Exposing the Health of Fitness Influencers - Are They REALLY Even Healthy?

are Fitness influencers really healthier than regular people like just because you push extreme exercise or you look a certain way like does that mean you're healthier and I want to look at the literature and I want to look at the data as a fitness influencer myself I really have to look in the mirror sometimes is how hard I push my body or how much I might restrict things in my diet is it really healthier than just living a casually healthy lifestyle so we're going to look at the exercise we're going to look at the side of like vigorous exercise strenuous activity effects on the heart we're going to look at body fat body composition we're going to look at performance-enhancing drug use all these things that go into making a fitness influencer to see if they really are healthier and how we can find that sweet spot because as people that consume this content we need to understand that those can be very motivating pieces and that is great to look at Fitness influencers for motivation but sometimes trying to live just like them is not what you want to do so the first piece we need to look at is something that's called the Goldilocks zone so let's dive into that after today's video I put a link down below for 30% off your entire grocery order through Thrive Market I also now have my own products through Thrive Market I have my low carb nut Butters that sweetened with allulose so I have like a Nutella knockoff that's made with hazelnuts and chocolate and sweetened with alula so if you like the taste of like that chocolate hazelnut spread you're going to you're going to love this stuff and again you can use that 30% off discount link to get this stuff I also have a macadamia nut dessert butter and a cinnamon Brazil nut butter all linked down below but whether or not you want to try that thrive Market allows you to get all your groceries delivered to your doorstep and you can sort by different diet type you can sort by allergies by different categories and it's all delivered in a couple of days super easy peasy so 30% off your whole grocery order your whole Cart Plus a $60 free gift when you use that special link that is down in the top line of the description underneath this video I would really appreciate you trying them out because your support of them supports this Channel and keeps us creating content the Goldilocks zone refers to exercise specifically and there was a study that was published in Missouri medicine that looked at the goldilock Zone because when you look at exercise intensity it is a U-shaped curve I guess more technically like a reverse j-shaped curve and what that means is that to little exercise obviously very bad for mortality too much exercise was also very bad for mortality so how do we find The Sweet Spot well on the surface this goldilock Zone seems to be about 150 minutes or so of moderate exercise per week or about 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week seems like when you go beyond that it starts to change things a little bit but the big thing the big takeaway with the goldilock zone is that when you started to exceed like 4 hours of intense exercise there started to be an increase in mortality risk now there's a lot of things that we can factor in here and we're not going to go into detail in this video because that's not the point of this video there's recovery modalities there's nutritional modalities there's things that you can do to offset more of the extreme sides of things but when you look at Fitness influencers and we all know the ones I'm talking about I'm not going to point fingers but some that push really extreme things particularly when it comes down to the endurance side of things and I'm kind of guilty of it too that's where we have to be careful like pushing heart pounding exercise for prolonged periods of time for the essence of push it harder no pain no gain it really could be detrimental that being said there's no upper limit based on the literature to like low to moderate even generally moderate exercise like leisurely exercise going out and playing pickle ball whatever going out and going for a little jog there doesn't seem to be an upper limit to that it's when it starts getting to this really high intensity stuff but with this need to look at very interesting data when they actually monitored the hza tribes they put heart rate monitors on hunter gatherers because what they want to do is they want to say what is what are they doing what did we used to do and what kind of level of intensity did we have for a culture or a tribe that seems to have really good metabolic health so this was published in the American Journal of human biology and they ultimately found that hunter gatherers seemed to do a lot a whole lot of low to moderate intensity activity okay they were moving around a lot looking in the average of like 16 to 20,000 steps per day on a low day like just like just chilling like that okay but what they found when they put heart rate monitors on two different Hoda tribes is that the amount of moderate to vigorous activity they did was actually pretty high not extreme vigorous but moderate to vigorous on average they were doing about 135 minutes per day that's 14 times The American Average okay what was interesting is they had no increased risk of cardiovascular disease or no increased risk of mortality based upon how much activity they were doing okay they also had great metabolic markers and they were active well into their 70s and they were doing pretty intense amounts of work so what this starts to tell us is