What If (Almost)Everything They Told You About Exercise Was Wrong?

Thanks, Covid! My butt is now the size of a Winnebago.

Before moving to Italy, I was a group fitness instructor and personal trainer in Houston, Texas.

For years I did this, teaching sixteen mat Pilates, weight lifting, and Yoga classes a week.

They weren’t easy classes. Not only did I have a citywide reputation for the best kind of brutality, I never asked my students to do anything I didn’t do myself. If that meant popping one-hundred and fifty squats three times a day, I did it with a smile on my face. Romanian deadlifts, planks, crunches, pushups, I breezed through them all while encouraging the troops to push themselves just a little bit harder.

A conditioned athlete I was, certainly. But I was never skinny.

At least, not skinny in the way a person might expect an instructor to look after all that sweaty, nausea-inducing pain. “I took one look at you and thought, great, this should be a class I can sleep through,” students would often tell me. “And then you proceeded to kick my ass into a brand new shape.”

In the interests of full disclosure, I have always been a curvy girl—short, endomorphic, big boobs, gains weight easily. I have Hashimoto’s Disease, which basically means that my thyroid, unlike me, is tragically underactive. I’m over forty and have two kids. But I’m not an emotional eater—in fact, I mostly hate the bother of eating. I’d rather do other things. So again, you’d think a woman who worked THAT hard at the gym, ate vegetarian, eschewed all sodas, alcohol, and most desserts, would be thin as a rail, right?

Wrong.

If I calorie restricted, which I did at times, I wasn’t able to do the physical work. Your body’s like a mule—it’s not going to pull the plow if you don’t feed it. If I didn’t calorie restrict, I wouldn’t gain weight, but I wasn’t losing it either.

Baffled, I changed endocrinologists. He was a well-intentioned man, but over-prescribed my thyroid medication, which is potentially dangerous. I did, indeed, lose weight for a time. As soon as we corrected the dosage, my weight shot back up, although I was doing nothing different.

I felt cheated. Everything I’d been told about eating healthy and exercise turned out to be fraudulent, or at the very least, not applicable to me. I had more than a few friends who worked half as hard and stuffed their faces with curly fries, all while airily complaining they’d had to “bump up” to a size five jeans.

Only recently have I been reading articles that confirm what I suspected all along: exercise is necessary for your mental and physical health, but it’s not really an effective weight-loss tool. And if you’re exercising in an attempt to erase the cake pops you ate at Starbie’s? You can forget it.

You get way less caloric mileage out of your workout than you realize. Your smartphone app is a shameless liar. Activity trackers fail to take into account that calories aren’t burned by everybody in the same way. Also, people who hate exercising tend to reward themselves afterward with more calories than they could ever burn at the gym.

That’s not to say exercise doesn’t have a role in our collective attempts to shed the Covid avoir du poids. As a nation, we have, on average, gained twenty-nine pounds this past year. We’ve been cooped up, bored, anxious, and close to the refrigerator. It was probably inevitable.

So if exercise isn’t the answer, what is?

For most of us, any diet that limits the number of calories we consume is the key. It all boils down to simple math: calories in mustn’t exceed calories expended. It should be a diet that’s balanced, and just as importantly, one you can live with over the long term.

There’s something else you need to remember. You and everybody else on this planet has a finite amount of willpower. You can only diet so long before your willpower simply stalls out. The next thing you know, you’re on your third piece of birthday cake, and it’s not even your birthday. Then you’re off and running, telling yourself it doesn’t matter, you blew it, might as well have the double fajitas.

Calorie restriction is fine up to a point, but I’m not a big believer in specific food restrictions. Nor am I a proponent of skipping meals or meal replacement shakes (unless you’re one of the glorious few who can have them without feeling deprived).

And that’s the secret to successful weight loss. NOT FEELING DEPRIVED. If giving up your glass of wine after dinner makes you miserable, don’t give it up. Have a sweet tooth? Cut yourself one thin slice of cake and savor every bite. Know thyself. Know thy limits. Give thyself one glorious “cheat meal” per week where you eat, within reason, some of the foods you’ve been missing the most. Will it slow your weight loss progress? Maybe, maybe not. Everyone’s different. But what it gives you is the freedom to enjoy food without restriction, it re-fluffs your willpower, and most importantly, it enables you to keep going, because chances are, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to watch your calories forever.

I will go so far as to say it’s not entirely what we eat, but how much we eat that puts pounds on and takes pounds off. Years ago, singer Dolly Parton said about her recent weight loss, “I don’t deprive myself of anything, not even chocolate cake. I let myself eat a tablespoon’s worth of whatever I want, and that’s how to keep from going crazy.”

So, find what works for you. Make food choices you can live with, not just a few months while you’re losing weight, but as a more or less permanent lifestyle.

The only thing worse than gaining weight is gaining weight that was previous lost. Man, do I hate that.

What I don’t hate: this scale (https://www.myshapa.com/)that gives you a color instead of a number. Green means you’re maintaining your weight, gray means you’re gaining, teal means you’re losing. I’m less reluctant to weigh myself now that I’m not staring at a number that feels arbitrary and mean and fails to reflect my genuine efforts to lose weight.

Last but not least. And I’m so passionate about this topic, I promise to write more on it soon.

You don’t owe it to anybody to be skinny or to “look good.”

Thank all the goddesses, we live in an age where real progress in being made in terms of body diversity, beauty diversity, and racial and gender diversity. Lest you think I’m being hypocritical here, I’m not. As a fitness professional, I recognize that healthy comes in many different sizes, not just one. But you are lighter on your feet and your joints are less creaky when you weigh less. That’s just physics. Everybody has that sweet spot where he or she looks good and feels good. That’s what I want for all of us, not some waifish, Madison Avenue-inspired fantasy of heroin chic.

Do you have any tips on losing or maintaining your weight? If so, I’d like to hear them!