Are you exercising to help reverse your prediabetes? If so, you may want to track how many calories your machine says you’ve burned.
Many coaches out there will have you track your calories burned, and also have you track your calories and the carbs, fat, and protein that you eat. But that is actually not the best way to reach your goals.
I recommend tracking the calories on your exercise machine for a different reason - so that you know if you are progressing over time.
If you are tracking the calories on your exercise machine to guide what you eat that day, or to know how much you’ve burned so you can have an extra treat, this could be getting you off track. That is because exercise machines are notoriously inaccurate (yep, even the ones where you plug in your height and weight). They often overestimate how many calories you’ve burned, so when people use this to guide their food choices, they often end up gaining weight or stalling their weight loss progress.
If on the other hand you use the calorie-tracking feature to track progress, you will not be led astray. The calorie feature will tell you if you’ve worked harder today than yesterday – it takes into account your distance and your incline or resistance to tell you how hard you’ve worked.
The major benefits of exercise don’t come from burning calories so you can eat more (let’s be honest, a serving of 12 nacho cheese Doritos has 150 calories, which would take you about 15 minutes of running on the treadmill to burn off – that means for each individual chip you want to “earn” from exercise you’d have to run for over a minute).
The real benefits of exercise are improving your insulin sensitivity and building your muscle to improve your overall metabolism. Instead of looking at the calorie tracker to see how many cookies you can eat, use it to push yourself a little harder this week than you did last week, so that you build muscle, boost your metabolism, improve your insulin sensitivity and reverse your prediabetes.
If you’d like to learn more about how to improve your insulin sensitivity and reverse your prediabetes, schedule a FREE strategy session with me.