I've been seeing this sentiment a lot lately around the sub:
"Exercise is pointless for weight loss""Exercise is a horrible idea if you're trying to lose weight""You can't outrun your fork. Lose weight first then workout."
I'm honestly mystified that people are giving this advice. While it's true that it's significantly more time-efficient to create a calorie deficit by eating less rather than exercising more, doing both is really helpful for a number of reasons. But my primary one is this:
I can eat more when I work out. And I like eating more.
My biggest hurdle to losing weight was eating so little compared to how I ate before. I'm a person who loves big, satisfying meals. I derive a lot of enjoyment from my red meat, rice, potatoes, cheese, beer, and wine. But my 1350 calorie budget didn't leave a lot of room for joy. It was pretty miserable and as a result: hard to see myself sticking to.
But then I realized that the app I was using (the free version of Noom) would add back half the calories racked up by my phone's pedometer to my budget. So I started taking walks! A 40-minute walk, at my weight, would inflate my budget by about 150 calories when halved. And god, 1500 was so much better than 1350. The extra 150 meant 8 oz of steak instead of 6! Or a guilt-free hard seltzer with a friend! The next month I increased my activity level. I had gotten an Apple Watch and started going to the gym. 20 minutes of interval training on the stair climber and getting my 10K steps in brought my budget to ~1700 calories on my workout days. A couple of months later, I added lifting weights and rock climbing. The habits added up and I kept going to the gym and kept going longer. What started with "if I pop on a podcast and go on a nice walk in the park, I can eat nearly twice as much mac and cheese" evolved into a legitimate lifestyle change.
Yesterday, my watch logged 169 minutes of exercise and 1,108 calories burned. Cut it in half, added it to my budget (which is now 1450 since I'm aiming for 1 lb of loss a week now), and I had a full 2,000 calories to eat while safely in deficit. Insane! I certainly don't do that much exercise daily, but the fact that my activity level could ever be this high in one day is shocking. If you asked me in November, I would have said it was impossible.
Now obviously I'm the type of person that is so motivated by food that I fell into being a gym rat quasi-unintentionally. This is NOT going to be true of everyone. But there is something to be said for how exercise can give you enough wiggle room to make your deficit less frustrating and more sustainable. That extra biscuit or bit of ice cream or chicken wing might be what you need to feel a little less gutted by this whole process. And it might snowball into some really great fitness habits as it did for me.
Some other benefits of working out while losing:
- More non-scale victories. Everyone hits a stall at some point, and it's hard not to see the number move. If you have other success metrics (e.g., jogging a mile without stopping/walking, completing a classic push-up versus a knee push-up, not being out of breath when you run up a flight of stairs), you can maintain a positive attitude!
- A habit of movement. Even if you're keeping it simple with a 30-minute walk every day, that habit of movement is so significant. A lot of people want to put on muscle after they're done losing. If you've already baked in the habit of movement, it's going to be a lot easier to transform that into more concerted fitness efforts. Going from couch to running is much harder than going from walking to running. Similarly, if you've been doing casual cardio at the gym it's less scary to transition to strength training than if you were walking through the doors for the first time.
- Better heart health. Even low-intensity exercise, like walking, will improve your cardiac functioning! As your heart gets more efficient at oxygenating your body, a lot of things just feel better. Better sleep and better endurance were big ones for me!
Now, this is certainly not to say you NEED to work out while losing weight. You really don't if you don't want to! CICO works and simply eating at a deficit will get you losing weight. But I really wish I'd stop seeing people hate on exercise or insist that you can't meaningfully inflate your calorie budget with it. It can be an exceedingly useful tool for sticking with your diet. It's what enabled me to lose 30 lbs!
EDIT: Some important things to remember: approach exercise in whatever way is accessible and (more importantly) safe for you. This is not a post to preach that you have to exercise or that it will absolutely supercharge your weight loss. This is just to say that adding movement to your day to increase your calorie budget is a very viable strategy. Just remember to only add back half of what the tracker tells you! They famously overestimate actual calorie burn. And start slow if you want to start! I started by walking!
submitted by
/u/Efficient-Doughnut24
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/fjBPvlc
