Why can you not out exercise poor eating choices?
 

Apologies if this is a really silly question!

Why can you not choose to eat a 'naughty' food/meal and engage in extra exercise to basically 'erase' the poor food choice?

On one hand I would like to believe a calorie deficit = weight loss but in reality whenever I make a poor choice as a treat and add extra exercise to burn it off (well and truly too!) I still gain! Why is that?

I am at goal now and have had a few minor treats -nothing terrible, all food I eat is homemade by me- I have seen the scale go up 2-5 pounds and it takes me around 3 days of solid calorie restriction to get back to my goal.

Thanks :)

It's far easier to eat 1000 calories than it is to burn 1000 calories. To burn 1000 calories you'd have to do over an hour of cardio - probably closer to an hour and a half. To eat 1000 calories, all you need is two large slices of pizza.

A lot of us used to eat well over 4000 calories per day when gaining weight, although our bodies only needed about 2000 to maintain (guessing at averages here... I would maintain closer to 2500 but I probabky ate well over 4000). So in order to maintain with exercise, I would have had to exercise for more time than I had available in the day after my sedentary job.

On top of that, exercise makes you hungry! Your body burns those calories and says whoa, we've been working hard, better keep those supplies up.

I think it's possible to practice intuitive eating and learn your body's signals to avoid overeating. Some people on this forum have had great success with that. But that's because the end result is eating the amount that's healthy and right for you. For those of us using other eating plans, the goal is that same, but the restriction of calories (or types of food) is more calculated and deliberate.

Probably the issue you're having is twofold. First it's easy to miscalculate calories burned. You can make a general estimate based on your weight and exertion level, but your body is more efficient when you've previously had more fat, and you're likely not burning as much as you think. Second, the types of foods that are treats may contain salt and other chemicals/substances that add to water retention. So, you might go up three pounds just from that, and the water weight drops away when you've had less salt for a few days.

I think faiora is even overestimating, depending on your weight and the exercise, it could take 2-3 hours (maybe more) to burn off 1000 calories.

And there are a variety of reasons your scale could be going up, it could be due to water retention. To gain 2 lbs, you'd have to eat approximately 7000 calories extra. So if you are just eating a few extra calories, then it probably isn't fat gain but rather water retention.

Good answer by faiora. To add, all fuel is not the same. Who wants to go out and exercise after a fast food binge? Nobody. That kind of stuff lays around in your belly weighing you down and sucking out all your energy.

There is also no "erasing" food. You can't think of it like that. It becomes part of your body, it serves a purpose to nourish you in some way. Like if you eat a slice of chocolate cake, let's say it's 600 calories. You'd need to do a couple of classes of zumba to burn off those calories, but the food still has to be processed by your body - the sugars, the fats, the carbohydrates, the dairy, all of it. I think faiora was wrong in saying you need an hour and a half of exercise to burn off 1000, the type of exercise that can do that is not easy to do, we're talking bootcamp style running uphill nonstop or something like that.

Any way you look at it, any amount of exercise you do, the food you eat is going to be the bottom line and the biggest factor in losing weight.

You can do it. Its like the idea that going on a crash diet will cause regain - it is assumed that most people will tend to fail through that method. However you never really know with these things. Maybe a quirky method will work for you.

My guess is you are underestimating how many calories were involved in your treat, and overestimating how many calories you are burning through exercise, and that's why you still gain. What happens when you try a combination of exercise and calorie restriction after a treat?

Good point.

I was talking about very heavy exercise e.g. jumping rope, but most people would not burn that much running, for example (although some of us heavyweights might - I have nearly 300 pounds of me to lug around so I will burn more than someone who weighs 150. Maybe not this much though).

Just goes to show, even I'm overestimating. :)

Because life is super, totally, ridonkulously unfair.

This.

I did an experiment (accidentally) on this very thing about 3 years ago. I was running marathons infrequently and decided to train for a 50 mile race. Prior to that, I was running a consistent, medium number of miles each week and was maintaining my weight around 145 lbs at the time. I tracked everything very precisely for a month and determined that I maintained that weight on 1400 NET calories per day, subtracting out the calorie burn from running (using an estimate of 90 calories/mile; I was running entirely on flat land at the time and at a consistent pace, so there was little variation).

I created a spreadsheet for my training that listed the run mileage for each day and I calculated the approximate increase in calories burned running the additional distances. My goal was to complete 4 months of training and to lose 5 pounds in the process, to give my knees some relief, so I calculated a net calorie intake to achieve that weight loss. I was quite religious (obsessive, in retrospect) about matching my exact calorie goals for each week, but at the time I lived alone and it was pretty easy.

Three months in, I was at my peak mileage running about 75 miles/week. According to my spreadsheet, I should have been down 4-5 pounds. Instead, I had gained 3 and it was a consistent, permanent gain (not glycogen/water fluctuation). The most logical conclusion was that my metabolic efficiency during running had increased with training and I was no longer burning nearly the same number of calories per mile as before. It seems obvious now, but I think about this every time this subject comes up on the forum. How many of us constantly change our exercise routines to keep from becoming too efficient at them and burning fewer calories over time? I am guessing it's not a high percentage of people - routine makes life easy. This could become a significant weight loss factor in the long haul (and it's ALL about the long haul).

Thank you for all the responses :) I am still three days of perfectly on track eating and exercising up a pound, which I realise doesn't sound like much but I only ate a homemade LCM bar, so it seems incredibly unfair! Adjusting to a maintenance lifestyle is quite tricky I am finding and as per usual the head stuff is the worst!

Jay, I'd be interested in knowing if you took any measurements besides weight.

Noname - I didn't. It would have been a better experiment if I had done body fat %, etc. The gain may have been equally fat and muscle... but I'm betting it was mostly fat. The increased calorie intake at the time was NOT comprised entirely of healthy food; there was quite a bit of dessert involved. Which is why I posted the story here - it relates to the question of out-exercising not just an increase in caloric intake, but an increase in intake of junky food. As others pointed out on the thread, all calories are not created equal. If I had eaten the additional calories entirely in vegetable form, the results would likely have been different.

I have an alternate explanation:

You lost lean mass, so you were no longer burning as many calories at rest. Don't get me wrong; cardio is awesome - it tones and firms and improves stamina and burns off calories. But it also reduces lean mass.

Addition: This apparently applies mainly to longer cardio sessions. Also, switching up types of cardio can be helpful, and doing interval training instead of longer stretches of repeated exercise, like running.

Also I hear it helps to make sure you eat before cardio so you can burn off food instead of lean mass, I guess. Your body doesn't necessarily target the fat first when trying to get fast fuel. There are multiple factors at play.

Here's one take on the subject

Agreed it is WAY more than 1-1.5 hrs to burn 1000 calories. For example, running a mile burns like 75-125! You may have to run a half marathon to burn that many. Nobody is doing that in an hour, and unless you are an olympic athlete, you aren't going to do that in 1.5 either. I think even 3 hours is an underestimate for most of us average people.

I am not discounting the other benefits of working out, just that we should be realistic about how much exercise really helps us slim down.