The Pitfalls Of Relying Solely on Exercise For Fat Loss
Most of my new clients think that their fat loss and body composition changes are going to come from exercising more (it helps a little) but without a focus on also changing your nutrition it can become problematic to rely on exercise just to burn calories for a number of reasons.
Your Calories Burned From Exercise is TINY
The diagram below does a great job of putting into perspective how small the number of calories burned in exercise is in relation to how many are used by your body overall.
The biggest percentage comes from you Basal Metabolic Rate, how many calories your body needs (at rest!) just to keep you alive.
Next is your daily movement, one reason why daily steps and moving regularly are important if you have a fat loss goal.
The energy required to process your food is called The Thermic Effect of Food or TEF.
The SMALLEST impact on calories burned is going to come from Exercise!
Your Nutrition Is The Biggest Driver of Fat Loss Results
No one wants to hear that you need to dial in eating all the fun foods and drinks (note I said dial in, not cut our altogether!) if you want to lose body fat but you will need to be prepared to make dietary changes if you want to lose body fat.
As you can see above, it's a small amount of expenditure and you never want to get to the stage where you are compensating for your lack of fat loss progress with excessive exercise.
This is why I advise my clients to do a fat loss phases rather than living in a pseudo calorie deficit spinning your wheels and just never getting the results you "feel" you are working so hard to achieve.
Priorities Fat Loss
1. Nutrition - This is where you will place your focus if you want to change your body composition. You must be in a calorie deficit to lose body fat, primarily this will come from eating less.
2. Workouts & Daily Movement
Regular Workouts 1-5 per week
Daily Steps +7500 (for health)
I advise my clients to keep these Nutrition & Workout targets completely separate. When you understand where your primary driver of fat loss comes from, it's easier to keep workouts and movement in the right place as part of your fat loss strategy.
Workouts and Daily Movement are aspects of health and fitness that we want to do in appropriate amounts of FOREVER, their purpose is to make you stronger and fitter to live a healthy life.
When you have no focus on nutrition and all the focus is on exercising to burn calories, what happens when your fat loss starts to stall?
The most common thing that happens is people increase the amount of exercise they do.
This becomes a big problem when you find yourself exercising for over an hour every day and still not seeing results. Where do you go then? 90 minutes, 2 hours?
If you dial in your nutrition to create a moderate deficit of 15-20% of you maintenance calories initially, and you adhere to your plan, you can see fat loss results without exercise (but obviously I don't encourage that) because I want everyone to have great strength and have good cardiovascular health.
Exercise is an incredible way to take care of your body so you can life a long, healthy, full and vibrant life, let's not abuse our body with excessive amounts of exercise just to burn calories x
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