Conquer Your Weight

Dr. Sarah Stombaugh: This is Dr. Sarah Stombaugh and you are listening to the Conquer Your Weight podcast. Announcer: Welcome to the Conquer Your Weight podcast, where you will learn to understand your mind and body so you can achieve long-term weight loss. Here's your host, obesity medicine physician and life coach, Dr. Sarah Stombaugh. Dr. Sarah Stombaugh: Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode. We are talking about why you should lift weights. I'm really excited about this topic. We've had a couple of conversations about exercise before, but we've not had a specific conversation about the role of resistance training or weightlifting strength training, however you want to describe that. And that is so, so important honestly just for our health in general, but especially when it comes to the weight loss journey. So today we are going to be diving into should you do it, why should you do it? How can you go about implementing that, especially if it's something that's brand new for you. We'll talk about some of the myths that will come up with strength training so that you can hear this podcast and feel confident in taking the next step to help improve your health. So to answer the first question, should you do strength training? The short answer is yes. Generally speaking, there is no one for whom we would not recommend strength training. Everybody should be doing some amount of strength training. It can be officially in a gym lifting weights, which is how we often think of it. But there are people for whom they have very active jobs or people who are taking care of young children where they might be doing a lot of lifting just not of traditional weights. And that can be okay as well as long as it is something that is happening really consistently. But the question people ask is, why should it be doing this? What benefit is it going to provide for me? So I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about the role of muscle versus the role of fat in our body. So when we think about body weight, a lot of times we think about losing weight, for example, and we say, oh, I'd like to lose weight. When we say that, what we actually mean is that we would like to lose fat mass. We would like maybe our body to be smaller, but when we lose weight, we really want to be conscious that we're not losing our lean muscle mass. So our muscle mass is very important. We have muscles throughout our body, sort of the traditional muscles that you think of like biceps and quads and hamstrings and things that we might do traditional lifts of, but really we have muscles in the entire part of throughout our entire skeleton in order to support our bones, support our body so that we can function in the way that we need to. And one of the things that happens is that after midlife, there is often a decrease of muscle mass that happens. This is normal physiology. So if you look at someone who continues to maintain the same activity level, even as such, there is often a decrease of muscle mass that starts to happen into the forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond. So it is important whatever stage life that you're in right now to work on your muscle mass that you can support yourself as you're advancing into your years. So when we think about the role of muscle mass, it is there to support our body, to keep us strong so that we can walk, so that we can lift things, that we can go about our daily activities. And it is a very metabolically healthy organ or a system that is supporting us in having a strong metabolism. Muscles burn a lot of energy compared to fat mass. So when we think about the number that we see on this scale, a lot of times what's interesting is that muscle is really dense. So if you look at say, five pounds of muscle for example, it's this really tight little brick when you compare that to five pounds of fat is this big and globular thing. And so when we think about losing weight, one of the things that happens is that if we've incorporated a lot of strength training, resistance training that weightlifting into our weight loss journey, we may find that the number on the scale is not shifting dramatically, but we start to see changes in terms of the size of our body. So maybe noticing that our waist size is smaller, our clothing is fitting a little bit looser, and that's because there's this transition where we are losing fat mass and gaining muscle mass. So the number on the scale may not be giving you a full picture of what's actually happening. One of the best ways you can track that is by looking at body composition. So there are body composition machines, ones that are clinical versus ones that you could even have in your own home, and those are great ways to get a general sense of what is your muscle mass versus what is your fat mass. And so as you're losing weight, you can see, is that preferentially coming from your fat mass? Are you able to support your muscle mass as you are losing weight, which is really, really important. If we are not conscious about supporting our muscle mass during weight loss, one of the things that can happen is that even though the number on the scale may be lower, we don't actually see the improvement in our metabolic health that we would necessarily expect as we're losing weight. And the reason why is that muscle is much more metabolically healthy compared to fat mass. So when we think of things like diabetes, we think of cardiovascular disease, things like high cholesterol, high blood pressure. We think of elevated waist circumference for example. All of these things are tied actually to fat mass and not actually specifically to our weight overall. So someone's weight may be independent of their health, and that's because we're thinking about this body fat percentage. So to bring that back, the goal is be aware of where your body is functioning right now, and as you're losing weight, how can we support your muscles in order to maintain them or possibly even grow them? And there are two things that are going to be really important there. One is the resistance training piece. The other is making sure that you're emphasizing protein in the diet. So those two pieces together are going to be the best way that you can support your muscles. And then as you're losing weight, you are now preferentially losing fat mass, which is really the goal. So then you see not only is the number on the scale going down, but you