This is my first column of spring. When I hear spring, my mind is already skipping ahead to summer. But after a winter of nothing but baggy jeans and sweatshirts, I'm not so sure my body is ready for summer. This is the time of year people resolve to eat nothing but cottage cheese and coffee for the next two months. As much as we might wish that was the secret to looking hot in shorts, we all know that's not the case. But why not?
First and most obviously, bad habits are hard to break and good habits are hard to start. It has taken time to develop your current eating patterns, so you can't change them overnight. After all winter on that couch, it's hard to get moving again.
Second, and here's the bad news, exercise itself does not cause weight loss. Most people can't eat whatever they want and lose weight at the gym. Exercise has a multitude of very real health benefits -- including helping with weight maintenance. But unless you're spending several hours a day at the gym (which is just as worrisome as never exercising), you won't see appreciable weight loss. It is much easier to create a calorie deficit by cutting your intake than to create that same calorie deficit by burning it through exercise. Think about it: Depending on your size, half an hour on the treadmill at six miles per hour will burn about 300 calories. That covers your fries from McDonald's or your cheeseburger, but not both. So to hit that magic 3,500 calories per week mark (i.e. a 1 pound weight loss), you can either decrease your daily consumption by 500 calories or burn 500 calories every day at the gym. And no recovering couch potato is willing to hit the gym seven days a week.
Third, a lot of people start out too strong. We've all seen it, all done it. If your diet consists of 1,000 calories per day, you're most likely not getting your appropriate caloric intake. Your body will complain. In reality, it's not that hard to limit yourself to 1,000 calories in one day. What is hard to do is to sustain that level of intake (and if you can, that may be a different health problem). But because you've tasted sugar, fat, carbohydrates or whatever it was you were avoiding, deprivation is that much more painful.
You'll also notice that whatever weight loss achieved can be undone by one or two days back at your old habits -- decreasing your motivation to keep dieting. This is because when you're starving yourself, your body releases its sugar stores. One of these storage sites is the liver, which stores a form of sugar called glycogen. Glycogen, however, is stored with a lot of water (up to a 3:1 ratio of water to glycogen). So much of that early weight loss is simply what you pee out. (This explains the gratifying early success of high-protein diets.) But the instant your body gets enough sugar, the liver hungrily restocks its stores of glycogen -- and the concomitant water -- leaving you right where you started.
In the same vein, it's easy to exercise three or four days in a row. But the early zeal fades and it's easy to let a day slide. Then two. Then three. Additionally, strenuous workouts every day, if you're not ready for them, are incredibly taxing on the body. You run every day for a week and all of a sudden your shins hurt when you walk, you have blisters all over your heels and you're probably hungrier than usual, which can quickly erase any caloric benefit you gained from that exercise. You start lifting weights that you've never lifted before and, oops, pulled a muscle, leaving you unable to work out for the next couple of weeks.
I'm not saying don't exercise or don't diet. Exercise confers plenty of actual benefits other than weight loss, and if you're like the two-thirds of the American population that is overweight, it probably wouldn't hurt to go on a diet. It's clichéd but true -- all things should be in moderation. Even if your legs aren't shorts-perfect by May, by starting gradually and building up you have a better chance of being shorts-perfect by August. And who doesn't want to start out the school year hot and healthy?
Anna is a University Medical student. She can be reached at asedney@cavalierdaily.com.
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