Don’t hold your breath.
It’s (gasp) breathing.
Olympic athletes are hiring breathing coaches. Californians are filling their lungs at trendy Hollywood “oxygen bars.” The marketing of breathing is so hot that GQ magazine called it “the Hula-Hoop of the ’90s.”
A new book that says you can actually lose weight just by breathing.
The book, “Jump Start Your Metabolism with the Power of Breath,” was written by breathing coach Pam Grout of Merriam, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. Grout said she lost 10 pounds in three weeks without even trying by starting a series of breathing exercises. Her book includes breathing exercises that she calls energy cocktails.
“The last thing I was trying to do was lose weight,” Grout said. “I was just trying to cope, but then I lost 10 pounds and had all this energy. I thought, `This is really interesting.’ “
Grout researched breathing, studied it and became a coach. Her self-published book (which was just picked up by Simon & Schuster) has been getting national exposure. Besides appearing on several national television talk shows, she has had her book mentioned in several major magazines.
Hold on.
Breathing books? Breathing bars? Breathing coaches?
Don’t we know how to breathe?
Not as well as we think, Grout said.
“Nine out of 10 people are not getting the full capacity that they could,” Grout said. “Our lungs are capable of holding a couple of gallons of oxygen per breath, but we’re settling for only a couple pints.”
Even when we take “deep breaths,” she said, we’re usually just taking the oxygen into our chests, not deep down toward our bellies where we really need it most.
(To see if you are breathing properly, Grout suggests the belly breath test. Lie down. Put one book on your belly and another on your chest. Take a breath. If the book on your chest rises higher than the one on your belly, you’re not breathing as effectively as you could.)
Such shallow breathing, Grout says, impoverishes our cells, slows our metabolism and leads to health consequences. The good news is that people can reduce stress, feel more relaxed, and–most important–“energize” their metabolisms and lose weight by performing deep-breathing exercises.
“Oxygen is the big kahuna!” Grout proclaims on the back of the book. “. . . When you don’t give your body enough oxygen (and 90 percent of us don’t), your body has no choice but to store fat.”
But Gerald Kerby, a pulmonologist and professor of medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center, said Grout’s contention was more baloney than breakthrough.
“It’s nonsense,” the lung expert said. “The main way to control your weight is to control the amount of food you put into your body.”
What about “pumping up” your metabolism?
“She’s got it backward,” he said. “Oxygen doesn’t drive metabolism. Metabolism determines how much oxygen the body needs to take in. . . . You don’t force oxygen into muscles to make them consume glucose and other foods.”
All Grout knows is that breathing exercises worked for her.
“Here I was, a single mom, totally run down,” she said. “A friend said, `You need to try these breathing exercises.’ In the course of the three-week trial, my energy just exploded. The other thing that happened is I lost 10 pounds.”
She cited several doctors who supported her positions on the health and weight-reducing benefits of proper breathing.
One was Sheldon Saul Hendler, an internist, biochemist and associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at San Diego. Hendler wrote a book about breathing in the late ’80s called “The Oxygen Breakthrough.”
While he supported books that encouraged better breathing, Hendler could not support Grout’s assertion that breathing alone could produce weight loss.
“It’s unfortunate that she is stressing weight loss,” he said. “That’s what I have a problem with because there are much more important reasons to learn how to breathe correctly than to lose weight.”
Such reasons, he said, include relaxation, anxiety and stress reduction, and improved performance by athletes, musicians, singers and speakers. Hendler also said Grout’s book could still be valuable.
“You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water,” he said. “There is no doubt breathing is important in a lot of ways. When people start trying to improve their health in one way, it often extends to other things. They may get more exercise, they may pay more attention to their diet.
“Can breathing itself cause weight loss? I don’t think so, but if it then leads to taking better care of your health generally by exercising and better nutritional habits, it could lead to weight loss.”
