RUSH: All right, ‘Kiss Cardio Goodbye, and Lose Weight.’ It’s right here. I knew I was right. Sometimes I’m right even when I think I’m wrong but I knew I was right on this. Well, all I had to do was get on a stupid treadmill and see if I walked a mile in a half hour, I’d burn a hundred calories, which is what, a Fig Newton? Give me a break! This guy says it in this book: cardio aerobic exercise kills everything but the appetite, which is not good if you’re trying to lose weight. ‘Jim Karas, a New York Times best-selling author…’ Actually, this is an ABC story: ‘Fitness Trainer’s Book Has Raised Controversy.’ Of course it ’caused controversy,’ because it’s violating everything all these so-called experts have said about exercise and weight loss. ‘In ‘The Cardio-Free Diet,’ Karas shares why, according to him, cardiovascular exercise alone won’t help you lose weight and keep it off. He says that instead of spending an hour running on a treadmill five times a week, you should learn how to perform strength training exercises for twenty minutes a day, three times a week.’
‘I ask them, ‘Is it working?’
‘They say, ‘Well, no, but I just need to do it more often and for a longer period of time.”
How many of you people are out there doing this? You’re running around. You’re walking around and you come back and you’re not losing any weight and say, I gotta step it up? Well… ‘If something isn’t working, are you going to do more of it? You keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result? Albert Einstein had a name for this type of logic: insanity. Cardio is mindless. You hop on the treadmill, jump on the bike, or step on the elliptical trainer, turn on the TV or pop in the earphones of your iPod, flip through your favorite magazines, and off you go…to nowhere fast. What are you accomplishing? Absolutely nothing, except a Zen-like trance, during which you should meditate on the following mantra: Mindless Exercise Yields Forgettable Results.’ (sigh) How many of you people go to the gym? Of those of you that go to the gym (I don’t go to the gym, obviously, because I already know all this) let me ask you a question. How many of the people in there do you think are liberals? They’re doing the same thing over and over again with no results whatsoever, but they buy into all of this pop culture rhetoric on this stuff.
‘For more than 20 years as a weight loss and fitness professional,’ Mr. Karas says, ‘I have been working with clients one-on-one and have been leading, teaching, and training a team of the best and the brightest physical trainers in New York and Chicago. We’ve been in the field, identifying cutting edge research, testing it, and then bringing the best of the best information and instruction to our clients. After 20 years of experience, I am convinced that cardio kills. It kills your weight loss plan, your joints, your internal organs and immune system, your body composition, your time and, most of all, your motivation to stay committed to losing weight. But there is one thing that cardio doesn’t kill: your appetite. The more cardio you do, the hungrier you get. You burn a few measly calories, then you eat twice as many [Fig Newtons] afterward. The result? Weight gain, and lots of it. Cardio is the channel surfing solution of exercise. It’s mindless and, as you have experienced, result-less,’ and then they go on and publish chapter one, and the guy says, hey, I fell for this myself.
‘I believed, like so many people, that working up a ‘good sweat’ equates to a good, effective workout. Basically, More Sweat = Better Workout. This is a common misconception. Just like everything else in the world, we have to learn to work smarter, not harder, to get ahead. In the last thirty years since the cardio craze has taken off, do you think Americans, on the whole, have lost weight? In 1987, there were 4.4 million treadmill users. By 2000, that number had exploded to 40 million users — more than a 900% increase. Consumers spend more on treadmills than any other home exercise equipment. Since 1980, the number of overweight Americans has doubled. According to Duke University,’ Well, maybe it’s not wise to quote them these days but we’ll stick with it, ”63% of U.S. adults were overweight or obese in 2005, compared to 58% in 2001.’ Given that there are 300 million Americans, that’s an additional 15 million Americans who became overweight or obese in just four years. How can this keep happening? It keeps happening because Americans continue to listen to the wrong advice. They want to believe that the answer to their problems is as easy as putting one foot in front of the other, but nothing worth having is that easy,’ and then he goes into what I told you about losing weight. It’s ‘calories in versus calories out,’ and the key is your resting metabolism. If you’re just in bed all day, that’s resting metabolism, and do you know that 60 to 70% of daily calorie burn occurs during resting metabolism?
Let me ask you people this, as a well-known diet expert (and that I am) I have always noticed that I weigh the least every day in the morning. I get up in the morning and what have I been doing all night? I’ve been sleeping, and I haven’t been sleeping on the treadmill. ‘Well, Rush, that’s because your food is digested.’ No, it’s not. You have a steady resting metabolism. I saw a story a couple months ago: sleep more and you’ll lose your weight. Look at the doubting Thomases in there. Okay, try it. You people that believe in all this cardio stuff, go out and do some cardio and get to the scale and see if you’ve lost weight after doing it. ‘Well, it doesn’t happen that fast, Rush.’ (scoffs) What do you mean it doesn’t that fast? Your least weight… How many times do you go to the doctor and get a checkup? They weigh you and you want to go the first thing in the morning so you’ll weigh the least, so the doctor will complain to you the least. The last thing you want to do is go in there after you’ve had lunch.
Some of you probably go in the gym, get in a sweat box, get in there and do some cardio and think you’ll weigh a little less after you do that, and you might if you’ve sweated a bunch of water but it isn’t going to take long if you start guzzling the old Perrier and whatever you sweat out will be right back on, and so forth. You really have to eat less, and he goes on say that it’s weight training. (It’s not described in this story, so I don’t know what kind of weight training he’s talking about. You gotta buy the book for that.) He says that that’s what increases your metabolism by 15%, and that’s what increases the burning of calories. ‘Strength training is the key to weight loss because it’s the only way to maintain and build lean muscle, which boosts your metabolism,’ and, of course, you burn more calories the more muscle you have just keeping the muscles in tone, and I’ve heard this from exercise gurus who are trying to convince me to do it but you know me and exercise: Screw all of it! But if you’re going to use it as a weight loss plan, weight training apparently is the way to go according to Jim Karas.