Why going to the gym is not enough to lose weight?

There is a common misconception that going to the gym 3-4 times per week is all you needed to lose weight.

I wish that would be true but I am sorry to tell you it just doesn’t work like that. Going to the gym will most definitely help you but not from a calorie burn perspective.

In this article, I want to explain why you will need to do more than go to the gym 3-4 times per week if you want to lose fat. Don’t worry that doesn’t mean you need to go to the gym more. The solution is quite simple.

Let’s look at Total Daily Energy Expenditure also known as TDEE. This is simply how much energy you burn in a day and from where that “burn” is coming from.

In this post, I want to cover what can you expect in the first few weeks of dieting, in the middle of it and at the end of your diet.

Image source

As you can see there are a few components of total daily energy expenditure. Let’s quickly go through each one of them.

Basal metabolic rate – BMR makes up the largest part of our total energy needs. This is simply the amount of energy we need to live day to day. BMR will be the energy needed for digestion, breathing, brain function, and maintaining the tissues (muscles). The last part is also why our BMR decreases when we lose weight and increases when we gain weight.

Non-exercise activity thermogenesis – NEAT as the name suggests is the energy that we burn with an activity that is not purposeful exercise. Think of things like walking, running errands, fidgeting, or doing yard work, it is any activity that is not “planned”. This is the area that we have the most influence over and will be an important element we will look at later.

Thermic effect of food – TEF is the energy needed to break down, absorb and metabolize food. Different macronutrients will have a different thermic effect, protein being the highest. An important thing to know is as you eat less this will be reduced and vice versa eating more will increase the number of calories you burn eating, digesting and assimilating food.

Exercise activity thermogenesis – EAT is the energy we burn when exercising. The more exercise we do the more we burn. As you can see we really don’t burn that many calories with exercise. The bigger we are the more we burn during exercise and the opposite. Imagine 115 – pound person doing a set of bodyweight lunges versus a 225 – pound person. Who will burn more calories doing that work?

Resting energy expenditure – REE

Non-resting energy expenditure – NREE

Now that you understand all the terms in the above photo let’s look at why going to the gym for 60-90min three to four times per week just won’t cut it.

By relying on the gym to get you shredded you are relying on the smallest part of your daily expenditure to make a difference, and not just that you are relying on that small part only 3-4 times per week. By using common sense you can see that you would need to workout a lot. The problem with that is you have limited amount of time you can dedicate to the gym before you also need to live your life.

What is the solution?

Instead of counting on the top 10% to make a difference let’s manipulate the bottom 90% to do the work for you. We can skip the thermic effect of food (TEF), the bang for your buck on this is just as negligible as counting on gym time to help you lose weight.

This leaves you with BMR and NEAT. The only way that you can really affect BMR and make it work for you is if there is more of you to maintain, that is the reason why people that carry around a lot of muscle mass generally have an easier time losing fat and they can do that at higher calories than someone that has less muscle mass. Increasing your BMR might be a viable strategy but that is not something that you can do overnight.

That leaves us with the second biggest calorie-burning component and one that we can influence the most, your non-exercise activity (NEAT).

We live in an increasingly sedentary world. There is almost nothing that can’t be done seated these days. You can order food to your door steps, Amazon Prime pretty much anything, and for the things that you do need to go out, you can go to drive-through. Unless you are a hands-on worker your work is probably behind a computer and most of the entertainment these days is consumed sitting.

I challenge you to look at your day and see how much activity you really get outside of the planned visits to the gym. I am willing to bet you will be surprised by how little you move.

The good thing about it is that you have the power to change that. You can live a more active lifestyle and leverage NEAT to your advantage. I might be focusing on fat loss here but living a more active lifestyle comes with a plethora of health benefits that go beyond looking jacked.

Here are three simple things you can do right now:

1. Increase your step count. A good starting point is 8-10k steps per day. For long-term success and weight maintenance, you are probably looking at 10-14k/day.

2. Be less lazy. This might sound harsh but that’s the reality. Our society and environment are making us lazier whether we like it or not. Park further from the grocery store, walk the dog more often and use stairs instead of elevators. Those might seem like small things but believe me, small things that are done for a long time add up to a big lasting change.

3. Pick up hobbies that require you to move. Soccer with the boys, dancing class with the girls, join a running group, hike on the weekends.

What about the gym?

I hope that by now you can see that trying to exercise for fat loss is just not going to work. Does that mean that you shouldn’t exercise? Absolutely not. Resistance training has immense benefits for your body beyond looking jacked. Obviously, I am biased, but I do believe everyone should be lifting weights in some shape or form.

There are two benefits of lifting weights depending on which stage of body transformation are you in.

If you are in the fat loss phase – then lifting weights will help you gain (in some cases), maintain or minimize muscle loss while in a calorie deficit. Muscles require a lot of energy to maintain (remember BMR) and the rule “use it or lose it” applies well here. When in calorie deficit there is less energy to sustain you, that’s the reason you burn stored body fat. Less energy means the body will try to get rid of things that require lots of energy, your hard-earned muscles. Lifting weights prevents that.

If you are in muscle building phase aka bulking – then lifting weight will provide your muscles with a stimulus to grow and get stronger. Without lifting weight and just eating more (calorie surplus) you would gain fat.

To summarize. Exercise, especially lifting weights is a poor way of burning calories but a great way to build muscles and look jacked, not to mention all the other health benefits that come with it. Your nutrition and non-exercise activity are the main leavers you should manipulate when it comes to weight gain or weight loss.

Thank you for reading!

-Anze

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