‘Why am I exercising but still not losing weight?’
When you’re working hard in the gym, but your weight doesn’t budge, it can be incredibly frustrating.
While it sounds counter-intuitive, its important to remember that exercise doesn’t always equal weight loss.
Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself..
1.Are you really in a deficit with your calories?
When losing weight, you need to create a slight calorie deficit consistently over time. Essentially, burn more calories than you’re consuming balanced over a long enough period, and you’ll be losing weight.
Exercise burns calories so it must automatically lead to weight loss, right? Not necessarily.
Unless you are maintaining that all-important deficit in your energy balance. This is why tracking your meals in a food diary (especially at the beginning) and monitoring your daily activity levels with step count for example, can be useful to highlight any areas which might be holding you back.
2. Are you moving very little outside the gym?
One big driver of weight loss is NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis). It is the energy expended in any activity that does not include formal exercise – walking, playing with the kids, doing the shopping, fidgeting at your desk.
Your NEAT can account for anything up to 50% of your daily energy expenditure if you’re active for most of the day.
Studies show that when people start an exercise programme, their NEAT can reduce which will lower energy expenditure and wipe out your calorie deficit.
This is why we recommend all clients to aim for a minimum of 10,000 steps per day consistently to keep their NEAT high. You can track this simply with a pedometer, fitness watch or smartphone app to monitor your steps daily.
3. Are you eating more without realizing?
Most people will over-estimate the amount of calories they burn when exercising, while underestimating the amount of calories they eat day to day.
It’s very common for people to think ‘I am exercising and burning more calories, so I should be able to eat more or treat myself’. But the extra calories can often wipe-out the extra calories burned.
Sometimes it can be imperceptible. Slight increases in hunger may mean an extra biscuit here and there, or a slightly larger portion at the dinner table. Again, extra calories add up and can negate your weight loss attempts.
This is why we advise clients to track their food intake when on a fat loss journey. Whether that is logging their calorie intake or monitoring portion sizes, having an honest and objective view can prevent unconscious overeating.
Key Takeaway:
Exercise is an important component of weight loss. Progressive weight training and increasing your daily movement is a big part of what we do at Lean Body personal training in Finchley, to help people achieve transformation results.
But exercise isn’t the magic bullet for weight loss on its own.
Combining effective diet and weight training strategies together is going to be the most effective and sustainable way of losing the weight you want.