I talk a lot about keto and intermittent fasting for fat loss, but in reality when I went from being physically obese at 250 pounds and 34 percent body fat to 170 pounds and 6 percent body fat, my secret was physical activity in the form of walking…
(show before and after photos)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qs45bojLbCXCQFOy2VtAUtUwwOPlXP9z?usp=sharing
Walking can be one of the best tools in your shed for serious fat loss.
In this lesson, I’ll be sharing with you how walking helps you lose stubborn fat, other surprising benefits of walking, and what the studies say in regards to how many steps you should take each day.
Additionally, I’ll be sharing with you some creative ways to use walking for faster results.
Let’s start with how lack of steps leads to the accumulation of fat, especially belly fat…
First, we need to understand that we have an obesity problem here in the United States. Harvard is predicating by the year 2030, that 50 percent of the population will be obese!
When we look at the average steps people get, we see it is very low at less than 3,000 steps each day.
It’s not just the weight loss, it’s your overall health and longevity.
The first step here in your protocol is to walk at the right times
The second step here in your protocol is to create walking adaptations.
The third step is to increase the intensity of your walking.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Walking Studies: https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP284169 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220303112207.htm https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35268055/
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(upbeat music) The Greek definition for metabolism is to transform. Your metabolism is designed to take food and to transform it into energy so you feel good and burn fat. We are determined to deliver the science and art of metabolism to you. We bring on the thought leaders in this space to have life-changing conversations so you could apply it and upgrade your metabolism. The topics covered here include biohacking, ketosis, carnivore, fasting strategies, mindset, and metabolic health. Your body was built to be self-healing. Our goal is to identify the interference and remove it. You are a masterpiece because you are a piece of the master. Welcome to the Metabolic Freedom Podcast. My name is Ben Azadi. I'm the best-selling author of KetoFlex, and I wanna thank you for spending part of your day with me. (upbeat music) I talk a lot about keto and intermittent fasting for fat loss, but in reality, when I was obese at 250 pounds and 34% body fat, I used something really simple to get rapid fat loss, to go from 250 pounds, as you can see on the screen, to as low as 6% body fat. And my secret was physical activity from walking. In this lesson, I'm gonna share with you how walking will help you burn fat. It could be the king of fat loss, and more than just fat loss, what it does for health and longevity and anti-aging. I'm also gonna be sharing with you three different methods to practice walking to get the biggest fat loss benefits. If you're not using walking as a tool in your shed for fat loss, I'm gonna inspire you to do so. Let's start with how lack of steps, a sedentary lifestyle leads to the accumulation of stubborn fat around your stomach, your hips, and your love handles. We know we have an obesity crisis, not just in the United States, but across the world. Harvard put out an article stating by the year 2030, 50% of Americans will be classified as obese. That's one in two adults. It's almost there at this point right now. When you don't get enough physical activity, when you don't get enough steps, it makes it really difficult to burn fat. Check out this study from the Journal of Physiology, titled Physical Inactivity Causes Exercise Resistance of Fat Metabolism. The study states that physical activity is the fourth leading cause of death in the world. It is associated with a myriad of diseases and premature death. Two possible contributing factors are post-prandial lipidemia, which accelerates atherosclerosis. That's the accumulation of plaque in your arteries. And it says it causes impaired whole body fat oxidation. That is the ability to burn stubborn fat. And they say it contributes to obesity. Acute exercise in physically active people is effective for increasing whole body fat oxidation and lowering those PPL levels the next morning. It states the increase in mortality with reduced daily steps is remarkably steep. Low background steps per day also impair the metabolic adaptations to short-term endurance training, suggesting that the ills of inactivity extend beyond fat metabolism. Exercise resistance with inactivity could be a culprit causing atherosclerosis and widespread diseases. The recommendations regarding the amount of moderate to vigorous exercises needed for health should factor in background activity. And this study says get at least 8,000 steps per day to avoid this exercise resistance. So you can see in this graphic from this study what exactly we're talking about here. This is how inactivity impairs fat metabolism after exercise. It shows that physical inactivity leads to fat accumulation and the ability to burn your own stored fat. So the study is saying you want to get at least 8,000 steps per day. The average person gets two to 3,000 steps per day. And it's also sharing, and other studies show this as well, that you want to get these steps over the course of a day. You don't just want to go and do a workout and get those 8,000 steps, or go for a long walk and get those 8,000 steps. Now there's nothing wrong with that. But to get the best benefits from walking as it pertains to