Recently, TIME published an article called "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin" by John Cloud. Cloud cites several studies which indicate that excessive, intense exercise, the kind so often recommended for losing weight, doesn't actually help you lose weight at all.
The personal trainers, the grueling runs, the countless classes and ridiculous equipment, might be doing more harm than good, especially if you don't understand the relationship between food, body, and exercise.
"People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated."
Basically, if you exercise more, if you exercise harder, you get hungrier. A half a muffin or a sports drink is all it takes to fuel all the calories you just burned in an hour at the gym.
Yes, muscle burns more calories than fat, but if you worked out hard enough to convert ten pounds of fat to muscle, you would still only be able to eat just an extra 40 calories per day. Which is one Oreo cookie or a tablespoon of mayonnaise.
Plus, if you tire yourself out with a burst of rigorous activity, you are much less likely to move around any more for the rest of the day.
"Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder."
Moving around is good for the human body and mind. Studies indicate that exercise is not only good for the heart, and prevents several diseases, but also helps maintain cognitive function and reduces the disabling effects of chronic back pain.
But we don't necessarily need to stress out our bodies at the gym. The "sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity" are not any more useful than just regular movement during our waking hours.
"(T)he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded."
The problem is the way we've come to define "exercise." Frequent, low-level activities, the sort that humans have been doing for thousands of years before leaf-blowers, Roombas, and corporate farming, may actually work better for us.
"You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."
What about the sacred exercise truths, such as raising heart rate and sweating as necessary to strengthen the cardiovascular system, or getting "ripped" in order to build muscle? Vigorous exercise isn't necessarily any more beneficial than carrying groceries or climbing stairs at a moderate pace.
And, get this, people who are obese already burn more calories than everyone else, anyway. This chart shows that a 100-pound person will burn 57 calories walking a mile. While a 275-pound person will burn 156 calories in the same distance. So, hell with the gym, I'm going for a walk. It's certainly cheaper.
By the end of the article, Cloud writes, "In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight."
That personal trainer I mentioned, he recommended lean protein, fruits and veggies, and low or non-fat foods. In just a few months, I'd dropped to 124 pounds and a size 4, and had a raging six-pack. Unfortunately, it took me several more months to drop the stupid boyfriend.
