Ep. 36 Why build muscle as a teen when losing weight
Mar 21, 2024
Dr Jenny Gourgari
Have you ever wondered why keeping muscle mass is key to a teen's healthy weight loss journey? I'm here to share with you essential insights on how a balanced approach to exercise can safeguard your child's muscle mass as they work to lose those extra pounds. This journey isn't just about outward appearances – it's deeply connected to maintaining hormonal balance and optimal cardiovascular health, essential pillars for lifelong health.
In this episode, we dive deep into the significance of muscle in regulating insulin sensitivity and offer practical tips that teens can apply to stay healthy.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
Have you ever wondered why keeping muscle mass is key to a teen's healthy weight loss journey? I'm here to share with you essential insights on how a balanced approach to exercise can safeguard your child's muscle mass as they work to lose those extra pounds. This journey isn't just about outward appearances – it's deeply connected to maintaining hormonal balance and optimal cardiovascular health, essential pillars for lifelong health.
In this episode, we dive deep into the significance of muscle in regulating insulin sensitivity and offer practical tips that teens can apply to stay healthy.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgary.
Speaker 2:
Hello, hello, welcome to another episode of the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. This is your host, dr Jenny Gorgary, and today I will be talking about exercise and how that can prevent losing muscle in teenagers that they're trying to get to a healthy weight by doing following both a dietary plan and some type of physical activity. It is recommended that teenagers that want to get into a healthy weight do at least one hour of physical activity every day. Now I understand that this is not always feasible and that's totally fine. Just do every day a little better than what you did yesterday. That's why I keep saying again and again but what I want to focus the discussion today.
Speaker 2:
The topic today is around weight reduction and how that can affect preservation on muscle mass. The problem with losing weight can be that if it is not done with exercise at the same time and it's not done with having enough protein intake also at the same time, it can make you lose not only fat but also lose muscle. Now why we don't want to lose muscle. What's the problem? The muscle, having more muscle mass than having more fat for the same amount of body weight can help you significantly with regulating the hormones that are important for not only weight loss, but also maintaining healthy weight and maintaining good cardiovascular health. I'm talking about insulin resistance. So I'll try to explain this in simple terms. Let's say you have 20% of muscle in your body and somebody else has 30% muscle in their body. They're both same teenagers, 15 years of age. They go and have a piece of cake. The person who has 30% body mass is going to have lower spike of insulin compared to the person who has 20% muscle mass. If they are similar. For all the other aspects, of course, this is just an imaginary scenario, but what I'm trying to say is that the insulin sensitivity is better when you have more muscle mass compared to if you have less muscle mass. And why is that important? Because when you eat something that has carbohydrates, that has sugar, it is absorbed by the muscles. There are receptors in the muscles that get the sugar inside the muscles. So it is important to have good muscle mass because that can improve your insulin sensitivity. Now you can ask okay, how much is my muscle mass? And this is my muscle mass, and what do I do if I increase it? The actual number I can give you a number. The actual number is variable. It depends on your height, your weight, your age. But what is important is to maintain a good muscle mass and to do what you can to improve your insulin sensitivity, to improve your cardiovascular health, and one good way to do that is through physical activity. So that is one reason why the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends to have at least one hour of physical activity for every child. I mean, it's true for adults, but I'm focusing on children and teenagers. Now. So the problem with weight loss if you are following a diet and an exercise plan and you wanna lose weight, then when you're losing weight, that can be losing weight from fat and also losing weight from muscle, and ideally we don't want to lose as much muscle mass. We prefer to lose more fat mass than muscle mass. It's inevitable to some extent to perhaps lose some muscle too if you're having a significant weight loss, but the important thing is to minimize the effect of muscle mass to the extent that it is possible and to try to have more preservation of the muscle mass to the extent that this is possible.
Speaker 2:
So there was this great study that was done a few years ago. The title of the manuscript is a Weight Reduction Program Preserves Fat Free Mass but Not Metabolic Rate in Obesity Adolescents. It was published in the Journal of Obesity Research in February 2004 by Stephan Lazar and his group. Now what these researchers did is they had 26 teenagers between the ages of 12 to 16 years of age and they followed them over a nine month weight reduction program. Now their average BMI was around 33.9. If you don't know what BMI is, you can go and listen to episode one when I explain a little bit more. But basically, bmi is a measurement that researchers use to evaluate what is the percentage of abnormal weight and how much weight teenagers need to lose to being a healthy BMI. That's what we use Now.
