Exercise doesn't help lose more weight!

[Vince B]

I came across an article via the UBC Alumni Library that allows us to access scientific journals.

The findings contradicts what bodybuilders, gym owners and PE teachers believed about weight loss.

Comparisons were made between active and inactive similar groups and found the energy used to be about equal.

In other words being active or doing exercise doesn't make you use more calories! That really is a surprise and needs to be explained.

Here is a link to The Exercise Paradox.


https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/why_physical_activity_does_little_to_control_weight

[Vince B]

Here is the original article:


The Exercise Paradox. By: Pontzer, Herman, Scientific American, 00368733, Feb2017, Vol. 316, Issue 2

[SOMEPARTS]

Bunk. Calories are energy. Work output is energy. Stored body mass is energy. Manipulate any of those factors up or down and it will affect body weight one way or the other.

[Vince B]

Bunk. Calories are energy. Work output is energy. Stored body mass is energy. Manipulate any of those factors up or down and it will affect body weight one way or the other.

You obviously didn't read the research.

[Dave D]

You obviously didn't read the research.

Vince are you posting this to troll?

Why do NBA players gain so much weight when they retire? Do you think Shaq, Barkley and Jordan are just eating more in retirement or do you think the fact that they are no longer running  ("exercising") 2-3 miles a game, and that's not neven considering practice, plays a bigger part in the weight gain?

[Vince B]

Vince are you posting this to troll?

Why do NBA players gain so much weight when they retire? Do you think Shaq, Barkley and Jordan are just eating more in retirement or do you think the fact that they are no longer running  ("exercising") 2-3 miles a game, and that's not neven considering practice, plays a bigger part in the weight gain?

Dave, I have no interest in this except to correct mistaken assumptions we all made about the benefits of doing exercise to lose weight.

By this I mean my opinion isn't at stake here. I am simply discussing the results of research into calorie consumption by active vs inactive groups.

Read what the researchers found comparing the same people in Africa and America living active versus sedentary lifestyles. Quite a surprise.

[Dave D]

Dave, I have no interest in this except to correct mistaken assumptions we all made about the benefits of doing exercise to lose weight.

By this I mean my opinion isn't at stake here. I am simply discussing the results of research into calorie consumption by active vs inactive groups.

Read what the researchers found comparing the same people in Africa and America living active versus sedentary lifestyles. Quite a surprise.

Okay I read the article and the study is interesting. The idea that calorie restriction alone causes weight loss and not exercise, as we use the same amount of engery regardless of physical output, is a counter culture idea.

[Tennisballz]

You can't out exercise a bad diet....but you're a fool if you believe that exercise doesn't at least help somewhat in losing weight.

[Vince B]

You can't out exercise a bad diet....but you're a fool if you believe that exercise doesn't at least help somewhat in losing weight.

The research is formidable and done many times with different groups. Somehow humans evolved to use a certain amount of calories no matter what work was done.

Why this is so is interesting but the results change what we believed about going to a gym to lose weight. It is literally a lie.

The research explains something that every gym owner knows. It is extremely difficult to reduce fat on obese individuals. Look at what protocols are prescribed for

the obese who join gyms. Do heaps and heaps of cardio. They tire and overheat but don't lose fat. Now we know why. So we bodybuilders have to adjust our beliefs and

not look down on fat people. Changing body composition is extremely difficult. Yes, forms of diets eventually work but even here there are difficulties.

There are still heaps of benefits for doing exercise and especially resistance training of course.

[pellius]

I came across an article via the UBC Alumni Library that allows us to access scientific journals.

The findings contradicts what bodybuilders, gym owners and PE teachers believed about weight loss.

Comparisons were made between active and inactive similar groups and found the energy used to be about equal.

In other words being active or doing exercise doesn't make you use more calories! That really is a surprise and needs to be explained.

Here is a link to The Exercise Paradox.


https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/why_physical_activity_does_little_to_control_weight

I didn't read the article because I will exercise regardless. Still, if you get two identical twins, exact same food intake that maintains their current weight and the exact same job. And when they come home one goes to the gym for two hours six days a week and the other just sits and watches TV. Hard to believe this would not make a difference.

Has your weight changed since you stopped working out?

[SOMEPARTS]

You obviously didn't read the research.

