Yesterday I came across this video/article from CNN that talks about why exercising is not key to lose weight but watching your diet and your calories are.
Basically what the article/video states is that we only burn from 10% to 30% (usually non-athletes like most of us only burn something between 5% to 15% in fact) of the calories we eat or drink through exercises and any other daily physical activities like taking a shower, typing, cooking, cleaning the house… The other calories we put in are burned by our bodies inner activities like digesting food (10%) and the basal metabolic rate (60% to 80%) aka the amount of energy it takes to keep our body running this wonderful machine that includes blood circulation, respiratory and brain functions to name a few. Considering that, it is pretty obvious that if we want to lose weight we should first and foremost pay attention in the calories intake. We can never eat or drink more than what we are spending/burning, otherwise, we will gain weight. This simple math is the key to lose weight. Regardless.
And speaking of the basal metabolic rate… as we get older this rate goes down, meaning that you burn even less calories from this internal process. That is one of the reasons it becomes more difficult to lose and/or keep our weight as we age.
Having said that, one way to keep this rate up is actually exercising, building up our muscle mass. Note taken.
Nevertheless, as you can see, exercising is still a very important element to our well-being. It improves our mood, our physical condition among other things… It is just not the key factor to lose weight as many people think. And I kind of could include myself here. Because I was not aware that we could only burn a little percentage of the calories we put in. I thought that since I exercise I could eat as much french toast as I wanted with no weight gain. Not the case anymore as I attested this Christmas, by the way.
Well, at least now I know better.
Fab After 47 