Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh my goodness, it is the end of 2023, coming right up to it. A podcast interview just came out with me and Jillian Michaels the other day on the Jillian Michaels podcast. I didn't actually know who she was. I kind of did. I was like, isn't she the Biggest Loser lady? Like the lady who was mean to everybody? But no, sheÕs amazing. I really, really liked her. Several people on my team follow her and were like, ÒOh, Susan, you're going to love her. This is going to be so great.Ó And it was, I really enjoyed getting to know her. We had a wonderful conversation, and if you are from the Jillian Michaels community and you're just visiting me for the first time here on the weekly vlog, I just want to say welcome.
The topic this week is with you in mind. It has to do with something that I stumbled on in my reading over the last month, something super eye opening on the general topic of exercise. I don't cover exercise much in the weekly vlog. Bright Line Eating¨ is mostly food focused, but exercise plays a role and especially because so many people link diet and exercise in their mind, and when they start to try to get their weight managed, they get back to the gym and they start trying to be more active and so forth. I want to address that in this week's vlog, looking at the science behind the topic of whether you can burn off calories the way people think you can. It's a really common thing. People think, ÒOh, I've eaten too much, now I need to get to the gym.Ó It's almost like there's the Libra astrological scales, right? The scales where you've got eating on one side and exercise on the other, and you're trying to make them balance out. That's actually the foundation of the common phrase, calories in calories out, as if you're adding up the food you've eaten on this side and the output you've got, which is like your basal metabolic rate, plus your exercise, plus your non-exercise activity, thermogenesis your NEAT right on this side, and you're trying to make them equal or ideally the output more so you can lose weight. We all know that there's a lot that's flawed with that conception. In this week's vlog, I'm going to cover something that I had no idea about. I can't believe I made it to this point in my career without knowing about this, but I think it's going to blow your mind. It's going to blow your mind.
Before I forget, at the end of this vlog, I'm just going to mention something about scholarships because we are coming up to the January 1st Boot Camp. And so it's scholarship time. Let's dive in. The idea of burning off calories,
You can't do it. You can't do it. The reason you can't do it is because your body is not just like a step counter that's totaling up your activity in an additive way. Your body is a very adaptive, responsive, intelligent machine, and it is accommodating and morphing and changing and adjusting based on what you do. I want to introduce you to the research of a guy named Herman Pontzer. Herman Pontzer is actually an anthropologist, and he was wondering about activity levels and caloric output in hunter-gatherer tribes versus farmers versus sedentary desk workers in the industrialized western world. And, of course, it is sort of people's notion that, well, we're getting heavier and some chunk of that's got to be because we're just not moving as much.
There's a whole body of literature that speaks to that. If you dig deeper, it's funded by the big food companies because they're very desperate to give us all the impression that it's not the sugar people are eating. It's not the ultra-processed foods people are eating, it's just that we need to move more. And Michelle Obama and Barack Obama got arm twisted by Coca-Cola into backing off the childhood obesity campaign and made it a Let's Move campaign, right? If we could just get our kids more active, that would do it. But it doesn't. Kids are still getting fatter, and we are all getting heavier. It's all not stopping at all. The obesity pandemic.
The reason is that exercise won't make you thin. I've introduced you to a study a long time ago where they took hundreds of overweight and obese women, I believe it was, and they divided them into several groups, including one group that didn't move at all. They were all sedentary to begin with. One group was the control group. They were told to continue not moving, and then several groups of tiered levels of exercise, a little bit of exercise, more exercise, more exercise, a whole bunch of exercise. The exercise was supervised by personal trainers who were making sure that people were getting in their minutes of exercise. At the end of this long study, everybody weighed the same. Nobody was losing weight based on how much exercise they were doing. Exercise does not make you thin. And when Herman Pontzer went out to the HDA people of Northern Tanzania, one of the last remaining true hunter-gatherer societies on planet Earth where they're literally hunting down game and gathering berries and digging up tubers and literally hunting and gathering their food, and they measured these folks' metabolisms kind of molecule for molecule using this heavy water technique. With this technique, they have people drink water where the H2O molecules, the hydrogen and the oxygen molecules have been adulterated by adding extra neutrons into the nucleus, meaning that they're heavier, but they're still hydrogen and water. They're hydrogen and oxygen, they're still H2O, but they weigh more. You can track them as these molecules go through the body. Then as they secrete them based on the rate of secretion, you can literally measure their metabolism kind of on a molecular level. Super accurate. And yeah, what they found was that these folks, hunter-gatherer folks in northern Tanzania, were not expending any more calories than people sitting at desk jobs in the United States, and they didn't believe it. They ran it again and they ran it again and they ran it again. They gave them GPS monitors to track their activity and calculated how much they were moving. And they were like, these people should be burning so many calories, but they weren't.
