I Worked Out For 343 Minutes This Week. Here’s What Happened.
January 20, 2021
As a part of my new year's resolution, I decided I wanted to get up and move around more. To put it to the test, this week I decided to walk 20-60 minutes every day on the treadmill.
Here’s how much time I spent walking, as well as the total calories I burnt after each session:
- Sunday: 60:03 minute walk, 303 calories
- Monday: 60:51 walk, 320 calories
- Tuesday: 20:10 walk, 107 calories
- Wednesday: 60:00 walk, 306 calories
- Thursday: 60:01 walk, 264 calories
- Friday: 63:20 walk, 324 calories
- Saturday: 20:02 walk, 70 calories
A whopping 343 minutes of exercise… and 1,694 calories burnt!
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
But what if I told you a single trip to McDonalds or even Red Lobster could have completely ruined all the work I put in and then some? Well, I’d be telling you the truth.
If I had eaten anything on this list, every minute of my workout would have been pointless.
Tragic isn’t it?
And yet, so many people think that they can lose weight with exercise alone.
You Can’t Work Off a Bad Diet
Working out… what is it good for anyway? In short, it’s good for everything. Working out combats health conditions, improves mood, boosts energy, promotes better sleep, increases your water intake… the list goes on and on.
And while it definitely helps with weight loss, the truth is… if you really want to lose weight, you can’t solely rely on working out. Recent studies show you need to burn off 3,000 calories a week to achieve weight loss without a diet change.
To put that into context, that’s a minimum of one hour of cardio, six days a week. And since you’d need to burn 500 calories per session, you’d need to walk at an intense incline or jog for that entire hour.
WOOF. That’s a lot of cardio. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to spend hours a week in the gym to lose weight.
Don’t get me wrong. Exercise is an essential part of your weight loss journey and overall health… so by no means should you cut it out. But if you really want to see quick and sustainable weight loss, you need to have the right balance of working out and eating healthy.
Keep reading to figure out how to get started.
Working out: Do What’s Realistic For You
When it comes to working out, you know your body and its limits. Don’t push yourself to achieve the unachievable. Instead, set smaller realistic goals as you get started.
Take my story for example. I know that running for an hour straight (or even ten minutes for that matter) is not sustainable, or achievable. Sure, I want to burn as many calories as possible! But not at the risk of injuring myself. I have a foot and a knee injury. So, walking is what is realistic for me if I want to exercise every day - which I do.
But in order to walk enough to burn 3,000 calories per week, I would need to be doing 1.5 hours a day… again, not realistic.
Look- if you can get up and walk for ten minutes three times a day… that’s awesome! Start small and build the habit of working out first. Once you’ve got the regular routine down, work your way up to bigger more ambitious goals.
Eating Healthy: For Faster Results, Fill Your Body With Nutrients
It’s not groundbreaking stuff… eating well helps you lose weight. You know that! But many people don’t know what kind of foods to eat to reduce cravings and feel full longer.
Here are some tips to start introducing into your diet:
Snacking… it’s okay if done right:
If there’s one place in your entire daily routine that can (and usually does) ruin your dietary goals, snacking is it. Snacks usually have little or no protein, little or no fiber, and can be so loaded with sugar that several days’ weight loss efforts can be ruined with a single poor choice.
But the right snacks can kill your appetite between meals and keep you from feeling deprived as you pursue your target weight. Look for snacks with high protein, fiber and even a little fat (which kills appetite far better and longer than carbs).
I use our line of HNS as my snacks. They are quick and easy to make, taste great and keep my energy levels high.
Read the label:
You have to be careful when you read labels, because many, if not most, nutritional ingredients are expensive. Therefore, companies use a technique called ‘fairy dust’ labeling. This is a sneaky trick where a product is loaded with a huge variety of nutritional ingredients - and subsequently a list a mile long of all sorts of neat-sounding, healthy stuff on board. But there’s a catch: the quantity of each of these dozens of ingredients tends to be so small that it costs almost nothing to put them in (and the body gets almost nothing out of ‘em), while the label looks like something designed by the gods of Mount Olympus.
Cook your own food:
We all love going out to eat occasionally. But we all know the typical plate size is much more than we need… and in the heat of the moment, that can be hard to resist! We also have no idea how much butter, salt, or oil is added to the food we order. Make no mistake. You can absolutely go out to eat. Just be sure to make healthier choices. Consider eating half the serving and taking the other half home for another meal.
But ultimately, if you really want to see effective weight loss, learn to get comfortable in your own kitchen. Invest in a really great cookbook to ensure you always leave the kitchen feeling full, satisfied and healthy!
Conclusion: No Matter How Much You Work out, You Need to Watch Your Diet For Weight Loss
If you have tempting food in the house, you’re going to eat it. It’s just how it goes.
So when you get hungry, make sure there are little to no temptations around that can cause you to get off track.
At the Metabolic Web Store, we have a huge assortment of delicious and highly nutritious supplements, soups, puddings, bars and even salty snacks. Grab some today to get your weight loss journey started.
My personal favorites are the Chocolate Metashake which mixes up quickly and easily with our shaker bottle, the double chocolate pudding when I need a treat, and the pomegranate high nutrient supplement for those in-between-meal snacks.