Nope, no need to because the whole premise is idiotic. Walk 10 miles a day with same calorie intake and see what happens.

[Vince B]

I didn't read the article because I will exercise regardless. Still, if you get two identical twins, exact same food intake that maintains their current weight and the exact same job. And when they come home one goes to the gym for two hours six days a week and the other just sits and watches TV. Hard to believe this would not make a difference.

Has your weight changed since you stopped working out?

Have you heard of the concept of set points re weight? BBW love this term. Essentially your body stays at a certain weight for a long period of time. The trouble with the extremely obese is that these set points seem to increase over the years. In the sixties I weighed around 90 kg or almost 200 pounds. When I was teaching PE in the seventies I weighed about 100 kg or 220 pounds. I now weigh about 5 or 6 kg more.

Please read some of that research because it is quite a surprise and something we should all know.

[pellius]

Have you heard of the concept of set points re weight? BBW love this term. Essentially your body stays at a certain weight for a long period of time. The trouble with the extremely obese is that these set points seem to increase over the years. In the sixties I weighed around 90 kg or almost 200 pounds. When I was teaching PE in the seventies I weighed about 100 kg or 220 pounds. I now weigh about 5 or 6 kg more.

Please read some of that research because it is quite a surprise and something we should all know.

All right, I'll read the damn thing. But my set point has varied during various stages of life. In my pristine peak, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, I always seemed to hover around 190-195 lb. Now I'm at 175-180 very often dropping to 170 lbs if I don't make it a point to keep up with my eating.

[Vince B]

Herman Pontzer is an anthropologist at Hunter College. He wrote:



"All of this evidence points toward obesity being a disease of gluttony rather than sloth. People gain weight when the calories they eat exceed the calories they expend. If daily energy expenditure has not changed over the course of human history, the primary culprit in the modern obesity pandemic must be the calories consumed. This should not be news. The old adage in public health is that “you can’t outrun a bad diet,” and experts know from personal experience and lots of data that just hitting the gym to lose weight is frustratingly ineffective. But the new science helps to explain why exercise is such a poor tool for weight loss. It is not that we are not trying hard enough. Our bodies have been plotting against us from the start."

[pellius]

Herman Pontzer is an anthropologist at Hunter College. He wrote:



"All of this evidence points toward obesity being a disease of gluttony rather than sloth. People gain weight when the calories they eat exceed the calories they expend. If daily energy expenditure has not changed over the course of human history, the primary culprit in the modern obesity pandemic must be the calories consumed. This should not be news. The old adage in public health is that “you can’t outrun a bad diet,” and experts know from personal experience and lots of data that just hitting the gym to lose weight is frustratingly ineffective. But the new science helps to explain why exercise is such a poor tool for weight loss. It is not that we are not trying hard enough. Our bodies have been plotting against us from the start."

Well, I do agree with that and have always believed that the number one reason people are fat is that they just eat too much. Coming from a big family there just wasn't enough food on the table for everyone to just stuff themselves. My mom would keep a close watch and let you know if she thought you had your share. And I really doubt she did that because she cared about our waistlines.

It's only relatively late in life when I started to pay closer attention to these things, that I noticed when most people eat, at least in the prosperous United States, people don't stop eating until they are stuffed. They just keep shoving in the food until it's all gone. I am amazed at how much people can eat in one sitting.

They can talk about genetics and being "big boned" all they want but, unless you're a teenager, I have never met a skinny adult that had a big appetite.

[The Italian Lifter]

Well, I do agree with that and have always believed that the number one reason people are fat is that they just eat too much. Coming from a big family there just wasn't enough food on the table for everyone to just stuff themselves. My mom would keep a close watch and let you know if she thought you had your share. And I really doubt she did that because she cared about our waistlines.

It's only relatively late in life when I started to pay closer attention to these things, that I noticed when most people eat, at least in the prosperous United States, people don't stop eating until they are stuffed. They just keep shoving in the food until it's all gone. I am amazed at how much people can eat in one sitting.

They can talk about genetics and being "big boned" all they want but, unless you're a teenager, I have never met a skinny adult that had a big appetite.

