Don’t Exercise to Lose Weight! It Won’t Work!

If anyone can help you lose weight, it’s Jillian Michaels, right?! I mean she’ll get in your face and make you workout SO HARD, the pounds will just drip off…literally! It’s so simple do more exercise to lose weight – so they say – right?? Isn’t that what we’re always told? Don’t people say you need to workout more? Shouldn’t you go to the gym?

Well I hate to burst your bubble, but its not true. If you exercise to lose weight, it is NOT going to work! Shows like The Biggest Loser showcase these participants working out HARD but what is really making the pounds drop is their very low calorie diets. I have a friend who was a contestant and winner on that show and he shared with me just how little they ate.

Don’t get me wrong though, it is incredibly beneficial to your health to exercise but to do it solely to lose weight will be an uphill battle and I hate to run uphill, don’t you?!

All too often we think we can “outrun” our forks and that’s just not the case. Let’s say you did a dance class for an hour and burned around 500 calories, good right?! Well, if you hadn’t exercised and just stood at your desk for that hour, you would have burned about 120 calories. So really, you only burned an additional 380 calories which could be zeroed out with just one cafe mocha.

Or you thought that maybe if you were just consistent with your exercise, say 4 days a week for 60 minutes, you’d lose weight. Guess what, you absolutely would…about 3-4 pounds a month. Does that sound motivating? I didn’t think so, especially if you’re choosing an exercise you don’t enjoy doing (did I mention I don’t like running???).

Remember though, no matter how little working out impacts your waistline, it does your body and mind so much good. It reduces your blood pressure, the triglycerides in your blood, the risk of Type II Diabetes, stroke, heart attack and provides beautiful muscle definition once you reach your goal weight. So why work to lose all that weight and get into a bikini if you’re going to look like skin over bones or your ticker is going to give out. Exercise IS important.

Why do we Exercise To Lose Weight?

Why do we believe that exercising will help us get lean and mean? It all comes down to profit…again! The government, the American Heart Association and the Big Food Companies all tell us to exercise more. They fail to mention that what it’s really going to take is better food choices because those less than better choices (like Pepsi, Sara Lee and Nabisco) are telling Americans the reason for our obesity epidemic is lack of exercise (not the sugar and wheat in their nutrition-less products).

Losing weight is going to come from your meal timing and meal planning. You have to choose to not eat all hours of the day and you have to be careful not to eat too many carbs (especially the processed kind). Do as your grandparents did and eat 3 square meals a day, 3 meals that come from the farm and not the factory. Your body wants to be at a healthy weight and if you feed it “just enough of the right stuff,” it will have no problem releasing the excess weight.

Now go take that dance class for fun…just promise you will not exercise to lose weight! 🙂