Pain vs. Pleasure - Fitness Dylemma

Posted on February 12, 2009
Filed Under life |

You have decided to lose weight right?

You joined the gym, or you hired personal trainer.

You go to your training sessions and the trainer tells you that in order to lose just ONE POUND of body fat you need to burn 3500 calories.

You get on the treadmill and in one hour of walking/running you find out the your legs are killing you, your back in on fire, you can’t breath, you are sweating like a pig, your mouth feels like SAHARA, and the display on the dashboard of the treadmill says —- 500 calories burned.

Don’t you get pissed off?

500 ???? after all this effort. So now you have to do it 7 more times to burn just 1 pound of fat.

That’s a lot of pain…

On the other hand right after your workout you go home and on the way back you decide to stop by Drive-thru and pick up your meal.

Finally, a little pleasure, a little comfort, mouth watering stuff. Oh, and there is no sweating.

So you get your meal and a drink and then you say to yourself. I just busted my butt off for one hour so now I can have a cookie or any other piece of “pleasure”

One cookie = 200 calories but you don’t stop there you get 3 because they come in the package.

OOPS now your pleasure is worth 600 calories + your meal which easily could be a 600-900 calories.

You repeat your draining workout again next day, skip it on the following day because your are darn sore but you still need to eat so you don’t skip your “pleasure”

It’s easy to skip the pain right? Especially, when you are sore and the thought of going to that stinky gym is a pain itself.

Now 3 months later you get on the scale all excited about “losing weight” because you actually did work out.

Unfortunately you find out that “for some reason” (maybe it’s your genes, maybe it’s your metabolism, maybe it’s your medication, maybe, maybe, maybe…)

prevented you from losing weight?

Now, let’s take a look again what you just did to yourself.

1 hour of pain 500 calories

1 minute of pleasure (okay maybe it takes 5 minutes to eat those cookies) 600 calories.

I think you can see my point by now.

It really happens (weight loss) through your nutrition not because you go to the gym.

You can spend 5 hours at the gym (pain) but if your caloric intake (pleasure) outnumbers your caloric expenditure your will actually gain weight.

Moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips.

Pleasure vs. Pain.

Which one do you choose? No one would choose pain of course, but if you really want to see weight loss results you need to consider limiting your pleasures.

That way your pain won’t be so bad.

Does it make sense to you?

There is no shortcuts in losing weight. You either entirely devote yourself to it or don’t bother because you will get even more frustrated and the only way to fix it will be through your comfort/pleasure.

Where would this lead you to?

One of my client stopped eating ice cream for a year. He was eating ice cream 3-4 times a week. Eliminating his pleasure helped him to lose over 20 lbs of body fat.

He realized that the pain he was enduring at the gym while chasing his goals was not worth the equivalent of pleasure he had from eating ice cream.