It’s been a whirlwind of activity in my life lately.
(Brier meeting her little brother Ro Wilder Pilon)
My wife delivered our second child (baby boy) on Saturday…so life has been busy (but busy is good).
And this leads me to the point of this post.
We’re all busy, and when life gets busy, there is nothing worse than wasted time.
And when it comes to weight loss success, exercise may actually be a WASTE of your time.
Crazy right?
And I know it’s super popular right now to pick on ‘long slow boring cardio’ but that’s not the point of this email – I’m talking about most forms of exercise!
A recent research trial examined the relationship between exercise and our populations weight gain, and came to the startling conclusion that:
“There is no evidence that a marked reduction in physical activity has been a contributor to this epidemic in the United States,”
“over the last couple of decades virtually all of our weight gain can be explained by an increase in energy intake.”
I know this sounds really counter intuitive, but consider the following:
Once you get passed a certain point, it may be that the effects of exercise have been largely exaggerated.
Example:
A friend of mine just competed a marathon.
Now, she wasn’t running for weight loss (she’s a full blown competitive runner), but if she were, she would probably find the following information down-right depressing:
She weighs 120 pounds. She ran 42.5 Kilometers (it took 3.5 hours).
Using these numbers we know that she burned roughly 2300 Calories.
Since a pound of fat contains roughly 3,500 available calories in the form of fat, and assuming she was burning 100% fat (which is virtually impossible) Then that marathon run for 3.5 hours burned less than 2/3 of a pound of body fat!
Running for 3.5 hours straight, covering 42.5 kilometers (over 26 miles) and not even a pound of fat lost.
This is not including the gels and sports drinks she probably consumed during the race!
With the right amount of in-race calories, you could actually finish an entire marathon without putting a dent in your body fat at all!
And this doesn’t just apply to marathons. If you spread those 26 miles over a week, and ran almost 4 miles EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK, you still would not have burned off even one pound of body fat.
Bottom line – for the vast majority of us, it’s not that we are exercising to little, it’s that we are simply eating more than we need to.
Now, please do me a favor and read that last line again.
I am certainly NOT saying that exercise doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t burn calories.
I am simply saying that for most of us, diet is the answer.
If you’re life is already busy, then for all intents and purposes, it is easier to eat less than it is to add in two and a half MORE hours of walking EVERYDAY. If you are already weight training 4 days a week, it may not make sense to add in 2 more days of training.
It doesn’t matter if you are doing high intensity training, intervals, hill sprints..fancy shmancy bodyweight circuits you name it, it’s a waste of your time (for weight loss) if you are eating more than you need to!
(Of course if you are already eating in a calorie deficit these things will help, just not as much as we’ve been told – or more correctly, sold).
Eat for weight loss. Exercise to build or maintain muscle mass. Stay active by doing activities you enjoy doing. If you have a sport, then train to be better at the sport but don’t expect them to create stunning transformations in the way your body looks – not without the proper diet.
There are a lot of benefits that come from exercise, (especially when that exercise builds muscle and is extremely time efficient) however the key to weight loss success will always be your diet.
If you are looking for weight loss success then as always I recommend Eat Stop Eat as an easy and effective way to lose weight, but any diet will do as long as it is easy, creates a caloric deficit and fits your lifestyle.
I hope this helps free up some of your time!
BP
