Shift your focus away from the gym …

Shift your focus away from the gym …👀 🏋🏼‍♂️

Whilst it’s obviously important to be active and to exercise for lots of reasons – not least of which is health and well being, too many people are too focused on the gym and what workout’s they’re doing when it comes to weight loss. So often I hear people frustrated that they’re ‘been to the gym every day’ but haven’t lost any weight.

The fact is you it’s very hard to create a meaningful calorie deficit via exercise and activity alone. You have to work extremely hard to burn more than a few hundred calories in a workout. Studies show we usually over estimate cals burnt and how active we are.

If you workout 5 days a week, for an hour a time (which is a substantial amount of exercise) you may feel you should be seeing some weight or fat loss. But that’s 5 hrs out of an entire week… for the average person working a 5 day week they’ll spend 40hrs working, assuming 8hrs sleep a night that’s 56hrs asleep, leaving another 67 hours or so of time when you’re doing everything else. So when you look at it like that those 5 hrs aren’t nearly as important as the other 107 hours (excluding sleep ).

So where do you think the focus should be? On those other hours! Yes the workouts are important for health and well being but they’re not the priority when it comes to fat loss. What you do for the rest of the day and what you eat is. You can’t out-exercise what you eat and diet is king when it comes to fat loss but general activity does help.

We always perceive a workout as burning more calories than it actually does (many studies have proved this). There’s also a tendency after a tough workout to eat more- either because we reward ourselves for the perceived effort or because we’re hungry. There’s also a tendency to be generally less active too if you’re exhausting yourself in workouts. If you spend your working day sat down, and then your evenings watching TV and your weekends fairly sedentary too then that’s what you need to focus on.

The end result is that by being focused on workouts as the only source of calorie expenditure we can end up moving less generally and eating more.

So shift your focus and as think beyond the gym. The calories you burn in a 1 hr workout will be considerably fewer than what you burn being generally active for the rest of the day. So think about how you spend the rest of your day. Do you find yourself sitting more than perhaps you need to? Do you amble instead of walking with purpose? Do you take the lift instead of the stairs? Think beyond the gym and focus instead on making yourself more active – get up, stand instead of sit, walk faster, walk more!

Also don’t be tempted to eat exercise calories back – just treat them as bonus cals rather than something to eat back.

🤗

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