Because the food, fitness, and diet industries (along with most medical providers) insist exercise is required for weight loss, most people who join the Code Red Lifestyle™ have a lot of unlearning to do when it comes to exercise and weight loss.

When I got fat over 10 years ago, and was both the fittest and fattest I’d ever been, I lost my weight with nutrition.

That’s how I learned that weight loss is 100% nutrition.

And today I’m one of the only people you’ll hear say exercise is not a way to address a weight problem.

With all this going on, and the fact that I was a celebrity trainer as well as a pro athlete, I’m frequently asked exercise questions. And one of them is, “Cristy, how many calories do I add in for exercise?”

My answer?

NONE!

First of all, eating for weight loss and eating for performance are as far apart as the east is from the west, which is why I frequently get fat athletes trying to argue with me what they should be eating (even though they’re fat).

I was a fat athlete, too, so I get where they’re coming from, but it doesn’t change the fact that the way you eat to lose weight and the way you eat when you’re Michael Phelps are radically different.

I exercise every day, and I don’t give myself extra calories. The Rebels I coach on my Mohawk & Medical Maintenance Page don’t get extra calories, either, even though they’re at goal weight.

Plus, when you’re adapted to fat-burning mode (which you should be if you’re doing Code Red correctly), your body’s accessing fat stores to fuel you, and unlike being in glucose-burning mode, where the energy you’re getting from sugar and carb-heavy foods suddenly bottoms out, there’s no “wall” like that when you’re in fat-burning mode.

In my experience, all the whole “you get extra calories because you exercised” bullcrap does is mistakenly convince people who are already struggling with their weight that they can eat more because they walked on the treadmill for an hour.

And let me tell you, most of the people thinking that aren’t eating extra broccoli!

Exercising increases hunger, so if you notice an appetite increase, you’re not imagining it.

(And by exercise I don’t mean walking your dog, yoga, or chasing your kids – I’m talking intense exercise, like lifting weights or running 25K marathons.)

If you insist on exercising during weight loss mode, expect to feel hungry (again, depending on the exercise).

The bottom line is, if getting extra calories because you exercised was working for you, you wouldn’t have a weight problem.

That means the sooner you can unlearn that industry programming (which is keeping you circling the weight loss mountain), the better.