Is the Exercise Bike Going to Make Me Healthy?

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A friend of mine contacted me recently about his health. He openly said that he was fat and was looking for advice. He doesn’t do any exercise and was curious if his exercise bike in the basement could turn the tide. In his e-mail two things stuck out at me:

“Our diet is good, we eat 9 out of 10 meals from home-cooked food”
“It just feels like that when I use the bike, I’m not really accomplishing anything. I may break a sweat and the monitor may say I burn 500 calories, but is it all just a trick? I don’t want to waste 30 minutes a day if nothing is going to happen.”

After getting the prerequisite, “go see your doctor” disclaimer out of the way. I decided to give him my completely unprofessional opinion. I’ve always believed that for the average person diet determines 70-75% of the body composition. I think the other 25-30% is determined by exercise. I’m going to go off-topic for a minute, but you’ll see how it all ties together in a minute.

I write about money on Lazy Man and Money, and one of the underlying tenants of personal finance is spend less than you earn. If you earn 1 billion dollars a year feel free to spend 900 million - you’ll be a rich, rich man. Once you start spending more than you earn though, you start getting in trouble and debt grows. One of the best ways to stay on track is to be frugal with your purchases. It’s often hard to make more money, but the majority of people in the United States could make a few sacrifices to get themselves on solid financial ground.

This goes the same for your body. If you eat more calories that you burn, your fat stores grow. It’s the same relationship with as the previous paragraph if you think about it. One answer could be to just burn more calories. That’s a good answer and it will work if you can keep up with it. However, when it comes to reality, people (myself included) drop exercise due to lack of time, because it’s boring, or simply because they don’t notice an immediate difference. This sounds exactly what my friend is going to up against with the exercise bike.

I was curious about his portion sizes, so I asked a follow up about that and he admitted that he didn’t really focus on that, but that the food was typically good - “vegetables, protein, rice and noodles.” Rice and noodles can be fairly calorie-dense, so that set off a concern in my head. It was his next sentence that really got me though, “But it probably doesn’t help that I never eat breakfast and sometimes don’t eat lunch. Can’t be good for the metabolism.” No, my friend, no it can’t be good. All day your body is trying to stop using calories and conserve energy. Then you give it a lot of calories, and probably go to sleep to store them as fat. If you think about it’s close to a perfect storm of what your body DOESN’T need.

I asked him to look at his eating habits some and then maybe he’ll have a good chance of seeing the exercise bike make a difference. I think he knew most of what he was doing wrong, but just failed in the execution. It happens to the best of us. He can turn it around though. He ended with “as I don’t have to give up my beer, I’m good.” It looks like he hasn’t been reading my beer diet.

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Posted by Lazy Man on December 7, 2007 in Reader Questions.

2 Responses to “Is the Exercise Bike Going to Make Me Healthy?”

Blaine Moore Says:
December 7th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I think that your advice is spot on as a starting point for your friend.

Tell him that he should plan on eating breakfast every day for 30 days, and that he should plan on riding his bike 4-5 days per week for that same period.

If on any given day he doesn’t feel like riding the bike, tell him he needs to get on it for just 10 minutes instead of for 30 minutes, and if he wants to stop after 10 minutes he is allowed to. He probably won’t bother.

The 30 days should be a short enough time frame that he can visualize it and make it happen, but long enough for a habit to form. It should also be long enough that he will hopefully start to see some positive results, and be encouraged to keep going.
deepali Says:
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Tell him to have the rice and noodles for breakfast.