San Antonio Personal Training

8/24/2009

According to this new Time Magazine article, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-1,00.html , you won't lose weight by exercising.

As a matter of fact, you will gain weight because of exercise. This is not good news for my business!  If you are a client of MPT and you read the title of this blog, you may just quit using the services of MPT.

So, why the heck am I putting it on my blog?  Because I think the article is malarky!  This is the entitlement mentality that has taken over in America.  Everyone is looking for a reason why they can't do something.  They just want an excuse. They want someone else to do things for them or they want to look for reasons why they can't achieve a goal rather than having to work for it!

If you are exercising you know that you have to eat right in order to achieve your goals, no matter what your goals are, whether it is weight loss, weight gain, heart health, etc.  This article is not telling you anything new on that front.

What this article does do, is lead you to believe that exercise will keep you from losing weight and frankly, that is just crap.

To be honest, I don't disagree with the article 100%.  If you are eating poorly, you won't lose weight.  And if you are eating things like doughnuts after a workout, then you can bet you won't be able to lose weight.  If you eat too much whether you workout all the time or not, you will not lose weight.  So, I agree with the article in that, if you eat too much food and especially too much of the wrong foods, then you won't lose weight.

What I don't agree with in the article is that exercise prevents you from losing weight.

If you are too mentally weak to keep yourself from eating a box of doughnuts after a workout, then you will be too mentally weak to keep yourself from eating a box of doughnuts when you are not working out.  If you feel like eating more after a workout, then educate yourself on what to eat and you will lose weight becasue you will be eating the right kinds of foods, keeping you caloric intake down.

Furthermore, if you read the article, it talks about "exercise" and only mentions studies that use steady state cardio to measure the effects of exercise on weight loss.  As we talk about all the time at MPT and as numerous studies have shown, Interval training is 9x most effective at burning fat than steady state cardio.

My conclusion is this, if you don't eat good foods at a low caloric value, then you won't lose weight.  However, exercise will not KEEP you from losing weight.  It WILL HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT FASTER, than diet alone and more importantly it will help you drop body fat faster and improve your body composition.  Yes, you will have to be disciplined and watch what you eat, but if you are disciplined enough to workout 4-5 times a week for 60-90 minutes/workout, then you should absolutely be able to keep yourself from eating an entire birthday cake after your dinner.

Lets be honest.  If you want to lose weight, we know that there are two things you have to do:

1) Eat properly.

2) Exercise.

If you do both of these, you don't allow yourself to make excuses or cheat, then you better believe that you will get in better shape.

So, don't be that person who reads this article and says, "whoa is me, I won't exercise because if I do I will eat more."  That is a terrible excuse from a weak person and that does not describe you!  You are a go getter and you are someone who succeeds at what they do.  So get up off the couch and go run some sprints.  When you get back, make yourself a nice spinach salad with chicken and be proud of yourself because you are on the right path to losing weight.

Make it a great day San Antonio!

Nicholas Wood

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www.sampt.com