Over Exercising is Devastating! For weight loss and health!

Those 800 calorie workouts are nearly always devastating for you! They can be terrible for weight loss and your health! If you work out 7 days a week or worse still twice on some days you are mostly likely sabotaging your own results and seriously hurting your health!

Too much exercise can dramatically slow weight loss. It’s all about the metabolic stress! A lot of over exercisers are ‘skinny’ fat – they have a low body weight but carry a high level of fat! A huge amount of health problems are connected to over exercise but people do not make the connection. Too much exercise rapidly drains your hormones, energy, your bones and joints and even your brain health!

It gets even worse if you under-eat and over exercise! Now you are really on the path to terrible health problems. Often these problems are hidden and can take 2 or 3 years to manifest, so people do not make the connection. We have many clients who come to us with sore joints, aches and pains, terrible sleep, low energy, poor skin and nails, terrible PMS and who cannot lose weight and often it is down to too much exercise.

Exercise needs to be carefully balanced with your food and nutrition intake. The more you exercise and the harder it is the more you need to eat! As we get older, we need more time to recover, so excessive exercise is particularly bad. We prefer people to do smart exercise!

Smart exercise is short and sweet but very specific to make sure that people get real results in terms of weight loss, toning and health! The food level people take daily is then calculated to work with this! We always recommend at least 2 full rest days every week – one mid week and possibly one at the weekend! We typically have people exercising about 5 x 35 minutes per week!

People training for 10kms or half marathons and beyond, need to be very careful of the food and exercise balance. The health consequences can be devastating, but again they will normally put it down to something else and the problem grows. Your exercise either works for you or against you. If you do not eat enough to support your exercise, it will destroy you, if you get the balance right, magical results will happen!

Thanks for reading,

If you have any questions about anything above please email me at david@system10.ie and I will reply.

David McDonagh (Nutritionist, fitness trainer & creator of System 10 Weight Loss)