Speaker 2:
Bmi is thought a perfect tool. It doesn't give you any information about body composition. It doesn't tell you, for example, how much of that weight is due to body fat and how much of that is due to muscle mass. So there is another measurement that researchers can do and there is a machine it's called DEXA scan. It's the same machine that is used to check for osteoporosis. So they had this scan and they asked all these teenagers to get into that at the beginning and at the end of the program, where they had them measured how much was their muscle mass in the beginning and how much was their fat mass in the beginning and what was at the end of the program.
Speaker 2:
Now, they also asked them to follow, say, an activity program, and the activity program included two sessions of 40 minutes each. They were done with a physical trainer and they were also testing them and measuring their heart rate to see how their heart, their basal heart rate and their maximum heart rate was. So when they tried to put them into the exercise, the intensity of the program was set at 60% of the initial maximum oxygen-aptic test. So it was an intense program and in addition to that they also had two hours of physical activity at school and they had two hours per week of aerobic activities at their institution, and then they were encouraged to also participate in physical activity with their parents during the weekend. They also gave them specific dietary recommendations and they also give them lectures about how to eat healthy, and they also taught them how to cook and make simple meals. So this was a nine-month program and at the end of the program what they found was that there was a significant improvement in the BM.
Speaker 2:
The teenagers lost an average of 16.9 kilograms, and when they looked at the percent body fat versus the percent muscle loss, they found that the boys did not lose significant muscle mass. The girls did lose some muscle mass. So there was some difference in how the boys and the girls responded to this program and to this intense activity in order to preserve the muscle mass. And the way the researchers explained it, which also makes sense, is that the boys were still growing and they had a significant growth spurt compared to the girls, who did not grow as much, because the boys tend to grow later in their puberty compared to girls and potentially because of that they had less of an effect on their muscle loss. However, as I mentioned in the beginning, it is expected that when you have weight loss you are going to lose some muscle mass, you are going to lose some fat mass, but the point is, is the expected muscle mass less, muscle mass loss, less than the actual muscle mass loss? And they did have some to predict the expected loss in the muscle and even in girls that they did lose muscle mass when they had this significant weight loss. The percent of muscle mass loss was less than what they would have lost if they hadn't participated in the exercise.
Speaker 2:
So my take-home message for today and this is just one of the manuscripts that support these notions is what we know that exercise improves muscle mass and exercise can prevent having significant muscle mass. It can prevent and preserve your muscle mass while you're losing weight, and we want you to have more muscle mass, as more muscle mass as possible, because that can help regulate better your insulin sensitivity and it can help you maintain a healthier cardiovascular health. So, again, you don't need to start with one hour of exercise if you're not doing anything at this point. But let's say, if you're exercising three times per week, I encourage you to go and exercise four times. If you're doing 15 minutes, you can go and do 20 minutes, and having someone who is a personal trainer can help you on that journey.
Speaker 2:
Don't be scared to do muscle strength. I used to think that, oh, I need to lift weights, for example, and I'm going to be very bulky and muscular if I do exercise. No, I'm not talking about this type of exercise. You don't need to lift 50 pounds to get the benefits of building muscle. You can just start with body weight exercises. You can start with simple training.
Speaker 2:
You can start things that you can easily do at your home, even if they're for five or 10 minutes, you can do them at your school. You can talk with your counselor. You can talk with other people at the gym or at sport events. You can just also do it by playing basketball. You can do it with warming activities even before you actually go and participate in the sport. So talk to your trainer, talk to someone who is an exercise physiologist. Go and talk to your provider if they have someone who they work with. But please do your best to incorporate some kind of physical activity in your weight loss journey, because that can help you maintain and preserve the muscle mass to the extent that is possible. That's all I had for today. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to reach out to me info at lifestyle14scom If there are any topics you would like me to talk about, and if you like this episode, please feel free to share it with anybody you think may benefit from hearing this message. Take care, bye.
Speaker 1:
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, I invite you to come check out the Lifts program. It's Dr Gorgary's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyle14scom and click on the Work With Me and Free resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of Lifestyle and Weight Loss for teens.