A study recently came out showing that one minute of intense exercise gives similar health benefits to that of 45 minutes of cardio.
There's a reason for this, and it’s something I’ve been talking about for years. I call it the ‘get thin or get eaten' body adaptation.
Activate Your “Get Thin or Get Eaten Adaptation”
The most effective approach to weight loss is convincing your body to want to be thin. Of course that begs the question; just HOW do you do that? And the answer is; your body will want to be thin if it deems that being thin is the safest thing from a ‘survival’ perspective.
One big secret to losing weight is knowing that the body stores fat for survival purposes. If your body thinks that it can just sit around and survive, it will. However, if you trick your body into thinking that sometimes it might get chased by a tiger, then it will respond hormonally, leaning towards a thin, lean physique.
When we were living in wildly hostile environments thousands of years ago, we were living outdoors, hungry and cold a lot of the time. We needed fat for survival. Fat kept us warm and protected from famine when there wasn't enough to eat. Fat is, in fact, our friend. Fat is a body survival mechanism. But there are other living environments from thousands of years ago that we lived in, where fat was not conducive to survival. It wasn't helping you in any way, shape or form.
What About Hot Environments?
Imagine, you're living outdoors and you're in a tropical, warm environment. When you're in a tropical, warm environment, it's warm all the time, so you don't need fat to keep you warm. Food is abundant. There are fruits and animal proteins, nuts and seeds. You can have all you want. It's all healthy, live, real foods, good for your digestion, it's anti-inflammatory, it's nourishing, it's got proteins, healthy fats, and it's all nutrientially perfect from a dietary point of view. In this situation, while you can have as much as you want, you don't need fat to protect you against any kind of famine and you don't need any fat stores to keep you warm
Using Short Term Acute Stress To Lose Weight
Let's imagine in that hot environment, there were predators, and every once in a while one of them came out and chased you. If you weren't lightning fast for 10, 20, 30 seconds, and outran everybody else, you were dead. And if you are faster than everybody else in a 10-second sprint or a 20-second sprint, you will survive.
That is called short-term acute stress. Short-term acute stresses have differing effects on the body than long-term, chronic, low-grade stresses.
A famine is an example of a long-term, chronic, low-grade stress. It causes hormonal changes that cause you to gain weight. Most of the stresses in our environment are long-term, chronic, low-grade stresses.
A short-term, acute stress is the exact opposite. Short-term, acute stresses reverse hormonal problems like leptin and insulin resistance. They make your body more sensitive to these very important fat-regulating hormones, and it makes it much easier to lose weight.
Get Fast or Get Eaten
If you had to run away from a predator that was intent on eating you, your body would get the message very quickly that if you weren't fast you were dead, and you activate what I call the get thin or get eaten adaptation. Then, as far as your body is concerned, survival is more important than storing fat. This hormonal shift turns your body into a fat shedding machine.
1 Minute of Intense Exercise
You can trick you body into thinking it needs to be prepared for being chased by a predator with one minute, intense exercises. Those 45 minute cardio workouts will never nudge your hormones into the weight loss potential like 1 minute intense exercise does.
If that predator came out of nowhere and started chasing you, you wouldn't go for a 45-minute cardio walk. You would sprint 10, 20 seconds, life or death style. That's the type of exercise I've advocated for years. The 1 minute intense workout is the best kind of exercise to really make your body want to be thin.
It's never been about calories in versus calories out. Weight loss is really about making the hormonal switch in your body. You may only burn a few hundred calories in these 1 minute intense workouts, but you will make hormonal changes and send the message to the survival brain that you need to be thin in order to survive.
Visualization is Vital
Your survival brain doesn’t know the difference between a real and an imagined experience, so you can use that to your advantage when you’re exercising. One of the best things you can do when you’re sprinting is to visualize that either you’re being chased by something or that you’re chasing something. Either way you’re communicating to your body that the reason you’re moving so fast is for survival reasons and that will activate the Get Thin Or Get Eaten Adaptation.
Practice even a couple of times per week and in no time flat your body will get the message that you need to be thin and fit for survival reasons. You change your body on a hormonal level and your body to want to be thin.
Short-term, periodic, intense exercise is the best way to convince your body to be thin to survive. Half the job's done once you understand exactly what's going on and how to get your body to once again want to be fit.
Share Your Ideas & Thoughts
Have you tried out the 1 minute intense exercise yet? Share your ideas and let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
