Jonathan Steedman (00:01.154)

Hey food groupies, gonna talk to you today about exercise and weight loss. Probably gonna call this episode, stop exercising for weight loss, just to ruffle some feathers. And I'm gonna explain that, why I'm gonna call it that in just a second. Very important caveat. At no point am I saying that exercise is bad. Exercise is incredible. It is probably the closest thing we have to a golden bullet for health.

I don't like comparing nutrition and exercise. They're both important, but like exercise is next level. It's impact on your, you know, if you're doing cardiovascular training, the improvements in longevity and health are monstrous. we just, resistance training is phenomenal. for, you know, your bone density in particular, know, tendons, ligament health, movement quality. So being able to,

You know, in life quality, guess, know, just quality of life rather, you know, as you age, being able to continue to do things and keep up with everyone. And then the really unsexy stuff of like, get yourself off the toilet. So when you're 80, you can continue to be super independent, you know, from, from then and beyond. So, and actually let's, that's not even touching on all of the mental health benefits and all of these other things that exercise can bring, right? So it is phenomenal. Please exercise. If you're not, try and find a way to do it.

I've got other podcasts on that too, but exercise is incredible. I just think, but people who are exercising for weight loss are often doing it wrong or rather that is just not the right way to think about exercise. Unless you just like, just as well, if you're training more than like 12 hours a week, this podcast probably isn't for you. I'm talking about the rest of us mere models who even, I'm

very fortunate. really love exercising. love weights. I probably average four to never six. I don't have the time, unfortunately, four to five sessions a week. And plus, you know, the odd run and things as well. I've, you know, trained pretty regularly. But I don't train for weight loss. Because if I want to lose weight, there's other ways to do it. And I think if you link your weight loss to your exercise, it's going to negatively impact your weight loss progress.

Jonathan Steedman (02:17.202)

not really due to any physical thing, but due to the way that you're going to approach it mentally. The first thing that I see happening with people who link their exercise to their weight loss is the second they can't exercise, whether that be due to sickness, either yourself or kids or something, or work gets crazy busy or knock on wood, but God forbid you get an injury and so you can't exercise in the way that you typically would.

when you can't exercise the way that you typically would, your weight loss efforts go out the window because you've linked the two. You think, well, didn't get to train this week. So like, what's the point? And you'll find that that will very quickly start to spill over into your food choices, right? Because you can't lose weight this week because you didn't exercise properly, right? Which is so not the case. You can absolutely can continue to make excellent progress on your weight loss if you continue to focus on food. Not nail your food 100%, you know, we're not about that, but.

continue your structured approach that has been helping with weight loss when you are exercising. Almost certainly what is going to weight loss while you're exercising is going to continue that weight loss when you stop exercising. So that's the first thing I see. So don't link them like that, okay? Whether or not you've exercised this week or are able to exercise this week, you can still lose fat. You can keep focusing on those nutritional principles, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing I find is we,

significantly overestimate the energy we've burned during an exercise session. And there's a couple of different reasons for that. The first is exercise feels hard if you're doing it properly, right? Not all of it, you know, there's gentle movement and that kind of stuff as well. But if you're getting after it, I know for me, if I do like a 90 minute heavy squat session, I feel like I've burnt 2000 calories, right? I just feel wrecked, particularly at the moment I'm in Queensland.

it's January, it's so flippin' hot. I trained in a shed, it's got air conditioning, but that like, just helps. And so I'm just destroyed by the end of it. And so it's really easy for me to just mentally over calculate or, you know, overestimate how many calories I've burned during that session. And then think about replacing that via food. I haven't burnt 2,000, I've probably burnt close to 400 or 500 or something like that.

Jonathan Steedman (04:37.771)

So that's the first thing. The second thing is that if we've got a smart device, like, you know, if you've got a watch that calculates energy expenditure, it can reinforce that overestimation because we know that those devices are pretty rubbish at estimating energy intake as well. So you look down and your watch is like, you've burnt 900 calories. You're like, cool. That means I probably can eat more. Don't do that. Okay. Yes, you need to be taking your exercise into account when you are calculating your energy requirements.

but you wanna distribute that across the week. So you want your daily average energy intake to be up a little bit to support your training. You don't want to react on the day of like, I did that really big session. I burnt lots of calories. I'm gonna add lots more calories right now. Because like I said, you're probably gonna A, overestimate and add more than you burnt. And then B, there's this other kind of, it's called the ugh, constrained model of.

And model of constrained energy. man, I should have looked up this before I I've forgotten it. Sorry. But it's like constrained energy model or something like that. Essentially, what it means is this idea that the body compensates for the energy you've burned during a training session, or at least attempts to it probably can't compensate for all of it, but it can often compensate for more of it than you think. And so what I mean by that is if you've done a hard training session early in the day,

let's say you burn, you truly burn 600 calories, your body is probably going to reduce your average energy expenditure for the rest of the day by anywhere from two to 300 calories. And so if you can do that math, you've actually only netted 300 calories from that session. Even though you burn 600 calories,

your body has down-regulated, it has constrained or reduced the amount of energy that you've expended naturally later in the day by about 300 calories. So you haven't had quite as much of a significant increase as you thought. And if you eat thinking you've burned an extra 600 calories, when you've only really added an extra 300 calories worth of burn to your day, you can see how that could get problematic over time. I am once again reminding you not to think about calories burnt when you're exercising and...

Jonathan Steedman (07:00.186)

that is not the only purpose of exercise and exercise is amazing. Please do it. I just needed to add that. I felt like I was spiraling into the like, it's only about the calories you burn. So you overestimate it mentally, your watch overestimates it. And then we forget the fact that our body compensates for it later in the day. None of those are going to be helpful when it comes to you eating a bit more. And so for that reason,

I much prefer for you to separate your exercise from your weight loss endeavors. Focus on your food, build a good structure that supports weight loss, add exercise on top for, the additional calorie burn, but much more importantly for all the other wonderful health benefits that it gives you both physically and mentally. And I find that if you can separate those two, I often get people I work with to just not think about them. Yes, okay, we time your food and...

We fuel effectively for that training session. But if you can separate your weight loss progress from your exercise, things go much, much, much better. So give that a try for the next few weeks. Let me know how you go.