Exercise for weight loss? A proven way to get lean.

Exercise does not immediately equal weight loss. You can’t exercise away the calories you just ate. Some calories consumed during exercise will help you keep exercising, but to lose stored fat you need to exercise consistently.

It really is that simple.

Recently the NY Times reported that fitness doesn’t lead to weight loss. This is old news. Credible fitness professionals have been telling people this for years.

Fitness and weight loss are not immediately cause and effect.

It is more of a continuum. When the NY article stated,

“Our bodies compensate for at least a quarter of the calories we expend during exercise, undermining our best efforts to lose weight by working out.”

Gretchen Reynolds

Remember this one important point, exercise doesn’t equal weight loss. Until it does, but it is not a straight line.

Exercise is excellent for your health and especially for weight maintenance. As a weight-loss strategy, alone, it is inefficient, but for maintaining that weight loss? It is imperative.

Another popular myth that goes with exercise and weight loss is that exercise will increase your appetite. Most people find that when they start exercising their appetite increases. This is temporary. As regular exercisers know, exercise soon becomes an appetite suppressant. Although this doesn’t equal weight loss either.

Why not?

It’s complicated. The calories eaten recently aren’t necessarily the ones being used for the next exercise session. The average lean 150-pound man –  like Canadian Olympian Andre de Grasse – so you know, not so average. Has about 1500-2,000 calories of stored carbohydrates and more than 100,000 calories of stored fat. Enough to run a hundred hours! But it isn’t quite that simple.

Facts about Fat in the Body

Carbohydrates are stored in the blood as glucose, in the liver and muscle as glycogen. This is critical for fueling muscle contraction, run out of glycogen and that’s it, you are running, actually not running, on empty. It takes about 90 minutes of exercise to run out of glycogen.

Fat provides more energy than carbohydrates but it takes longer to be broken down into fatty acids to be used as a fuel source and requires oxygen to be burned. To use fat as a primary fuel source exercise needs to be at a low to moderate intensity level.

So we do use fat as fuel?

Yes, but it’s more complicated and it also requires glycogen.

Burning fat is like trying to start a fire. You need kindling – the carbohydrates – to light the fire and keep it burning. Fat is like the big log you want to burn, run out of kindling and the fire goes out. Running out of carbohydrates will limit your ability to keep exercising.

We have known for a long time that exercise improves our ability to use fat as a fuel source quicker and exercise improves the capacity of muscle to oxidize fat.

Being fit and healthy improves your ability to burn fat especially in women, researchers from the University of Bath proved that the ability to burn fat as a fuel appears to protect against future weight gain, ensuring good weight management. However, they caution that the body’s ability to burn fat should not be equated with an ability to lose weight.

This adaptation occurs when we are fit, not when we try to lose weight.

Typically any kind of calorie deficit due to dieting alone results in muscle loss, this is the problem, muscle uses fat for fuel, lose muscle and this compromises your ability to lose stored fat.

Consistent exercise causes muscle adaptations to improve fatty acid oxidation (fat burning).

How?

By increasing the number of mitochondria in muscle cells. Mitochondria are the fuel cells of your muscles and make it possible to use fat as a fuel source. Through strength, endurance, and interval training, these workouts improve mitochondrial density and fat oxidation.

Mighty Mitochondria

Mitochondrial density enhances our ability to use fat as a fuel source. You can make more mitochondria in muscle cells through exercise. Lose muscle through a calorie-restrictive diet, and lose your ability to burn fat.

5 Ways to Be a Better Fat Burner

So exercise does not equal weight loss. Until it does.

Consistent, regular exercise improves your ability to use fat as fuel, through a complicated combination of reactions that allows you to access and oxidize fat stores. It is not immediate and there is no hacking it. The best way to reduce adipose tissue is to eat enough, not too much and not too little, and exercise consistently.

Change your mind, change your health,

Shayla