I'm Dr. Shannon Ritchie. I'm a doctor of physical therapy, fitness trainer, and founder of

Fethelow Fitness. In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your health

based on science. Welcome to the show.

Hi, everyone. Every year on Thanksgiving, I do an episode about how you can't earn your food and how attempting to burn off what you eat doesn't work the way we think it does.

And when I learned the science of calorie expenditure, it truly changed a piece of my relationship

with food and exercise.

It was a piece of the puzzle that allowed me to separate food and exercise and no longer

use exercise as a tool to, you know, erase a meal or earn a meal because I realized that

there's really no scientific validity behind burning

off what you eat, at least to a certain extent. And I realize this content may be redundant

for the weekly listener. I know I talk about this all the time, but sometimes it takes hearing

things many, many times and in different ways in order for it to ultimately settle in. And I will add

some different types of content here at the end of the episode. So if you are used to what I'm

about to say about how we burn calories and the science behind that, then stick around to the end

because I'm going to give a little bit of a different spin on this. And if you're new,

welcome, this information can truly be game-changing. It really allowed me to stop feeling the pressure

to exercise as intensely as possible just to burn more calories. I truly stopped seeing that as

necessary or beneficial. I stopped running my body into the ground just to try to like burn off what I was

eating or burn fat. It also made me take more responsibility of what I was eating and I stopped

expecting my workouts to burn off my food decision. So this ultimately helped form a more positive relationship around

exercise, around food. It made exercise suck less because I wasn't going as hard as possible

just to burn more. I saw better results because I was actually focusing on the things that mattered

...