Exercise & Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

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

More On… Exercise

The “dialectic of competition”
is that yesterday's leading edge,
is today's standard practice,
and tomorrow's bare minimum.

Introduction

There is a clear, proven, cause-and-effect relationship between a healthier diet and increased physical activity. A large number of medical experiments have demonstrated that deficiencies of various vitamins and minerals will degrade both physical performance and endurance—which means energy production—not just during the exercise but also in ordinary life.

In other words, if you mismanage the nutritional Vital Factors discussed earlier, you will suffer from continuous low energy output—and turn into a couch potato. If this happens, the homeostatic phenomenon I irreverently call “The Beast” will also be constantly trying to make you eat more in order to try to get more of whichever of these Vital Factor(s) you lack. (So you become a couch potato layered with sour cream.

This means that when you get the other Vital Factors balanced, you won’t have low-energy problems anymore and exercise will begin to feel good again. Until you have the other Vital Factors balanced, it won’t. When you have them balanced, you can gain the benefits of exercise for weight loss. Until you have them balanced, you can't.

Therefore, before beginning a weight-loss exercise program, your first objective should be to put your attention onto mastering the process of getting (and keeping) the other Vital Factors balanced.

When you’ve gotten good at that, it becomes worthwhile to “push yourself” a little to see if you’ve reached the stage where exercise can directly help you lose weight. You’ll know when this happens because that’s when exercise will begin to feel “not so bad” and “sort of refreshing” and “almost kind of fun”. (Wow! ).

When you reach this stage, your Beast will no longer be “worried” about how it’s going to take care of your body’s essential needs for EFAs, protein, minerals, etc. Then it’ll “lighten up” on letting you be more active because it’ll no longer have any need to suppress your desire to be active. That’s when you’ll almost unknowingly start to do more and be more active and start burning more fat and losing more weight (assuming, of course, that you haven’t put yourself on some version of the Liar’s Diet ).

This also means that one of the greatest benefits of exercise is as an “early warning system”. When you exercise, and it feels good, you know you’ve got the other Vital Factors balanced properly. When it doesn’t feel good, you should suspect that one of them needs some attention, and you should start thinking about which one that might be—so you can fix it before The Beast wakes up and tries to fix it for you.

To summarize, exercise feels good when you’ve gotten yourself ready for it. Before this, any exercise program is just obnoxious drudgery with a very short life expectancy—much like the other aspects of  those “Heroic” diets.

At this point, if you’re not completely clear on the other Vital Factors, you should re-read at least Part One. In the rest of this chapter I assume you already understand how to handle the other Vital Factors and I go on to discuss the metabolic effect of exercise on the fat-burning process and—more importantly—what you should do to maximize that effect.

As a preview, I’ll tell you that some types of exercise burn very little fat and are also likely to make you eat more. Other types of exercise burn almost nothing but fat and additionally tend to keep your body burning fat even after you stop exercising. (As a bonus, this latter type doesn’t even increase your appetite.)

There are at least two decades of solid science demonstrating these facts. But exercising will be a waste of your time and energy if you don’t understand the differences between these two types.