Exercising won’t help you lose weight. Only cutting calories REALLY makes the difference.
LindseyUtibe
Posts: 1 Member
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
Or, free summary if you don’t want to pay for the publishers fee: https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/why_physical_activity_does_little_to_control_weight
Or, free summary if you don’t want to pay for the publishers fee: https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/why_physical_activity_does_little_to_control_weight
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mmmm k6
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Because exercise burns calories, it contributes to a calorie deficit. It certainly does help, but it's not necessary for weight loss.37
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jennifer_417 wrote: »Because exercise burns calories, it contributes to a calorie deficit. It certainly does help, but it's not necessary for weight loss.
QFT8 -
That article is a hot mess. The author appears to be trying to support the assertion that a calorie deficit created by activity will not have the same weight loss results as the same deficit created by eating less. Throwing in the obligatory "of course CICO applies" just adds to the confusion.15
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jennifer_417 wrote: »Because exercise burns calories, it contributes to a calorie deficit. It certainly does help, but it's not necessary for weight loss.
This is simple and irrefutable math.10 -
It's kind of like saying your side business won't pay for your house. But it's still better to have an extra income.29
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That's absurd. Of course weight loss is all about the calories, and making sure you consume fewer than you burn. But if the calories I burn during exercise contribute to that deficit, then it does help. Sorry, that's just physics at work.
(Of course, if you do what I did during training for my first marathon years ago and eat all the calories you burned back plus extra, then yeah, exercise won't help you lose. LOL.
)
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That's absurd. Of course weight loss is all about the calories, and making sure you consume fewer than you burn. But if the calories I burn during exercise contribute to that deficit, then it does help. Sorry, that's just physics at work.
(Of course, if you do what I did during training for my first marathon years ago and eat all the calories you burned back plus extra, then yeah, exercise won't help you lose. LOL. )
The runger is real!! :bigsmile:9 -
Maybe you mean it's not essential, but it definitely helps. Also, if you become a slim model but sits all day long, you are still setting yourself up for a lot of future physical problems. So, yeah.. it's best to keep the body moving.4
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"Exercising won’t help you lose weight. Only cutting calories REALLY makes the difference."
Please be very cautious about making absolute statements about people as just one example makes the statement false.
"Exercise might not help you lose weight" would be a true statement but the obverse "exercise might help you lose weight" is also true.
Some people do lose weight by exercising more and eating the same. Could even be many people - not everyone tracks calories, some deliberately exercise more or add more daily activity. Go to a gym in January and you might meet some of them!13 -
Is it me or does the title of the article have nothing to do with what she actually studied?
Should the title not have been "Becoming a Hadza hunter-gatherer in Africa won't help you lose weight if you are still in a calorific excess".
Another article confusing the simple point of CI<CO and ignoring the clear health benefits of physical activity.7 -
Exercise only helps lose weight if you are eating less calories than your body burns.
To lose weight, you need to be eating less calories than your body burns. Exercise is great for overall health, and definitely burns calories, but, if you eat more calories than your body burns, even exercising, you will gain weight.
Weight loss is all about eating less calories than your body burns.4 -
The basic premise is nonsense. Exercise increases calories out, which is half of the equation,
However, I would say that that CI is the easier side of the equation to count (reasonably) accurately. The CO figure is harder to work out accurately.
So when I wasn’t able to exercise i found getting my deficit spot on (not too little, not too much) was quite easy. When I started adding exercise, it got harder to hit a precise, predictable deficit, because of the extra question; “how many exercise cals should I eat back”. I still haven’t fully answered that question.
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You are preaching to the converted here
CI/CO wins every time. Exercise can help with the deficit but as long as we eat less than we burn, we lose. 3 -
Under what parameters? Length of observation, control over subject eating? Without knowing what exactly this is talking about it's nearly meaningless.3
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I'll take answers that are meaningless without context, for 1000 Alex.15
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Stockholm_Andy wrote: »
Should the title not have been "Becoming a Hadza hunter-gatherer in Africa won't help you lose weight if you are still in a calorific excess".
Well damn. *cancels plane ticket*7 -
"Getting a second job or working overtime won't help you pay down your debt. The only way to decrease debt is to take in more money than you spend."
There is a bit of an analogy here. If your second job causes you to spend more money on clothes, or take-out meals, then you may net less money than you expected - you may even lose money. But it certainly can be a good strategy to reduce your debt, if you pay attention to what you're spending and earning.
Just so with calories - if you exercise without paying attention to how much you're eating, you are prone to fail. That doesn't mean that exercise isn't an important part of an overall weight management strategy.14 -
Another side is that if you exercise to (near) exhaustion and with insufficient recovery for your fitness level, fatigue creates a caloric drain on your daily-life non-exercise calorie burn (you do less, and less energetically, at work, with chores, via leisure activities, maybe rest/sleep more).
In that scenario, total CO doesn't increase by the entire amount of the exercise calorie burn, especially when in a calorie deficit - the body tries to rest/conserve energy!
You can potentially counter this effect if you're aware of it, but it can be subtle - and fatigue drains your cognitive faculties a tad, too.
This is one reason I suggest new exercisers start with lower intensity workouts and more frequent rest days, and gradually increase as fitness improves, rather than immediately shooting for intense cardio every day, if their main goal is weight loss. The gradual ramp-up is likely to be better for overall weight loss, as well as less injury-prone, not to mention less likely to fuel the "exercise = misery" myth.
Although CICO is a simple formula, that doesn't mean there's no nuance in its real-world application. There is some tendency for bodies to seek comfortable equilibrium. (*Not* saying set-point is a thing, BTW!)
