Category: Nutrition and Calorie Tips

Why exercise alone won’t get you results … 🏋🏼‍♂️

I know I say this a lot but If I had a pound for everyone I speak to who tells me that they exercise a lot but can’t understand they aren’t getting results I would be a rich woman!

I discussed this last week but I thought this pie chart helps visualise why those workouts have so little impact on your fat/weight loss and how what you do outside your workouts is far more important.

Fat loss is far more about behaviour change than it is about the calories you burn during a workout. 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 and you can’t put exercise your diet (it’s a lot easier to eat several hundred calories than burn it off). Studies also show we usually over estimate cals burnt and how active we are. So instead of fixating on the small amount of your waking hours that you’re doing a workout, instead focus on the rest of the time.

The calories you burn in a 45 min 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.

Exercise for health and well-being and focus on the food side of things if you want to lose weight!

🤗xx

Stop exercising to lose weight… 🏃🏼‍♂️

Whenever someone wants to lose weight inevitably they place a huge focus on exercising to burn more calories. Exercise appears to be the holy grail of weight loss behaviours. Exercising to burn calories and lose weight becomes the main goal. And yes, of course it’s important to exercise and yes of course it does increase your energy output but, as I’ve discussed before, you will never ever be able to out-exercise food.

So whilst I wholeheartedly support people exercising more (I’m an instructor so obviously I do!) it’s not with the sole purpose of losing weight. That’s last on my list of reasons for anyone to partake in exercise and it should be last on yours too!

Instead, move your body to improve your mental and physical well being. There are so many reasons to exercise that go beyond burning calories.

* Exercise improves muscle mass, bone and joint health and keeps you functioning independently into old age.

* Whilst excess exercise can down-regulate immune function, regular exercise serves to improve the resiliency and expression/activity of immune cells and mediators so it improves immune function and helps protect against disease.

* It makes you feel stronger and more empowered

* It improves mood, can reduce anxiety and some symptoms of depression and relieves stress.

* It improves cardiovascular health and reduces disease risk

* It increases self confidence

Above all – exercise to celebrate that you can! Not to lose weight!

🤗xx

Practical New Year’s Resolutions… ⭐️

Although I suggested alternative resolutions yesterday I’m aware that for many their resolutions do involve making a fresh start at health and fitness. Often these resolutions will be things like to “lose weight” or to “get fit” or perhaps “eat healthier’. Now whilst these are all great goals they’re quite hard to achieve without some practical steps. They’re outcomes of changes you need to make rather than actual resolutions per se.

If you are making New Year’s resolutions about your health and fitness, then instead of making generalised statements try to focus instead on small actions you can take every day that will lead to those end goals.

So instead of resolving to lose weight, perhaps instead resolve to identify where the excess calories are in your diet. Are they coming from alcohol? Extra snacks? Take aways? Portion sizes? And then you can take steps to reduce them and therefore reduce your calorie intake (leading to fat and weight loss).

Instead of resolving to “get fit”, instead focus on upping your daily steps. Rather than choosing an arbitrary goal of 10,000 steps, instead commit to increasing your steps. If you’re already hitting 12,000 steps a day then aim for 14,000, if you’re getting 4,000 aim for 6,000 etc. Also consider adding some exercise 1-3 times a week. It doesn’t matter what that exercise is really just pick something you actually enjoy; dancing, running, weight lifting, swimming cycling etc.

Rather than resolving to “Eat healthier” commit to adding a portion of fruit or veg to every meal. Aside from the fact that it will increase your overall nutrition, it will increase fibre levels, and will probably help reduce overall calories as by filling some of your plate with fruit and veg you’re going to eat less of other, more calorie dense foods.

This approach is far better than making massive changes, subscribing to fad diets/detoxes/challenges etc which may well cause you to lose weight quickly but will also see you putting that weight back on once you’re back to eating normally again. Take small sustainable steps and you’ll find you’ll hit your goals and be able to maintain it within your lifestyle too! 🙂

Xx