When most people begin their fat loss journey, the first thing they do is hit the gym or the pavement.
This is a good thing; regular exercise has countless benefits for your physical and mental health, and it can act as a keystone habit that creates a cascade of positive change in your life.
And yet, you can work out all the time and still not lose a single pound. Many people get stuck here, understandably frustrated because they feel like they’re working really hard with little to show for it.
Why does this happen?
The most important consideration for fat loss is to sustain a caloric deficit (consuming less energy than your body uses) for a prolonged period of time. This is part of the laws of thermodynamics which govern how energy is stored, transferred, and converted throughout the entire physical world.
There are many internal and external factors that affect both the amount of food you eat and amount of energy you use, but ultimately if you don’t obey this law you won’t be successful.
Read more: The Only 3 Things You Need to Lose Fat
It’s true that you burn calories during exercise. Sadly, it’s extremely easy to eat those calories back in a fraction of the time you spent working out.
[Side note – It’s also notoriously difficult to accurately measure how many calories you burn while working out. This is why, if a client is counting calories, I don’t want them to add back calories their FitBit, Apple Watch, treadmill, etc. told them they burned exercising. You should only consider your activity levels when calculating or adjusting calorie goals.]
For example, you can burn ~200-500 calories running for 30 minutes.
Any regular size candy bar from the corner store is around 200-250 calories. A single cookie from your favorite coffee shop can be upwards of 400+ calories. A single beer is 125-400 calories; ditto for different sized glasses of wine.
If you have a hard workout and enjoy a treat later because “you earned it”, you can potentially wipe out all those calories burned (and then some) in a few short minutes!
[Another side note – This is one reason why it’s so important to try to eat whole foods as you diet. A 400 calorie salad is going to fill you up and give you a lot more sustained energy than a 400 calorie cookie.]
There are other problems with trying to exercise your way into weight loss. Too much of the wrong kind of exercise makes it much harder to stick with your nutrition plan.
Doing hours and hours of steady state cardio every day can dramatically drive up your appetite. When you constantly feel ravenous, it’s difficult to eat in a deficit.
Too much high intensity training can also be problematic. There is a lot of evidence that suggests an appropriate amount of this stuff helps you lose fat. Unfortunately, many in the fitness industry took this a little too far and made high intensity training the sole focus of their workouts (I’m looking at you, Orange Theory).
It’s counterproductive to always train this way because it drives you to exhaustion, which can effect sleep, stress, and fuel powerful cravings for junk food. As you can imagine, this doesn’t make it easier to make good food choices or stick with your diet.
So, what should you be doing for exercise if you want to be successful with your weight loss goals? Here are my suggestions:
- Strength training 2-4 times per week. This helps you hold onto (or even build) muscle as you diet. Muscle keeps your metabolism revving, which means you can eat more food and still lose weight.
- Daily walking and low intensity movement. Being more active in your daily life is one of the most powerful things you can do to achieve your fat loss goals. Sit less, move more, take up a physical hobby, and mind your daily step count. You will burn a lot more calories without the negative effects on your appetite.
- High intensity interval training or other intense conditioning 1-3 times per week. Keep it under 15 minutes and make sure you’re really pushing yourself during that time. Resist the urge to do more than this!
Start here and make a big effort to work on your eating. If after a while your progress starts to stall, then you can think about adding extra cardio sessions or HIIT.
Over the last 7+ years working with clients, I’ve seen countless people get stuck in the “I’m exercising a lot and not losing weight” trap. I am going to dig into this and four other common hangups in my free “5 Fat Loss Mistakes” webinar, which you can sign up for using the box below.
The webinar will take place next Thursday, February 25 at 6pm CST. If you can’t make it live, you can still watch the replay afterwards. I hope to see you there!