Exercise Alone Doesn't Help You Lose Weight?

It seems that there is more research buzz pointing in the direction that exercise isn't as big a factor in losing weight as people are led to believe.

The first time this splashed on my radar was from this article in Time Magazine. The author was getting virtually speared online by various pundits and squawkers for suggesting that exercise wasn't a panacea in weight loss, and worse, may actually contribute to weight gain (I exercised a lot today, so I deserve this donut!)

So you can imagine my surprise when I found this article on the diet blog saying that exercise alone won't help you lose weight. Funny enough this article references the Time article, but goes on to cite other recent work that indicates that exercise is a marginal influence on weight compared to your diet.

I've suspected this for awhile. It's not just the BS that gets spread around by gym rats like, "You're heavier because muscle weighs more than fat!" and evidently forgetting that a pound is a pound, no matter what you're weighing, and that in order to actually gain muscle a person has to be eating a surplus of calories to gain building material in the body from which to build more muscle.

I also suspected it when I found out that fat burns only about four to six calories less than muscle per pound. If you replace five pounds of fat with muscle, your body will metabolize only 30 more calories a day at rest. That's a slice of 2% cheese. I vaguely remember having touched on the topic before.

And remember, to build muscle you need to increase your intake of food. Food fuels you but it is also the supply of building material from which your body grows and repairs itself. That means you need to monitor your calorie burning while exercising to make sure you don't have a surplus in calories leading to weight gain, which in my case would be counter productive!

I suspected exercise wasn't a huge key in weight loss again when I found that walking an hour on the treadmill at between 3 and 4 miles per hour would usually lead to an estimated calorie burn of approximately one McDonald's cheeseburger. Not the meal. The burger. Plain cheeseburger (which is 300 calories, by the way). This isn't much of a dent when people snarf double cheeseburgers in two's.

One hour on the treadmill and all I can get for it is a single cheeseburger? Ouch.

Of course some of the gym rats will say things like, "Exercise revs up the metabolism for an hour or two after you exercise, so you lose weight that way too!", or, "building more muscle means burning more calories even at rest!"

Which may be true. But driving your car speeds up the erosion on it's paint and metal on the fenders due to friction with the air and bugs and pebbles that bounce off it while speeding down the road. It's technically true. Just as wind and weather wear away at rocks over time, you're speeding up these same effects on your car to some degree by driving it, since it's like having a constant 45 to 65 mile per hour wind with rocks and bugs hurling into the surface of the vehicle, thus eroding it away. Yet it's not enough of a significant impact to warrant serious concern.

It's about time for an attitude shift in exercise from health fanatics. This evidence is pointing to the need for primarily altering your eating habits, and exercise would just augment this change. None of these articles are saying you shouldn't exercise; to the contrary, they say that exercise has other benefits, while weight loss isn't really one of them. It's still well known that exercise reduces osteoporosis risk as we age. It helps with balance. It does contribute to weight loss to a small degree (although you wipe this out if you celebrate your dedications to the gym with going out for a slice of pie at that local ice cream shop.) Exercise helps your heart and keeps you fit. I'm told it improves your mood as well but I've yet to experience that.

Being active helps you with weight maintenance. But it is an adjunct to adopting better, more reasonable eating habits. Maybe even from schools; I don't recall having a class that focused on telling you that the typical American diet had you eating like a chemical-laden pig, but I do remember wondering what the point of "phys ed" was (oh boy! I get to play a sport that I can't stand watching on TV...oh boy...yeah...not fun.)

Think about it. In an hour at the gym the average person burns up what, 300 to 500 calories? Roughly? Maybe 600. That, for the average person, is the calories in one or two snacks. A snack bar is roughly 300 calories. Some go as high as 500. So your hour in the gym may have bought you a five-minute snack. It doesn't even cover a "full" breakfast at a fast food joint.

And if you're trying to lose weight it's the calories that count.

3500 calories over your burned calorie count is a pound of fat. That means cutting back 500 calories from your diet each day will result in losing a pound over the course of a week. Or every two weeks if you cut back 250 calories per day. When you look at bread and see that a couple slices amount to 100 calories or that your average slice of whole-milk cheese is 100 calories than you can see that trimming your calorie intake here and there can have a bigger effect than jamming more exercise into your schedule, especially when in real-world activities fewer people visit the gym each day and keep up sacrificing their time to hang at the gym and of those gym-goers there's apparently a healthy number that like "treating" themselves to an ice cream cone or extra slice of pizza because they were good about going to the gym.

How about you? Have you noticed a significant impact from exercise on your weight? Or have you noticed that eating less has a bigger impact on yoru weight?