Diet culture has led us to believe that exercise is a key component in weight loss, which is why many people embark on an exercise program when they want to lose weight.
But what happens when you can’t exercise — either due to injury, illness or being isolated at home due to a pandemic?
Well the good news, is that exercise will not make or break your weight loss.
Here’s why.
Exercise is only 3% of the equation.
A common myth that many people believe — and one that the fitness and weight loss industry want you to believe — is that you must exercise a lot to lose weight.
Ever heard of the ‘calories in-calories out’ approach? For years, we’ve been told that weight loss is simply a caloric equation. If you burn more calories than you consume, then you’ll automatically lose weight. This explains why many people start intense exercise programs filled with long daily workouts (sometimes several workouts a day!), believing that the more calories they burn, the more weight they’ll lose.
But this isn’t the case. In fact, you can over-exercise, increasing your risk for injury and burnout. Too much exercise also places a lot of stress on your body, which prevents you from losing weight, and may even cause weight gain!
The truth is when it comes to weight loss, you only need to spend 3% of your week exercising in order to lose weight. That’s around 5 hours a week, out of a total of 168 hours.
That leaves us with 163 hours where we’re not exercising.
163 hours.
And most people are focusing on 5 hours.
So what should we be working on during the rest of our week, so we can lose weight without exercise?
Focus on movement
While you may not be able to train, you should still keep moving. Even if you’re injured, there will always be some way you can keep moving your body. This could be in the form of walking, cycling, swimming, or even something as simple as stretching or rolling. The human body was designed to move, so move it as much as you can.
Nutrition
Once again, the diet industry has taught us that the only way to lose weight is to cut back on what we eat. Remember the calories in-calories out approach? What many people do is to severely restrict their food intake, believing that the fewer calories they eat, and the more calories they burn, the bigger the calorie deficit and the more weight they’ll lose.
But research shows that restricting your food and following diets actually makes your situation worse by causing weight gain. (If you want to know more about how damaging diets are to your physical and mental health, be sure to read our blog How diets steal your health and happiness.)
In order to build a metabolism that functions properly and helps you burn fat, you actually need to feed it proper food. Instead of focusing on calories, you should focus on the nutritional value of foods because it’s only when we feed our body the correct nutrition that it becomes a body that burns fat, and helps us to lose weight without exercise playing a major role.
Meal-prep your way to success
A sure-fire way to ensure that you have readily available meals that are high in nutrition and keep your body functioning properly, is to do regular meal prep. Meal prep is a structured process that helps you create delicious, nutritious meals that will support your weight loss goals, while saving you time, money and stress. Our blog Family friendly meal prep secrets will show you how to develop this life-changing skill.
While food does play an important role in your weight loss journey, there are other things that have far more impact on your weight loss than you may realise.
Metabolic blockers
Metabolic blockers are things that impact your metabolism and prevent you from losing weight no matter how good your diet and exercise program is. The most common are:
- Chronic stress
- Poor sleep
- Excessive alcohol consumption.
Chronic stress
Stress and weight gain are linked. Stress elicits responses in your body that make losing weight difficult. The first is the release of the hormone, cortisol. Cortisol increases your appetite, your cravings for junk food and makes it easier for your body to accumulate fat on your stomach. Stress also causes you to burn less calories, and contributes to poor sleep.
Poor sleep
Studies have shown that poor sleep is associated with weight gain, increased appetite, a likelihood of giving into tempting foods, increased intake of foods high in calories, fats and carbs. Poor sleep also slows your metabolism, and increases your stress levels.
Excessive alcohol consumption
Drinking too much alcohol will severely restrict your ability to lose weight. Alcohol drastically increases your calorie intake and leads to poorer food choices, increased hunger, poor digestion, increased fat accumulation, and interferes with your sleep!
In order to lose weight, you’ll need to eliminate (or greatly reduce) the metabolic blockers in your life.
And the way forward with this is to focus on your habits, because your habits will determine whether you succeed at losing weight for good, or not.
Habits
Habits are subconscious thoughts, beliefs or patterns of behaviour that are repeated regularly. Basically, habits run our life. If we have habits that support weight loss, then we’ll find it relatively easy to lose weight and keep it off. However, if we have habits that sabotage our weight loss efforts, then we’ll always be struggling.
There are many habits that prevent people from losing weight, which are listed below. To find out more about each particular habit, follow the link to the relevant blog.
- Having a diet mindset — this will see you jump from one diet to another, always looking for a quick-fix to your weight problem
- Being a perfectionist — trying to get everything ‘right’ and beating yourself up for making mistakes
- Feeling guilty about putting yourself first — always putting other people’s needs before your own
- Being a people-pleaser – trying to be all things to all people in a quest to be loved and accepted
- Lack of confidence — doubting yourself and your ability to lose weight
- Living in fear — being afraid of what others think, and being afraid of change and being afraid to take chances
- Not celebrating your small wins — and only looking for big results
- Focusing on the end result, instead of the daily action steps that will lead to your result
- Comparing yourself to others, instead of focusing on what you need to do.
Other common habits that hold people back from losing weight are listed below. How many can you relate to?
- Taking things personally
- Restricting food
- Believing you’ll be happy when you lose weight
- Procrastination
- Following rules
- Emotional eating
- Feeling guilty around some foods
- Feeling ashamed
- Being afraid to ask for help
- Fearful of being seen
- Blaming others
- Trying to control things
- Overthinking things
- Avoiding your feelings
- Spending time with toxic people
- Thinking that diets are the answer.
Regardless of your intentions, your habits will determine whether you succeed with weight loss. If you can relate to any of the habits listed above, long-term weight loss will not be possible, because these habits will always prevent you from succeeding.
The secret is to develop new habits that will set you up for success.
How do you change habits?
Habits work in a loop. First of all, there is a trigger – something that triggers you to behave or think in a certain way. This behaviour is called a routine. And this routine results in a reward. Unless there is something in it for you, you won’t continue a certain behaviour.
The trick in changing your habit is to recognise your trigger, and then engage in a different routine or behaviour that will still give you a reward. There is a great example of how to do this in our blog, How to break your bad habits.
Increasing your awareness of habits
However, changing habits is not possible unless you’re aware of the habits you currently have, when they pop up, and how they impact you. This can be very difficult to do, because habits are subconscious patterns of behaviour that ‘kick-in’ without us being aware of them.
That’s where we can help. Because we’re not emotionally invested in your habits, we are able to recognise the ones that are holding you back from losing weight. We can also help you understand when they occur and how they impact you. Once we have this awareness, we are able to put together a personalised action plan designed to help you implement new routines of behaviour so you can begin changing your habits one at a time.
And as we’ve seen, setting up habits that support weight loss is more powerful and will lead to greater success, than simply relying on exercise to lose weight.
