image0What if the answer to your weight loss goals was in a spoonful of peanut butter?

Let’s talk about the frustration of not seeing weight loss results despite increasing your exercise efforts.

When you adjust your mindset on weight loss toward the most powerful strategy to address the objective, it becomes easier than you think.

You are swimming against the current when you rely primarily on increasing exercise efforts to trigger weight loss. To make things worse, people often get bogged down in worrying about carbs instead of calories.

It’s as simple as this: Calorie deficit. You have to eat in a calorie deficit to lose weight. A carb deficit is not the answer. Calories in, calories out. If the number of cals in (consumed) is less than the number of cals out (burned), you’ll lose weight. Period, end of the story. If you aren’t losing weight, you aren’t doing this. If you want to lose weight, do this.

If a spoonful of peanut butter is 200 calories and it takes 20 minutes of intense cycling to burn a spoonful of peanut butter, doesn’t it seem like an uphill battle to just keep adding exercise to achieve caloric deficit? You can do it, but do the math, 5 spoonfuls of peanut butter will take you an hour and a half of aggressive cycling to burn off. Who has an hour and a half to do aggressive cycling? I suppose some people do, and congratulations to you. Most people don’t.

Rather than figuring out how you’re going to do 90 minutes of cycling per day to finally tip the scales into a calorie deficit, how about you eat less peanut butter (figuratively speaking) and find a sustainable amount of exercise that feels good? This eliminates the frustrating place many people are in of trying to out-exercise your food intake. It’s a losing battle.

Turning the calorie dial down is a far more sustainable, efficient, and effective way to produce weight loss than to focus on cranking the giant exercise dial-up. If you look at the kitchen as the place where weight loss starts, and the gym as the place where health starts, you’ll finally be swimming with the current.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy DiFrancesco

Tim DiFrancesco, PT, DPT spent 6 seasons as the Head Strength & Conditioning Coach of the Los Angeles Lakers and is the founder of TD Athletes Edge. He is nationally renowned for his evidence-based and scientific approach to fitness, training, nutrition, and recovery for athletes and fitness enthusiasts.

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