health, longevity, and fat loss is to create these exercise snacks. These are intentional times throughout the day where you get inactivity, you get in steps. I'll give you some examples. When you go to the shopping mall or the grocery store, instead of driving all around the parking lot, looking for the closest parking spot to get you into that shopping center faster, forget about that. Park far and walk your way to the shopping center and walk your way back. You get steps that way. Another example, when you have the option to take the elevator or to take the stairs, take the stairs. If you're taking the escalators, walk on the escalators as you take it. Go walk your dog throughout the day. Take breaks throughout the day and get those steps. Another adaptation or a variation could be a walking treadmill, right? The goal is to accumulate these steps throughout the day to get the biggest bang for your buck. Now with all that being said, there's also some research showing that it's not just about fat loss. Walking has profound benefits on health and longevity. This study from Science News titled meta-analysis of 15 studies report new findings on how many daily walking steps needed for longevity benefit. The meta-analysis of 15 studies involved nearly 50,000 people from four continents offering new insights into identifying the amount of daily walking steps that will ultimately improve adults' health and longevity. After analyzing 15 studies with nearly 50,000 participants, it found that walking at least 7,000 steps daily can reduce risk of all cause mortality by 50 to 70% compared to those who walked fewer steps. That's really fascinating because the first study I referenced said in order for you to achieve the maximum fat loss you want to hit about 8,000 steps per day, this is saying you only need to get about five to 7,000 steps to reduce risk of all cause mortality by 50 to 70%. So the bare minimum of steps that I would suggest you get every day is at least 5,000. If you could get it over 8,000 and maybe even closer to 10,000 and 12,000, we see that there's more benefits to fat loss and longevity that seems to taper out around 14 to 16,000 steps. So the general range that you want to hit is somewhere between 5,000 steps as the minimum and up to about 16,000 steps per day. Walking is one of the best ways we could become more insulin sensitive. About 60%, 60% of Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. This is a result of high insulin and glucose levels. And your insulin levels could be elevated for up to 14 years according to the Whitehall study. Without your fasting blood sugars changing or your A1C changing and then all of a sudden boom, you're diagnosed with pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. This is called hyperinsulinemia. Another term is insulin resistance. When insulin has to be pumped out so hard and so much because of high carbohydrate diets and inactivity, it leads to a whole host of problems. It's the first domino to fall. High insulin levels are the first domino to fall that leads to obesity, chronic disease, cancer, heart disease. And then I can name the condition, it's linked to high insulin levels. With an active lifestyle, getting those steps, you lower insulin levels. Because when you walk, you move the largest muscles in your body, your glutes, your quads, your hamstrings. The simple contraction of these muscles allows insulin to become more sensitive as the cells in your legs suck up the blood sugar, suck up the glucose floating around in the bloodstream. This sensitizes insulin and it's one of the fastest, easiest, best ways to lose fat. Walking in general utilizes more fat as a percentage for fuel. The more steps you get, the more fat you burn, the cool part is that you're not breaking down any muscle with these daily steps because it's not intense enough or vigorous enough and extensive enough to break down that muscle. You preserve muscle mass, which is actually important for longevity and for overall metabolic health and raising your metabolic rate. Not only does it do all those wonderful things, it improves blood flow and oxygen and nutrient delivery to your muscles as well. One of the best ways to know if you are in a fat burning state or a fed state, which is a fat storage state, is to track post-prandial glucose, post-prandial meaning after eating. The higher your blood sugar rises after eating and the longer it stays elevated, the more insulin needs to be cranked out. An insulin is an energy sensing hormone and it tells your body to store fat. Therefore, the higher your blood sugar levels after eating, the faster you store fat and the longer it takes to going back to burning fat. Hands down my favorite way to track post-prandial glucose and blood sugar levels in general is with a continuous glucose monitor. I've been using Nutrisense and their amazing program for so many years and I've been able to pinpoint specific foods that raise my blood sugar levels after eating. I've also been able to pinpoint what quality sleep and lack of quality sleep does to raise my blood sugar levels, what exercise does. It is such an incredible way to customize your approach no matter what diet you are following. And one of the cool things about Nutrisense, they give you a professional in their app to monitor your progress and the human expertise also gives nutrition advice as well. These are eye opening insights from CGM data to help you make actionable steps. Head over to nutrisense.io/freedom and use the coupon code freedom to get $50 off your first month. That is nutrisense.io/freedom. Coupon code is freedom. Every morning I've been putting something in my coffee which has enhanced my health and wellness. I've been putting high quality Shelagit. Shelagit is