Running to Lose Weight? Here's How Much You Need: Kyle Flack - 2021-01-06

Happy New Year! Did you resolve to lose weight this year? Running
burns a ton of calories so it should be a great way to melt off
the pounds, right? Well, maybe not. Dr. Kyle Flack, a weight-loss
researcher from the University of Kentucky, conducts studies on
how the body responds to exercise and how much you really need to
work out to work off those extra pounds, and it turns out you
need to work out a lot more than the current recommendations
suggest.


Dr. Flack was recently featured in a New York Times article on
exercising to lose weight and he shares his research results and
provides insights on why weight loss isn’t as simple as burning
more calories than you take in. He explains how body chemistry
can seemingly work against us, thwarting significant weight loss,
especially for fitter people, and why it’s not uncommon for
people to actually gain weight while training for a marathon.


Through his studies, Dr. Flack has found that people
overcompensate for the calories they’ve burned pretty
consistently, and he shares what the average calorie
overcompensation amount is and how much exercise time is required
to overcome it to really drop pounds. He also talks about how
long it takes to make exercise a habit, he compares strength
training to aerobic exercise for weight loss potential, and also
reveals whether it’s possible to build muscle and lose fat at the
same time. If your goal is to lose or maintain your weight
through your running, this is definitely a must-listen-to
episode!


Kyle Flack grew up in a small town in Vermont where, as a 4-year
starter on the varsity football team, earned All-State honors
twice and won two state championships. He left to play college
football at Ferrum College in Southwest Virginia, earning a BS in
health sciences 4 years later. He continued his education at
Virginia Tech in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and
Exercise, where he earned his PhD in 2014. 


Upon beginning grad school, Kyle also turned over a new leaf in
terms of his exercise routine, going from 280-pound power-lifting
football player (who got winded walking upstairs) to a runner. He
devoted an entire winter and spring to this newfound training,
lost 40 pounds, and completed his first marathon, Vermont City
Marathon in 2008. 


From there he was addicted, running two marathons each year for
the next 5 years throughout grad school and dropping another 30
pounds. Each marathon was a new learning experience, a new
opportunity to get better, and always ended with the goal or
running the next marathon faster! 


After grad school, and after finally reaching that sub-3:30 goal
(he did the Marshall University Marathon in 3:27) Kyle shifted
his attention to triathlons, which he has been at since 2014.
Kyle completed a Post-Doctoral research fellowship with the USDA
in Grand Forks North Dakota from 2014 to 2017 and has since been
an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky in the
Department of Dietetics and Human Nutrition since 2017. Kyle is
an RD (registered dietitian) and primarily focused on researching
weight loss physiology, how exercise may affect eating behaviors,
and how exercise can be more appropriately used for weight
control.    


 


Questions Kyle is asked:


 


4:52 You are a researcher at the University of Kentucky
specializing in how exercise affects eating and weight
loss.  And you don't just study it, you used running to lose
weight yourself.  Can you share your experience?


 


7:27 You were already an athlete with football so it wasn’t like
you were obese or overweight and just wanted to lose weight by
running?


 


7:58 Let’s get into some weight loss science.  It seems that
weight loss should be easy. It’s "calories in and calories
out."  What makes it more complicated than that?


 


10:00 When you lose weight, you’re obviously lighter so there’s
less of you to move around. Is that correct?


 


10:30 Why isn't exercise generally effective for weight loss?


 


11:37 Overcompensating for calorie expenditure due to exercise is
not entirely all our fault. This is not entirely a willpower
issue or something like that. Our body’s working against us. Is
that correct?


 


14:28 What you’re saying is when you go for a great run and you
get all these endorphins flowing, you’re feeling really good, the
entire pan of brownies tastes even better, right?


 


15:15 Many athletes that I’ve coached have actually gained weight
when they start training for a marathon. They are burning a ton
of calories and for whatever reason instead of losing weight,
they gain weight. How is that possible?


 


19:34 I did a calculator once to figure out how many calories I
burned running a mile and it was something terrible like 56
calories, and I’m just like, “What! That’s not fair.” Why is our
body doing this to us?


 


20:17 In a recent study you did, you and your team found that in
order to lose fat, the participants in the study needed to burn
3000 extra calories per week.  Can you talk about this
study?


 


21:52 In your recent study, were the participants moving less in
their normal lives when they weren’t exercising? Were they
slowing down?


 


23:27 The exercise you put the test participants through, was it
just walking? Is that what you had them do?


 


23:51 Any other differences would you expect to find if you did
the same study with athletes rather than obese, sedentary people?


 


25:01 Does the type of exercise matter?  How about duration,
frequency, or intensity?


 


26:44 The results of your study show frequency doesn’t matter.
That’s good news for the weekend warriors, right?


 


27:19 You’ve also done some studies about the reinforcement value
of exercise and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can make
exercise a habit that we can stick to.


 


33:27 You’re talking about a significant amount of exercise,
five, six, seven hours a week for most people to get addicted to
exercise?


 


34:11 One thing about exercise studies and nutrition studies,
there’s some inherent difficulties in studying human beings
because we’re not rats and you can’t put us in cages. So what
kind of limitations did you find in some of your studies? What
are the challenges that you find in this kind of work?


 


39:36 Nutrition labels, they don’t have to be perfectly accurate.
I’ve heard that you can be 20% off on your nutrition label and it
still be okay with the FDA. So calories in aren’t always perfect,
right?


 


40:12 What about strength training?  How does that differ
from cardio when it comes to weight loss,  hunger, the
afterburn? We hear that when you strength train, muscles take
more energy to sustain than fat does so you’re burning more just
standing around if you have more muscle mass. Can you talk about
that?


 


42:59 Can you gain muscle at the same time as lose fat? I’ve
heard that that’s not always the case. Is that possible?


 


44:18 What questions are still unsolved and what kind of research
are you looking to do in the future?






Questions I ask everyone:


 


48:39 If you could go back and talk to yourself when you started
running, what advice would you give?


 


49:46 What is the greatest gift running has given you?


 


50:19 Where can listeners connect with you?


 
Quotes by Kyle:

 


“If you lose weight, we would expect you to decrease your total
energy expenditure, but what’s really been found is that if you
lose weight, you decrease it more than what we would anticipate.”


 


“We need to exercise more to overcome that obligatory
1000-calorie-a-week compensatory response so we can actually see
useful weight loss. So that 150-minutes-a-week recommendation
that we hear actually isn’t enough to overcome that compensatory
response.”


 


“With aerobic exercise, you can put someone on, ‘You’re going to
exercise at this heart rate for 30 minutes,’ and you can do that
for everybody and they all have the same workout. But if you say,
‘Okay, you’re going to go to the gym and lift weights for an
hour,’ that’s going to look completely different from one person
to the next person in terms of muscle activation, what you’re
lifting, how heavy, how intense.”


 


Take a Listen on Your Next Run


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Mentioned in this podcast:

 


kyle.flack@uky.edu


New York Times Article - Exercise for Weight Loss: Aim for 300
Minutes a Week


Runners Connect Winner's Circle Facebook Community


RunnersConnect Facebook page


https://runnersconnect.net/focus/


RunnersConnect Focus Classes


Use Promo Code RTTT for 20% off Sweaty Betty at
www.sweatybetty.com/RTTT







Follow Kyle on:


 


Kyle Flack | Human Environmental Sciences (uky.edu)







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