Exercise and Diet: a troubled relationship

If one of your goals is fat loss, you probably know that it can be a real challenge to attain, and sustain, your goal. Many people have gone on restrictive diets and experienced considerable weight loss, only to watch it creep back on once their diets return to “normal”. Your desire to reach a healthy and attractive body weight and body composition is attainable and sustainable with the right approach.

To achieve success in losing fat you have to acquire some skills in “couples counselling”. The couple in this case is exercise and diet. The oversimplified truth of fat loss is that you “just have to burn more calories than you are eating”. Unfortunately, that it is easier said than done.

On the one hand, you have exercise, which burns calories, and people find boring. The longer and harder you work out in one bout of exercise, the more calories you burn. When you add more bouts (going from two workouts per week to four) and increase consistency (not missing workouts), you burn considerably more calories than if you weren’t exercising.

On the other hand, you have food, which is a source of calories, and people love. As you can guess, some food has more calories than others. Because our bodies are designed to store calories in case of famine (a throw back to our Neanderthal-like physiology), once you have consumed what you need for body functions, you either store the excess calories as fat, or the remains pass through your digestive track.

It is important to understand that our habits, including diet and exercise, are driven by needs. Human beings have many needs, one of the most powerful of which is the need for certainty. Certainty comes in many forms, including the feelings we associate with “comfort” foods. Not unlike an addict getting a fix, these foods are in some cases abused to relax us when stressed, reward our accomplishments, and soothe our broken hearts. The overt danger in comfort foods is that it is almost inevitable that you will consume more than your body needs, even with added exercise, resulting in fat gain of about one kilogram per year from your thirties onwards.

Here’s where the counselling skills come in handy. You need to reconcile your “needs” and “wants”. You need enough calories (and nutrients) to sustain your bodily functions, daily activity, and exercise, but no more. Anything more than that is a want. Wants create a guarantee that you will gain fat. The critical part of this counselling is that when you give in to your wants, it is almost impossible to do enough exercise to offset the extra calories. For example, a typical meal at a popular fast food restaurant has so many calories it would take you over three hours of stationary cycling just to maintain your weight (not to mention the nutrient imbalances), let alone lose any weight. How often are you on the bike for three hours?

Next time you are planning your week, add an extra set to your workout, or an extra session overall, and make your food choices based on what your body needs, and less for what you want. The result will be the healthier, attractive body you want.