Time Magazine: Exercise Doesn't Work?

Wow...interesting how much noise is being made about this article at Time postulating that exercise doesn't help in weight loss.

I thought it was interesting. Then again, I think much of the article correlated with what I've observed in my time with exercise and people's habits, so it may be simply a matter of noticing some form of confirmation bias on my part.

I read the article about a week ago. But now there's blog entries and articles appearing to comment on the piece. This article from juancole.com declares the article to be an "epic fail", concluding that:

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The science on all this is perfectly clear. Vigorous exercise (both aerobic and resistance training) combined with a low-fat diet is what allows people to take weight off and keep it off. Time is shockingly wrong.

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The diet-blog had this snippet:

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n summary, the article essentially claims that exercise won't help you lose weight, and may in fact be responsible for people GAINING weight. Hmmm... The author, John Cloud (ooh the irony in that surname) goes on an anecdotally-based tirade, side-stepping contradictory evidence and common sense on route to his perplexing hypothesis.

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I thought this was an interesting claim since in the article author quotes Eric Ravussin of Louisiana State University as well as the journal Public Library of Science...diet blog implied that the entire thing is anecdote-based.

Further, the article doesn't say you shouldn't exercise; it states right in it that "In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual postexercise reward."

In other words, the article is saying that exercise is good for you, you should exercise for those benefits, but exercise alone won't necessarily help with losing weight.

The article states that people wipe out a lot of the calories burned by going out and eating more because, after all, they worked hard at the gym...what's the harm?

I've been going to the gym and found that a half-mile brisk walk on the treadmill...ten minutes...burns about 150 calories. That means that if I walked about 3 miles per hour for twenty minutes, that's a plain cheeseburger at McDonalds.

Keep in mind that most people don't eat a cheeseburger. If it's not a double cheeseburger or bigger, most people won't order it. With fries. And rarely do I see people getting the diet soda.

The article emphasizes that alterations in your diet are necessary for losing weight, not keeping the same habits except for an hour at the gym.

The blowback I've been reading online like to comment about how the article is so wrong, how exercise helps you lose weight, la la la...please. Weight loss isn't a subject that boils down easily.

• Fast foods and processed foods are inexpensive and convenient. They're also loaded with fats and preservatives, sugars, and salt. They also make up most of the American diet.
• Americans are fat and getting fatter. If it were as simple as waving a wand or just declaring that we want to lose weight, we wouldn't have this problem. We do.
• Americans overindulge. We simply eat too much. Portion sizes are out of control.
• Our media barrages us with images of foods that are engineered to make us want more and to eat more. It's socially acceptable to eat a brownie at the convenience store or slather on fat-laden dressings. Foods that seem like healthier choices aren't necessarily healthy (salads are good for you! Until you put on the dressing...chicken is good for you! Until you see the salt content...). Sound bites alone apparently don't help us make the right choices once you dig below the surface.
• Lots of health nuts talk about things like "muscle burns more calories than fat". Yeah...it does. Except it's not a dramatic difference overall. It's about 4 calories per pound. Muscle burns 6 calories per pound, fat burns 2. So if you replace 10 pounds of fat (burning 20 calories) with 10 pounds of muscle (60 calories) you're burning 40 calories a day more. That's it. One cup of sugar-free jello pudding (chocolate) is 60 calories. Ten pounds of added muscle isn't enough to burn off the sugar free pudding.
• They also like saying that muscle weighs more than fat...that is supposed to make you feel better about not losing weight while exercising. Which is interesting to me because, quick! Which weighs more? A pound of feathers or a pound of sand? Um...they're both a pound. Plus, in my researching muscle training for lifting weight, you actually have to eat more calories because muscle won't build itself. You have to supply more energy and building material in order to bulk up. If you're truly focusing on losing weight, you're not gaining muscle, because you're eating less. Otherwise you're on a weight training regimen where you're eating more and working really hard to track what you're eating and how you're working it into your body properly.
  

I know that empirically speaking, this isn't evidence, but sometimes you have to sit back and start analyzing your own observations and using common sense.

