Exercise, meal timing & fat loss: The ✅ right & ❌wrong (but common) approaches

Most people - the experts included - are making a MASSIVE MISTAKE in the way they think about weight management when it comes to calorie intake, calorie burn and exercise. 

Here it is:

Matching food/calorie intake to overall activity level across an entire day.

This is the old ‘calories in = calories out’ model (that suggests that if you eat 1800 cals in a day and spend 2100 cals on activity/living, you’ll lose weight).

Logical? Yes. 

True? No. (At least not the way most people are doing it.)


I want to make sure you aren’t making this mistake either (like MOST of the formerly stuck, frustrated women I’ve helped overcome weight gain, hormonal and metabolic issues).

So let’s see if you relate to this common example:

  • Lisa wants to lose fat. 

  • She does an intense, fasted hour at the gym in the morning and figures she’s burned ~600 calories total…go Lisa! 

  • She then rushes off to attend to life and doesn’t eat until she’s super hungry, which she figures is a good thing because she wants to burn more fat post-workout. 

  • She eventually has a nice, light late morning meal - like a salad - or maybe she skips lunch altogether and throws down a protein bar instead because she got too busy.

  • Then she gets ravenous in the afternoon, so she has a big snack, perhaps indulging a bit more than she would have liked.

  • She finishes her day with a nice big, healthy dinner, her biggest meal of the day. She follows it with a little dessert, since she’s still hungry, and figures, “It’s all good, I burned 600 cals in the gym this morning, so it all evens out!” 

Nope.

This is the absolutely WRONG approach.

It might have worked when we were young, but it sure as heck don’t anymore.

(Lisa is like almost every single woman I work with, by the way, and my former self too.)

The truth is that it will actually backfire and over time, have the opposite of the intended effect: weight gain, high blood sugar, insulin resistance, high cortisol, high cholesterol, poor sleep, anxiety and so on…

AKA - Hormone imbalance city!

Why?

Because this is just not how bodies work

Matching caloric intake over the entire day doesn’t work for a variety of reasons:

  1. Bodies need fuel for workouts, especially female bodies! Men can get away with fasted workouts with much greater success than women due to hormonal differences.

  2. Waiting too long to eat in the morning slows down your metabolism and messes up sex hormones over time.

  3. Stacking most of your caloric intake late in the day - after your body has used most of the energy it needs to burn WAY earlier in the day - means you’ll store those calories as fat, not mention raise your blood sugar and insulin overnight, causing knock-on effects like bad sleep and high cortisol the next day (metabolic dysfunction).

So then, what REALLY happens with Lisa?

  • The fasted workout she does in the morning puts her in a caloric deficit (good for weight loss) but raises her cortisol as her body senses it doesn’t have enough fuel to power her workout (BAD!). 

  • She waits too long to eat, which makes the problem worse and raises cortisol more. 

  • She fights the urge to snack all day as her body tells her it wants more fuel to grow her muscles and power her brain, but she resists, thinking she’s doing herself a solid toward losing fat. 

  • She probably gets tired and brain foggy or headachey by late afternoon, is desperate for a snack and now has no will power to resist that delicious muffin she’s been thinking about all afternoon. 

  • She finally eats a balanced meal in the evening but finds herself really snacky after dinner and unable to resist the “call of the cupboard” because she has underfuelled her body through the daytime. 

  • She overshoots her target caloric intake after bingeing on ice cream or popcorn or chocolate or whatever calorie-dense, carb-a-licious / fatty food she can find. 

  • She sleeps like crap because her body is trying to process all that food overnight while her stomach is meant to be empty and her body and brain can focus on repair and rejuvenation.

  • She feels anxious in the morning because her cortisol is elevated, which causes her to have intense cravings for sugary, fatty or salty foods.

  • She feels guilty, so repeats the cycle that day too, trying to wait as long as she can to eat in the morning because she feels so gross (and still full) from the night before. 

  • She hits an energy slump and brain fog in the afternoon from not sleeping well and indulging in sugar.

  • Because she’s up kept this pattern of under-eating during day for a long time, her sex hormones are out of whack and her metabolism has slowed down to compensate… and she puts on weight and feels terrible, exactly the opposite of what she wants and has been working so hard for.

Ok, so that’s the wrong approach to having a healthy metabolism, hormones and weight. 

What to do instead? 

  1. Ideally, pair food intake with activity: match the calories/food you eat to the activity you’ll do after, not your total activity across the entire day. This means if you have a big workout at 7am then sit all day and have minimal activity later, you need to eat a LOT more earlier in the day, ideally having a subsantial meal after your workout.

    If your food intake and activity level don’t match - as in eating dinner then watching TV - make them match more closely by having a walk or doing some active chores after dinner. 15-30 mins, that’s it. Gentle at night so you don’t rev up your engine. May seem hard at first, but easy (and addictive!) when you get the hang of it. You’ll sleep soooo much better.

  2. Along those lines: eat more during the day, far less at night. Have breakfast, or at least eat sooner! Our bodies evolved to digest and process energy during daylight hours to match our energy expenditure. We are not nocturnal but many of us have nocturnal eating habits. At night, we naturally produce far less insulin and our digestive functions slow down. This is very problematic for the long-term health of late eaters. Don’t do it!

  3. DO NOT STARVE YOURSELF. Ever. This NEVER produces sustainable weight loss for women (especially after 40) and will backfire.

  4. No fasted workouts. Have a whey isolate shake (see my smoothie tips here!), or collagen + cream in your coffee first if you’re a morning workout-er like me.

(You can’t see the giant breakfast burrito in my tummy powering this incredible fat-burng ski tour we did on New Year’s day!)

There’s a LOT more to the healthy meal timing/fat loss picture than I’ve illustrated here - including personalization according to your hormones and blood work - but the “calories-in-calories-out” thing this is one of the biggest mistakes I sees so I wanted to call it out here.

For a few more tips on how NOT to lose weight, see this post!

I hope this has been helpful and eye-opening if this is your current reality.

Reach out to me if you want more help.

Tomorrow I’ll offer some thoughts on the question “how many calories should I eat?” (which I don’t love but get allllllllllllllll the time).

I’m with you on this journey, friend.


If you enjoy this content, please let me know and please follow my social channels @drmarypines! I read ALL your comments on everything, and appreciate you very much for it!

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