If this diary looks familiar, that's because it's a repeat and extension of Sunday night's WHEE diary. Unfortunately, that diary got hijacked by a vegan flame war. I had several requests from WHEEble regulars to repeat the diary, so I agreed to do it as my Wednesday morning effort. I'm going to expand on it a bit, but much of what you're about to read has been copied-and-pasted from the previous diary.
Last week's Time Magazine cover story was titled "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin." The four page article asks the question, "If Americans are exercising more than ever, why aren't we getting thin?"
WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
Time is not the first magazine to have a high-profile article on this subject. In 2007, Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, wrote an article for New York Magazine titled "The Scientist and the Stairmaster - Why most of us believe that exercise makes us thinner—and why we're wrong."
Writer John Cloud opens the Time magazine story with a description of his weekly exercise routine - cardio on Tuesday, workout with his personal trainer on Wednesday, an exercise class on Thursday, and a long run on Friday. He asks plaintively, "I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out?"
He then proceeds to lay out his case. Americans are hitting the gym more than ever. In 1993, 23 million Americans belonged to a health club, but now that number has nearly doubled, to 45 million. The Minnesota Heart Survey found the 57% of respondents claimed to get regular exercise in 2000, up from 47% in 1980. At the same time, Americans are growing fatter - in fact, 2/3 of adults are either overweight or obese. How can this be? Cloud has an explanation:
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.
Cloud reports on a study published earlier this year by Dr. Timothy Church. Church arranged for three groups of women (464 participants total) to work out once a week with a personal trainer for various amounts of time. A fourth group was asked to maintain their usual activity levels, but did not do any additional exercise as part of the study. Church found that there was no significant difference in the amount of weight lost by the control group versus the other three groups. Dr. Church hypothesized that the reason was compensation -- as Cloud puts it,
Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home.
Although Dr. Church seems to be leaning toward the "reward" aspect of compensation, Cloud thinks exercise makes people hungrier, produces "ravenous compensatory eating" and causes us to "crave sugary calorieslike those in muffins or in 'sports' drinks like Gatorade."
As an aside, one thing I [Edward] liked about this article is Cloud's use of sources. For example, he mentions an article in Obesity Research that explains that added muscle mass burns 13 calories per kilogram of muscle (I plan to return to this on a future Geek My Fitness diary). Psychological Bulletin is specified as the source of an article on self-control, and the International Journal of Obesity is the source of an 18-month study that found that children who exercised compensated by an average of 100 calories more than they burned exercising. Compare this to Taubes' New York Magazine hit piece, which unhelpfully uses terms like "a team of Danish researchers" or "two Finnish researchers" - good luck finding links to THOSE studies, pilgrim. ("So two Finnish physiologists walk into a weight room...")
Cloud goes on to talk about brown fat (rats have it, humans don't), then mentions a Psychological Bulletin paper on willpower - according to authors Muraven and Baumeister, "...self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it." This is followed by a discussion of a study of the effects on exercise on appetite in schoolchildren by "...Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity," (definitely a go-to guy for this subject) and "Kendrin Sonneville of Children's Hospital Boston", who
found in their 18-month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more — not just a little more, but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.
After laying out his case against the idea that one can lose weight through exercise, Cloud admits that exercise may actually have SOME benefits, citing recent studies that found that exercise can help improve cognitive ability and provide relief from back pain. He then introduces a question:
...whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours...do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?
One problem I [Edward] have with Cloud's argument is that he disregards the possibility of external influences on exercise, appetite, and self-control. For example, he cites a study on English schoolchildren:
Kids at the first school, an expensive private academy, got an average of 9.2 hours per week of scheduled, usually rigorous physical education. Kids at the two other schools — one in a village near Plymouth and the other an urban school — got just 2.4 hours and 1.7 hours of PE per week, respectively.
...
And no matter how much PE they got during school hours, when you look at the whole day, the kids from the three schools moved the same amount, at about the same intensity. The kids at the fancy private school underwent significantly more physical activity before 3 p.m., but overall they didn't move more. "Once they get home, if they are very active in school, they are probably staying still a bit more because they've already expended so much energy," says Alissa Frémeaux, a biostatistician who helped conduct the study.
Is that really the only reason they exercised less at home - because they wore themselves out with exercise at school? Or is it possible that the parents of these children made them sit down and study after they got home from their "expensive private academy"?
Some might protest that I am making too much of this example to argue that Cloud disregards the effects of external influences on appetite and self-control. However, at no point in his article does he mention any tools that can help dieters with portion control. For example, websites like Fitday and Sparkpeople make calorie counting much easier than in the days before the Intertubez. New smartphone apps bring this function right to the dinner table. I've found the online food logging part of my bodybugg to be highly effective to help ensure that I don't overeat after I finish my daily aerobic workout (a.k.a. bike commute). But to read Cloud's article, you might think the idea of an easy-to-use electronic calorie counter was still just a gleam in Al Gore's pre-Internet eye.
To me, the most useful takeaway of Cloud's article is the last page, where he returns to the idea 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.
The idea that lots of low-level physical activity can be more effective for weight loss than short bursts of gut-busting workouts is something that really resonates with me. The first time I lost major amounts of weight was when I started doing a lot of bicycling. But, you say, that doesn't sound like "low-level physical activity" - that's exercise! True - however, the SECOND time I lost a lot of weight was when I was taking two or three hours of ballroom dance classes on weekdays, and hitting the Austin Ballroom Dancers Saturday night dance. Just wimpy ballroom dancing, at a level where I could hold a conversation with my partner (well, except Viennese waltz) -- but I did a LOT of it, and I got down to 150 pounds without paying a bit of attention to my diet.
Cloud concludes his article by saying
In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain.
Aug 12:
Wed PM - mommyof3
Aug 13:
Thur AM - debbieleft
Thur PM - It really is that important
Aug 14:
Fri AM - jennyjem
Fri PM - ???
Aug 15:
Sat AM - ???
Sat PM - Brimi
Aug 16:
Sun AM - louisev
Sun PM - jiffykeen
Aug 17:
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
Aug 18:
Tues AM - ???
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Aug 19:
Wed AM - Edward Spurlock
Wed PM - ???