Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

If you’re looking for exercise to directly help you drop that bundle of extra weight you’re carrying, don’t bother. Energy expenditure through exercise almost never equals energy intake through eating, and especially if you’re still eating like there’s no tomorrow.

BUT—exercise, if you do it, is a great motivator. If you exercise, particularly if you didn’t exercise before or couldn’t keep it up in the past, you can come to believe that you can do anything, even diet successfully. Exercising too might be a way for you to dispel negative moods that lead to emotional eating and eventually to diet busting or diet quitting. And the self-regulation exercise calls for can be something you take with you to eating less food and eating weight-reducing food.

Make no mistake about it, though. Exercise itself cannot burn enough calories to keep up with your energy intake if you have weight to lose and you haven’t changed your eating habits. But as a motivator, exercise may be just what you need to put you on the road to doing something about your eating habits.

by Maria's Last Diet

You might eat more after you exercise because exercise can make you hungry. It doesn’t have to, but it can. You also might eat more after you exercise, not from hunger, but because you feel you deserve a reward for exercising. Just think, if you didn’t change your old weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating habits what you might want to reward yourself with. It might be those old chips. Never get enough of them. Or a sweet. You deserve a sweet, don’t you—for sweating through that workout.

There is still another possibility besides eating that can lead to wiping away all your hard work exercising. You will probably be tired from your workout and you will most likely rest more than usual, which means you won’t be expending the same amount of energy you usually do when you are not exercising.

Don’t forget this cautionary wisdom when someone holds up exercise to you as the elixir for weight loss.

by Maria's Last Diet

Exercise, whether it helps you lose weight or not, is certainly good for you. It can improve your health, lift your spirits, and do lots else for you. While your aim might be to exercise or want to exercise to lose weight, you could also have a number of other reasons for exercising which you might not be aware of. Your behavior or even your intentions are usually determined by more than one factor. Having a number of reasons for exercising may help you actually do it.

Do you or would you exercise to:

    •    Enjoy the feeling of exercising
    •    Have a healthy body
    •    Prevent health problems
    •    Make myself stronger
    •    Increase my endurance
    •    Have a good looking body
    •    Reduce tension
    •    Prevent heart disease
    •    Be with other people
    •    Stay competitive
    •    Build muscles
    •    Feel good
    •    Play
    •    Work off the week
    •    Get away from the usual routine
    •    Be virtuous

What would be your reason(s) for exercising besides losing weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

If you wanted to lose one-half pound a week, you would have to expend about 2000 additional calories of physical activity per week. Over 5 days this would amount to burning off 400 calories a day. At a body weight of 165 lbs, walking at a speed of 3 miles per hour, you would have to walk for 80 minutes to burn off 400 calories. Can you do this and keep doing this amount of exercise week after week, at a rate of one-half pound a week, until you lose the weight you want to lose?

by Maria's Last Diet

If you intend to lose weight through exercise alone, one of the things you will have to do is to keep exercising, since you will not be changing your eating habits. Can you keep up an exercise regimen vigorous enough to create and maintain a negative energy balance?

You should know that twice as many people do not translate their intention to exercise into actual exercise as those who have no intention to exercise. Of those people who intend to exercise, only about 50% actually do it. So the intention to behavior gap is something you will have to reckon with.

There is even further bad news for those of you who intend to lose weight by exercise alone.

An average weight person burns only about 100 calories (kcal) a mile whether she walks or runs.

And if you are counting on benefiting from the after energy expenditure of an elevated metabolic rate, think again. It is only athletes who do prolonged, exhaustive exercise that have elevated metabolic rates for more than 24 hours afterward. The average person has a post-exercise energy expenditure of about 5 to10 calories after light exercise and 35 calories after moderate exercise.

How likely is it that you will lose your unwanted weight by exercise alone?

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you one of those women who is beguiled by exercise, a regular gung-ho exercise nut with all the latest equipment, gym membership, and at least one good friend to walk with? Nevertheless, do you do as little exercising as you can? If this is an accurate snapshot of you, is this any way to lose weight? You don’t even do the very thing you advocate as the way to lose weight. Well, for your information, don’t worry about not exercising. The weight loss research shows that losing weight through exercise just doesn’t cut it. 

It doesn’t matter if you confess and freely admit you aren’t exercising. You can use not exercising as your defensive excuse all you want: “I would be losing my excess weight if only I would exercise.” “If only” echoes through many a failed weight loss effort. The excuses for not exercising are legion. There’s not enough time. No energy after the tough day. “I just didn’t have it in me today.” “At least I thought about it today.” On and on. Excuse after excuse. No exercising is the excuse of excuses for not losing weight. The “I didn’t exercise” gambit so easily deflects the fact that you aren’t doing anything consistent and effective about the calories-in side of the equation.  

