A personal trainer has taken to Instagram to explain why exercising for long periods of time to ‘earn’ AKA burn off all the calories ‘bad’ foods have is unhealthy and unrealistic.
Social media can sometimes be beneficial to health and fitness; however, it’s mostly a hindrance.
For example, many social media accounts and posts promote unsafe detoxes, diets and workouts. Plus, it’s been proven that constantly seeing ridiculously fit people (most of whom are actually photoshopped or heavily edited digitally) on social media can cause people to develop body image issues and eating disorders.
Social media is also filled with tons of misinformation.
Thankfully, some are using social media for good. For instance, one health writer recently pointed out that while it’s true that 100 calories of broccoli has more protein than 100 calories of beef, it’s unfeasible to eat 100 calories of broccoli in one sitting.
Another example is Anthony Coffey, a personal trainer and owner of Bloom Training, who has taken to Instagram to highlight why you can’t and shouldn’t strive to ‘earn’ the calories you eat with exercise.
In his post, Anthony calls out a popular TikTok video that claims you’d have to walk for “1 hour and 19 minutes” to “burn off” a large serving of Mcdonald’s fries. He says this TikTok’s misinformation is likely to cause eating disorders and “that is not how your metabolism actually works.”
Anthony then goes on to explain how it does work as well as why deliberately exercising for long periods of time to burn off ‘bad’ food, firstly, is not good for you and secondly, doesn’t really work.
“If you’re aware of something called your TDEE [total daily energy expenditure], you know that you only burn about 5 to 15 of your daily calories from exercise. The rest is coming from places like digestion, non-exercise movement and your basal metabolic rate.”
Anthony Coffey
“So thinking that you have to ‘earn’ the calories you eat through exercise is just a non-educated way of thinking and you are much better off looking at the whole picture, like sleeping well, getting your daily step count in and not sitting all day. All [these] things have a much larger impact on your metabolic rate.”
Bravo to Anthony for shedding light on the common misconception that you can exercise away all the calories you get from food and for using his social media platform in a positive way.
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