Dr. BT's Blog

In my blog entry "Is Exercise for Burning Calories?", I talked about why it's not an efficient way of losing weight. In this post, I'd like to talk about other myths of exercises.

Many people want to lose fat, especially fat in certain places, and believe, led by the fashionable trend, that they can do it by exercising that particular place, such abs. Unfortunately, this is not the case. To understand this, just pick up a teenager, and a 35 year old, with say, identical % body fat. So you'd say, proportionally they are equally fat. But you'll see the younger one has fat uniformly distributed throughout the body, while the older one loses fat in the face, neck, upper arm, and gains fat in the belly or hip, or upper leg. The redistribution is caused by genetic and aging, It's not dissimilar to how our hair changes. For male, as we age, the hair recedes at the temple, while at the same time, hair grows on the body, or nose, or ear, or eyebrows.

You may build muscles, but you cannot hide the fat. That's why we see for many gym goers, they have beef'ed up muscles to be proud of, only have pockets of fat around their waist and belly. You can always tell a young body and a middle age body, no matter how he exercises, assuming the fat% is kept the same.

Thus, the only way not to redistribute fat is to delay aging. If you can have a bio-age of 35, when at 60, you can show a physique of a 35! That's, among many other benefits, what YBM Life! is about.

But no matter what, we'll age sooner or later, as long as we are in this life of physical body (read more about pre-life, current life, after life view of Taoism here). Therefore, we still need to talk about how to look young even when we are older. The best way, as you may guess now, is to keep weight as close as possible to your ideal, which is when you were between age 18-22. This way, your fat % will be always kept minimal, and the fat redistribution is minimally shown. This is achieved through YBM Diet and YBM Caloric Restriction (CR).

What about exercises? What's the use? Of course, it is vitally important. As discussed in my previous blog entry, and in YBM Exercise, exercise is for cardiovascular health, for strength training, and for flexibility.

This article also discusses some myths of exercises.

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