Smash fat faster

By Lou Schuler

Not long ago I found myself in a situation you can probably identify with. My family and I were on a weekend trip with another family, and for breakfast I made myself a four-egg omelet. I fixed a bowl of fruit as a side and then sat down to eat as our friends looked on in horror. One of them asked, politely, why I ate that much. "Because I'm hungry," I said between bites. If I didn't eat this much now, I explained, I'd be crazy hungry later.

But what they really wanted to know was how I could get away with eating that much. I was the leanest adult in the room—and yet I ate more than the others. Logically, people who are lean must eat less. Right? Otherwise they wouldn't be lean. What could be simpler?

That's what Dr Bernard Gutin believed back in 2000, when he began his study of 800 teenagers. The goal was to look at the relationship of diet and physical activity to risk factors for cardiovascular disease. "We thought exercise and diet would play a role by making kids less likely to get fat and less likely to develop risk factors for these adult diseases," he says. "We assumed the kids who ate the most would be the fattest." But they weren't.

Instead, Gutin and his team at the Medical College of Georgia found that the kids who ate the most were typically the leanest. In some cases, the fattest kids actually ate less than their lean counterparts.

Naturally, the researchers assumed that physical activity would explain the discrepancy. "We thought the leanest kids must be exercising a lot more; so even though they were eating more, they were also moving more," Gutin says.

But that wasn't entirely true either. Total physical activity—the amount of time the kids spent up and moving—wasn't a strong predictor of which kids would be leaner than others.

What mattered was how much vigorous exercise they did—how much time they spent running, jumping, lifting, and playing sports.

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THIS SEEMED IMPROBABLE AT FIRST. BUT EVEN a few minutes a day of high-effort exercise was enough to separate the leanest teenagers from the fattest. How could that be?

But before we talk about why this matters, let's start with an important qualifier: The leanest kids didn't necessarily weigh less than the fattest ones. But they did have better body composition—that is, more muscle and bone, and less fat. And the only factor that explains it is the amount of exercise that had them moving fast, elevating their heart rate, and forcing their muscles to work hard.

Now here's why this article is billed as a weight-loss story, not a fitness piece: Sometime in the late 20th century, health and nutrition experts decided that most people weigh more than they should. An estimated 500 million adults are now considered obese, and that's just in Cleveland. (Just kidding, Cleveland; it's the worldwide estimate.) They tell us we're all overweight because we eat more than we should. The obvious solution seemed to be: Eat less, and then weigh less as a result.

You're considered overweight if your body mass index, or BMI, is between 25 and 29.9. For a 5'10" guy, the overweight range is 174 to 208 pounds. Anything more is classified as obese. (Check your BMI here.) If you're an athlete, a serious lifter, or just a guy who's active and not obviously thin, you're probably "overweight." Chances are you've been told as much by a well-meaning doctor.

And yet according to a 2013 CDC review, people who are "overweight" actually have a lower risk of mortality than people who fall in the normal BMI range. The researchers were at a loss to explain why heavier people might live longer. One possibility is that their higher percentage of lean mass helps make them stronger. And there's plenty of evidence that stronger people live longer and have lower risks of cancer and heart disease. In fact, muscular strength is connected with reduced risks of almost every health condition associated with cardiovascular disease.

Most important, stronger people tend to have less body fat generally and less belly fat specifically. In other words, they're leaner not because they weigh less but because they have more muscle mass. Once you have that muscle, you can use it to attack the fat that covers it up.