Why you can't solve a bad diet with exercise if you want to lose weight

"If I kill myself in the gym I can eat whatever I want" or "as long as I go running, I'll have my weight under control". Have you ever thought things similar to these? Do you think that monitoring food is a secondary concern if you comply with the exercise?

We are sorry to tell you that you are in a error. If you want to lose weight, you have to watch what you eat, no matter how much you go to the gym almost every day. Unfortunately for all of us, when it comes to slimming down there are no shortcuts.

To lose weight you need a caloric deficit

To understand why it is not enough to exercise we have to start by explaining the basics when it comes to weight loss: you need to achieve a caloric deficit.

Our body obtains the energy you need from food The energy it consumes, and when it consumes more energy than it expends, it stores it in the form of fatty tissue in anticipation of times of scarcity, when it ingests less than it needs.

So if you want to lose weight you must achieve your body to call on those fat reservesby taking in fewer calories than you expend. All diets, both those that work in the long term and those that are promoted as miracle diets, are based on this principle. The difference is how this calorie deficit is achieved and how easy it is to avoid the yo-yo effect (quickly recovering everything lost).

Fast ingesting calories, slow burning them off

With the above in mind, you might think that you have increasing the amount of physical exercise is sufficient you do. That way you would burn more calories and you could achieve that caloric deficit that will make you lose weight, right?

Well, yes in theory, but in practice this is really difficult to achieve for the following reason: after thousands of years of evolution, most of it with a shortage of caloric food within our reach, our body has developed a real talent when it comes to quickly detect, enjoy and process high-calorie dense foods and to slowly burn those same calories.

From a purely technical point of view, our body is in that sense a highly efficient machine. The problem is that in a world where calories are no longer scarce, but rather in surplus, this efficiency works against us, and it is difficult to maintain a healthy weight by focusing only on physical exercise and neglecting nutrition.

What you would have to run to burn these calories

A year ago, the British Royal Society for Public Health published the following article a table in which he collected how much exercise it takes to burn off certain unhealthy foods. We collect it here, translated into Spanish, to give you an idea of the imbalance between calories in when you eat and calories out when you exercise.

Always keep in mind that there are more influencing factors on the rate at which your body burns calories, such as the percentage of muscle mass or one's fitness level. This is especially relevant in aerobic exercise, to which the body eventually gets used to and you have to do more and more of the same exercise to burn the same calories.

What if you do other sports?

Maybe neither running nor walking is your thing. So how many calories do you expend doing your favorite sport? The Mayo Clinic published in October 2017 a compilation with this information, calculating. the number of calories per sport putting as an average subject a woman weighing 76 kilos and a man weighing 88 kilos.

Exercise without diet, bad solution

If you take a look at both tables, you will realize why we are trying to losing weight by relying exclusively on exercise without paying any attention to diet is not a great idea: if you're a woman, you need more than an hour on the elliptical to make up for a quarter of a pizza, and swimming for more than an hour at moderate intensity to burn off a bun, and if you're a man, the numbers are a little more on your side, but you're also more likely to have consumed larger portions.

In addition to inefficientThis approach to physical exercise may end up with the following taking all the fun out of it by converting it into a compensation mechanism, as a form of atone blame for what we eat. Likewise, unhealthy food can be seen as a reward we give ourselves after doing sports, paving the way for a possible eating disorder.

For efficiency in losing weight and also as a way of enjoying the process much more, it is much more convenient to use a combined approach of exercise and dietThe diet is understood not as a restrictive menu that tells you what to eat at all times, but as a way to improve eating habits by reducing and eliminating ultra-processed foods, those with added sugars, those with a high salt content and those that use poor quality flours and fats.

By reducing these foods, we will reduce the calories we eat, especially those that do not provide us with beneficial nutrients, and combining it with exercise. the caloric deficit we were talking about at the beginning of this section is produced and that it is, in fact, the only real method for burning fat.