Ten Minutes: Do More, Weight Less

"Are your legs painted on?" It's something I'd often hear from my grandmother as I was growing up — usually when I was cadging a lift somewhere. Her point was a good one.

As a girl, she would walk 10km to school and back every day. Today, we're increasingly sedentary, and it's impacting on our fitness, health and, most obviously, weight.

Weight loss and gain comes down to an extremely basic formula: energy in v energy out over time. If you consume more calories than your body uses, you'll store that surplus energy as fat. Consume fewer calories than you use and your body will use your stored energy. Given most of us in the West overeat, it's not surprising that our energy in/out balance is out of kilter.

So what do we do about it? We join a gym or jog. But the problem's not lack of exercise. It's lack of activity. There's an important difference.

Just being alive requires energy — for me, around 2,100 calories a day. But I have a pretty active lifestyle and get through 2,700-3,000 calories a day, just through teaching, running around the studios and being on my feet.

If I was trying to burn off those 600-900 extra calories by working out, I'd have to train for a couple of hours every day. Instead, I do it just by showing up to work.

The answer's simple. If you want to get fitter and/or stronger, go to the gym.

If you want to lose weight, get off your butt and do more. Exercise as well, obviously, but think of it as the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

Cake? OK, bad analogy ...

David Higgins is co-founder of TenPilates (tenpilates.com)