Exercise and dieting are mutually exclusive—no they aren’t

Real-life example: One day the receptionist at the gym where I used to consult came to me with an unusual request. A man had asked to see me, but he didn’t want to go on a diet. He just wanted to talk! The receptionist wanted to check if I was ok with this. ‘How does he look?’ I asked. Was this just a ploy to line maaro me? ‘No, no.’ She assured me. ‘His son is in the 8th standard and is working out in the gym too. He lost his wife recently and just wanted to discuss some health issues with you before committing to a diet.’ ‘All right,’ I told her. ‘If you vouch for him I will see him but only for ten minutes.’ (I had all the time in the world but was zealously learning to be a professional.)

‘Hello madam,’ the old man said. ‘Thanks for seeing me. I just want you to look at me.’ He then asked me what I thought his age was. Now I was a smart girl and had learned within months of setting up my consultancy NEVER to answer this question. ‘Well I don’t take guesses, why don’t you tell me your age,’ I said. ‘I am 48.’ Oops! He looked like he was 60. ‘How much do I weigh?’ Another question I had learned not to answer. ‘I weigh 68 kilos,’ he told me. He looked 88 to 90 kilos to me. Then, he took out a Bombay Times paper cutting from his pocket. He pointed to a large advertisement for a chain of weight loss clinics that had a ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture of a man.

‘Look, that’s me.’ ‘Congratulations,’ I managed. He looked like a superstar in the pic as compared to what he looked like in reality. He was regarded as an inspiration to all the other clients at the center, I was made aware, and the weight loss chain was flying him to Delhi to inaugurate their new franchise and hosting him at a five-star hotel! ‘That’s great.’ I said. But what did he want from me? ‘I want you to come with me to the changing room and take a look at me.’ What? This was the first time a client had asked to strip in front of me. (But it’s not the only reason why this incident is memorable.) Having been in the fitness industry for over three years I was used to people describing their bodies, sex life, toilet rendezvous, etc in detail to me, but this was a first. I accompanied him to the men’s locker room and he took his clothes off.?

Flop! Out fell his stomach, towards his knees. ‘This,’ he held the jiggly wiggly mass in his hands. ‘I want to get rid of this.’ ‘All right, let's go out and talk,’ I said. I managed to mask my emotions but I felt disgusted and sympathy for him at the same time, and with alarming intensity. What had this man done and why? ‘What have you been doing?’ I asked. ‘Well, I weighed 116 kilos when I lost my wife a year ago. My son is in the 8th standard and it’s very difficult for me to look after him alone. I am making very good money in my business and I want to remarry because my son needs a mother.’

‘Really?’ I said to myself. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘nobody was going to marry a 116 kilos widower with a teenage son.’ Friends and family asked him to lose weight. So he paid over a lakh at the weight loss center and enrolled in a 6-month program where all he had to do was lie down on a table for 20 to 30 minutes daily while painless electric currents worked on him, and go on a crash diet where he ate barely anything the whole day: channa, buttermilk, and some dal. To speed up the process, he was asked to go on an hour-long walk (no gym of course) every morning and evening, if he wanted faster ‘results’. Then the center suggested another program: using firming gels for his belly. But after spending close to half a lakh for the gels and massage therapy, his stomach still sagged.

So the center suggested a tummy tuck and asked him to increase the duration of his walks to 1? hours, twice a day. ‘I have started the walks but am not sure about the tuck. It will cost me a lot, and funnily I don’t actually feel good being at 68 kilos. I always thought I would feel great even if I reached 80 kilos. I have never been so thin all my life, so why do you think I am not looking great after such successful weight loss?’ (Incidentally, he had also lost most of his hair. For which the center had an oil and massage program of course, and a weaving program too: he had signed up for the oil and massage program already.) I gave him a lecture on how he had lost all his lean body weight. ‘Your bones must be hollow and your muscles have shrunk. You must start training with weights to rebuild lost muscle and bones. Of course, you will need to go very slow. The diet plan that I put you on will be very different from what you have been following and will make you gain some weight. Are you ok with that?’?

