Health Coaching FAQs – Part 2

Welcome back to my Health Coaching FAQs series! My primary aim for this article is to provide a bit more clarity to three more common nutrition and health-related topics. There is a lot of information and misinformation out there about what, when, why, and how to eat. This can be very confusing as a consumer and, quite frankly, it is even often confusing to those of us who are engrossed in the research.

For example, one source says that fat is bad for us, while another source says that carbohydrates are bad. I am not going to address all of these examples in this particular article, but what I am going to continue with are the frequently asked questions I get almost daily. The three questions for this installment are:

• Is exercise the best way to lose weight?
• Why do I have high motivation on some days and zero motivation on other days?
• Does intermittent fasting work for weight loss?

Is exercise the best way to lose weight?

Exercise is neither the best nor the easiest way to lose weight. First off, it is very difficult to expend enough calories to burn even one pound of fat.

Let’s do the math. There are 3500 calories packed into one single pound of fat. Let’s say that the average person burns 100 calories per mile of running, which takes about 10 minutes. You would need to run 35 miles (and for almost six hours!) to burn the equivalent of one pound of fat. Do you have time for that, or is monitoring the number of calories you consume via your diet a much easier and more efficient option? I prefer the latter!

Switching mindsets

I remember going down the exercise-only path in the past, successfully losing a bit of weight through running and other excessive cardio exercises. It took me a while (at least three to six months to lose 10 to 20 pounds), and ...