 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. Welcome to part four in the Finding Your Fat Loss Sweet Spot series. We're looking at number three here, but it's part four in the video series. Physical activity and exercise, right? You've probably heard the old adage, use it or lose it. It's absolutely true. All physical activity counts and movement is the best way to protect our muscle while we lose fat. So I like to use this boardroom scenario whenever I talk about this. So each organ system, imagine these people sitting around the table basically, they have to make budget cuts. There's less income. There's less money coming in. So they have to decide what can we cut away to save cost and money and what do we have to keep? Well, I think about this in the context of your human body on a diet, right? There is less food coming in. So each organ system is sitting around the table trying to make its case for whether or not they need to be cut or decreased or not, right? So your brain's always going to say, Hey, I got nothing, I have nothing to spare, right? I'm keeping my fuel. You need to make sure that your muscles and your bones, they say the same thing, right? If you aren't using your muscles, they are fair game as a fuel source. So you want to make the case that muscle is too important to burn. Resistance training is ideal, right? Strength training preserves muscle by sending all of the right signals, right? Your body is much, much less likely to use muscle as fuel if you are stimulating muscle protein synthesis on a regular basis. It's like, why would your body do that? Why would your body say, Hey, let's use these biceps for fuel? It's like, wait a minute. We're just building them now. We're getting all these signals to stimulate muscle protein synthesis that we need it. So it doesn't make any sense to burn it for fuel. So you're making your muscle a top priority. You're basically reminding your body that it should hold onto muscle rather than using it as a fuel source. So let's look at the science behind this. Some really cool studies. All right. What does the science say? The role of diet and exercise for the maintenance of fat free mass and resting metabolic rate during weight loss. So this one looked at the percentage of weight loss that was fat versus fat free mass in three different contexts. So dieting alone, if you just go on a diet with no physical activity, no exercise for every pound of weight that was lost, up to 69% of that pound would be fat tissue, whereas the remaining 31% could originate from fat free mass. And specifically, they said the loss of muscle tissue. So you lose a pound of weight, 69% of it's fat, 31% of it is lean mass like muscle. That's called the skinny fat approach. You're losing a bunch of lean mass to get the skill moving. We talked about skinny fat in the last video. Just by adding cardio, so adding cardio vascular exercise, the equation now chains. For every pound of weight you lose, 78% of it is fat and 22% of it is fat free mass. So that's a pretty nice improvement. But here's the key. Adding resistance training. So training with weights, machines, body weight exercises, doing yoga drastically changed the equation. For every pound of weight that was lost, 97% of it was fat and only 3% of it was fat free mass. Do you now see why strength training is a big part of my programs? Do you see why I have entire sections in my intermittent fasting program about strength training? Because it's that important to make sure you're losing fat and preserving muscle. So let's look at another study. Exercise preserves lean mass and performance during severe energy deficit. The role of exercise volume and dietary protein content. So we're going to get the exercise part of it in this one. This was an extreme calorie deficit. The subjects in this study ate around 320 calories per day. So obviously a super extreme diet. But at the same time, they performed 45 minutes of one arm cranking on an ergonometer and then followed by eight hours of walking each day during the study. So the arm cranking decreased arm lean mass loss by 29%. So using the muscles of the arm decreased the amount of lean mass in the arm that was lost during the severe calorie deficit by 29%. And then the eight hours of walking reduced the loss of leg lean mass by 57%. You're sending signals to your body that your muscles are functional, your muscles are needed, so they're put on the back burner as far as a fuel source goes. So here's a quote from this study. In conclusion, concomitant, I hate that word sorry, low intensity exercise such as walking or arm cranking even during an extreme energy deficit results in remarkable preservation of lean mass. So use it or lose it. Next study. What about if we actually increase our physical activity and increase lean mass? Can we do that? Well the effects of habitual physical activity on the resting metabolic rates and body compositions of women age 35 to 50 years. So we have women age 35 to 50 years and they're put into two categories. They were classified as physically active if they did about nine hours per week of physical activity or they were classified as sedentary if they did about one hour per week of physical activity. So one group was physically active nine hours a week, the other group was physically active one hour per week. Let's look at their resting metabolic rates. We're not talking about the calories they burned with that extra activity. The active groups resting metabolic rate based on the amount of lean mass they had on their body was 1,510 calories per day. The sedentary groups resting metabolic rate was 1,443 calories per day. That's a difference of 67 calories every single day just being burned at rest. That's 24,455 calories per year. That is seven pounds of fat per year. So you take that increase in basal or resting metabolic rate but then on top of it you think about well they're also burning extra calories because they're physically active eight more hours per week. That's why the physically active group had a body fat percentage so more muscle and less fat of 18.9 percent whereas the sedentary group had a body fat percentage of 28.8 percent. So this is all the reason I need to convince people to get moving. Okay so how movement preserves muscle. So check out these videos for more details about how strength training can mean the difference between weight loss success or failure. All right so number three on our list physical activity or exercise. So next up we're going to look at the powerful effect that protein can have on making sure that you are losing the fat that you want while sparing the muscle that you need. I hope this one helped. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.