Oh, we get competing messages, don’t we. The latest befuddlement that we’re trying to get our heads around is this “exercise myth” idea. In the “everything you used to think was right is wrong” vane, it’s now being suggested (ready for it?) that…

exercising can make us fat.

What do I think of this?

Photo by Rachel de Joode

Glad you asked, because it’s become a little project of mine lately – to wrap my head around the science of it all, and to encourage people to back off a little. To be gentle. To enjoy exercise and not use it as a self-flagellating mechanism of misery.

First, I should say…I used to do a lot of exercise

I used to self-flagellate. I used to run soft sand races and compete in 24-hour mountain bike races. I ran 10km to work when I edited magazines. And back. I went for 3-hour bush runs on weekends. I went to the gym, did chin-ups on first dates (and didn’t that end badly), and could beat my boyfriends in arm wrestles. Yes, it was an ego thing, too.

But a few years back it took its toll (the ego stuff as well). I kept trying to exercise hard. I kept getting injuries. And eventually I had to accept, that this way of doing things was somehow not right.

We are not meant to push ourselves. We are meant to move and be energised and get blood flowing…but beyond that, it’s just dumb and ineffective.

Exercise does not work for weight loss

Indeed, we’re designed to NOT lose weight when we exercise.

In his book Big Fat Lies, David Gillespie touches on the science that explains that we are designed to NOT burn off a lot of energy when we exercise. This is what enabled us to keep going and going all day and not waste away.

Then there’s the psychological element. If you’re doing exercise just for weight loss, don’t bother. Let me rephrase that. Exercise. Move. Keep active. But don’t expect it to make you lose a lot of weight.

A study compared hunter-gatherers in Tanzania with Western folk. It calculated the participants’ typical daily physical activity, energy expenditure and resting metabolic rates and found the former do move more, but they weren’t burning more calories. In fact, they found their metabolic rates the same as sedate Westerners. That’s the way we roll. Calories in doesn’t equal calories out. We’re far more complex than that.

To put things in perspective:

To burn off a piece of white bread you have to run up 20 flights of stairs.

In fact, it can make us fat!

A Time magazine cover story a while back – ”Why exercise won’t make you thin” – looked at all the evidence and found exercise may actually cause us to consume more calories than we expend, therefore negating the hard, sweaty work on the stair master. It jolted me awake when I read it. The article went as far as to say our over-exercising obsession is adding to the obesity epidemic.

I read The Art of Possibility a few years ago. It’s an odd book..I’m not sure that I get it entirely. But I like the way it’s sprinkled with little lessons, like this one below. It’s very much a “just because” read with no apology given for it’s odd format.

Image by Tierney Gearon

Anyway. The lesson:

Four young men sit by the bedside of their dying father. The old man, with his last breath, tells them there is a huge treasure buried in the family fields. The sons crowd around him crying, “Where, where?” but it is too late.

The day after the funeral and for many days to come, the young men go out with their picks and shovels and turn the soil, digging deeply into the ground from one end of the each field to the other. They find nothing and, bitterly disappointed, abandon the search.

The next season the farm has its best harvest ever.

This theme is going through my life at the moment. I spoke about it at my book launch. I shared that the most shit-full experiences in life always turn out to be a gift. Likewise, the stuff you dig down into – often out of shit-full necessity – so often becomes something fruitful in and of itself.

Like my autoimmune disease. It was certainly shit-full. Still is. I spent almost a year unable to work or walk (about four years ago). Which forced me to go over my life and dig down deep…and to blog about it…because I was forced to (I struggled to work in any other environment). My blog then became my livelihood and it has reaped a bountiful harvest in so many ways for me.

Of course, I didn’t foresee this at the time. But deep down I had faith… in something… and I kept tilling.

I hope that if you’re going through some shit-fullness that this might come of some comfort. Keep tilling…xx

Since I’ve been back my thyroid has been wreaking it’s annoying old havoc. While I was away it was so much calmer, perhaps one day a week of pain. For the past week, it’s been four days of pain, which is how it was before I left. I’m still trying to work out what triggers it. In the meantime, I cope, I modulate, I recalibrate and I try to see it all as a necessary gift.

Photo by Brian Oldham

I just had a bad few days of it over the weekend. So I thought I would share just how a typical thyroid day transpires for me, while it’s fresh. And how I cope with the various symptoms. Not to garner pity*, but to comfort those out there with chronic illness who grapple with the loneliness of it all. Mostly, I find, when you have chronic, unexplainable, unfixable illness, all you want is to know you’re not alone and that your symptoms are real and understandable and worthy of recognition, if only via some stranger’s blog post.

* although, if I’m honest, I’m often seeking “leeway” from the world.

But also – and I say this often – I reckon what I learn from having auto-immune disease is applicable to anyone wanting to lead a better, more well life. A life closer to the core. More real. More conscious. When you have an auto-immune disease you are that much more sensitive to the bad shit we do to ourselves and that we’re forced to put up with – the smells, the additives… the noise. We are the canaries down the mineshaft. Want to know what’s bad for you? What’s doing you damage? Ask an AI sufferer! They feel it with their every pore in real time where others often do not.

So. My Sunday.