You Can't Outrun Your Fork: Exercise Myths Debunked

Forget everything you think you know about exercise and weight loss. The truth might surprise you—and it's backed by science.

Ever found yourself grinding away on the treadmill while the scale refuses to budge? You're not alone. Exercise is often touted as the answer to weight loss, but the research tells a different story. A 400-calorie muffin takes two minutes to eat but 45 minutes of jogging to burn off. Our bodies are even programmed to compensate after workouts by increasing hunger and decreasing movement throughout the day.

But don't cancel your gym membership just yet. Exercise shines as a powerful tool for maintaining weight loss and transforming health in ways the scale can't measure. Regular movement preserves muscle mass during weight loss, keeping your metabolism humming. It improves insulin sensitivity, regulates mood, reduces stress, and enhances sleep quality—all factors that indirectly support weight management by controlling stress eating and balancing hunger hormones.

The sweet spot combines both cardio for heart health and strength training for muscle preservation. The World Health Organization recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise weekly plus strength training twice weekly, though weight management may benefit from 250-300 minutes. The most sustainable approach? Find activities you genuinely enjoy, start small, and focus on consistency over intensity. Remember that non-exercise movement throughout the day (NEAT) often burns more calories than formal workouts, and beware of fitness trackers that overestimate calorie burn by 20-50%.

Looking to transform your relationship with exercise? Stop viewing it as punishment for eating and start seeing it as a privilege—a way to build a stronger, more energetic body that will carry you through life. Pair smart nutrition with consistent movement, and you've created the most powerful strategy for long-term health and weight management. Want to learn more about plant-based nutrition and lifestyle medicine? Visit plantbaseddoctorjules.com for free resources to support your journey.

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Dr. Jules

Chapters

• 0:00 Section A

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hey everyone, welcome to Season 2 of the Dr Jewel's Plant-Based Podcast, where we discuss everything from plant-based nutrition to the main pillars of lifestyle medicine. Yo, plant-based buddies, welcome back to another episode. Today we're going to be talking about exercise and weight loss, a topic that's loaded with myths and half-truths and Instagram slogans. Now, if you've ever heard someone say you just need to move more to lose weight, or ever heard someone say you just need to move more to lose weight, or abs are made in the gym or abs are made in the kitchen, you'll see that there's still a lot of confusion out there on what's true and what's not. So today we're going to break those down and I'm going to explain what the science really says about how movement impacts your weight, from the calories you burn to the appetite. That changes to long-term weight maintenance. Now, spoiler alert exercise is amazing for you, but maybe not for the reasons you think, and maybe it's not that great for weight loss. Let's start by talking about why exercise isn't the magic bullet for weight loss. The magic bullet for weight loss. So the elephant in the room is that exercise alone is not a guaranteed way of losing weight. Now, don't get me wrong. I love exercise, I train, I compete, I move every single day and it's one of the most powerful things you can do for your health single day and it's one of the most powerful things you can do for your health period. But if we're talking strictly about the number on the scale, the research is pretty clear Diet changes are going to have a much bigger impact on your weight than exercise alone. Now why, you may ask. Well, because it's far easier to eat 500 calories than it is to burn 500 calories. That muffin that you eat with your coffee, that's about 400 calories and you can eat that in literally two minutes. But to burn all that same amount of calories jogging, you'd need to run for almost 45 minutes. Now, our bodies are clever. When you burn more calories through movement, your body may even nudge you to eat more and to move less during the rest of the day, a concept that's called compensatory behavior. Basically, if you run a 10k in the morning, you're less likely to want to move around or go do your grocery and you're more likely to sit on your couch for the rest of the day. And you're more likely to sit on your couch for the rest of the day, meaning that you're probably going to be hungrier later, but not just hungrier you're going to move less and burn less calories to compensate. So, yes, exercise does burn calories, but the net effect isn't always as dramatic as people hope when it comes to fat loss.