I agree the article is unhelpful, though. 8 -
Ok... after the comments, not even going to read article.... I mean calories are king, exercise helps burn more and allow you to eat a little more when losing.... whole different ball game for maintanace. Exercise is very important. *edit* also want to note, you probably won't see too many obese hunter gatherers. I think the human body was meant to move. These people probably walk 17km a day... just MY observation. Actually there is some evidence that when you make a hunter gatherer group sedentary and give them high calorie food, well... they become obese...just saying..8
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LindseyUtibe wrote: »https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
Or, free summary if you don’t want to pay for the publishers fee: https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/why_physical_activity_does_little_to_control_weight
Exercise makes a huge difference for me. For some reason it makes me about 90% less likely to overeat. I am less focused on food and less bored. I don't want to outeat my calorie burn most of the time. Only time I gain weight is when I am not exercising.13 -
WillingtoLose1001984 wrote: »LindseyUtibe wrote: »https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
Or, free summary if you don’t want to pay for the publishers fee: https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/why_physical_activity_does_little_to_control_weight
Exercise makes a huge difference for me. For some reason it makes me about 90% less likely to overeat. I am less focused on food and less bored. I don't want to outeat my calorie burn most of the time. Only time I gain weight is when I am not exercising. I think people on here underestimate the benefits of exercising on what you end up consuming.
I think the biggest problem is the bolded/underlined in your post - extrapolating n=1 to n=all.
Some people find that exercise reduces their appetite. Others find that it makes them hungrier and they eat a lot more (or struggle very hard not to do so). Some find cardio hunger-inducing ("runger"), some discover that strength training does it to them. Personally, neither running nor strength training have any effect upon my appetite either way - but for whatever reason, swimming makes me absolutely famished, like I could eat a house and everything in it. If swimming was my main form of exercise, I would have found weight loss a lot more difficult and I would have been hangry a lot more than I was.
Exercise can certainly help create a calorie deficit (and is a good idea for a lot of other reasons), but you can't out-train a bad diet. I don't think it's at all accurate to say "exercise won't help you lose weight", but your calorie intake will be the primary driver.12 -
I lost at around 1 pound a week. I burned around 500 calories a day with exercise when I was actively losing.
Did that 1 pound a week loss come from the 500 calorie a day deficit created from the amount of food I ate or was it from the 500 calories extra a day I could eat because of exercise?
You can not say that exercising won’t help you lose weight. Only cutting calories REALLY makes the difference. You can lose weight without exercising and what you eat makes a more significant difference for most people because there simply are not enough hours in the day to eat away a poor diet through exercise. To say that exercise makes no difference is, however, incorrect. It is all part of balancing the CICO equation.4 -
I don't know about not being about to "out-train a bad diet." I hear that phrase a lot and I guess I don't even know what that saying means. Because whenever I totally blow my calorie budget (I love to bake), I just go for a run and it's all cool again. It sure seems to work for me on a regular basis. I'm a middle-aged person who has been maintaining at goal for over 7 years and I'm pretty fit from out-training my bad diet all the time. I'm terrible, I know.
ETA: IMO, it's all about the calorie deficit. Whether you get that from restricting food intake or increasing activity, or both, it doesn't matter to me. If you're doing it right (accuracy and consistency) it all does the same thing in the end. Different methods are going to appeal to different people. Rock on, everyone!
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I've successfully lost weight using 3 methods ...
-- exercising a lot, and eating quite a bit too.
-- cutting back on what I've been eating, and not exercising very much.
-- a combination of cutting back on what I've been eating and exercising.
In my 20s, I had crept up just into the "overweight" category. I began cycling a whole lot, plus other exercise like walking, weight lifting, and cross-country skiing ... and lost the weight. I kept it off for a couple decades by continuing to do a whole lot of exercise.
In my early 40s, I crept back up into the "overweight" category. That winter, I didn't do much exercise (just walking 3 km/day to get to work and back) but cut back on what I was eating ... and lost the weight.
Most recently, late 40s, I had crept back up into the "overweight" category again. I came here and did a combo of the two ... and lost the weight.11 -
What if I tell you it's possible to cut calories while consuming what would have otherwise been your maintenance calories if you introduce more exercise. Would that blow your mind?
My current sedentary maintenance is just under 2000 calories. On days I'm more active I'm able to maintain my deficit eating 2000 calories.9 -
Exercise is the tipping point for some people because they intuitively eat maintenance calories and exercise creates the deficit. This is why some people march through here extolling the power of exercise while also saying they never stopped eating differently. Unfortunately these results are only reproduceable in very specific situations so mimicking them is likely to end in failure.
That is not to say people shouldn't exercise or praise exercise they just shouldn't expect it to be the key to their weight loss by itself.7 -
Exercise is the tipping point for some people because they intuitively eat maintenance calories and exercise creates the deficit. This is why some people march through here extolling the power of exercise while also saying they never stopped eating differently. Unfortunately these results are only reproduceable in very specific situations so mimicking them is likely to end in failure.
That is not to say people shouldn't exercise or praise exercise they just shouldn't expect it to be the key to their weight loss by itself.
I think the biggest problem with that route is the possibility that you could become injured, which would result in a major change in how you have managed weight loss. I know it is always in the back of my mind that there could come a time when I can not burn as much as I now am and will have to make changes to compensate.3 -
NorthCascades wrote: »It's kind of like saying your side business won't pay for your house. But it's still better to have an extra income.
I love this analogy! I have two jobs & my part time one doesn't pay the mortgage, but it puts food on the table. I could have lost the weight I did without exercise, but the exercise has added to my quality of life even more than just the weight loss alone.5
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