Is exercising good for your health? Sure! Is it key to losing weight? Absolutely not! But so many people believe that it is. We’ve all heard the mantra “eat less and exercise more to lose weight.” Close to 50 million Americans have gym memberships or belong to health clubs. We spend about $20 billion a year on gym memberships, yet obesity rates continue to drastically increase year after year.
There are many good reasons to exercise, such as improving cardiovascular health, but weight loss is not one of them. The truth of the matter is that although exercise is important for good health, the foods you eat are three times more important for controlling your weight than exercise. I remember reading a Time magazine cover story that quoted the prominent exercise researcher and professor Eric Ravussin, who admitted to Time (“Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” August 9, 2009) that “in general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless.”
To lose one pound of fat by exercising, you must burn 3,500 calories. This would be equivalent to running thirty-five miles or walking on a treadmill for about seven and a half hours (at four miles per hour). As you can see, it would take a considerable amount of exercise to make a huge impact on your weight-loss goals.
I think it is important to note that exercise has many more benefits beyond weight loss. Most people who take up exercise become healthier by increasing their aerobic activity, which results in decreased blood pressure and overall better mood and mental health. I think because exercise is good for your overall health, many health practitioners downplay the fact that more and more research has shown that exercise has a negligible impact on weight loss. In other words, exercise may not be critical for weight loss, but in general, it is still great for our overall health.
It is true that exercise burns calories, and you must burn calories to lose weight, but exercise has another effect that counteracts the burning of calories: it stimulates hunger, which causes you to eat more, which in turn offsets any weight lost from exercising. Exercise doesn’t necessarily make you lose weight; in fact, it could make you gain some. The one time in my life that I worked out with a trainer for a few months, I gained fifteen pounds. When I complained to my trainer, he said the extra weight was all muscle. But my feeling was Who cares? I can’t fit into my clothes. And I hated my new body shape—not curvy and shapely, but big and bulky.
Even though I feel it is one of my personal flaws, I have to be honest with you: I don’t work out. I haven’t exercised in years. I tried to in the past but could never stick with it for more than four months, even when I had a trainer. I know that it’s good for me and that we should all exercise, but unfortunately, I don’t have the discipline to stick to an exercise regimen. However, I do have a strong desire to look and feel great. So I had to figure out how I could lose weight and keep it off, knowing that I didn’t want to do fad diets and didn’t want to be in the gym all the time. Happily, I found a system of healthy living that has yielded amazing results: permanent weight loss, a higher energy level, and overall great health! As a result, I have come to the conclusion that staying slim is all about eating right, while being fit is about exercising. So, as long as I focus on healthy eating, I will continue to stay slim. But if I want to reach a high level of fitness, I will need to incorporate more exercise into my life.
The question we should be asking ourselves is how much physical activity we need to be healthy and fit. Physical activity is about movement—things that get you moving throughout the day and away from the computer, TV, bed, or couch. Exercise is a type of physical activity where you set aside a specified amount of time to get moving. You can be physically active throughout the course of the day without ever going to the gym.
People tend to greatly overestimate how many calories they burn while “exercising.” The reality is that walking on a treadmill for about an hour burns only 350 to 400 calories, which can be nullified with one jelly donut or one or two glasses of wine. People typically burn 200 to 300 calories in a 30-minute aerobic-exercise session, but when they follow it up with a bottle of Gatorade, they replace all the calories they just burned. Another way to think of it is that you have to do a lot more exercise than the average person does in a typical hour-long session to burn off about 500 calories. To burn off just two donuts, about 500 calories, takes roughly two hours of cycling. To burn off two slices of pepperoni pizza, you’d have to do one and a half hours of swimming. So you have to do an awful lot more exercise than most people realize to make any real progress toward weight loss.
For some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don’t necessarily lose weight. An increasing body of work reveals that exercise is rather ineffective when it comes to losing weight unless eating habits are also changed. Changing how and what you eat is the most effective route for losing weight. So, practically speaking, exercise is not the most effective method for slimming down unless you have the training regimen of an Olympian or professional athlete.
I definitely don’t want to give people an excuse to not exercise; rather, I want them to accurately understand what exercise can and cannot do for their weight-loss goals. Those of you who do exercise should be proud of yourselves, and I encourage you to keep it up. When you get more physically active, you feel better about yourself and feel more inclined to watch the type of foods you put in your body.
In a very noteworthy experiment led by Dr. Timothy Church at the Louisiana State University, who published his results in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, hundreds of overweight women were put on exercise regimens for a six-month period for the purpose of determining the health benefits of exercise. One group worked out for 70 minutes each week, another for 135 minutes, another for 190 minutes, and another kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise. The women in the study were all postmenopausal, sedentary, overweight, and had elevated blood pressure. To ensure there was 100 percent compliance with the exercise regimens, the women’s exercising was supervised to accurately monitor results.
It was found that there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who had exercised, even with some groups exercising for several hours per week, and those who did not exercise. In fact, some of the women who exercised even gained weight. The possible reason for this was a problem identified as “compensation.” Those who did exercise canceled out the calories they had just burned by eating more, typically as a self-reward (rewarding yourself with food) for working out or to satisfy their stimulated appetites from the actual workout. It would be as if I would eat a donut or pastry to celebrate all the hard effort that I just put in during my workout, but in reality, I simply erased all the calories that were burned. So if you have committed to exercising, and that is indeed a good thing, be sure not to get in the habit of rewarding yourself with food.
One positive finding in the study was that every exercise group reported an improvement in quality of life, including the group that exercised for ten minutes a day. That means that as little as ten minutes of exercise a day has benefits. This is very good news for those who can find only ten to fifteen minutes a day for exercise but are not able to find one hour three times a week.
Barry Braun, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts, found that the evidence emerging from his research team shows that moderate exercise, such as “low-intensity ambulation” (i.e., walking), may help to burn calories “without triggering a caloric compensation effect,” meaning you won’t immediately feel the need for a snack after your workout as a result of increased appetite hormones in your blood. This means that an intense workout in the gym might actually be less effective than gentle exercises, such as walking, in terms of weight loss because you don’t get the stimulated appetite that comes with intense workouts.
If you look at numerous studies over the years, it clearly shows exercise alone won’t make you thin; rather, being physically active is a key factor in weight loss. In the DHEMM System, we focus on ways to get physically active throughout the day as opposed to just exercising a few times a week. Even if you just do light exercise—like taking a brisk walk to and from lunch or walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator—you will get many of the good benefits of exercise. This is because light exercise can increase your heart rate and improve your cardiovascular health.
Another consideration is that once you become overweight, it is much harder to exercise or go to the gym to work out. However, you are more likely to be able to simply “get moving” throughout the day. Once you begin to lose weight and become healthier, it will be easier to incorporate more intense physical activity (i.e., exercise) into your daily regimen.
I strongly believe that nutritional education must come first. People don’t lack willpower; they lack nutritional education. Eating habits must change first with a focus on nutrient-rich foods that do not cause the body to gain and store fat. I believe that changing how and what you eat will help you lose weight. Being physically active helps you keep the weight off permanently, so you’ll find two key steps of the DHEMM System are to EAT (healthy, nutrient-rich foods) and to MOVE (get physically active throughout the day). Since we know being physically active is good for your overall health, it makes sense to focus on that as well as changing your eating habits.