To explain that exercise does not affect your weight, or impact on obesity rates

[allmyown]

I see this misconception all over MN every day.

Exercise is fantastic for your physical and mental health in many ways, but it is not a weight loss tool.

Posters are forever quoting energy in -minus energy out = energy stored, etc, as if we are petrol engines or something! we are not - this is not how our body works.

It is more like energy available / energy required to maintain weight= energy body decides to use.

Your body burns off excess energy if you are taking in more than your homeostatic systems think you need. Your body slows down and uses far less energy if you have taken in less than your homeostatic system thinks you need.

And so if you lose weight, and go below what your body wants you to be, then your metabolism will just slow down massively to make the weight go back on. And if you exercise a lot, your metabolism will just adjust to accommodate that.

The key to weight loss is making sure your homeostatic systems decide you should be a healthy weight. You can lower the weight your homeostatic systems is attempting to maintain, with healthy eating, cut out sugar, HPF, vegetable oil, margarine, and cut down on wheat.

Eat plenty of fresh food and greens, nothing long dated.

Unless you are running 10K every single day, you are not exercising enough to change your weight, and even if you are, it won't stay changed.

The obesity epidemic is related to sugar, highly processed food, vegetable oil, margarine, etc, and poor diet in general, not too little exercise.

But don't get me wrong, there are other health problems caused by too little exercise, I am not saying exercise is bad, just that an obese child is not necessarily a child getting inadequate exercise, as so many people seem to think.

Read "Why we eat too much" by Andrew Jenkinson, he explains the up to date science in so much more detail.

You are describing a single theory and presenting it as fact. There are multiple theories on how to achieve and maintain healthy weights - some contrast the one you believe to be true.

Your error is trying to convince people the theory you believe is the singular truth - it isn't.

Can you confirm your qualifications on this topic?

Why is it baffling? There have been multiple research papers produced trying to convince us they are right on any one theory that later were proven to be incorrect this could be another one. Look at BMI swinging this way and that....20 years ago someone would be telling us with 100% certainty it is the best measurement of obesity, now that is disputed. Back further and smoking was recommended by doctors to calm nerves....were they right too?

Theories come and go, this is another and if you read the thread lots of people have anecdotal experiences that point to something different.

You and the OP are free to believe as you wish, same as others are. We don't all subscribe to the same beliefs.

@cocolocosmoko I am curious to the type of exercise you are talking about when you say it 'does nothing for me'.

It is pretty well known exercise can prevent the metabolic diseases which can make weight management problematic to say the least. It increases strength, fitness, flexibility, mobility, circulatory and cardiovascular health which make simple functioning throughout normal life possible.

It is not really disputed that a sedentary lifestyle causes health problems especially in later life.

I would agree weight loss in the presence of some kind of exercise is not always linear. This is because the whole issue is far more complex than that. Different types of exercise and different ways of exercise can do different things to the body. It is possible to overtrain which stimulates the release of cortisol which might work against what someone is trying to achieve. But not all exercise is the same. Some types of training actually reduce stress and inflammation.

Like different foods, exercise is complex. But we need both to live healthily.

ive been saying this for years that you don’t need to exercise to lose weight. Exercise won’t burn fat because it’ll use the quickest energy store available and that isn’t fat. However it’ll stop you gaining from what you are eating so it can help with weight loss it you eat well.

I used to exercise a lot. I got long Covid 4 years ago and haven’t been able to exercise since. When I eat healthily I lose weight just the same as exercised. But not exercising is terrible for your health overall. I’ve lost a lot of muscle mass and that isn’t good. So if people want to believe that exercise helps them lose weight, then let them because a lot of us need to move more.

@Jurassicparkinajug

Exercise won’t burn fat because it’ll use the quickest energy store available and that isn’t fat.

Look up MAF training. That burns fat.

I got long Covid 4 years ago and haven’t been able to exercise since. When I eat healthily I lose weight just the same as exercised

@Jurassicparkinajug, can you not do any type of physical activity? It all is a type of exercise. I managed to still go for walks throughout my cancer treatment a few years ago. Really, I think people can be quite restricted in terms of what they view as a type of exercise. I would say do what you can do. For your muscle mass at the very least. There might be some gentle resistance training you can do too. After my cancer treatment ( also suffered from sciatica) I started doing the exercises designed for people who are invalids and functional movements (off YouTube) before I came across slow jogging/running and learnt how to run with good technique. My fitness and mobility gradually increased and I now run 10k a day, walk 5 k and do strength and resistance training. Lost 4 stone and have more muscle mass in my 50s than I did in my 30s (according to my body composition scales - yes I've had the same set that long!😂)

I’ve got long covid.

