How Long Do I Have To Exercise Before I See Changes?

When I start working with a new client who wants to lose weight, I often get this question asked of me in sort of a subtle way.  “Subtle” because the client usually doesn’t want to offend me thinking that I “live to exercise” or because I make my living as a successful business owner of a personal training center, I believe every person on the planet should be a fitness fanatic.  So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to clarify what you should expect and the perhaps the personal approach you should consider taking when it comes to exercise and losing the excess fat you’re tired of wearing.

The “short” answer: probably a lot longer than you want.

The long answer: As a professional health and diet coach, I tend to cover a lot of weight loss nutrition and diet issues, but fitness is a crucial factor in not only weight loss but in overall health as well.  So I’m eager to discuss exercise issues in greater detail. Truth is I spend a fair amount of time coaching, speaking and writing about how to integrate exercise with diet for faster, more effective fat loss and subesquent easier weight management once you reach your goal.

Exercise is a vital component of not just weight loss and weight management, but stress relief, energy, sleep, aging, disease prevention, bone health, and on and on it goes…but it’s easy to focus on the nutrition and diet issues and forget that we have to move our lazy buns on a regular, consistent basis. Leaving exercise out of the weight loss equation is far more destructive to your health than any number of diet “sins” you might commit.  Notwithstanding the fact that I believe our standard American diet is largely responsible for most of our health problems and most common causes of death, the importance of exercise cannot be overstated.

Most people don’t exercise on a regular basis for many reasons… or should I say “excuses”.

Eating is not a habit, but a necessity. After all, no one really forgets to eat for very long. And it’s usually rather enjoyable to change food selections and to modify our diets for the better, for we get immediate psychological rewards: control, accomplishment, tangibility.

Exercise is also a necessity, but it’s no longer integral to our daily lives like eating is.  Let’s face it, few people are out plowing an acre of sod nowadays, so exercise can feel more like a ”chore”. No one likes a chore, and establishing a chore as an ingrained habit is tough. Life’s rewards require elbow grease, and unfortunately that will never change. If exercise were easy or yielded quick results, I promise you that everyone would be doing it. Exercise is certainly worth the effort, and not in spite of the challenge, but because it is “a challenge”.  The long-term health rewards of exercise – outside of the brief blast of endorphins following your workout – are not always initially apparent and certainly not immediate.

And if you don’t view exercise as an unpleasant chore, then perhaps you join the community that view it as a means to an end: getting a leaner, shapelier or sexier body. Those fitness infomercials feature men and women with six-pack abs and celebrities like Christie Brinkley for a reason – deep down, most people want to look like that. But the reality is that even the fittest folks are not necessarily going to end up looking “like that”. You can only maximize what you’ve got.  I believe that we have to stop thinking of exercise as a vanity tool and remember that it’s simply a basic necessity of life.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be excited about using exercise to lose fat and weight if you hope to shed some extra pounds. But we fall off the proverbial treadmill over and over again because we’re getting on it for the wrong reasons in the first place – exercise is about far more than weight loss.

So, how long before you see results?

You really can’t fight your genes. I witnessed one woman I coach become sleek and toned after just 3 months in our Genesis Weight Loss Boot Camp.  Another guy I work with exercises day in and day out, both at Genesis and on his own, and has for two years now; although he’s fit and lean, he will never look like Matthew McConaughey no matter how hard he tries. (It’s worth noting that if you start your children on a regular exercise program from an early age, they’ll develop muscles that will stay with them for a lifetime, even if they gain a little weight down the road as we all tend to do.)

But there is some justice: the longer you exercise, the easier it will be to make changes to your body composition and your shape. That said, results are different for everyone. It’s a complex equation of existing muscles, your natural build, your metabolism, the way you distribute fat on your body and many other factors. You actually do get an immediate health boost from exercise, but let’s be honest: how many are really after that? As a national average, although not here at Genesis, most folks give up on exercise after just a few weeks or even a few days because we don’t see the immediate desired physical results. The fact is, even if you’re a Genesis client participating in both our exercise program AND our weight loss nutrition coaching program, you’re going to have to put in a few “serious” months before seeing any real improvement.

The point is, if you’re asking that question – how long before I see results – the answer is almost always: much longer than you want. Hang in there though; changes in weight, body composition, leanness, and shape will happen faster and easier under our guidance at Genesis than anywhere else. We all want to look good, and many of us want or need to lose weight (excess body fat). Those are healthy and admirable goals.  But while exercise can and does help with these goals, at the end of the day, we’ve got to realign our thinking and remember that exercise, more than anything, is a necessity for health, and despite what the marketers would have us feel, that’s the real reason you should be doing it.

Please share your thoughts on this, your challenges, and your successes, with me here. I’d love to hear your perspective.

Until next week…

Rita Bryan
President & Co-Founder
Genesis Personal Fitness of Newtown, PA
Tel: 215-504-0100