Time: Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

[Stephanie]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.html

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
By JOHN CLOUD

==snip==

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE — PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science — published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church's team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months — did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home.

==much more at link==

:hide:

[vadawg]

1. i guess just because you are feeling hungry dosent mean you have to stuff yourself

with crap, nothing wrong with going without when you get the pangs or eating something healthy. Always amazes me the portion size and number of meals people feel they need to eat and with snacking in between...


i wonder also if this is just a female thing, or do males suffer from the same issue,

[Cronus Protagonist]

2. What about the body fat ratio?

Did they take into account that muscle is four times heavier per cubic inch than fat, and that the workout group perhaps had more of that vs fat cells?

[Stephanie]

3. Not really, but this is interesting >

You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn't matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn't exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn't muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does?

Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.

Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown fat helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells' power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy. When they're switched off, animals don't get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn effortlessly.

Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it's very difficult to make them obese, even when you force-feed them in labs. But humans — we're pathetic. We have so little brown fat that researchers didn't even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. That's one reason humans can gain weight with just an extra half-muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we don't need in our regular ("white") fat cells.

[KittyWampus]

7. good info there that I didn't know.

[hlthe2b]

10. Exactly... How did they define "weight loss"

Adding muscle will add pounds, while decreasing body fat and in most cases, decreasing inches.


It is sad that media covers these issues so poorly.

[nolabels]

18. Gaining pounds while getting fit sounds normal and is what happens to me

I have also found that after getting in better shape some weight might drop off. This seems to be because being in shape makes for being more active during ALL the day.

The obsession with a body shape that is sold in advertisement is a waste of time. Feeling good about what how your body is performing from your own perspective should be the most important thing

[Blue_Tires]

4. it's supposed to be exercise PLUS diet

otherwise you're just spinning your tires...

[zipplewrath]

11. Absolutely

The article is VERY misleading. I'd be curious to know if the authors of the study don't even like it. This was effectively an attempt at controlling a single variable. To some extent they didn't even succeed at that since they admit that the "control" group was affected merely by filling out the survey. Weight loss is about diet AND exercise. Furthermore, exercise is about more than weight control. It's about a general level of health and fitness that will also affect what and how you process food. In essence this study merely confirmed that exercise is not an "independent" variable in the weight loss equation.

[Captain Hilts]

14. Correct. Just dieting often slows your metabolism to a crawl. nt

[zbdent]

5. true, exercise alone will not lose weight ...

as is true that just changing what you eat will not make you lose weight ... it's changing your lifestyle.

I am an example.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2005. Weight 195-203 lbs, 5' 4". Ruled obese.

Got on my stationary bicycle, changed my eating habits. No sugar when possible, started not eating as much. Got up to an hour per night on the bicycle, according to the odometer, roughly 20 miles.

In a few months, I was down to 160.

Now, I haven't exercised for quite some time. But I still limit/eliminate sugar when I can, keep intake limited. Rose back to 170-175 for a while, but recent events had me drop back down to 160-165 on a regular basis. And my sugar levels are in the normal range.

[KittyWampus]

8. Congratulations for taking charge of your eating habits and sugar levels.

[zbdent]

9. thank you. Mrs. ZBDent the other day said

"You can have a candy bar if you want!" points out that it's stuff in moderation, once in a while won't be harmful, but I sit there and think, "Why bother? I'm so used to not doing it, don't quit."

And it seems that there's a lot more "sugar-free" (albeit not calorie free, which affects more) stuff than there seemed to be when I was a kid. But that's probably because I wasn't paying that much attention.

I think that the key to me being able to cope with this is the fact that I have cousins who were diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, and they've lived with it their entire lives, so I could deal with type 2. (I don't require insulin) I've lost one cousin to complications, another is having failing health, and one grand-cousin (daughter of cousin) is dealing with a new kidney, so I do get to hear about stuff going on.

[KittyWampus]

6. Sorry, but if you change your eating habits, eating after a good work out can be VERY helpful.

It's just changing that ham & cheese sandwich for a chicken/avocado on lettuce salad, for instance. Or eating a small handful of almonds for a snack. Or drinking a blueberry smoothie sweetened with stevia.

Exercise isn't about weight loss as much as building muscle, which requires fewer calories to maintain.

The Science behind everything I just wrote is pretty solid. This article seems suspect and I wonder who the group REALLY represents.

I notices some years ago a strain of Science reporting the NYTimes, for instance, that pretty much comes across as saying this and that is useless in trying to lose weight. Almost as if there's a segment out there who don't want people to change their eating habits.

[billyoc]

12. LSU!

Go Tigers!

:rofl:

[Captain Hilts]

13. Yeah, screw the cardio-vascular and other health benefits of exercise! nt

[Stephanie]

21. well if you read the article they are not discounting that at all

[KG]

15. well, that would explain all those 350 lbs marathoners.

:eyes:

[WeDidIt]

16. I hate studies like this

Fact of the matter is, diet alone will not help you lose weight. Excercise alone will not help you lose weight.

