#51: Earning your food with exercise - why burning calories does not work
[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn, your host, a certified menopause fitness coach. So I'm really focused on women in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and the kinds of things they need to do to keep their bodies in shape as they go through perimenopause and beyond so that we can have long, strong, healthy lives.
And today we are talking about a phenomenon that I came across, especially in the holiday season, which is women who are training or working out to earn their food.
So this is actually the 51st episode of the podcast. And I have to start by saying thank you so much to all of you who have been listening to the podcast. It has grown enormously over the past 50 episodes. There have been tens of thousands of you, who have [00:01:00] listened to the podcast and that's really, really exciting that the message is spreading.
And if you know anybody who could benefit from the information that I'm sharing, then please share the podcast forward , because we want to make sure that women in midlife are learning the things they need to know about keeping their body healthy and functioning properly for the next 50 years of our lives. All right. So let's get started with the show.
So let me start with a story and sip a coffee first.
So it was one Sunday. I was at the gym for my beloved dance class, which happens on Sunday evenings. And just as we're waiting for the instructor to get set up, some of the ladies that I've known forever at the gym who are very much, um, cardio [00:02:00] queens have started some of them to do body pump lately.
But in any case, they came into the classroom and one of them said, Hey, I was just on the treadmill. And in that 10 minutes that I was walking there, I burned 200 calories. And then another one of them answered something else about burning calories. And I was like, this is kind of a weird subject to have going on here.
What's going on? So I asked them, so why are you guys talking about this kind of thing? And the answer was that we need to burn calories so that we can eat at Christmas. Well, if you know me, you know that my jaw dropped because this was like, well, I know this kind of thing happens. I've heard it happens, but I've never seen well educated, reasonable, middle aged women actually behave in this manner.
My jaw dropped [00:03:00] and I remembered that I'd been at the gym the previous day and one of these same women had been on a treadmill. I hadn't seen her at the gym in a while. She said she'd had some kind of procedure done so she wasn't able to go to her aerobics classes, but she had been walking on the treadmill for two hours and was telling me about the number of calories she had burned.
And I remember thinking to myself when she was talking about that, that, uh, I hope she realizes that that is not really an accurate number, uh, that the treadmill is giving you, but she was really like interpreting it as fact. All right. So I want to make sure that you, my wonderful listener is not confused, about this point.
So some myths to bust or facts to lay out there is number one, the trackers are not accurate and what they [00:04:00] tell you, the amount of calories you're burning okay? If you have a sports watch on, it will tell you how many calories. It ain't the truth, okay, don't believe it. So if you're, you know, deciding that, Hey, can I have that ice cream bar tonight at dessert?
Um, or do I need to skip it based on what your watch has told you today about what calories you've burned? It's not, Hey, no, no wonder you're gaining weight, right? Or that you're having trouble controlling your weight. You cannot trust the number that your sports watch is giving you. Even worse, is the number that the machine is giving you because the machine is just, you know, going by how far you're going and what your weight and what your age is. I mean, most of them aren't even looking at your heart rate. Not that that even particularly helps. So I don't [00:05:00] want you to think like, Oh, but if I give it more information, it will tell me the truth.
No, no, no. That's not the point that I'm getting at. The point is you cannot believe these machines. You cannot believe your watch when it tells you how many calories you've burned. You cannot believe the treadmill or the spinning bicycle or whatever else. Just forget that. That is no. Okay. You can think of it as maybe a relative thing.
Um, that, hey, obviously when you're walking at a slow pace for 10 minutes versus running. Uh, for 10 minutes, you're gonna burn more calories with the running for 10 minutes than the walking for 10 minutes, things like that. You may be able to compare and what I, cause I do use a sports watch and what I use it for really is to look at how high my heart rate goes, because I want to make sure for my cardiovascular health that I'm really [00:06:00] challenging my heart at least, you know, once every two weeks to close to its maximum.
So for that kind of thing, it's okay, but the calorie tracking thing, nope and the other place where you can definitely notice it is that weight training, you know, you're trying to figure out, like, was this a hard workout? Was it an easy workout? You know, was it an effective workout? If you're relying on your sports watch to tell you, well, it's going to tell you that your weight training session is less of a workout than that slow meandering walk you took with your friend.
Right. And you and I both know if you've been weight training and pushing your body hard, you know, when you've gotten into weight training, not when you're right at the beginning, that it is definitely a tougher workout than taking a little walk with your friend for the same amount of time. So please do not trust what those trackers have to say to you.
They are not [00:07:00] true. And if you believe that, if you think, Oh, I burned 500 calories in my class. Now I can eat a 500 calorie dinner. You are going to fail to manage your weight using that strategy. Then whole different ball of wax is that if you are doing a ton of cardio, like these women were before Christmas so that they could eat their Christmas dinner, you know, they were thinking, Oh, you know, if I work out two hours, three hours a day, and I'm burning all these calories, you know, then, then I've created this deficit and then I can eat whatever I want guilt free at Christmas.
Well, first of all, Oh my God, can I just, yeah. And talk to you about what a kind of a warped relationship with that, with food that starts to develop over time. Right. But the other thing is that when you are doing that amount of cardio, your body. It's not just like a machine that, [00:08:00] Hey, I'll just use it more.
