We have this idea that if we want to lose weight, we join a gym on January 1st, we start
working out regularly, and eventually we’ll slim down.
Well, here’s some bad news. It turns out exercise is actually pretty useless when it comes to weight loss.
Let me tell you, exercise isn’t a weight loss tool per se, it’s excellent for health and is probably the best single thing that you can do other than stopping smoking to improve your health.
But don’t look at it as a weight loss tool. Exercise will definitely help you live a longer,
happier life…. It’s just not the best way to lose weight. And the reason has to do with how our bodies use energy. You may not realize it, but physical activity is actually a tiny component of your daily energy burn.
There are three main ways our bodies burn calories. These include your resting metabolism, so that’s how much energy your body burns just for its basic functioning, just to keep you alive, basically. The other part of energy expenditure is the thermic effect of food, and that’s just how much energy is required to break food down in your body. The third part of energy expenditure is physical activity.
For most people, physical activity – that’s any movement you do, only accounts for about 10 to 30 percent of energy use. So, the vast majority of energy or calories you burn every day comes from your basal or resting metabolism, over which you have very little control.
While 100% of your “calories in” are up to you, only up to about 30% of your “calories out” are in your control.
One study found that if a 90kg man ran for an hour, 4 days a week for a month, he’d
lose about 2.2 kg at most, assuming everything else stays the same. But not everything stays the same!
Researchers have found we make all kinds of behavioural and physiological adaptations when we start increasing the amount of exercise, we’re getting every day. For one thing, exercise tends to make people hungry. And I’m sure you know the feeling: you go for a spinning class in the morning, and then by the time you eat breakfast you’re so hungry you maybe double the size of the portion of oatmeal you normally eat.
There’s also evidence to suggest that some people simply slow down after a workout, so if you went running in the morning you might be less inclined to take the stairs at work. These are called “compensatory behaviours”- the various ways we unknowingly undermine our workouts.
So how I can control the “calories In”? don’t overeat.
We can undo the calories that we burn off in exercise pretty quickly.
It would take about an hour of running to burn off a Big Mac and fries. You’d have to spend about an hour dancing pretty vigorously to burn off three glasses of wine you might drink with dinner. An hour of cycling really intensely on exercise bikes to burn off about two doughnuts.
That’s why exercise is best seen as a healthy supplement for a strategy that’s focused on food.
People often think they can drink extra bottles of soda as long as they work out. Well, that is wrong, sugary drinks will never help anyone to reduce weight. Actually, burning off those extra calories from a can of soda is really, really hard.
We need healthier choices about what we eat. It’s not impossible to lose weight through exercise, it’s just a lot harder. And we need to recognize how that works
If you do go to the gym, and you burn all these calories, it takes you a long time to do so
and you put in a great amount of effort, unfortunately you can erase all of that in five minutes of eating a slice of pizza!!
As my personal trainer always told me, “the calories are in the kitchen”!
There is no way I have the time, the patience and the motivation to count calories, so therefore I use self-hypnosis to help me to eat healthy food in a natural and easy way.
And we all know that “healthy” means eating more green, more grilled meat or fish and more natural sugar (fruits) and no need to count calories! We all know half pizza has less calories than a whole pizza doesn’t it?
The key is letting our subconscious mind to help us to feel full after a half pizza without consciously thinking about it!
And the more you use self-hypnosis to train your mind to eat the right amount of food, 3 meals a day and to enjoy while you are eating food, the more natural it comes to you to eat healthier and the portions that your body needs.
I am so glad when clients tell me they don’t feel the need to eat unhealthy food or to overeat anymore. Because that, is the starting point of losing weight and feeling better with yourself!
