Limitations of exercise

boomerising · May 2019

I'd be interested to know what you think of this article. I thought it was excellent, and it really helped to push me to resume using MyFitnessPal, after a period of pretty serious emotional eating of which my scale and my clothing tell the tale. I don't think any of us can afford to blow off the general health significance of regular exercise, but there is a lot of food for thought about pitfalls here.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-you-shouldn-t-exercise-to-lose-weight-explained-with-60-studies

dcman00000 · May 2019

I think in the end its really just proving the point that you can burn all the calories you want at the gym. If you still meet or exceed what you burned for the day, you will gain weight. I know that happened to me a bunch of times. I've been going to the gym on and off since I was 14 (almost 17 years now) and this is the very first time Im doing so on a restricted diet and I'm finally actually losing weight.

Before I would actually gain weight, and its because I would always eat to satisfaction. After a few days of lifting I noticed my appetite would pick up (probably a response to burning those calories, body trying to maintain itself I suppose). Since I never cut back on eating, I'd put on tons of muscle and fat everytime. When I stopped going my new higher weight would basically stay, but my higher appetite would stay as well, and now I'm not lifting so My body comp would switch over to even more fat and less muscle with basically no drop in weight.

Just my 2 cents. Glad I got serious about the dieting part.

boomerising · May 2019

Thanks for sharing experience on this. Sounds like you're on the road to success this time, good luck. Your narrative reflects some of the weight-related pitfalls of exercise, for sure. I know when I work out, which I try to do 3x/week but often fail, I get the hungries almost the minute I'm done. I have to be a lot more careful about that, especially since my gym visits tend to be in the late afternoon/evening.

BrianSharpe · May 2019

They could have summarized the whole article into the old adage - you can't outrun a bad diet.

Diet for weight loss, exercise for fitness.

AnnPT77 · May 2019

Some of the ideas in the article are irrelevant if you're calorie-counting (the only thing that can happen unconsciously is non-exercise activity slow-down, and there are ways to counter that).

But, yeah. I was very active for over a decade, solid workouts 6 days most weeks, and stayed obese. It's easy to eat that few hundred extra calories daily, without thinking about it.

If someone's close to maintenance calorie intake, and adds exercise without increasing eating, they'll lose weight, of course. But that rarely happens in the wild.

Azdak · May 2019

Unfortunately, the article starts with the Tanzania guy, whom I have read about before and whose ideas seemed mainly speculative. But other than that, the information was not different from what I have been telling clients for 30 years and writing about on MFP for 10.

To me, what the article is more about how misleading most fitness/exercise marketing and mainstream information is, that about how “useless” exercise is for weight loss. The baby is definitely thrown out with the bath water.

I have read most of the information/studies in the article and agree with the basic conclusions. However, the only “debunking” that takes place is a “debunking” of the idea that exercise alone will lead to dramatic weight loss. While that may be a prevalent idea in fitness marketing and general media articles about exercise, it is not one that any serious health professional espouses. While it is important to clear up those misconceptions, by focusing only on that one aspect, the article becomes fundamentally misleading as well (not a criticism — you can only write about one theme at a time).

It is also important to remember that, while exercise is not a cure all by itself and only plays a modest role in the weight loss process, that modest role is CRUCIAL for both long-term success and for losing the right kind of weight (i.e. fat loss). In fact, I think one has almost zero chance of maintaining weight loss without exercise (and there are studies that support that idea as well).

The takeaway: understand the limits of the benefits that exercise can provide for a weight loss program. Be aware of the behavioral changes, and consciously avoid them. And, as always, realize there are no quick fixes or shortcuts.

And lift weights.

boomerising · May 2019

Azdak wrote: »

It is also important to remember that, while exercise is not a cure all by itself and only plays a modest role in the weight loss process, that modest role is CRUCIAL for both long-term success and for losing the right kind of weight (i.e. fat loss). In fact, I think one has almost zero chance of maintaining weight loss without exercise (and there are studies that support that idea as well).

Totally agree.

Do you think lifting weights is helpful with weight maintenance even if you're not doing it "to failure"? (I'm 66 and really afraid of strains, sprains, etc., or god forbid cracking thin bones, so I set resistance weights only to where the effort is uncomfortable and annoying, not to where I couldn't possibly do it again after three sets.)

Limitations of exercise

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