Here’s A Totally New And Bizarre Way To Approach Exercise That Sort Of Broke Our Brains
…and made us do it more
by The Candidly Team
We’ve heard A LOT of things about weight loss. Actually it’s more like we’ve been told a lot of things about weight loss.
And like most things that come attached to a multi-billion dollar industry, that information is frequently unsolicited. Contradictory. Confusing. And often, trying to sell us something.
With so many approaches and techniques and Wild West supplements flying around, we sometimes forget that the crux of losing weight (or losing fat rather) is mainly a matter of this: burning more calories than we consume.
Which naturally makes us all think we have to eat less, work out more, eat less, work out more. Eat half of a second hamburger at dinner. Run a 3k the next morning. Have one or two of those brownies being passed around the office. Rush to the gym just in time for your sugar crash to make you want to curl yourself around a dumbbell and fall into a deep sleep.
You get where we’re going with this. There’s a lot of food-is-bad-and-therefore-exercise-is-punishment messaging. And this goes on in our own brains where we are much meaner than we are in real life or to the outside world.
But what if tried something weird? Something that at first sounds wrong but might end up changing the very way we think about health, wellness, and yeah, even weight loss.
It’s an idea we got from Maggie Sterling, a self-described “weight loss coach who loves food.” And listen, we usually try to stick to registered dieticians to get our nutrition advice, just because there is so much unsubstantiated information out there, but we found Maggie’s words along with her attitude toward food to be interesting.
So here’s her novel concept:
If you aren’t about to watch a TikTok in the middle of this article, this is the gist:
Stop lumping diet and exercise together.
In fact, stop thinking about exercise as having anything to do with losing weight.
Now we understand that burning more calories can indeed come as a result of working out and that having more muscle tone can help us burn more calories. So before you start revving your engines in rage, please note that we are NOT claiming that exercise is not absolutely essential to our health or that food restriction is the only path to losing weight.
Actually we’re not claiming anything really. We’re not dieticians either. We are just people (most of us over 40) who are opening up our own ears to this idea to see if there’s a kernel of wisdom in it for us.
And what we came away with are three reasons why it resonates. And we’re sharing them here, because maybe you feel the same. Maybe you too have been stuck in a cycle of not being able to get yourself to work out consistently, and it makes you feel demoralized and dejected and no closer to your goals.
So what are some reasons we might want to stop making exercise all about weight loss?
1) Thinking of exercise as a way to burn what we eat can lead us to do it less.
When we enter an inconsistent cycle of eating wherein we restrict and then overeat, we often mimic this pattern in our workouts. It might not be a consciously spelled out thought, but we use how we ate that day to determine whether or not we’ll exercise. And this can manifest in multiple ways, all which tether our workouts to our eating:
“I ate well today. No need to go the gym.”
“I ate well today. I’m in the zone. Now let’s get to the gym.”
“I ate horribly today. Forget the gym. This day is a bust. I’ll start tomorrow".
“ I hate horribly today. I have to go to the gym to make up for it.”
See how none of these things make working out about being strong and healthy or living longer or having better gut health or heart health or brain health or having less anxiety or boosting our mood every frickin’ day? It’s just about what I ate that day and what number I might see on the scale as a result.
2) It makes us think of exercise as punishment and food as a reward.
Filing a workout into a self-punishing activity sets us up mentally and physically for failure. We already talked about how it can lead to inconsistency in terms of when and how much we exercise, but it also messes up our thinking about why we exercise and eat well in the first place.
Both can be ways of being nice to ourselves, of nourishing ourselves, of actively caring about our own mental and physical wellbeing. We don’t torture ourselves on the treadmill so we can dive into a doublecream donut, which we actually end up not enjoying anyway, because those same self-punishing thoughts start creeping in the moment we “indulge.”
We noticed that whenever we were using a workout as reasoning to launch into a Double Quarter Pounder, we were missing a more meaningful truth about both diet and exercise, and that is that neither has to center itself entirely on weight loss. When we think of activity and food as seamless parts of our existence, not a thing that should rapidly change from one moment to another as some sort of punishment-reward system, we carve a more peaceful path for consistent patterns, and those patterns can include the occasional donut or Quarter Pounder. Just not all the emotional baggage that comes with it.
3) It makes exercise feel like part of a temporary goal instead of an ongoing aspect of our lives.
Our Editor-in-Chief recently wrote very honestly about her own experience with weight loss, and one thing she said about building healthy habits hit home for all of us:
The hardest part of all of it for me was recognizing that this isn’t something I’m “cramming” in in order to reach an end goal at a certain time after which I can celebrate with a Big Mac and 4 rolls of Starbursts. It’s not the same mentality as crash dieting to look skinny for your sister’s wedding. There is no end game. The end game is just … the actual end. And all of these habits will help the end come muuuch further down the road.
Isn’t that the real goal? To live longer, healthier, less obsessive lives where exercise is one pillar and how we eat is another? The more we focus on the multitude of benefits that come from being active humans, the more the world opens itself up to us. And that world is just so much bigger and more interesting than the insular thinking so many of us have about weight loss.
So much freer.
This article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used in place of professional advice, medical treatment, or professional care in any way. This article is not intended to be and should not be a substitute for professional care, advice or treatment. Please consult with your physician or healthcare provider before changing any health regimen. This article is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease of any kind. Read our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
