. Not only are those calorie estimators wildly deceptive and as inaccurate as the nutrition labels on packaged foods, but they are also the exact wrong issue to focus on. Instead of worrying about the quantity of exercise, the focus needs to be on the quality of exercise. Fortunately, scientific research has demonstrated that if you pursue the high-quality movements you’ll learn here, the results are therapeutic to your setpoint, metabolism, and overall health.
Case in point: A study done at Skidmore College compared a traditional calorie-counting “eat less, exercise more—harder” program against a simpler “eat more, exercise less” program (Arciero et al. 2006).
There were two groups in this study. Let’s call them the Quantity Group and the Quality Group. The Quantity Group ate a more conventional Western diet, while performing traditional aerobic exercise for 40 minutes per day, 6 days per week. The Quality Group followed a smarter diet, while exercising only 60 percent as much, but with higher quality. The study lasted 12 weeks and included 34 women and 29 men between the ages of 20 and 60.
At the end of the study, the Quantity Group ate less food and exercised 18 hours more than the Quality Group. The Quality Group focused on high-intensity cardio and resistance training and ate more but higher-quality calories. Here’s what the researchers found:
Quality Group vs. Quantity Group
The Quality Group lost more body fat, developed more body-firming muscle, trimmed their waistlines significantly, and dropped their cholesterol levels. Amazing, isn’t it?
What this means to you: The movement principles you will learn and apply here will have the same transformative effects on you because they will lower your setpoint.
If you are thinking, “But I like to jog” or “I enjoy going to my Zumba class,” that’s fine, and you should continue doing what you enjoy. If you love going to a Zumba class, dancing, and being with your friends, that is wonderful. Those specific types of exercises are great at some things. They’re just not great at the specific type of setpoint-lowering effects we’re after here. SANE activity is the form of exercise that lowers your setpoint most effectively. Best of all, you can do very little of it, infrequently, and sit back and enjoy those results.
And for what it’s worth, it’s rare in life that you can do less and get more. So when that opportunity arises—like it is right now—enjoy it!
HORMONES, SETPOINT, AND SANE ACTIVITY… OH MY!
This new way of moving your body activates positive hormonal changes, which lower your setpoint. Traditional exercise such as aerobics, extreme aerobics, jogging, and running activate negative hormonal changes that can raise your setpoint.
For example, traditional exercise suppresses the production of the thyroid hormone T3 (a key hormone in determining if your body can “burn more”—instead of store more—when faced with excess calories), especially in women. The last thing you want is for exercise to harm T3 production, slow down your metabolism, and cause your body to store more fat.
Also, traditional exercise can exert a lot of stress on your body. The American Heart Association found that jogging injures more than half of the people who do it. This high injury rate is due in part to the fact that every mile you run, your feet hit the ground about 900 times. Let’s say you weigh 150 pounds. That means for every mile you run, you are smashing 135,000 pounds of force against your joints, ligaments, and every other part of your body. You could say that’s like dropping 37 Toyota Camrys on yourself every time you go for a jog.
Even worse is the hormonal damage involving cortisol. I know we already talked about cortisol quite a bit, but because of all that “exercise is so amazing and healthy for you” messaging out there, it’s critical to understand that exercise raises your stress, or cortisol, levels. As you learned in previous chapters, chronic high levels of this hormone cause a high setpoint. Few things are this clear in human metabolism, but the fact is that studies always show that if you chronically elevate cortisol (like when you go to bed late every day because of work and then force yourself to get up early to exercise), your setpoint will rise. You may also remember that elevated cortisol is particularly detrimental to your waistline, as it causes a disproportionate amount of fat to deposit around your midsection.
To add insult to injury, chronic stress also increases insulin levels. As you now know, chronically high insulin, like cortisol, directly causes a high setpoint in humans. In human study after human study, if you elevate humans’ levels of insulin (e.g., through medication), their setpoint rises. It’s a setpoint double whammy when you are chronically stressed out!
