Exercise and Weight Loss
“You can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet.”
Actually, no. Wait… what? You’re kidding right? Isn’t losing weight all about burning more calories than you take in? And if that’s true, can’t you effectively shed pounds by burning all those extra calories with exercise? Once again, I hate to burst your bubble, but no. The old saying is true; you can’t outrun your fork. Here’s the problem. Typical exercise, and especially steady-state exercise, burns very few calories. And, anaerobic exercise puts on muscle, which weighs more than fat. If your goal is simply to lose weight, exercise is a losing proposition. But if your goal is to get strong, improve your health, and increase your energy, exercise is a win-win-win.
Adding muscle wins the day eventually
One pound of fat burns 2 calories a day.
One pound of muscle burns 350 calories a day.
The problem is that far too many people have been trained to think that the scale is the best measurement tool for fitness. My advice to anyone wanting to lose weight and get fit, is to put their scale away and ignore it, until months down the road.
When it comes to losing weight, and especially if you need to lose a lot of weight, you are going to have to radically change your diet. With that said, ultimately, you will do your body good by increasing your muscle mass. Doing so will eventually turn your body into a fat burning machine. But it takes time. Don’t expect quick results.
Anaerobic exercise wins again
A study was done where 60 people were put on the exact same diet over a 6 week period of time. They were divided up into 3 groups. One group did not exercise at all. One did only aerobic exercise, and the other did only anaerobic exercise. The important thing to recognize from this study is that the aerobic group actually lost muscle mass, while the anaerobic group gained 9-percent muscle mass. Since muscle burns many more calories than fat, anaerobic exercise should always be your method of choice. That is, if your goal is to lose weight and keep it off.
Metabolism and weight loss
Whenever I talk about metabolism, I always show a candy bar. Then I say, some of you here can eat the candy bar, wrapper, and cardboard, and not gain weight – and you’re disgusting! I then usually see some people in the audience pointing to those who they know fit that category. Then I say, and some of you here are putting on weight just by looking at the picture of a candy bar (laughter). Everyone has a different metabolism, some fast, some slow, some in between. With that said, there are only 3-things you can control that will affect your metabolism. And by far the most important is muscle mass.
