Exercise for Weight Loss & Anxiety: Killing Multiple Birds with One Stone

With the locked down last year and the work from home recommendation that runs until 24 October, a lot of Singaporeans started getting back pain.

In fact, it’s such a common experience that hospitals and and magazines started giving out advice. Albeit, mostly not congruent from the latest clinical guideline recommendations. Despite the compelling claims from ergonomic companies, exercise is the long-term pain solution. It can give you temporary relief, and also provide the stimulus for your body to become stronger.

As a chiropractor in Singapore, I use exercise to help your body grow in capacity and resilience so you don’t have to keep coming back.

Exercise does more than just building muscles or losing weight

This is something that doesn’t come intuitive to most people:

1. Exercise for recovery from pain or injury is not the same as exercise for fitness.

A lot of people would do a general self-directed workout as part of their pain management, and say that exercises don’t help with their symptoms. This is often because the chosen exercises, the sets/repetitions performed, the intensity, the frequency are not optimised for recovery.

For some people, they would overload their body and end up  achieving the opposite — they make their conditions worse.

For some people, they would underload their body and end up with little to no results.

2) Exercise that are specific to recovery can also come with other benefits.

This is where you may get to kill multiple birds with a single stone.

I share this because Adele (yes, that Adele) just shared in an interview that she achieved her weight loss with exercises. More interestingly, her objective was not to lose weight or to get an “Revenge Body”!

What got her started with exercise is her anxiety. She was exercising so she can help herself manage her anxiety.

She lost 100 pounds over a two-year period! That’s 45kg or just under 2kg per month.

Similarly, exercise for recovery can help you increase fitness and general mood. If you are lucky, you may even shed a few pounds!

Exercise is MORE about the process rather than the outcome

A few of you lucky ones would exercise because you genuinely love it.

Most of you, like myself, will struggle to get enough exercise in because we don’t particularly enjoy it. But at the same time, we know it’s important and that it’s something that is good for us.

For us, the problem with exercise is not that it doesn’t give us results. But it’s that we don’t stick to it long enough for us to see a meaningful change.

Many experts do agree that weight loss at 2kg per month is ideal for sustainable, long-term change. The problem for most of us is that 2kg per month doesn’t sound like impressive results.

But it adds up! Adele lost 45kg over two years!

Good results is not about some one-shot wonder. It’s about being able to do something that works. Then do it consistently.

This is why exercise works best if we view it as a process. It’s really about trying to make it a part of your lifestyle, and doing a meaningful amount of it.

Then isn’t exercise like chiropractic adjustments because you have to keep doing anyways?

No, they are not the same.

With exercise, your body does literally adapt to the added stimulus you are introducing to your body. We know people who workout see improve cardiovascular fitness, strength, muscle mass, bone mineral density, etc.

These are objective, tangible changes that we can directly attribute to exercise.

Research has even shown that regular physical activity can help you live longer, increase your health-span (i.e., how many healthy years you have rather than how long you live), less likely to die from cancer and heart issues.

Chiropractic adjustments DO NOT give you any of these benefits. Sure, some chiropractors may claim that their special style of creakily crack can help. But uh, no high quality studies has been able to demonstrate this.

Also, exercise is an activity you can do on your own for free. Spinal manipulation? Not so much.

In summary, spinal adjustments and exercise are not the same thing.