If you change nothing about your diet but add exercise to your routine, will you lose weight? If you’re up to date on your fitness reading you might lean towards no, since there has been much reporting about the fact that exercise is a poor tool for weight loss. If you don’t read the mountain of health and wellness material generated every day, you might be thinking that yes, you ought to lose weight if you suddenly start burning some calories. The real answer, of course, is you might or you might not. It depends on where you start.
You Have To Know Your Starting Point
Your body burns calories in two contexts. The first is while running basic functions like circulation, breathing, and minimal brain activity while at rest. This energy expenditure is known as the Resting Metabolic Rate, or RMR. The second is through activity like walking, talking, lifting, and so on. To make a long story short, adding up your RMR with your daily activity gives you your total caloric needs (very approximately). That’s your starting point. If you are taking in more calories than this number you’ll gain weight, fewer and you’ll lose it. Simple enough.
Except it’s not. It’s pretty much impossible to figure out that number with enough accuracy for it to really be useful. Our lives are just too imprecise. We move different amounts on different days (did you go to the gym, were you in the office or out in the field, was it a weekend day, did you take the bus or drive a car?) and during different times of the year (how many long walks do you take in February if you live in the northern climates?). Add to that holidays and birthdays, vacations and dinner parties and caloric intake really becomes topsy turvy. Plotted on a graph it ends up looking like the year-end summary for the stock market.
Now, if you are interested in weight loss, the uncertainty has important repercussions. First of all, it makes it pretty difficult to know whether exercise will help with weight loss. If, for example, you are two hundred calories over your needs seven days a week and you burn three hundred fifty calories three times a week, you won’t lose weight because you are only burning 1050 (3 x 350) of the 1400 (7 x 200) excess that you are taking in each week. Of course, if you are only one hundred calories over your needs each day while burning three hundred fifty at the gym three times a week, then you’re in business. Alas, the whole thought experiment is a fairly moot point because of the above-mentioned problem. You don’t do the same thing every day and you really have no idea what these numbers are, so how can you know?
Don’t discount the insidious nature of this trap. Since we tend to overestimate how many calories we burn while working out and underestimate how many we consume in excess, a good exercise habit often slows weight gain down but, in the end, does not help to control it over time. This can lead to a lot of frustration if you were happily heading to the gym, believing it was keeping excess body fat at bay, only to find yourself not where you hoped to be at the end of the year.
Exercise Is For Physical Health. Nutrition Is For Weight Loss
In the end, this is all just more evidence that exercise is not really the way to lose weight. But don’t be bummed. What exercise does really well is boost your physical health. It builds and maintains strength, coordination, cardiovascular fitness, muscle and bone mass, mobility and flexibility. These are wonderful things worth targeting. Do that, and forget the calories. If you are really focused on the weight loss then you know the three things to focus on—nutrition, nutrition, nutrition.