2. A half-hour walk doesn’t equal a brownie.
I remember going out to eat with some friends after a bike ride. Someone commented on how we deserved dessert because we had just spent the day exercising; in fact, we had taken a leisurely twenty-minute ride through the park. This probably burned the calories in a slice of our French bread, but definitely not those in the caramel fudge brownie dessert. Bummer.
And while it’s easy to underestimate how many calories something has, it’s also easy to overestimate how many calories we burn while exercising. Double bummer.
Even if you exercise a fair amount, it’s not carte blanche to eat whatever you want. (Unless you exercise a ton, have the metabolism of a sixteen-year-old boy, and really can eat whatever you want). A report investigating the commonly-held beliefs about exercising, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, concludes that although exercise does burn calories during and after exercise, for overweight persons, “excessive caloric expenditure has limited implications for substantially reducing body weight independent of nutritional modifications.” In other words, to lose weight, you have to cut calories and increase exercise.
3. You have time to exercise.
If you have time to check email, watch a sitcom or two, surf the internet, have drinks/coffee/dinner with friends, go clothes shopping, and on and on, then you have time to exercise. Yes, sometimes you have to sacrifice sleep, TV, or leisure time to fit it in. Yes, sometimes you have to prioritize your exercise time over other things. But your health and the feeling you get after having worked out is well worth it.
4. Eating more of something won’t help you lose weight.
The food industry is keen to latch onto weight loss research and spin it for their sales purposes. A prime example is the widespread claim that eating more dairy products will help you lose weight. However, a recent review of forty-nine clinical trials from 1966 to 2007 showed that “neither dairy nor calcium supplements helped people lose weight.”
This idea—that eating more of a certain type of product will help you lose weight—is constantly regurgitated on supermarket shelves (think low-fat cake, low-carb crackers, high in whole grain cookies, and trans fat-free chips), but is in direct opposition to the basic idea behind weight loss—that we have to eat less, not more.
