Are you exercising regularly and not losing weight? Some people find when they start to exercise the pounds don’t drop off as they anticipated, and they may even gain a little weight. If you’re weight training, some of the gains may be due to muscles holding on to more water. On the other hand, it’s also possible you’re putting on body fat. How can that be when you’re exercising?
Some People Overeat the Benefits of Exercise
When some people finish a workout and they see a candy bar, a little voice inside tells them they deserve it. After all, they just walked for 45 minutes on the treadmill. Don’t listen to those voices. That one candy bar will offset all the calories you burned during your 45-minute workout. The reality is you burn off a little over 250 calories when you walk on a treadmill at a 4 mile-per-hour pace for 45 minutes. That’s equivalent to the calories in a standard Snicker’s bar. If you reward yourself like this often, you could end up gaining, not losing, on your exercise program. No wonder they say you can’t out-exercise a bad diet!
Plan Your Diet Ahead of Time to Prevent Overeating
If you start an exercise program without addressing your diet, it can lead to frustration when you don’t get the results you want. At the other extreme, don’t restrict calories too much or your body will sense famine and slow down the rate it burns fat. If you’re trying to lose weight, cut your calorie count back by no more than 500 a day. You’ll lose a pound a week and even more if you exercise regularly.
Use an online calculator to see exactly how many calories you need a day based on your height. Then subtract 500. Once you know how many calories you have to work with, plan your meals and snacks a week ahead of time. If you decide what you’re going to eat the day of, you’re less likely to make the wrong food choices out of convenience.
Be sure to include healthy, low-calorie snacks in your daily food plan to ward off unplanned indulgences that can wipe out a day’s worth of exercise. Choose snacks that contain protein and include a small amount of protein with every meal. High-protein foods are best for controlling appetite. Also, include foods that are high in appetite-quenching fiber such as beans and veggies. Drink lots of water or unsweetened green tea.
Another way to stop overeating the calorie-burning benefits of exercise is to keep a food diary. Write down what you ate and when you ate it. This will keep you accountable. You’ll think twice about biting into that chocolate chip cookie if you have to chronicle it in your food diary. Write down how you felt when you ate and your level of hunger. This will make you more aware of emotional eating patterns that can sabotage weight loss.
Once you’ve built up a certain level of fitness, increase the intensity of your exercise, and do some interval training where you work out at a high intensity for a short period of time and then recover. High-intensity interval training burns significantly more calories over the long-term because you continue to burn calories and fat even after you stop exercising for the day. Resistance training will help you build more metabolically active muscle tissue.
The Bottom Line?
It’s easy to overindulge when you know you’re working out, and it doesn’t take a lot of indulgences to overeat the calorie-burning benefits of exercise. Plan your diet and hold yourself accountable by keeping a food diary.
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What Science Says About Overeating
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