

Interviewer: We've always been told, to lose weight: to eat less, and exercise more. Is that wrong?
Mark MacDonald: There's some truth to that. The reality is, I would say eat cleaner and optimize your exercise. The whole idea in life, if I go spend $20,000 on a credit card, if I create a $20,000 deficit, I have to repay that. Same thing with your body. So, if you're eating less and then you are actually exercising more, you are creating a caloric deficit. This it the whole thought process, okay, my body will burn more fat. The problem is, it all stems on blood sugar, because your nervous system needs glucose to provide energy, ATP for your body. So, whenever you create a deficit, your body holds fat, because it thinks it's in a starvation mode, and it burns lean body mass.
So, eating less and exercising more is not the solution. It's eating correctly, which is just balancing your blood sugar, feeding your body as it goes, being satisfied and ready to eat, and then activating your muscles. With exercise, a lot of times we think, "I'm going to do four days of just fat burning cardio, I'm going to walk for 60 minutes." Now, if you are doing no exercise, that's great, but your body, about half of your body is red muscle, which is like that slow, steady cardio, like a marathon runner. The other half is white muscle, like a sprinter, explosion. So, if you are only doing one type of cardio and you aren't doing any kind of high intensity interval training, you are only burning fat in the muscles you are working. Little things, like just us sitting here, by me keeping my shoulders back and activating my core, I recruit more muscle, stable blood sugar releases your stored fat, and that fat gets burned up in your muscle. It's just becoming better at what you do, notdoing more, and letting go of the old philosophy. That's why I say the first thing is shifting your mind-set. Once you get there, the world is ours. But until we get there, living this is how you do it, this is how you do it, until you shift it, you can never really see what's possible.
Interviewer: What type of exercise is more beneficial? We hear a lot about interval training, we hear cardio, strict weight training, what's going to get us to that next step?
Mark: It all depends on the goal of the person. We look at the spectrum, we talk about 75 percent of the audience will be overweight by 2020, so a lot of people just aren't exercising. My mom, for example, who is 70, and who is actually winning her health now, she walks three times a week. And that's great for her. But if we are looking at how do you maximize each one, there are really three categories to exercise. There's fat burning cardio, which is that slow, steady, consistent, when you have enough oxygen so you can burn fat. If you do like a stationary bicycle, you recruit less muscle fiber in that same 60 minutes than if you did treadmill on a high incline, or hill climbing, because by walking on a treadmill, there is low impact and on an incline you recruit your gluts, so you recruit more muscle, so you burn more fat in that same amount of time. It's using fat burning, and making sure you are using the best exercises.
High intensity cardio, like sprinting, if you can sprint, it's your best, or running up stairs. You do one minute explosion, one to two minute recovery. Then, what you would do, if you can't do that type of high impact, you can do a spin class, or you can do a stationary bike, it won't recruit the same amount of muscle fibers. So, everyone, you need fat burning cardio, you need high intensity, and then you need some kind of strength training. I'm big in a body through space movements, like functional movements like push-ups and pull-ups. Not just lifting a lot of weight, but actually activating your core. As athletes, we're soccer players here, you think about when you are playing a sport, all the different muscle fibers you recruit. So when I look at a day, I was just in L.A. and we did a celebrity boot camp, and what we focused on was: Okay, you're going to do two days of strength training, two days of high intensity cardio, each one of those 30 minute sessions, and then each of that is followed by 30 minutes of fat burning cardio. Strength training and high intensity cardio burn sugar, fat burning cardio burns fat. You always do your fat burning cardio after the high intensity or the strength training, and that's how you get really smart and not about doing more, but becoming much better at what you do. So, about four to five days a week, 60 minutes.
You put in what you think is the right combination of diet and exercise, but you don't see the results. Why is that? Nutritionist Mark Macdonald discusses this issue and explains why so many people have this concept wrong. Find out what you should be concentrating on instead of fewer calories and more exercise. He also discusses the right type of exercise and the most efficient to help you lose those pounds! Finally find out where we've been going wrong!
In order to keep our content free, some of the links may be affiliate links to trusted websites. Shopping through them will bring a small commission to iHealthTube.com. Read our full affiliate disclaimer for more info.
- 1822 reads