may find that your body is a smaller size, your clothes are fitting differently and you'll see those metabolic health improvements. So seeing improvement in your blood sugars, in your blood pressures in your cholesterol, for example. So the muscle versus fat thing is really important. We also talked though about the fact that muscle is more metabolically active. So what that means is that muscles use more energy compared to the same amount of fat. And so when you have more muscle on your body, your body has a higher caloric need every day, which what that means is that you can eat more food and so your body will need more fuel in order to maintain that muscle. And we can be careful in working with that muscle balance such that when you're losing weight, if you can still stay in a slight deficit, your body is still able though to eat a significant amount of food compared to if you weren't doing the resistance training. So resistance training helps with maintaining the need that our body has for calories, for that energy so that we don't have to just starve ourself in order to lose weight because that can be one of the things that happens when we lose weight without any nod to resistance training in doing that muscle piece. If our body is losing muscle mass as we're losing weight, our body over time will have lower and lower metabolic needs. And so this is one of the things that happens if someone's in a diet, let's say they're eating 2000 calories a day and they decide I'm going to go in a 1500 calorie per day diet, and that's working really well for them for a period of time they're losing weight, but now they find at 1500 calories per day, they're not losing weight, they've hit a plateau, so they drop their calories even more. They're eating 1200 calories per day, and as they're eating 1200 calories per day, that's great. They're losing weight, but they feel bad, they're hungry all the time. They might start realizing they're cold all the time. And there can be this sort of endless cycle where a metabolic rate will be decreasing if we are not cognizant about that muscle mass piece. So what happens with working on our muscle mass and making sure that we are supporting that is that we can continue to have an elevated metabolic rate so that we're able to drop our calories just slightly rather than having to adhere to an ever lower diet number of calories in our diet. So that is a really, really important piece, making sure that we're supporting our body with that muscle mass, both for the sake of our health, for the sake of our hunger, and it can make a huge difference in the way our body feels just in terms of energy, in terms of strength and all of that. So a lot of people may be thinking, okay, I get it. I know that I need to do resistance training, but I have no idea what that means or how to do that. And as I mentioned at the very beginning, that can look like a couple of different things that can look like a very formal training program, something done at home or something done at the gym with traditional weights or that can look like non-traditional lifting as long as it's something that is repetitive and it's something that it's intentionally done throughout the day. So interestingly, as a mom of young children, I honestly think that having a baby is probably the best weight training regimen you can go through because you start with let's say the seven pound child and they slowly grow and over time you are getting used to lifting an eight pound child, a 10 pound child, a 15 pound child, a 20 pound child. And I will tell you, even my now 4-year-old just absolutely loves snuggles and he is about 44 pounds, and so I am used to lifting 44 pounds in order to lift him up and support his body weight. But it's interesting that training program ends when your children no longer desire to be lifted up and carried as often. And so that does need to be carried into a more formal exercise training program if you desire to keep up some of those benefits. So for a mother, for example, for someone who's working in a pretty labor intensive job where they're doing lifting, maybe they're stocking shelves, maybe they're building things or a handyman, you're going to see that lifting piece come in in other ways, and that is excellent. So we don't necessarily have to have a formal exercise regimen as long as it is getting built in regularly in other ways, but if it's not, you want to make sure that you're doing that in order to support your health. So like I said, that can be a home program, that could be something done at the gym. Honestly, if you have never done any sort of weight training before, the best way to do it is to look for support. That can either be an online program, sometimes even going onto YouTube and typing in five minute, 10 minute upper body weightlifting regimen for beginners or something like that will give you some prompts for exercises that you can start doing at home with small hand weights or even using things that you have around the house like canned goods or bottles of water or gallon of milk or things like that that can help to simulate that lifting even without using a traditional dumbbell for example. Or that can be something that you do in a gym. I really recommend if you've never stepped foot into a gym before, if you've never used any of the weight training equipment, it is a good idea to either have a introduction to that with someone who knows what they're doing. Ideally, a personal trainer who works in that gym that can give you an idea of these are the different machines, these are going to be helping to support different parts of your body and then making a plan that you can sort of get into that routine. So some people like to continue working with a personal trainer long term because that allows them to have that accountability, have that person who can give them guidance, give them suggestions on how to adjust their technique. For example, other people are more interested in doing short-term, maybe four to successions just to get started understanding what are the different lifts that they're going to do. And weight training can look like a lot of different things for most people getting started. I usually recommend two days per week, and when you're doing two days per week, you can do a whole body workout during that time if you're starting to do more often. The thing I want to point out is that it is important to make sure you have plenty of time to recover