Maria's Last Diet

Exercise Advice. Don’t Do It If You Want To Lose Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

How many times have you said or heard another woman say “I can’t lose weight if I don’t exercise.”

What if you were to learn that “You won’t lose weight if you do exercise?” This idea goes against the unarguable fact that there is a calories-out side to weight loss. The calorie-out side is embodied in the Exercise part of the familiar formula: Weight Loss = Diet + Exercise. Not only is it common knowledge that if you want to lose weight, you must exercise, but it also the word of weight-loss pundits everywhere.

Well, hold up a moment and check out a 2012 review of the exercise research that found only a small amount of weight was lost as a result of exercising. After careful analysis the researchers attributed the small amount of weight lost to low levels of exercise and the increase in calorie intake that resulted from exercising.

So what this means is that if you want to lose weight by exercising, you will have to exercise a lot and more vigorously and at the same time somehow not compensate for calories lost through exercising by increasing your calorie intake.

If this is the case, why not simply concentrate your efforts on the calorie-in side of the weight-loss equation? Deal more specifically with the amount and kind of food you eat and with your personal reasons for eating and gaining weight the way you have been. You should probably also limit your reliance on exercise, making sure it is not your primary means of weight loss.

 

Your Exercise Routine and Body Satisfaction

by Maria's Last Diet

Believe it or not, the physical effects of you doing your exercising may not be what makes you more satisfied with your own body. It may be the success you have in meeting the challenges of your exercise regimen that makes more of a difference when it comes to greater body satisfaction.

There is something to be said about successfully meeting challenges, don’t you think? The “I can do it”, “I did it” feelings are key to what you think of yourself; and interestingly, feeling that you have the power and the ability to do what you have to or want to when exercising makes you feel good about the body that’s making this effort.

This still does not mean that exercise is what is going to enable you to lose weight. The biggest bang for your buck is still the calories-in side of the equation. What you eat and how much you eat makes all the difference in the world. Feeling good about your body and about yourself as a result of meeting the exercise challenge should help you be more confident that you can meet the other challenge of not eating too much food and not eating so many fattening foods.

Daily Energy Intake vs. Daily Energy Expenditure. Who Wins?

by Maria's Last Diet

Call it energy intake. That’s when you take the food in.

Energy expenditure. That’s not only your physical activity; it’s also your metabolism and core body temperature regulation.

It’s a lot easier to increase your energy intake than it is to increase your energy expenditure. Eating too much food or eating too much calorie-rich food, as you might have first-hand experience with, is a lot easier than doing too much exercise. Right?

The day-to-day variability in energy expenditure is estimated to be about 8 to 10% compared to 20 to 25% for energy intake.

Changes in energy intake, not changes in energy expenditure, have the biggest impact on body weight.

Forewarned is forearmed.

 

What is a Good Exercise to Lose Weight? There is None. Here’s Why.

by Maria's Last Diet

The real truth about exercise is that it doesn’t cause weight loss. As hard as that is for people to believe, you cannot burn calories as fast as you are consuming them if you haven’t cut down on the amount of food or changed to much less energy-rich foods. Then there’s the kick-in-the-face fact that exercise can make you hungry—so then you want to eat more, not cut down. If you are dieting and you are exercising too, guess what? You might not lose any more weight than by just dieting without exercising because your hunger from exercising can make you eat more.  And furthermore: if you faithfully execute your daily formal exercise routine, you may compensate by reducing your overall daily physical activity. Exercise, as far as a method for losing weight is concerned, it just can’t seem to win.

 

Sedentary Living Wrongfully Blamed for You Becoming Overweight

by Maria's Last Diet

Right on the subject of our awful sedentary living style and how bad it is for you compared to the much more active lifestyle of our hunter-gatherer forebears, six researchers, four anthropologists, a primatologist, and an archaeologist from different universities and research centers in the United States funded by the National Science Foundation, studied the energy expenditure in a modern day hunter-gatherer group of people, the Hazda, who live in Northern Tanzania, and compared their energy expenditure with that of Westerners living in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Overall physical activity level was greater among the Hazda than among the Westerners. But there was no difference in average daily energy expenditure (calories-out), a finding that challenges energy expenditure and sedentary lifestyles as causes for overweight and obesity in Western countries.

It is, therefore, a better bet to say the obesity epidemic in Western civilization is being caused by eating too much food and eating fattening foods rather than by a sedentary lifestyle. It was not only this one study that found our total energy expenditure not the guilty culprit, the “Hunter Energetics and Human Obesity” research cited other research that came to the same conclusion.

 

The Exercise Excuse — Have You Made One For Not Losing Your Unwanted Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

“I have to do something about my weight. I must go back to the gym. Or, I could start walking again. I never should have stopped exercising.”

How may times have you heard this? Have you said it yourself?

Well, check it out. Exercise may be just an excuse for not doing what you should be doing, working on the calories-in side of the equation (going on a diet, eating less). You might not think of exercise as just an excuse. But if you really don’t want to give up the way you’ve been eating, then what would you call it? Your relationship with food, as far as you’re concerned, should go undisturbed. So you let exercise, or at least the goal to exercise, be the sole answer to “I have to do something about my weight.”

