A lot of people start out on their fitness journey in the gym for one reason: they want to lose weight. It’s the default setting, and for a lot of us uncoupling the concepts of exercise and fat loss is a near impossible feat. But if weight loss is your only motivation for working out, you’re making a mistake – one that might be costing you long-term success.

On a recent episode of the Men’s Health Podcast, fitness coach and bestselling nutrition author Ben Carpenter shared that it’s a trap he’s seen people fall into time and time again. ‘A large motivation for many people to go to the gym is weight loss,’ he says. ‘But the research actually suggests that people who exercise purely for aesthetic goals tend to have worse body image.’ In other words, if the only reason you’re working out is to look a certain way, you might be setting yourself up for failure.

Carpenter, whose new book Fat Loss Habits focuses on sustainable weight-loss strategies, points to the fact that regular exercisers – the ones who stick with it for decades, not just a few months – tend to do it for reasons beyond the number on the scale. ‘If you survey people who’ve been training for 20 years, chances are they’re doing it because they enjoy it. Their motivation isn’t just ‘I need to lose five pounds’; it’s about the way exercise makes them feel.’

This shift in mindset is key to long-term consistency. When exercise is framed as a punishment for what you ate or a chore required for fat loss, it’s far too easy to lose enthusiasm when results slow down. But when it’s something you do for enjoyment, for strength, for stress relief, or just because it makes you feel good, it stops being a temporary fix and becomes part of your life.

‘Physical activity improves your health independently of body weight change,’ Carpenter says. ‘If more people understood that, we’d see a lot more long-term success stories.’

So here’s the real takeaway: stop exercising just to lose weight. Start exercising because it makes your life better.

The irony? If you focus on movement, strength, and consistency rather than obsessing over the scale, the results you want will probably come anyway.

If you want to know more about Carpenter’s approach to effortless fat loss, watch the video above or tune into the Men’s Health Podcast – on all good podcast platforms or via YouTube.

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With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.    

As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.   

Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.   

 You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.