By Anastasia Aleiferi,
In today’s society, people are obsessed with their looks. With the use of social media, people are more connected than ever and people can also connect with others and always people’s image is exposed to the world. And so, with people having an obsession with their image and with their eating habits because there are some standards in the world, people nowadays are obsessed with working out and with what they’re eating. But what is the truth behind working out?
The body works like any other machine; there is a way that it takes in energy in order to keep on working, this happens by eating food and the more or harder that it works the more energy it spends, or in this case the more calories it burns. Depending on the type of exercise you do, the more calories the body burns. For example, walking burns 260 calories, biking 600 kcal and running 700 kcal. If you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores them in the form of fat. 1kg of fat is about 7000 kcal. In order to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you eat. There are two ways to do this: one is by eating less and the other is by burning more. But shouldn’t working out result in you losing weight and also being healthier? Well, that is all the truth, or at least not entirely the truth. Most people, when working out, they experience frustration because they get stuck at a certain point with their weight or they can work out more easily in order to burn more calories.
Well, the basic idea behind working out is moving more and doing intense exercises. But that isn’t entirely it. Scientists in 2012 took people from different parts of the world and different tribes and tried to measure their calorie burning during and day and they found out that people in industrialized countries and people from tribes burn on average the same number of calories. For some reason, the number of calories someone burns isn’t entirely dependent on the lifestyle of that person. The body has a certain amount of calories that it wants to burn per day. If someone wants to get lean or gain more muscle mass than they have, they can exercise to attain that goal, but the human body carries its calorie budget per unit stable. If someone wants to lose weight, the body can sabotage that person in small or big amounts.
Firstly, when someone starts working out, the body unconsciously makes that person move less when they don’t pay attention, for example that person sits more when they meet friends, or choose to take the elevator more often. That way, the body makes you balance out the excessive calorie burning and your eating. If you are someone that for the first time has started working out in years, yes your body starts burning more calories and you lose weight, but after a certain point you get stuck because your body has adapted to this sudden change in lifestyle and after a few months, you start to burn the same calorie budget as the original one. So, the question at this point is why is the body trying to sabotage your progress?
Well, during the old times, people moved around because they had to work to get their food or make it. Now that there is an abundance of food and moving around is a matter of choice that energy has to go somewhere. The body needs energy to work, but when there is left over energy, it uses it to operate, and using more energy that it needs is something bad, because the excess energy goes everywhere in the body and it can cause long term problems, such as chronic inflammation. This information can cause serious health problems, such as cancer, heart failure, or overproduce hormones.
So the body is used to using the calories to move around for certain things, but now the body adapts to the lifestyle of the person to burn those calories in stupid stuff. So, by working out, you don’t necessarily burn more calories to become healthy but you do what your body is made to do. Working out restores some inner physical and psychological balance and restores your body. So regular exercise is important to a better and healthier way of living. But what do we do with the constant hunger?
Humans in order to develop they need a lot more food than other animals in the world, cause it takes much longer for them to develop, and the brain requires a larger number of calories to keep developing and functioning properly. Humans are great at being calorie harvesters either by hunting enough to keep them from going hungry for days or by harvesting plants to always have enough to eat. But today, this efficiency has become a problem because of the amount of food that is around us. But in order to lose fat, you need to eat, but not overeat. But how can we do this? Well, people need to be more mindful of the things that they eat. Most commonly, the food that makes it difficult to be processed is sugar, because this is the type of food that stays longer in the body. Usually, in the environment sugary foods are more difficult to find and better calorie storages, so the human mind subconsciously wants them in order to keep more energy in it, but nowadays sugar is everywhere and that makes people eat more and become obese. Also, because of over-exercising, we can be more hungry because the body wants to replenish what it just lost, so we start eating more often, but that leads us getting stuck to a certain weight. Eating smarter and making a diet that can be perfect for your way of living without overeating, can be something difficult but necessary in order to achieve your goals and also to live a healthier and happy life.
So the lesson of the day is this; people can have an idea of what their body image goal is and they want to achieve it fast, but if they don’t have a balanced way of living, working out and eating you can’t be healthy. Don’t be so hard on yourself and find your own balance in life.
References
- Stored fat fights against the body’s attempts to lose weight. University of Cambridge. Available here
- Kraft, T. et al.. “The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies“. Science. 374
- Metabolic constraint imposes tradeoff between body size and number of brain neurons in human evolution. PNAS. Available here
- Metabolic acceleration and the evolution of human brain size and life history. nature. Available here
- How Our Ancestors Broke through the Gray Ceiling Comparative Evidence for Cooperative Breeding in Early Homo. The University of Chicago Press. Available here
- Obesity. Our World in Data. Available here
- The crown joules: energetics, ecology, and evolution in humans and other primates. Wiley. Available here