Investigations into the cellular nature of this shows that what the body does when we're extra active is it compensates the rest of the time by burning less. It takes from the baseline levels of energy that would normally go to fuel your immune system, your endocrine system, your respiratory, all the things, and it just shifts you into low gear so that at the end of the few days, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, you've actually burned no more calories than if you were just sitting at a desk job. People around the world burn about 2000 to 3000 calories no matter their activity level. That's what people burn. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense because if you think about times when food is the most scarce, I'm talking like a long time ago, like thousands and thousands of years ago when food was the most scarce, that's when we would've had to have been the most active to literally go relocate to a new climate, perhaps put our gear on our back, pack up the campsite, put it all on your back, and then go migrate to where there might be more food or hunt and gather more, which takes more energy.
The body, the brain, is trying to keep us alive during this time. It makes sense that it would adaptively downshift into the lowest gear possible and steal wherever it could just to burn fewer calories to keep us alive during this time of needed extra activity. It kind of makes sense, but it's a bit horrifying, isn't it, that you can't just think, well, my basal metabolic rate is 1800 calories a day, and then I'll go put in an hour on the treadmill and before you know it, I will have burned this much more calories? Whatever the readout is on that dial, add that to my baseline. It doesn't work that way. We've got the proof of that by the fact that no matter how much we tell people to exercise, it doesn't make them lose weight. It doesn't make them lose weight.
This is all part of the logic. I didn't even know this research, but this is built into the logic behind the Bright Line Eating approach to exercise, which is nuanced. Yes, if you go out there on the web, there's people who are like Bright Line Eating is a terrible program. These are the across-the-board diet bashers, right? They're just on a mission to make sure that every last possible way of losing weight is demonized and vilified across the board. They come at Bright Line Eating and they say it's restrictive, and they say that it causes eating disorders, which actually, we reduce eating disorders. They say that they're against exercise. It's like, whoa, Nelly, we're not against exercise. Tell that to my personal trainer that I pay to workout with twice a week. No, we are not against exercise at all.
What we are is we're nuanced about it. People don't like nuance. They have a hard time with caveats and contingencies, right? So, let me tell you where we stand on exercise. We're pro exercise, we're into science around here. The science is very clear that exercise is one of the best ways to improve your longevity, to improve your overall health, to improve your cardiovascular fitness. Your heart health, your lung health, your bone density, your muscle health, your sex drive, your self-esteem - exercise is good for just about everything except losing weight. Since we are primarily in the weight-loss business around here, and we serve a certain demographic, the demographic of people who are higher than average on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scaleª, we have learned through bitter experience and hard data that people who insist on exercising vigorously at the beginning of their Bright Line Eating program are the least successful.
There are reasons for that. It's that exercise makes you hungrier. It triggers a compensation effect also psychologically, where now you're justifying eating a little bit off plan because you've been to the gym so much this week. Also, at the beginning of a weight-loss regimen, toxins are flooding into your body because fat cells are shrinking, and the toxins are being pushed out into the bloodstream. There's an initial dip in energy where you feel more tired and it's going to take even more to get to the gym at the very beginning of doing Bright Line Eating. What we've learned is that when people rest at the beginning, when they carve out a sacred stretch of time, I'm going to say a few months like the stretch of the Boot Camp, plus maybe an extra couple months, like maybe four months of time to just give themselves a hall pass and not be stressing themselves to get to the gym during that time.
Just to be explicit, I mean for people who did not have a dedicated exercise regimen set up, they don't try to set one up during this period of time. This may be four months. For people who did have an automatic well-oiled machine of an exercise regimen set up, they take a good look at it to see if it's maybe a little addictive because we do serve people who have brains that are predisposed to addiction. Are you thinking about burning off calories? Are you wedded to that exercise in an addictive way? If so, you might want to consider giving it up for a bit, or if it's not, it's just a healthy habit, then keep doing it by all means. If you're tired, if you've got one of those days going on where something's got to give, go easy on the exercise, and make sure that you've got enough in your tank to handle the food and get the food right, because research shows that getting your food right is what will ensure the success of your weight-loss attempt.
