An Unhealthy and Counterproductive Exercise Habit.

Reflecting on a Mistake I've Been Making.

If you’re new here (and given this is still a small blog, you probably are), Cinq Personnes is a blog about living better, more disciplined, and smarter lives. Consider subscribing (it’s free) and sharing the blog with people who it might help. If you want to support keeping the lights on, paid subscribers get a weekly read/watch list!

I was going to write a post today about digital organization, but a key part of my writing process (good idea for another post) is that I should drop things and focus on inspiration if it strikes, and today it did!

My exercise regimen is nothing special, with vanishingly few exceptions I workout three days (~1 hour strength + 1 hour cardio + sometimes a 5K walk) and then rest for one day (I still stretch and sometimes do active recovery stuff like big walks on my rest day).

Since I’m trying to lose weight, I’m trying to burn more calories exercising than I consume in any given day, and this leads to a bit of a brainworm that I have a problem with (but expect is more common than not). Basically, what I’ve ended up doing, is eating a fair bit more on exercise days as opposed to rest days, because I’ve sort of trained myself to feel that I must burn more than I consume every day. Part of this is downstream of the logic that if I burn more than I consume on every individual day, then I’m making notable progress every day, and the other part is that I feel the need to reward myself and comfort myself with good food after a brutal workout.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with this dynamic. The big one that’s obvious to me today, after for the first time in a while I did four exercise days in a row, pushing my rest day back — is that you have to rest — it’s non-negotiable and not putting the brakes on progress, but a fundamental part of it. Unfortunately, when you have a policy of eating a lot less and kind of depriving yourself on these days, they end up sucking, and you feel the need to skip rest days, which is bad!

It also strengthens the sort of oscillatory behavior where you cut back eating a lot on rest days, and overindulge on exercise days, which makes it easy to associate rest days with boring sitting around and eating basic foods, and exercise days with being exhausted, but getting a bubble tea and maybe some carbs! This is just really unbalanced, and while it makes a sort of micro scale sense, it leads to misery over long periods of time — including and probably especially if you don’t rest enough because you don’t enjoy your rest days. I should say, it isn’t all bad behaviour, it sort of makes logical sense that if your exercise is low and then high for several days, that you’d want a similar pattern in your calorie intake, but this isn’t the case!

Part of the problem that I haven’t even talked about is that when you look at weight loss, or even health day-to-day, you don’t leave room for bodily processes that play out over periods that are longer than 24 hours, and you also can’t build a healthy lifestyle which obviously most exist outside of individualized daily buckets. It’s like weighing yourself every day and feeling like you aren’t making progress if you aren’t lighter everyday even though how much your body actually weighs is not what you are measuring.

I think I’ve fallen into this because it’s more or less easy or logical to apply myopically, but it’s suboptimal, and as I talked about in my last post, often the good path is the hard path. It’s hard to understand and live with the reality that changing your body composition and routines has to occur over fairly long periods of time, and that cheap tricks will probably undermine that process.

So then, how would things look ideally?

Well, while you might exercise in this high-high-low pattern, for eating I think it’s best to try to be very consistent from day to day. Obviously if you’re not literally eating the same thing every day (which is a good way to be miserable) your calorie intake will always vary a lot, but doing something like adding an extra meal is to be avoided. Something I (and many people) do is indulge on a periodic basis (calling this a cheat day or referring to it as cheating is ridiculous, it’s ok and a normal part of being healthy), and the goal then has to be to maintain the truth of the following:

\(Calories_{Period} + Calories_{Indulgence} - CaloriesBurned_{Period} > 0\)

I.e. you must have enough of a caloric deficit on average every day, to cover any indulgence over a given period, and still be in the negative. This is tricky because you probably are cutting things a little closer than eating more on a workout day, and cutting a meal on a rest day, but the return on that investment of energy is that you have something that is both more sustainable and less unpleasant, at the cost of being a little harder to keep track of.

Such is life.