How To Lose Weight Through Exercise

Why it's really hard to get thin from exercise alone

Pictured: All I can see is the neon-yellow shoes. Photo by Chander R on Unsplash

If you want to lose weight, one of the first things that every single person you talk to will tell you is to exercise. Go out and run, hit the gym, try and make sure you’re active as much as possible. This is because of a fairly simple equation - your body stores energy as fat when it has too much energy. If you eat too much, you can burn off the energy by exercising, because this requires your body to use all that excess food as fuel. Therefore, if you want to lose weight, one of the best things you can do is get out and move more.

The problem is that this advice is very flawed. It’s true that exercising can burn more calories, and that enough exercise can make you lose weight, but in practice the amount and intensity of exercise required to drop even a few pounds is much greater than most people imagine.

Exercise is brilliant, and you should do as much of it as possible. But it turns out exercising specifically to lose weight is much more complicated than most people have been led to believe.