that for metabolically healthy people that are watching their diets and are kind of in control of their life being able to push that moderate to vigorous intensity is entirely doable so if you embody your practice and you really Practice What You Preach you can push it there but the problems which we're going to talk about in a second come into when we start pushing these go forever kind of like you can go run 100 miles and be fine kind of thing all the time there's a study Post in the European Journal of preventative Cardiology that divided people into sedentary light exercise moderate exercise and vigorous exercise or kind of extreme exercise over the course of a week like how many minutes or hours per week long story short to spare you a lot of details they found that all groups of exercise light moderate and vigorous were better than being sedentary okay so even if you say you know what I'm going to take this video to the bank I don't want to do vigorous exercise that's fine just don't be sedentary because sedentary is worse than any of these categories I know that sometimes we strike fear about the vigorous activity but it's still better to do vigorous activity than it is to do no activity however there was a study published in the American College of Cardiology took a look at Runners they found that Runners that were just light Runners like joggers they would run at a light intensity they had the best outcome as far as mortality risk was concerned followed by moderate and then strenuous Runners ended up having the lowest Improvement or the least overall Improvement when it came down to mortality risk so those that pushed it harder with the running actually had higher chance of dying than those that were just casual joggers which is interesting because when you start getting into that category again you're talking about pushing it very hard now before I put this whole section to bed and we move on to body fat I want to talk about a big study that was published in jamama took a look at 205,000 Australians okay and they found that no matter what any amount of vigorous activity seem to be an improvement okay now listen here's what I mean if you take two people and both people are doing this same amount of moderate physical activity but one of them does even a little bit of vigorous or a lot of vigorous they're still going to have a better outcome than the person that didn't do the vigorous so the point is is we need some vigorous activity we need it it is important if we want to live a long healthy life but the dose makes the poison and some of these influencers really do push it at least they appear to push it and they might be pushing the wrong agenda for a lot of people now the reason that this could be problematic a lot of times comes down to the heart and I'm going to give you a quick mechanistic breakdown of like what happens there you have a constant remodeling of the heart that happens when you're having high intensity and Recovery high intensity and Recovery particularly in the right ventricle so essentially what ends up happening is you get sort of this uh Remodeling and potential fibrosis makes it harder for the heart to contract because you have fibrosis that's forming then you also end up getting left ventricle hypertrophy in the walls of the heart so what happens here is the heart is a muscle so when you're working really hard so you start strengthening that heart so much that it gets strong you put yourself at risk for arhythmia and apib this is why you start to see it's called the athletes Heart Again full disclaimer that is a pretty extreme case but if you were to train like a good majority of the fitness and sort of endurance influencers tell you to that could happen and that is a very real thing the athletes heart is a real condition okay so then we have the body fat side of things now I have to fall on the sword Here I Am low body fat but there is a difference between being low body fat and extreme body fat where we're taking pictures trying to show every single vein in the ABS all the time and you've got a lot of people that are trying to stay so ridiculously lean year round in bodybuilding contest prep shape all the time for the sake of Instagram and showing an image I don't think that that's healthy okay if you look at the bodybuilding World in general a lot of them will even admit that what they're doing is not exactly healthy it's purely for a look and I've been there I totally get it but when you look at the big picture it's really difficult to find data on low body fat being bad which is wild so it doesn't mean that it isn't bad here's the problem that we face if you're an evidence-based person and you're looking at low body fat risks most of the literature out there Compares lower body fat to high body fat there's not enough people in the low body fat category to really get a good cohort of people so most of the literature is just comparing people that are very high body fat to low body fat in which the case is most of the time low body fat is going to be better than high body fat so but it doesn't take into consideration very low body fat compared to moderately low body fat the only literature we have to look at that helps us with this is going to be BMI and BMI is going to show us a u-shape curve that low BMI is very very bad when it comes down to mortality risk as well as high BMI but low BMI is probably looking at someone that's very frail possibly anorexic po possibly dealing with a problem right High BMI is going to be someone that's obese this does not factor in muscle it does not factor in fat so it makes the literature very