The Myth of Exercise

Reality

Exercise will never result in significant weight loss unless you spend a lot of time on it and dramatically change your eating habits. Just look at the ads offering exercise equipment and programs. They almost always say in fine print that the results they advertise are only achieved when combined with proper diet and exercise. Translation: eat less, exercise more and you will lose weight and look better.

The facts about exercise and weight loss.

To lose 1 pound of weight, you must burn 3,500 calories, and doing so with a typical exercise routine will take about a month. You heard it right, you will have to exercise for about a month to lose a pound.

If you do a typical exercise routine with a home gym or gym, you are likely to burn less than 300 calories per session. Therefore, to lose just one pound of weight through exercise, you would have to do 30 minutes of exercise for about 12 days each month. And that means that the amount of calories you eat did not increase.

While we do bodybuilding and other exercises, most of us burn between 7 and 10 calories per minute. However, that's only for the minutes you exercise. Much of an hour-long exercise session is spent moving from machine to machine, changing equipment, and just hanging out.

So in the best conditions, using an average of 8 ½ calories per minute and exercising for 40 minutes of an hour-long exercise session, they would burn about 340 calories. Using the 3 recommended workouts per week, that's about 1,020 calories each week that we would burn through exercise. It would take about a month of exercise at this rate to lose about a pound. And most of us don't exercise at that การออกกำลังกาย.

Another surprising finding from recent research is that people who exercise tend to reward themselves for taking the time to exercise. We all know the feeling of, wow, I just burned 300 calories, can I afford that donut. Only one will not hurt. Many gyms now stock fruit juice bars and beverage machines where the average drink is approximately 200 to 300 calories.

Obviously, you still have 300 calories ahead of you exercising because if you had eaten the donut or drunk anyway, you would have been over 300 calories.

Then the question becomes; Am I ready to exercise for an hour so I can eat a donut or drink a juice? Or would it be smarter and easier to figure out how not to eat the donut or drink it?

The same logic applies to all forms of exercise. If you are not enjoying exercise or are not doing it for a purpose other than weight loss, is it really worth doing for the purpose of losing weight?

These are the facts about exercise and weight loss. They are not placed here to take you away from exercise or encourage you to exercise. They are simply facts that you can use to decide if exercise is a worthwhile activity for you.

Here are some typical exercises and how many calories an average 155-pound person would burn doing 30 minutes.

You will also see food that you could give up to achieve the same.

Walking at a moderate pace - 130 calories - One slice of bread

Jogging - 350 calories - Subway Roast Beef Sandwich

Stationary bike - 250 calories - Toast in Taco Bell

Moderate weightlifting - 135 calories - Cheese in your ham sandwich

Swimming - 300 calories - Two servings of potato chips

Low Impact Aerobics - 175 Calories - One Serving of Potato Chips

These types of exercises actually burn a fairly significant amount of calories, if you do them regularly. But the reality is that very few of us will do this type of exercise during this time for the rest of our lives. Therefore, counting on them as the answer to weight loss is not realistic.

None of these numbers represent specific details about the calories consumed or burned, but they are quite representative of what most people would experience.