‘Yes I am,’ he pleaded, ‘I just need to feel better.’ We ended the conversation with me warning him that he really shouldn’t be walking so much—didn’t he do any work in the day? ‘I have good staff,’ he said. ‘But why do you want me to cut down on the walking?’ ‘Because,’ I replied, ‘your weight-bearing joints are weak after the crash diet and not strong enough to bear the stresses that three hours of walking would place on them.’ I asked if he really planned to go to the Delhi opening. ‘This weight loss has done you no good.’ ‘I have good relationships with everybody at the center and they have helped me achieve an impossible task [I was just beginning to understand what goes on inside the mind of a fat body] of losing weight so out of gratitude I will go.’ ‘But you will fool many others,’ I argued. ‘Yeah but…’

I left it at that. A week later my receptionist told me that the man had called to cancel his appointment. ‘Rujuta, that man won’t come today. He went for a walk yesterday morning, tripped over a speed breaker, fell down, and suffered multiple fractures on his arm.’ ‘What?’ So here was a man who had just lost a lot of lean weight: lack of exercise reduces neuromuscular control, while not eating in the morning and for long hours during the day reduces blood glucose levels. The combined effect of it all was that just tripping over a speed breaker, which at worst should have bruised his arm, left him with multiple fractures. The only good thing was that he didn’t go for the Delhi opening!?

Where is the bravery in losing weight? People with diarrhea lose weight. So do people with jaundice, malaria, TB, not to mention cancer, and AIDS. In fact the bigger the disease the faster the weight loss. Because we think that weight loss will make us happy, but we feel only frustrated and older (not wiser) at the end of yet another extreme diet, it comes with a heightened sense of victimization and betrayal. The minute we are ‘off’ the diet all our weight is back. Please note that this time the weight gain is only in terms of fat weight. So our body composition is now worse than ever. We have lost our muscle and bone density, and our fat weight is higher than what it was when we went on the diet. A lot of dieticians are popular because they guarantee weight loss without any exercise.

So cool na? And some advertisements even top that. No diet, no exercise, no pills, only weight loss! If you are a regular on the Mumbai local (like me), you must have entertained yourself (with someone treading on your toes, an elbow in your breast, and an umbrella poking in your back) by reading one of those ads: ‘No boss, no timing, no paperwork, no travel, no selling—earn up to Rs 100,000 per month.’ What do you think of these ads? I think the same about no exercise, no diet, no pills, only weight-loss ads. Any program which discourages you from exercising is worthless.

Being on a diet might help you lose weight, but without exercise, we lose our muscles and bone density. And the loss of bone density and muscle is aging. The human body is designed for continuous activity. The least we can do is give it 30 to 45 minutes of exercise for 3 days a week to keep it in good shape and condition. The body works on one basic principle: use it or lose it. Humans were born with a tail remember? We lost our tail because we never used it. We might soon lose out on our muscles and bone density, as we just don’t seem to use either of these live tissues.

I hated maths in school. But loved one word: corollary. It’s used in algebra all the time. Ok, so here is the corollary to the above myth: as long as you exercise it’s ok to eat whatever you want. Really think so? Do you think as long as you drive your car it doesn’t matter what you put into it; kerosene, petrol, diesel? (People are always so much smarter about their cars than their bodies.) Nope. Wrong! Now just because I use my body regularly doesn’t mean I should abuse it. So, exercise is a part of adopting a better lifestyle but it is NOT an alternative to eating right. In fact, the more people get committed to working out, the more they usually care about how to get the right nutrients to their bodies.

When you start eating healthy and exercising regularly, you will initially see a drop in your body fat but not as much in your weight. However, when you crash diet, you lose a lot of weight because your lean body weight comes down while your fat body weight remains the same, and sometimes actually increases. Fat occupies a lot of volume on the body and weighs very little. Muscle is denser, so it occupies much less space but will weigh a lot. (Compare fat to 1-kilo cotton and muscle to 1-kilo iron. Can you see what I am saying? Same weight but a big difference in their volume or the space they occupy.) This is why people often look flabby after their ‘diets’. So stop holding your body for ransom on the weighing scale. Why do you need to know how much you weigh? It is no indicator of health or fitness levels. Know that the higher the amount of lean bodyweight you carry, the greater your fat-burning capacity. Do you really want to go for ‘guaranteed’ weight loss (invariably attacking the LBW) and lose your fat-burning abilities?