Exercise less, eat more. Yes, you read that right! This is the truth about one of the biggest misconceptions in fitness today. Moving your body is important for your body and your brain, but don’t think of it as a way to counter overeating. Your eating habits will burn far more fat than your exercise routines ever will.
Using exercise as a way to purge your overindulgences at the table will eventually eat you alive. It reminds me of a comment I overheard at the gym that I would have completely related to 10 years ago: “I was so hungry last night when I got home from the gym that I ate a whole box of chocolate chip cookies while I was cooking dinner. So I’m going to work out for two extra hours today to burn it off.”
I was once on that same gerbil wheel. To burn off all the excessive calories I had binged on that day, I would follow up my indulgences with a thrash-and-burn-fest as penance.
I would do 15 minutes at level 10 on the Stairmaster and say to myself “I won’t eat cookie dough off a spoon at midnight again” 30 times. And run an extra four miles and repeat “I will only eat rice cakes all day tomorrow” 15 times.
Binge and purge, binge and purge.
It’s a devastating cycle because the reality is, it takes a lot of extra work to burn off that 600-calorie brownie you inhaled in three bites while flipping the channels—worth a full hour of exercise at high intensity just to break even.
You don’t have to beat yourself up over an occasional indulgence but when you make it a regular habit, the cycle can be devastating.
The purpose of exercise is to allow your body to operate as its highest potential, not to “burn off” what you ate the night before. The body doesn’t work that way.
Your metabolism, the natural processes taking place in your body all day long, are what get rid of your fat deposits. There are specific triggers that tell your body to burn or store fat depending on what you eat and when you eat it.
Eat in such a way that your metabolism naturally increases, and your body will automatically burn more fat. Eat poorly, and you won’t just gain fat, you’ll also slow down your system, which makes it even harder to lose fat and feel energized.
Exercise early in the day and you will benefit from extra fat burn all day long. The most important thing, however, is to exercise efficiently. Here’s how.
The goal is to do 30 minutes of exercise, 5–6 times per week, focused on fat burning with interval and resistance training in your optimal fat burning zone. Targeted training that builds lean muscle is far more effective for boosting your metabolism than an hour on a treadmill while never breaking a sweat.
Lean muscle mass is the foundation for efficient fat burning. However, if you miss a day or can’t fit in a full workout, don’t beat yourself up. Just do a few push-ups, sit-ups, squats, or a go for a nice walk or jog. Any movement is better than none—you’re still moving faster than everyone else on the couch.
Exercise should serve as a way of improving cardiovascular health, building muscle mass and hopefully allowing for some pretty awesome endorphins to kick in and make you feel silly-happy. If you’re not eating enough of the right foods, it can actually undo all the good, including burning that hard-earned muscle instead of fat.
When you eat cleaner and exercise effectively, you are living a sustainable lifestyle that feeds your sanity, not your face. There is nothing more stressful—mentally and physically—than trying to reinvent what your body requires you to do to survive and thrive daily. The better habits and routines that you develop to determine what you eat, when you eat, the quantity of food you eat, and the quality of food you eat, including how those foods combine, the easier this concept of maintenance becomes.
That’s regularly scheduled care. Not sporadic, when the stuff breaks down kind of work. It’s the work that keeps the engine humming, like the well-tuned machine that you are. After all, your time is precious. Like every bite, make every minute of exercise count.
Mareya Ibrahim is The Fit Foody, an award-winning chef on Everyday Health’s Emmy-nominated show “Recipe Rehab,” and author and founder of EatCleaner.com. Her book “The Clean Eating Handbook,” a guide on how to eat cleaner and get leaner, was released in May 2013.
