A new reason why exercise is essential for fat loss....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 5-31-2012

Some doctors who study obesity say exercise doesn’t do much to help fat loss.

Just like the story of the blind men and the elephant, they are partly correct.

If you still eat fattening foods and do nothing to change that or find and use a sustainable way to cut calories, you do have to get 8 to 10 hours a day of exercise to have exercise by itself cause fat loss. 

And, what many people do also prevents fat loss.  They get 200 or 300 calories of good exercise, yes.  But then they give themselves a 500 to 600 calorie fattening treat they think the exercise will help them get away with!  Oops!

Few people who get 8 to 10 hours a day of exercise ever get fat and few people today can have a life and get that much exercise.  So for most of us no matter how much or how well we exercise we will still be fat unless we stop fattening foods close to 100 % and find and use a sustainable way to cut calories.

But, guess what?  To do those things that are required for fat loss, you have to stop the habits involved in eating fattening foods and drinking fattening drinks.  You have to establish new habits to eat real foods instead.  And you have to add new habits to routinely do the other sustainable calorie reduction you find is doable for you.

That makes exercise essential for effective and permanent fat loss.

Here’s why. 

In a new book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, he does a great job explaining the new research that has found how to change habits successfully.

You DID read that correctly.  It’s not only possible to change habits, we know how to do it now and why it works!

In practice, the researchers found that new habits often get sabotaged by difficult or challenging circumstances.  BUT this does NOT happen to people who believe they can succeed.

They found 3 ways to create that belief a religious conversion experience or something like it; joining a group or community of people who have succeeded; and succeeding in changing a key habit on their own.

That specifically means that if you have 7 habit changes you need to make and do even ONE successfully, your chances of doing the other 6 go up dramatically.  In fact, in people who do a lot of positive habit changes successfully, that’s extremely common.

They call these keystone habits.

For fat loss you do need to make positive changes in what you eat and drink.

So it makes sense that if a certain kind of keystone habit was unusually effective in helping you make those changes it would really be worth it to do that one first.

We know what that habit is.

Yes!  Exercise IS that keystone habit.

People who begin to exercise regularly even at easy levels and just a few days a week, even one or two, routinely then do other habit changes successfully.

(People who exercise literally think better than people who don’t.  And, people who exercise feel dramatically more able to cause changes in their lives and to control what they do. So this effect is no accident!)

There are about 12 other solid reasons exercise is essential or extremely helpful with fat loss and keeping it off.  We’ve posted on them before. (Some kinds of exercise make fat loss easier and faster.  Exercise can help cut the amount of calories you need to cut back enough to make it sustainable to do so, a huge reason by itself.  And, though it’s not widely known, exercise can begin to deliver most of the benefits people lose fat to get -- well before they even lose much fat!)

But this news is extremely important and may be the number one reason why exercise is essential for successful fat loss.

Effective and sustainable fat loss depends on permanent upgrades in what you eat and drink including some kinds of calorie reduction you find doable.

But achieving effective and sustainable fat loss will ONLY happen for you if you stop any bad habits you have and begin do those upgrades by habit.

The research shows if you begin to exercise regularly and quite likely ONLY if you exercise, you have a decent shot at making those changes to your habits.

That means that the doctors who only know you need more than exercise to lose fat, ARE correct; but they won’t be very effective at helping people lose fat either!

If you want to SUCCEED at fat loss, exercise is essential.