- Faithful Fitness: God, Weight Loss, and Exercise
- Garlic Sweet Potato Mash
- Why My eBook Hasn’t Been Popular
- One Weird Thing that Helps Me Enjoy Exercise More
- How Does Guilt Fit into Weirdly Faithful Fitness?
- Are there Good Foods and Bad Foods?
- The Freedom of Constraint
- Call Me Weird, But…I LOVE the Paleo Lifestyle!
- Do This When You Feel Ridiculously Underqualified
- Laughter is the best…Fitness?
- Motivations for The Coming Week
- Ask the Experts for Fitness Advice: YOU!
- I Am a Person Who
- How my Son’s Life-Threatening Condition Gave Me Freedom
- Do You Need Exercise Accountability?
- How Losing the Guilt Breaks the Cycle
- My Family Hates Exercise
- Grace for the Now
- How Workouts Can Lead to Fat Gain
- Your Expert Advice: Fitness
- Don’t Forget de’ FEET!
- Four Steps to Tell Your Support Peeps What You Need
- A Day in the Life of Maintaining a 100 lb Weight Loss
- Three Girls and a Dog
- The Red Zone: How to Enjoy the Holidays and Stay Fit
- How to Avoid Burn Out and Find Fitness Success
Is it possible your workouts are causing you to GAIN fat? Say it isn’t so!
The Cold Hard Truth
There is only one way to gain fat: Eating too much.
Here is another truth: Anyone can lose weight.
Wait, you might be thinking. What if I have a thyroid condition? What if I am diabetic? What if I have injuries or health conditions that make vigorous exercise difficult? All of these factors are valid, but none negate the fact that at the end of the day, weight loss and gain is not about exercise. It’s about diet.
About 4 years ago I was a participant in a fascinating research study at the University of Colorado about weight loss. I learned a great deal from the study as well as from the doctor leading the study. One of the points she said to me was, “Put anyone on a desert island without food, they will lose weight.” Tough truth to hear, but it’s reality. As much as I complain about my genetics, my slow metabolism, or whatever else, I can and will lose weight if I eat the proper diet.
Exercise does burn calories. The trouble is, even when I am busting butt training for a half ironman, distance cycling, hiking a 14er, or whatever else crazy athletic adventure I’ve taken up, I can always out-eat my exercise calorie burn. Call me a gifted eater, but I have a strong feeling I’m not the only one.
The Truth about Workouts
A typical daily workout — let’s say one hour at the gym, outside running, or doing a video at home, is very important for overall fitness. It’s also a huge component in mental health and mind-set. However, let’s not kid ourselves about how many calories we are burning and use it as a justification to eat too much. This can lead to gaining fat. For me a typical workout in an hour might burn anywhere from 300-400 calories depending on the type. (Not 600 like the machines or some class instructors claim.) That’s not a lot of food, friends. Some larger protein bars have 300+ calories.
The other pattern that can happen is that some of us end up being MORE sedentary after a workout, whether from fatigue or because we feel we “got our workout in” so it’s not necessary to continue moving. I’m guilty of this. I’m a big fan of trackers like the BodyBugg or FitBit because I believe these devices show just how much daily life activity really matters. Regular active movement really does add up, and I think it doesn’t give quite as much reason of justified overeating.
Have you ever used exercise as a justification for overeating? How might you go about making small changes to move toward healthier eating?
- Faithful Fitness: God, Weight Loss, and Exercise
- Why My eBook Hasn’t Been Popular
- One Weird Thing that Helps Me Enjoy Exercise More
- How Does Guilt Fit into Weirdly Faithful Fitness?
- Are there Good Foods and Bad Foods?
- The Freedom of Constraint
- Call Me Weird, But…I LOVE the Paleo Lifestyle!
- Do This When You Feel Ridiculously Underqualified
- Laughter is the best…Fitness?
- Motivations for The Coming Week
- Ask the Experts for Fitness Advice: YOU!
- I Am a Person Who
- How my Son’s Life-Threatening Condition Gave Me Freedom
- Do You Need Exercise Accountability?
- How Losing the Guilt Breaks the Cycle
- My Family Hates Exercise
- Garlic Sweet Potato Mash
- Grace for the Now
- How Workouts Can Lead to Fat Gain
- Your Expert Advice: Fitness
- Don’t Forget de’ FEET!
- Four Steps to Tell Your Support Peeps What You Need
- A Day in the Life of Maintaining a 100 lb Weight Loss
- Three Girls and a Dog
- The Red Zone: How to Enjoy the Holidays and Stay Fit
- How to Avoid Burn Out and Find Fitness Success
I heard a quote once “you can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet”. That is so true and could explain why I lost 5 lbs in January then lost and regained the same 5 additional lbs for the next 6 months. I have exercised 3 or more days per week for about 3 years and while it did help in a lot of ways, it did not help me lose weight. I rely on exercise for toning my body, mental health, physical health, and a general sense of well-being but it will not undo what we do to our bodies with fake food. It wasn’t until August, when I changed the way I eat that I began seeing steady weight loss. It is not as fast as the weight loss I saw in 2005 but this is a lifestyle change that I can maintain. Starting over is no fun and I never want to do it again.
Having well-balanced meals every day and avoiding eating between meals. These are my simple secrets to weight control.
Sometimes I have used sites that count calories too to stay accountable. It’s tough when you spend an hour doing Zumba and come home to something that would basically erase the hour you just worked out. I don’t have a FitBit but I would be very curious to see what my everyday activity added up to.
I can remember being so discourage with how little calories exercise actually burned off. And wondering if a trek through 3 corners of the huge Super Wal-mart counted as exercise. 🙂 My biggest problem is being willing to make the necesary changes in eating, being willing to give up or change the things I “love” that aren’t good for me. I know one answer to that is to love something else more – health, longer life, gaining in self-control, etc. – but that somehow fails me with the “Oh, this little bit isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things” mindset.