You can't exercise enough

A lot of people tell me they exercise because they like to eat.  While commendable, that's not advisable.  If you happen to be younger (let's say under 35), you can probably get away with that for a time because your body is still in growth and burning calorie mode (for the most part).

But that's not true of everyone under 35 and is not necessarily true if you are over 35.  You see, as you age your muscle starts to leave you.  Muscle is expensive to maintain and your body would rather get rid of it (to a point) than have to maintain it.  Maintenance is hard work and requires the body to do things the mind doesn't always want to do.

Don't get me wrong...the muscle doesn't have to leave, but if there's not reason for it to stay around, your body will jettison the muscle like spoiled milk.  If the muscle has a reason to stick around (i.e. working out, doing manual labor, etc.) it will and does require additional nutrients and calories.  But here's the kicker: it doesn't require THAT much more! 

How much more your body require depends in large part how much muscle it has to maintain and how much additional activity you are doing.  The more muscle you have the more calories you burn (even just sitting around).  The more activity you do, the more calories you burn.  Depending on the activity, you may continue burning calories several hours after the activity has ended.

So how many more calories does working out allow you to burn?  Do you know how many calories you burn during your workout?  If not, figure it out.  That will tell you what your approximate calorie expenditure is in addition to your normal every day activities.  Based on my experience at the club most people burn between 500-800 calories during a typical workout.  Some more, some less.

That's usually after an hour long workout.  So if you don't do anything more than your normal activities for the rest of the day, you might (wrongly) assume you could eat an additional 500-800 calories without gaining weight.  That's a nice idea, but I don't believe that holds true for most people. 

If that were the case, you'd see more people not gaining weight since they are exercising.  That couldn't be further from the truth.  There are several reasons why this the case:

1. You consume way more than the 500-800 calories you burned.
2. You really aren't burning the amount of calories you think you are during exercise.
3. Your body isn't as efficient using the calories you ingested and still wants to store the energy.
4. It takes one hour to burn 500-800 calories and five minutes to consume 500-800 calories.

There are sub-reasons to each of these and I could go into a lot more detail to explain each one of these...and if you are interested leave me a comment and I'll respond to you.  Suffice to say for now you probably fall into one of the above reasons.  Most of you fall into reason #4...and you can't exercise enough to get the extra calories out of your system; there's not enough time in the day!

The best way to approach this is to keep everything in moderation.  Don't lull yourself into believing that you can eat what you want because you exercise.  Only people with finely tuned bodies can get away with eating what they want...but it even catches up with them if they try to do it too long.  Keep your eating levels constant even though you are exercising.  You'll do better in the long run.