Small Steps to Health

Exercise is Not an Excuse to Eat More

April 5th, 2008 by asithi · 1 Comment

Tagged Fitness, Healthy Eating

Quite often most people end up undoing all their hard work when exercising by eating too much. Exercise in does not compensate for that bowl of ice cream. But it took me a long time to realize that. I figured that since I was sweating and out of breath, I must have burned it off 15 minutes into exercising. In reality it actually takes an hour of moderate exercise to burn that bowl of ice cream off.

According to a study about women and exercise, women who exercised an average of 73 minutes a week lost about 3 pounds without dieting. But women who exercised an average 190 minutes a week without dieting lost the same amount of weight! These women admitted that they were eating more with the increase in physical activity.

Like me, most people tend to over estimate the amount of calories they burn when exercising and under estimate the amount of calories they are eating. A healthy life is a three legged stool: genetics, exercise, and eating. Since we cannot control our genes, we can only work on the other two components within our control.

Exercising without considering our eating habits means we are taking one step forward and then one step back. So we are not going anywhere. It takes about 40 minutes of moderate activity to burn off a Snickers bar. If eating a Snickers bar every day is your goal, then by all means go for it. But for those of you trying to loose some extra weight like I am, what is the point of all that sweating if you not making progress towards the finish line? I rather spend that time talking with my friends or reading a good book than to have to sweat for that Snickers.

Until next time and thanks for stopping by.

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