between weightlifting activities. So if you wanted to do three or four days per week on those days, you may not be doing whole body, but you may be actually having two days that are focused on upper body and two days that are focused on lower body, for example. That doesn't mean those are necessarily the only days that you are moving your body. You can still decide on other days that you're walking or biking or doing other movements that you really enjoy, but that weight training specific piece, aiming for two to four days is a really great place that can help to support your goals. And if that's something that you can keep up long-term, it's going to support your muscles, it's going to support your bones. One of the best things we can do to reduce the risk of osteoporosis or osteopenia, which is decreased bone density is working on our muscle mass. When we work on our muscles, when we do that resistance training, the muscles pull on the bones, that pulling signal on the bones, get the bones a signal that they need to strengthen. And so when we're consistently doing that throughout our body, our body is not only building its muscles but also strengthening its bones. So when we think about our transition to elderly years, and you may have heard me say before, when I think about the reason that I do strength training, it is for my old lady goals. I have young children, I do a lot of walking and then playing with them. I'm lifting with them, I'll do squats with them, I'm dancing with them. I feel like in a lot of ways I have some of that built in. But going to the gym and doing formal weight training for me is about making sure that I build and maintain my strength in order to reduce my risk of osteoporosis and in order to keep my muscles as strong as possible so that I can do things like lift a suitcase into an overhead compartment as I continue to get older, that I can go about all of my daily activities that I can squat down to do, gardening, that I can do things that are really important to me because I've consistently built those muscles throughout my life. And if you feel like, oh my gosh, I'm 60, I'm 70, I'm 80 and I'm not doing this right now, that's okay. You can absolutely get started at any time. The best time to get started is now. So you could have done it in the past, and if you didn't, that's okay. You can get started today and make a huge difference in your life, improving your mobility, improving your strength, and changing your body composition so that not only does your body feel healthier, it may also be stronger and just feel like it's functioning for you in the way that you need it to. So a lot of times too, it's paying attention to some of those short-term goals, paying attention to after an exercise regimen, how is your body feeling? Does your body feel more energized? Does your body feel strong? Do you find that over time there's maybe less achiness of the joints that your body is moving for you in a way that just feels easier, feels better? That is exactly what we are looking for. If you start to notice, certainly after exercise, you're going to have some muscle soreness that is normal. It should be a comfortable, I am unaware of this soreness. If it's a soreness that's like, I literally can't walk because I am so sore, then you have overdone it in a gym. And if you were not working with a personal trainer, that's a really good way to take a step back and make sure that you're having someone who's helping you to set realistic goals that are going to support you without putting you at risk for injury. We do know that our risk for injury can increase if we're doing activities that are new to us and especially if we're doing them improperly. So that also points to making sure that you start low, take it slow, build slowly over time, and then get the support that you need. If you find that you have a joint or a tendon that's really bothering you, it's a good idea to see maybe your primary care physician or an orthopedic or sports medicine doctor in order to evaluate that. A lot of times if you're able to treat it early, you can stop a injury from fully happening. And so that's certainly a good idea as well. But hopefully this has been a good overview for you about why exercising is such an important thing. I do want to address one myth that we think about all the time, and this is this idea that I'm going to get bulky. And so I just want to share, I think especially for women, there is this concern that if I go to the gym and I lift weights, I'm going to put on muscle and I'm not going to lose any of my fat mass, so my body will just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, certainly for some people, that is the goal. If you think about people who are doing power lifting or doing certain regimens where they're trying to build their muscle, it may be their goal for their body to get bigger, but most people, their goal is not necessarily for that to happen. And certainly for the people who are listening to my podcast, usually their goal is for their body to get smaller. So that's where pairing diet and exercise together is such an important thing. Making sure that you have nutrition that is going to support your muscle, support your weight goals, and really giving you that overall health and wellness support so that your body is able to build muscle while reducing fat mass. So you find that your body becomes leaner, becomes stronger, but isn't feeling like it's just getting bulky and thick. So that's absolutely possible if you're finding that's challenging, that's where it's really great to employ the help of someone like myself who's a board certified obesity medicine physician. If you were looking for support with that, I would love to see you as a patient in my practice. I'm accepting new patients right now. There's never been a better time to enroll. Come on over to my website. It's www.sarahstambaughmd.com. I just brought a personal trainer and health coach into my practice. She is amazing. And so we've been supporting our patients even more with some of these things. And so if you are interested in getting one-on-one support, working with people who are going to help tailor advice to exactly what you need for your life, for your busy schedule, we would love to support you with that. So visit us at sarahstambaughmd.com. You can fill out the new patient form on our website. I would love to see you over there. Otherwise, I will see you all next week. Take care.