Exercise Isn't the Best Option for Weight Loss

Losing weight is hard and the body even makes it harder. I remember a time when I wanted to lose and wait, it wasn't like I was putting on weight, I just wanted to shred a little but when I began to exercise, my instructor kept on saying you can do more. After about 2 hours, I began to feel hungry and I started to tell myself that I needed to refill myself else I would lose it.

The body is a machine that follows thermodynamics law and so it needs energy to stay alive. When we eat food, the body utilizes this raw material to provide energy and this energy is measured in calories. The energy from the food we all eat is measured in calories but then someone would ask why we need calories. From that heartbeat, gut digestion, immune response, muscle contraction and relaxation and so on, we need calories to make all this work. The more the movement or work, the more calories are burn so we can refer to calories as the body's fuel.

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While I am just going to the gym now to keep fit, if you are one who burns less calories that you consume, then you should expect that your body would store those excess calories as fat and this is why some scientists go with the calorie in calorie out saying to burn fat, one needs to lose more calories that one is consuming in the form of energy. To do this, we exercise our body well seems to be the right answer just that it doesn't always workout and it can be frustrating for people when they realize that they are working out with not getting the results deserved. In reality, exercise isn't a great way to burn fat and it wasn't until recently that we understood this.

How did we begin to talk about workout and fat burning? While I was doing my research, I learned that this workout myth started a long time ago. Scientist were studying people who lived in city and sat for a long time working against hunter-gatherer who would walk a long way to hunt and did a lot of movement even in the process of hunting. You would expect that the hunter burns more calories than the office worker in the city but you would be surprise that they both burn the same amount of calories.

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For some strange reason we have seen that the amount of calories that we burn is not related to the type of lifestyle that we live. The body has a fix amount of calorie that it would burn on a daily and in the case of body builders, the body burns more calories to build and keep those muscles.

When you or myself perform Regular exercise we enjoy benefits such as reducing chronic inflammation as well as stress, improve heart health, ease depression and makes us live longer. Movement is not really made to burn fat because at the end, the calories burned during exercise doesn't have much difference compared to the calories burned doing normal activity. So what is responsible for our obesity?

Overeating is one answer. In the past, during our hunting ancestors, we ate what we needed and used the calories from the food to hunt and gather food but now, with excess food, we overeat as a result of our extremely hungry brains which eats about 20% of the total calorie of the body at rest. When we exercise, we aren't going to be burning fat in the long run but we would be giving the body balance, making us resilient.

Reference

^{https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/stored-fat-fights-against-the-bodys-attempts-to-lose
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486561/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7785455
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499909/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095254623001084
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-for-people-of-three-different-weights
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499909/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2647711/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8551017/}