If you knew how long it would take you to work off the single, delicious slice of chocolate cake sitting in front of you, the chances are you’d never eat it. “Exercise is good for your heart, it’s good for your mind, it’s good for your spirit,” says Consultant Dietician Sigrid S. De Silva adding, “but if you’re exercising to lose weight, you might find yourself very frustrated instead.”
In fact, if you’ve been exercising in a determined bid to drop those extra few kilograms, you might discover to your dismay that the opposite is happening. The reasons why you might gain weight even on a disciplined exercise regime can be startling simple, according to Sigrid, and many of them boil down to what you eat, how much you eat and when you eat...in other words, your diet.
Exercise gets your blood pumping and leaves you feeling good. It can also leave you feeling very hungry. And a hungry person might not always have the patience to make the smartest dietary choice. A quick snack of chips and a soft drink or even a pastry will typically negate half, if not all, the calories you’ve just sweated out so laboriously.
Another reason you might put on weight is because your body has begun to transform fat into muscle. Muscle tissue is denser, hence heavier, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. As your body becomes more toned, you’ll still look good, though your weighing scale might still refuse to flatter you. “Even if the weight is a little more, the inches will be less,” says Sigrid.
Women are at a distinct disadvantage in the muscle stakes. “Men by nature have more muscle tissue than women,” she says, explaining that as a result their bodies are far more likely to respond positively to exercise. Unlike fatty tissue, which requires no maintenance, muscle tissue burns up calories.
“Therefore males actually have a chance of losing weight through exercise, but we females, with our unfairly reduced muscle tissue, have less of a chance, because we don’t spend that much energy when we exercise. We have to work much harder at losing weight through exercise,” says Sigrid ruefully. On exercise alone - without making dietary changes - a woman is unlikely to be able to drop more than a kilogram or two. Of course, modern urban conditions offer much in the way of easy calories and some of these arrive in deceptive packaging. You might dismiss a traditional rice and curry as too heavy, but such a meal actually makes more sense than grabbing a few short eats. High in fibre, this meal will leave you feeling full and provide you with a balanced offering of protein and carbohydrates. It’s also more likely that you’ll stick to a glass of water to accompany it.
On the other hand, it seems all too easy to add to an already unhealthy snack, cold coffee or an aerated drink. The smaller quantities of the latter leave you unsatisfied and, as a result, far more likely to overeat when you next sit down at a table. It helps to understand how your body operates. In the simple process of living, an adult weighing 60kg may burn approximately 1800 calories in a day. Your body after all is ‘on’ 24/7 – you breathe, your heart pounds, and various organs demand their share of energy.
Even when you are asleep your body only slows down, it doesn’t stop. Despite knowing this, you would expect an hour’s exercise to account for at least these many calories. The actual figure, however, is rather dispiriting, with a vigorous bout of exercise burning up only 200 - 300 calories.
These figures are only approximates and will change depending on your gender, height, weight and the demands of your lifestyle, the pace of your exercise and its duration, but they are enough to help you estimate the price of that decadent slice of chocolate cake for dessert. To burn your scrumptious meal plus a dessert off, you just might have to walk from Colombo to Kurunegala and back, says Sigrid laughing. “To increase the rate at which our bodies use calories, of course we must exercise, but know that that comes at a much slower rate than what our body uses normally,” she cautions.
Finding the right diet to support this process can be tricky. Fasting, though it might seem the most obvious answer, doesn’t help - it only catapults the body into conservation mode, turning it into a jealous guardian of its fat reserves. Instead eating before you exercise ensures that that food gets converted into energy when you exercise. The sugars in a chocolate bar will give you a boost almost immediately, while a banana might take 10 -15 minutes to make its way through your system. If you’ve just eaten a hearty meal rich in carbohydrates, you might want to wait an hour and half to two hours before hitting the gym.
In the end, regular exercise remains essential for good health, but perhaps not the best way to lose weight – diet plays too big a role. Still, “you have to enjoy your slice of cake, but don’t think in terms of how long it’s going to take you to work it off,” says Sigrid.
If you’re going to indulge, take pleasure in it, after all the season almost demands it. Still, there’s no excuse for gluttony – “do have a treat here and there,” says Sigrid, “but make sure you don’t overindulge.” |
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