Dont Make Exercise A Punishment For Enjoying Life

Exercise is not a transaction for calories eaten. Both food and exercise have a lot of qualities to them besides energy absorbed and then burned. No doubt, food intake and activity levels are very important for determining your current body weight. Considering looking beyond just calories in vs. out will set you up for success, while making the whole process much more enjoyable. One reason for this is getting specific with calorie intakes and calories burned is very hard to do. I’d like to break down for you why you should consider ignoring how many calories you burn during exercise, and focus on some of the other benefits.

Looking beyond calories burned

Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t a little accountant in your body that measures the calories in and calories out, and perfectly adjusts your weight, muscular tone and health based on these two factors. Yes, calories eaten and calories burned in a day are very important for determining your weight. However, there are multiple other factors that will determine how lean you look, your bodies shape, as well as your likelyhood of living well into old age.

• Genetics: Some people just turn food into muscle in the right places, and dont put on fat easily, or when they do put on fat it’s in the right places. Some people are insanely strong with little to no training. It’s unfair but it’s reality.

• Exercise type: Per minute, running may burn more calories than some heavy hip hingeing. But I will almost guarantee the person spending more time hip hingeing will have a much more development in their butt and legs.

• Strength and stability: Riding the exercise bike or eliptical machine for an hour each day may make it harder to put the weight on, but it wont do nearly as much for increasing your strength and stability. These are very important for living an active life, and retaining your mobility and wellness into old age.

• Insulin sensitivity: Having large and active muscles will give your body a much easier job regulating your blood sugars, this will reduce your risk of diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, it also makes iteasier to look lean and toned.

• Injury and pain reduction: Exercising correctly will reduce your chance of pain, discomfort and injury. Strengthening your joints, and increase your mobility.

Measuring Errors

It is almost impossible to practically measure your calorie expenditure outside of very controlled lab environments. Calculators found inside calorie tracking apps, and several online TDEE formulas will give you a good starting estimate. However, we are all different, we have different non-exercise related activity levels. You may walk to work everyday, work a manual labour job, your immune system might be fighting a nasty infection, you might be building a tonne of new muscle mass. All of these factors are very hard to account for, and will not remain constant. Use an estimate, exercise for all of the possible benefits, and if your weight moves in the right direction, dont change anything. If it doesn’t start changing your calorie intake.

“But my Fitbit said I just burned 800 calories in my workout!”

Your Fitbit is wrong.

Wearable trackers are very poor at estimating how many calories you burned[1]. If you wear a tracker, they’re great for measuring resting heart rate and sleep, but definitely don’t pay any attention to how many calories it said you burned during exercise. Don’t get me started on what the 8-year old exercise bike at your gym has to say about calories burned either. One of the reasons that these instruments tend to be innacurate is that depending on how much experience you have with a particular exercise, you become more or less efficient while doing it. Put me and Mo Farah on a treadmill for 10 kilometres and while he gracefully cruises through it and I limp along to the finish line, he will burn far less calories.

The Psychological Damage

Simply exercising to increase your energy needs has two main negative effects on your quality of life:

1) It makes exercise boring and unengaging:

Jumping on a treadmill for 60 minutes at a low to moderate speed may burn a lot of calories, but unless you underwent surgery to replace the contents of your skull with a guinea pig’s white matter, the novelty of this is going to wear off very quickly. Measuring only one very simple metric every workout is going to be extremely dull, and I dont care how many fitspo influencers you look at each day, you’re not going to keep showing up. And if you do, you’re going to resent it. I’m sure you have unavoidable parts of your day that you find boring and unengaging, dont make your health and fitness one of them.

2) It adds guilt to your nutrition and penance to your exercise:

You cannot play calorie catch up for your food chocies using exercise. If you live in the modern world and aren’t a professional athlete or full time hot person, you do not have enough time in the day to exercise away dessert. The majority of your calories are burned from your body simply keeping you alive and moving. Even very intense exercise will add only a small amount to your calorie needs, and you cant do that all day. The wear and tear on your joints and fatigue on your nervous system will be too much. Then theres the neuroticism and accounting that goes into every treat or thing you enjoy. Do you want to live a life where you look at a piece of pizza and instead of relishing in the mouth watering anticipation of a centuries of italian food culture combined with modern food science designed to make you happy, you now see 25-minutes of yourself on the eliptical machine, resistance 5, medium speed (285 calories)?

Well what do I do instead?

1) Eat to train, and recover:

You should be looking to eat to improve performance and recovery. By eating to fuel your training session, you allow yourself to train harder for longer, while having it not feel as miserable. Suffering doesn’t have a 1:1 correlation with results. If you can eat enough quality food, rich in protein, rich in fibre, and the right amount and type of carbohydrates and fats. You will enjoy much more improvement over the long run, and you will feel much better doing it. Psychologically it’s great not looking at food as a necessary evil, but an ally in your journey to becoming even more of a sexy beast.

2) Train to gain muscle

Muscle mass is healthy. No, I’m not talking about the level of muscularity that you need to inject hormones brewed in chinese bathtubs into yourself twice a day type. Training to build and maintain as much natural muscle mass as possible has several benefits:

• It improves your metabolism: Having that extra muscle hanging around means that in the long run, you can eat way more food without putting on weight, as your body funnels more energy into keeping you meaty, as opposed to storing it in fat. Also the very act of building the muscle takes up even more calories, giving you a huge advantage when you start training. Even further, building muscle reduces your chances of developing insulin resistance and diabetes [2]. But I’ll get further into that in a future article.

• It increases your energy burned when exercising: What do you think takes more energy? picking up 50kg or picking up 200kg? The higher your power output, and the more you can sustain that effort over time, the more energy you’ll burn when exercising.

3) Focus on your fitness

One of the cool but sometimes frustrating things about fitness is theres so many things that can count as fitness. How is your resting heart rate? your heart rate recovery? your rate of force development? how high can you jump? how much can you lift over your head? Whats your mitochondrial density? All of these things are really cool to develop. By focusing on improving your fitness and developing all of its facets, you get to feel more like a superhero, and less like a robot that burns chicken breasts and skinny teas for fuel.

4) Increase your activity levels doing something enjoyable

Let’s say you don’t care much for the gym. Or you’re all gymmed out and dont want to reduce your food intake to lose weight. Don’t walk on the treadmill or plop down on the recliner bike! You have two much better options. The first being increasing the amount that you walk in any given day, I often tell my clients with fat loss goals to go for a walk outside in the morning. This has the benefit of being more mentally stimulating then a treadmill, as well as having exposure to light in the morning can massively improve your sleep quality [3]

The other option is to go pick up a new hobby that requires you to be active. Go to dance classes, book in a time with your mates to play pick-up basketball, learn a martial art, start hiking. All of these have the benefit of being fun and engaging since you have to learn a new skill, and often have a social element involved as well, which increases your chances of showing up, and is wonderful for your emotional health.

References

[1] Shcherbina, A., Mattsson, C., Waggott, D., Salisbury, H., Christle, J., Hastie, T., Wheeler, M. and Ashley, E., 2017. Accuracy in Wrist-Worn, Sensor-Based Measurements of Heart Rate and Energy Expenditure in a Diverse Cohort. Journal of Personalized Medicine, 7(2), p.3.

[2] McPherron, A., Guo, T., Bond, N. and Gavrilova, O., 2013. Increasing muscle mass to improve metabolism. Adipocyte, 2(2), pp.92-98.

[3] Blume, C., Garbazza, C. and Spitschan, M., 2019. Effects of light on human circadian rhythms, sleep and mood. Somnologie, 23(3), pp.147-156.