And it, you know, uses more gas, like a car does. Your body is more intelligent than just a car. So when you have done a lot of physical activity, when you've burned a lot of calories, uh, in exercise. Your body will compensate for that. And it does it in very clever ways that you probably won't even notice.
One thing that it will do is it will reduce the amount of non exercise activity thermogenesis going on. So this is all the extra movement that you do. So if you're watching this video. Uh, watching this on video. You can see that my hands are waving. I'm holding a cup of coffee.
My body is a little bit moving in my chair, all this kind of thing. This spends a lot of calories over the course of the day when you do it. And when your body is trying to conserve energy, because you have [00:09:00] been doing so much aerobic activity, or maybe you're in a calorie deficit or whatever.
It cuts down on how much you move and then you're sitting still, right? You're not talking with your hands. You're not tapping your foot. It'll be a lot of effort, for example, to get yourself to walk up the stairs rather than taking the elevator. You won't want to stand at your standing desk. It does it in little ways.
I know this was a very, very powerful effect that I noticed when I was in a calorie deficit, when I'd sat at my desk during the day to do work, my body was like a bump on a log. It was really effort for me to get up and do anything. And your body does the same kind of thing when you have been spending a lot of calories. It tries to get back to some kind of balance and if you've been spending a ton of calories in the exercise classes It's going to [00:10:00] take that back by not having you move the other 23 hours out of the day So that's going to reduce the amount of calories that you actually end up spending in that day
And then there's the aspect of you spend a lot of calories, I m ean, we don't know how many, right, because the measurements aren't correct, but you've spent some amount of calories. So your appetite is going to increase. And maybe this, um, is not so obvious to people who do a lot of cardio because then it is a pretty normal state of mind. But since I've gone through phases of doing very little cardio, where I've been really focusing on the weight training and doing the cardio, you know, one time a week, I notice really strongly that on the cardio days, my appetite is just through the roof.
Right. As my body is [00:11:00] compensating and I have different kinds of cravings, like more of a carb craving than there is if I'm just doing weight training. And accompanying that, when you see on your sports watch or on the machine that, Hey, I have just burned 500 calories, then you might reach for that extra cookie or have that extra little dessert or whatever.
And then finally, and this is, this is like funny because it's like a two edged sword, right? The more you work out cardiovascularly, The better cardiovascular shape you'll be in, and the less calories it will actually take your body to do that workout. I mean, and that's great, right? Because what are you trying to do?
You're trying to get fit, and you are getting more fit. It's, it's like when you're running, you know, if you run a little bit more every day, your body gets in a little bit better shape for running. You know, it's, it [00:12:00] feels easier. You're able to run a little bit faster, a little bit longer. Whatever. But at the same time, your body is actually getting more efficient at running, which means it's burning fewer calories to do that same exercise.
So you can see that the kind of strategy of, Hey, I'm going to burn a ton of calories so that I can eat. It's kind of doomed to failure because you are just going to need to keep increasing and increasing, increasing the amount of exercise that you do as you get in better and better shape to burn even the same amount of calories in that workout. So really all kinds of reasons why that is not going to be a very working strategy.
All right, so just to recap why working out to earn your food doesn't work is:
(A) the trackers, your sports watch and the tracker on the machine that you're using, they will not tell you the truth [00:13:00] about how many calories you've spent. That number can be way, way off. Way off. And it will be telling you, you spent more calories than what you spent. And probably as you get in better shape, it will be even more off than what it is when you've just started training,
(B) Your body will start working against you. It will reduce the amount of NEAT, the non exercise activity that you do to reduce the calories that you burn over the course of the day. So it's making up for the fact that you did this tough workout.
(C) Plus, your appetite will go up. So you'll feel hungrier and more likely eat more or want to eat more or have a harder time not eating more. And because you see that you have supposedly burned all these calories, you may actually feel like, yeah, I actually can eat more because I burned all these calories, but you haven't actually burned all those calories that it told you you burned, you've [00:14:00] burned a lot less. Plus then your body has already made some compensations as a result.
(D) and finally, as you get in better shape, you're going to need to work out longer or harder to burn the same amount of calories. And of course that's unsustainable. You can't just forever increase the amount of time you're spending exercising because your body is going to suffer for that, right? Wear and tear. And plus who has time to be just. training and training and training all the time.
Okay. So those are the reasons why it doesn't work. And then to top it off, it's just a bad idea to start thinking of food as something you have to earn the right to eat. Of course you need to feed your body. Food is a basic of life, right, of keeping yourself healthy.
It's not something you need to earn just the same way as you don't need to earn people's love. You certainly don't need to earn the right to [00:15:00] eat food. And then the other thing is that exercise should be something that you do for your health and enjoyment and not as a I need to pay for the fact that I'm eating by exercising, like driving yourself to exercise.
So I think this whole concept of earning your meals just leads to a really bad downward spiral. And I'm hoping that this podcast has helped you to maybe think about that differently.
Okay, so you may be wondering, what should I do instead if I want to be managing my weight? Or maybe even losing weight and I shouldn't be counting how many calories I'm burning and kind of planning my food according to that. And now the answer to that question is a little bit longer. So I am going to answer that in next week's [00:16:00] podcast.
So if you're interested in hearing that, make sure that you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss it. In the meanwhile, I wish you a wonderful week. And, happy training!