Exercise is nothing to snivel at. There’s no doubt it’s good for you. It energizes you, makes you healthier, stronger, fitter, more motivated, happier, maybe even more likeable. But what it doesn’t do, until research tells us otherwise, is make you lose weight. The only sure thing that exercise does in regard to weight is stimulate appetite, especially if you exercise a lot. And that’s counterproductive where losing unwanted weight is concerned.

The moral of this exercise story is if you want to lose weight don’t work on the calories-out side of the equation. It’s calories-in or bust.

 

If You Keep on Exercising, Chances are This Will Motivate You to Keep On Losing Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

Exercise alone might not do the trick when it comes to losing unwanted weight, but exercise alone can help you feel more satisfied with your body—that is, if you keep to the exercise regimen. These are the results of a research study in the journal Body Image.

The importance of this research is that when women were helped a lot to stick with a good exercise routine, they stuck. How important is that, all you women who find it hard to exercise?

Conclusions: Feeling you are competent. Seeing yourself rise to the challenge—and conquer it. Knowing you have the ability. Overcoming barriers. All of these psychological motivating factors led to greater body satisfaction, even more so than any change in physiological factors like body weight and body composition.

Now, take these findings and apply them to the weight-loss process. Need help losing weight? Get lots of it. Use weight-loss psychology to help you stick to a diet slash plan for losing excess weight. Would the same conclusions hold? Feeling you are competent. See yourself as rising to the challenge and conquering it. Knowing you have the ability. Overcoming barriers. Would all of these psychological motivating factors lead to you having much less difficulty losing weight?

 

Exercise and Weight Loss - Not a Happy Couple

by Maria's Last Die

Exercise alone—says the latest research—will not make you thin. But it looks like it contributes a great deal to helping you stay thin, once you’ve gotten there. This is not to say that you shouldn’t exercise when you are trying to lose the weight. Exercise can contribute to your overall health in numerous ways, and it can also make you just plain feel better. But if you are counting on exercise to make you shed the pounds, you will probably be disappointed.

So, the problem of weight-loss success is once again relegated to the area of food. But, of course, it’s never just the food that’s involved. If you could simply pick a weight-loss diet that has less calories—and stick to it, no one would have weight issues.

For women, especially, the issues related to their eating habits are the biggest nuts to crack (no apologies for the food lingo).

For example: Why do you eat too much? What does overeating do for you? Do you really want to be thinner, or are you afraid of that? Is the weight a kind of security for you? Do you feel empty in your life and try to fill the hole with comfort food? Do any people close to you count on you being fat for their own reasons? Are you afraid of big changes? Do you have a lack of confidence in your ability to make big changes? Do you feel defeated before you start because of the memory of past failures?

When you spell things out like this, it can be much easier to see that even if you go on the best diet plan, you’re still facing very powerful obstacles—obstacles that reside within you.

Wouldn’t it make the most sense to tackle these obstacles, either before you start on a new diet plan, or at least at the same time?

If you don’t, won’t you be looking at another failed weight-loss attempt?

What’s What About Exercise and Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

You want to lose weight, right?  So, exercise, exercise, exercise, right?

Well, it’s not so clear-cut. It’s complicated and not a sure bet that exercise will directly help you lose the weight.

The current thinking is that exercise alone does not, in fact, help you lose weight. It’s far more likely that exercise will help you maintain a weight loss, once you have achieved it.

One of the reasons for this is that people tend to eat more when they exercise, in order to make up for the extra energy expenditure. Contributing to this is that exercise has a significant effect on appetite. Furthermore, this increased appetite from exercising seems to be at work specifically in women. This may be nature’s way of ensuring that women maintain enough energy stores for reproduction.

All of this is not to say that exercise doesn’t benefit you, as a woman, in many other health-related ways. But in order to lose weight, you will need to address your eating—and all the issues surrounding it. There’s no getting around it.

If you want to read more about the latest thinking on the effect of exercise on weight loss, go to The New York Times, April 12, 2010, "Weighing the Evidence on Exercise". 

What Good is Physical Exercise if it Doesn't Help You Lose the Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

So you don't lose the weight when you exercise. Don't get disappointed. Exercise in and of itself (i.e., calories out) does not stand up to overeating and eating fattening foods (calories in).

But you do derive benefits from exercising that can affect your outlook on taking too many calories in.

Exercise does make you healthier. Among other health changes, exercise can lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure and lower resting heart rate. Exercise can affect your psychological state, as well, making you have more positive moods and feel more positively about yourself.

These non-weight-losing benefits of exercise get you moving in a direction that can lead to weight-loss. For example, as a result of exercising, you are more focused on your body and doing things that make you (and your body) feel better and look better. The motivation is there. The positive feedback is there. You've established a regimen. All of these steps bring you closer to doing something about the calories-in side of the equation.