Stop Exercising Just to Lose Weight

Train for this reason instead

Egis R.
4 min readAug 23

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Weight loss is the primary motivation for exercise for most people. This is a big fugging problem because not losing weight is one of the main reasons why many people stop exercising (source):

For the overweight and obese women in this study, weight loss was the primary motivation for physical activity participation. Subsequently, these women perceived a failure to lose weight as strongly affecting their motivation to continue or re-engage in physical activity. <…> Of the 5 participants who dropped out of the exercise program during the 12 weeks, 4 had not lost weight.
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Sure, you might lose some weight at the beginning but at some point, weight loss will stop. It always does (otherwise, you would…die). And what happens when the scale stops moving? Well, you go “godfuckingdammit what’s goin’ on here?” and you stop exercising because it no longer delivers the results for which you started to exercise in the first place.

The reason for this is your attitude toward exercise — you exercise to lose weight. If that’s the only reason you do it, it will always be this chore you have to do to lose weight. You are doomed with a capital You’re Fucked.

This is why many of the subjects in the above study reported discontinuing their exercise programs when weight loss was not forthcoming.

This is also why a European Union-wide survey found that a quarter of respondents thought that “unless physical activity resulted in weight loss, they were not really benefiting from it.”

Listen…

Exercise is not a reliable tool for losing weight and this was demonstrated in a 2011 systematic review and meta-analysis:

Isolated aerobic exercise and weight loss: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
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Let’s take me as an example sitting at 99 kg or 218 lbs in the imperial system which, as Tom Segura once said, sucks a dead dog’s dick on a dusty driveway. Anyway. If I weight trained 4x/week for a total of 4 hours/week, I would burn around 1,800 kcal/week (based on metabolic equivalents). And that is assuming vigorous effort which most people don’t train with. Most people train with light intensity which would slash that number in half.

That is not enough to move the scale. To see the scale move, I would have to lift weights closer to 8 hours/week. My head hurts after…

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Egis R.

I’m Egis, an online weight loss coach who has heightened BS sensors for fitness & nutrition. Only evidence-based & sustainable fat loss. www.absscience.com