Someone is gonna hunt me down on this one…
I know – you’ve been told forever that diet and exercise are the way to weight loss. That if you can just find the perfect diet and manage to get yourself in the gym 4 times a week, that the weight will fly off and you’ll look like one of those beautiful people on the cover of TIME magazine.
But I lost 60 pounds and I didn’t exercise. Not at all.
Me before I lost weight…
Me after…
This is a tough myth to deconstruct because there’s so much truth and almost truth mixed up together. As a doctor, it seems like I should never tell anyone not to exercise. I mean, look at all the benefits of exercise! Why would I ever tell anyone not to exercise?
Let’s look at those benefits. First, exercise is wonderful for your mental health and well-being. It’s important to move to get your heart working and staying strong. Exercising is good for your joints, your flexibility, your bone density, and maintaining or growing your muscle mass. It keeps you young and keeps you healthy. Exercise is for moving and enjoying the feeling of movement in your body. It should be used as an act of self-love, not a punishment or weapon against yourself for being overweight.
There are some people who swear that becoming a gym rat or a runner changed their whole life and that’s how they got the weight off. I’m sure that this post is completely contrary to what they believe is true from their experience. But I’m talking to you here. You’re like the rest of us who have tried to get the exercise and diet balance right and have watched not one pound come off and stay off. I was overweight from adolescence through having my first child after residency, so I tried that too. Actually, I was a dancer throughout high school and college and worked out and danced hard for at least 4 days a week, and didn’t lose a pound.
Why doesn’t exercise make a difference in weight loss and why are some people exceptions to this rule? If you really talk to people who swear that their exercise routine is what changed everything, they’ll admit that they also changed their eating while they made their workout a focus of their life. For some people, it feels wrong to eat junk food after they’ve sweated it out in their workout. They feel motivated to eat differently and as they see changes in their bodies they keep adjusting their eating to support their weight loss.
But even more of us find that working out makes us hungry, so we eat more. We also listen to that tiny voice that says we deserve to have a treat, even a “healthy” one like a smoothie or a bar because we worked out, not realizing that we just ate every calorie and more than we burned in the gym. When the scale doesn’t change despite our workout, we get discouraged and stop exercising.
When exercise is the focus of our weight loss efforts, we teach ourselves that we can’t lose weight without exercise. We know this isn’t true when there are people who are wheelchair-bound who lose weight, or when people who can’t exercise have weight loss surgery and they lose weight without exercise. I think we doctors have unwittingly taught our patients to focus on the end goal instead of starting where change happens – at the beginning. It will be wonderful if you lose weight and incorporate exercise in your life as part of your healthy lifestyle, but if you can’t get moving because of the weight you’re carrying, you won’t have a lighter body or one that moves. Now, you can definitely exercise while you’re overweight! It’s just that if you have to focus on the strongest tool to lose weight, it won’t be exercise alone.
When we believe the myth that weight loss requires exercise, we also set ourselves up to dilute our efforts. This is the most important reason why people fail when they start a diet and exercise plan. Most of us need to change things little by little over time so that our changes last. If we try to change everything at once, we often do well for a while, but then something happens in our lives and we get overwhelmed and off track and we go back to our default options for eating and our exercise routine is the first thing to fall off our schedule. It’s too much, too fast. We can’t sustain sudden change for long without a compelling reason, and for most people that has to be on the level of a life-threatening diagnosis for themselves or their child. Seems dramatic, but I’ve seen it again and again.
Small, focused, sustained changes make a difference. When you make them normal over time, you don’t backslide and the weight doesn’t come back. We didn’t gain the weight all at once either. We did small things over and over that caused the weight to come on our bodies. We can undo it the same way! With focus, it can come off faster than it came on. But trying to make those eating changes and the mind drama that comes with it plus an exercise regimen requirement is too much for your mind to juggle at once for long.
Your brain can be rewired to do things differently. It takes sustained training to do it, but it can be done! That’s the good news. The bad news is that your brain prefers to conserve energy at all costs and will resist efforts to change because change requires energy. The old way of doing things is easier and more energy-efficient. So if you overwhelm the brain with lots of changes at once, you’re setting yourself up to fail. The practice of change takes time and your brain can’t focus on multiple changes at once. The default setting is easier. Your work is to change the default, and this happens one change at a time. This is the reason I recommend focusing on your eating plan and not exercise – you’ll see results faster and you’ll be motivated to keep going. The persistence is what makes the changes become your default!
It’s totally possible to lose weight without exercise! You can add exercise to your life once you’ve got your eating plan working for you if you want to do it. But you don’t have to in order to lose your weight. Focus is what you need to get those changes locked in. But remember what I said about making changes and mind-drama? That’s real, and it can be tough to find your way out of the drama on your own. I can help! Email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and we can set up a free mini-session to help you decide if weight loss coaching is what you need to finally be successful at long-term weight loss. You don’t have to do it alone!
Here’s your video help for the week!