OK this a tough one to take on board.
After believing that exercise was the only way to control my weight for so many years, I’m still struggling with the concept myself to be honest. But the results are speaking for themselves!
my story of exercise & my waistline
For years I’ve been running long distances to manage my weight. But there are a heap of other benefits as well. It gives me space to think. It keeps me sane. I love my running. I even ran a marathon back in 2005.
At the height of my marathon training, I was averaging 90km per week. You’d think with those types of distances I would have been rail thin. But the truth is, my weight and my waistline were about the same. My appetite, on the other hand was voracious and even though I tried to eat normally, I just couldn’t help myself. Happily, though when I backed off my running, my appetite adjusted and again I stayed about the same.
But as I’ve cut down my running from an average of 60km per week to about 30km per week for the last few weeks, I’ve changed my diet to the Slow Carb way AND my waistline is heading in the right direction. I’ve even lost a few kgs.
All this while having one cheat day per week where I eat anything I want. At times it does feel a bit too good to be true, like I’ve stumbled on the keys to food-lover’s utopia in a dream and I’m going to wake up any minute now.
As I said before, the results are speaking for themselves. My waist-to-hip ratio is down to 0.75 (from 0.81 before Christmas) so I’m more than 1/2 way towards meeting my goal of getting it to 0.7. Happy days.
But the best thing is I feel really comfortable in my relationship with food. After years of feeling guilty if I’m full after my meals, I’ve learned to eat until I’m comfortable and full and leave it at that. It’s like I can finally trust myself to take what I need to fuel my body and leave what I don’t.
And even better is being able to spoil myself guilt-free one day a week with chocolate and ice cream and loads of red wine.
I look forward to you joining me here in this little food-lovers paradise…If I can do it. So can you!
gary taubes’ explanation
In Why We Get Fat, Gary Taubes spends a lot of time debunking the popular theory that increasing our exercise levels is the key to losing weight. I’ll spare you the details of the laboratory rat experiments he quotes, but I found one study particularly interesting.
In Denmark a group of sedentary, overweight men and women were studied over 18 months while they trained to run a marathon. After being turned into marathon runners, the men lost on average only 2.5kg (5lb) and the women in the study had zero change to their weight.
Tabues asks a very good question. ‘Would you train to run a twenty-six mile (42.2km) foot race upon being told you might lose five pounds of fat after a year and a half of work?’
Another way to look at it is this. Pretend you’ve been invited to a big fancy dinner. You’re really excited about going so in preparation for the big meal you’d probably do a few things to make sure you had a healthy appetite for the big night. So you’d go for a walk or a swim. Right? Or you’d skip lunch.
It’s funny to think that in so many instances we acknowledge the power of our bodies to adjust our appetites according to our energy expenditure, yet when it comes to diet and exercise, we fail to make the connection.
the good news is you can stop beating yourself up about not exercising enough
I’m not saying don’t exercise. I still believe in the old use-it-or-lose-it maxim. And for me, there are so many other benefits like relief from stress and time to think and process things.
Just don’t expect exercise to lead to long term weight loss. And by the same token, don’t feel bad or guilty if you don’t exercise.
the bad news is you can’t use exercise as a justification to indulge any more
I’m afraid the days of thinking ‘I’ll just have another few glasses of wine (or chocolate or cake) and I’ll be good and go for a run tomorrow’ are gone. Although depending on how you look at it, this may not exactly be bad news.
If you want to indulge, by all means do so but its time to be honest about the consequences. This is where having a designated cheat or indulgence day works like a charm.
Add to my Old Favourite Recipes