Rethink Exercise Knowing These 5 Key Factors

Rethink Exercise Knowing These 5 Key Factors

Losing weight is hard, and unfortunately, your body seems to sabotage you every step of the way. Your body is a complex biological machine that follows the laws of thermodynamics and requires energy and raw materials to stay alive, which is why you eat. The energy from food is measured in calories, and you need a certain amount to power your internal systems.

To effectively lose weight, it's essential to rethink exercise as a critical component of your strategy. Your brain requires energy to think, process information, and regulate your body's functions. Your heart needs energy to pump blood throughout your body, delivering oxygen and nutrients to your cells. Your gut uses energy to digest the food you eat, breaking it down into usable nutrients and eliminating waste.

Your immune system constantly works to protect you from infections and illnesses, and this too consumes energy.Additionally, you contract your muscles to move around, whether it's walking, running, or simply standing up. The harder a movement is, the more calories you burn. However, as you lose weight, your body becomes more efficient, requiring fewer calories for the same activities.

This efficiency can slow down your weight loss progress, making it feel like your body is working against you. To combat this, you need to rethink exercise and incorporate activities that challenge your body in new ways.So rethink exercise is important. your body has mechanisms in place to protect against starvation. When you reduce your calorie intake, your body may respond by lowering your metabolic rate to conserve energy.

This adaptive response can make it even more challenging to shed those extra pounds. This is why it is crucial to rethink exercise as not just a calorie-burning activity but as a way to boost your metabolism and maintain muscle mass.Understanding these biological processes can help you develop a more effective weight loss strategy.

Instead of focusing solely on cutting calories, incorporating regular physical activity, building muscle mass, and maintaining a balanced diet can help you achieve sustainable weight loss. Remember, patience and consistency are key, as your body needs time to adjust to new habits and changes. By choosing to rethink exercise, you can create a more holistic and effective approach to achieving your weight loss goals.

Rethink exercise knowing first key factor:To lose weight, you have to burn more than you eat

An hour of walking burns about 260 calories, moderate swimming 430, biking 600, running 700. If you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores them mostly in the form of fat. One kilogram, or two pounds of fat is about 7000 calories. Seems simple. To lose weight, you have to burn more than you eat, so fat is turned back into energy. There are two ways to do this: Eating less and burning more, say by moving around aimlessly, also called working out.

Rethink exercise knowing second key factor: in reality exercising is a bad way to burn fat

We also get told early on that exercising is healthy, so working out should kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly work out. It's one of those frustrating experiences where you do what you think is right only to not see the results you deserve. In reality, exercising is a bad way to burn fat. And until recently, we fundamentally misunderstood what moving around a lot does to our bodies.

A few years ago, scientists began to compare populations in industrialized societies, which sit a lot, to hunter-gatherer communities, who move around a lot. The Hadza people in Tanzania walk an average of 9 km a day to find wild plants and hunt animals, dig for tubers, climb trees for honey, or collect water. They can move more in a single day than an office worker in a week. So of course, they burn more calories, right?

But it turns out that the Hadza burn the same number of calories per day as a typical person in an industrialized country: around 1900 for women and around 2600 for men – which doesn’t make sense at all. It’s also not their genes, since it’s the same for other hunter-gatherer tribes.To make sense of this, scientists had to rethink exercise and its impact on our metabolism.

They realized that the human body adjusts its energy expenditure to maintain a stable caloric burn, regardless of activity level. This means that just increasing physical activity alone might not lead to the expected weight loss. Therefore, it’s crucial to rethink exercise and understand that it should be part of a holistic approach to health rather than just a method for burning calories.

Rethink exercise knowing third key factor:your body keeps your calorie budget per unit of you

It got even stranger: Active people who work out regularly do burn more than inactive people. But only very little, often as low as 100 calories, the equivalent of a single apple. For some strange reason, the number of calories you burn is pretty much unrelated to your lifestyle.

Per kilo of body weight, your body has a fixed calorie budget it wants to burn per day. Sure, if you want to gain muscles by pumping iron, you also need to eat more to build and sustain them or your new muscles wither away. But in total, your body keeps your calorie budget per unit of you, pretty stable.

