The essentiality of exercise for permanent weight loss
The Best Exercise You Can Do
What is the best exercise you can do? Is it running, jogging, biking, swimming, dancing, walking? The answer – the best exercise you can do is the exercise you will do. It is moving that is important, regardless of the form that moving takes. However, the easiest, most convenient, and most universal exercise that everyone knows how to do is walking. Therefore, walking is the specific exercise that I will address. But the principles of exercising for weight loss and weight loss maintenance apply to exercise in whatever form that exercise may take.
Exercise and Calories
The first benefit of exercise for weight loss and weight loss maintenance is the most obvious. Exercise burns calories. How many? A 150-pound person who walks a mile in 15 minutes will burn 100 calories. Thus, a 150-pound person who walks 3 miles a day in 45 minutes would burn 300 calories per day. Since 3,500 calories equal one pound of body fat, in theory a 150-pound person who walks 3 miles a day in 45 minutes could lose a pound every 11 or 12 days. In practice weight lost by exercising depends on age, current weight, and metabolism. People without much weight to lose won’t lose much weight at all. In their case, exercise will help them maintain their optimum body weight.
Exercise and Appetite
More important than calories burned is the effect of exercise on appetite. Contrary to popular belief, study after study confirms a surprising truth: unlike dieting, exercise does not cause an automatic increase in appetite. In fact, exercise actually curbs false appetite resulting from boredom, depression, stress or habit, while enhancing true appetite resulting from hunger. Some research has indicated that people who exercise actually have a better sense of how many calories they need than people who don’t. Eating from hunger rather than from emotion is the difference between addictive eating and normal eating and, therefore, the difference between normal weight and overweight.
Exercise and Internal Cues of Hunger and Satiety
Compulsive overeaters don’t know when they are hungry, and they don’t know when they are full. Exercise helps put them in touch with internal cues of hunger and satiety. Overeaters eat from external cues, such as time of day, sight or smell of food, being in a particular place or circumstance, in reaction to an emotional event. Normal eaters eat only when they are hungry. If they are not hungry, no matter what you put in front of them, they will not eat it. Unlike overeaters, they stop eating when they are full. They know when they are no longer hungry. Overeaters don’t. Since they don’t know when they are hungry, they don’t know when they are no longer hungry. They stop eating only when there is nothing left to eat. Exercise is crucial in making the transition from eating triggered by external cues to eating triggered only by hunger. Dieting does not do this. Dieting compounds the problem: by its nature, dieting requires ignoring feelings of hunger, and this results in ignoring feelings of fullness as well.
Next weeks article will discuss two other benefits of exercise – its effect on sleep and depression – and the impact that lack of sleep and depression have on weight.
Mary Lou Williams, M. Ed., is a lecturer and writer in the field of nutrition. She welcomes inquiries. She can be reached at 267-6480.