SCIENCE, HEALTH
You probably remember the first day you resolved to lose weight only too well. You got a gym membership, committed to an exercise routine, and perhaps dropped a few pounds in the first couple of months or so. But, as time went on, the numbers on the scale became stagnant or maybe even began to rise again.
What gives?
We’ve long contemplated weight loss via exercise in simple “calories in, calories out” terms. That is evident in national guidelines that recommend a 500–600 kcal/day deficit with diet and exercise to instigate fat loss.
Researchers at the University of Missouri–Columbia further support the need for an active lifestyle. They note that when people are sedentary for long periods, their bodies stop producing lipase—a fat-inhibiting enzyme essential for weight loss.
The need for an active lifestyle is also supported by a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Here, researchers found that stretching once an hour boosted metabolism by nearly 13%.
So, could it be that you have simply not been consistent enough?
According to the Healthy Body Weight Planner, committing to a regular exercise routine rarely leads to substantial weight loss.
They argue that: If a hypothetical 200-pound person committed to a 60-minute medium-intensity run four days a week – all while maintaining their calorie intake – if the person followed the set routine for 30 days, they’d lose a grand total of 5 pounds.
If this individual decided to relax more after the exercise or increase food intake, they’d end up losing even less weight.
As such, if one is obese or overweight and targeting to lose many pounds, it would take them a significant amount of time and effort to attain their goals through exercise.
In a just universe, exercising would lead to substantial weight loss.
After all, physical activity burns calories. And if that happens without replacing the calories or lowering our energy expenditure; then, we enter the coveted negative energy balance. (Where we use our internal energy stores and shed weight.)
Unfortunately, human metabolisms are not as just. They tend to compensate for calories lost to exercise. It could be by:
Human energy balance is a dynamic system. Doing more exercises, for example, sets off a cascade of physiological and behavioral changes that impact how many calories you burn.
A study published in the journal of Current Biology notes that an increased activity level does not translate to an increased body energy expenditure. Instead, as the active energy expenditure (spent in physical activities) increases, the body compensates by reducing the basal energy expenditure.
Think of it this way: when you burn lots of energy through high or medium-intensity workouts, your body interprets that as being in trouble. So to help you survive as long as possible, the body slows down most functions that burn calories, including your metabolism, blood pressure, and immune system. In other words, the body tries to hold on to stored fats for future needs.
(As this study shows, high activity levels can cause people to burn nearly 500 fewer calories a day.)
The said, energy compensation averages 28% for a typical person. That means only 72% of the calories you burn when exercising translates into “burnt” calories that day.
The referenced study noted that: people at the 10th percentile of the BMI distribution compensate 27.7% of activity calories, while those at the 90th percentile do so 49.2%.
Thus, persons with higher fat levels are more likely to deposit more fats. (Think of it as the body biologically defending the gained weight.)
While the reason is unclear, it could be that people become “stronger” energy compensators as they accumulate more fat. In which case, using exercise to lose weight only becomes less and less effective with time.
By exercising, you decrease your basal energy expenditure as your body compensates for energy. So the question then becomes; which portion of the body’s basal functioning is foregone to cover more physical activity?
Is it metabolism? Blood pressure system? Or worse, the immune system?
Whichever it is, it’s logical to assume that too much exercise can lead to detrimental effects. After all, the baseline functionalities exist for a reason—to keep us alive.
In summary, increasing levels of activities do not lead to substantial weight gain. This study shows that physically active people burn the same calories as those leading a somewhat sedentary life.
While stories of people losing a significant amount of weight by hitting the gym abound, part of the existing evidence tells a different story.
Researchers have followed anyone and everyone in a bid to understand the relationship between exercise and weight loss. They have studied sedentary young twins,post-menopausal obese women, and even people training for marathons. (That is, different groups of people that; increase their physical activities through cycling, running, or personal training sessions.)
Yet the results are always the same: very few pounds lost at best, even in highly controlled scenarios.
David Allison, a University of Alabama obesity researcher, sums it this way:
“Adding physical activity has a very modest effect on weight loss, a lesser effect than you’d mathematically predict.”
The extra calories burnt after exercising account for a statistically small part of your body’s total energy expenditure. According to Alexxai Kravitz, a neuroscientist and obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health, that’s nearly 10-30% of total energy expenditure (TEE).
Generally, there are three components to total energy expenditure:
Keep in mind this 10-30% is for overall physical activity, of which workouts are a subset.
Energy intake and energy expenditure aren’t independent of each other.
And workouts, of course, have ways of making people hungry. When the hunger is ‘bad,’ you might wind up consuming more calories than you burned off.
Think of that “if I jog now, I deserve that doughnut later” mentality. Or “let me work hard now to ‘earn’ that extra margarita at happy hour.”
Research shows that people tend to increase food intake after workouts. (Either because they were hungrier or presumed to have burned off more calories.) So, they spend an hour on a treadmill only to have their hard work undone by a single slice of pizza.
Evidence also suggests that people may slow down after exercising, and this less use of energy on non-gym activities can slow down weight loss.
There’s no doubt that people who exercise more regularly experience a range of health benefits.
It’s just that, when it comes to weight loss, exercise leads to only modest results.
At the individual level, you can optimize your results by:
The idea is to combine physical activity with other weight-loss strategies. Taking a whole body and mind approach requires diet, exercise, biology, mental health (unhealthy eating behaviors, emotional eating, etc.), and psychology (toxic stress/ trauma) to address weight loss from all angles. We understand that this can be a lot to manage alone, especially if you’ve got a busy lifestyle. That’s why the Relish Life program provides everything you need to lose weight and keep it off – without having to do an entire lifestyle overhaul. If you’re ready to get started, click here.
As a critically acclaimed circus acrobat and elite athlete, Shannon did what it took to maintain the weight to look the part, no matter how unhealthy the path to get there. This led to disordered eating – a common issue in the world of professional athletics – and a loud inner critic who constantly told her she was never thin enough, never small enough, and never quite good enough, either.
When she became a mother, her struggle with “bouncing back” and weight gain contributed to her feelings of failure at this new chapter in life, which led to depression and an inability to be fully present for herself, her life, and her family. She needed to make a change to save her life and reclaim her happiness, so she embarked on the journey of redefining what it meant to live fully and win in the ways that matter most. Shannon rose to a place of sustainable health and self-love and began guiding her clients through the same journey with incredible and lasting results that didn’t feel like work, sacrifice, or suffering.
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