Faulty Research?

Helpful. Losing weight is 80% diet, 20% exercise. Like the article states, exercise provides many other health benefits other than losing weight.

Losing weight is all about eating at a calorie deficit. Just because you exercise doesn't mean you can eat whatever you want. Some people "reward" themselves after exercising by eating more calories than they burned from their workout. "I exercised today so I deserve a Whopper and fries."

As a Health Coach, I see MANY clients (and others) that have bought into the "I can eat whatever I want, in whatever amount I want, becuase I spent an hour on the treadmill at the gym".

If you Truly are looking to lose weight, you need to make changes to your lifestyle that will get you to this goal, AND to make them life-long changes, you need to do them in small steps. The FIRST step MUST be getting your eating "under control" or begin to practise healthy eating that supports losing weight.

Once you have the eating under control, add in exercise that you like. Exercise is NOT about losing weight, it is about being (and becoming) healthy, and should be treated as such.

The obesity problem in the US is caused by unhealthy eating (MANY of the health issues we have in the US are caused by our inactive lifestyles).

I agree with you on most everything you said, diet is extremely important but isnt exercise and "moving" just as important? I do feel the cause of todays obesity problem has alot to do with diet, theres no doubt about it but when you add to that a seditary lifestyle it only compounds the problem!! We have remotes for everything these days, we have drive thrus, we have tvs, computers, ipods, video games. People will run circles around a parking lot for 10 mins just waiting to get a open spot in front of a store, we have escalators and elevators, etc. We have become a nation that has become accustomed to sitting on our butts all the time or not having to put out much energy or work for different things and that I feel along with the diet is what fuels the problem. If we were more active it wouldnt be as bad, nowhere near as bad!!

~Carrie~

The article is not necessarily "wrong", it's just a standard lay media treatment of a fitness and health topic --shallow, with contrived "controversy".

I dont agree with this at all!

From a purely physiological standpoint the article is 100% correct. Even if you are a die-hard gym goer diet dictates your results. If you eat a surplus amount of calories and exercise you'll still gain weight. You may gain more muscle weight than fat weight depending on what you eat but you will gain weight. If you exercise and eat at a healthy deficit, you'll lose more fat weight than muscle weight if you're eating well. I can take my currently strength training program, bump my calories about to about 4K per day and gain mass if I wanted too.

Now combining diet and exercise is the better thing to do because there are other health aspects associated to exercise, stronger muscles, bones, improved circulation, improved mood, etc.

So, we shouldn't be logging exercise calories? Seriously confused here...

Not really. If you use a TDEE calculation versus MFP then nope. There are many schools of thought but based on reading I've done about HRM's and counting calories, it's fairly inaccurate and you're better off using a calorie calculation method (like TDEE) that doesn't require you to eat-back exercise calories. It's just too subjective and doesn't account for calorie "burn" beyond just the exercise period. Not to mention HRM's are not all that accurate. If I remember correctly, HRM's are only close when doing a brisk walk, anything else is not even in the ballpark.

You can lose weight with diet alone. If you want to look good when you're done, you need to lift.