Let me start by saying that I so wish this Myth were true. Honestly! It would make everybody’s life so much easier: do some cardio three times a week, little bit of yoga or zumba here and there, and voilà! We could hit the city with our girlfriends every Saturday, drink all the daiquiris/margaritas/liquid calories that we fancied, eat all the sushi and cake we desired, and keep our skinny jeans on.
As you might know by now, gorgeous, this does not happen.
Lots of exercise + delicious food = gorgeous slim body
We exercise till we drop, we count calories of every single bite we put in or near our mouths, and when we get on the scale, the numbers prove one more time that our sophisticated math equation is awfully flawed.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is that, if we exercise too much, our body is under stress, and it will hang on to every single morceau of calories as it would hang for dear life. This is Biology 101: we are the children of years of evolution, and way down the road in Flintstone times, a lot of calorie burning meant most likely famine. So our bodies hung on to every bit of food available, maximized its absorption and storing whatever was left over in our hips.
Sadly, our sedentary, modern day bodies are almost identically programmed as Fred and Wilma’s, so when we exercise too much we might be creating the opposite effect of what we’re aiming for.
The second reason for our flawed math equation is what I call the Burning Bananas Lesson, and in my experience this is what happens 99% of the time to 99% of women.
The story goes like this: many, many years ago, when I was a young and broke college student, I had begun to get a bit of a muffin top. My options were limited to either losing the flab or buying new clothes – I had tried going around campus with almost unzipped pants and that did not work as well as I had anticipated -, so I joined the school gym for free.
For the next two weeks, I had a blast. I was working out every day! For thirty minutes! Me, the couch potato, moving on the elliptical machine! I felt in heaven. Strangely enough, though, my clothes started to get tighter, not loser.
Truth be told, since I was working out, I had also adjusted my food intake a little bit. If I was sweating like a pig that must mean I could eat like one, right?
Wrong.
When I mentioned my dilemma to my vegan roommate, she answered very matter of fact: “Let’s see…30 minutes on the elliptical machine equal about 100 calories, which is about… a banana”.
“So you’re telling me that every time I work out, I’m ONLY burning ONE banana?”
“Uh…yes. That’s good, though”.
True, that would have been good if I only ate a banana a day. Alas, I was eating a little bit more than that. In fact, since I was working out, I was gulping down half the banana jungle. (Note to self: have you ever seen a skinny gorilla?)
My workout enthusiasm lasted no more than a couple of weeks. I thought that exercising would give me the free pass to eat anything I wanted, in the amounts that I wanted, and it was hard to admit that I had been fooling myself. Once I realized that I was using exercise as an excuse to binge, my strategy backfired. I tried to exercise more and alter my diet, but it felt really depressing to be counting calories and minding portion sizes all day long.
Instead of using exercising as a means to be in tune with my body, I got attuned to my binges. Instead of listening to my feelings about food and body image, I gave in to my fears of depravation, gulping every single slice of cake that came under my radar just because I had an excuse to do so – hey, I work out! And once guilt and pounds kept piling on, I punished myself by both exercising and dieting.
So my dear, next time you need an excuse to diet, over exercise or overeat, please remember yours truly burning bananas. You deserve so much better . I’ll toast to that with my girlfriends next Saturday evening.
