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A Thin Cut
By Dr. B. Ramana
What exercises will make me slim?
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This question reflects one of the big myths of weight loss. It is not your workout that will make you thin.
Do you imagine that what you do in the gym for one hour is going to undo what you do in the other 23 hours in a day?
I know young men who drink buckets of whisky and eat pizzas every other day, and who imagine their belly has shrunk by one inch on account of their gym workout over the next three days. “Do I look thinner, Doc?” one such man would say, sucking in his breath, almost blue in the face were it not for his skin color coming in the way.
What does science say? It has been shown repeatedly that the most important (or even the only way) to get thinner is to incur a caloric deficit. This means you eat fewer calories than you burn.
While an hour of exercise can burn anywhere from 100 to 300 calories (usually--though people always overestimate this), a meal or snack (say a burger, Coke and fries) can set you back by up to 1500-2000 calories!
A samosa and jalebi feast at your favorite chat shop after the Sunday morning walk in the park(where you probably burned all of an impressive 100 calories) could give you around 800 to 1500 calories (depending on how deeply you dug into the stock of the shop). So, you tell me, in which instance can you out-train or out-exercise a bad diet? Not enough logic, you say? Let us take things to an extreme.
A 65 kg marathon runner, running 42 kilometers, burns around 2600 calories. Every marathon runner, as we know, drink sports drinks, energy drinks or sugary water all the way till the end. If we average several drinks, each amounting to 200 -300 calories (this is variable) the intake of these calories adds at least 1000 to 1500 calories.
In effect, the marathon runner, at this moment of calculation, has run 42 kilometers and burnt off around 1000 calories plus/minus change. If you have ever known marathon runners, they take a lot of carbohydrates both before and after the run. So, it is not hard to imagine a single meal wiping out this caloric deficit!
In short, you could run a marathon for 42 kilometers and not lose one ounce of fat! The reason is simple: we all eat more than we need. Address your diet, and weight loss is achievable. Not otherwise. So, as an exercise freak myself, why am I looking like I am trashing it? I am not. I am simply pointing out that for exercise to help you look smart, slim and muscular (or toned, if you wish to use that word), you need to attack your over-eating. Exercise is fantastic for many reasons, but let’s keep things in perspective
(Dr. B. Ramana is a Bariatric Surgeon at BMI Kolkata. He can be reached at rambodoc@gmail.com, website:http://www.bmi-india.com, blog: http://rambodoc.wordpress.com) |