packed full of micro minerals and micro nutrients. And you have to remember this, the mitochondria, they run off of high quality minerals and amino acids. When you consume Shelagit, high quality Shelagit like the one I use from Man of Vitality, it's gonna provide your mitochondria and your cells, minerals in their most bioavailable form supporting overall health, stronger immunity and improved energy levels. The product I use from Man of Vitality has a combination of Shelagit and Ormis. Ormis is a supercharged supplement and their unique formulation contains Ormis elements in the most bioavailable form for optimal absorption. They source the Ormis from the bottom of the Dead Sea and they source the Shelagit from the top of the Himalayan mountains. Both are extreme environments and what this does, it stresses the Shelagit and the Ormis to become more bioavailable and stronger and more potent when you consume it. So I simply put a sashay in my coffee every morning and you'll notice a difference the first time you use it. If you head over to manahvitality.com/ketocamp and use the coupon code Ketocamp, you'll get a nice discount off your order. Manah is spelled with two N's, M-A-N-N-A vitality.com/ketocamp, go check it out. I think you're gonna love it just like I do. - And walking can be done by pretty much any person of any walk of life, of any age. That's the cool thing about it. And I love that the studies are showing you only have to get 5,000 steps a day to get a lot of these benefits. So now that we have established what walking, physical activity can do for fat loss, health and longevity, let's discuss three variations to incorporate into your daily walk and routine to get the biggest bang for your buck, the most benefits. The first way is to walk at the right time. The best time to go for a walk is right after your meal. Ideally, you wanna go for a walk after all of your meals, but I know for some people, that might be really difficult to do with your schedule. So if you could time a walk after your largest meal of the day, especially the highest carbohydrate rich meal that you consume per day, you're gonna get the most benefits. Here's why. The overall goal for fat loss, health and longevity is to optimize your post-prandial blood sugar levels. The word post-prandial means after eating. The more elevated your blood glucose levels are after eating, the more insulin needs to be cranked out. The more insulin that's cranked out, the more fat you're storing. That's because when you eat food, you're gonna turn the food, especially carbohydrates and even protein, into strings of sugar called glycogen. You store this glycogen in your glycogen storage, your liver and muscle cells, but if your post-prandial glucose stays elevated, it goes too high after eating after you refill those glycogen stores and what's left, the rest goes into your body fat. So if we could blunt this post-prandial glucose response, if we could produce less insulin, we'll go back into a fat burning state much faster. Walking after that meal is one of the best ways to achieve this. I've done several tests with the continuous glucose monitor while I eat the same meal and I will not go for a walk and look at my post-prandial glucose levels and then I'll eat the same meal the next day and then go for a walk and I notice a significant difference in those blood sugar levels after eating and it's not just my NF1 experiment, the research backs this up as well. This study titled the effects of post-prandial walking on the glucose response after meals with different characteristics showed exactly what I'm referring to here. Here's what the study showed. Post-prandial brisk walking substantially reduced the glucose peak in both studies with no significant differences across conditions. When evaluating the glycemic response throughout the two hours, post-meal, post-prandial walking was more effective after consuming a lower carbohydrate content meal and similarly effective after a mixed meal or a high carbohydrate drink. Although higher glucose values were observed when consuming the carbohydrate, the high glucose drink, our findings show that a 30 minute post-prandial brisk walking session improves the glycemic response after meals with different carbohydrate content and macronutrient composition with implications for post-prandial exercise prescription in daily life scenarios. Therefore, one of the best things you can do is to go for a 30 minute walk after your biggest meal of the day. The meal that has the most carbohydrates to get this post-prandial glucose effect, the benefit of lowering those post-prandial glucose. What happens here is your body activates your glute for transporters and it's just a signal to clear glucose out of the bloodstream and use it for energy. And you get that with a walk after a meal. So if you could go for a walk after all your meals, awesome, if not choose the biggest meal of the day and go for up to a 30 minute walk to get that benefit. The second way to enhance your walking is to create walking adaptations. This is something that I did constantly as I was on my way to achieving a fit healthy body from being obese to being physically fit. Walking adaptations forces your bodies to adapt different changes and patterns. This confuses the body and the muscles which accelerates fat burning and elevates your basal metabolic rate. All great personal trainers and fitness coaches understand the principle of adaptation. Meaning if you ever worked out or were trained by a great fitness coach, a personal trainer, you've seen this. Every week is the new exercise. Every week it's high weight, low weight, low rep, high rep. They change it up constantly to keep the body adapting and guessing. Prevent stalls, prevents