Speaker 1: 3:54

Now you may be thinking if exercise isn't that great for weight loss, why bother? Well, even if exercise is not the best way to lose weight, it's a phenomenal way to maintain weight loss. In other words, it's one of the best tools that you can use to help keep weight off once you've lost it. Exercise has a bunch of other benefits and, honestly, they blow the scale out of the water. It helps preserve muscle mass when you're losing weight. That keeps your basal metabolic rate, or your metabolism, higher, meaning that with more muscle mass, you burn more calories at rest, and so weight maintenance becomes easier. It also improves insulin sensitivity, which means that your body is going to be able to handle carbs more effectively. It also helps to regulate mood and manage stress, and, as most people know, stress eating is a real thing. So if your mood is better, you're going to be more resilient when it comes to managing cravings, and exercise also improves the quality of your sleep and, as we've also already discussed in a previous podcast episode. Sleep will directly impact hormones like leptin, ghrelin, cortisol hormones that directly impact your appetite and support weight management by keeping hunger hormones in check. In short, exercise changes your health, your strength and your energy in ways the scale could never measure. But calorie deficits by managing nutrition is probably the best lever that you can pull to lose weight more efficiently, but also in a healthier way.

Speaker 1: 5:59

So if we try to get practical when we talk about exercise for weight management, the two big categories of exercise are cardio or resistance training. Now, cardio, we're talking about running, cycling, swimming, rowing burns more calories during the activity itself and is great for heart health and endurance and creating an immediate calorie deficit. Now, some people would say that cardio makes you live longer and resistance training makes you live better, but we don't need to be choosing between one or the other. Strength training, like lifting weights and doing bodyweight exercises or resistance bands, burns fewer calories during the workout itself, but it helps build more muscle, and more muscle means that you're burning more calories at rest. Your resting metabolism is higher, so you're burning more calories throughout the day, even when you're just sitting on your couch watching Netflix.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Now the sweet spot is to do a bit of both Do cardio for your heart and strength for your muscles, and a variety of movements to just keep things interesting and sustainable. People always ask me what's the best exercise, and the answer is simple the best exercise for you is the one that you enjoy the most and are much more able to sustain over the long term. Now, if you only do cardio, maybe you risk losing more muscle mass along with the fat that you're losing, but if you only lift, you might not be getting the same cardiovascular benefits that are offered with cardio. So try to combine both and simply go get the best of both worlds.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Now in terms of exercise, how much do you really need? If we talk numbers, the World Health Organization or WHO recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity plus muscle strengthening activities on two or more days. That means that if you're doing, example, 30 minutes of cardio, you would do 30 minutes of cardio five days a week, plus strength training two or more days per week. Now these can be done on the same day if that's easier. Basically, do the activities that you enjoy, but try to have a balanced mix of cardio activities and strength training. Now, if your goal is both weight loss and maintenance, research would suggest that you might benefit from a little bit more exercise, maybe even closer to 250 to 300 minutes of moderate exercise per week. But the most important thing is that if that number sounds overwhelming, start smaller. Exercise is dose dependent. You'll get benefits from doing very little. You'll simply just get more benefits by doing more, and even 10 minute bouts of movement will add up and consistency will always beat intensity.

Speaker 1: 9:48

But here's something that most people don't expect Exercise is not just great for muscle, great for heart health. It can also change your appetite, and not always in the way you think. Now, for a lot of people, especially in the early stages of exercising, it can suppress hunger for a few hours after your workout. That's great, but for a lot of other people, it can actually make them hungrier, sometimes enough to completely annihilate the calorie deficit that they were in. So, basically, the hunger increase from the exercise is making you consume more calories than you previously burned during the workout. And this is exactly why exercise and nutrition need to be partners, because if your goal is fat loss, you need to pair a smart eating plan with consistent movement. That's the most effective strategy. Just simply think of it like two different gears that are working together. If you take one of those away, the whole machine slows down.

Speaker 1: 11:08

Now, the most important thing when you're exercising and aiming for a calorie deficit in order to lose weight, and specifically fat, is to protect muscle mass. People who work out a lot and who don't eat a lot and induce very large calorie deficits that could be over 500 calories per day they start risking losing muscle mass. Now, if you lose a lot of muscle mass, the loss of lean tissue will lower your BMR, your basal metabolic rate, and that means that if you lose a lot of weight and a lot of that weight is muscle mass. At rest, you're burning less calories. Now this is one of the fears that we're seeing with people that are embarking on these weight loss drugs. They're magnificent People get their life back, they protect their heart, protect the kidneys, reduce diabetes and, for a lot of people, they help them lose weight when everything else failed. But there's a catch. If people are losing 20 to 25% of their weight within a year to 18 months, a considerable amount of muscle mass is lost during that time. And if that happens and your basal metabolic rate or your BMR the amount of calories you burn throughout the day goes down, it may be more difficult to stay in a calorie deficit if you come off of these medications. So that's always something to keep in mind.

