Trying to exercise your way out of a bad diet is just not possible.
You would need to run 4 miles a day for a week to burn up 1 super-sized fast food meal. To quote a famous YouTuber: "Ain't nobody got time for that".
Meanwhile, the impact of the toxins in that meal (the hydrogenated oils and refined sugars) are wrecking havoc on your hormones, blood vessels and internal organs. So doing a brutal workout to try to erase that damage is adding insult to injury.
FOOD TRUTH: Only real food nourishes and provides energy to the elegant body systems that sustain you.
A meal of steamed vegetables seasoned with fresh herbs and slathered with pastured butter alongside some clean animal protein like a seared grass-fed steak fuels your body and keeps your brain humming contentedly for hours without spiking insulin and cravings for sugary junk food. A salad with greens and vegetables, avocado and an olive oil and lemon juice dressing is infinitely more satisfying than a 250 calorie sweetened "meal bar" fortified with vitamins and minerals. Why? Because it has more calories and includes nourishing fats and fiber.
But the real difference is that your body understands the language of real food and knows how to process it into it's useable components.
"Food" created in a lab is like scrambled code and the biological response to it is equally confusing.
When you venture into the world of engineered edibles calorie math is deceptive. Serving sizes are notoriously irrelevant: 1 cup of plain cereal = 150 calories. But who only eats that much? It's nearly impossible because food scientists have determined a "bliss point": the place at which the sugar, salt and fat ratio of a food stimulates your brain to trigger the release of endorphins and dopamine - which makes you eat more and more and more...
We know that reward-seeking actions become very powerful: we call it addiction.
Chips, cereals, cookies and candy are as nutritionally bankrupt as cigarettes but we love them because they are as addictive. Cereal and junk foods are designed to serve the interests of the companies that sell them since they are cheap to manufacture, have a long shelf life. To be sure, they did the math!
Here are some examples taken from a chart in Gillian Drake's book "The Truth About Food" that compare the nutrition in real food vs. similar processed food:
1 egg from a free range chicken = 4 from confinement hens
(3 times as many calories)
1 oz. Kerry Gold Irish butter from grass-fed cows = 8 oz. Land O'Lakes butter (2 sticks)
(100 calories vs. 1600 calories)
1 medium organic apple = TWO 8 oz. glasses of Mott's apple juice
(95 calories vs. 240 calories)
Notice how many more calories you need to eat to get the same nutrition which means that you buy more and eat more. So you get fatter and the food corporations get richer. Now that's math that really matters.
Rather than trying to "burn off" the excessive calories you consume (in nutritionally-deficient processed food) count on natural real foods to satisfy your appetite and nourish your body.