hard to look at and extrapolate anything that I could say with absolute certainty based upon the evidence is going to be good bad or ugly now by BMI standards I am obese by body fat standards I'm very lean now when you start getting into the categories you start saying the desired body fat for Optimal Health seems to be for men around like 10 to 15% body fat for women maybe 18 to 25 when you start getting into the 8 to 10 body fat you're in like kind of like a sweet spot of being able to be Fitness and lean when you start getting down to 5% or less you can make a lot of arguments that that is detrimental okay that staying at that level of body fat is going to be detrimental for hormone function remember like you need to pull from your fat to build hormones this is important so that's why you see hormones crash especially in women that get very very lean right it's bad for the hormones okay also bad for the brain it's bad for the overall myelination of our nerves but one of the things that people Overlook is that we have fat soluble vitamins vitamin A vitamin D vitamin E vitamin K if you don't have a place for those vitamins to go you have to continually be bringing them in and again when you look at people that are trying to stay very very lean restrictive diets that aren't getting adequate nutrition in it's hard to get those vitamins in the first place let alone having a place to store them so I can't tell you that being super lean is 100% going to be dangerous but I can tell you from experience that if I am very lean I get sick more I have a harder time recovering my hormones don't function as well there's problems in the bedroom it's noticeable so being very very very lean all the time although looks good on the surface isn't always what you want to be so I prefer to be in the ballpark of like 6 7 8 % than I do in the ballpark of four five or 6% body fat and I can tell you that the means in which a lot of people use to get to that level of body fat is usually not really good which brings me to another category performance-enhancing drugs now full disclaimer like I have no problem with people using testosterone replacement I think it's actually quite beneficial I think it's hugely beneficial and it's helped a lot of people candidly I don't even have an issue with people using performance dancing drugs outside of trt most people that I have known in the world of competitive sports or the world of bodybuilding they actually are pretty responsible and they do it right but that's the small minority of people that I know there was a study published in the Journal of internal medicine to took a look at Danish people that were uh 545 of them using anabolic androgenic steroids AAS or 5,450 control okay there is a three times higher mortality risk in those using AAS than those that were not now this could easily get picked apart because there's a lot of confounders for example people that are using steroids might be doing more extreme things they're pushing their bodies in harder ways they're pushing their nutrition in harder ways they're just different kind of person they're more they're less risk averse they're willing to take risk and therefore their risk of mortality might be higher so there's a lot of things there but when you look at the other literature uh there was a study published in liver International looked at 95 AAS users versus 85 nonas users over a 12% increase risk of developing fatty liver disease again does this mean that if you use them responsibly and again I know I could get like destroyed for even saying that but if you use them responsibly I don't know if this is going to be an issue however in the world of social media when someone is trying to look a certain way contest prep all the time huge muscle super lean year round constantly abusing Trend and using all this different stuff I don't think that's exactly healthy right you're probably going to run into an issue there's also a study published in circulation there's going to be increased risk of uh cardiomyopathy increased risk of myocardial inunction a heart attack uh conduction abnormalities where the heart actually just can't like send this proper signal so it's going to going to beat in a weird way so to get to the extreme to look a certain way to be a fitness influencer when you factor in a lot of these things probably not the healthiest thing and the dose makes the poison and it's all about the minimum effect of dose and if there's one thing that I've learned over the last 10 years 12 years of doing what I do is that getting more extreme with things although my get you a little more attention the juice is usually not worth the squeeze the stress you put on your body the Havoc that you wreak on your life to squeeze a little bit more in the way of viewership absolutely not worth it I would much rather trade some of the extreme side of what I've done for some of the more modest approach that a lot of my viewers have and finding that balance so as always keep it locked in here on my channel I'll see you tomorrow

Channel: Thomas DeLauer

Views: 60,155

Keywords: fitness influencer, fitness influencer tier list, fitness influencers are lying to you, fitness influencer cringe, fitness influencers are the worst, fitness influencers dying, fitness influencers on steroids, are fitness influencers on steroids, are fitness influencers fake, why are fitness influencers dying, why are fitness influencers hated, why fitness influencers are bad, why do fitness influencers sell out, thomas delauer, fitness influencers exposed

Id: NEZ-C-RSOBg

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2024