Role of Exercise in Fat Loss
Part 4 of 6: Preoccupation
Reviewing from our last entry, the most important contributions to healthy weight loss are:
- Keeping our bones, organs, and muscles heavy while reducing body fat weight
- Increasing lean muscle tissue in order to burn more calories
- Improving our body shape
Improving our body shape is really quite simple since there are really only two things we can do about it; 1) we can influence how much muscle we have and 2) we can influence how much excess body fat we carry around.
The fourth factor in our fat loss series is “Preoccupation”. Or, in others words, stay busy so that you are not sitting around thinking about your next snack (or worse, sitting around eating mindlessly out of boredom).
“Pretend that you typically arrive home from the office every afternoon and plop in front of the television at 6pm. You eat dinner and watch television until 11pm and then retire.
After several months of this habit, you begin to feel guilty that you are wasting your life when those hours could be spent productively. You correctly reason that you could spend those wasted evenings for several months to renovate a room, finish the attic, or organize your garage. You implement a moratorium on evening television and embark on a project to finish the attic. After another several months, you have not only finished the attic, but a delightful surprise – your waistline is smaller. You then conclude that your reduction is due to the additional caloric expenditure of your increased activity. This is a natural mistake.”
– Ken Hutchins, SuperSlow, The Ultimate Exercise ProtocolTrue, you may have spent a few more calories than you would have sitting on the couch. But more likely, the main contribution to your reduced waistline, was not haven eaten the extra calories in the first place. Why? Because you were preoccupied - you were too busy to mindlessly eat more calories than your body needed. Ever try to eat a fish taco while power sanding? Me either…
Thom Tombs