It's what will ensure the success of your whole Bright Transformation. It's the driver. Food is the driver, not exercise. Actually, there's beauty in uncoupling exercise from your weight-loss attempt so that when you get into Maintenance and your weight creeps up by a couple pounds because it will sometimes, you're not thinking, I got to hit the gym. You're thinking, have I been making heavier choices with my food? Do I need to shave something out of my food plan for a period of time till this comes back down? You're understanding that food is the lever. Food is the lever. Exercise is a separate thing that you do for health and well-being and flexibility and strength and joy and fun, and it's not part of your, ÒI got to do it to manage my weight schema.Ó It's just not in there. It's literally not one of the factors at all.
If you've got an exercise regimen and you want to keep it up, you feel like it's not addictive, keep it up and easy does it, right? This isn't the time to be training for a marathon, breaking your records. It's a nuanced approach, right? That's the first four months of a Bright Line Eating journey. That's the time when if you haven't been exercising at all, give yourself a hall pass and just don't start yet. The time to start exercising is right. When your food is really truly automatic, everything related to your food, writing it down the night before committing it, then eating only in exactly that, that regimen has become absolutely automatic, like brushing your teeth at that point. Let's say it's four months in and you've still got a lot of weight to lose, like maybe another 50 pounds. You've probably at this point already lost 50 pounds, or 30 to 50 pounds, somewhere in there.
But at that point, do you have a lot more weight to lose? If so, start exercising. That's a great time to start exercising. If you're about to transition to Maintenance though, don't start exercising. When you're about to start transitioning to Maintenance, that's another juncture where you don't want to make any changes on the exercise side of the equation, it will kick up some hunger. It will build some lean mass, which is good, but you want to be careful that you're not doing that while you're transitioning to Maintenance because you're going to be using the bathroom scale in a very surgical precision way to know how much food to add or not add so you can land the plane at Maintenance, right? Maintenance is something we excel at here at Bright Line Eating, and I'm telling you, it's not the time to change what you're doing with exercise.
You might just want to wait till you've got all that weight off and you're in Maintenance. Then take a look around. You've had your Bright Transformation, you're in your Bright Body, the excess weight is gone. Now you can say, ÒWhere do I fit exercise into my life? How do I move my body that gives me joy? What can I do that feels so nourishing, life affirming?Ó It's time to get moving. It's time to get moving.
And so yes, it is true that our primary advice to people who aren't already exercising is to not start exercising when they start doing Bright Line Eating. That doesn't mean we're exercise haters. It does mean that perhaps unknowingly, we've kind of realized that it's not going to move the needle. You don't get to work your way into your Bright Body in the gym. It doesn't happen like that. We stick to what we do best here at Bright Line Eating, which is helping people lose their excess weight and helping people who have that more addictive relationship with food to get free, to get free. Part of that freedom is exercise freedom, the freedom to not feel enslaved and beholden when it comes to the gym, but to have habits that are life affirming and joyous and wonderful.
I'll tell you what I'm doing for exercise these days. I do work out with Justin, who's a genius personal trainer twice a week, upper body, lower body, I'm getting stronger. It feels great. I deadlift 135 pounds. I bench press working on the pounds there too, working toward that pull up, which is, as you may know, my lifetime bucket bucket goal bucket list goal is to do a pull-up. I'm very, very far from that now, still thanks to my shoulder injury, which is now almost entirely better. Then I'm doing Egoscue exercises every day. It takes me about 15 to 20 minutes for my posture, for my, yeah, just my alignment, no injuries, just loving that. I walk a lot. I get more than 10,000 steps a day, on average. I think I average 11,000 steps a day according to my Oura ring. That's what I do. That's what gives me joy. Sometimes I dance. Find what gives you joy in the gym and just recognize you got to handle your food because whatever it is that you just ate, you can't go to the gym to burn it off. It doesn't work like that.
Before I sign off on the weekly vlog here, I just want to say we've got a scholarship opportunity coming, and scholarships are open right now if you're watching this vlog when it releases in real time, that's Wednesday, December 13th, 2023. Scholarship applications close on Sunday, December 17th, 2023. Then, Boot Camp registration starts at the end of the month, the tail end of the month, December 31st, we're going to have some videos that release right before then. There'll be a great webinar. Registration will be open in the first few days of January, and then the Boot Camp will start on January 6th, 2024. If you've wanted a scholarship to the Boot Camp, we always offer 10 total scholarships to the Boot Camp. Now's the time to apply the button below and get your application in. We always have more applications than we can say yes to, so understand if you don't hear a positive on that one, it's not personal, I promise. I promise. We love each of you equally and we just do our best giving out scholarships, but people who've applied in the past do get a little bit of a leg up as well. So, apply now and maybe you'll get a scholarship in the future. Just keep an eye out. I always mention it in the vlog when that opportunity is coming up.
That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.