We have this idea that:
If we want to lose weight we joined a gym on January 1 we start working out regularly and eventually be slim down well here's some bad news , I read more than 60 studies on this and
it turns out exercise is actually pretty useless when it comes to weight
loss doctor
Kevin hall at the national institutes of health has done
some of the most important studies on
exercise and weight loss we need
to rebrand exercise exercise in a weight loss tool per/se
it's excellent
for health it's probably the best single thing that you can do other
than
stopping smoking to improve your health bites don't look at it as a
weight loss tool
exercise will definitely help you live a longer
happier life
https://amzn.to/2SH3ZDj
it's just not the best way to lose
weight and the reason
has to do with how our bodies use energy you may not realize it but
physical activity is actually a tiny component of your daily energy
burns there are 3 main
ways our bodies burn calories these include your
resting metabolism so that's how much
energy your body burns just for
its basic functioning just to keep you alive basically the
other part of
energy expenditures the thermic effect of food and not just how much
energy
is required to break food down in your body. Third
part of energy expenditure is physical
activity for most people physical
activity that's any movement you do only accounts for
about 10 to 30
percent of energy use so the vast majority of energy or calories you
burn
every day comes from your Basil or resting metabolism over which
you have very little
control while 100 percent of your calories in are
up to you only about 30 percent of your
calories out for in your control
one study found that if a 200 pound man ran for an hour 4
days a week
for a month he lose about 5 pounds at most assuming everything else
stays the
same and everything else doesn't stay the same researchers
have found we make all kinds
of behavioral and physiological adaptations
when we start increasing the amount of exercise
we're getting every day
for one thing exercise tends to make people hungry and I'm sure
you
know the feeling you you go for a spinning class in the morning and then
by the time
you breakfast you're so hungry you may be double the size
of the portion of oatmeal you
normally eat there's also evidence to
suggest that some people simply slow down after a
workout so if you went
running in the morning you might be less inclined to take the stairs
at
work these are called compensatory behaviors they're basically the
various ways we
unknowingly undermine our workouts researchers have also
discovered a phenomenon
called metabolic compensation as people start
to slim down the resting metabolism can slow
down so the amount of
energy you burn while at rest is lower that means it this far might
shrink as you start to lose weight for still a lot of research to be
done but one study from
2012 is particularly interesting they went out
into the middle of the Savannah in Tanzania
to measure the energy burn
among a group of hunter gathers called the heads up these are
super
active Lina hunter gathers they're not spending their days behind a
computer at a desk
and what they found was shocking what we found is
there is no difference at all so even
though the how to have a much more
physically active lifestyle they were burning anymore
calories every
day the adults in the U. S. and Europe somehow.
https://amzn.to/3lxw9gF
The energy
they used for physical activity was being offset or conserved elsewhere
so how did they stay slim they
don't over eat we can undo the calories
that we burn off an exercise pretty quickly it would
take about an hour
running to burn off the big mac and fries you have to spend about an
hour dancing pretty vigorously to burn off 3 glasses of wine you might
drink with dinner
an hour of cycling really intensely on exercise bikes
to burn off about 2 donuts and that's
why exercise is best seen as a
healthy supplement for a strategy that's focused on food but
despite extremely high obesity rates in the U. S. government agencies continue
to present
exercise as a solution as do companies with the real interest
in making sure we keep eating
and drinking their products since the 19
twenties companies like coca Cola have been
aligning themselves with the
exercise message the idea here is that you can drink all these
extra bottles of soda as long as you work out but as we're seeing it doesn't
work like that
actually burning off those extra calories from Canistota
is really really hard we have an
obesity problem in this country a
mission to a low physical activity and eating too many
calories is equally responsible for it public health policy makers should really
prioritize
improving our food environment to help people make healthier
choices about what they eat
it's not impossible to lose weight through
exercise it's just a lot harder and we need to
recognize how that works
if you do go to the gym the burn all these galleries takes you a
long
time to do so and put in a great amount of effort you can erase all of
that in 5 minutes
and eating a slice of pizza it's relative magnitude is
is actually quite surprising and most
people don't appreciate that.
