We hear it all the time. If we exercise, we will lose weight. The message is everywhere: local radio advertising gym memberships, print media touting the latest and greatest exercise fad, TV’s The Biggest Loser (which I love watching by the way) promising 100 pounds of weight loss or more in 4 months. If we exercise we will shrink, right?
Well think again everybody. Exercise is very beneficial, both physically and psychologically. People who exercise regularly are less likely to develop cancer, diabetes and heart disease. They are also more likely maintain cognitive functions and less likely to develop mental disorders. So PLEASE, don’t stop exercising! But I’ll say it again a little bit differently, the daily food choices that you make matter more in the battle of “The Energy Gap.”
Guy on a Treadmill
The energy gap is the difference between the calories that you consume and the calories that you burn. If you consume more than you burn, your gap is positive and your weight will increase. If you burn more than you consume, your gap is negative and your weight will decrease. It’s actually very simple and I’ve written about it many times before.
But what I haven’t written about before is a problem that I just read about called the “Compensation Problem.” The compensation problem is the biggest reason why exercise doesn’t help most of us lose much weight. It’s actually very simple, exercise makes us hungry, and it makes us lazy!
One of the major problems with exercise is that it makes a lot of us hungrier. Raise your hand if this is familiar to you. You just spent an hour at the gym, sweating to the oldies. You’re in the car on your way home, or back to work when you have a compelling need to hit Starbucks for a Venti White Chocolate Mocha and a Cinnamon Chip Scone. You think, “It’s no big deal, I just worked my butt of for an hour, I deserve it!” We’ve all done it, right? Well, unless you burned 1070 calories (I looked up the numbers) at the gym (that’s hard to do in an hour) you’ve now created yourself a positive energy gap and ruined any chance of losing weight due to your exercise at the gym.
There’s another way that exercise makes it harder to lose weight. Studies have shown that after an hour of vigorous exercise, most people are less active for the rest of the day. In fact, many people burn more calories during a normal, moderately active, “non gym day” than they do if they spend an hour at the gym and take the rest of the day off by resting on the couch because they’re so tired from the gym!
So not only do most of us eat more when we exercise, we also tend to burn fewer calories throughout the day when. This compensation problem is a huge problem.
So what’s the solution to losing weight? You know it. Calculate the amount of calories you need to maintain your weight. Subtract 500. Keep track of your calories consumed and burned during exercise. Maintain a total negative energy gap of 500 calories per day and you’ll lose a pound per week.
Exercise is good! Keep doing it! But only the most mentally tough of us will be able to overcome the compensation problem in the long term. For the rest of us. If it goes in our mouths, right it down!
Note: If you want to read more about the compensation problem, check out this article.
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I’m glad that at the end of your post you mentioned that a person needs to be mentally tough to achieve long lasting weight loss. This is by and large the most important part. I feel that I am finally at a point in my life where I can emotionally handle what it takes to get healthy. Yet it has taken years for me to come to this point and a lot of re-education and re-training my habits.
I don’t really care for the statement that exercise doesn’t work for weight loss. Even with the disclaimer citing its many benefits, I disagree.
It is about achieving a balance in life. I have found that I need to focus on both exercise and what I eat. I do agree with you that my best results have been achieved when I am more conscious of what I eat!
Your examples of why “exercise does not work” are better attributed to a person not having solid goals along in addition a bit of laziness. The exercise works fine. It’s the crappy food one eats which negates the exercise. If you have the proper goals in place, you’ll perform your exercise routine and go eat a meal that complies with your weight loss plan. If you eat something else, then you’ve failed yourself. Don’t blame the exercise for eating bad food. Even if your plan is only to subtract calories without exercise, one can easily justify to themselves how they deserve to eat pizza and ice cream. Either way, a person needs to have goals and stick to them.
James: I’m not sure my mind is made up. What I am sure of is that the article suggested that research shows exercise makes it harder to stick to our goals and that some of us are better off taking a more even approach to calorie reduction. Stretching your calorie reduction throughout the day by eating sensibly may be easier to maintain for the long term than getting your entire calorie deficit in one shot through an intense vigorous exercise program that makes you feel hungry. The article made me think, but I’m not giving up my exercise because it makes me feel so good about myself
My mileage has varied on this, by quite a bit. There are a number of studies showing that exercise can act as an appetite suppresant (for example, here and here ) and that has certainly been my personal experience; also that I tend to crave healthier food after exercising. Certainly, I know I while not lose any weight at all by dieting alone; even on moderate diets my body goes straight to starvation mode and won’t give up an ounce. (And frankly, I’d rather be fat and healthy than skinny and sick, which makes exercise far more important than weight loss to me.)
Also, any article that mentions the “huge” jump in obesity since 1980 without mentioning that in the interim the definition of obesity was changed to include far more people is immediately suspect in its “research” to me; the studies cited are cherrypicked for sound bites, even when their results are contradicted by a much larger quantity of larger studies, and once again, someone who should know better is presenting correlation as causation. I suggest reading this post at Junkfood Science instead.
As you know, people feel hungry after a workout because their body requires energy. If you are burning 1000+ calories in a workout, you’ll need to feed yourself. I forget how many calories a day you are on, but let’s say it’s 2000. You lose 1000 through exercise. That leaves your body with 1000 calories to work with. For most men, that is going to be below your basal metabolic rate (the number of calories you body needs to perform basic functions). If you keep that pace up, your body will slow your metabolism to compensate. Essentially, you are starving yourself to death, which leads to the binge eating, you can’t help to eat like that if you are starving. Generally speaking, people that exercise a great deal end up eating a lot more, but still losing weight. The trick is to eat the proper number of CLEAN calories at the proper intervals.
