Sometimes, walking is more beneficial than running

One of the things I learnt during my fat loss journey is the concept that less is more.

I was intending to cut fats very quickly but yet I did not want to sacrifice my health, as well as my lean muscle.

One of the most common ways nowadays is to cut caloric intake by 500 to 1000 kcals, as well as to do intensive cardio or HIIT.

Ironically, that's the exact wrong thing to do.

What happens is that you start to feel lethargic. Your body's base metabolic rate might have been 1800 kcals. What this means is that without exercise, your body burns 1800 kcals a day. When you cut your intake by 500 kcals, your body actually adapts by burning significantly less energy, hence causing lethargy.

The next most common way is to do intensive cardio. Things like spin class, body combat, or even High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT workouts. Have you ever been for an intense swimming lesson and then feeling very hungry after that? That's what happens when you go for something intensive. Your body uses a lot of "quick" energy source, and you feel drained. In fact, if you chose to grit through and not supply your body with replenishment, you actually start to lose muscle mass.

What happens is you get a double whammy of losing strength and feeling like shit everyday. When you step on the scale 8 weeks later, you might have lost 8kg, but 3-4 kg of that was lean muscle mass.

The more effective way is to actually trick the body. My weapon of choice is the keto diet, which essentially cuts carbs to 0, and increases your fat intake to 50% or more of your calories. That might be a bit too extreme for most people, so another easier way is to do intermittent daily fasting, or to have 1 fast day a week. My suggestion is to do the 1 fast day a week, as well as to eat 1 meal a day for the remaining 6 days. To be clear, this means you do not eat any food for 1 day a week, and for the rest of the days, you skip breakfast and dinner. When you do that, your body adapts. (Watch this for some clarity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhmtoAYVRSo) It starts to realise that the cycle has changed. And then it starts to realise that your whole body is filled with fats and fuel. Interestingly, you actually don't feel lethargic, and for me, I actually sleep lesser, because suddenly at 11pm, your body is burning fats as fuel and hence your brain remains awake.

In terms of workout, since you are in a severe caloric deficit, you shouldn't be doing workouts that burn a lot of "quick" energy, but instead, you should conserve those "quick" energy for heavy weights training, while doing low intensity cardio in order to trigger beta oxidation. (Lift Heavy for Fat Loss https://www.alexfergus.com/blog/11-reasons-why-you-need-to-lift-heavy-for-fat-loss)

In simple terms, you should be skipping all HIIT workouts and instead focus your intensive workouts into heavy lifts in order to preserve muscle mass, while doing slow cardio that is below 60% of your maximum heart rate, in order to let your body slowly convert the inefficient fats into fuel. It is proven that slow walks are better in this, and when you increase the intensity of the walks into jogs and sprints, you start to switch energy source to "quick" energy again. (Read more here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24669314/)

If enough people comment, I might leave some photos.... But what I am trying to say is that over the 11 weeks, I went from

88.4kg @ 27.8% body fat, visceral fat of 15 and a basal metabolic of 1,797 kcal

to 74.2kg @ 18.0% body fat, visceral fat of 9 and a basal metabolic of 1,698 kcal.

This means I went from

24.57kg fat mass and 63.82kg lean mass

to 13.35kg fat mass and 60.84kg lean mass.

For those keen to research more, read up on

• Intermittent fasting,
• Once a week fasting,
• Low Intensity Steady State Cardio
• Beta Oxidation of Fatty Acid
• and for the adventurous, keto diet and exogenous ketones.

PS: I am not a certified personal trainer, but I love to read. I take medical journals seriously, and I take my health metrics more seriously that a person's perception of effectiveness. I go for blood tests twice a year. We can have a discussion if the above sounds intriguing to you.

Now I digress. However, what these 11 weeks brought to me wasn't so much the dieting or the losing weight. It was the realisation that we sometimes have to do things that we think are counter-intuitive. For example, many of us might have chosen to do 30 minutes of HIIT, versus doing 2 hours of slow walks, because we will give reasons like it's more efficient, and you don't have that much time in a day. However, the more efficient use of the 30 minutes, could result into an inefficient use of the remaining 23 hours and 30 minutes.

During those slow walks, I use the time to read up on news, to catch up with things that I seldom do when I was caught up with the hustle and bustle of my day. It gives me time to think and strategise for the next few days. Likewise, it has taught me that sometimes, I should not think about the most optimised way of doing something, but instead, to take my time with it.

Sometimes, in order to move ahead, we need to step away from the grind in order to see the bigger picture.

Have you done things that seem counter-intuitive in the beginning, but it all makes sense in the end?