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WHY THE GYM ISN'T WORKING · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  @paulthenutritionist: Before we get started on this episode, I just wanted to say if you want five days of completing free coaching from me, a registered leading nutritionist, for free straight in your inbox, go to tinyurl.com/kickstarter26 and you will get five days of completely free coaching straight in your inbox just by clicking that link. So if you've enjoyed anything that I've ever said, go to tinyurl.com/kickstarter20six. Let's get into the episode. Welcome to No Forking Nonsense, the podcast that slices through the nonsense and serves you straight talking nutrition advice that actually works. I'm Paul, a registered nutritionist and your host.
• 0:45
  And every episode, I'll be debunking diet myths, breaking down confusing food advice, and giving you practical science backed tips to help you eat better, feel better, and get your hedge back. There'll be no fads, no shite, just real talk that makes sense. Let's get stuck in. Hello and and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense. I want to ask you something.
• 1:08
  Have you ever trained consistently for weeks, maybe months, felt fitter, felt stronger and then stepped on the scales or looked in the mirror and thought nothing's actually changed here. No, you're not imagining that and you're not doing anything wrong, you've just been sold a lie, a very persistent and profitable lie, and the lie is if you just work hard enough in the gym, the rest takes care of itself. And I'm here to tell you that it won't, and today we're going to talk exactly why and more importantly what you actually need to do instead. So let's start with some brutal honesty about exercise and calories. A forty five minute gym session, well a decent one, weights and cardio, you're sweating a bit, burns somewhere between 300 to 500 calories for most people and a large glass of wine is about 200 calories.
• 2:02
  A Starbucks caramel frappuccino is about 400 calories. A post gym meal deal from tesco sandwich, crisp, drink easily 708 100 calories. You see the problem? Exercise is brilliant and I'm not here to tell you to stop going to the gym, but the idea that you can eat whatever you want because you went for a run is one of the most common and most damaging beliefs in health and fitness. And the research backed this up comprehensively.
• 2:30
  A landmark study published in the Current Biology Journal looked at the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunter gatherer societies on earth. These are people who walk 10 to 15 kilometres every single day. They hunt, they forage, and they're physically active in most ways that many of us will never be. Their total calorie expenditure was virtually identical to sedentary office workers in the Western world. Why?
• 3:04
  Because the body adapts, it compensates, it down regulates other energy expenditure to account for the extra physical activity. Our bodies are extraordinarily efficient at protecting its energy stores. It did not evolve to help you lose weight, it evolved to survive. This is called the constrained energy model of metabolism and it fundamentally changes how we need to think about exercise and fat loss. You see there are two problems happening at the same time here.
• 3:36
  First, we overestimate how much we burn in the gym. Those machines are lying to you, the treadmill says that you burnt 600 calories and you almost certainly didn't. Research consistently shows that exercise machines overestimate calorie burn anywhere between 20 to 93%. The Cross Trainer is particularly guilt for this. Your fitness watch is better but still not accurate.
• 4:02
  Studies show that wrist based trackers typically overestimate exercise calories by anything from 20 to 40%, so you've burnt a lot less than you think. Second, we underestimate how much we eat. This isn't you being flawed, it's a documented research universal human tendency. I remember studying at university a study that found people underestimate their calories by up to 40%. Trained dietitians underestimate around 20%.
• 4:34
  No one's immune to this. We often forget the handful of nuts, we don't count the cooking oil, we eyeball a portion and call it 100 grams when actually it's 200 grams. We don't log the biscuit we had whilst making a cup of tea because it doesn't count, it does count. So you've burnt less than you think and you've probably eaten more than you think, and then you wonder why results aren't coming. Then there's psychological trap, and here's where it gets really interesting.
• 5:01
  Exercise doesn't just fail to compensate for poor nutrition in a mathematical sense, it actively creates psychological permission to eat more. This is called the licensing effect, and it s been studied extensively. There was a lot of research published in the journal of Appetite that found that people who exercised ate significantly more in the hours and days after training, not because they were physically hungrier, but just because they felt that they'd earned it. You've done the hard thing, you went to the gym when you probably didn't want to, you deserved the treat, you can have the extra portion, you've worked for it. Does that sound familiar?
• 5:37
  The gym creates what psychologists call moral licencing. Doing something virtuous makes us feel justified in doing something indulgent immediately afterwards. This is completely normal human psychology, but it's worth understanding because once you see it, you usually can't unsee it, and you can start making different, more positive choices. So what does the research absolutely show? So here's a direct answer to the question of whether you can out train a bad diet.
• 6:06
  Multiple systematic reviews and meta analysis, which are the studies that paw the results of dozens of other studies, have consistently found that diet alone produces more weight loss than exercise alone. A major review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that you cannot outrun a bad diet, and that's their words, not mine. Exercise is critical for health: it reduces cardiovascular disease, improves mental health, builds muscle, improves insulin sensitivity, increases bone density, extends life. The evidence for exercise and longevity is overwhelming and unambiguous. But for body composition, for actually changing how you look and feel, nutrition is always doing the heavy lifting every single time.
• 6:55
  The sweet spot as you d expect is both diet and exercise together produces significantly better results than either alone, but if you re forced to prioritise one, the research is clear on which one is more important. So let me give you some practical context. A thirty minute run at a comfortable pace burns roughly around 300 calories for an average person. A medium portion of chips from the chip shop is around 500 calories. A standard Greggs sausage roll is around three thirty calories, two pints of lager four sixty calories.
