Maine Roast blog
Why Exercise Isn’t Enough for Weight Loss (Proven By One Insanely Active East African Tribe)
The researchers were floored.
Even the head researcher, a professor named Herman Pontzer (who has a Ph.D. at Harvard), was puzzled.
Everything they believed about exercise and weight loss toppled like a house of cards. What was common sense before now shattered like a mirror dropped from a tall building.
And the one thing that blew their minds the most?
This scientific breakthrough was made by people who had nothing to do with science. In fact, these people’s lives haven’t changed for the past 10,000 years.
They had no rules or calendars... let alone a research lab.
It was their primal wisdom that taught the researchers what can now change everything we know about weight loss. And we’ll tell you all about it in a minute.
But first, let’s meet the unsuspecting ‘scientists’.
How the Life of a Modern Hunter-Gatherer Looks Like
The Hadza are a nomad East African tribe roaming the Tanzanian savannahs.
They’re the ‘last of the first’ – the final remaining hunter-gatherer tribe on Earth.
When hungry, a Hadza doesn’t hop to the nearest Trader’s Joe. He must forage or kill if he wants his family to eat.
The Hadza’s hunting trips are reserved for mornings and evenings. And those trips are no picnic – they’ll often walk for miles before they find good food.
In fact, the average Hadza walks up to 7 miles – the length of 123.2 football fields – in a single day!
And that’s not including all the digging and hard physical work they do.
“The Hadza get more activity in a day than the standard American gets in a week,” Pontzer says.
Are they in good shape?
You bet! It’s six-pack abs galore down in Hadzaland.
But what may surprise you is that you could be burning the same amount of calories in a day as the average Hadza.
Impossible? The answer will surprise you.
Read on to learn more about the researchers’ shocking findings.
Why Living Like Cavemen (And Cavewomen) Won’t Make Us Thin
Pontzer and his team were determined.
They wanted to find out how many calories are burned on any given day with the insanely active lifestyle of a Hadza.
But the researchers had to play it smart.
Bringing these people in a lab setting and sticking electrodes on them was impossible. (If they tried they’d have to face the wrath of the Hadza’s bow-and-arrow ways.)
That’s why they did something that completely flew under the Hadza’s radars.
Enter: the stealthy “double labeled water” method:
A special water labeled with harmless oxygen and hydrogen atoms is given to subjects to drink. This water is a 100% safe way of tracking their energy expenditure i.e. how many calories they burn.
Pontzer and his team offered it to 46 Hadza men and women to drink. And then their urine tests told the researchers everything they needed to know.
And so the startling discovery was made:
“Surprisingly, despite spending their days trekking long distances to forage for wild plants and game, the Hadza burned no more calories each day than adults in the U.S. and Europe. The team ran several analyses accounting for the effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. In all analyses, daily energy expenditure among the Hadza hunter-gatherers was indistinguishable from that of Westerners.”What does this mean?
Well it turns out we aren’t that different from the Hadza – at least not in the number of calories we burn per day. In the researchers’ words:
“The similarity in daily energy expenditure across a broad range of lifestyles suggests that habitual metabolic rates are relatively constant among human populations.”
So even when we are engaging in hard labor, our bodies will always default to the baseline calorie-burning level.
And why is this? The answer is simple:
Our body is extremely adaptable. When we increase our activity it adapts our energy expenditure over time to match our activity levels.
It does it to conserve us energy, which makes sense for our survival as a species.
But it doesn’t make much sense for weight loss.
That’s why the researchers say it's time to stop assuming more physical activity always means more calories burned.
So if exercise does nothing we shouldn’t do it, right? Not so fast!
The Secret to Making Exercise Work for Weight-Loss
Only ten more minutes to go…
It feels like an eternity, doesn’t it?
As if time slows down on the cardio machine... making those minutes of huffing and puffing feel like pure agony.
Sometimes you DO make it to the end. That’s when you feel proud for a while. But then you remember it’s cardio again next day…
And all that time the weight scale bounces back and forth each week like some old pendulum clock.
Meanwhile on social media countless women post their impossible body transformations and their six-month six-packs.
It can be a pain seeing this, we know. But let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute.
Isn’t it easier to not eat that chocolate bar than it is to cycle an hour to burn it off?
