Common Fitness Mistake #7: Exercising your way out of a Bad Diet

In a previous installment, we already discussed the mistake of emphasizing cardio over weight training, now let’s look at cardio compared to diet.

I would like this next statement to be seared into everyone’s memory. You cannot exercise your way out of a crappy diet. Why? Because “Math”.

Let’s imagine you work hard to create a caloric deficit all week. You know from previous weeks that you maintain your body weight at a hypothetical 2000 calories per day. Therefore, you decide to eat about 1700 calories per day. A deficit of 300 calories. In one week, you’ve burned 2100 more calories than you ate, good job.

• For the sake of this illustration we are drastically simplifying the process. In reality, there are countless mechanisms in your body making adjustments for the decreased caloric intake, not to mention that estimating your intake is very hard because food packaging is not always accurate. But for now, we will lay that aside.

If you continue with this deficit. You will lose some weight in theory. However, there are several more factors in play.

One, people often underestimate how much they are eating when they are attempting to lose weight. See how that’s a problem? If you think you ate a serving of peanut butter as part of your snack but in reality you two servings of peanut butter, you just added 200 calories to your day and almost erased our hypothetical deficit.

Two, even if you correctly estimated your food throughout the week, you can easily undo the caloric deficit that you worked hard to create ALL week, in just ONE meal. Don’t believe me? Check out this article [link] that shows you what 2000 calories looks like. Some of those meals would go down very easily and not feel like 2000 calories. The meal below? Yep, 2000 calories.

Maybe those are not your issues. Maybe you’ve decided to plan for your extra calories. There is still an issue. You will run out of energy and time before you can burn all of the extra calories. It is simply much easier to consume calories than it is to burn them.

Here is an image I have posted in a previous blog

That muffin you had with your co-worker that you planned to work off. That’s a 48 minute walk. A can of soda with dinner, another 30 minutes. See where this is going? If you want time to sleep, go to school or work and spend time with family, then you’d better watch what you eat because otherwise your plan to burn off all of the extra calories will leave you burnt out!

And let’s face it, no one wants to be stuck in a hamster wheel working super hard only to break even...except maybe this guy.