According to a recent study from the University of Cambridge, lack of exercise is twice as deadly as obesity!

Lead study author, Ulf Ekelund, from the Epidemiological Research Unit at the University of Cambridge, estimated that eradicating physical inactivity would have twice as great a positive impact on early mortality as eradication of obesity. His data suggest that it is far more important to increase the number of people exercising than it is to reduce the number of people that are obese.

The good news is that the same exercise that decreases early mortality is the exercise that prevents us from gaining weight.

These data come from a 12-year-long study measuring height, weight, waist circumference and self-reported levels of physical activity in 334,000 men and women. The researches found that all it takes to decrease the incidence of premature death was for people to engage in a moderate amount of physical activity (a moderately active lifestyle) rather than no significant physical activity (a completely sedentary lifestyle). They reported that exercise that burns only an average of around 100 calories could decrease the risk of early death by between 16 and 30 percent.

Of course, the benefits of exercise go way beyond prevention of early death. Moderate exercise improves mental function, reduces risk of many debilitating diseases including diabetes, improves your immune system, significantly decreases your risk for cancer and dramatically improves your quality of life.

If you ask anyone that exercises regularly, they will say their main complaint is that they don’t have more time for exercise. Unlike most other activities, at the end of a day, people almost never say “I wish I didn’t exercise today.”

Something worth thinking about.

Gastric bypass surgery was popularized more than 30 years ago. Today it is recognized as the most common, most successful weight loss procedure in the world. And the dramatic results experienced by gastric bypass patients make it easy to see why. Over the course of just 2 years, most patients lose between 70% and 80% of all excess weight. The surgery is so effective, in fact, that many people who undergo the procedure have reported continued results up to 20 years later.

Patients are advised to follow strict dietary guidelines, as this is the best way to promote and maintain weight loss in the days, weeks, and months following surgery. The dietary guidelines for patients change with time, particularly as they pertain to re-introducing more foods into your diet. This is generally referred to as a “staged” approach, and it progresses from liquids to pureed foods to soft foods to solid foods over time.

Foods to Avoid Long-Term

At about the 8-week mark after your gastric bypass surgery, your system will be ready for firmer food. However, there are some foods that will always be more difficult to process than others. We advise patients to avoid these as much as possible:

• Tough meats
• Bread
• Fried food
• Dried fruits
• Stringy or fibrous vegetables
• Popcorn
• Nuts / seeds
• Carbonated beverages
• Anything high in fat or sugar

As with any surgery, the way your body reacts may differ from the way another person’s reacts. As such, we recommend taking the process slowly. Don’t rush the reintroduction of food into your diet. Instead, try “new” foods one at a time. You’ll quickly learn what your stomach can and can’t handle. Foods you used to eat regularly may now cause nausea, stomach pain, or vomiting. On the other hand, foods you used to have no appetite for may be ones your body now craves and loves.

Pro Tip: Some foods will only cause discomfort temporarily. Certain foods may be hard to tolerate at first, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to reintroduce them into your diet later on. Don’t be discouraged! It’s a learning process that you’ll adapt to over time.

For more information about gastric bypass surgery, contact us at The N.E.W. Program for a consultation.

Imagine yourself at your Best Weight, and then imagine 2 or 3 physical activities that you would be able to do if you were at that weight, but that you can’t do now. Use these activities to get an idea of the exercise regimen you need in order to achieve these goals.

Principle – Think about the 2-or-3 most energetic activity goals and this should help you identify your exercise plans. If you expect to be able to participate in energetic activities for fun, then you need your exercise pattern to be about twice as strenuous as the most energetic activities that you hope to do.

Principle – Toned muscles in a healthy weight person have a high metabolism and burn calories very effectively. These toned muscles will minimize development of body fat, help balance your blood sugar, and prevent weight gain. Being at a healthy weight and having an rewarding exercise pattern that will keep your muscles toned is the “Holly Grail of Weight Control.”

The physiologic definition of exercise is based on what happens when your muscles burn calories in order to generate energy. Oxygen is required to burn calories and generate energy. Oxygen is absorbed through your lungs, concentrated in your blood, and then pumped out to your body by your heart.

