The Spoon Is Mightier Than The Treadmill
We all know someone that’s fallen into this trap.
Maybe that day comes when you’re finally going to get in shape. You’re motivated, and this time feels different. Change is in the air and you’re ready to commit. So what do you do? Yup, you guessed it. You lace up the trainers and go out for a run.
And that is your first mistake.
Exercising as a sole strategy for weight loss is pretty futile. While it is technically possible, you’re unlikely to be successful without first taking a hard look at what you’re eating. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not anti-exercise. I owned a CrossFit gym for more than 10 years. Exercise is powerful and we can all benefit from it.
That being said, exercise when used alone, specifically cardio, is most likely to cause you to gain weight, not lose it. Let's take a look at why. While sleep, protein intake, and other variables are important when it comes to losing weight, it's beyond debate that calories in vs. calories out is the primary mechanism that decides if we’re gaining or losing weight.
It’s physics. If there are more calories entering your body than being burned, the energy will build up. Your body’s primary mechanism for storing energy is unfortunately to add volume to your fat cells. Conversely, to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you eat. Let's take a look at an example with some specifics.
Let’s say you want to start to lose weight at the rate of 1lb per week, a conservative rate for most people. A pound of fat contains 3500 calories. To burn that in a week you’ll need to burn 500 calories per day more than you eat (500 cal per day deficit x 7 days in a week = 3500 cal burned per week). You’ve also decided that you’re going to exercise, in the form of running, to create this additional calorie burn.
While there’s some variation, most people burn about 100 calories per mile of running. To hit your daily calorie burn goal you’re looking at running 5 miles per day, 7 days per week. That’s pretty daunting in its own right, but what makes this situation even more challenging is the unspoken assumption that you won’t change anything about your food intake.
Cardio has many benefits, but one downside is it can make you ravenously hungry compared to alternatives like resistance training. Running five miles per day tends to make people a LOT hungrier than they were before they were exercising. The increase in hunger signaling is so strong that if you’re not monitoring your food intake it can be very easy to eat not just enough to cancel out the 500 calories you burned, but far more, putting you into a calorie surplus and gaining weight.
Add to that the common mindset of “I ran 5mi today! I can have a beer and some tortilla chips” and most people in this simplified scenario will be losing ground on their weight loss goals. Additionally, even if you’re successful at maintaining your food intake AND hitting your calorie burn goals, most of the weight you lose will be muscle mass not body fat. Cardio is a muscle wasting activity, not muscle building. Just think about someone you know who runs a lot but doesn’t lift weights. Do they have well developed and defined muscles? Without some rather extraordinary genetics, definitely not. While losing some muscle while losing weight is inevitable, keeping as much muscle as you can should be a top priority for aesthetic, health, and longevity reasons.
So what’s a better strategy? After 15 years of coaching here’s how we approach effective, sustainable weight loss:
Improve your food quality by eating mostly meat, vegetables, fruits, and healthy fats. This has a heavily anti-inflammatory effect along with keeping people full longer with less calorie intake
Add exercise in the form of resistance training not to burn calories, but to signal the body to burn body fat instead of muscle
Control food intake through tracking calories and macronutrient targets to achieve an optimal calorie deficit.
Fine tune your hormonal state for weight loss through improved sleep, targeted supplementation, and superior hydration.
We very consistently teach our clients how to lose as much weight as they want at the rate of roughly 1% of body weight per week. In our experience this is about as fast as you can go and still minimize muscle loss. For a 200lb individual that’s 2lbs per week. It might not seem like much, but in reality it’s rapid and sustainable progress.
We’ve had clients lose and keep off more than 200lbs using this method. Bottom line, it WORKS.
If you want to know more, schedule a free consultation with us! We’ll tell you all about how the Program will work for you.