Exercise can make you fat. So what?

This Daily Mail article has been getting around -- it's a popular-press take on the theme "exercise can make you fat."

I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying "Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?"

And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra "rules" to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

• Choosing "fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling," over weight training
• Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
• Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume "a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout" and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking "squash" as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
• Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

 

• You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
  
• You don't need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
• Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

 

Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

 

• Don't start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
• I recommend starting with exercise. If you're starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day -- whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. "Gradually" means "slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule."
• Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
• The first metric of performance is "Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?" Once you have "showing up" pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is "Did I finish my session?" After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
• Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don't worry about it -- except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like "Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda."
• A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don't anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point -- when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week -- that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
• If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

It isn't terribly scientific, but I can't see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

Comments

[Amy Jane (UntanglingTales)]

It's amazing to me how being healthy in my mind changes the way I take in information.

When my world feels like it's falling down around my ears, everyone but me is the expert, and there's no way I can go wrong doing *anything* different that I'm doing now.

(In such a state, the vastly contradictory messages that fly at us create a fierce cognitive dissonance that my broken self wears itself out trying to reconcile.)

Then at times like now, when I'm strong, I can just take it all in and use what's useful while tossing the rest.

What a difference perspective makes on the weight of each new tidbit.

[MrsDarwin]

I lived this post this weekend: I ran my 5k on Saturday, then spent the rest of the day eating. Because I was HUNGRY. But I sure had lovely muscle definition right after the run!

[MelanieB]

My biggest barrier to exercising is well, just not wanting to exercise. I'll freely admit to being a lifelong bookworm and couch potato. But also I feel like I never have an opportunity to develop habits when everything changes so rapidly from toddler to pregnant to newborn to toddler. I feel like the past seven years I've been waiting for life to settle into some kind of predictable routine and I'm beginning to see that the only thing I can predict is that the unexpected will arise. Given that it's so hard to motivate myself to try to make long term changes in habit when I know they are just going to be disrupted right at the point where they begin to become habits. I love the suggestion about only five minutes a day or 20 minutes twice a week. That actually seems achievable! At least until I think that in about six months I'm going to be recovering from major surgery while adapting to living on a newborn's schedule again. I know any small gains I make will be thrown out during 4-6 weeks of recovery and that any interest in exercise will probably lag even longer than that.

[Heather]

Melanie, you might find that a six-month base of moderate exercise gives you more energy during the newborn phase and helps you bounce back from the birth quicker! Also, you might find that exercise becomes enjoyable, which would give you a bit of an incentive to start back when you can. Just a few random thoughts, hope you don't mind my butting in!

[bearing]

@Melanie: "I know any small gains I make will be thrown out during 4-6 weeks of recovery..."

I don't think this is an accurate assumption. #1: many gains you make might be mental. #2: there is also the experience of fitting it into your schedule, setting goals, gaining support from family... #3: your recovery will probably be influenced by your level of fitness during pregnancy.

I think your observation is spot on that always waiting for life to settle into a predictable routine can be a major obstacle. There are many things that people put off until "the time is right" -- and sometimes this is the right decision, but that's much more likely when there is a specific and realistic vision of what the "right" time looks like and when it will be. I think you could compare it to people waiting until "the right" time to have their first child...

Sometimes the habit that needs to be worked on is the habit of rolling with disruptions :-)

[Dorian Speed]

For me, and I am in no way a weight loss success story, exercise DOES seem to help in that it reduces my stress level and I'm a stress eater par excellence.

[MelanieB]

Bearing, I agree about putting it off into the right time and the gains of mental habits. I think so far I've been very much focused on the mental habits necessary to housekeeping and prayer and rolling with the disruptions in those areas and I can see how it would be the same in the area of exercise. The only period in my life that I deliberately implemented an exercise routine (other than the constant walking during my two grad school years when I didn't have a car) was when I was pregnant with Bella and I took a prenatal yoga class. But after the c-section I became very paranoid about what was an appropriate level of activity during recovery from surgery and that fear has sort of stuck with me.

I think perhaps what I need to get over that block is to have someone help me outline a plan for getting back into some kind of a routine that is appropriate after a c-section as well as something that will work during the various stages of pregnancy. Like I said, I do appreciate the idea of beginning with five minute intervals. That feels very doable to me. what still feels too overwhelming is figuring out what specific kind of exercise I should be doing during that five minute period.

[Bearing]

Melanie, I have never had a c-section. Maybe some other readers who have and who manage an active lifestyle (you know who you are) might have some advice about this. You might also peruse books about serious fitness that are by women and for women -- I have 3 or 4 at home, I am going to look and see if they have anything to say about postpartum recovery to activity that includes cesarean recovery.

I can tell you that after my natural deliveries my midwife recommended staying out of swimming pools for 6 weeks, and since lap pool swimming is my primary fitness activity AND I didn't like swimming for the last month, it wasn't an insignificant training gap and is maybe comparable to an 8 week rest period for someone whose fitness program was something simpler like walking. I started back 2 weeks after birth by going to the same gym I swim at (I was still practicing the habit of "showing up," see?) and walking just a few minutes around the track. Worked my way up from there --
I forget how many weeks it took me to get this far -- till I was walking 40 minutes, the length of a swim workout (practicing the habit of "finishing my session," see?) When I was cleared to get in the pool again, I had enough cardio fitness that I could swim slowly for the whole 40 minutes, and then it was a trivial matter to work my way back up to where I was. The *most important* gains you make with exercise are the habit of showing up for the start of your session, and the habit of still being there at the end. I don't think I can stress that enough.