Trying to control your body weight with exercise can be exhausting.  I encourage you not to do that.  I encourage you to use exercise for your mental and physical well being instead.  I grieve the years I wasted misusing exercise.  I used to try to do what felt most intense and what made me sweat the most in order to feel good about myself, my diet, and my body.  I hated exercise.  I categorized exercise into "good" and "bad" like I did food.  "Good" exercise was exercise that made me sweat a lot.  "Bad" or "ineffective" exercise was things like walking or stretching -- exercise that didn't make me sweat.

I connected exercise with losing weight which sent me on a rollercoaster for 23 years.  Surprise -- I never landed at what I deemed an "acceptable" weight.

Why am I encouraging you not to use exercise to control your weight?  Because it doesn't work long term. 

First of all, exercise depletes willpower.  Every time you make a decision or expend some kind of focus, your willpower gets tapped.  We only have a small amount of willpower available at a time -- about 15 minutes.  When you start an exercise program, your willpower drains and you likely won't have any left to decide how or what to eat.  I ended up not making great food choices most of the time when I was hooked on exercise.

Secondly, the more you exercise, the hungrier you get.  This stirs up all kinds of food chatter in the mind.  This is exactly what we are trying to avoid -- we are trying to build a brain that doesn't obsess about what and how much to eat.  You likely will fall into an "I've exercised so I can eat" mentality and end up overeating.

Thirdly, when you exercise and this exercise regime is not an ingrained habit, it is much harder to build automatic habits with your food because you are splitting your focus.  Remember, we only have 15 minutes of willpower on board and it gets tapped out readily.

Lastly, I never want to have to exercise in order to be a certain size because what if I get injured?  What if I'm not able to exercise for a long period of time?  What if I'm on holidays and just don't feel like exercising?  I just don't want to be married to a certain kind of exercise for an aesthetic purpose.

I invite you to uncouple exercise and body weight.

Until next time,