Labor ≠ Sports! 3 reasons why exercise doesn't make you lose weight

"Why haven't I lost weight after exercising for a month?"

“I work out so hard but I still can’t lose weight!”

This is a common complaint in the clinic and online. Due to my work, I often advise patients to exercise moderately and control their weight to prevent joint degeneration and osteoporosis. Over the long term, many people have tried, but few have succeeded.

Since I don’t run a weight loss clinic or an exercise prescription clinic, I don’t have enough time to explain in detail how to exercise and how to lose weight in the clinic (in fact, there is enough information on the Internet), so I will simply summarize the three common reasons why "exercise doesn’t make you lose weight":

1. You Misunderstand Labor as Exercise

"My usual exercise is doing housework and tending the garden, which is enough for me."

"I have to stand for ten hours at work and walk around, so the amount of exercise is already enough."

In fact, labor is absolutely not equal to exercise. The hustle and bustle of routine work can make you tired and even cause body aches without being able to effectively burn calories!

In fact, our bodies are also very smart and can quickly learn and adapt to routine activities. In order to survive, the human body tends to consume the least amount of calories to complete the same work. For example, if your job requires you to go up and down the stairs 20 times a day, you can burn about 260 calories at the beginning (climbing stairs at a normal speed for one minute consumes about 13 calories). After a week, your body only needs to consume less than 200 calories to go up and down the stairs 20 times. After doing the same job for a month, the calories you need to consume may be less than half of the original!

2. You think you have consumed a lot of cards

In order to lose weight, you join a gym or buy a treadmill or flywheel to exercise at home. Every time you stare at the LCD screen on the machine and see the "calorie consumption" number keep jumping up, you feel a great sense of accomplishment. I consumed 600 calories a day, thinking that I could consume 9,000 calories and lose 1 kg in 15 days! (Burning 1 kg of fat produces about 9,000 calories.) Based on this calculation, you can lose 24 kg in a year.

However, every time the number on the scale always shatters your dreams, you give up on yourself and keep getting fatter and fatter.

There are two reasons for this, one is that most commercially available machines overestimate the calories burned (happy meters). Another reason is what was mentioned in the previous paragraph: "The body tends to consume the least amount of calories to complete the same work." When you do the same aerobic exercise every time, the calories burned the tenth time are already much less than the first time. (But the numbers on the treadmill screen make you think you’re burning the same number of calories.)

Therefore, in the exercises you plan, there must be different exercise modes, and avoid being monotonous!

3. You lack muscle to help consume energy

Exercise is really hard, it would be great if there was a way to burn calories without exercising.

some! In fact, when you don't have any activity on a daily basis, your body will consume some calories (basal metabolic rate) to maintain operation. Here comes the point: each kilogram of fat tissue consumes 4-7 calories per day, while each kilogram of muscle can consume 75-125 calories per day! ! ! They are all friends, which is dozens of times the difference! ! !

Therefore, in the exercise you plan, be sure to include weight training to increase muscle content so that you can get twice the result with half the effort.

Sports is a profession

Although exercise is a lifestyle attitude, how to exercise correctly is a profession. As in the medical, briefing, science and technology fields, the best way to get the most benefits in the shortest time is to consult a professional sports coach and plan exercise prescriptions according to personal goals.

If you don't want to spend time exercising, your body will protest one day. They don’t want to spend time understanding the principles of exercise physiology and sports training, nor do they want to seek help from professional coaches, which will result in half the result with twice the effort and a high risk of sports injuries.

When it comes to professional matters, we should "get out of the way and let the professionals do it!"

This article is from: Dr. Tai Dawei's blog Ta-Wei, Tai MD

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