PBS Nova – Boston Marathon episode review

October 9, 3:41 PMNutrition ExaminerCarol Bardelli

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Nutrition Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Certain people have a way of saying things that shake us at the core.- Thurgood Marshall, American Jurist and Lawyer.

I TiVo’d an episode of NOVA awhile back on the Boston Marathon. The show is entitled “Marathon Challenge: explore what it takes – both physically and mentally – for novice runners to make it through a classic test of endurance.”

In the show, NOVA chose and followed its own team of regular people – mostly sedentary non-athletes – as they struggled through months of training with sports and medical professionals in preparation for running the Boston Marathon.

One striking statement made in this documentary has to do with a side effect of living a very sedentary life. 

Despite outward physical appearances of being normal weight many sedentary non-exercisers, and especially those who
eschew resistance training, are actually overweight.  Even people who don’t look overweight can be “over” fat. Miriam Nelson, a TUFTS professor, states in the documentary, “What we see is someone with an ideal body weight can be overly fat and under muscled.”

Here we are in a country where 67 percent of us are overweight or obese and it’s obvious by simply looking at us. As a majority we seem to be playing Russian roulette with our health. Yet many of our normal weight counterparts are also too fat by Dr. Miriam Nelson’s standards.

That puts MOST OF US in the category of having a less than optimal body composition. The fact remains, while slim folks may appear small we may also have too much body fat! Yes, I touched on this previously but wanted to explore it further.

Yikes!  Here’s what having too much body fat means.  More body fat can equal excess amounts of harmful hormones and poor health outcomes.  This is particularly true if our “over fat” is belly fat.

Many low carb, low fat, low calorie, and “whatever you’re on” dieters who are successful experience this phenomenon more readily.  Some dieters lose a lot of weight, but they ignored exercise and particularly muscle building.  They look smaller but still have a body fat percentage way higher than their size would indicate.

This high body fat phenomenon is prevalent in people who lose a great deal of weight.  Look around you and you will see many people who lose a lot of weight are still quite big. This is because our fat cells do not disappear. They only shrink. And when you’ve been obese or morbidly obese this means you cannot down size. You will always have more fat cells than an always thin person. But it’s also there in most average Americans. The main reason is we ignore our muscle mass and the lack there of.

Most people who lose a lot of weight still have a high body fat percentage compared to people who’ve always been a normal weight. This is particularly true if you rarely exercise or eschew resistance training. (Yeah, I sound like a broken record. For you young uns think broken digital media). You can lose over a hundred pounds yet still be, as Mirriam Nelson says, “over-fat”.

For most normal weight people this “problem” may not actually pose a problem. It’s simply a cosmetic consideration.  For some a lack of adequate muscle mass can contribute to a lower metabolism and unless resolved by building muscle mass they may  face a “Catch 22” of continued fat gain and muscle loss through chronic yoyo dieting.

In the NOVA documentary, Betsy, the most overweight of the group, had to delay her training due to health issues.

Yet Betsy touches your heart and she gallantly goes on to be one of the very few marathoners who radically changes her body composition, not just losing weight but lowering her body fat percentage. Betsy proves that you can change your body composition positively through discipline and hard work.

Many of the other marathoners who were “over fat” didn’t change their body composition despite intense aerobic training. Neither did they pursue resistance training - the core approach to changing body composition.

Their efforts at running longer and longer distances made them aerobically fitter. Their endurance and cardiovascular health improved. But their body fat percentages remained stable.

The final joy of this show is that all but one recruited runner finished the Boston Marathon. Only one woman who had type I diabetes had to drop out due to stress fractures.  This documentary is inspirational and motivational while not attempting to white wash the difficulties these runners faced. It’s a must see show for anyone interested in fitness or lifestyle change. One runner even gave up smoking.

While this documentary was intriguing on many fronts, the most compelling questions it raises is this: “Does our personal or collective body fat percentages really matter?”  and “How much body fat is actually unhealthy or dangerous?” 

I don’t have the answers to those questions at this time. But you can’t bet a box of Twinkies than I going to research the issues. I’m into flexing more than just my biceps.

Additional reading:

The Skinny on Fat - Researchers have some ideas about how fat goes from being a few vanity pounds to representing an actual health risk by Alicia Di Rado


How Fat Cells Work by Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D.