You Can't Outsmart A Bad Diet

The desire to be healthier comes with a lot of moving parts.

It isn’t as easy as committing to a workout every single morning, especially if you’ve got weight loss goals. One of the most common things I hear people say a few weeks after adopting a new fitness regimen is, I haven’t lost any weight or I wish I felt healthier.

I can tell you right away that the majority of people that commit to even the most rigorous fitness programs do not see the results they’re looking forward to for one very simple reason.

Diet.

Commitment is a big word.

Committing to exercise and making adjustments to your daily routine are definitely important achievements and they’re not always easy, so I don’t like to take away from the hard work that goes into them. But in the same breath, it’s important to remember that overall health and fitness is not just about activity and exercise. If you want to see and feel real results, you have to pay attention to what you put into your body as much as you focus on how you’re going to burn it off (which is the wrong way to look at health anyway!).

A 360 approach.

You have to be willing to commit to making changes all around if you want to see long term results, which means taking a 360 approach to how you think about your well-being. What does that mean? It’s actually really simple. If you’re looking to achieve better health, you have to be mindful of your physical fitness, your eating habits, water intake and sleeping patterns.

You can’t outsmart a bad diet.

We’ve all comforted ourselves with the idea that if we eat a few slices of pizza one night, we can burn it all off through a couple hard hours of exercise and eating better in the days that follow. But there’s no such thing as outsmarting bad diet choices, especially if you’re making those choices on a regular basis. This is for a few reasons, the first being that it takes a lot more energy to work off calories that come from unhealthy foods. It might take you all of five minutes to devour something super greasy, but there’s zero correlation to how long it would take you to burn that off through exercise (let’s just say it would take way longer than an hour to burn 1,000 calories off with regular exercise.) When it comes to losing weight, you’re never going to burn more than what you eat, which is exactly why paying attention to diet is imperative to healthy weight loss.

Our bodies process different foods, differently.

Many people count calories - a ton, actually. It might work for some in theory, but the science isn’t sound. There’s a big difference in how our bodies break down healthy foods vs. unhealthy foods. Downing 500 ultra-processed calories has certain effects on our bodies, while eating 500 whole food calories is of course more beneficial to us for a number of reasons. Our bodies break down unhealthy foods in a way that doesn’t serve us well (think about how you feel after overindulging in fast food or junk). This is why calorie counting doesn’t really work - because we’re focusing on a specific number of calories in an effort to limit our intake of bad foods instead of the actual nutrients we’re ingesting. The real goal is to focus on what you should be eating (nutrient rich foods) instead of what you should be avoiding.

3 ways to help break the cycle.

There are three helpful ways to break the ‘eat junk and then exercise’ cycle. First, remember that there are so many amazing and delicious foods out there that you do like. You may have just forgotten because you’re surrounded by too much junk or because ordering in is easier than it’s ever been. Get rid of processed food options that make it difficult for the healthier choices to be the easy ones and refrain from bringing foods with zero nutrients into your home or wherever you spend the most time eating or preparing food. Focus on fruits, LOTS of vegetables, proteins, whole foods and healthy fats. Second, don’t overwhelm yourself. Make small changes on a consistent basis and you’ll find they impact you in the right way, longer term. More importantly, taking small steps won’t make you feel like you’re going cold turkey and like anything in life, practical changes (and expectations) when it comes to regulating your diet sets you up for success. Three, remember that treats really are treats. Whether you love ice cream or chocolate bars, making the decision to reward yourself with a sweet treat that you love occasionally means you’re less likely to binge. If your diet is healthy and balanced most of the time, the occasional indulgence isn’t going to throw you off the horse.

If you aren’t seeing the results you were expecting even after committing to an intense workout schedule, remember to think about what you’re eating, why you’re eating it and how important it is to accept that you can’t exercise off a bad diet.