First, in order for you to maintain your weight you have to look at your Basal Metabolic Rate; basically it's the calories you burn when you sit on your ass all day. It's the energy used for metabolizing food, breathing, generating body head, circulating blood, and maintaining your weight level. Yes, fat does take calories to maintain. Just not as much as muscle. When you look at the BMR for what it takes to maintain an overweight body, you should get a very rough idea of what a 400 or 500 pound person is eating each day in order to stay at that weight level, regardless of how much he or she protests that they eat as much as their skinny friends do or exercise as much as their friends do. The body doesn't absorb mass from osmosis through your skin. Raw materials...water, protein, etc...come from your food and drink. You eat; the body processes it and integrates some of the material as fat or other tissues, the rest is excreted as sweat, urine, feces and water from your breathing.

Second, I find far more people who refuse or actively ignore simple things like counting calories or reading food labels. Food-wise, one of the great sources of depression I've found comes from finding out just what is in those McD's burgers and breakfast wraps and all the labels at the supermarket. I have had virtual sticker shock from discovering just how many calories I was actually shoveling into my gaping maw over the course of the day; a slice of cheese there, an extra helping of Chef Boy-R-Dee there...it adds up. It's amazingly simple to pile on a couple hundred calories by just adding on an extra helping at lunch and dinner. Eating out? Oh lord...the foods taste good because they have fat, salt, and sugar in various forms added. Wonderful taste, but they're all essentially treats; foods that should be eaten sparingly. Read the labels. The wraps I prep at home have far fewer fats and processing in them compared to McD's sausage burrito for breakfast, despite in some ways being similar. But the difference adds up. One of the most effective weight loss plans for the long term involves keeping a food diary...most people simply won't do it.

Third, as the article states, I've seen people who reward themselves because they've been working hard for the day or think they cut back a lot at lunch (do they actually check how many calories they saved, so they could treat themselves? One huge muffin from popular fast coffee chains can easily top 400 to 500 calories...that's most of a meal in itself...so an entire hour or more of a workout could be wiped out with ten minutes of yummy time. While in college the fraternity I belonged to had a "wing night" where we'd all meet at a local sports bar and generally hang out and eat wings and be obnoxious (although the waitress put up with us because we were regulars who ended up leaving a nice tip for putting up with us, and since they were nice while we were there we'd usually try picking up after ourselves as a tip-of-the-hat for their patience). We happened to pick a night that apparently a local weight loss group does their weigh-in. We knew because later that night the same group of very overweight individuals would come in and order pie as their "treat for the week".

Yes. Morbidly obese individuals were coming in from their diet group to celebrate making it another week on their diet by eating pie.

I bring that up because:

• It illustrates the mentality of depriving yourself or torturing yourself in the gym means an obligation to treat yourself. It's an unhealthy attitude because it's so easy to go overboard...do I really think they were just having a slice of pie once a week? I'll put it this way...in the years I was at the college, they never really changed the way they looked when they came in.
• I'm fat. Grossly, morbidly obese. For some reason this seems to give a free pass for making observations about other overweight people. But this doesn' t really matter in America because, as it's been said before, the two classes of people that are still socially acceptable to make fun of are fat people and smokers.
• These people were like millions of other Americans. I've heard some of their conversations. I have little doubt that they were looking for a simple way to lose weight that involved anything except what's known to work...take in fewer calories than you're burning. They would try all the diet plans, pills, herbs,...the most telling is if you ask someone on a diet how many calories they're getting a day and they just kind of give you that glazed-over look, then they're not tracking what they're eating.

Fourth, how many people have gym memberships but never go? Gym memberships are reaching record levels in America. I have trouble believing that those memberships are necessarily translating into higher activity levels. At the small gym I go to there's a sign in sheet on which we're supposed to "X" the days we come in, presumably for their record keeping. I see some people with solid X's across the sheet and other people with X's every other day or so, but there are plenty of names that have nothing down. To be clear I don't sit and analyze the sheet closely; I see names as I'm flipping to get to my name, and I'm fully aware that some people may not sign in as the big notes on the doors ask us to do. It's just an anecdotal observation. But I have a hard time believing it's not a possible trend.

So this article in time isn't necessarily misleading from what I've seen and experienced. The article's points sum up as exercise is healthy and you should do it because it has many benefits, but for weight loss you need to rely on cutting down calories and changing your habits more than relying on exercise. I don't know why this is a point of contention for people on the blogosphere. The article isn't saying you should drop the gym membership or stop the cardio routines. It's saying you need to stop getting off your arse if it's to walk to the fridge or pantry for a "little snack"...