Top Health Engineer Tests How Much Fat You Can ACTUALLY Lose Walking Instead of Running: 80-Days

All right, let's go. It's day 80 of the fat loss results series for running versus walking. So, I'll show you the progress videos, a day 80 and a day 60. I'll show you the weight scale and I'll also show you a file loss scan known as DEXA. And then I'm also doing these as progress videos because I want you to be able to see my story as I'm coming up as opposed to when I'm there and having trouble recounting what actually happened.

Um, so I'm going to give you the nittygritty details of that. So, compared to my expectations at the beginning of this experiment, the results were very surprising. I like to do a belly roll in front of the mirror so you can see the abs at all kinds of angles and shadows. That way, it's more realistic and, you know, you can see what it's actually like.

I also like to do a point of view cuz I've always wondered what it was like to have abs. And, you know, this is the closest I've ever gotten. So, I'm sharing it with you. All right. So, just knowing that and let me show you my weight from the day 60. Can you guess what my day 80 weight is going to be?

I'll pause for 3 seconds. This is my weight on day 80. It's 174. 2. So, it's only6 lb lighter or about. 3 kg. Daytoday my weight fluctuated a lot. I'll show you the full data in a future video. For now, I want to make this quick. All right. So before we begin analyzing those numbers, let's just look at the DEXA scan results.

So the body fat, if you don't know, DEXA is supposed to be a gold standard for measuring body fat percentage. In the last day 60 video, I got some conflicting results from one of the scanners. And so I decided to get both done at the same time uh today. So I had G Lunar in the morning and then I had the Hologic Horizon in the afternoon.

So, the Hologic Horizon, which is on this side, says that my body fat percentage was 13. 7%. So, it's about 2. 1% lower than day 60. So, that's pretty good. 2% drop. I'll take that. G Lunar says it's 9. 7% total body fat right now. So, it's dropped from its last can, which it said on day 40 was 12. 6%.

So if you take the average of these two, I'm probably around 11 to 12% total body fat. You know, both of them actually agree that my abdominal fat is lower than my total by about 2 to 3%. So my abdominal body fat should look like 9 to 10%, 9 to 11, I don't know. I think that is almost consistent. I think I might have a little bit higher to be honest.

So I still want to keep doing this. So, I'm just going to do the average of them right now. And if you're interested in the research study and looking at what the details are, I'm just going to put it up if you want to decide which one to use between the two of them. Yeah. So, so the hologic says my trunk fat percent is 11.

And I think this one says it's 3% lower. I actually lost the breakdown. So, I think it was saying 8%. I need to get that from them. Uh, but yeah, doesn't matter. Okay. But you came here to actually look at what's the difference between running versus walking. Not just my update in the whole experiment.

Right now, I can't tell. I don't think we can tell if running or walking is better. It kind of looks the same. I want to be sure. So, I'm not going to make a final decision until day 100. So, if you watched my earlier video, the science-based theory for why running might be worse than walking is because running in endurance athletes increases cortisol.

And if you watch that video as well, cortisol reduces fat usage or fat burning by reducing a critical step, a bottleneck step. So, it's blocking the whole path. You can imagine on like a highway. Yeah. it just like blocks that step and so it reduces total fat burn. Now if you actually look at my cortisol results which I did at the same time so that's controlled for I do very controlled experiments it actually decreased.

So my cortisol decreased. I expected my cortisol to increase especially because two or 3 days before the test. So my last run I did a half marathon in the morning fasted. I did a fasted half marathon. It was really stressful. But there's actually a good possible set of explanations for why this happened to me.

So the first reason is that 20 days may have not been a long enough period to notice that chronic increase in cortisol that you observe in endurance athlete. Supposedly the adaptation happens over months or years, not 20 days. So if you want to do this experiment and you're measuring your cortisol, you know, maybe test a period that is longer than 20 days.

Another possible reason for why this might have happened is because I'm very particular about my sleep schedule and my caloric intake obviously and my hygiene habits. So, you know, ignore the hair. I just like how this looks. I guess those are able to maintain your brain in a good place where cortisol can be not too high.

So, if you look at the research that tested endurance athletes, uh they were not looking at a 20-day period. These are actual endurance athletes who do this for a living or you know a very serious hobby. So this is based on research that says that cortisol is a systemic uh stress buffer. If you have a good system for managing your stress, cortisol might not get as high.

The third possible reason, you know, like I mentioned, I love running these days. I'm not just doing it to burn calories. I do it because I love the achievement and the endorphins that I get out of it. So that itself might reduce the cortisol response to that just cuz I love it so much. So if you're doing this kind of study for yourself, which I recommend everybody does, it's always better to get your own data.

I would measure the cortisol. You might not respond to running in the same way that I did. All right. So at the end of this video, I promise you my impression of how it's going, right? I don't want to tell you advice when I've already made it and not tell you my experience when I'm going up. Okay. So, so far I've told you that I don't think it matters running versus walking, at least for me.

I don't want to just make you wait until day 100. I want to give you the nuance that's actually valuable as somebody who is currently in that boat in that struggle who knows the day-to-day challenges. So the first thing I want to talk about is there is a nuance in that it doesn't matter with running versus walking and it has to do with appetite and sleep.

So I can go to bed on a completely empty stomach. I'll find it really hard to sleep. Some nights I actually woke up at like 3:00 a. m. uh really really violently probably because I was hungry. And I actually remember writing this down in my diary or my log or whatever. And what I wrote down was I'm you know I'm too hungry.

I'm too hungry to fall asleep. I don't really care about apps as much right now. I need to find a better way to do this so that it doesn't disrupt my sleep. And the thing that I had to do to overcome this obstacle was actually walk more so I can have a big dinner. Most days I burnt around 3500 calories because I walked in this phase for about an hour even though I also ran.

that was able to allow me to eat 3,000 calories in total and therefore about a,000 calories for dinner couple hours before I go to bed. And so I was able to sleep soundly. So that is important, right? So the takeaway that I'm taking and maybe you take as well and the way that I'm thinking of this is that walking is required for abs.

Definitely for getting abs, potentially even maintaining it. We'll see. You know, you could equate something else like walking, maybe, you know, somebody that has abs because they play a sport and do that for like an hour a day. I would consider that to be the same as walking. I think walking is a lot more practical for people my age and over because you get to call your people while you're doing that.

You get to call the people that you love and it's a really easy exercise when you do that. So, all right. For this next impression, I touched on it a little bit, but it's actually a lot more critical than I said at the beginning. So, I remember talking to my wife at the beginning of this phase at around day 65, and I just said, you know what I realized?

I don't care about this anymore. And it wasn't like, oh, like this sucks. This is not worth it. Which is really weird because that only happens a few days. A lot of the days I'm actually super excited to get asked for the first time. I think I'm gonna have like a dance party or whatever. So, subscribe.

It is still surprising to have those days. I did not have that before. Like before day 60, I was always like, "Let's go. Let's get those abs, you know." So, I think the takeaway from this is it's really hard to care about getting abs 2 months of dieting. You sort of just have to do it. And it's not that it's hard.

It doesn't seem as rewarding. Maybe because I'm not I don't feel like I'm learning or changing much stuff. I don't know. We'll see. At the end of day 100, hopefully I should have abs my satisfaction. I think I might go a little longer. We'll see if I still care at that point. All right. So, that's all I wanted to say.

Go ahead and share this video. Peace.