Confessions of a Startled Woman

Since I switched to a county recreation center for moving my molecules, I’ve been fortunate blessed to meet many women from different walks than mine. A community center is by design a melting pot and, despite our being in suburbia, it remains so. I see families arriving with swim suits and towels for the indoor pool, senior couples who come together and split to use the weight or cardio room or walk together on the track upstairs. Young moms drop off small children and come to a class for an hour of mommy time. Women like me take water classes, yoga, cycling, and Pilates, or work with a personal trainer.

I’m finding the classes I enjoy most are taught by Lisa Condie, a certified fitness instructor with more than 20 years of encouraging people. I take the Keep Moving class (which she initiated) and now, the BeamFit class with her. She creates a sense

I liked my own first class on the Beam!

of community in each of her classes and they are full–with everyone from teens to men and women my parents’ age.

One day, as we were doing the cool down in Keep Moving, she mentioned the importance of such activity as we’d just completed–that which is not so murderous as to render you incapable of moving about for the rest of the day, yet provides a benefit. We spoke after and I asked her to blog her thoughts.

This is Part One: The Problem. I’m looking forward to your feedback.

Confessions of a Fitness Instructor:

I see them come to class year after year.

I see them pedal and run steps to nowhere in the gym…lift, kick and crunch…year after year, and yet each of them look just the same as they did when they began their “exercise program”.  WHY??

Even more than the “regulars”, I see the “drop ins”.  They may drop in for a month, three months, even six…but then, they disappear.  Their bodies didn’t change.  The workout was hard…and no matter how perky that instructor’s voice remained, the workout was not fun.  And their muscles ached.  And places that they didn’t even know they had muscles, ached.  And still the scale did not go down, jeans did not zip up, and motivation to exercise ran out. What went wrong??

I am writing to tell you the “rest of the story”…the ugly mathematics of caloric expenditure.  I am going to explain why exercise alone will not make you thin.  By now you are probably thinking I’m a real downer…and who invited me to the party anyway??  Fear not–there is good news ahead.

We are a population that knows, by now, that exercise is necessary for a healthy body.  Most of us grasp the rudiments of weight gain and loss: energy into your body (calories) must be burned off through movement, or stored as fat.  The theory is that it is possible to burn more calories than you take in, resulting in weight loss.  The reality is, you must do a lot more exercise than most people realize.  An hour of spinning (hard, aerobic exercise) burns off one donut.  The end, that’s all.  However, exercise DOES work.  By understanding a few more concepts of behavior and science, you CAN make it work for you.

The Reward System:

In a recent study at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr. Timothy Church, women were divided into four groups.  For six months, three of the groups had an exercise regime of varying amounts of time.  The fourth group had no exercise. Food was not regulated. At the end of the study, there was no significant change in the weight of any group.  In the three groups of exercisers, ALL had adjusted their food intake such that they lost no weight.  They “self-rewarded” their good job at the gym.  The compensated and celebrated all their hard work away.

I Did That Already:
We tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of our day and assume that one hour at the gym is sufficient.  In a recent article from the American Council on Exercise, they describe a new type of athlete—the “couch potato athlete”. Relentless at the gym, and exhausted the rest of the day.  Natural activity for the day is over.  Rather than going up and down stairs, or out to the mailbox, throwing the ball for a pet, all activity stops!  We “did that already”…..

Evidence is emerging that an intense workout in the gym is actually less effective than a more gentle approach in terms of weight loss.  Stay tuned…I’ll tell you all about it!

‹

My little green dotter

P.S. Me, again. What Lisa is going to tell us next time fits so well with my affection for the DirectLife Activity Monitor. Yes, I am still enamored with getting green dots.