Exercise: Fat Buster or Fat Waste of Time?
I am often flummoxed by “experts” who claim exercise has no influence on weight loss. Case in point, Gary Taubes writing in the New York Times a few years ago:
Stuff like this drives me nuts. Taubes has a lot of important things to say about weight loss, but he ruins them by throwing out chestnuts like this. At this writing, the human body is not manufactured by Casio. It is not a calculator. Admittedly, this article is from 2007 and only last year did modern science finally admit that the whole “pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories” is redonkulously over-simplistic. But instead of waxing sarcastic any longer, I’m going to throw down a little study out of Rome showing that exercise benefits insulin-treated obese patients with diabetes.
Yes, I understand that these are hardly typical exercisers, but it’s pretty black and white that BMI and waist circumference were affected by a healthy dose o’ cardio and weight training. So I guess it’s a little silly to categorically dismiss exercise as a weight loss method cuz for every study you have, someone else has another two studies saying the exact opposite thing. In other words, the only absolute truth about fitness and nutrition is that there is no absolute truth about fitness and nutrition, so quit being a smarty pants.
Just sayin’.
diabetes, exercise, fat, gary taubes, weight loss
You should do a blog about the pounds of fat being 3500 kcals and the specifics. 🙂
I did! http://thefitnessnerd.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-losing-weight-slowly-worth-wait.html
Gary Taubes lost me when he said that blueberries make him fat. Now I don’t follow him at all.
That being said, I think even though he used the calories-in-vs-calories-out-doesn’t-work argument, he was really trying to say is that you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. Which is completely true. It’s a lot easier to not eat the double whopper with cheese than it is to run the equivalent of its calories (half-marathon? just a guess).
The thing to keep in mind with his article is he’s talking primarily about AEROBIC exercise. When you start dealing with anything an-aerobic, it’s a whole different game. Sprinting has been shown to increase the size of your mitochondria, helping you to metabolise fat and avert future fat gain. With regards to weight training, you’re still going to want to take in as many calories as you expend, but they’ll be used to rebuild muscle tissue, instead of just being stored as fat like they would with aerobic exercise.
He makes some good points, (he doesn’t outright say it but the Nixon regime was the number one cause of obesity worldwide) and I think we should all put the concept of calorie expenditure to rest, but exercise is still at least 20% of the weight loss formula. If he doesn’t think exercise helps you get lean, he’s doing it wrong.