There is nothing worse than trying super hard, or feeling like you are, and getting nowhere. Many people go to the gym with dedication to lose weight and/or tone up and they have minimum results. Why is that?

Article by Bella Trost

Weight loss happens by calorie deficit. To create a calorie deficit you actually have to cut your calories. Doing this by exercising, as far as I know, is almost impossible. First of all, exercise increases hunger. Secondly, with training it is very hard to burn a meaningful amount of calories.

Jogging for an hour may burn a few hundred calories but not many people who need to lose weight can (or should) jog for an hour at the time. What about HIIT or resistance training? They might be more effective calorie burners but again, an overweight person can hardly jump around and lift/throw/push heavy weights. To clarify here is an example: a Classic Magnum vanilla ice cream covered in Belgian chocolate contains 280 calories – that’s roughly 30 minutes of jogging. Your ice cream was just a snack or one of your snacks. On top of that you will have at least another 3-5 meals during the day. At some point you cannot just jog, hike, jump or lift your calories away.

I deeply believe in training. Exercising regularly has massive benefits to our physical and mental health but to use training as a tool for weight loss seems ineffective and brutal. It is hard to find time for training but it’s even harder to find more than 30-90 minutes a day – and you don’t just want to spend all your free time in the gym. Over exercising makes you tired, sore and after a while, unmotivated and burned out. And when you train while tired the chance of getting injured increases significantly.

So do you need to train? Yes, if you would like to maximize your health and if you want to have some muscle tone, definitely. But don’t kill yourself and all your time at the gym. Have a well managed diet instead – have an adequate amount of protein (crucial for building muscle and losing fat); stick to single ingredient, unprocessed foods (click here to read about the right grocery shopping); and use exercise as a boost.