Finally, there is the negative impact that traditional exercise has on your appetite hormones—leptin and ghrelin. Research suggests that exercises such as spinning, swimming, and running increase appetite shortly after exercise by decreasing leptin and raising ghrelin. This can lead to cravings for the inSANE foods that elevate your setpoint.
When you think about the traditional forms of exercise that have failed you in the past, it’s helpful to think about their impact on appetite like this: In the same way that people drink more water when they do more traditional exercise, they also eat more when they do more traditional exercise. Jeffrey M. Friedman, MD, PhD, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York, puts it well: “Exercise by itself has not been shown to be highly effective in treating obesity because the increased energy use from exercise is generally offset by increased caloric intake.”
By contrast, SANE activity has no negative impact on appetite and powerfully helps to clear hormonal “clogs.” It has been shown to reduce insulin resistance and raise levels of two fat-burning hormones—testosterone and human growth hormone (HGH)—which are essential for reducing body fat, especially belly fat. A study from East Carolina University published in 2007 in the Journal of Applied Physiology showed how smarter exercisers burned belly fat both during and after a workout (Hortobágyi et al. 1993 and Ormsbee et al. 2002). The researchers inserted probes in the exerciser’s fat tissue. The probes stayed in place before, during, and 45 minutes after a resistance training workout (resistance training is a key part of the SANE plan). At the end of the workout, researchers found that resistance training increased the burning of belly fat during exercise and for at least 40 minutes afterward.
If you are serious about lowering your setpoint weight permanently, then incorporating SANE activity into your life should take priority over any other type of movement. Whether you are starting from active, sedentary, or somewhere in the middle, with just 20 minutes a week, you will clear away the hormonal clog that has been keeping your setpoint elevated.
INSANE EXTREME EXERCISE VERSUS SANE ACTIVITY
There has been a surge of “extreme” forms of exercise hitting the market recently. Why? This is just another iteration of the common “more is more” myth. If walking is so good for you, jogging must be twice as good. Then running a mile. But let’s take that up a notch with a 5K, then a 10K, then a half marathon, then a marathon, and then an ultramarathon. More is not more, especially when it comes to exercise. Just about every orthopedic surgeon and chiropractor tells me: “CrossFit and those ‘extreme’ DVD workouts are the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my business!” because of the injuries they almost always cause.
It can be helpful to think of these forms of physical activity like cutting your hair with a chainsaw. It may sort of “work” in some perverted sense of the word, but it also carries along with it excessive and unnecessary risk. Also, if these exercises were as potent as claimed, why would anyone need to do them 5 or more days per week? Think about the potency of exercise as being like the potency of cayenne pepper in a recipe—a little bit adds a lot of spiciness. You do not need a large quantity of potent things—and if you need a lot of something, it is not potent.
To be fair, quite a few people, from competitive endurance athletes to high-performing military personnel, swear by extreme-exercise regimens. If you enjoy extreme exercise and can do it safely and sustainably, then enjoy it. It simply doesn’t lower your setpoint.
None of what I’m saying means you should ever give up on exercise. It simply means you will reach your goal faster if you exercise in a way specifically designed to get you to your specific goal.
HOW SANE ACTIVITY HELPS LOWER YOUR SETPOINT
SANE activity has nothing to do with the quantity of calories burned during the 1 percent of your life you will spend exercising. It focuses on the quality of how you exercise, which is to say what muscle fibers you engage, how many you activate, and how they trigger more clog-clearing hormones—thereby lowering your setpoint.
Six SANE principles come into play when lowering your setpoint through activity. Once you understand these principles, you’ll see why SANE activity allows you to work out smarter, in less time, and get even better results, using a simple set of movements you can perform in just 20 minutes a week.
Principle #1: Deep
A little SANE exercise does something any amount of traditional exercise can’t do: It stimulates your deep muscle fibers. For background, we all have several different types of muscle fibers that do different things. Broadly speaking, each of your skeletal muscles contain slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers. Type 1 fibers, or slow-twitch fibers, are involved mostly in exercises that require a little force for a long time such as running, jogging, or cycling.
