walking for weight loss ~ weight loss 2013

Jason Schneider credits his parents and grandparents with passing along many fine qualities to their children and grandchildren, including compassion, dedication, and intelligence. “They also passed along the propensity to be overweight and/or obese,” Schneider said.
“The family would gather at all the High Holy Days and after prayers, we would eat — and eat and eat and eat. We all would leave with leftovers.” Schneider, now 39, admits, “All my life, my fridge was my friend.”
At one point in his 20s, Schneider dropped 52 pounds with diet and exercise. He gained back the weight, and kept it on until he went into the weight loss and diet counseling business. Today Schneider weighs 150 and is the owner of a local Weight Loss Couture. (See www.weightlosscouture.com)
Schneider made time recently to talk about his battle with weight and how his job now keeps him fit and satisfied professionally at the same time.

You grew up in West County, in a family of big eaters. How did you deal with that?
I started gaining weight when I was about 8. Then in my early 20s, I started walking, which developed into running, and I went to the gym. I also ate sparingly.

What happened next?

I lost weight, but when I quit exercising and started eating more, the weight came back. By 2003, I had tried many of the weight-loss programs. Then a friend of mine went to a seminar about the Pounds and Inches Away program, and we decided to go into the weight-loss business together.

In March of 2011, you opened a Pounds and Inches Away branch in Fairview, Ill. How did it go?
At first, I was a silent partner, which was good because I weighed about 240 or 245 pounds at the time. Then I decided if I was going to be a part owner of a weight-loss business, I needed to look the part.

What route did you go?
I followed the protocol for the Pounds and Inches Away program. Some say it’s a fad, but the program has been around since the 1970s. In 40 days, I lost 39 pounds. I waited two months and did a second round, and lost 21 additional pounds.

Dropping the excess pounds sparked your interest in nutrition and diet. Why?
I started looking at the science of weight loss. Suddenly it all clicked, and I lost more weight, got down to 150. I was able to get off two cholesterol medications and two hypertension medications.

So was this journey about health or looks or just wanting to be different from the family?
I’ll let the doctor tell you what being overweight or obese does to your body. I’m an expert about what it does to my mind. You want to fit into the seat on a plane and not panic if the person in front of you reclines. Being seated at a restaurant booth with a nonadjustable table, being able to find clothes that fit, being able to lift things or run to the car and not be winded — it’s these small things that make me grateful I am staying within a normal BMI. ...More at Weight-loss pro now walks the walk - St. Louis Jewish Light

The whole question of what kind of exercise is best for weight loss or weight control is a tangled and complicated one. Does the exercise burn mostly fat or carbs? Does it stimulate “afterburn” after the workout is done? Does it leave you feeling extra-hungry so that you overcompensate by eating too much? All these factors are very hard to control in the lab over long periods of time, so there’s something to be said for “free-living” experiments, where you simply observe a very large number of people over many years and try to figure out which behaviors led to which outcomes. (This approach has problems too, of course, like distinguishing cause from correlation — no single approach is perfect.)
Anyway, that’s a long-winded intro to a new study from Paul Williams at Berkeley National Lab. He’s the man behind the National Runners’ Health Study, which has been following more than 120,000 runners going back to 1991. His latest study, just published online in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, compares a cohort of 32,000 runners from that study with 15,000 walkers from the related National Walkers’ Health Study, with an average follow-up time of just over six years. The goal: look at how much the subjects increased or decreased the amount of walking or running they did during that time, and see how it affected their weight.
Of course, you can’t directly compare running and walking through time spent or even distance covered, because they’re at different intensities. Walking is typically classified as “moderate” exercise, at 3-6 METs (1 MET is the amount of energy you burn while lying around on the sofa); running is typically classified as “vigorous,” at more than 6 METs. In theory, though, you’d expect that if you compare a similar change in METs burned, the weight loss should be similar regardless of whether you’re walking or running.
That’s not what Williams found. An increase or decrease in METs burned through running produced a significantly greater loss or gain, respectively, of weight compared to the same increase or decrease in walking METs. In particular, for the heaviest 25% of subjects in the study, calories burned through running led to 90% more weight loss than calories burned through walking.
Why is this? This study can’t answer that question, but Williams suggests a few possibilities — it’s well established that vigorous exercise stimulates more “afterburn” than moderate exercise, for example. He also notes studies that have found that post-exercise appetite suppression is greater after vigorous exercise, though my impression is that some other studies have found precisely the opposite. The data certainly isn’t perfect, and I wouldn’t take this study as the “last word” on weight loss and exercise intensity. That being said, I have to admit that it makes sense to me!...More at Running v. Walking for Weight Loss - RUNNING PLUS