When your muscles work hard, they need more energy, and they need more oxygen to burn calories and generate this energy. To provide the oxygen you breath faster and your heart pumps faster. By using the extra oxygen your heart and lungs provide, your muscles burn more calories and generate more energy, allowing them to work harder.

All physical activities result in an increased demand by your muscles for energy, but I define exercise as the level of activity where your muscles begin to adapt in order to improve their capacity for work. In other words, activity does not result in your muscles increasing their ability to do things. Exercise, on the other hand, results in a sustained increase in your physical abilities.

For exercise to occur, you need an activity that takes you outside of your comfort zone. When you are in your comfort zone you are able to breath easily and can carry on a conversation in a normal tone, your heart rate isn’t fast (less than 100 bpm), and you don’t sweat. Activities within your comfort zone are easy, or can be defined as “easy exercise.” Once you go beyond your comfort zone you are doing moderate exercise, or more. In order to perform moderate exercise, you breath more rapidly and it’s difficult to talk in a relaxed, casual manner. When you perform strenuous exercise, you begin to “huff and puff”, your heart rate climbs higher, and your body begins to sweat harder to give off all the extra heat it’s creating by burning up calories.

Moderately strenuous exercise results in your muscles growing and toning, increasing their ability to burn more calories, and your metabolism increases. The level of exercise required to achieve the “moderately strenuous” level varies based on your baseline level of fitness. Trained athletes need to perform some pretty impressive exercises in order to push themselves outside of their comfort zone. Someone that’s out of shape, and just beginning to exercise, doesn’t have to perform at that same level in order to get the exercise needed to improve. Regardless of your starting point, everyone needs to go beyond their comfort zone in order to improve their fitness with exercise.

If you aren’t breathing hard, your heart rate is not increased, and you aren’t sweating, then you are not exercising. Checking your heart rate is a reasonably good way to know how hard you’re exercising. Easy exercise begins with a heart rate above 100, and moderately strenuous exercise (often called aerobic exercise) begins with a heart rate above about 120.

Scientific studies on how to maintain weight loss have shown that moderately strenuous exercise (HR>120) on a regular basis (at least 5 times per week), sustained for at least 30 minutes, is required to prevent weight regain. This varies from person to person, but the best way to think about it is, if you want to avoid weight gain, have a fitness program that includes moderately strenuous exercise on a regular basis.

To be safe, evaluate your own level of health and fitness before beginning an exercise program. If you have health concerns always consult with your physician to be sure exercise is safe.

Most books about dieting will doom you to failure. They give you rules to follow that, once broken, make you feel like a cheater. That’s not what I do in my clinic and that’s not the purpose of my book “World’s Greatest Weight Loss.”

Millions of people buy self-help books on dieting and weight loss, and try to follow magic formulas that rarely, if ever, turn out to be magic. And when they can’t follow the rules listed in the book, they blame themselves and say, “I’ve failed.”

Some of the “experts” writing such books are people who have lost weight successfully and then promote their habits as the answer for everyone. Other weight-loss experts are scientists who have studied the science of food, obesity and disease, and have come up with a set of rules based on lab experiments.

The problem is that these habits and rules rarely take into account how people really want to live. They impose a set of rules that are outside most people’s needs and desires. This is a formula for failure.

As a physician who has dedicated my professional career to weight control, it’s clear to me that my patients are the strong ones. They aren’t like all the other obese people that try one diet after another, fail, pretend for a while that it doesn’t matter, and then find another magical diet to try and repeat this pattern over and over again. My patients aren’t willing to pretend it doesn’t matter, and they’ve decided to stop following failed diet formulas. They are the ones determined to find a better answer, a different strategy.

Weight-loss surgery is not the answer for everyone; it’s certainly not the only solution and it’s definitely not the easy way out. But, for those struggling with obesity and not finding success using other methods, surgery may be your best answer.

Before reading my book, there is one scientifically supported fact that I want you to know. Bariatric surgery is currently the single most successful method for obese people to achieve long-term weight loss. It routinely succeeds when all other methods have failed, making it truly the world’s greatest weight loss method available.

“It’s not so much that a person wins, but that they refuse to lose, that results in success.”

Brian Quebbemann, M.D.