Exercise is not for losing weight!

Gillespie reminds us, in 'Sweet Poison', that we are the only animal that does deliberate exercise just for the sake of it and not just to chase our food etc He says that it's great for the body and has health benefits that none can deny. However, the main reason that it's done should not be to lose weight. It's been proven that exercise makes you hungrier so if you are eating the wrong food - like fructose - it'll be worse for your health.

Exercise, according to Gillespie and the Mayo clinic, can help with:

• improving your mood
• fighting heart disease by improving blood circulation
• strengthening your heart and lungs
• helping you get a better night's sleep
• weight loss
• put the spark back in your sex life
• just for fun
• endorphin rush
• gives you 'head space'
• for you ('me' time)
• just to feel well

Years ago, being fat was blamed on lack of exercise as doctors and researchers noticed that fat people rarely exercised. However, they could've come up with a more sensible conclusion, Gillespie feels, which is that fat people don't exercise because they're fat. Who wants to try and exercise if you're really overweight etc? It's much harder work than for those who are trim, taut and terrific. Also, there's the psychological aspect of it all. (Riding your bike might show off your fat body more etc) Poor fat people! Instead of doctors looking at their own bad advice telling us to eat low-fat foods that were majorly sweetened with fructose, to hide the lack of taste that the fat took with it, we were blamed for being overweight as we were, apparently, lazy slobs...

In 2002, I joined the gym and worked out 4-6 days a week. Most days, I was up at 5.30am and at the gym at 6am. Cardio, bike classes, weights, Abs/Butts/Thigh classes etc Serious weights workouts too. I lose 11 kgs and was much more fit. I mainly lost that weight through exercise as I refused to do much with my diet. (Never liked dieting) Then...I hit a plateau and couldn't lose anymore. I had done as much as I could with exercise alone. I just stayed at that weight/fitness for a few years. Alas, I changed jobs to one where I had to start an hour earlier, in the mornings, and couldn't get to the gym then. I hated going at night, in family time, so I went less and less. The weight slowly crept back on, and brought friends along for the ride! Sob sob! I weighed more than I did before I started, as is often the case. Have since had two more babies by caesareans, and am breastfeeding so getting to the gym is out. If I do return to work next year, as a teacher, marking and preparation time, plus 5 kids, will mean no time for the gym. I could not feasibly lose the weight via exercise alone so I HAVE to do something with my eating patterns!

Our body is very efficient at using up the calories we eat so that burning them off through exercise is very difficult. Gillespie says, "our enormously efficient energy use means that all we need to travel 8km on a bicycle is the energy contained in the 10 teaspooons of sugar in a can of soft drink. To do the same thing in a car, we would need the energy contained in 1kg of sugar (200 teaspooons). Put in this fashion, riding a bicycle 8km and not drinking a can of soft drink both have approximately the same energy effect. I know which I would rather do" (p.138) So, burning off what we eat, particularly the excess is an uphill battle. If you're overweight, like me, you want to eat into your fat stores, not just try and work off the latest fructose you've ingested. He points out that the food we eat makes it hard to lose weight, no matter how much exercise we do.

"Exercise and dieting help us lower that weight gain but it will always be a losing battle for as long as we dontinue to consume fructose...staying thin in an environment where almost all food is now flavoured with fructose is like trying to row a canoe with a barbed-wire paddle. Exercise is good for all sorts of reasons, but losing weight shouldn't be one of the motivations. Exercising at a level that would even begin to undo the weight you put on from consuming fructose is almost impossible (if you still want to do anything else in your life). A far saner approach is simply not to consume the fructose in the first place...[Exercise] is a spectacularly inefficient means of achieving [weight loss]...Don't exercise if your dominant purpose is to lose weight: let a lack of fructose do that instead." (quoted from Chapter 10)

He lost his 40kgs doing no particular kind of exercise and has now happily lost his lethargy so feels more like it. Once you lose the weight, any exercise you do, with a fructose limited diet, will be far more effective and the exercise will be "financed from your fat treasury."(p.146)

Since Gillespie lost his 40kgs, he has felt much more like exercising.
What he says makes sense from what I have experienced with exercise...