How To Lose Weight Without Breaking a Sweat with Exercise!

Today, we are going to talk about How To Lose Weight Without Breaking a Sweat with Exercise!

Which seems ignorant and little naive on my part, doesn’t it?

But it’s not, it’s actually a sign of a deeper understanding of how your metabolism actually works. How your body burns body fat and accumulates body fat.

Also, how many of us have stopped exercising since COVID restrictions closed our gyms, cancelled our exercise classes and all our trainers retired since they basically couldn’t work anymore?

I hear from a lot of you that you used to exercise, but really haven’t done much since COVID. And I want to assure you that that is just fine as far as your fat-burning goes.

Hear me clearly, if you can’t or don’t exercise, you can still be very metabolically healthy. You can still burn inches of body fat around your midsection.

The big main point I want to drive home today is that exercise is not the key to weight loss, food is.

A healthy metabolism is.

You absolutely cannot out exercise a bad diet.

The key to healthy sustained weight loss is a healthy metabolism. Most of us have damaged metabolisms. Exercise does not repair a damaged metabolism.

If you lean too much on exercise, you may have wonderful aerobic capacity and big muscles, but you’re not necessarily healthy. You may still be riddled with inflammation, sore muscles, achy joints, get constant injuries, and need really long recovery times.

If you exercise with a damaged metabolism, you’re really straining your body in a bad way. You’ll end up being dependent on energy drinks, caffeine and supplements to get you through your workouts. And eventually, your joints and body will begin to break down under the inflammatory pressure.

The reason we think exercise is key is because with low-calorie diets, we use exercise to boost calorie burn.
When you go on Weight Watchers, Noom, or any other calorie counting, portion control type diet, the whole goal is to create a calorie deficit.

But the truth of calorie restriction is there is a bottom.

Here’s how it works:
Let’s say you eat 2000 calories a day. Ok? Your body will burn around 2000 calories a day. Did you catch that? Your body burns about the same amount of calories you give it. This means, if you are 30 lbs overweight and you eat 2000 calories, your body burns about 2000 calories.

If I’m not overweight and eat 1600, my body burns 1600 calories. Which means, you as an overweight person actually burn more calories than I do. Which is not how we think about this. We think lean people have fast or high metabolisms that just naturally burn 2200 calories a day no matter what they eat.

But biologically, that isn’t how it works. And we’ve known this for over 100 years. Your body burns about the same amount of calories you eat. They are not independent variables. They go up and down together.

So, if you are overweight and eating 2000 calories and then go on a diet and drop to 1600 calories a day, you may lose a little weight. But within weeks, your metabolism will adjust and you’ll stop losing weight. And we’ve all experienced this, right? The weight stall!

Your body no longer burns 2000 calories while you only eat 1600. It adjusts. It’s not stupid. It senses that there is less fuel coming in and adjusts your metabolic rate. You may get colder, your digestion slows, you may feel sluggish, you may become irritable and cranky.
This is your body adjusting to your low calorie diet.

Now, here is where the love and idolization of exercise was born.

Exercise, temporarily increases metabolism. When you push and pull muscles, it takes energy. It takes calories. So, even though your body doesn’t want to do it, it now has to use valuable calories it’s trying to hold onto to fuel your Zumba or pilates class.

And this is what you hear all the time. The key to weight maintenance is exercise. No it’s not.

You have to exercise to control your weight. No you don’t.

Exercise is the reactive crisis control to the fact that you can’t just continue to eat less and less and still lose weight.

Calorie restrictive diets only work for a short period of time and they need that metabolic boost from exercise to work. And that isn’t necessary. We made that combination up. It’s not just about calories.

Which leads us into our next point.

We all either burn sugar or fat for energy. If your metabolism is broken, you’re burning sugar, not belly fat when you exercise. With a repaired and fully functioning metabolism, you can burn body fat for energy while you exercise.

So all those calories you are burning, aren’t even fat. You’re burning sugar. Then when you’re done exercising you eat more sugar and simply replenish the sugar stores you just burned. Especially if you eat carbohydrates and protein within an hour after exercising. So all that work did nothing for your belly fat. You’re not burning belly sugar. You want to burn belly fat.

I know some of you are shaking your head in disbelief, and I’m not saying exercising is bad.

It has lot’s a good things going for it. Balance, strength, mental health, all sorts of things.

What I’m saying is that exercise is not the Holy Grail of fat burning. Exercise is not even necessary to lose weight.

So if you have bad knees, a bad back, are in a wheel chair, or immobile, or just lost access to your gym or rec center, you can still lose weight.

The key is in your eating. Because the real problem is a broken metabolism and the key to healing a broken metabolism is food. Not exercising.

You can heal your metabolism and burn fat without ever taking a SilverSneakers class.

Again, there are great things about Silver Sneakers, but we don’t need to fret or stress or worship exercise for weight loss or weight control.

The key is food.

The key is a healthy, fat-burning metabolism.

If you’re already exercising, great! There’s nothing wrong with it, but if you’re exercising and not seeing the results you are working so hard to see, that’s because your metabolism isn’t burning fat because it’s damaged. You’re burning sugar.

If you are not exercising, don’t worry about it. Don’t focus your weight loss journey with hiring a trainer or buying a treadmill.

Start with your food. Start with repairing your metabolism using food.

This is what we do in the Freese Method. We repair your metabolism so that you can burn fat.

So that when you exercise you are using fat for the energy to exercise.

So that if you can’t/won’t/don’t exercise you can still lower your blood pressure and lose weight.

The key to long term weight loss and weight control is not exercise.

Exercise compliments your life if you have a metabolism ready to run it.

Exercise is hard on your life if you use to mask the symptoms of a damaged metabolism or exercise a bunch so that you can eat whatever you want.

That will always, always backfire eventually.

So don’t fret any longer about not being able to do 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week.

Do not fret about not getting in your 10,000 steps.

Exercise is wonderful for many things, but ironically, weight loss and weight control are not one of them.