Rethinking Your Relationship with Food & Gym
Out of all the fitness myths, one of the most destructive is that you need to live at the gym to sculpt a strong, healthy body. That’s because it has a polarizing effect: Some women reject working out altogether, either because they’re too daunted to get started or they’ve tried and failed; others unknowingly push themselves beyond the point of progress. Women tell me all the time— with great pride— about their back-to-back spin classes or the boot camp where they did hundreds of crunches and burpees, or how they knocked out a 10-mile run just for the heck of it.
Impressive? Absolutely. Effective? That depends on your goal. More often than not, these lengthy routines don’t have a direct correlation to physical changes. And super-active women are still griping about stubborn belly fat, wishing to lose those last 5 pounds. The problem isn’t with their effort, it’s with their approach. (In fact, research shows that 97 percent of dieters regain the weight they lost, and experts suspect that the likely cause is their workout method.)
Some of it can be attributed to this: For almost two decades, we’ve been hearing the seductive call of the “fat-burning zone,” in which you burn a greater percentage of fat calories. And we’ve been told you get there by doing moderate— not hard— exercise. But it’s not that simple. When you exercise at 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, in that so-called zone, you burn fewer calories per minute during and after your workout. That’s why if you look inside any gym here in America, you’ll see rows of people sweating it out on treadmills (or ellipticals, stair steppers, or stationary bikes)— and if you stop in again months later, many of those same people won’t look that much slimmer, despite the countless hours they’ve spent in those crowded cardio rooms.
Picture your physical activity level on a spectrum. At one end is the effortless kind, like sitting at your desk or walking to a meeting. When you’re not exerting yourself, your body actually burns a higher percentage of calories from fat than it does when you’re active. That’s partly why the fat-burning zone was so appealing— it sounds awesome. But, of course, that doesn’t mean sitting at your desk or wandering the halls at work will shrink your hips faster than doing jumping jacks or running a sprint.
Now, toward the other end of the activity spectrum is a super-intense workout that sends your heart rate way beyond the classic fat-burning zone. At this point, your body needs quick energy, so it starts burning less flab and turns instead to carbohydrates, which enter the bloodstream faster than fat does. The upside: The harder you work, the more calories you burn. At your max effort, experts estimate that you could be burning 20 to 30 calories a minute. And it’s the total number of calories you burn that actually blasts body fat.
Besides burning more calories per minute, high-intensity exercise unleashes a flood of hormones, including epinephrine, that helps your body burn calories even when you’re not working out. Case in point: People who cycled at a high intensity for 20 minutes torched more calories for hours after their workouts than they did after cycling at a low intensity for 30 to 60 minutes, according to a study reported in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. You won’t get those benefits from exercising in the classic fat-burning zone.
