Why Exercise Is Ineffective For Weight Loss

The message of this blog is that high fat, reduced carbohydrate diets are the key to long term health and weight loss. But what about exercise? We have been told to get off the couch for years to reduce our waist lines. The reality is that exercise based weight loss is a lot more difficult than it seems. Exercise is extremely important for a huge array of reasons, but weight loss is not one of them.

Running

I used to run quite a bit. Even did a marathon at one point. I was at a healthy weight when I was doing that, but it involved a huge amount of training. I had a sports watch which counted calories and I also looked up some estimates of calories burned based on my weight and speed of running. When I ran at a reasonable pace for one hour I would burn about 700 calories.

Whopper

There are 660 calories in a Whopper. So if I run for an hour a day I can eat a whopper. No chips or drink, just the whopper. The rest of my day's intake better add up to the same amount of calories I am burning in my other daily activities. Too many calories and I will get fat. Too few and I will waste away.

What is a calorie?

I think one of the problems with the calorie as a unit of measurement is that people don't know how big one is. i.e. 'What do I have to do to burn this?' Well now you know. No need for you to run for an hour to find out. Just keep in mind when you are looking at calorie numbers that burning 700 of these will take an hour of running. Tot up the total calories in your day and you will realise that exercise without dietary modification is not going to make much of a dent in all that processed high carb food.

The good news is that you won't be reading calorie numbers from the side of packets for long. The content of your food is important, but it's the carbohydrate content rather than the calories that you will be interested in.

So get plenty of varied exercise, but don't wear your knees out. And cut way down on carbohydrates.

Instructions to follow.