Oh hey, welcome to Healthy Ish. Thanks for joining us today on this Body and Soul podcast. I am Felicity Harley. Joining me today in the studio is doctor Nick Fuller. He's a health expert and leading obesity researcher and he's just pend a book called Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids. And it's not just for kids, no, there is so much
information for everyone. And he is going to talk about the relationship between exercise and maintaining a healthy weight, what all the research says, and he's going to give us some tips on how to maintain that exercise regime. If weight loss is your goal. Now, if you do like what you hear from doctor Nick Fuller listening to extra Healthy Ish, our sister podcast where he shares his simple steps to maintaining a healthy size, you can grab that
wherever we get your podcasts. Nick, welcome well back to healthy Thank you very much.
In a minute, having me back on it has been time flies. It's great to be back in this.
Jude, I waited for so long because you are just a wealth of knowledge.
Oh that's very kind of you.
And thankfully put it in a new book. Congratulations, Thank you. Let's pick up on one of the themes in your book, which is about well movement, structured movement, exercise. What does the research say when it comes to exercise and weight if you want to lose weight?
Definitely an interesting topic this one because often when we're going out on a weight loss journey, patients ask me, can I just focus on diet? He said, okay, for neglect exercise sleep health. The answer is no, you need to be focusing on the three key pillars being diet, exercise, and sleep health and these should form, you know, the key components of any lifestyle weight management program. Now. The reason being is because exercise has sort of three key
components or three key benefits. Now, the first one is that you're going to get benefits independent of weight loss. Now, what I mean by that is you might not lose much weight or any weight when you just go and embark on a weight loss program, but you'll start seeing significant improvements in your health from the minute you start moving, So reductions in your risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease, type two diabetes, but also improvements in other aspects of
life vitality and energy and mental health. So that's a real key component to really focus on because when you are embarking on it, I guess a health kick weight loss journey. You really need to do need to reflect on the improvements in health that you're going to be getting from day dot. We like to fixate on the number on the scales, but health is just or more important than weight. But exercise is also helping with two other key components. Now, the second one is the improvements
in body composition that you're going to be getting. Now, when we are losing weight, we want to be losing it predominantly from body fat stores. We want to hold on to our muscle mass stores, and the best way of doing that is by actually moving undertaking regular daily physical activity. You're going to be holding onto your muscle mass stores, losing the weight predominantly from body fat stores.
Which brings me to the third point, which means you're going to be able to keep that weight off long term. Because muscle is one of those determining factors of how quickly your engine is revving along or your metabolic rate, and that is how many calories you're burning at rest.
So you could have two people of the same weight one hundred kilos, but the person with the more muscle or better muscle to fat ratio is going to have a higher metabolic rate and consequently be able to keep that weight off much better than the person that has a higher body fat to muscle ratio. So exercise is doing all of these wonderful potent things and importantly helping you with that long term weight management journey.
The interesting thing, just going back to your first answer that question is sleep is just calling out sleep. We don't often think about and weight loss together, do we know?
And our research shows that it's actually a third or third a third. So what I mean by that is diet is about thirty three percent of the focus. Interesting, thirty three percent should be exercise and thirty three percent sleep health. But usually you know we talk about, oh, is it an eighty twenty split eighty being diet twenty percent exercise. No, it's actually a third or third a third. You must be focusing on all three key pillars, and you know, just to touch on sleep really quickly if
you're getting poor sleep. And that's usually because we're the last thing we're using before we go to bettes. The devices emitting blue light, disrupting melatone production, making hard to fall asleep and stay asleep, you wake up sleep deprived. It's hard, really hard getting to sleep and then staying asleep. Poor quality sleep means you wake up sleep deprived the
next morning. Your appetite hormones are surging. If I take blood samples off you, which we do in our clinics at the APA Hospital, Sydney UNI, Grellon level or the hunger hormone is actually going up after one night of sleep deprivation, so that means you're going to be hungrier. So that's not just a subjective feeling, it's an objective
response to that sleep deprivation. Grellon levels are being produced or grellin is being produced from your stomach, acting on your brain a clever part of the brain called the hypothalamus, telling you to go and eat more. You're also going to go for go to the vending machine because it's the easier default option to look for that high She'll
go high or fat high are you looking for? We've all been there, well been there, And you're also going to neglect things like physical activity because you're tired and lethargic.
