Summary

Let’s say you exercise an hour a day, seven days a week. Sweat, grunting, the real deal. Exercising does two things: It makes you hungry and makes you proud. So let’s say after every workout you eat a huge dinner with extra dessert. You know that’s not ideal, but you just accomplished something hard, so it feels justified. After a year of this you haven’t lost any weight, which was your goal. You can’t figure it out. You’re exercising every day. You’re so frustrated. The name for this is “food compensation,” and it’s wily foe. In his book The Body, Bill Bryson writes: One study in America found that people overestimate the number of calories they burned in a workout by a factor of four. They also then consumed, on average, about twice as many calories as they had just burned off … the fact is, you can quickly undo a lot of exercise by eating a lot of food, and most of us do. You can’t measure the benefit of exercise just by tracking how much you work out. It’s the gap between your workout and avoiding offsetting...