This post is about exercise. And about weight loss. And about the relationship between the two. Which, sad to say, is probably a very different relationship than you might think. Exercise is the greatest anti-aging activity on the planet. And the data is clear: Exercise can help with depression, lower the risk for heart disease and cancer, and reduce the risk and complications of diabetes. It can even grow new brain cells. What it can’t do is cause you to lose weight.
Although the benefits of exercise are well-documented, the fact is that most people exercise for vanity reasons, not primarily for health. It’s horribly difficult to seriously change the way you look through exercise alone. People don’t understand that it is very difficult to exercise enough to lose weight. If that is why you are doing it, you are going to fail.
The idea that exercise causes weight loss is firmly embedded in our national consciousness, and is accepted as a basic truth even by people who don’t exercise. One reason is the widely-accepted theory that weight loss is all about calories. The truth is, you don’t actually burn a ton of calories during exercise, unless you’re Michael Phelps. Mounting evidence suggests that exercise makes us hungry and that we wind up eating more extra calories in response to that hunger than we “burn up” doing the exercise that made us hungry in the first place. Many people are fond of saying things like “I work out so I can eat what I want.” Umm… not so much. As we always say at Real Fitness Coaching, “You can’t out-train a bad diet.”
Exercise does have a relationship to weight — it’s just not as perfect a relationship as most of us would like. While exercise by itself is fairly useless for losing weight, it appears to be critical to keeping the weight off once you’ve lost it. But to do that, you may have to work harder or longer than you thought. And walking is fine — for all the health benefits mentioned above — but it’s pretty inefficient for weight loss. A much better and more efficient way to exercise — and one that research is clearly showing works a lot better — is to do high-intensity circuit training. No one believes in exercise more than we do. But trying to lose weight with exercise alone — particularly the long, slow, arduous and generally not-fun method of running mindlessly on a treadmill — is a doomed strategy if your goal is to lose body fat.
Here’s a much better strategy:
One: Revamp your diet, concentrating on carbohydrates. Carbohydrates — particularly sugar, soft drinks and starches like potatoes, rice, pasta, bread, cereals and crackers — drive levels of insulin, your “fat storage” hormone, through the roof, which makes it brutally hard to lose body fat. Eat more protein and fat, get your carbs from vegetables and fruits, and eat less of everything in general.
Two: Exercise regularly, but exercise smart. Increase the intensity and shorten the time. Circuit and interval training are the the most effective forms of exercise when it comes to both health benefits and fat burning.
Three: Recognize that fitness and six-pack abs aren’t the same thing. Exercise for fitness and for health, and to maintain your gains. But don’t expect your morning walk to transform your body, especially if you don’t take serious aim at your diet.
Eric Ravussin, professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. and an expert on weight loss, put it best: “In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss.”