plateaus and gets the body adapting. And when you would force the body to adapt, good cells get stronger, bad cells don't adapt. Those are cells, those are mitochondria and your body's really smart. It'll get rid of the bad stuff that's not strong. It's kind of like survival of the fittest and it'll enhance the strong cells in mitochondria which help with energy production, which help with your basal metabolic rate, which at the end of the day, help with your energy levels and help with fat loss. This is why programs like P90X, if you've ever done that or heard about that, work so well because of this concept called muscle confusion. So how do you create muscle confusion and adaptation with walking here are my favorite methods to achieve this. Walking on an incline treadmill is a fantastic way to create an adaptation. This treadmill could be found at your gym, you could buy an under the desk treadmill, setting it up on an incline and walking on that creates an adaptation, creates additional stressors to get more benefits from that. Walking backward or sideways is another way to achieve that. Again, you could do that on a treadmill or you could walk around your neighborhood, backward or sideways, helps to strengthen knees, creates adaptation, creates more benefits from the walking. Yes, your neighbors might think you're crazy and you could let them know why you're doing this and you could educate them and send them to this video or podcast to understand more. Walking outside in the elements is a great way as well to create adaptations. Bonus points if you do this in the morning during sunrise and during the evening, during sunset, but the heat, the temperature outside, the variations outside, the elements are going to help create adaptation as well. So if you get out of your house or your gym and go outside and walk, also beneficial, even more beneficial. All this adds up to the more variation and changes you could bring to your adaptations and your walking, the more benefits you're going to get. So you could also do this by walking a little faster, slowing down, faster slowing down. Anything you can do to change up a normal routine with your walking, you're going to create an adaptation. The third method to get more benefits from your walking is to increase the intensity of your walking. This is similar to the adaptation principle we just discussed, but we're taking it to another level here. Most people walk at a casual pace, which doesn't really create adaptation or elevate the metabolism to burn extra fat. When you increase your speed during a walk or add certain weights to a walk, you create an energy demand the body has to adapt to, which forces the body to burn more fat and increase your metabolic rate. A good walking pace to achieve this is to try the walking and talking test. You don't need to have a buddy to do this, although you can, but here's what you want to accomplish. You want to be mostly out of breath during a walk. Not completely, but mostly out of breath. If you could hit that target of walking and talking and you're talking, but you're having some difficulty speaking 'cause you're out of breath, you hit a good pace. You're burning fat, you're getting a lot of benefits and getting a good intense workout from that walk. So test that out and make sure you're a little bit out of breath to create that adaptation and to force this demand on your body to adapt to to get more fat loss. Another way to achieve this is to add weights as you walk. You could add dumbbells, hold a kettlebell, put on a backpack with weights, or maybe even wear something like heavy clothes to create additional stressors during that walk for your body to adapt to and get more results as well. All of these variations work really well to achieve the results you want to get. This is the king of fat loss. If you skip this and you're just focused on nutrition and lifting weights, yes, you'll get some benefits. But if you apply this to whatever nutrition or a pro grander following, whatever routine you have, it's going to elevate your results. Now with all that being said, I'm going to answer some of the most common questions I get when I talk about the concept of walking for fat loss. So let's get started with the first question. First question is what are some of the key signs someone may have a harmful sedentary lifestyle? The first obvious one is you have extra weight on your body, especially belly fat. You look down and you see your belly, that is a sign of a sedentary lifestyle that usually means you have high insulin levels, high blood sugar levels, insulin resistance, and type two diabetes for sure is a sign of a sedentary lifestyle. But also achy joints, we should not move it around. Your joints are going to be achy. You use it or you lose it. Having skin tags and brown patches are signs of insulin resistance from a sedentary lifestyle as well. And feeling tired after eating meals is another sign of a sedentary lifestyle. So you could overcome all of that just by getting those 5,000 plus steps per day. The next question is what are some of the worst exercises people do for losing weight and longevity that I should avoid? Chronic cardio and chronic exercise is going to actually be counterintuitive. You might think more is better, more steps, long runs. Extreme workouts are better and more consistent workouts are better. But the truth is that is not the case. You want to apply these stressors, but you want to adapt to it and recover from those stressors. And chronic cardio and exercising too much actually can cause a cortisol response, which is your stress hormone, which actually causes you to store fat. So you want to find a good sweet spot of getting in your physical activity, getting quality