Why Am I Continuing to Gain Weight While Exercising?
By: Melissa Dubois
Gym memberships and excessive exercise is not the total solution to weight loss. Daily exercise can improve physical fitness and promote a person’s overall health, but it’s not the main determining factor in body fat reduction. In fact, many who rely on exercise alone often find themselves gaining more weight in the long run.
Exercise Expenditure and Diet
Exercising expends the body’s energy, often leading towards increased hunger in response. While this is in response to an elevated metabolism and is a healthy reaction, it often leads to excessive eating. Even with the calorie-burning physical expenditure, it is quite easy to overeat beyond your daily necessity. Eating in excessive amounts in combination with strenuous exercise may be detrimental to your goals in the long run.
Exercise and Nutrition: The Synergistic Relationship
Physical exercise is truly a great thing, but in order for its effect to fully come to fruition, it must be complimented with a proper nutritional regimentation. You could exercise for hours and hours, and see minimal results if your diet is poorly constructed.
Most professional athletes will tell you that diet is responsible for 85% or more of the results you see. It doesn’t come down to carbohydrates verses fats, either. Nutrition is much more intricate than fad diet creators would have you think.
Nutritional deficiencies distract the body from performing its task. Some nutritional deficiencies lead to diseases or extreme conditions, letting the body know that the deficiency is present. When a nutritional deficiency is present, the body cannot focus on losing weight or gaining muscle. Enhancing your diet with high quality superfoods and supplements can help you to fight nutritional deficiencies.
Toxic Overload
Similar to nutritional deficiencies, if the body is overloaded with toxins, then it simply cannot focus on any other tasks. Trans fat builds layers of plastic-like substance around the organs, and high-fructose corn syrup contains deadly mercury. When your body is dealing with these chemical abominations, it has no time for weight loss. A stressed body is an unhealthy body.
Eliminating processed food from your diet (eating high quality organic food in its place), along with anything that contains toxic additives such as MSG, aspartame, high-fructose corn syrup, or trans fat, will lead to astronomical changes in your physique.
Knowing Your Body
Knowing your body is a challenging task, but it can be done through monitoring how your body responds to different techniques. Change your diet, create an exercise routine that incorporates weight lifting (for optimal metabolic function even if you are female!), and see what your body does. Try getting more sun does optimizing your vitamin D levels solve the problem? Your body is giving you the answer, you just have to decode it.
Exercise alone will not cause weight loss. It is extremely beneficial and should its benefits should be experienced by everyone, but without proper eating habits it will simply not be the weight loss miracle you are looking for.
