Exercise More and Eat Less, Simple Right?

Not So Fast!

You may have heard the dated expression to exercise more and eat less to lose weight. This might seem like sound advice but it’s just not that straightforward. For the couch potato living a sedentary lifestyle doing no exercise at all, then yes it could work. But only for a short period of time as our bodies adapt, specifically our metabolism. During periods of extended eating less your body will get hungrier, energy levels drop and you get cravings. The same happens when you exercise harder, longer or add more training sessions to your schedule.

Your body wants to stay at the same point, this is called homeostasis. When you decide that you want to make a change to your energy balance like doing the above it pushes back. It will slow your metabolism to burn fewer calories. This is called adaptive thermogenesis and the caloric burn can decline by up to 25%.

The exercise more and eat less idea can spiral out of control. When your weight loss starts to slow down as the metabolism starts to adapt what do most people do? They decide to do even more exercise and eat less again until the scales start moving the way they want it. It’s a race to the bottom. You’ll be eating so little and trying to fuel too much training that you can’t perform optimally, your mood will be awful and illness/injury won’t be far behind.

Let Me Show You That Works

Using the calculator from my last post I input the details of a 30 year old female, who is 5′ 2″, weighs 11 stone/70kg and is sedentary. Her maintenance calories would be 1648. She wants to lose weight so she restricts her calories to 1200 per day and starts walking a couple times a week. She begins to lose weight for a few weeks but it then slows down. In an effort to keep it going she reduces calories again to less than a 1000 per day and begins running instead of walking, for a longer duration and more frequently. Weight loss begins again but it’s only a matter of time until it slows again. Do you think it’d be a good idea to reduce calories further? Have you seen how little 1200 calories worth of food is let alone less than a 1000? Good luck enjoying 3 meals and a snack or two spread over that many calories.

Check back later this week when I’ll explain a better way to lose weight and keep it off for good.