Prepare to have your mind blown, all ye exercise fanatics and weight-loss obsessed people.
It might be OK to stop killing yourself on the StairMill.
In Time’s “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” the writer, an exercise addict, concludes — using information from various studies — that most people who exercise hard are hungrier and therefore eat more, even more than they would have eaten if they had just skipped the gym.
“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.
Just moving around the house, while also eating light is the way to go, according to the article. In other words: You can simply skip the gym, but you also need to skip the reward muffin, too.
The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we’ve come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat.
But we need to exercise and be fit because muscle issue burns more than fat tissue, right? Yes, but, ultimately, not so much:
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.
We’re not saying exercise is bad for you or that there aren’t other incredible benefits (like muscle tone), but this is definitely some tasty food for thought for those of us who are already either couch potatoes or only active around the house and garden.
Read all of “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” here and comment below!
To learn how to eat right, check out Time’s ”How to Lose Big” video with Jillian Michaels, “The Biggest Loser” trainer, who explains what to eat at work, even if you’re a “volume” eater. She also explains why diet soda can make you hungry.
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