How are you doing? How's that body of yours? If you're like most of us, I'm guessing you're not entirely thrilled by the shape.
I feel your pain.
All through school I nursed a pot-belly affixed to a narrow torso and pathetic arms and legs that no amount of school-bag lifting (bicep curls and quad crunches) could repair.
After our teenage years comes the fat. Those stubborn rings that grow thicker every year. All our boot camping performed at the most ungodly of hours and soft sand torture sessions and diets of green mulch and grilled animal haunches seem to do very little. All that effort, so little reward.
Most of us never learn the secret to leanness. And so we shift into our middle and old ages, if we make it that far, increasingly heavier, increasingly soft. It affects our mobility, our happiness, our very being. What good is life if we can't walk, run or even get out of bed without pain?
But, here's something that is as simple as it is profound.
A new paper released in the British Medical Journal suggests that losing weight is as simple as… breathing.
I wrote about the physicist-turned-pop-scientist, Ruben Meerman, a 43-year-old from Bondi, a few weeks ago. His paper (written along with Andrew J. Brown, a professor at the University of New South Wales) was embargoed back then and so I couldn't light up too much on his findings, but it's this.
When you lose weight it doesn't just disappear. There's no fat monster gobbling up all those lost hips and guts.
"The whole reason I'm the dipshit who figured this out is by being a physics geek, I know that if you start with 10 kilos of fat after it has been metabolised you still have to account for those 10 kilos of fat," says Ruben. "The atoms continue to exist. They don't vanish out of the universe."
Where do they go? "You breathe it out as a mix of carbon dioxide and water," says Ruben.
Which means? "We can finally call out the weight loss industry who tell us we can lose weight without doing exercise or eating less. It doesn't exist. And there's a cap on how fast you can lose weight."
Ruben says the limit on how you can lose weight is determined by how many times you breathe in a day. It differs from person to person, of course, but, let's say you breathe 12 times a minute at rest. If you increase that rate, and any form of exercise will do, it can be walking or having sex, your breathing rate will increase and so will the weight you lose.
But don't think you can just sit on your couch and take more breaths. It isn't that simple. "That's called hyperventilation," says Ruben. "If you just sit in your chair and breathe more you'll get tingly fingers, palpitations and you'll possibly fall unconscious."
I'll make it easier. Let's say you're a 70 kilogram man (oh, I wish!). With a little exercise, sleep and work, you'll breathe out 210 grams of carbon a day. Put in less than 210 grams and you lose weight; more and you gain weight. Walk for 45 minutes and your rate of breathing will increase and you'll spit out another 40 grams of carbon making it 250 grams for the day. Reward yourself with a muffin at a cafe on the way home and you're back to square one.
If you want to lose weight, says Ruben, it's all about the numbers. And, he says, losing weight and having healthy insides aren't the same thing.
He points out the American biology teacher John Cisna who ate nothing but McDonalds for three months. The difference with his experiment, as compared to Morgan Spurlock who made the movie Super Size Me about eating McDonalds for a month and subsequently turning into a ball of nearly-dead fat, was Cisna limited his kilojoule intake to 8000 a day. He lost 16 kilos and his cholesterol dived. Spurlock put on 11 kilos and his cholesterol soared. What's the lesson? It's not the McDonalds making you fat, it's how much you eat of it.
"Get in touch with your body, find out the number of kilojoules you can eat for your own weight and… own it," says Ruben, whose paper has gone viral with stories in such prestigious organs as the Washington Post and by the BBC. "My brother keeps googling my name and yelling out, 'Pakistan! Sweden! Norway! I have to pinch myself! No one took me seriously before."