Speaker 1: 12:43

That's why I encourage my patients to, with any weight loss diet, to increase the amount of protein. It promotes satiety. It's the macronutrient that has the highest thermogenic effect of food, meaning that you're burning a lot more calories simply by processing the proteins for absorption and for use that you would with carbs or fat. So that helps promote satiety, fullness and weight loss as well, but it also helps you maintain your muscle mass, protect your muscle mass. Most patients that are in calorie deficits using cardio or strength training to protect muscle mass. I do encourage them to aim from 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilograms of body weight. For most people, that's something between 20 to 40 grams of protein at each of the three meals and one or two of your snacks.

Speaker 1: 13:44

Now there's another player in this game of weight loss, something that we call NEAT Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. That's all of the movement that you do outside of formal exercise Walking the dog, cleaning the house or even fidgeting at your desk and for some people, neat can actually account for hundreds of calories. Sometimes people burn more calories with NEAT than they do with the calorie burn from the workout itself. People who move a lot during the day tend to find that their weight management is easier even without hitting the gym every single day. So, yes, working out and exercise it matters, but so does taking the stairs or parking farther from the store, just moving more in everyday life, because these calories they absolutely accumulate, and for most people they do account for more calories burned than formal workouts.

Speaker 1: 14:55

Now it's also important to talk about a few of the mistakes that people make and a few quick traps that people need to avoid. Number one is overestimating the calories you burn. Now, fitness trackers are great, but they can overestimate calories burned by 20 to 50 percent. Some people. What they do is they go on their treadmill for an hour and it says I burned 700 calories when in reality, you just burned 300. You just burned 300. What happens then is that people tend to be a little bit more generous with their calories at their next meal, saying I can afford to eat more because I just burned so much calories.

Speaker 1: 15:38

Now, that's a common trap that people need to be mindful of. These trackers, specifically the trackers that are wearables or, even worse, the trackers that are built into cardio machines, for example, are notoriously not precise and that often leads to reward eating. The concept of I worked out, so I earned this mindset can undo the whole calorie deficit from your workout and for some people, when you combine that with the increase in appetite, it actually tips them over the balance and they eat too many calories and they end up not even losing any weight. And there are actually reported cases of people who exercise and end up gaining weight because they eat unhealthy, calorie dense foods, because of the increase in hunger that they have through exercising. And also the most common mistake and a very important one is simple Going too hard too soon. People are burning out or getting injured just because they're ego lifting or ego running. It's much better to go slow and to sustain over the long term than to try to break personal best or Olympic records during your first few months of working out. The goal is to focus on building habits that you can maintain for years, not just over weeks Right on Now. It's very important to recognize that exercise is great, but on its own it's not a silver bullet for weight loss, but it's a critical piece of the long-term puzzle. Exercise is great for regulating hormones and regulating appetite and improving sleep and resilience, stress management and all of these things play a very important role in anyone's weight loss journey.

Speaker 1: 17:41

Now, if you pair that with healthy eating, you've got a very powerful one-two punch. You need to think of exercise less as a way of punishing yourself for eating and more as a way of building a stronger, healthier and more energetic body. We get to exercise. It is a privilege moving our body, but if you're starting from scratch. My advice is simple Pick something you actually enjoy Walking, dancing, hiking, lifting, swimming, jogging.

Speaker 1: 18:18

I do calisthenics, I do rock climbing, I run, I bike, I row, I lift. I love all forms of movement and that's why I'm able to do it consistently. If my shoulder hurts from a lifting session, well I run, and if my ankle hurts from a running session, well I do something else. And this way I'm capable of doing it consistently, and that's why, over the last 20 years of working out at least five or six days per week, I've been able to add great variety to my workouts. So to keep them fun.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Now your body will thank you, not just in the changes in your weight, but with better mood, better energy, better sleep and, basically, better resilience against chronic diseases. Right on. Thanks so much, friends. If this helped you rethink how exercise will fit in your life and with your weight goals, share it with someone who's been grinding away on a treadmill wondering why the scale isn't budging. Check out my website or all my resources to find out more. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you in the next episode. Peace, hey, everyone. Go check out my website, plantbaseddoctorjulescom to find free downloadable resources and remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr Jules Cormier, and on YouTube at Plant Based Dr Jules.