The Essential Role of Moving More and Eating Better with Robert Ross

You’ve heard it everywhere: “You can’t outrun a bad diet.” Or maybe it’s “Exercise doesn’t matter for weight loss.” Or wait, is it “Just lift weights and you’ll be fine”? The conflicting advice is enough to make anyone throw their hands up in frustration. What if the real answer isn’t choosing between diet and exercise, but understanding how they work together?

Join Holly and Jim as they sit down with Robert Ross, one of the rare researchers who has spent over three decades studying both sides of the equation. Ross is a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and he’s led groundbreaking research on how exercise, diet, and body fat interact, especially that stubborn visceral fat that drives metabolic disease. His work has shaped clinical guidelines and challenged long-held assumptions about weight loss. You’ll discover why the bathroom scale might be lying to you, what your belt buckle reveals that the scale doesn’t, and why being a “non-responder” to exercise might be a myth.

Get ready for a conversation that will fundamentally change how you think about managing your weight, whether you’re considering GLP-1 medications, struggling to keep weight off, or just trying to figure out if you should be doing cardio or lifting weights.

Discussed on the episode:

• Why the bathroom scale has done more harm than good in obesity management
• The belt buckle test that reveals more than any scale ever could
• What happens to visceral fat when you exercise without losing weight
• The truth about exercise “compensation”: Do you really eat more when you work out?
• Why 5% weight loss being “clinically meaningful” might be the wrong message.
• How cardiorespiratory fitness protects your health even if you have obesity
• The intensity question: Does working harder actually matter for fat loss?
• What we’re losing (literally) when we only focus on GLP-1 medications
• The myth of exercise “non-responders” and what the data really shows
• Why resistance exercise becomes critical as we age
• The one simple movement activity Ross recommends if you only have 10 minutes.