Are You Faster Than Your Diet?

I’m in the fitness business. I am a certified trainer and gym owner. I teach boot camps at my gym in Vero Beach, as well as lead workouts and give exercise instruction online. I write with all sincerity: while I believe in the benefits of exercise, exercise alone is not the answer to your weight loss woes. That’s not encouraging to hear coming from a fitness professional, but don’t you want the truth?

It’s my job to encourage people to get more active, but people need to have a realistic understanding of how exercise and eating work together to get the results they want. People need the truth about weight loss – and the truth can sting a little. I always say, “You can hate me now, but I know you’ll love me later.”

Fact vs. Fiction

Let’s address myths and misconceptions to get some clutter out of the equation. Sadly, we live in a world of people desperate to lose weight, but they don’t know how to do it. They are willing to try anything claiming amazing results. Desperate people are an easy target for the weight loss industry. Big companies will do anything to get their business – including distort truth, use photoshop, and leave out important facts.

As people grow in desperation, we’ll keep seeing companies market to the frustrated overweight population. According to Market Data Enterprises, in 2012 Americans spent an estimated 65 billion dollars trying to lose weight. That’s a 7 billion dollar increase since 2008, yet obesity continues to rise every year. If these products worked, shouldn’t obesity go down?

Misinformation all around us makes it practically impossible to figure out fact from fiction.

Let me give you two fantastic tips for your journey:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

2. If it looks like work, it probably works.

These two principles clear up confusion. They take down all the weight loss pills, miracle supplements, magic weight loss gimmicks, multi-level marketing scams, fad diets and all the other crazy apparatuses claiming to give you a six-pack in six minutes. Gone!

Now that all the riff-raff is out of the equation, let’s focus on what DOES work: diet and exercise. I know, big surprise – but stay tuned for some little surprises as we dig deeper into the subject.

The Truth About Exercise

Exercise is a funny thing. It’s incredibly rewarding if you do it correctly, and it can sculpt your body into the most amazing shape – IF (big “if” here) you get your diet in shape too. But, putting most of your effort into exercise alone is like detailing your car and keeping a cover on it. No one can see your hard work unless you unveil the beautiful, strong machine you’ve sculpted under the fat.

Don’t quite believe me? Maybe you are thinking of that friend who brags about eating pizza and having abs. Maybe you’re thinking of someone who lost weight doing some crazy workout program, but happened to leave out how much they had changed their diet. My goal is to help you look past what you see and convince you of the truth. Food matters.

My Personal Experience with Weight Loss, Exercise and Eating

If exercise really was the solution to weight loss, I should be able to run a few times a week and drop pounds. So why don’t I lose weight when I increase my cardio? Because exercise increases my metabolism, which in turn, increases my appetite. I only burn 300 calories on a 3-mile run. I have to really fight my body’s desire to replace those calories. I can erase a 3-mile run in 3 minutes flat if I’m not careful.

I tried losing weight without tracking calories, and I have not been successful. Not even once.

When I do track calories, I can get in the best shape of my life. I got the leanest I’d ever been, competing at 10% body fat and winning first place in my first NPC (National Bodybuilding Championships) competition– and the only thing I did differently was log my calories.

To achieve these results, I didn’t work out harder than ever before. In fact, I’ve worked out harder for much less impressive results. I actually felt a little guilty when I saw other competitors work much harder in the gym, meanwhile I was working my hardest in the kitchen. The key to my success was absolutely, hands down, tracking my food intake.

Look at Your Weight Loss like a Banker

Any financial planner worth her weight (pun intended) will tell you to pay attention to how much you’re spending. The same goes for calories and weight loss. You can make better decisions when you know the cost of an item (or the calories in a meal).  When you go shopping and pick out a shirt, you figure out if it’s worth the price tag before you make your decision. When you look at your dinner options, you have to do the same thing.

Understanding the calorie “cost” makes it easy to understand what you put into your body. When you realize a hamburger, small French fry and small soda costs you a whopping 1,175 calories, think of how much work you would have to do to “afford” that meal. You would practically have to run a half marathon to pay it off. You’re faced with the million-dollar question: Is it worth it or not? NOT!

You may be thinking,“I don’t eat fast food.” Let’s examine a healthier meal to compare exercise with. I randomly looked up a major steakhouse and chose the first healthy looking salad with a glass of merlot. The meal racked up 1,078 calories in Lose It!, which would take over two hours of an intense sweat-your-butt-off-and-cry-a-little type of exercise to erase what probably only took 15 minutes to consume. Do you get the picture? You simply can’t compete with what you eat.

Food Matters

Hopefully by now you’ve begun to see just how much food really does matter. It matters so much, at my gym we require our clients and boot campers to log food in the Lose It! app. We spend a great deal of time educating our clients about food and teaching them how to eat according to their goals. We remind them daily (normally during the toughest part of their training, like during the middle of a million burpees) of how they can erase all their hard work in the gym in just 5 minutes of poor food choices.

While we’d love to claim it, our clients aren’t losing literally thousands of pounds in our boot camps because they are doing the hardest workout in the fitness industry or because of our unique offerings. We are getting results because our team and our clients realize food matters.

We encourage people to be equally strong in the kitchen as they are in the gym. We convince them to take that same discipline it takes to show up three to four times a week, and harness that discipline while shopping for groceries and dining out.

The photos below are from some of my real life clients who understand that food matters.

Weight loss success is a total lifestyle change. Every calorie counts – in the gym and on the plate.