Pushing harder can backfire

Ever feel like you’re doing everything right, but your body weight just won’t budge?

You’re walking more. You’re crushing your fitness classes. You’re watching what you eat. But the scale stays stuck.

There’s a scientific reason this happens. And it’s not because your metabolism is broken. It’s not because you’re lazy. And it’s definitely not because you’re too old.

It’s because your body is actually trying to help you. And sometimes, that means making weight loss harder.

A recent study out of Virginia looked at exactly this. Researchers tracked 75 adults between the ages of 18 and 63 over a two-week period. The participants ranged from completely sedentary people to ultra-marathon runners.

The researchers wanted to know: Does more physical activity automatically mean more calories burned?

The short answer? Not always.

Body runs on a budget

Think of your body as if it has a daily energy budget. It spends that energy on all kinds of things — digestion, thinking, immune health, movement and more.

Now, when you start moving more, your body doesn’t increase the budget in a linear fashion. Instead, it finds places to cut costs. It shifts calories away from some areas to give them to this extra exercise.

This is something called exercise energy compensation.

Let’s say you do a workout that burns 100 calories. You might think you just added 100 calories to your total burn. But your body might only burn 70 more in total, because it saves the other 30 by slowing things down elsewhere.

That could mean you fidget less the rest of the day. You feel more tired and move less without realizing it. Or your body pulls back on other energy-hungry processes like digestion or hormone production. It may even signal more hunger and you “eat back” the difference.

The study

In the Virginia study, researchers used high-level tools — including doubly labelled water and activity trackers — to measure people’s true energy expenditure over 14 days.

And here’s what they found:

● There was a link between how much people moved and how many calories they burned, but it had a limit.

● No one in the study burned more than about 2.5 times their resting metabolic rate — even the ultra-endurance athletes.

● People who were eating enough to maintain their weight didn’t show signs of major compensation. But the cap was still there.

That 2.5 factor is important. It lines up with what scientists have seen in hunter-gatherer populations and long-distance athletes. It seems to be the body’s natural ceiling.

Which means even if you’re moving more, your body doesn’t let you burn unlimited calories. It’s trying to keep things balanced. And that matters a lot when you’re trying to lose fat.

When does compensation happen?

There are two major times your body pulls back on calorie burn:

● When you’re training hard, but not eating enough. (Think of marathon training while eating like a bird. Your body can’t keep up, so it starts saving energy wherever it can.

● When you’re in a big calorie deficit and still exercising a lot. (This is the classic diet trap: You eat 1,200 calories a day, do six workouts a week and your body slams the brakes to survive.)

In both cases, your body doesn’t want to crash — so it adapts. Which means your total daily burn may be lower than the numbers suggest on your watch or treadmill.

This doesn’t mean exercise is useless. Far from it. But it does mean more is not always better. And pushing harder, eating less and trying to “outrun” fat loss might actually backfire.

That’s why I focus on what I call the Big 5:

1. Calories and protein aligned to your goals (far easier and more effective to reduce intake by 300 calories than trying to increase output by 300 calories day after day)

2. Strength training three to four times a week (best tool to preserve muscle and bone)

3. Walking 8,000 -10,000 steps a day (to reduce that energy-compensation gap)

4. Drinking three litres of water daily (self-explanatory)

5. Getting at least seven hours of sleep

These habits work with your body, not against it. They’re sustainable. And they’re proven to help you burn fat without burning out.

Final thoughts

This new Virginia study doesn’t disprove the idea our bodies adapt to exercise. It confirms it.

Your body is smart. It wants to protect you. And when you push too hard for too long, it will adjust to keep you from running out of fuel. That’s not failure. That’s biology.

So if your fat loss has stalled, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. You know you can’t out-run your fork and fat loss rarely works out well when you want the desired outcome quickly. It might just mean your body’s trying to help — and you need a smarter plan that works with that.

If you want help building a strategy like this, reach out. I work with busy parents and professionals who want to drop 20 pounds or more without extreme diets or endless cardio.

Let’s work with your body, not against it.

Mitch Calvert is a Winnipeg-based fitness coach.