Hello and welcome back to the HealthyDuniya. This blog starts to discuss and explore your reasons to do exercise. So to start with, we’d like you to think about the last time you tried to lose weight. You may have started a diet or changed your eating in some way.

Was there also an exercise component to your plan, too?

After all, we’ve all been told that to lose weight we need to eat less and move more. The calories in and the calories that equation we so often hear. This principle comes from something called thermodynamics, and strictly speaking, it is true. However, human beings are more than just one line equations. We are complex beings. We are conscious and we live in an extremely complex society and have complex relationships with each other and the world around us. And that’s what we want to concentrate on now.

We want to explore what happens to your relationship with exercise when you tried to do exercise in the pursuit of weight loss. We want to explore why exercise for some doesn’t always seem to help with weight loss. We want to help you to discover whether you think exercise is important in your life.

In our experience and as you may have established from the introductory videos that we offer, diets often don’t work in the long term, but

What happens to the exercise?

We have a few questions for you to ponder over and if it’s helpful, write your answers down as we ask these questions. So when you last took part in exercise for weight loss, how did it go? Perhaps it was initially helpful and you lost weight. But what happened if the weight loss started to plateau? What happened to the diet and exercise plan in the long run? Did you carry on after the diet had stopped or did do the exercise also stop? Did during the exercise in pursuit of weight loss keep you motivated to do the exercise? Did exercise feel like a way to justify or make up for food you had eaten or the way your body looked?

Was there a motivation to look or feel a certain way through exercise? Overall, how effective has exercise been for you in losing weight? If it was not helpful in the long term, how did that make you feel about exercise in general? And importantly, what impact do you think stopping the exercise has had on your health, your well-being and your life in the long term?

Who tells us that we should do exercise to change the shape of our bodies or to lose weight?

It is all around us, from women’s magazines to the fitness industry. Have you ever asked or stopped to think about what’s in it for them? Or perhaps you’ve had to do so much exercise that it started to impact on other areas of your life, like canceling social engagements just so you could go to the gym. So we know that’s a lot of questions to answer.

So take your time and re-read the blog if necessary. But hopefully by answering these questions, you might discover whether exercising for weight loss has been help for you physically and psychologically. And if it has, that’s great. If it hasn’t, then the next part of the video might help you to discover why not? And then we want to help you find other reasons and intentions to move your body.

Of course, if it has helped, you are still more than welcome to explore the other reasons too. We want to pause here to recognize that different bodies have different abilities when it comes to movement and exercise. We have worked with people experiencing lots of different health conditions, such as persistent pain, physical disabilities and chronic heart and lung conditions.

We acknowledge that movement will look different for everyone. You are the expert in your body. If you have any concerns about introducing or changing the amount of exercise that you do, then please see a qualified health care professional.

So,

Why for some people, does an exercise help them with weight loss?

Despite us all having similar biology. We are all individuals. And while some people seem to be able to exercise and lose weight, others struggle. The reasons for this are complex and multi-factorial. And just like genetics, influences are eating behaviors and weight. The same thing applies to exercise and weight.

Our genes influence how our bodies react and adapt to exercise. The environment around us would have an influence, an impact on how and when we move our bodies. The economics of the area we live in and our personal finances can have an impact on what type of activity is available to us, and psychological factors can influence what, when and how we move our bodies.

Let’s be honest here.

Doing exercise can be hard work, and it could be argued that humans are inherently lazy after all. That’s why we have invented everything that we have ever invented to make our lives easier. This makes sense given our evolutionary past. We evolved in a tough world where energy or food was hard to come by. So energy conservation was one of the key factors. It’s a long term survival. You only have to look at the animal kingdom now to see that hunting animals don’t go for a jog to keep fit before they go hunting.

The only thing that did motivate us to move was looking and hunting for food or out of fear of being eaten or attacked. Biology and psychology is all about survival. It does everything in its power to keep us alive and functioning.

Our bodies evolved so that we maintain a store of energy just in case. And should our bodies notice that this energy store is being depleted, or if it become ill, or if we put ourselves in a diet, we engage in exercise, it will do everything in its power to get that energy stored back by increasing the drive to eat. You might have experienced this for yourself.

Have you ever noticed after doing some exercise, there is an increased sense of hunger?

Our bodies don’t know that we now live in an environment as a good supply of food and is safe relative to when we evolved. It just sees it as a reduction in that very useful store. We also found it really interesting to learn that there is evidence that shows when we do exercise with the sole intention of trying to lose weight, we actually don’t get as many of the physical and psychological benefits the exercise would normally give us.

And the trouble with thinking of exercise solely in terms of weight loss is that we lose sight of all the other health and well-being benefits. Many of us have experienced and know about.