Exercise and Weight Loss

I got into a rather animated conversation over the weekend about exercise and how it relates to weight loss.

My position is that exercise isn't a feasible weight loss tool for most people.

I say this for a couple of reasons. First, I've crunched numbers, and in the lifestyle led by most people it just isn't realistic to use exercise to offset eating habits.

Let's first get some numbers so we have some idea what I'm talking about. This alone is a chore; I'm big on numbers adding up to results. The human body is funny about things regarding solid numbers; you can only get rough estimates, and I've resigned myself to that, but you can normally get those numbers to fit with a plus-or-minus that is reasonable. Want to lose a pound of weight? Drop 3500 calories from your average diet in that timeframe. A pound of fat is 3500 calories. Simple.

Most foods give (rough) calories on the label when purchased pre-packaged. My 2% cheese was fifty calories per slice. Egg Beaters were 30 calories per quarter-cup. Multiply your servings by the calories.

There were rough formulas figuring out my basal metabolic rate, the calories burned if I just sat on the couch all day and breathed. Without more sophisticated techniques, this should give some idea of "if I ate this much, I stay the same weight; eat 3500 less over a week/month/whatever, I lose a pound; eat 3500 more, I gain a pound." It wasn't precisely accurate but it was close enough.

I also already blogged about the body acting like a rubber bag; calories don't magically appear or disappear. You gain or lose weight based on what you put into the body and what is excreted from the body. It's like balancing a chemistry equation.

Combine these bits of information...your body can only gain or lose based on what you put into the body and excrete from the body, 3500 calories equal a pound of weight, and you can figure out your BMR to find and estimate your "maintenance calories" and from there figure out how to lose weight to get to a goal, and you should be able to come up with a pretty simple guideline of how many calories to eat per day to achieve your goal. A routine. Routines, especially for people like me, are good. And considering my aversion to hassles then this is a pretty simple way to lose weight.

Now exercise. I can't count it as part of a routine for a variety of reasons.

First, it's terribly difficult to get numbers to plug in to a chart for tracking your net caloric intake for a day. How many calories does walking burn per hour? One of my two favorite diet books, The Hacker's Diet, states that the average person burns 300 calories per hour. The Nutristrategy.com website gives three numbers for someone walking 2 miles per hour "slow pace": a 130 pound person burns 148 calories, a 155 pound person burns 176, and a 190 pound person burns 216. The Mayo Clinic's website lists that a person weighing 160 pounds walking 2 miles per hour burns 183 calories per hour, 200 pounds burns 228, and 240 pounds burns 273 calories per hour. So what number do I use? Plus I'd have to figure it out on a sliding scale as weight changes. Why is this? Because the calories you burn depend on your metabolism, the activity level (what is the definition of walking? The intensity, the technique you use while doing it, etc. all affect the calories you burn...), the weight you're moving around on your body...this is as close to calculating magic as figuring out a mortgage schedule. There are websites where you can get a rough number by entering your weight and how long you walked.

Okay, so now you have a rough set of numbers that seem about as accurate as what you'd get throwing darts at a chart. Let's just say you walked slowly and burned 200 calories. The numbers on the charts are for walking *an hour*. No change. You need to dedicate an hour to exercise. Plus the time it takes to get changed and go where you're going to exercise (if you're doing this at a track or gym, for example). So let's just throw another rediculous estimate and say it was an hour and a half total and you burned 200 calories. Come to think of it this probably isn't all that off base for a beginning exerciser in poor physical shape. What did you burn off for an hour of work? Let's look at some common fast foods.

The Fast Food Calorie Counter, available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, tells us that the McDonald's Egg McMuffin is 300 calories. A 6 piece Chicken McNugget is 250 calories. Even a Fruit N' Yogurt Parfait without the granola is 130 calories. Ever been to a Chevy's tex-mex restaurant? Their grilled steak tacos are 972 calories. Their Portobello Mushroom and Asparagus Fajitas without tortillas are 618 calories. Red Lobster's Honey BBQ Grilled Chicken and Shrimp is 710 calories; and if you go there, you need to remember to factor in your salad (plus dressing) and your cheddar bay biscuits are 150 calories each.

So you spent an hour sweating your cajones off and you managed to lose a part of an Egg McMuffin, or a little more than a cheddar bay biscuit. You just spent an hour working off what you enjoyed for three minutes, if even that long.

For weight loss, that's a lot of work to offset something that you enjoyed for a very short period of time. This brings up the next reason exercise isn't a good method to lose weight.

You have to keep doing it.

You need to schedule a regular time to do it and keep with it. For people like me, most comfortable with routine, this limits what can be done. I couldn't exercise outdoors; if weather interrupts me, it will be a reason to stop the routine, or at least feel like dirt because I didn't do it that day. So I'd have to figure out a way to exercise in a gym or my basement on a treadmill or bike. But what of other events that interrupt my schedule? Unless you are an athlete or can be dedicated to constant exercise it just doesn't seem feasible that this is something that will be reliably followed over a long period of time.

The hassle to get rid of those couple hundred calories just isn't enough compared to just cutting out the calories in the first place. After the third set of clothes end up with stains that I just can't get out from the arm pits I start to question why I just didn't eat the @#$ burger in the first place.

So, if I'm doing this solely to eliminate calories and lose weight, I'd gain back an hour and a half (or more) of time and a clean set of clothes if I just don't eat a burger. That's a huge savings in the hassle department.

Now I'm not saying that exercise is bad or that I'd refuse to do it, especially if I lose enough weight that I could actually move for an hour without wishing my legs would just shrivel up and die if that would reduce my pain. I found, after going through numbers and information, that exercise is simply too difficult and too much hassle to use solely for calorie reduction. Exercise is good because it helps your lifespan. It tones the body, increases metabolism, and will make you just feel better. So if I do exercise, it's for the extra effects and it's on my own schedule so I don't feel like I've yet again failed myself because I went to the movies instead of the gym. The calorie reduction is a side effect and not the primary effect I'm looking for out of it.

The book The Hacker's Diet approaches the problem of weight loss as an engineering problem. For someone with Asperger's tendencies, this is an excellent book for spelling out the mechanics of weight loss. That book also recommended that exercise not be used for weight loss but instead be done for health reasons:

Clearly, even an hour a day of exercise doesn't account for much food. And what's the likelihood you'll find the time to spend a full hour, every day, month after month, year after year, doing those exercises?

So, don't exercise to try to burn off calories and lose weight. Unless you're a professional athlete or obsessed with sports, you're not likely to spend enough time exercising strenuously enough to make much of a difference. Exercise will help you lose weight in more subtle ways. Regular exercise increases your rate of metabolism: the number of calories you burn all the time. Plus, for many people, exercise actually reduces appetite.

So in my philosophy, exercise simply isn't sustainable for weight loss. Reducing your food intake is far easier and more reliable and is less hassle. If I lose enough weight that basic exercise isn't as painful as recovery from surgery has been then I can do recreational exercise for the benefits exercise offers; I may burn calories but I wouldn't have to fret about integrating it into my calorie burning charts.

Maybe someone else would be willing to do it and put it into their own weight loss tracking routine. I just happen to think that if it were that simple then gyms wouldn't have so many people show up for a month and then disappear into their old eating and exercising habits. Not that "eating less" has a higher success rate, but at least the effort of not shoving as much into your mouth is less than dragging your butt to an exercise session for a couple hours every other day...