Only the combination of the two works, and it must be accomplished slowly over a long period of time to be effective.

I know, I'm struggling with the problem now, and the only effective means I have found is a combined approach. It's slow going, but it's working.

[Liquorice]

31. I lost the weight I needed to lose with diet alone. nt

[Stephanie]

32. that's what I'm thinking

this article is provocative because it challenges conventional wisdom

[Liquorice]

34. I had two exercise-related injuries; One was so bad that I

couldn't exercise anymore--plantar fasciitis in my foot from walking on a treadmill. I STILL have this painful affliction 9 months later. It is crippling, and I regret ever buying a treadmill. After the injury, I just kept eating lower calories without the exercise and lost the same amount of weight I had been losing with the diet plus hours of boring walking on that stinking treadmill. I sold my treadmill and am glad that torture machine is gone!

[Stephanie]

33. what did you do, btw?

curious

[Liquorice]

35. I just ate lower calories and drank (still drink) green smoothies. Those

things are delicious and give you tons of energy and nutrition.

[Stephanie]

37. green smoothies sounds good!

I might try that!

[mainer]

17. I'm proof that he's absolutely wrong

I lost 15 pounds jUST with exercise. I still eat tons of french fries and drink booze. All I did was jump onto a treadmill every day, and the weight came off.

[shellgame26]

27. Exactly

Eversince I started running about 6 years ago I haven't had a problem maintaining my weight.

[ecstatic]

19. Very interesting...

Thank goodness I canceled my gym membership!

[Uzybone]

20. What a load of rubbish

small wonder print journalism is on its death bed.

[undeterred]

22. Exercise gives you energy if you do it in the right amount.

People eat sweets because they are tired and listless. Exercising makes you more alert and focused.

[DevonRex]

23. Hmm. I guess I'm imagining that 15-pound weight loss since June.

All I do is walk. Some days I walk 4 miles. Once or twice a week I walk 8 miles. I don't consider myself to be dieting, although we eat well. We only eat whole grain rice, pasta, etc. We eat lean meat, chicken and fish and fresh vegetables and fruit. My husband brings a candy bar home every night. Sometimes we split it, sometimes we each have one.

Last night I made meat balls with lots of tomatoes and peppers and onions in the sauce and put that over brown rice. It was delicious. And then I had a Mounds for desert.

But who knew that I couldn't lose weight by exercising? :shrug:

[Stephanie]

28. Read the article - walking seems to be better than strenuous exercise

[Subdivisions]

24. BS.

I was recently living in an apartment complex where there was this young lady who had gained alot of weight while recovering from some sort of surgery. I noticed that she was walking the perimeter of the complex two or three times a day. Not jogging. Not fast-walking. Just walking.

Meanwhile, my extemely sociable "brother-in-law" (his sister and I are not married but may as well be) enjoys sitting on his front stoop and always says hi or talks to the neighbors as they come and go. At some point he had occasion to speak with this young lady and she told him about the surgery and that she was unhappy about the weight gain and was told by her doctor that low-impact exercise would help her lose the weight, though it might take awhile. She slightly altered her diet but otherwise eats normally. And, she walks.

I moved from those apartments several months ago and when I was over to BIL's the other day, this young lady walked by and we said hello to her and she stopped to chat. I hadn't seen her walking for a couple of months, which made her weight loss much more noticable. She has gone from being fat (not obese) to now having a nearly-perfect hour-glass figure. And she did it simply by walking. Granted, it's taken her a year of persistent walking but she proved to my fat ass that even just walking (and eating in moderation) is enough to make a huge difference in the amount of weight one carries around.

Now, all I have to do is obtain a crowbar to pry myself away from DU and go out and walk and maybe I'll be as proud of myself for losing weight as that young lady is.

[DevonRex]

25. That's exactly what I'm doing and it works. Just walk. You'll be amazed

at how much your mood improves, too. I have energy now that I haven't had in years. Before sometimes I was too tired to even think of a grocery list for healthy meals. We're making better choices and my outlook on life is much more positive now.

[rd_kent]

26. What a bunch of shit!

Exercise is a part of the weigh-loss, healthy lifestyle continuum. One should "eat" 5-6 times per day, small portions and healthy food low in fat, sugar and simple carbs. Its not a diet (a temporary eating plan) but a lifestyle. Exercise is a critical part as well. The headline that "exercise wont make you thin" is misleading and disingenuous.

[flvegan]

29. That first sentence is pretty irresponsible.

And on the contrary, exercise can also suppress the appetite. I didn't see them mention that though.

[RagAss]

30. Lift weights...drink wine...that is all !

[JackDragna]

36. There's a lot of anecdotal arguments in this thread..

..of people discounting the person's research. You, as an individual, may have had success with an exercise-based approach to losing weight, or perhaps you did just eat less. Either way, until you've read this person's paper, you have no basis from which to criticize the researcher.