3 Reasons Your Exercising May Be Hurting Your Weight Loss

Today we are asking the question, “Could exercising actually be hurting your attempts to burn fat?”

It’s officially warming up and the snow is all gone, the wind is dying down and it’s just overall more pleasant to be outside.

Most of us, hibernate to a certain degree during winter and then we make our emergence out into the world again in springtime with commitments to walking and being more active.

Mainly so that we can lose the five to ten pounds we accumulated over the winter.

Or we feel the warmer weather and are suddenly aware that we are not shorts or tank top ready and want to lose some weight.

Ok, so far, this is all good.  Nothing wrong with any of this. Nothing wrong with wanting to get out of the house and be more active and want to lose weight.

Now, we are going to turn our focus to a specific subset of these people who want to go out and be active in the warm weather.

We are going to focus on women, specifically women over 40 who have the intention and goal to burn excess fat from their bodies by exercising.

We are going to focus on women who want to lose fat around their midsections, fat anywhere, really, and are going to use exercise, either walking, running, biking, pickle ball, tennis, gardening, or whatever activity you want to do to burn calories and lose weight.

Do you see what we are doing?

We are not talking about the women who walk with friends to chat and catch up. We are not talking about women who just generally enjoy a leisure walk because it helps their mind and mood. 

We are talking about the women who are using exercise as the means to the goal of weight loss, specifically to burn fat.

I used to be this woman. I have exercised all my life and while I like the way it made me feel mentally and whatnot, if I was honest with myself, the majority reason that I was doing it was to have a fit body. 

To burn fat. 

To look great. 

Right?

If you are trying to exercise for fat loss, this session is for you.

Problem #1: Put too much emphasis on exercise.

The biggest problem I see with exercise and weight loss is that we place equal if not more importance and effort into exercise and not enough on diet or food.

We talk about weight loss and say things like, exercise and eat right!  Be active and eat sensibly.  As if both activity and eating were 50/50 partners in how we control our body fat.

Or worse. Exercise is somehow even more than 50%. Like, if you exercise you can eat whatever you want.  Huge lie.  I grew up with this mentality and it is a huge lie.  You can not be healthy by over-excising and eating whatever you want. That is not healthy.

Weight loss, fat loss, in particular, is 95% food. 95% diet. 95% eating habits and 5% exercise.

Dr. Fung once used the analogy that exercise is bunting in a baseball game.  It’s a skill that helps the game, but 95% of the game is skills like throwing, batting, fielding, and running.  

We would never practice bunting more than hitting or throwing or fielding, right?

We wouldn’t spend 50% of our energy and time and skill on a tactic that we only use 2% of the time to help us win baseball games?

But that is exactly what we do with exercise.  We spend a ton, I mean a ton of money on active wear, new shoes, gym memberships, trainers, and whatnot, but we choose and purchase the cheapest, most processed, empty food we can get our hands on.

We will pay for expensive $800 treadmills but we wouldn’t think of buying raspberries or avocados because they’re just too expensive.

We put so much emphasis and focus on exercises that we don’t understand or appreciate that the money is better spent on food.

The focus is better spent on food.

Your return on investment is 1000% times better with food, not exercise.

Don’t believe me? No problem, we have tons, tons of data to back this up.  

But I’m going to bring up one study in particular.

It’s called the Women's Healthy Initiative. In its entirety, the WHI enrolled more than 160,000 postmenopausal women aged 50–79 years (at the time of study enrollment) over 15 years, making it one of the largest U.S. prevention studies of its kind, with a budget of $625 million.  

It has given us a lot of information about hormone replacement therapy and heart disease.  But it also showed that women who exercised, whether at intense, moderate, or mild intensities over 10 years did not lose weight. Furthermore, the study found there was no change in body composition.  Which means, they weren’t replacing fat with muscle.  Body fat percentage stayed the same over 10 years of working out.

“But Hannah! I have a friend who works out and she’s slim!?”

Ok.  That may be true. This is another example of a logical fallacy called, the Anecdotal Evidence Fallacy or Correlation or Causation Fallacy.

But she’s not slim because of her exercise. She’s slim and she’s active.  But she may be slim because of what she eats or doesn’t eat when she’s not exercising.

If you see a toned, lean woman in the pool or at Zumba or running down the street, you can bet with scientific certainty she got there because of her diet, not the exercise that you are currently witnessing.

I swim. I do yoga.  The exercise tones my muscles a bit, but my body composition, and my body fat percentage are due to my diet. 

Exercise will sabotage your attempts at weight loss because you are focusing on the wrong thing.  Then you get discouraged. Then you overeat.

And here are a few other metabolic reasons that exercise could actually be blocking any weight loss.

Problem #2: Metabolic & Caloric Compensation

Exercise creates both metabolic and caloric compensation. Meaning you are more hungry and will eat those 200 calories you’ve burned and you’ll sit or move around less during the day.  Yes, it’s true.

Problem #3: Excess Cortisol and Stress on Your Body

Plus, too much exercise causes surges in cortisol and adrenaline that cause your body to pump out sugar when you’re not even eating to keep up with the muscle demands.  Most of the time, this sugar production is more than what we need for the workout, so we end up with insulin that is turned on and fat accumulation instead of fat burning!  

Now, at this point, I’ll get questions about specific types of exercise, like what about my weight lifting, what about my pilates?

Here’s the thing.  It doesn’t matter what type of exercise you do.  

The point is that if you are doing that exercise, that cycling, that water aerobics to burn fat you need to know that will only contribute 5% of any weight loss to your goal.

These is not scientific numbers, but it’s a good visual, if you want to lose 40 lbs, exercising will help you lose 2 of those pounds.

If you want to lose 60 lbs, exercise may only help you lose 3 of those pounds.

Do you see the visual I’m creating?

This is why in the Freese Method, exercise is not part of the Method. It’s not part of the program.  If you want to do it, fine. You can.

We use it as a tool to control our dopamine and clear out sugar from our blood, but it is not equal in importance, time, or effort to meal planning, meal preparation, and eating.  

And since all the meal stuff only takes 30 minutes a day… well, losing weight and burning fat is actually not very time-consuming at all.

Again, if you lift weights for bone building and balance. Good! Keep it up.  If you are walking because it gets you outside in the sunshine, amazing! Lots of great things come from exercise. 

But fat loss is not one of them.

Exercise is the worst way to lose weight. We have a ton of evidence for this.

Exercise and eating right are not equal partners pulling the weight loss wagon.  Ok?

What and when we eat is way, way more important. So let’s focus on that!

You absolutely have what it takes to lose weight, achieve glowing health, and never stress about your weight again, we just need to repair your metabolism first!