Energy and work are two sides of a coin: It takes work to obtain energy, and energy is needed to do work! In the history of life, energy has always been scarce, and every living thing has evolved diverse ways to stay alive before a successful extraction of energy from the usually non-guaranteed next “meal.” As a Nigerian born, I am familiar with the boisterous annual “metabolic behavior” that celebrates harvest time called Odun Ikore in my Yoruba language. This season is often called the New Yam Festival in most Nigerian ethnic groups, and it includes the harvest of other staple foods such as cassava, corn, wheat etc.
The harvest season is also marked by the abundance of ripe fruits, and as a village boy, I still remember those days of stepping outside to freely pluck oranges, cashew fruits and pineapples in the yard. Interestingly, this so-called period of abundance is the only time of the year that fruits are available. In other words, the sweet sugar found in fruits, which easily converts to fat, exclusively exists during harvest time. Therefore, fruits that are not eaten are left rotten and from dry season to the next harvest season, people live on starchy tubers and grains with occasional protein from hunting games. The now ubiquitous easily digestible cheap liquid calories such as fruit juices, sodas and the colorful sugary drinks do not exist and are never missed where I grew up.
One may ask what has the cycle of harvest and dry season got to do with exercise and weight loss? Well, whether in the Indianapolis suburb or any rural setting, kids inherently have the propensity to run all the time. As in my village and in all natural environments, the reality of life is that no adult gets up early for a morning jog and you may again ask why? Simply stated: energy is scarce! To put it in proper modern context, no one fills up their car tank and purposelessly drives around town just to burn off the full tank, even in a period of gasoline glut.
As I type this article, a Google search with “exercise and weight loss” generates close to two million hits! This is how much interest there is about the idea of exercise and weight loss as millions are spent in grant dollars for research studies on this topic. In meagre environments, there are no weighing scales and no exotic bowls of fruits or mouthwatering desserts, but people routinely log up to seven miles on a daily basis besides hours of obligatory physical exertions to extract precious energy for life and survival. It is therefore inconceivable to get up for an early morning jog to burn off the manually earned precious energy. In fact, there is a saying in my language stating that if a man is seen running, he is either pursuing something or something is pursuing him. In other words, running is an occasional emergency necessity, and it could not be made more obvious by an American saying that forbids “shouting fire in a crowded theater” even though this is often quoted in the context of Law.
The idea of exercise and weight loss therefore defies metabolic logic, and by extension no manufactured designs burn energy for no reasons. Therefore, on the face value, the so-called additive model of energy expenditure assumes that exercise is a limitless “asset” that is not part of the whole metabolic system which can be “dialed up” to burn energy and lose weight at will. This contradicts our man-made sporting activities that have limits in terms of play time and seasons. In the extreme sense, if exercise were effective for weight loss, most of the athletes would not only be too skinny and weak by the end of each playing season and more importantly a lot of them would never survive the physical demands of years of professional athletic careers.
Every continent was colonized by man on foot and if exercise directly affected weight loss, human ancestors would not have made it out of Africa, and by extension, all moving living things would have gone extinct, leaving our planet with only lush forests. Physical exertions, often in a fasting state, precede energy extraction from food consumption. It is therefore illogical to burn off every pound of unwanted fat easily with exercise given that our primitive body system evolved to conserve hard-earned energy over the millennia. “Exercise is medicine” may sound like a loose catchphrase but against “exercise for weight loss” advice, physical activity primarily shaped human health long before modern medicine and was not meant for weight loss.
Mukaila Kareem, a doctor of physiotherapy, writes from the USA and can be reached via makkareem5@gmail.com
