Feel the burn
You’ve heard of the phrase ‘you can’t outrun a bad diet’, right? It sounds like a Pinterest board, but it does have some truth behind it. If your nutrition isn’t great, then no amount of running will help you lose weight.
As anyone who has ever attempted to ‘burn off’ a slice of cake will know, it takes a really long time to burn a meaningful amount of calories through exercise. If you’re aiming to create a calorie deficit, it’s a lot easier to just not have that slice of cake rather than punish yourself afterwards with hours of cardio.
There’s also the impact exercise has on our appetites to consider. Have you ever done a particularly vigorous workout and then felt like you wanted to eat everything in sight? It’s a common theme, and while it can be seen as ‘refuelling’, when we’re talking about calories in vs calories out it’s just another way of taking in a lot of extra calories with very little effort.
Exercise also has a knock-on effect in our daily lives known as ‘compensatory behaviours’. This means you might take the lift instead of the stairs because of a particularly strenuous leg day, or you might want to rest more because you’re tired.
Both scenarios are completely understandable, but it means that you won’t be burning the calories you’d usually burn by using the stairs or being generally more active.