• 7:28
  You can eat back an entire morning run-in one visit to Greggs eating a sausage roll without even trying. Now here's a different scenario. Imagine someone who goes to the gym four times a week literally, they're doing all the right things in training, but they're also having a big lunch because they train that morning. Having a glass of wine most evenings because they've earned it, adding a bit extra to their portions because they're active, having and a protein bar as a snack that's actually three fifty calories of chocolate with a little bit of protein in. None of those things are terrible individually, but together they will easily wipe out an entire calorie deficit that that four gym sessions have created.
• 8:09
  And this isn't hypothetical, this is a conversation I have every single week. So what can you do instead? Right, this is a practical bit. What to do with this information? Firstly, stop using exercise as a reward system for food.
• 8:23
  The gym is for your health, your strength, your fitness, longevity, your mental health. It is not a transaction where you earn food. The moment you separate those two things in your mind, everything will get a lot easier and you will make more progress. Two, understand that NEAT matters more than most people realise. NEAT stands for non exercise activity thermogenesis.
• 8:48
  It's the calories that you burn outside of formal exercise, so walking, standing, fidgeting, taking the stairs, pottering around the house. For most people, NEET will contribute more to your daily calorie burn than your actual gym sessions. And here's the thing, research from the Mayo Clinic showed that when people start formally exercising, their knee often drops. You go to the gym in the morning and then you subconsciously move less for the rest of the day, you take the lift, You sit on the sofa in the evening because you feel like you've done your bit. The practical fix is you need to keep moving outside the gym.
• 9:24
  Hit your steps regardless of whether you trained. Don't let the gym become an excuse to be sedentary for the other twenty three hours, which many people do. Three. Get your nutrition sorted before you optimise your training. If you are spending three hours a week obsessing over a training programme, but your food is absolutely inconsistent, you're essentially polishing a car that doesn't have an engine.
• 9:46
  Get the basics right first, enough protein to stay full and hold on to muscle. Colour is roughly in the right place 80% of the time. A plan that survives real life, work stresses, weekends, social events. Once the nutrition is consistent, the training enhances dramatically, but without the nutrition foundations, you're just going to be getting fitter and wondering why nothing's changing in the mirror. Four.
• 10:11
  Track what you eat for at least two weeks. You don't have to do this forever if you're not working with a nutritionist, you don't have to obsess, but two weeks of logging what your weight's doing, and logging what you're putting in your mouth honestly and accurately. You don't know, estimate it, you weigh things, you log the cooking oil, you log the milk in your coffee. Almost everyone who does this is surprised what they find, and I know this because when I first start working with my clients, the first thing I ask them to do is for the first four days, track their normal days eating. And it's so important because they're eating their normal life and it's not that they're eating badly, they're often not, but because the gap between what they thought they were eating and what they were actually eating is larger than expected.
• 10:58
  That information is so important, it's data that is going to help us moving forward. Then we want to build a simple repeatable structure around your food. The people who get consistent results, they're not necessarily eating perfectly every single day, they're just being consistent. I say to my clients all the time, our bodies love consistency, but our sleep cycle is impacted by us being boring and having those consistent schedules. Our weight loss loves consistency, it loves us eating similar times.
• 11:28
  The consistency is what makes a massive difference. A protein like breakfast made on autopilot, a decent lunch most days, a dinner that's roughly balanced, a snack that's planned in as opposed to just being spontaneous. That's the framework. It doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to be consistent and ideally repeatable. Finally, you cannot out train a bad diet.
• 11:52
  Nutrition is the most important part of you making any type of progress. The science is clear on this, the maths is clear on this, and honestly most people who've been training for a while probably know this in their gut already, they just haven't wanted to hear it out loud. So it's so important that we are aware of what we're eating and we spend some time getting on top of ensuring that we have the nutrition part of our life sorted, because you eat at least three or four times a day, that s three or four opportunities every single day to make progress. Making the smallest of changes to structure your meals around your lifestyles, around your job, to look at our energy levels, ensuring that we re eating as much food as possible to fuel our day, whatever that looks like, whether that's work, whether that's looking after your kids, whether that is to go to the gym. If you're under fuelled, it's very very unlikely you're going to make progress for many many reasons.
• 12:52
  So eat properly, move consistently and stop trying to earn your food with exercise because if you're under eating or if you're eating the wrong things, it's unlikely that your training is going to have any impact anyway. I have worked with professional sports athletes, I've worked with people underweight, I've worked with people overweight, I've worked with people with various different health conditions, and I can categorically tell you that when we simplify their nutrition, when their nutrition becomes automatic, when we guide people how to eat for social events, to eat for weekends, how to eat to fuel themselves, to give them as much food as possible, then they get the best results in all areas of their life, not just whilst they're doing their sport, but in terms of whatever their goals are, whether that is fat loss, whether that's just having enough energy to run around with the kids, whether that's to look better in the mirror. All of these things are directly impacted by what you are putting in your body and I cannot emphasise enough, I am not telling you to eat perfectly 100% of the time. 80% of the time is good enough but that 80% needs to be an 80% that is absolutely tailored around you.
• 14:10
  I hope you found this episode useful. If you have any questions or you want to understand what you should be eating around your lifestyle to get your results customised around you, send me an email saying yes please. The nutritionist uk dot com. That's Paul@thenutritionistuk.com. I'll speak to you That's next it for this episode of No Forking Nonsense, where the fluff gets binned and the facts get served.
• 14:40
  If you found this helpful, share it with someone who could do some clarity from an expert. That's me, by the way. And make sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you want more straight talking, no nonsense nutrition advice, come and find me on Instagram at Paul, the nutritionist. Until next time, eat smart, feel human again, and stop falling for the Nonsense.
• 15:00
  See you next time.