I can’t do any sort of exercise. A walk to the kitchen leaves me exhausted.

I remember watching a documentary on weight loss and one of the largest original gym owners (can’t remember which one but maybe fitness first?) said exactly the same thing. Exercise alone will make no real difference, it’s all about what’s going in. If you look at someone like Davina McCall she looks fantastic, exercises loads but also eats next to nothing! I’ve been following a menopause lady who looks amazing then about 2 weeks ago she posted what she’d eaten that day and it was literally tiny portions of mostly greens. I am not overweight but I’m about a stone heavier than I was pre menopause, I refuse to starve myself to get back to original weight. So I try to eat less and more healthy but I stay just under 10 stone and that’s what it’s going to have to be!

I saw Davinia Mcall on something out of her normal context. I think it was some clothing brand she had designed and was trying to sell to M and S.

Anyway, she looked awful. Emaciated.

I have Long Covid as well as an underlying auto-immune disease. If you don’t exercise you’ll never get out. Even if you have to start with walking to the bathroom and back daily, and then build it up.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow,

I can’t do any sort of exercise. A walk to the kitchen leaves me exhausted

I'm sorry, I hope I didn't offend you. I don't like to assume what each condition means as there can be lots of variation between how conditions affect people. I hope you can find a way to improve your health in the future.

Can you link to the published studies on this? I'd like to read more about it.

It doesn't sound right to me though, DH started going to the gym about a month ago and has lost 5kgs since then. Was that just coincidence?

It's a shame @allmyown has made quite such a black and white statement, because objectively, the first half of "To explain that exercise does not affect your weight, or impact on obesity rates" cannot be true - at least in the short term!

Everyone, from the most sedentary to elite athletes can impact their weight in some way from exercise. (Even though OP has a - complex - point about the longer term impact.)

It's a shame, as it's brought out all the responses from across the spectrum.

Sticking to "exercise alone will never be an effective response to obesity" would be a far less marmite kind of a statement.

Do we need to change our diet away from high sugar, highly processed food options at a population level? Yes!

Is a high sugar/sweetener diet going to mess up any individual's insulin response and make fat storage more likely? Yes.

Is the extent to which that happens highly variable across the population? Yes!

Is having a high proportion of non-food (made in a factory not in the ground) items in a diet going to throw off gut flora & digestion? Yes.

Is the extent to which that impacts an individual's energy levels/fatigue/weight gain/metabolism/development of cancerous cells highly variable across the population? Yes.

Does everyone benefit from the heart-protective effect of even moderate levels of exercise? Yes.

Does exercise being to help regulating insulin levels again? Yes.

Does exercise help increase muscle mass, protect against falls, and improve later life mobility and independence? Yes.

Is saying that exercise alone won't fix the obesity epidemic accurate - yes, because we've gone beyond the tipping point of what is acceptable to categorise as 'food' for healthy functioning of the human body.

But it's no good focussing on a message that could too easily be interpreted as 'there's no point exercising'. That misses the point entirely too!

Would it be nice to normalise a plate full of food with no added emulsifiers, thickeners, preservatives, colourings, sweetners or artificial flavourings? YES, yes, a thousand times yes! And without excessive levels of sugar or fat? Yes!

But the "food" industry has nailed the right levels of sweet, salt & fat to make their products utterly addictive, reducing 'full' hormone production and increasing 'I need to eat' hormone production very effectively.

Reducing availability/intake of these "food" products will be the only answer to the population level obesity crisis in the end - but exercise also has to be part of the picture to keep everybody HEALTHY, not just smaller.

I agree with this but I think the original post was pointing out that exercising like crazy but eating whatever you want isn’t going to work to make you lose weight. I hardly ever have a ‘ready meal’, I cook from scratch nearly every day but do eat out once a week-once a fortnight ish. Do I have the odd packet of crisp, yes, the odd biscuit, yes. I couldn’t cut it all out. There’s also the sad fact that crap food is cheaper so I have the luxury to buy good food as we’re not on a very tight budget. I don’t know how we as a country can change to make good food available to all.

Well we could stick a 60% VAT rate on anything that had been processed to include emulsifiers, sweeteners, artificial thickeners, colours or flavours @Janus

The food lobby & politicians could spend years telling us why it's not possible. But if we wanted to, it is!

