Below is an excerpt from Part One of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

The Exercise Factor

There are always "therapists", "trainers", "nutritionists", (and even diet-book authorsJ) ready to feed you great gobs of breathless blather about how you need more exercise. (How do they know?).

Quite a few of these alleged specialists also like to lay subtle "guilt-trips" on you about how if you don't force yourself to exercise you're just a spineless, apathetic victim of the flawed modern social order.

This is nonsense squared! The only thing you're a victim of is ignorance---their ignorance even more than your own.

The truth is that exercise can be very useful for weight loss---after you have created the right circumstances for it to be useful---and not one second earlier. Until you create the right circumstances, it's unpleasant, difficult, and sometimes even dangerous. The need to create the right circumstances before trying to exercise is the single most important contribution of threshold theory to the issue of exercising for weight loss. What do I mean by this?

The reason you have become a couch potato (or some other horizontal vegetableJ) is that your Beast is trying to conserve its limited supplies of the one (or more) nutrients that you're chronically low on. It does this by "demotivating" you physically---because producing energy always requires a direct or indirect contribution from every single one of the roughly 50 nutrients that you must get from food. If you get low on even one of these, The Beast knows this and "turns off" your desire to expend any unnecessary energy. (That's its job).

After a few months, years, (decades), of being "turned off" most of the time, you forget that there's any other way to be. If you even notice this, you give yourself excuses: "I don't need to do that anymore"---"I've just gotten old"---"There's nothing I can do about it". This is more nonsense. (But this time it's self-inflicted nonsense.)

Most of us have days when we are noticeably more energetic, enthusiastic, happy, and upbeat. On days like this, exercise is not a chore. It's fun! And it usually takes a fun form (a game with friends; a walk in the park with your spouse; a night on the town; whatever "fun" means to you). But then---maybe the very next day---the energy's gone and your life goes in just the opposite direction.

This is usually The Beast just doing its thing. When it runs low on anything it needs to produce energy, it turns off the unnecessary energy-using "frills" in your life---like happiness, enthusiasm, enjoyment, and especially any desire to be physically active.

When it happens, this effect is not much fun for you, but it does have one useful function. If you can train yourself to notice when it starts to happen, it becomes a very valuable "early warning" that you may be losing control of one of the nutritional vital factors. For example, if you run low on one of the EFAs or one of the macrominerals, you can expect The Beast to lower your energy level. But if you're aware that it is doing this, you can use Multi-Diet techniques to figure out which vital factor is causing the problem and correct the situation much faster than random eating could ever do it.

[Note: We will assume that you're not coming down with a cold and that you don't have any unusually depressing or stressful situations in your life - other things which could also obviously cause a low energy level.]

These points mean that on the Multi-Diet, the first and most important use of exercise is as an indicator that you are managing the other vital factors properly. You don't need to do very much exercise to use it this way (see below).

Of course, exercise has many well-known useful effects in addition to this "early warning" effect. You may already know about some of them

• "Low-intensity" exercise tends to switch your body over to burning mainly fat and to keep it doing this even after the exercise is over. "Low intensity" means about 25-30% of "VO2 max". (See the discussion starting on page 279.)
• "Strength" exercises tend to prevent "diet slowdown" as you lose weight. (See the discussion starting on page 284 .)
• The right kind of eating after exercising helps to keep the body burning mostly fat for its energy needs. (See the discussion starting on page 282.)
• Of course, all exercise burns more Calories and tends to "get you in shape".

You will find an in-depth discussion of these effects along with the research and references in MORE ON... EXERCISE on page 275 in Part Two. 

Using the Exercise Factor

If you're like me, the mere thought of exercise causes not just stress, but distress. J But you can relax, because on the Multi-Diet you don't need to start exercising right away. (Whew!: J) First you get the other vital factors under control by using the ideas and techniques we've discussed earlier. This is important because if they're not under control The Beast will be wide-awake fighting your attempts to "waste" its short supply of vital nutrients on producing energy for mere exercise. And if one thing ought to be clear by now, we Multi-Dieters don't fight The Beast. We trick it, divert it, manage it, use it---but we never fight it. (We leave the hopeless battles and lost causes to all those purveyors of various Heroic Diets.)

After you've used the other vital factors to control The Beast, then you should begin exercising. That's when you'll probably actually begin to enjoy exercise---though at first you may still have to "push" yourself a little to get going.

Remember also that you are not exercising to burn calories or to "get in shape" (although if you want to---go for it!). At this early stage you are mainly using exercise as feedback to better manage The Beast.

Later you may want to get into more serious regular exercise to really peel off pounds. Before you do that however, please read MORE ON... EXERCISE on page 275 in order to avoid certain pitfalls that can erase many of the benefits that such exercise will have.

You don't need to do very much exercise to get most of these "indicator" benefits. One way I do it is to jog very easily either in place or around the room for 20 minutes listening to an audiotape, the radio, or even watching TV. [Note: Jogging for 20 minutes burns about 100 Calories.] Alternatively, when the weather's nice, I take a brisk walk around my neighborhood. I never do either of these things vigorously enough to break a sweat or even breathe hard. If you can do this much exercise without having to fight with yourself to get started (or to keep going) then you can be pretty sure that you've got solid control of the other vital factors. Conversely, if you begin to notice that you "just don't feel like it" for more than a day or two, you should suspect that The Beast is beginning to feel deprived of some nutrient that it needs. You should then focus on that problem and fix whatever it is.

One other point that you should understand is that the Exercise Factor becomes progressively more important as you lose weight. The reason for this is that as your excess weight shrinks, so does your Calorie deficit, so you lose the fat that's left more slowly. It is partly for this reason that traditional "dieter's lore" states that "the last five pounds" are always the hardest. (See the discussion of DIET SLOWDOWN on page 157 in Part Two.)

Rule-of-Thumb for The Exercise Factor

Pick a convenient time and plan to get about 20 minutes of light exercise at that time every day. Try not to miss more than one or two days a week.

As always, if you know, believe, or even suspect that you might have any type of abnormal medical condition, please have a doctor monitor your physical status while you are on any diet or exercise program. I want you to lose that fat, not your health.

You will find a much more in-depth discussion of these and other issues along with the research and references, in MORE ON... EXERCISE on page 275 in Part Two. You may turn to that chapter now and come back here afterward, or just continue on in Part One.

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Calorie and Nutrient Tracking

When you are "heavy" (more than 30 pounds above ideal) the "1500-Calorie per day" and other Multi-Diet rules of thumb suggested above work very well because the "energy dynamics" of your body weight are in your favor. (I know it's hard to believe that anything about your weight is in your favor, but it's true in this one case. I explain this in MORE ON... BODY WEIGHT & CALORIES on page 139 in Part Two.)

But, when you are less than about 10-15 pounds overweight, these rules of thumb are not really precise enough---you will get much better results with the other methods discussed in Part Two.

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