You want to know why it’s so hard to lose weight? It’s simple; people keep screwing with your heads. There’s so much junk information out there and wrong assumptions by people looking to justify why they themselves can’t seem to lose weight.

A perfect example of this cropped up on TIME magazine’s website over the weekend [Read article here]. The author, John Cloud, first tells how he has never had a weight problem, but is still trying to lose some vanity weight. He first describes his 4 day a week exercise routine, then throws a bunch of research at the audience trying to explain his troubles away with some feel good, you don’t need to break a sweat to lose weight snake-oil.

First, let’s look at his exercise routine:

Tuesday: 30 minutes on a stair climber

Wednesday: 60 minutes of “something” with a personal trainer

Thursday: Some sort of cardio class involving a foam wedge

Friday: 5.5 mile run, let’s say he’s at a decent pace and does it in 60 minutes

So what he’s telling us is that he does 2.5 hours of cardio, and “maybe” an hour of weight lifting every week. Honestly this is nowhere near enough. Really he should be trying to exercise 45 minutes every day, or a little over 5 hours every week. The author is only doing half that.

Second, look at what he is doing. It’s nearly all cardio, and the author has states he has been doing this for quite some time. As I’ve mentioned before, research studies all agree that cardiovascular exercise only burns calories for 15 minutes after the workout. To make matters worse, our bodies adapt pretty quickly to any cardio exercise we do, lessening their effectiveness over time!

Third, what does he do after he exercises? The author admits to binging on food and being inactive the rest of the day. The author does a wonderful job of showcasing research proving things we all already know. After you workout, you get hungry.

Personally, after a workout, I feel like a ravenous T-Rex, ready to eat the first thing I can run down. Our bodies know that they have just expended energy and are looking to replace that energy. Tapping our fat stores is tough, eating more is easy, so our bodies try the easy way first, begging us to stop by Starbucks or Applebee’s on the way home.

Our bodies need to rebuild themselves after working out, and a good post-exercise meal is a good thing to have. However, and the author cites my sources proving this, is that people feel that exercising gives them license to over eat afterwards. Post work out meals are a necessity, but it’s also the most important time to make sure you are giving your body exactly what, and how much it needs.

Can a person lose weight without exercising? Yes, of course you can! Losing weight is simply burning more calories than one ingests. But when most people spend their day in behind a desk or in front of a TV they don’t burn very much. Exercising is simply a way for a person to burn more calories than they normally would.

The author goes to great pains to show how important proper eating is when trying to lose weight, and I couldn’t agree more with that fact. 50% of losing weight is dieting. But the author wants to cut out the other 50% which is exercise/ upping calories burned.

Because I’m an engineer, here’s an equation:

Calories consumed – Calories burned = weight lost

That’s it. Everything reduces to this simple fact. If you eat more than your body can burn or get rid of in waste, then you will gain weight. It really comes down to self control of what and how much you
eat.

There is research out there which states that self-control is a mental muscle and that fatiguing it or your body in general will make it weaker. The same is true with strengthening it, the more you resist that hot fudge sundae, the easier it will get. The author tries to use this as an excuse to why it’s ok to eat poorly after a workout and why we should give up exercising for knitting on the couch.

In summary, the author wittily sates that he “might skip the VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual post exercise reward”. This is silly, because while he is skipping the extra calories, he is also skipping burning any calories, so he still isn’t making any progress. Let me give him a better idea.

Hit the stair climber and burn calories, and still skip the reward. We all like to treat and reward ourselves, but let’s let that cut, sleek figure in the mirror be our reward.

Let fitting into a size smaller pants be our reward.

Let being a success story be our reward.

Let playing with our kids 10 years from now be our reward.

Let living the life you always wanted be our reward.

That’s how you lose weight. See? Isn’t that simple?

This entry was posted on August 11, 2009 at 7:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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