SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/gains/ [collaborativefund.com]

Let me tell you a story about why some people arent as financially secure as they could be. It starts with a weight-loss study.

Fitness is a $30 billion industry. Almost 40% of Americans are obese.

How do you reconcile those figures?

You could say a lot of people dont exercise. Or they arent exercising enough, or they arent doing the right exercises. All three are correct.

A group of researchers last year found a fourth reason: The majority of those exercising for weight loss either lose no weight or not nearly as much as they should.

The reason, the researchers found, is simple. Exercising makes you feel like you accomplished something healthy, which can rationalize a post-workout food binge. Eating a pizza after sitting on the couch all day might bring guilt, but doing it after a jog feels like a justified treat.

A lot of exercise can be offset by a lot of food. Thats what we do, and we do it because exercising gives us a moral license to eat more.

These arent small numbers. Food compensation seduced its way into 90% of the exercisers lives. Another study found that people fresh from the gym overestimated their energy use by up to 400 percent and ate more than twice as many calories as they had just burned off.

Something obvious but hard to deal with in real time is that exercise only works when its gains arent cashed in.

You cant measure the benefit of exercise by merely looking at how much you sweat. The gap between what you gain and how much you avoid offsetting that gain is the figure that matters most.

The same goes for saving money.

Original Submission