Fast-twitch fibers, on the other hand, are used when you need a lot of force for a short period of time, like when you are lifting a heavy piece of furniture. Fast-twitch fibers are further divided into type 2a, type 2x, and type 2b fibers—each getting progressively stronger and more hormonally helpful. These fibers are what I refer to as “deep.” When you do SANE workouts, you will use type 1 and all type 2 muscle fibers, whereas traditional exercises such as jogging or running use only type 1 fibers.
Stop and think about that for a moment. You are about to do a form of physical movement that activates muscle fibers that you may have never activated before. How exciting is this?! Think about if you never exercised your biceps for your whole life and then started exercising them. Could you imagine how quickly you would experience dramatic results? That’s a lot what you have available for you for every muscle on your body with this new method of movement. Entire classes of muscle fibers (type 2a, type 2x, and type 2b) found in every one of your skeletal muscles will be activated for the first time in your life!
Type 2b muscle fibers are especially exciting. They have the ability to lower your setpoint quickly because, when activated, they trigger a huge amount of clog-clearing hormones. Boston University researchers found that the type 2b muscle fibers have “a previously unappreciated role in regulating whole-body metabolism [unclogging].” And a big reason conventional exercise hasn’t helped you keep weight off is because it never activates these types of muscle fibers (more on this below).
While working out smarter, you’ll be doing slow and safe movements that require a lot of force, activate your deep muscle fibers, and demand a lot of energy. You’ll then run out of energy in a short time, but you’ll achieve dramatic hormonal benefits. You’ll also get quite sore and won’t be able to do it for a long time or frequently. And that’s great: You get more results in less time.
By working your deep muscle fibers, you can work out less—but smarter—and create an incredible setpoint-lowering response that is not possible with traditional forms of exercise.
Principle #2: Resistance
To unlock the hormonally healing power of all those previously untapped muscle fibers, you must exercise with enough “resistance.” Resistance training is any form of exercise that requires your skeletal muscles to contract against an opposite force (the resistance). What can you use for that external resistance? Anything you want: dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, a weight vest, soup cans, bottles of water, bricks, another person, even your own body weight.
When the resistance becomes too great for your slow-twitch fibers, then your deeper fast-twitch muscle fibers are recruited. Therefore, applying enough resistance is necessary for activating your uniquely beneficial fast-twitch fibers. The more resistance you apply to your muscles (up to a point), the better setpoint-lowering results you get. It’s also important to note that no quantity of light resistance will ever activate these specific setpoint-lowering muscle fibers. However, one forceful push gets the job done. That’s why a lot of resistance is essential to activating your unique setpoint-lowering type 2 muscle fibers.
Because you will be incorporating a lot of resistance to ensure your muscles have to generate a lot of force, your SANE workouts will use up a lot of energy quickly and will therefore be short.10 Also, because they are activating all your muscle fibers (not just your type 1 slow-twitch muscle fibers), your SANE workouts require a lot of recovery time. In fact, how long your muscles take to recover is a great way to tell if you are working out smarter. If you exercise on Monday and then can do the same workout (same reps, same weight, etc.) a day or two later, you are not activating your deep muscle fibers. But if Monday’s workout used enough resistance to exercise all your muscle fibers, they will not be ready to go again 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 days later. Type 2b muscle fibers need at least 6 days to recover.
If you are exercising frequently, either you are not exercising smarter or you are not giving your deep muscle fibers enough time to do their hormonally healing job. Either way, you are spending more time exercising and burning less body fat, long-term. Enough of that. Enjoy SANE activity to do less and get more.
Principle #3: Eccentric
Traditional resistance training exercise has two types of contraction: concentric, which occurs as the muscle is shortening, usually as you lift the resistance (e.g., curling a dumbbell up with your arms), and eccentric, which occurs as the muscle is lengthening, usually as you lower the resistance (e.g., lowering the dumbbell with your arms).