Rethink exercise knowing forth key factor: Overcome weight loss plateaus by shocking your system with sudden exercise changes

Rethink exercise knowing fifth key factor: Working out is not a magic bullet but regular exercise is so incredibly healthy

We are simplifying a lot here and this is relatively new science, but in a nutshell: There are many different systems in your body trying to do their job as well as possible. So rethinking exercise is important And if there’s extra energy, they seem to use it. Unfortunately, this is bad. When your immune cells detect injuries or infections, they trigger inflammation. Fighter cells, alarm chemicals and fluids flood into your tissue.

This is crucial but it also causes damage, so it needs to be cleaned up quickly or it can become chronic. And chronic inflammation is one of the major contributors to many serious diseases, from cancer to heart failure. If your immune system is on a tight budget, it has to be efficient with inflammation – with lots of free calories though, it over commits. Another thing is that your glands produce hormones you don’t need. Like cortisol, the stress hormone, which triggers your fight or flight response.

So rethink exercise is important. Crucial for survival, but if you have too much of it you get, well, very stressed, all the time. Chronic stress is a major cause for a bouquet of health issues including your mental state. For our ancestors who moved a lot and had to deal with sudden bursts of activity, fleeing from a lion, attacking that bison, this cortisol was crucial – but if you live a modern, sedentary lifestyle your body is ready for action that doesn’t happen, hurting itself in the process. Your body evolved to move regularly and is fine tuned to a certain base level of activity.

If this activity is missing it still uses almost the identical amount of energy, just on stupid stuff. This is why you burn almost the same number of calories whether you work out or not - by working out you are not doing anything extra; you are doing what your body is literally made to do. Working out is not a magic bullet, but it seems to restore an internal physical balance that seriously affects your body. And this is also why regular exercise is so incredibly healthy, the evidence is incredibly clear here.

It reduces chronic inflammation and stress, it is good for your heart, may ease depression, and makes you live longer and better. Movement is not really made to burn your fat though. Why Humans Are So Hungry When your ancestors evolved, they had to work hard for calories. Sometimes it would be easy and they could afford to chill out quite a bit. But in hard times they had to move quite a bit to feed themselves, walk longer to find prey, or dig longer to find tubers.

If extra movement burned more calories this would lead to a spiral of starvation. The less food you find, the more energy you need to find food – which doesn’t even fill you up, because you moved more. It’s like taking on more debt when you are in the red. It works for a while, but then you go bankrupt and die. So for your ancestors, being able to move a lot without burning extra calories was a matter of life and death.

Rethink exercise knowing fifth key factor: the obesity epidemic of the modern world is not primarily caused by laziness, but by overeating

Humans evolved to be mad for calories. Because of our extremely hungry brains, and our extremely useless kids. Kids are cute but unlike other species, human kids have to be fed and cared for by adults for years before they become even remotely useful. Because the human brain not only eats up about 20% of all our calories at rest – twice as much as our closest ape relatives’ – it also takes a lot of time to develop through playing, learning and honing social skills – all the things that make us human.

Our species is so extremely calorie-expensive to maintain that we became super-efficient calorie harvesters. 5 hours of human hunter gatherer foraging yields between 3,000 and 5,000 calories, while our ape relatives get no more than 1,500 in the same time. And we became so good at calorie harvesting precisely because of our big brains and years of social skill training. In a typical ancestral tribe, some members would spend the day searching for plants, others hunting or gathering honey, others nurturing kids.

And at the end of the day, we’d share the calories so that no one would end up hungry. Being frenetic calorie harvesters seems to be deeply part of what makes us human. It's not a bug, but a feature. But today it seems as if that feature has turned on us – we can’t stop overproducing food, and overeating. If you want to lose fat, food is the answer. We’ll cover diet in the next part.

So, to conclude: You'll probably not lose nearly as much fat by working out as you hoped, but you will do something more important: give your body balance and make you more resilient and prevent or delay many of the diseases that will make your life miserable so you can enjoy a higher quality of life, for much longer.

But physical fitness is only half the equation. To make the most of your long, healthy life, you also need a fit, active mind—one trained to navigate our fascinating world and agile enough to solve any problem.  That's actually hard work. But we’re not alone. We are guided by our curiosity. It’s what drives us to explore the world and to learn about anything and everything.

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