No need to fret about it. Exercise won’t help you lose weight, not if you continue to pack on the calories the way you have been. Exercise at best, if you keep eating the way you have been, is fewer calories-out than the number of calories you are taking in. And those calories-out require much greater effort on your part to get rid of than the calories you took in. You can see why it is the dieting side of things you have to work on and why you can keep on making your exercise excuses all you like.

by Maria's Last Diet

Exercise will not make you thin, not unless you do an enormous amount of it like marathon runners do. Exercise will help you stay thin, though, once you lose all your unwanted weight. Exercise is still good for you when you are trying to lose weight. Exercise can contribute to your overall health, it can motivate you, and it can also make you feel better physically and emotionally. To repeat, if you are counting on exercise to make you shed your extra pounds, you will be disappointed.

The way to lose weight is to concentrate on the calories-in side of things and not take in so many calories. Forget about exercise as being of equal importance for weight loss. It is just not the equal of reducing nunber of calories-in. If you turn your attention to the calories-in side and forget about exercising to lose weight, take a broad rather than a narrow view of calories-in. This broad view put simply, it is never just the food. Taking calories-in, as all women will tell you, is not just a narrow matter of the food you eat. The broader view of calories-in is what causes you to take in so many calories?

For example, what does overeating do for you? Is your weight a form of security for you? Do you feel empty in your life and try to fill the hole by taking calories-in? Do you really want to be thinner, or are you afraid of being a thin woman? Do any people close to you count on you being overweight for their own reasons? Are you afraid of personal changes, the kind of personal changes that will happen if you give up your current pattern of weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating? As you can see, none of these issues have anything to do with physical exercise.

When you describe the calories-in/calories-out issue like this, you will find it much easier to see why exercise is not an effective way to reduce your weight. Exercise, for most people, is off the mark. What is driving you emotionally to pack on the calories is what you need to discover and do something about. Exercising to lose weight when you are eating to take care of yourself emotionally is a totally irrelevant step to take.

When it came to exercising, there was no bicycle, no treadmill, no elliptical trainer, no long set of stairs, no walking or running with friends, no parking at the far end of the supermarket parking lot for a good long walk to the store. Exercise was only a pleasant thought entertained now and then. And there was not even a drop of guilt mixed in.

So what. Who cares. Your exercise routine can’t help you lose weight—not if you’re packing on the calories. Exercise alone is at best some calories out, a mere drop in the bucket after all. It is usually the calories-in that kill your chance at successful weight loss. When it comes to losing weight, calories-in is everything. Exercise alone is nothing.

There are some calorie-burning stats that say a 250-pound man has to walk up thirty flights of stairs to lose a pound and if you want to lose all the calories from one big Mac, you have to walk nine miles. On the Internet and on About.com it says that you have to burn 3500 calories to shed just one pound. Like everyone else, you probably want to trust the Internet. It is so easy to punch in a bunch of keywords and get your answer that it’s a shame to disbelieve the information

Never mind all of that, though. The real truth about exercise is that it doesn’t cause weight loss. The real, real, real truth about exercise is that it does have an important bearing on reducing your weight despite the fact that curbing calories-out holds much less weight (get it?) than calories-in. It’s true, exercise alone doesn’t burn calories fast enough to keep up with the overeater, the specialist in fattening food, the over-snacker, and the outright binger. But, and this is a big, big but (one “t”), exercise is a good motivator when it comes to losing weight.

If you are able to keep on exercising on some kind of regular basis, you will discover that you can stick to a difficult regimen. This can give you the umph you need to do something steady and reliable too about the calories-in side of things. For sticking to a regimen is what reducing your calories-in is all about.

If you exercised regularly, you would get still another benefit besides regimen adherence that you can transfer over to the calories-in side. You would feel differently in your body, and about your body as well. Exercise can give you a whole new appreciation of your body.

Exercising your body makes it an inescapable fact that you are taking better care of your body. Feeling better about your toned-up body makes you feel better about yourself. You will feel better not only about your body self, but also better about your self-self because you are doing something. It's the “doing something” part that makes you feel better about yourself as a person. You will be rescuing yourself from living with a person—you—who was doing nothing about her body and getting nowhere fast.

Remember, unless you train for marathons and exert yourself physically to an unusual degree, exercise does not directly lead to weight loss. There is no doubt, however, that exercise is a good motivator, and motivation is what most people need to keep on keeping on with their weight loss regimens and doing what it takes on the all important calories-in side of things.