Homeostasis: Why Moderation Is the Key to Health

According to author Gary Taubes in the 1 October 2007 New York magazine, whose recent book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease makes us rethink all that we know about weight loss, “despite half a century of efforts to prove otherwise, scientists still can’t say that exercise will help keep off the pounds.

This is not to say that there aren’t excellent reasons to be physically active, as these reports invariably point out. We might just enjoy exercise. We may increase our overall fitness; we may live longer, perhaps by reducing our risk of heart disease or diabetes; we’ll probably feel better about ourselves.... But there’s no reason to think that we will lose any significant amount of weight, and little reason to think we will prevent ourselves from gaining it.”

As it turns out, intense exercise stimulates our appetites, so we tend to ingest the calories that we expend. So Joan Breibart’s comment about just putting a candy dispenser on the treadmill so when we have burned 200 calories the bar pops out is not so far off the money.

“The job of determining how fuels (glucose and fatty acids) will be used, whether we will store them as fat or burn them for energy, is carried out primarily by the hormone insulin in concert with an enzyme known technically as lipoprotein lipase—LPL, for short. (Sex hormones also interact with LPL, which is why men and women fatten differently.)

In the eighties, biochemists and physiologists worked out how LPL responds to exercise. They found that during a workout, LPL activity increases in muscle tissue, and so our muscle cells suck up fatty acids to use for fuel. Then, when we’re done exercising, LPL activity in the muscle tissue tapers off and LPL activity in our fat tissue spikes, pulling calories into fat cells. This works to return to the fat cells any fat they might have had to surrender—homeostasis, in other words. The more rigorous the exercise, and the more fat lost from our fat tissue, the greater the subsequent increase in LPL activity in the fat cells. Thus, post-workout, we get hungry: Our fat tissue is devoting itself to restoring calories as fat, depriving other tissues and organs of the fuel they need and triggering a compensatory impulse to eat. The feeling of hunger is the brain’s way of trying to satisfy the demands of the body. Just as sweating makes us thirsty, burning off calories makes us hungry.”

Now, you may be thinking, “But Lynda, you always counsel us to eat well and exercise to maintain a healthy weight. What are you saying!?” What does this all mean?

My answer--Moderation is the key! If the body is programmed towards homeostasis then it is best for us to avoid the large hormonal swings caused by radical shifts in either diet or exercise. We need to eat healthy foods in smaller meals more frequently throughout the day to avoid the big drops in insulin levels that make us ravenously hungry. And we need to understand that white starchy and sugary processed foods (white rice, flour, sugar) lead to greater faster spikes in insulin levels and greater fat gains.

It is crucial that we exercise daily to keep us feeling and functioning better. Joseph Pilates always believed that exercise should be done moderately and defined physical fitness as the ability to “engage in our many and varied daily tasks with spontaneous zest and pleasure.” In other words, if you work out all the time and still worry about hurting your back or pulling a hamstring when you play football or rugby you are NOT fit!

So don’t worry that you must exercise 60 minutes a day or that there is some magic weight loss food or pill you haven’t found yet. Just eat and exercise in moderation, focusing on maintaining balance in your life and body, and good health will follow!

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