2:00 P•M
I drag my weary body to the gym and jump on the treadmill for 45 minutes. I am also wearing four layers of clothes with black bin bags taped to my arms, legs to increase the amount of sweat. I usually quite enjoy the gym but those 45 minutes were some of the worst I ever spent down there.
6:30 P•M
My stomach has caved in because of dehydration. I could only manage to two spoons of baby food.
This is a part of diary written by a Sports Scientist experimenting to see if humans can lose over 10kg of weight within 24 hours. The Sports Scientist Ross Edgley who took part in the experiment frantically controlled his weight. He ate only baby food without carbohydrate and water and drank only 100mL water. He would also do hot Epsom salt baths and sauna. Finally he succeeded in losing weight from 94.7kg to 83.4kg.
Many people think that it is a successful diet if their weight decreased rapidly. However, it is hard to say if it really was a successful diet. Ross recovered his weight in 2 hours after the experiment.
The human body is made up of 50~70% water. Over 47.5kg of his weight consist of water. It is natural that he recovered weight when retaking water because he must lost a danger amount in the process.
Weight is not important in a diet. A person who is overweight is not necessarily obese while a person whose weight is standard may actually be obese. The factor that decides obesity is body fat not weight. A male’s standard body fat percentage is 15~20% and 20~25% for females. Anything over these percentages is deemed to be obese. A good diet then is aimed reducing body fat.
Then, what is the ideal diet? A member of the Korean Diet Association said “increasing basal metabolism results in an efficient diet.” Basal metabolism is the minimum amount of energy that a human needs for life conservation. Compared to a car, usage is the basal metabolism and fuel is the calories. The higher usage of the car, the more fuels it spends. So the higher the basal metabolism is, the more calories we spend.
Basal metabolism increases as muscles increase. It is because muscle is the main consumer of the body’s calories. When thinking that the energy consumption of the fat is 1, same weight of the muscle consumes 70. So the more muscles we have, the less energy is changed into fat when we eat the same amount of calories.
Muscles are very important to our body. They decrease 1% per a year after age 30. If we age to 80 we will have half amount of muscles that we did when we were young. It is no exaggeration to say that the more age increases the more illnesses we have because of the decline of muscles. However, many people don’t know the importance of muscles. People who do exercise for weight loss want to decrease the weight that muscles occupy. We have to remember that the purpose of diet is health not weight loss.
[Today’s Training]
So, for today’s exercise I want to introduce is the ‘Babel Roll Out.’ It gives stronger stimulation than the sit-up making it effective abdominal workout in a short time.
1. Put your knees on a mat and grab the babel, shoulder width apart putting your arms vertically.
2. Roll the babel forward putting your hip not to rise too much.
If you roll babel fast you’ll tumble forward and if you raise your hips too much you’ll get backache.
So roll the babel slowly.
3. Return to the first step slowly feeling stimulation in abdominal muscles.
