Have you ever felt guilty after eating desert? Ever felt guilty for pigging out at dinner, when you knew you should have stuck to your nutrition plan? If you have, then you’re not alone.

But what if you decided—after feeling guilty for eating too much—that you would “punish yourself” and “making up those calories” with an extra workout. Unfortunately, not only is that unlikely to help you “make up the calories,” it also creates another problem. It creates a negative relationship with exercise.

Exercise is something we should be grateful to be able to do; something we “get to” do, but don’t “have to” do. It shouldn’t be used as a means for punishing ourselves.

Why would we actively punish ourselves anyways? I mean, doesn’t life beat us down at times anyways?

 

 

It’s far too easy to let the little goblin in our head run rampant. We have desert and our negative self-talk has a chance to go crazy. We say to ourselves, “I shouldn’t have eaten that cup of Oreo ice cream, I’m gonna be so fat. I have to go run on a treadmill to burn off all these calories.” The sad truth is that this line of thinking creates more problems than solutions.

 

A Negative Relationship With Exercise

If we’re crushing our nutrition—following the BSP NOVA nutrition habits for example—then why does it have to be the end of the world to have a desert every once in a while? The answer is…it doesn’t. When we force ourselves to exercise afterward as punishment for eating desert, for example, we ruin something that could have been enjoyable.

Instead of that desert being a nice treat and something we enjoyed, it’s something that we feel guilty about. Now, we don’t even fully enjoy it! How silly is that?

Instead, we can acknowledge that we are going to have a desert and leave it at that. We relax and have the desert in peace knowing it won’t derail our progress. I mean, really, so what if you had a cookie?

So what if you had a slice of cake?

A piece of pie?

In the grand scheme of things it’s no big deal. Now, if this is done consistently every day, or multiple times a week, then that’s a different story. That would be a cause for concern and would have negative effects on your health. But a cookie once a week? You’ll survive, I promise.

 

“We’re a product of our habits, not our occasions.” – James Clear

 

So long as those deserts stay occasions, and don’t become habits, we’ll be fine. When we don’t treat exercise as punishment we’ll enjoy occasional treats that we decide to have, create or maintain a positive relationship with exercise, and we won’t needlessly waste time that could’ve been spent elsewhere.

So, hopefully you see how this intention—that of using exercise as punishment—can create a worse problem than the solution it provides. But here’s the thing: that isn’t even a good solution at all.

 

 

Making Up Calories

When we view exercise as a means to burn calories we do ourselves a disservice. Sure, do we burn calories through exercise? Yes, of course we burn calories with exercise; a far easier, and less time-consuming way to control calories though, is with our nutrition.

Let’s say you go to the gym after your giant desert because you want to “make up those calories.” Well, unless your giant desert was actually a teeny-weensie desert, then it’s going to take you a lot of time to burn that many calories (and the calorie counter on your heart rate monitor and favorite cardio machine is grossly inaccurate). It’s simply not an effective use of our time.

Strength training is a means for us to get stronger, move better, and feel better. It helps us build lean muscle mass that causes us to burn more calories at rest by increasing our BMR—which, by the way, is the largest contributor to daily calorie burn. Strength training can also help us build stronger bones, have increased energy, and countless more benefits. Plus, we only have so much time in each day.

Maybe you hit a plateau after a few months of getting started with exercise, and you’re wondering what you can do to keep the fat loss going. Well, you could choose to add more exercise in, but what if you’re already going 4-5 days a week? Is it realistic to add another day of exercise, or more time to a day you already workout? Or, is it easier to simply make small adjustments in what you eat?

When we view exercise as a means to punish ourselves for some food we ate, we create more problems than solutions. We now made a meal that could have been enjoyable, less enjoyable, and we created a negative relationship with exercise.

Exercise is something that we get to do, not something we need to do because we decided to have desert—a gift, not a punishment.