Lifting weights—the concentric action—gets more attention in muscle magazines but lowering weights—the eccentric action—gets more results in studies. In fact, safely and slowly lowering resistance enables you to use up to 40 percent more resistance. More resistance means more total muscle fibers activated, more setpoint-lowering hormones triggered, and more calorie-hungry muscle developed.
Wait! Does that mean exercising like this will make me grow big bulky muscles? Nope. Few people can become very muscular because few people—particularly women—have the genes required to do so. As William Kraemer, PhD, the editor of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, tells us, “Women have been sold a myth of becoming big. They do not have the genetics.”
There are hormonal issues at play, too. The high levels of testosterone needed to develop bulky muscles are found in only a small percentage of men, and as mentioned earlier most women have about the same level of testosterone as a ten-year-old boy. Also, everyone has a gene called GDF-8, which regulates a substance called myostatin. This controls the amount of muscle you have and how much it develops naturally. It is why some people have more natural muscle tone than others, even without exercise—they have higher levels of myostatin. The base levels of hormones, myostatin, and muscle in nearly all women and most men make it impossible for them to naturally build “bulky” muscles using any form of exercise.
Principle #4: Hormonal
Yasuhiro Izumiya, MD, PhD, a molecular cardiologist at Boston University, found that the development of the specific type of muscle fibers targeted by SANE movement “can regress obesity and resolve metabolic disorders in obese mice” (Izumiya 2008). Notably, Izumiya doesn’t mention “burning calories” or “working up a sweat,” but rather mentions “resolving metabolic disorders”—that is, clearing hormonal clogs.
Izumiya went on to describe how these muscle fibers cleared hormonal clogs by improving “insulin sensitivity and [causing] reductions in blood glucose, insulin, and leptin levels.” Most encouragingly, he noted, “These effects occurred despite a reduction in physical activity.” This is more proof that less is more when you want to clear hormonal clogs and lower your setpoint.
The effect on other hormones is equally profound. Exercise scientists from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania State University in University Park examined the effects of both concentric and eccentric muscle contractions on several anabolic (setpoint-lowering) hormones. The 21 test subjects were young men randomly assigned to one of three groups: an eccentric-training group, a concentric-training group, and a nonexercising control group.
The eccentric group showed increased levels of both growth hormone and testosterone—both of which favor muscle-toning and development, plus decreased secretion of cortisol (which suppresses muscle development and stores fat). These findings suggest that eccentric muscle contractions are most effective for eliciting an increased flow of anabolic hormones conducive to developing your calorie-hungry and setpoint-lowering lean muscles—and dampening the effects of fat-storing cortisol.
Eccentric exercise also helps clear up another hormonal condition: insulin resistance. A study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that just half an hour of eccentric exercise a week reduced insulin resistance more than concentric exercise did (Irving et al. 2008). Twenty women were randomly assigned to an exercise group that did either concentric or eccentric movements once a week for 8 weeks. At the end of the experiment, researchers discovered that the eccentric exercisers had substantially increased muscle strength, decreased insulin resistance, and improved blood lipid profiles more than concentric exercisers.
Principle #5: Infrequent
Infrequent SANE workouts can deliver lifesaving benefits without requiring hours each week. The more resistance you use and the more you accentuate the eccentric portion of the movement, the more muscle fibers you work, the more energy you use, and the more sore you get—therefore, the less exercise you need to do in terms of both duration (exercise for about 10 minutes at a time) and frequency (once or twice per week) to burn fat and lower your setpoint.
Besides the “more time to do everything else” benefits, infrequent exercising also helps keeps stress levels down and cortisol, that same stress hormone we’ve discussed a bunch, in check. Infrequent workouts also ensure your body can actually benefit from your workout. Not many people talk about this, because there’s no money to be made by telling people not to work out, but most of the benefits from effective forms of exercise happen while you are recovering—not while you are exercising.
When you exercise effectively, you cause slight and useful damage to your body. Your body then repairs this damage and gets a little more robust to “protect” itself from future damage. If you exercise too frequently, that robustification—that is, the whole point of effective exercise—doesn’t happen. Again, more is not more. Less is more. And that’s why your smarter approach to exercise is all about safe, short, and infrequent workouts.
