True or False-Exercise Makes You Thinner?
I have been going through Gary Taubes “Why We Get Fat” book with the intention of writing a review of it soon, but I mentioned some of the details on forums already and I noticed that people can get pretty upset.
What makes them upset is the idea that perhaps exercise alone does not make you thinner after all.
This idea that it does is everywhere. It’s repeated in marketing claims, in books, and I guess everyone I know believes it.
What if it is just not true? Can anyone actually prove it? Have there been scientific studies that show conclusively that this is a fact?
I did a google to check on it, and ran across this (from guess who?)-
…For most of us, fear of flab is the reason we exercise, the motivation that drives us to the gym. It’s also why public-health authorities have taken to encouraging ever more exercise as part of a healthy lifestyle. If we’re fat or fatter than ideal, we work out. Burn calories. Expend energy. Still fat? Burn more. The dietary guidelines of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, now recommend that we engage in up to 60 minutes daily of “moderate to vigorous intensity” physical activity just to maintain weight—that is, keep us from fattening further. Considering the ubiquity of the message, the hold it has on our lives, and the elegant simplicity of the notion—burn calories, lose weight—wouldn’t it be nice to believe it were true? The catch is that science suggests it’s not, and so the answer to all of the above quiz questions is “no.”
Just last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine published joint guidelines for physical activity and health. They suggested that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to “promote and maintain health.” What they didn’t say, though, was that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight. Indeed, the best they could say about the relationship between fat and exercise was this: “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.” In other words, despite half a century of efforts to prove otherwise, scientists still can’t say that exercise will help keep off the pounds.
The 30 minutes recommended by the AHA-ACSM report is a departure from the recent guidelines of other authoritative organizations—the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the International Association for the Study of Obesity—both of which, like the USDA, have recommended that we exercise for up to 60 minutes a day to avoid what the USDA calls “unhealthy weight gain.” But the reason for this 60-minute recommendation is precisely that so little evidence exists to support the notion that exercising less has any effect.
The report that these experts cite most often as grounds for their assessments was published in 2000 by two Finnish researchers who surveyed all the relevant research on exercise and weight of the previous twenty years. Yet the Finnish report, the most scientifically rigorous review of the evidence to date, can hardly be said to have cleared up the matter. When the Finnish investigators looked at the results of the dozen best-constructed experimental trials that addressed weight maintenance—that is, successful dieters who were trying to keep off the pounds they had shed—they found that everyone regains weight. And depending on the type of trial, exercise would either decrease the rate of that gain (by 3.2 ounces per month) or increase its rate (by 1.8 ounces). As the Finns themselves concluded, with characteristic understatement, the relationship between exercise and weight is “more complex” than they might otherwise have imagined.
I’m not sure what to think of this myself, to be honest. I do know that “working it off” didn’t work for me-not while pounding out motos for months on a motocross bike, and not while riding a bicycle when weight was coming off after I got things sorted out with the help of the Holtorf Group in Torrance, Ca. Weight was melting off when I just focused on getting my chemistry sorted out, but when I tried exercise to speed it up, it just put weight on.
Since I got a lot of requests for advice, I would always say- “blood chemistry first, exercise later.” I’m still trying to understand it, which is why this stuff Taubes is writing is so fascinating. His book digs into the technical details of how and why.
I’ll save the techie stuff for the book review, which I hope to do real soon.
What I haven’t seen yet is a technical response to Taubes that provides proof of how exercise actually makes people thinner. I don’t mean “because I know it does,” I mean real, scientific proof, based on real facts, with real explanations.
I tossed “How exercise makes you thin” in google, and instead found this:
…”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 [Time]…
The Time entry cites as a reference, an article in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
The folks at Fitness Magazine didn’t like that too much. They responded with-
10 Reasons Why Exercise Makes You Thin (Or Why TIME Magazine Got It Wrong)
The problem with Fitness Magazine’s response is that it sucks.
Their #1 talks about cortisol and lowering stress, not about the actual mechanism that would explain how exercising makes you thin, or how. Fail.
Their #2 is “You need to burn more calories than you consume in order to lose weight,” which doesn’t mention exercise or exactly how that would work. You can’t and don’t “burn” calories, you consume energy. It’s way more complicated than that.
The rest are just slogans that are repeated all the time. No technical references, no proof.
Let’s keep going.. Same google search-
Got a few pounds to lose? Cancel the gym membership. An increasing body of research reveals that exercise does next to nothing for you when it comes to losing weight. A result for couch potatoes, yes, but also one that could have serious implications for the government’s long-term health strategy…
It looks like science has been looking after all, but it seems that the “exercise makes you thin” argument is losing.
Edit: Added this one about a half-day later-
The blog “weightoftheevidence” is discussing Taubes first book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease.
Simply put, Taubes contends dieting with exercise doesn’t make you lose more weight.
In fact, he reached the contrarian position that exercise does not make you lose weight from a number of studies designed to prove that exercise makes you lose weight – studies that found instead that weight loss is similar between groups who are eating similar calories and one group is exercising and one group is not exercising.
With the release of the book, no one seems to want to actually discuss the studies and data Taubes writes about; instead it seems the intent is to quickly stifle any and all discussion about the matter and maintain the status quo! Heaven forbid anyone learn that they won’t lose more weight on the scale if they exercise!
I’m seeing the same thing. When you mention this, no one really has data, just opinion. You press them for proof, and they get off the subject and declare themselves right anyway. Strange.
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