Healthy Byte: Can’t Out Gym Poor Eating Choices

Aside from those who has youth on their side or are the lucky few to be genetically programmed to repel fat, the above statement holds true for most. And it is perhaps the most difficult hard truth to accept and implement. The assumption of exercise negates everything & anything one consume is folly. Below is an excerpt from an expert explaining why it is folly:

But what many people don’t realize is that it’s much easier to cut excess calories from your diet than it is to burn them off with extra activity, says Natalie Digate Muth, MD, RDN, senior adviser for health-care solutions for the American Council on Exercise. Take a 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, for example. It may only take a few minutes to guzzle those 240 calories, but you’d have to walk or run nearly 2½ miles to burn them off.

So unless you’re a professional athlete, you’re probably not exercising enough to cancel out an all-you-can-eat diet.

SOURCE: HERE

Still not a believer? Here’s more expert explanation:

Narula said that because of misconceptions about weight loss, people often overeat and assume that they can burn off the excess calories at the gym. But “it’s easier to take out the calories than to try and burn them off,” she said. For example, for an individual with a daily caloric intake of 3,500 to drop a pound of fat, it would take one and a half times as long to lose weight through exercise burning 200 calories per day than through cutting 500 calories a day from their diet.

“That’s either an hour or an hour and a half at the gym on the treadmill, on the rowing machine; or it’s cutting out a couple sodas, a bagel with cream cheese, a cupcake,” Narula said.

SOURCE: HERE

The bottom line is, unless you are Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson who’s job is to stay fit and gets paid to invest hours a day at the gym, for most of us everyday folks there simply isn’t enough hours in the day to out exercise poor eating choices.

As Albert Einstein definitely said, “For every cheeseburger ingested, an equal and opposite cheeseburger must occur somewhere.” What Einstein knew intuitively was that diet matters; what goes in must go out, or else it will turn into love handles. That’s just science.

So we decided to look at the number of calories in 13 commonly consumed foods and drinks, and evaluate how many steps (and miles) it would take to walk off those calories. We used an average of 2,000 steps for a mile, and about 89 calories burned per mile walked. No, these are not perfect measurements; yes, these estimates will depend on your height, weight, gender, atmospheric conditions, etc.

Next time you’re thinking of grabbing an on-the-go meal, better make sure your boots were made for walking.