You Only Have To Exercise on Days That You Eat

Dr Joseph S. Alpert, M.D  said “You only have to exercise on the days that you eat.”

Exercise won’t help you lose weight, but without exercise you are not going to lose weight either.

Confused? Well, the diet industry would like you to believe that the low carb, low fat, raw food, party girl, diet will save you. The fitness industry would like to you to believe you can get a 6 pack in 6 weeks, lose the love handles with 3 easy exercises, have a bikini body in 21 days. None of the above is true.

You may have heard that exercise won’t help you lose weight and that is true. You can’t exercise enough to burn off too much food. If you don’t believe me watch the Treadmill vs Pizza video below.

The other problem with trying to exercise off your food choices? Food is everywhere and the opportunity to be sedentary is also the easiest choice. Drive thrus are the perfect example of this. You don’t have to move, don’t even have to get out of your car to eat.

Even doing activities that are pretty similar to 50 years ago burn less calories. For example, parents now burn 225 calories less per day than 50 years ago looking after their kids, because of television, computers, dishwashers … we were designed to do physical activity for 9 hours a day. Now, to compensate for our sedentary work life we would need to run 10 KM every day.

The research shows that to lose weight you need to eat less. But, that doesn’t work to keep the weight off. Why? Because we are actually not eating that much more, but more of us are getting bigger and bigger. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates  the cost of obesity, worldwide is about $2 trillion US dollars every year! This equals the cost of smoking, war and terrorism combined.

So, what exactly is going on?

Energy flux, and it like many other things, we have known about it since the 1950s. This is when Harvard nutrition professor Jean Mayer Ph.D. found that workers who were active during the day found a natural balance between calories in and calories out, but sedentary workers gained weight regardless of their diet. Professor Mayer summarized that human beings evolved to do a certain amount of activity everyday and when we do, our weight is stable.

However, being sedentary messes with the system. Mayer said,

“In his hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, man did not have any opportunity for sedentary life except very recently. An inactive life for man is as recent (and as abnormal) as caging is for an animal. In this light, it is not surprising that some of the usual [metabolic] adjustment mechanisms would prove inadequate.”

The National Weight Control Registry has similar findings. They track successful “losers”. People who have lost more than 30 pounds and kept it off for more than one year. The average person lost 66 pounds and has kept it off for more than 5 years. Most successful losers exercise at least one hour everyday.

Exercise may not burn off a lot of calories, but it reduces abdominal fat, improves blood sugars, blood pressure and triglycerides.

Exercise has another benefit. It helps you control your appetite.

Exercise more and you can more accurately measure your appetite. People who exercise regularly have a good understanding of what they can eat to maintain their weight. Don’t exercise and suddenly you have lost the magic key to the kingdom of weight control.

You can’t exercise away a bad diet, but now you know that you only have to exercise on days that you eat.

Change your mind, change your health,

Shayla