Principle #6: Brief
When you exercise all your muscle fibers, you use up all your energy quickly and therefore can’t do it for a long period of time. Putting it another way, if you can do any sort of movement for a long period of time, it’s not activating all your muscle fibers; it’s only activating your “slow to run out of energy” slow-twitch fibers. For example, you can’t hold a heavy box of books (lots of resistance/weight and a lot of muscle fibers worked) as long as you can hold this book (little resistance/weight and few fibers worked). Like the infrequency principle, this principle is awesome because it means you get radically better results from exercise and have plenty of time for all the beautiful things that your new, lower-setpoint life will have in store for you.
With brief workouts, you become completely exhausted in only a matter of seconds. That’s intense. But you do this by moving in an extremely slow and controlled manner using larger muscle groups and more muscle fibers. That’s safe. You put zero impact on your joints, so there’s less chance of injury. That’s sustainable. You will feel sore for several days after a single short workout. That’s effective. In short: SANE activity actually does what “extreme” forms of exercise claim to do, but it does so in less time with dramatically more safety, sustainability, and effectiveness.
SANE INTERVAL TRAINING
The best way to exercise SANEly is by doing the eccentric training that we just covered (we’ll cover the “how to” in the next chapter). However, if you enjoy using cardio machines such as stationary bikes or ellipticals to exercise, you can do those SANEly—using more resistance—too. This is called SANE interval training.
SANE interval training is like a metabolic plunger for hormonal clogs. Experts at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, for example, have found that it stimulates the body to improve insulin sensitivity more than low-quality/high-quantity cardiovascular exercise (Earnest 2008). You can also stimulate many deep muscle fibers with SANE interval training, which leads to a lower setpoint. Best of all: It takes 10 minutes a week. Again, it’s awesome, and all sorts of studies prove it.
Brian Irving, PhD, of the University of Virginia, took two groups of women and had them do traditional cardiovascular exercise or SANE-type interval training (Irving et al. 2008). The two groups burned the same number of calories exercising, but the SANE-exercise group spent significantly less time exercising, while losing significantly more belly fat.
Martin Gibala, PhD, of McMaster University, separated people into SANE-type interval training and traditional cardiovascular exercise groups. Over the course of the 2-week study, the SANE group exercised for 2.5 hours, while the traditional exercise group exercised for 10.5 hours (McGuff and Little 2009).
At the end of the study, both groups got the same results even though the SANE-exercise group spent 320 percent less time exercising than the traditional exercise group. Gibala put it like this: “We thought there would be benefits, but we did not expect them to be this obvious. It shows how effective short intense exercise can be.”
RESTORATIVE ACTIVITIES
The third and final form of SANE movement is restorative activities. Be sure to enjoy as much restorative activity as you can to complement your SANE eccentric and interval training. Restorative activity includes walking, recreational bike riding, yoga, Pilates, stretching, tai chi, meditation, and qigong. If you choose to include walking—which is about the easiest restorative activity you can do—10,000 steps daily is a great idea.
These activities link the body and mind through conscious movement that helps decrease the nervous system’s perception of stress. This drops levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which, as you know, causes all sorts of setpoint chaos. So the takeaway is simple: Do about 20 minutes of SANE eccentric and smarter interval training per week and then focus on lots of easy and enjoyable restorative activities.
Phew! That was a lot and a lot different from what you’ve been told in the past. And thank goodness, because if you’re like most people, conventional high-quantity/low-quality exercise hasn’t left you slimmer. Instead, it’s left you bored, injured, discouraged, hungrier, and heavier. Not because you did anything wrong but because the advice you were given is wrong.
Thankfully, your new smarter approach is to think of exercise like medicine and to celebrate because you just discovered the prescription for permanent weight loss when used in conjunction with SANE eating: 20 minutes weekly of eccentric resistance training and SANE interval training, complemented with enjoyable restorative activity. Less time spent exercising, more time spent enjoying your new lower-setpoint life. Love it!