A couple of things James: I think you meant to say that if I am on 2000 calories/day and I burn 1000 through exercise then I have 3000 calories to work with, not 1000. But I caught your meaning. Also, please remember that I have been fighting this war for a long time and that I win the small battles more often than not. Just because I report on some research that makes a lot of sense in my head about why it used to be so hard for me to lose weight, doesn’t mean that that’s where I’m at right now. I thought the information would prove helpful for other people who aren’t as far along on their journey as you seem to be, or as I happen to be.
I think part of the conceptual disconnect is that athletes and other people who are committed to serious exercise (2-3 hours/day) often have a hard time getting enough calories to maintain their weight. On my longer (90 kilometer) bike rides this summer I’ve been burning around 2,500 calories in a day, and I know that for many serious bicyclists 90 km just counts as a training ride; I know bikers who routinely do twice that distance in a day, plus they’re not just doing their long rides on weekends.
So clearly exercise does make a difference, but if you’re not doing vigorous aerobic exercise for at least an hour a day then you’re probably not going to lose a lot of weight through exercise alone. I read in the NY Times a few years ago that if you ran as fast as you could from the bottom to the top of the Empire State Building and then ate a Snickers bar at the top, all the calories you’d burned getting up there would be replaced by those in the Snickers bar.
I exercise daily for 30-60 minutes, although not always sustained aerobic exercise, and I’m not losing weight at any perceptible rate. (On the other hand, I’m not gaining weight either.) Diet adjustment in combination with exercise is the only way for me to shed pounds.
There’s more to the “energy gap” when it comes to exercise, eating, and weight loss than simply calories consumed vs. calories burned.
Check out this interesting website/article about someone who only lost 5 pounds after training for months for a triathlon – more than 20 hrs a week of exercise and watching every calorie she ate.
http://figureathlete.tmuscle.com/free_online_article/training/the_final_nail_in_the_cardio_coffin
There was a recent article in a similar vein at the NYT:
http://health.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-obesity-ess.html
These articles irritate me. Number one, this one doesn’t ring true to me, because, like Jeliza, I’ve found exercise to be an appetite suppressant and plus I consciously know that if I eat more after exercising, I’m undoing my progress. Maybe these research findings ring true to other people, fine, but I don’t think anyone should use this research to try to tell themselves that exercising isn’t helpful for weight loss in general, which is what the article implies, even though we all know that the real message is always eat less than you burn, that doesn’t make for a sensational news story. As JD would say, do what works for you.
“Everything you thought was good is bad! Science is turned on its head! Truth exposed as lies!” That is just a bunch of nonsense. This article is about psychology, not physiology. Exercise works to lose weight! The article claims that if you exercise, you’ll lie around like a lump for the rest of the day rather than moving around more. Most days I exercise are weekends or days off, when I’d just be sitting on the couch otherwise. Days I don’t get to exercise, I’m on my feet running around and working. It’s all about burning more calories, however you do it. 300 calories in a workout may not be huge but it’s better than nothing! My fear is that people read this and just don’t bother to get off the couch. “Hey Bob, look on the TV! They’re saying that exercise doesn’t help weight loss anyway!”
I find it irresponsible of news media outlets to give all this press to stuff that discourages people from actually losing weight because “it’s so hard” and “your mind and body are programmed against losing weight”. If we want to talk about psychology, what about the psychology of getting the messages that weight loss is too hard, exercise is bad. You could totally write the article from the other perspective too, saying that “it doesn’t matter what you eat, you can eat candy bars if you like as long as you burn off enough calories. Diet may have anti-cancer and heart disease benefits, but diet won’t make you lose weight, exercise will do it by allowing you to burn off the calories you take in.” Exercise works, it’s the psychology that doesn’t.
As a physician I just feel like patients are getting the wrong messages. Weight loss itself (not just exercise and diet as lifestyle factors) has health benefits and we should be touting them, not discouraging people from bothering to try.
Jeliza, they changed the definition because they reviewed tens of thousands of studies showing that a BMI of greater than 25 is correlated with greater health risks. What it means to any given person about being “overweight” or about our population being “overweight” is another story. I don’t need research to tell me that I’m surrounded by fat people. I can see it everywhere I go, especially in my job at the hospital. Have you visited other countries lately and then returned to the USA? Obesity epidemic takes on a sudden and profound significance when you experience the transition. I think it’s perfectly appropriate to point out that as a whole, our country is fat. Reading studies with an eye towards statistical significance and research methodology is always a good idea, but I don’t think the article was saying anything debatable. The Junkfood Science article claims that the media “ignores” stories on studies showing that overweight people live longer. Don’t think this is true, since I’ve heard about these studies plenty of times lately. However, I certainly think your point on correlation/causation applies to that study… why is it that the overweight/obese had less risk of sudden death? Alll they’re doing is looking at large populations and telling you mortality rates. The question of why and what that means to people’s quality of life question has not been answered, and until it is can we really draw conclusions from these studies on what it means to your health to be overweight? Mortality aside, there is plenty of morbidity to being overweight that I see every day like osteoarthritis, asthma, diabetic foot infections, etc. (As to the skinny and sick, being skinny is not usually their choice but related to a disease process like cancer, AIDS, etc) People suffering from these ailments have a lower quality of life, plus they run into all kinds of other problems in medical care that I could write a hundred pages about (can’t get IV lines placed, can’t fit in the CT scanner, etc etc etc). So do I think that I’m going to start advising patients that being overweight and sedentary is not a big deal? Nope.
I don’t think the weight loss industry has a conspiracy to make people think that they are fat and need to get thin. They don’t need to. Everyone already wants to be thinner and the vast majority are not thin regardless of how you define “thin”.
Sorry for the novel-length comment but this issue is close to home (or work anyway) for me.