Geez, it’s been a while since I last wrote something. Two and a half months, to be exact. To remind you that I exist, I wrote this post. So let me explain why you’ll struggle to hell and back if you rely on cardio/exercise to lose weight. Three reasons:
1. The amount of exercise required to create enough calorie deficit to lose substantial weight = ‘what-the-fugging-fugg’ amount
You don’t burn as many calories as you think during your workouts. To illustrate that, let’s use metabolic equivalents (METs). Off to Google. It says METs are a concept used in epidemiology to quantify physical activity intensity.
Your one-hour resting metabolic rate (RMR) counts as 1 MET. Every time you get up and move around, the MET number increases and you burn more calories. And although this system can be inaccurate for estimating activity energy expenditure in people of different sex, RMR, body composition, etc. it’ll do for our purpose.
Here’s a chart that shows an approximation of how many calories, based on METs of different popular activities, a 170-pound female would burn. Because Google said that’s how much the average American woman aged 20 years weighs. Google rocks. Behold:
You’d burn ~500 kcal/hour of jogging. It may seem like quite something but keep in mind that it’s a full damn hour of non-stop jogging. As tempting as a visit to the proctologist.
If your goal is 1 pound of weight loss per week, that means creating a 3,500-calorie deficit or jogging every single day for an hour (note that the human body is dynamic and you almost always lose less weight than predicted mathematically). Lolwut? Yup. Not really sustainable.
If you’re all “Dunno dunno, Egis… my smartwatch says I burn 800 calories jogging, so I think you’re wrong, stupid, and you swear too much,” please know that your smartwatch is no bueno at estimating calorie expenditure. No bueno being a massive understatement.
Exercise, whether it’s cardio or any other form of exercise, is great for many “well duh” health benefits. But it’s pretty shit for weight loss. It’s great for weight loss maintenance (in fact, it’s “the most consistent positive correlate of weight loss maintenance”). But not so for weight loss.
My point with all this blah blah blah is that you need to get your shit together and make appropriate dietary changes. Creating a substantial calorie deficit via dietary changes is a lot more effective and easier than it is to ‘burn it off’ with exercise. A few hundred extra calories burned through exercise is just a bonus.
2. Energy compensation
Not only do you not burn as many calories as you think from exercise but your body has 85 reasons to decrease calorie expenditure when you go nuts and push exercise to extremely high and unsustainable levels.
Most people think that if you burn 500 kcal via exercise, that’s an automatic +500 kcal to your total daily calorie expenditure. It’s what we know as the additive energy expenditure model:
And based on this study, the additive energy expenditure model is only true for people in neutral (weight maintenance) or positive (weight gain) energy balance – as you increase exercise level, total calorie expenditure goes up pretty linearly.
It’s when you’re in a negative energy balance (trying to lose weight) that your body starts making adaptive adjustments to constrain energy expenditure. Especially if you increase exercise to extremely high levels. That’s constrained energy expenditure model:
I suspect that most of that hit takes non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) – energy expended for everything you do that’s not sleeping, eating, or formal exercise (walking to work, typing, fidgeting, etc.).
So if you’re trying to lose weight and you flirt recklessly with very high levels of exercise, it’s very likely that your body will downgrade calorie expenditure from other processes happening at rest leaving you wondering why more exercise ≠ more weight loss.
Important! When the whole constrained energy model appeared on social media some keyboard warriors went “Aha! See, exercise is completely useless.” Anyone who said this is an asshat. Yes, some people – those in a calorie deficit and doing a shitload of exercise – may experience energy compensation and burn fewer calories than anticipated but this doesn’t mean exercise is useless. Resistance training preserves muscle mass when dieting and cardio is great for your health in general. It’s not just about how many calories you burn.
3. High risk of burnout
Exercising for hours every single week, because remember it takes a shitload of exercise to create a sufficient amount of calorie deficit for weight loss to occur, for minimal return is both physically and mentally exhausting. Especially when you don’t see much improvement in the scale weight.
Shuffling on the treadmill like a dead zombie just to lose weight is a losing strategy.
If you take this route – rely on exercise to lose weight – it’s going to be this chore you need to do to lose weight. Eventually, you’ll quit and think “Heck, what’s wrong with me? Why exercise sucks so much? I hope whoever invented it got fugging stabbed in the dick.”
So what should you do instead?
I’m not the smartest person on earth but I think I have a better, more sustainable plan:
- “Eat for fat loss.” I tried to count how many times I already said this in my posts. And the number is around a shit-ton. Making a few dietary tweaks to create a calorie deficit is much easier than burning the same amount via exercise.
- “Train for muscle and strength.” Lift weights 2-4x/week to retain/build muscle. Focus on improving your health and getting stronger rather than burning calories aka train for performance.
- If you do cardio, do it for its amazing health benefits, not the calorie burn.
- Aim to increase your movement outside the gym. Anything over 7k steps/day is an outstanding result.
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Anyfuggingway, I need to make money to make a living so if you want to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, apply for my 1-on-1 Coaching. I tend to get cool results. Check my approach and results on Instagram. Or…
If you want something free, sign up for my Weight Loss Formula that’s designed to help you create the foundation of good habits & sustainable strategies that set you up for long-term weight loss success (it comes with “5 pillars of weight loss”).
Cheers, Egis
