MYTHS about Exercise
Why can’t exercise be enough for weight loss?
Remember the days of Infomercials where they would sell exercise equipment or DVDs that would promise of lasting weight loss with only the addition of this product? That was only available for $39.99 for the next 30 minutes.
The equipment or the DVDs aren’t enough for weight loss for one main reasons- food. If we are not mindful with what we are eating, we will not experience significant weight loss.
1) appetite
When we start to be more active, our evolutionary body will think it needs to eat more, as a famine could be hitting. It is up to us and our rational brain to be aware that we do not need to eat enough for a week, that all we did was take a Spin class.
2) Lack of awareness.
We also could start to get sloppy with our food. An extra piece of bread while out to dinner here and a scoop of ice cream here, and the next thing you know the entire workout has been negated calorically because well, we worked out. Now if you are exercising for stress relief or to strengthen your mind body connection, then we should have a side conversation about gluten and dairy, but if your goal is weight loss, these extras will add up.
3) Over/under.
Most machines at the gym or our fitness trackers tend to track on the generous side of the fence when it comes to how many calories we burend. ( Stanford Medicine, March 2017) Research has shown that people consistently eat more food when offered larger sized
portions. So portion control is important when you’re trying to lose weight and keep it off. (Mayo Clinic 2015). So we are told we burn more than we truly are, and we tend to eat more than we think we are eating, so there is even more reason to not take exercise into account when we are making food choices.
There are many great reasons to exercise, weight loss isn’t the only one. It can be a part of a weight loss plan, but the more mindful we are in general to our food the better for all aspects of our health.
Erin Wathen
As a Holistic Health Coach, it is Erin’s big hairy audacious goal is to change the dialogue around how we look at weight loss. It is not a matter of being it Ketosis or Food Swaps but the feelings we have that we are avoiding by overeating. Why are so many of us not tackling the real issues we have? It is easier and safer to obsess over the latest diet fad. Whether it be with our job, or our Mom, boyfriend, politics… until we address how we manage our feelings in the world, we are not going to.
