Ep. 38 Exercise for Weight Loss?

Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker, and I’m a life and weight loss coach. If you don’t know me, I help women lose weight, own the process and have a healthy relationship with food. And that’s what this podcast is here to help you do. And if you’re listening to this in real time, happy new year! This is the first episode of the year and I’m really excited because I have lots of great topics lined up for the next couple of months based on what you might be experiencing if you’ve decided that this is the year you’re going to live in your natural shape. 

And as you may know I’ve been on maternity leave and now that is officially over and I’m coaching full time, so that means I will have lots of goodies coming your way this year. So if this is YOUR year - you’ve decided you’re not going through another summer hiding in your clothes, I’ve got you. Stay for the end of this episode to hear about another freebie I’m offering. 

So a question I get a lot is what exercise is best for weight loss or how much should I be exercising for fat loss. Even if you didn’t set a clear new year's resolution, it’s pretty common to have the intention to exercise more. So whether you’ve made a goal to workout more or simply move more for weight loss, I know this episode is going to (hopefully) give you a fresh perspective on exercise and it may also drastically change what you currently have planned.  

So first off, going forward I’m mostly going to use the term movement instead of exercise. Words have so much power and I think exercise has the connotation of burning off calories (at least for me it does) whereas movement is not about weight loss at all  - it’s simply about moving our bodies as they were designed to move whether that’s walking, stretching or pole dancing. Maybe you’ve seen that documentary on Netflix about pole dancing. I’ve only watched a little bit of it but you might want to check it out. So far it’s really inspiring when it comes to body image and women reclaiming their sensuality. 

My sister lived in Denmark for a few years and people there don’t say exercising or even working out, they say “training.” I thought that was interesting too - as if they are training their bodies for something specific like being stronger or more agile.

But I digress. The first thing I want you to know is that exercise, working out, movement won’t DIRECTLY lead to weight loss. Are you surprised? Or did you already kinda suspect based on years of working out without losing weight.

Here’s the reason. By now you know It’s not about calories in, calories out so trying to burn off enough calories to lose weight is almost impossible. It’s not efficient. We know that your body will use whatever it has at it’s disposal for fuel and it will first choose what’s easiest to convert into fuel - the glucose from food - turning it into glycogen for fuel. Once that runs out, your body switches to burning the fat stores on your body. 

So that means if you aren’t eating, yet you are breathing, then you are losing non-water body weight (so body fat and muscle). It’s impossible not to because the carbon part of the carbon dioxide that you breathe out comes from the breakdown of carbs and fats in your body. (Brad Pylon) 

The most efficient way to release fat is to control what we put in our bodies period.

So you might have noticed I mentioned we lose body fat AND muscle at the same time, so you might be thinking  “well I need to continue to workout because I don’t want to lose any muscle”. Or maybe you’re exercising to lose fat and gain muscle. 

So here’s what I want to say about that, I’m all for building muscle because of how it looks, how it feels to be strong and because of all the health benefits it has for your body. But it’s very hard for your body to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. This goes back to insulin and how often your body is in storing mode (either storing fat and muscle) or burning mode (same thing - fat and muscle). 

Fortunately for us, when we’re in burning mode we burn a lot of the fat and only a little muscle. Unfortunately it’s also easier to gain a lot of fat and harder to gain muscle. So what’s the bottom line here? My recommendation is to lose the excess weight first, then once you’ve reached your goal weight, or where you feel you're at your best, THEN you build muscle. It’s simply easier and more efficient to do one at a time. 

Now if you are trying to white knuckle your way into doing 30 min HITT or barre youtube videos 5 days a week and hating your life, this is great news. However if you're someone who has already developed movement habits that you enjoy, it doesn’t mean you have to stop. The main point is that you don’t NEED exercise to lose weight, you’re doing it for other reasons. 

There was a time when I thought cardio was going to make me skinny. Like if I just ran enough I’d run the fat right off my body. And so I ran for an hour every day after work and then 2 hours on the weekend for almost a year. I’ve never had too much resistance to movement personally, for me it has always been about overeating. And during this time I was still in the mentality that so long as I ran I could still eat as much as I wanted and then some, so of course it didn’t work. It only made me hungrier and I ate more than I would have normally. And as much as I did enjoy the benefits of it, like the feeling of running itself, being outside. I lived in Vancouver, so often it was running in the rain which I grew to love because I lived close to the ocean and I could run along the seawall and when it rained I had the path to myself. Plus my little dog  Huxley would come with me so overall it was great. But looking back I know that at least part of it was for fat loss and trying to offset my calories. Even though I was enjoying all of the benefits, my primary motivation was not health, but weight loss. 

And that leads me to my next point which is when we use exercise as a either a punishment or to “make up” for our overeating. You know this is happening if you think, “well I really overate last night so I’m going to get up extra early, do more time on the peloton. It seems harmless. It seems like it’s even a healthy thing to do right? What could be wrong with more minutes on the bike? But it always comes back to the reasons why we are taking the action, not the action itself. When we know that we don’t need to use movement as a weight loss tool, we don’t need to use it to correct our so called mistakes with food. It’s just not a good strategy for weight loss and basically it makes you feel like crap - like you have to repent for overeating and that’s never the case. It only means that there is likely more going on with you that needs to be brought to the surface. 

Another sneaky thing I see happening is that we think we should exercise whether it’s for losing weight or because it’s healthy and then when we don’t do it because we don’t feel like it, we make that mean something bad about us. And then what do we do when we feel bad? We overeat.

So just notice if your brain starts to go there. Get curious about it. Decide if how you’re thinking about it is making you more or less of who you want to be. Now you know that exercise isn’t the main factor in your weight loss, so that should help correct that cycle. 

So exercise does not directly lead to weight loss but I do think it indirectly helps. So while you can absolutely reach your goal weight without being active, you’ll still benefit from doing movement that you enjoy. And this includes simply walking. Walking is maybe the most underestimated tool for weight loss. It helps us clear our head, it gets the endorphins going, we get fresh air, it gives us time to reflect, take time for ourselves or catch up with friends and it simply feels good to move our bodies - our body is designed to walk long distances.  

With the recent surge in covid cases, this is really the only way I’m seeing any of my friends, is by going for a walk. 

Alright now I did mention I was going to tell you about something extra I have for you and that’s a webinar I’ve called How to Lose Weight for the Last Time. I did a webinar about a month or so ago and had some tech issues so you might have signed up and then didn’t get in. Again, my apologies for that happening. However, I promise you I have figured out how to host a webinar properly so if you have questions for me, about weight loss or about my one-on-one coaching program, this is a great forum for that. 

You’re going to learn why your previous attempts haven’t worked, why you haven’t been able to stay committed and what needs to happen for you to truly make that shift into the person you need to be to make your relationship with food and living at your natural shape, really effortless - it’s just who you are and how you live. 

So if that sounds good to you, join me live on Wed. Jan. 19th at 5:00pm Pacific time, 8pm Eastern to get started. That is actually the date my sister is due with her first baby! How fun is that? She lives in Calgary so I won’t be with her plus apparently only 5% of women deliver on their due date, so anyway I think it will be totally fine to be in the webinar on her due date.

You can sign up by clicking the link in the shownotes or going to my website at mindfulshape.com And if you want the info but you can’t attend that day, register anyways because I’ll send you a replay afterwards. Okay, talk to you again soon.