And that tax take could be diverted to teaching children how to cook more than cakes & sausage rolls in school lessons. Community cooking lessons. Support for farmers. NHS programs to help wean people off addictive food which kills their 'full' triggers.

But there's too much power with those who make money from foods that are killing us, so 🤷🏼‍♀️

The lack of cooking in schools is not the schools fault.

They have an hour a week where l used to teach, and that’s on a 6 month rotation. The problem is the government putting too much into the school curriculum not leaving enough time for it.

Sausage rolls or whatever are done because of time limitations. They don’t have time to teach lasagne or whatever unless it’s GCSE.

Exercise will burn fat, if you don’t replace the energy used.

the body always uses it’s glycogen stores first. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you can’t bypass that.

once the liver’s glycogen stores are gone, blood sugar drops and the body needs to find another energy source. Which is fat.

so if you exercise beyond needing glycogen, you will burn fat. Similar to intermittent fasting- if you don’t eat you use up your glycogen existing and start to burn fat for energy.

where it falls down is if you don’t control your eating, chances are you will then eat enough to replace the fat stores you’ve used up.

where exercise helps if muscle constantly burns energy, whereas fat doesn’t. So a 10st person who exercises will lose more weight for the same amount of calories as a 10st person who doesn’t exercise. One because exercise uses calories, two because their metabolic rate is higher, so even if they don’t exercise one day, they burn more calories.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow I'm 100% not suggesting it's the schools' fault! It's government policy about what is the highest priority to our society!

We also have 4 generations now who may never have been taught to cook with raw ingredients. We could replace some cash benefits with a food box that would make a balanced diet for a family. But the food industry is so ingrained with high fat, high sugar, high salt products, that if the country switched to handing out a box with pasta, tinned tomatoes, lentils, celery, carrots, onions, oats, apples etc, there would be way too high a response rate of simply 'I/my kids won't eat that muck. Where's the pizza & chicken nuggets & crisps & cocoa pops?'

Calories in minus calories out will indeed determine weight change. Exercise will change calories out. In the short term it will increase the amount of energy you use and if you maintain eating habits you will lose weight. There is a risk that if it’s not properly fuelled your body will start metabolising your muscle mass and that will slow down your base metabolic rate which will make it even harder to lose weight.

Body builders get shredded by increasing muscle mass and then dieting (losing some of the muscle gains but more fat), on a repeating cycle. As time goes on, they increase their metabolic rate and it gets easier to lose fat every time they cycle.

So, I agree and disagree with you. Just doing cardio and not fuelling it properly will not lead to long term weight loss. But a strength building exercise routine can lead to weight loss.

@Mrspenfold123

Just doing cardio and not fuelling it properly will not lead to long term weight loss. But a strength building exercise routine can lead to weight loss.

Cardio can be really beneficial though. Not only regarding circulatory, cardiovascular and mental health but also with regards to training the body's fat burning systems to operate more readily and efficiently. So someone won't be as likely to 'hit the wall' once glycogen stores are depleted. The switch over to burning fat happens more seamlessly.

Not say building strength and muscle doesn't have very beneficial effects too. Just that cardio is a very important part of the all round picture of exercise. It is an important function of the human body which needs to be developed and honed by the individual. Just like everything else.

Oh for the love of all that is holy, no Coca Cola were not the originators of this. Aristotle the biologist and philosopher for example espoused the benefits of exercise for the physical benefits and mental benefits, and about a billion others in the interim did so too, before coca cola or anyone else piped up.

There's a whole world of scientific research out there that focuses on the human body, and not only weight loss. To genuinely understand weight loss / fat loss requires an understanding of general biology and physiology first. It is an utterly fundamental biological reality that there is an undeniable clear and predictable relationship between exercise and fat loss. It is biology 101.

Without this knowledge, or by focusing only on weight loss literature you can be easily led by snake oil salesmen or confused by competing so-called theories.

Exercise is great for your mood and suppressing your appetite. It does make you want to eat a lot better as well. If I don’t go to my gym classes I feel really sluggish.

I totally agree that cardio is beneficial too. All I was saying is that dieting AND doing lots of cardio simultaneously might crash your metabolism so might not help in the long run with sustainable weight loss. Fuel your cardio sessions and maintain muscle mass.

Is it possible to do any form of exercise without increasing muscle mass though?

Since I started cycling to work the muscles in my legs have got noticeably bigger despite cycling at a pretty slow pace.

I am sure weight training would have a larger impact but I definitely have improved muscle tone over just sitting on my backside!