In theory yes. But practice is what trips us up.
Because most people find it impossible not to eat. They go overboard and then end up sweating it out as punishment.
(It’s like watching a dog trying to catch its tail – going in circles only to plop down exhausted in the end.)
So now the million dollar question is:
Is there a way for normal people (who don’t have superhuman willpower levels) to stop this cycle?
How to Eat Less Without It Feeling Like Self-Punishment
Being the starving calorie-counting dieter is no fun.
Every meal has to be measured to the last ounce and then put in some app. And then of course you have to lug that meal in tupperware to make the diet work.
This would work beautifully if the world was perfect.
But it’s not. And you’re not a robot.
Slip ups happen. Emotions get in the way.
You forget to fetch ingredients for your pre-planned meal plan. That’s when you have to pretend cheese and crackers are actual food.
It’s frustrating. The stars have to be perfectly aligned every day for you to hit that calorie goal.
That’s why the calorie-counting route is not for everyone.
Some people prefer to keep it simple & just skip a meal or two.
It’s a good alternative for those who don’t want to obsessively portion everything with a food scale like some drug dealer.
But as we’ll see, skipping meals can get tricky.
The Dead Simple Way to Eat Less Without Obsessing About it
“Wanna eat less calories? It’s easy. Just skip breakfast and do intermittent fasting.”
We won’t argue if intermittent fasting works for weight loss. There’s solid science backing it and many people have gotten incredible results with it.
And remember the Hadza, our African friends from earlier?
They’re ‘intermittent fasting’ every single day: If they don’t hunt for food, they don’t eat.
But we modern people have the opposite problem.
We’re surrounded by food and temptations every day. For us not eating is a battle fought anew every day.
And we don’t always win that battle.
The morning hunger pang can be too much sometimes. It scratches and scrapes from inside our bellies until we give it what it wants. This makes it IMPOSSIBLE to put food out of our minds.
So how do we avoid it? How do we tell that hungry devil to keep quiet – at least for a few hours?
An itty bitty snack could be the answer.
But what kind of snack?
For starters, it has to be low in calories. It has to be tasty. And it also has to fill you up. (Let’s face it: half a banana never satisfied anyone.)
Does this mythical morning snack even exist?
Fortunately the perfect solution to our hunger woes already exists...
It’s called Protein Coffee and 10,600+ people have already dropped their morning coffee for it.
This Drink ‘Postpones’ Even the Strongest Morning Hunger Pangs
“I feel full and I eat at least half or less of what I used to eat.” - Suzanne K.
So what’s so special about this new drink everyone’s talking about?
Its main ingredients are simple: Instantized (Pure) Whey Protein and high-grade Colombian Coffee.
Yet many people report amazing benefits from it like:
- A nice feeling of fullness that keeps your mind off food for hours.
- A pleasant, steady, jitter-less caffeine kick that jolts you wide awake.
- A flavor comparable to high-end specialty coffee house drinks.
When taken with dairy-free milk or water Protein Coffee is less than 100 calories per drink. And yet people are reporting ‘it feels like you just ate a rich, hearty meal’.
“It keeps me feeling fuller longer and I am not only feeling a difference but I am seeing too” -@TheMom
Protein Coffee works to automatically cut down on your daily calorie intake – with no extra work or willpower on your part.
(And which weight-loss pill or fat burner does that? Sure they do the job suppressing your appetite, but they’re loaded with who knows what.)
Did we mention Protein Coffee is delicious to drink? It’s not some tasteless powder or pill to swallow – you get to enjoy every creamy sip.
What about the cost?
Here’s an interesting fact: Per serving Protein Coffee costs less than half the cost of a tall Starbucks latte!
This means not only you skip the empty, sugary calories... but you keep the great taste, too.
Tastes like a latte that I would pay big bucks for at a gourmet coffee shop! -Belinda A.Is this creamy drink what finally tips the scales in your favor? Find out more about it here.
P.S. In case it runs out of stock (happens few times a year) some customers choose to hoard up supplies of their favorite Protein Coffee flavors. Whether for themselves or to share it with family & friends, they cannot afford to NOT have any of this delicious coffee at hand. That’s why Maine Roast are giving a (%) Discount + Free Shipping when you shop in bulk.