That was me until approx 8-10 years ago.
Always been skinny although I ate like a 240 lbs man, even if I ate let's say 5/6 bigmacs in a sitting or 2 pounds of meat my weight never changed.
It was frustrating trying to put on mass.
After 35 years old my weight just went up to the point that now I have to exercise as much as possible (now my weight is 200 lbs/6" but body fat is high).
I guess as you age your metabolism just slows down every year.

[muscleman-2017]

I know from my own life experience that exercise helps you stay lean. So your article must be bunk.

[DroppingPlates]

That's because your metabolism tries to adapt ASAP to a certain stress (survival mechanism). The only way to keep burning fat on the long haul is by re-adjusting your calorie intake and/or your exercise volume/frequency when needed.

[Thin Lizzy]

There is the science and then there’s how things play out in the real world.

People who go from a sedentary job to an active one will invariably find that they lose weight. This is because they not only burn more calories but they also have less free time to eat. It’s a lot easier to eat while you’re sitting at a desk then if you are doing something like construction work.

That said, exercise increases appetite. On Saturdays, I’ll do a long run of 10 miles or more. After that, I could spend the rest of the day going from one meal to the next. So, if you’re not careful you can easily make up the calories burned and then some. That’s what a lot of people do. They put too much currency in exercise as a weight-loss tool and see it as a license to fill their faces.

[pellius]

One thing that should be mentioned that weight, in and of itself, is the not the issue with most people.
It's body composition. So two people can be the same height and weight but if one if doing intense resistance training and the other one is a couch potato they will look very, very different and their lean to fat ratio will also be quite different.

[Vince B]

From most of the posts here people don't believe what the researchers found. Lifestyle didn't make a difference to energy used.

That goes against everything we believed even in high school. The reality is that this notion while seemingly making sense is false.

Somehow we evolved to use a certain amount of energy and that wasn't related to what we were doing....being active or sitting around.

The large human brains require a lot of energy. So we adapted systems that converted food to energy faster. Plus we didn't depend on

vegetation like many other animals do. We needed a much more efficient and effective digestive system.

Looks like one of the basic bro-science beliefs has to be erased. Exercise alone isn't effective in reducing body weight.

[Primemuscle]

Some of what's covered in the article makes sense. Studies are difficult to refute, particularly if your not a scientist who specializes in the study of exercise and weight loss.

My own experiences tend to support what the article says. When I'm in full exercise mode, I tend to gain weight. This is because exercising makes me feel hungrier then when I don't exercise. In fact, I often have force myself to eat during extended periods of inactivity. Another factor is that I originally started lifting weights some 58 years ago in order to gain weight and I was successful, probably because my doctor simultaneously prescribed D-bol and testosterone because I was so grossly underweight.

As I have come to realize over my lifetime, I have an unusually fast metabolism. I recently confirmed this once again when I decided to stop drinking alcohol. Being as how I was a fairly heavy drinker, I expected to experience detox symptoms, which never happened, so I investigated why this might be. Turns out, people who metabolize alcohol faster, tend to not have hangovers or experience much detox when quitting. The negative result is that I was an alcoholic with little or no symptoms. Rarely did I ever experience drunkenness. Therefore, the usual triggers to let you know when you've had enough don't kick in. I was buying a fifth of scotch pretty much every other day even though I never drank before 5:00 p.m. (a self made rule).

Alcohol is full of empty calories in the form of sugar. Since stopping drinking a little over a week ago, I've lost about a pound a day even though I've forced myself to eat more. In addition, I lowered my carbohydrate and upped protein intake.

The bottom line is that not all people fit into generalized studies. There are always exceptions.

  

[rocket]

Looks like one of the basic bro-science beliefs has to be erased. Exercise alone isn't effective in reducing body weight.[/color]

I'm stunned that there is anybody here who actually thinks exercising has anything to do with reducing body weight, alone.

I thought we were all clear.  Body is machine, we fuel it.  Body covers itself with spare fuel.  Body doesn't get that fuel, uses spare fuel in fat cells.

Exercise has nothing to do with that other than exacerbating the fuel requirements.

[ProudVirgin69]

I think another thing to be considered is we overestimate the amount of calories burned through exercise.  1 hour of exercise is maybe 500-600 calories .. it's very easy to undo that just by eating a little extra

[Dokey111]

Bunk. Calories are energy fuel. Work output is energy. Stored body mass is energy fuel. Manipulate any of those factors up or down and it will affect body weight one way or the other.