I think that's really interesting because I've never heard someone answer with that that as part of the mix when it comes to, you know, the whole shebang of how you will have a healthy weight loss back to exercise. Is there one type of exercise well? Is one type better than another? You know, talk about building strength? Is strength better than hit or is it a mixture of both? Or what works When.
It comes to losing weight, and this is also a question that comes up a lot, the real important thing is to firstly get moving regularly and in a way that you can sustain. So often when we start again a health kick or a weight loss journey, we sort of subscribe to this sort of four to eight twelve week approach where we do the all or nothing. We go to the gym or start the boot camp, and then unfortunately we get bored, or we hate it, or we get injured, and we go back to our old way.
So the first thing you need to bear in mind is that what are you going to do to form a habit that actually sticks and that will last. So that's why it's important to firstly focus on incidental activity. What can you do in your day to day life to actually bump up your movement Because the biggest reason or the largest reason why we don't lose any weight when we embark on an exercise program is because our
baseline activity level is so low. So then we start moving, all we're doing is getting to the level that we should be for general heart health. Now, the research shows that you need to be doing sixty minutes of physical moderate physical activity every day to actually lose weight.
Now, the guy that even for a fairly active person, that is quite a lot.
It's quite a lot, and that's why you need to think, Okay, what can I do to bump up my incidental There's a lot we can be doing there in terms of using stairs instead of lifts, parking away further away in the parking lot, when we going grocery shopping. It all adds up, and that can be part of your sixty minutes of modern intensity activity. But this is the real reason why you're not losing weight with an exercise program alone,
because our baseline level is so low. So first you've got to start to build it up in a gradual way so we don't get injured. We don't, and we also in corporate activities that we like. But then coming back to your question, there is no better exercise. All exercise and physical activity is great. What you need to be doing is mixing it up, particularly with weight loss. So we have a translational program into a weight loss for adults, and in the weight loss months, we get
them to shake up what they're doing. So one day they do a modern intense walk huffing and puffing. The next day they might do a hit class, and then they get in the pool the next day, so that you're mixing up and you're allowing your body to recover in between. So there is no best activity. It's about incorporating ones that you love, that you are going to sustain, and also that get your heart rate up every second day.
I think it's really important and I think it's great that we're you know, so perhaps five or ten years ago exercise you see about go to the gym, doing a hit class, going for a run, but now exercise, and you talk about this in your new book. While it's named at kids, I think it's very much also aimed at parents that we should really view walking to the bus, walking to pick our kids up from school as exercise as well, because that was never factored into that equation.
Definitely, we evolve to move, but now we drive everywhere from A to B. We think about it. If we're working, we drive to the office, we might walk a few steps, we sit down for the majority of the day, and then drive home. And then we absurdly probably drive to the gym to do our structured activity and then drive home. Yeah, and look, this is embedding our day to day life now. But what we really need to do is refocus how we can embed physical activity into our day to day lives.
This is particularly relevant for the next generation because we need to wire their brain to know that exercise is a must have, not a nice to have. It's a
must have. It has to be incorporating into your day to day life and it's something you do every day, which is where the new book, Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids comes in to equip parents with six healthy habits so that they can get their kids moving, they can get the meeting healthy, enjoying nutritious food, and importantly getting good sleep health so that we can raise the next generation so that they don't have this lifelong struggle with weight
and health that many of us as adults are going through.
Nick, thank you for coming on healthy It is thank you very much. Felicity next book is called Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids, and in that book is of course a lot of his wisdom and his research, but also some beautiful recipes for everyone. Anyway, I hope you did enjoy
this chat you got something out of it. If you did, tell us, rate and review this episode, Subscribe to this podcast, jump online, bodyansoul dot com dot you, follow us on socials, Grab our print edition, which is our your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy ish