We’ve all heard it before “You just need to eat less and exercise more”. It’s time to stop this myth. It doesn't work. On the contrary it can cause you to gain weight.
There was a study done at Skidmore College between two groups of men and women for 12 weeks:
Group 1: Average food, eat less, exercise more (18 hours more cardio)
Group 2: Quality food, eat more, exercise less (HIIT & resistance training)
Group 1 is what most of you will think of when you want to lose weight. Eat less and exercise more. But Group 2 achieved a higher % body fat loss, greater increase in lean muscle, lower cholesterol and reduction in belly fat.
It’s not about eating less and exercising more - it’s about improving the quality of your food and the quality of your workout.
The message “A calorie is a calorie, so eat whatever, just not too much” is not true and the quality of the food you eat will define your health and transform your body composition.
Eating high quality whole nutritious natural foods such as vegetables, proteins, fats and fruits and avoiding starches and sweets is your key to success.
The good news is that studies from all around the world offer evidence that the consequences of eating a low-quality diet are reversible. So don't give up! Take action now.
We just need to improve the quality of our eating and exercise. Again it is the kind of food, not the quantity of food, and the type of exercise not the quantity of exercise that matters.
Eating more doesn't make you fat and starving yourself doesn't make you lose weight. When your body needs more calories and none are available it just slows down how quickly it burns calories (giving you less energy). If you’ve starved yourself and you don’t have enough energy our bodies burn muscle first, not fat.
Eating more of the right foods has been clinically proven to help us burn fat over the long term. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that people who ate more high quality food (9,500 more calories over 6 months) lost 200% more weight. A study at the University of Connecticut found that people who ate more high quality foods (300 more calories per day) burned more body fat.
Exercising more doesn't make you thin. Exercise by itself has not been shown to be highly effective in weight loss because the increased energy use from exercise is generally offset by increased caloric intake. It's much easier to eat calories than to burn them. A 30min jog might only burn 170 calories but then you have a 190 calorie sports drink to recover and reward because “you earned it”. Also exercising more can encourage eating more low-quality food.
It's not about exercising more, it’s about exercising smarter. Forget long jogs trying to burn calories, instead focus on quality exercise less frequently, for a shorter period of time using a lot of resistance. At ELITE Health Club we focus on resistance training and powerlifting utilising compound exercises (squat, bench press, and deadlift).
The more resistance we use, the more muscle fibres we work, the more energy we use, the faster we run out of energy and the less exercise we need to do. You just need to pick an exercise that requires a lot of force, many muscle fibres, and a lot of energy. Our ELITE coaches will help with this.
As well as being a smarter way to workout resistance training can also reverse ageing. Scientists at the Buck Institute for Age Research discovered that after six months of resistance training “the transcriptional signature of ageing was markedly reversed”.
To learn more about how to improve the quality of your eating and exercise to transform your body and improve your health simply contact us.
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