Exercise will not make you thin

For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come. -- 1 Timothy 4:8 (NKJ)


It’s natural that anyone who spends 40 minutes in treadmill torture land will want to clobber me for stating that exercise will not make you thin. Why in the world would we submit ourselves to hamster-like hell if it wasn’t taking us at least a few steps farther away from the sales rack at Lane Bryant?

The fact is, exercise does help--but only a little, and not enough to make the kind of difference that most of us have in mind. When the Apostle Paul told Timothy about exercise, he had no idea how prophetic those words would become for us 2,000 years later. There was no such thing as Oreo cookies in first century Palestine.

Consider this: one Oreo cookie (less than half of a serving size, according to the package) is 70 calories. It takes 20 minutes of fast walking on a treadmill to burn the calories of one Oreo cookie for the average 150 pound person –as if anyone who loves food would eat only one Oreo cookie! And if we were eating only one Oreo cookie and this was our only vice, none of us would be concerned about weight loss. But weight loss entails some cold, hard facts.

You need to exercise off 500 calories every day off the calories you need daily to sustain your weight. If you are relying on exercise alone to help you lose weight, you need to do this every day, seven days a week, in order to lose just one miserable pound. I could gain a pound by accident. I swallow too much air and the scale goes up.

If you run a ten minute mile for 40 minutes you will probably burn something like 400 calories. So you’ll have to do that every day and supplement with at least a two mile walk every day or some other exercise that will make up the difference every day in order to burn your 500 calories. And then you must make sure that you eat no more than it takes to sustain your current body weight, even if you are hungry. If you go over the calorie limit just one day, technically speaking, you will not achieve your weight loss goal.

It is possible that you could lose one pound a week through exercise alone on a consistent basis. But possible and probable are two different things. Relying on exercise alone to make us thin is a recipe for disillusionment (a.k.a hitting the Haagen Daaz in disgust after a week, if we make it that long).

There are some compelling reasons to exercise. Helping with weight loss is one of them. I advocate exercise. It has changed my life, and I will write about that more another day. But more importantly, there’s a clue in what Paul wrote to Timothy that can help us far more than increasing our exercise time.

For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.

Paul wasn’t dismissing exercise; instead he was promoting something that is of far greater value—godliness. Contrary to the images that Saturday Night Live and Dana Carvey have forever put in my mind about godliness, it has nothing to do with the church lady. Instead it literally means “to worship well.” In other words, it means to reflect on and express outwardly the characteristics of God in our lives.

Godliness, Paul says, is also profitable for “all” things which help us both in this life and the one after. So if godliness helps us in “all” things, it certainly helps us when it comes to our health and our eating habits. What does it look like to be “godly” or to be “like God would be” in our eating habits? Can my food consumption affect my spiritual well being?

There are too many Scripture references about food to cover them all in this post—but when it comes to food consumption under the New Covenant (that refers to the Christian), Scripture deals most with the subject of how much we eat--self control or portion sizes--rather than what we eat.

2 Peter 1: 5-7; 2 Timothy 3: 1-9; and 2 Corinthians 10:5 are great reference points toward which to turn for thoughts about self-control and the consequences of lacking it. This is an incredibly convicting notion for a woman who loves to eat. Portion control is an indication of self control or a lack thereof, and ultimately how I worship God in my eating habits.

No amount of exercise will make up for a pattern of putting too much food in our mouth—exercise will probably not make us thin. Worse, it will never fix the spiritual consequences and implications of gluttony. But mastering self control through faith and knowledge (2 Peter 1:5-7) in this very personal, daily discipline of what goes in our mouths will--and those benefits will help us now and forever.