There’s a popular and not so popular approach to slimming that says you can eat anything so long as you exercise and sweat off those calories. So just like the zebra song, does a Zebra have white stripes or black stripes, do we eat more because we go to the gym, or do we go to the gym to eat more?
Aside from the occasional indulgence, many of us at one time in the past have had a big meal and headed to the local gym for an over-the-top, full-blown heavy breathing workout session.
A lot of people say things like “it’s fine to eat some junk because I went to the gym today,” or “It won’t affect me if I have that cake because I’m a gym dog!” So we’ve earned a treat and decide to eat a double sloppy burger chased by an apple fritter as a reward.
Not the best plan, says Alex McComber, The Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project Community Advisor and Researcher.
“We continue to need a balance of all food groups,” adding that vegetables is a great choice because they are buff with large amounts of vitamins and nutrients.
Exercise on a regular basis is a great way to improve your overall health and it brings about a number of positive changes that can enhance your quality of life. It seems, however, most of us are not interested in these changes. Exercise is the green light to pig out, and that means processed foods.
“Processed food is still crap with the added preservatives, high levels of salts and added sugars and fats will still do us no good in the long run,” says McComber.
One problem is that a treat may house more calories than you think. This is complicated when you consider you’re probably burning off fewer calories than you think.
So, one of my favourites was a big bag of Lay’s Barbecue-flavoured potato chips with 230 calories per serving, and who eats a serving? A bag is between 500 and 1000 calories, but who knows? On average, factoring in treadmill pace, height and weight, a person may, and I’m being generous here, burn 500-600 calories. That’s a good deal of extra work.
In 2014, health journalist Michael Mosley shocked and shook the fitness world warning that exercise can actually cause us to gain weight. “The key problem is that we reward ourselves with ‘treats’ after exercise or have the “I’ve been to the gym, so I can eat what I want mentality,” he said during a BBC interview about his claims in the 2012 documentary The Truth About Exercise.
For many people, the whole objective of going to the gym, or exercising more, is to lose weight, yet eating up to what you burn won’t make this happen.
