Why Exercise Alone Won’t Help You Lose Weight

(Correction to my last post: My mom found the hummus recipes online and shared them with me.)

Why Exercise Alone Won’t Help You Lose Weight

**Dr. A’s Habits of Health; p. 64

I love to exercise at this point in life, if only I can find the time. Kevin got me a membership to 24hr. Fitness for Christmas and it was the best thing I could have received this year. I wasn’t always so fond of exercise though, especially in High School. At that time I played sports but wasn’t fueling my body well and was carrying around extra weight. Back then, when I was 16+ yrs. younger, running the mile in gym class was something I dreaded and participating in conditioning practices for volleyball was a form of torture! I don’t think I could have imagined back then that I would go on to play competitive sports in college and run 2 full marathons before turning 30. I have discovered now in my 30’s that although exercise is fun and rewarding when your body is well-fueled, it is not the answer to weight loss.

After each baby I would normally start running and doing exercise videos as soon as possible and within 6-9 months get back to a “healthy weight”. This time around, things were different. My body had carried 3 babies full term in less than 4 yrs., I was busier taking care of them at home, and I was getting older. Had I used exercise alone, I would still be working on getting rid of my accumulated fat. Starting in February, I was able to rid my body of the extra fat & inches in only about 8 weeks using the Take Shape for Life Program. If it can work for me, a busy mom who was nursing and has a thyroid condition, it can work for almost anyone.

It seems to me that it is a more reasonable approach to work on getting toward your healthy weight and then introduce exercise. At the gym I see so many overweight people literally killing themselves each day. They appear to be working beyond what their body can handle safely and are not making much obvious progress from week to week. Here is why that doesn’t work:

**When you take in more calories that you expend, the excess gets stored as fat-3,500 calories in one pound (of fat). Eating just 100 extra calories a day, beyond what your body needs, translates into 36,500 calories of excess energy over the course of a year. Even if your body stores only 1/2 of that, the result is over 5 extra pounds of fat a year!

You can try to burn those excess calories through exercie alone. But in order to burn JUST ONE pound of fat you'd have to run 33.8 miles!!! Just for one pound. And nearly 1/3 of us have an extra 30 lbs of fat. I certainly did after having Dylan. To burn that much, you'd have to run 1,040 miles, the equivalent of 40 marathons.  I use the Take Shape for Life Program b/c it puts my clients into a controlled fat-burning state that offloads 2-4lbs of fat per week. That's 7,000-14,000 calories of unheathly fat removed weekly. So then once that fat is gone your body is a much more effecient machine to work toward your goal.

 

For those of you that don't like to exercise this is a relief because there is an easier way to get to a healthy weight. For those that love exercise it is possibly an answer to the question of why your love for movement hasn't impacted your body the way you were hoping. Either way, exercise is a key to lifelong health and good for the heart, soul, mind & body! Just remember that is is not the most efficient way to reach your goal weight!