Q: I'm too busy to go to the gym. Can I lose weight while working in the office or driving my car?

A:  Excellent question! I'm going to give you a couple of "mind-benders" - different ways of thinking about exercise - that may help you with this issue.

Mind-bender #1: Exercise is not for weight loss or weight control.

It's pitched that way to us in the media, by gyms, by exercise gurus, but it's not.

The purpose of exercise is to develop higher levels of fitness -to accomplish what you want to accomplish in life more sustainably, with greater ease, and with minimum risk of injury.

When you exercise to lose weight, you're setting yourself up for failure. Have you ever been on a treadmill that told you your calories burned? 30 minutes of agony for what? A snickers bar and a decaf!

Exercising to lose weight is like filling your car up with gas in the morning, and then saying, "I'm going to fill up with gas again tonight, so I've got to figure out a way to burn 11.9 gallons between now and 6 pm. Maybe I'll drive to Boston. But when will I have time to drive to Boston? Oh, dear."

Weight issues can be complicated, and exercise is definitely a part of the equation, but not the primary part. That role is reserved for quality of the food you eat, and the quality of your consciousness while you're eating. (That may sound new-agey, but we'll get into very scientific explanations in a later discussion.)

Mind-bender #2: The gym is not the best place to exercise.

The gym offers a huge benefit: a motivating environment. In fact, that benefit is so important, that if you go to a gym and it works for you, I'd encourage you to keep going, even though the typical gym workout is problematic for a number of reasons.

I'll introduce a "high level" concept: marginal cost vs. marginal benefit. For a lot of busy people, the gym is just bad economics:

• Cost of going to the gym: 1.5 hours (including travel, shower, parking, sign-in, waiting for machines, etc.)
• Benefit of going to the gym: 30 minute workout

Compare that to a 15-minute workout at home that works your whole body in natural, functional movements, burns as many calories as the gym workout in half the time, and preps your body to burn 142% more calories than a typical treadmill workout for an entire hour after the workout.

So if you want to lose weight while driving or working on the computer, you have two new strategies:

1. Eat higher quality foods - more nutrition per calorie. More on this in the "Yummm!" section, but the basic idea is whole plant-based foods.

2. Do short high-intensity workouts rather than the traditional gym machine circuits or treadmill /stepper marathons.