Category Archives: Exercise
Walking Versus Running. Which Is Better After Bariatric Surgery?
It’s hard to overstate the importance of exercise after your bariatric procedure. The surgery forces you to eat less and be more mindful of the calories and macronutrients you put in your body; however, surgery does not force you to exercise. That said, exercise represents a vital component of any weight loss program, bariatric surgery or not. Arguably, exercise is the primary driver of weight loss maintenance over the longer term.
That leads us to a common question – is walking or running better after bariatric surgery?
There are benefits and drawbacks to walking and running but let’s approach this question in more general terms.
How You Can Use Zone 2 Training to Lose Weight After Surgery
We are constantly bombarded with diet and exercise programs that promise fast weight loss results. But what if the most effective exercise programs are the ones we’ve known for years? What if many high-performance athletes have always used these simple exercises to prepare for the highest level of competition? What if these exercises did not require intense training all the time? It sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true commercials, doesn’t it? But the truth is that zone 2 training is precisely one of these exercises and should be a part of every bariatric patient’s return to exercise.
In this article, we will discuss zone 2 training and how it can make a difference in your postop exercise program.
Why Dieting Alone Simply Doesn’t Work
Have you found that what seems like endless days of dieting slowly yield fewer and fewer incremental pounds lost? Today, we will discuss why obese patients who try to embark on dietary restriction alone have difficulty maintaining their weight loss progress and often end up regaining their weight.
Restricting your caloric intake is the fastest way to lose weight, certainly at the beginning of your dietary program. Avoiding ingesting calories in the first place is far easier than burning them off later, either through exercise or resting metabolic activity. However, the human body is incredibly adaptable and will make changes to compensate for this reduced caloric intake. The body, which has considered your higher weight as normal for years, will work hard to maintain what it wrongly believes to be an equilibrium. We now know that the body develops a sort of set point. It will adjust the metabolism and how it stores fat to maintain that setpoint. Dieting alone is often insufficient to break through and continue losing weight long-term.
Does a Peloton Make Sense for Bariatric Patients?
There’s no doubt that we, as humans, look for the next great diet or exercise solution. In fact, just judging by the size of the diet and exercise industry in the United States, we probably think about it a lot more than we even realize. So, when a novel product comes on the market, there’s a whole lot of excitement around it. Case in point is the Peloton bike. Marketed as a premium spinning bike, it also offers a subscription-based series of classes that can be taken on demand. But does a Peloton make sense for a bariatric surgery patient?
Before delving into this question, it is important to remember that you need to speak to your bariatric surgeon before starting any new exercise program. You should also remember that in the six to eight weeks after bariatric surgery, you will want to exercise, but you will not want to overdo it. As such, if a Peloton bike is in your sights, you should only start it once you have been cleared by your bariatric team.
