At the Burn the Fat Inner Circle member forums, I get a question which comes up with alarming frequency: “Why isn’t my cardio working?” Despite not only doing regular cardio for weeks, but actually increasing the duration of her workouts, one member still saw no added fat loss and started wondering what she was doing wrong… or what was wrong with her! I gave her the surprisingly simple answer, which I’ve printed for you as well in this article and new research has added even more to the answer – it’s a NEAT explanation…How is it possible that some people do tons of cardio and don’t lose weight?
Simple: Weight loss is a function of caloric deficit, not how much cardio you do. Cardio is only one of the tools you use to create and increase a caloric deficit.
Endurance athletes are a perfect example for illustrating the error in thinking that “an hour a day” (or whatever amount) of cardio will guarantee weight loss…
They might train for two, three, even four hours or more on some days, but they are often not trying to lose weight. They (have to) eat huge amounts of food to fuel their training and keep their weight stable.
It’s not unusual at all for a cyclist to burn 4000 or 5000 calories per day and not lose any weight. Why? Same reason you’re doing a lot of cardio but not losing weight: there’s no calorie deficit. Calories in are equaling the calories out.
What you need to do is shift your focus OFF of some kind of prerequisite time spent doing cardio and ON to the REAL pre-requisite for weight loss: a caloric deficit.
If your caloric intake remains exactly the same and you add cardio or other training or activity you will create a deficit and you will lose weight, guaranteed.
With all this talk about “cardio” and “training” one important area that people often forget about is all the other activity in your life outside of your cardio and weight training. There’s a name for that:
Non exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT
NEAT is all your physical activity throughout the day, excluding your “formal” workouts.
NEAT includes all the calories you burn from casual walking, shopping, yard work, housework, standing, pacing and even little things like talking, chewing, changing posture, maintaining posture and fidgeting. Walking contributes to the majority of NEAT
It seems like a bunch of little stuff – and it is – which is why most people completely ignore it. Big mistake.
At the end of the day, week, month and year, all the little stuff adds up to a very significant amount of energy. For most people, NEAT accounts for about 30% of physical activity calories spent daily, but NEAT can run as low 15% in sedentary individuals and as high as 50% in highly active individuals.
I’m always telling people to exercise more – to burn more, not just eat less. This is not only for health, fitness and well-being, but also to help increase fat loss.
But some people say that increasing exercise doesn’t always work and they quote from research to make their case. It’s true that some studies paradoxically don’t show better weight loss by adding exercise on top of diet.
But there are explanations for this…
If you add training into your fat loss regime but you don’t maintain your nutritional discipline and keep your food intake the same, you remain in energy balance. If a study doesn’t monitor this type of compensation, or if the researchers trust the subjects to accurately self-report their own food intake (hahahahahahahaha!), it will look like the exercise was for nothing.
In studies where the food intake was controlled when exercise was added… surprise, surprise, weight loss increased!
Stated differently, all these “experts” who keep saying that exercise doesn’t work for weight loss are ignoring or not understanding the concepts of calorie deficit and energy compensation.
Why Exercise “Doesn’t Work” – The NEAT Explanation
So a handful of people exercise and then eat more than they were eating before and then scratch their heads and wonder why they aren’t losing. DUH!
Or, they go on some idiotic crusade against exercise. “SEE! exercise is a waste of time… all you have to do is follow the ‘magic’ diet!”
Wrong. Dieting alone is the worst way to lose weight because without training, the composition of the weight y
No comments:
Post a Comment