sleep, recovering, and then repeat so on and so forth. So I'm personally not a fan of long distance running, like people run 5Ks and marathons. That's actually counterintuitive to health, longevity and fat loss. I like these exercise snacks that we spoke about. Burst training is also great, sprinting is great. So I would avoid the chronic exercise and do more burst, short, intense, and then recover and back and forth exercises. The next question is, are there any hacks while walking to enhance weight loss? I know some people put on weighted backpacks or heavy clothes to sweat more. What are your thoughts on this? Yes, as I mentioned earlier, this creates additional stressors and adaptation. If you're a beginner to walking and you're just starting to improve your daily step count, don't even do this. First, get your daily steps up over $5,000, get it closer to at least $8,000. Once you're comfortable doing that, then you want to stack an additional stressor. That could be holding the dumbbells, a weighted vest, holding your little dog and walking around the neighborhood. So eventually you want to get there, but if you're a beginner, I would not recommend it. But it will help overall with fat loss, inflammation, lowering of inflammation and overall longevity. Next question is, what are the best times of day you would recommend going for a walk? Kind of touched upon this in the video, but the best time is after a meal, in the morning getting that sunshine. And the reason I say that, by the way, in the morning, when you get sunshine through your eyes, through your retina on your skin, so take off your sunglasses, you sink your hormones, your circadian rhythm with mother nature. And that's the way we're designed to thrive. It balances your hormones, buffers cortisol, helps you burn more fat. And then at night, helps you get better sleep 'cause that sun signals to your pineal gland to start storing melatonin. And then at night when you go to bed, you release it. And melatonin is important for metabolic health. It's an anti-inflammatory, it's an antioxidant. It also helps to get quality sleep to recover from the physical activity. So you could see how it goes hand in hand. Now the sunset also has benefits when you look at the sunset because then it signals to your pineal gland to start releasing that melatonin. So if you can get morning sunshine, evening sunshine, and walk after the meals, those are the best three times for walking. The next question is, if people don't have an hour in a day to get the allotted amount of steps required to see results, what are the other hacks or exercises you would recommend? This is perfect because I actually don't recommend just going for an hour walk and that's your activity for the day. We recommend the exercise snacks. Five minutes, 10 minutes, just getting those daily steps, being creative with how you get those steps, parking far in the parking lot, taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Doing whatever you can to just chip away throughout the day to get the steps. You don't have to carve out an hour a day to get the steps. I actually don't recommend that. Do it throughout the day with exercise snacks. Maybe you work in your office for three hours and you're like, okay, time to take a 10 minute break and you just walk around your office or walk around the backyard or walk outside somewhere for 10 minutes and then go back to work. Doing that throughout the day is much better than just going for a 60 minute walk once a day. The next question is, what are some of the big ways you turned walking and other forms of exercise into a habit? I struggle to be consistent with it and make it feel seamless in my day. Yeah, I totally could relate to that same thing with me and a lot of people when you start to change their behaviors, it could be difficult. I always tell my Keto Camp Academy students one tweak a week, right? If you're the average person in getting two to 3,000 steps per day, I don't expect you to go to 8,000 and 10,000 in that first week. If you're at 3,000, go from 3,000 to 3,500 the next day. Do that for a few days and then go to 4,000 steps per day. Do that for a few days and then go to 4,500 steps per day. Ramp your way up and you won't know how many steps you get unless you track it. So the good news is that there's many ways to track your steps. There are free apps on your phone that you can download and as long as you keep the phone on you with you walk, when you walk and the app turned on, it'll count your steps. Then we have things like Apple Watch, Woop Bands, Fit Bits, I use an Aura Ring, it counts your daily steps. So if you start tracking that and just start increasing it each day or each few days, it'll turn into a habit. When you try to do too much too soon, that's where you could feel overwhelmed and struggle to be consistent. So don't go from 3,000 steps to 10,000 steps in a week. Build your way up and remember, one tweak a week. That's all it takes to really get those results and then it becomes a habit. You rewire the brain and then it's just habitual. That's exactly what I did 'cause I lived a sedentary lifestyle for 20 plus years. This would lead to my obesity and once I started to develop these habits and do exactly what I taught you today, everything changed for me. It changed my life, I feel incredible, I burned a lot of fat, I went from obese to being fit and you could do the same thing too. (upbeat music) This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Benazotti, disclaimer responsibility from any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not accept responsibility of statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or non-direct interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician. You
