That’s what I felt about this article in Time, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin“, by John Cloud.  It’s 4 pages long, but these two paras tell you all you need to know:

“More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government’s definition. Yes, it’s entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don’t. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight?

When I read this, my initial response was, “WTF???”  Even the researchers he quotes, Eric Ravussin and Timothy Church, don’t go that far.  Is he serious?

Apparently so:

After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in “sports” drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you’re hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it’s easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting.

In other words, exercise is inevitably followed by compensatory eating of junk, which completely wipes out any calorie-burning benefits.

Bulls**t.  Do “we” get hungry after working out?  Sure, “we” do, but contrary to Cloud’s contention, “ravenous compensatory eating” isn’t a foregone conclusion.  In fact, the study he discusses by Church et al explicitly rejects this notion:

In the 12 KKW group approximately 27% of individuals did not have significant compensation in response to exercise training suggesting there are individuals that can achieve higher doses of exercise without compensation. Though primarily focused on weight loss maintenance, not weight loss, data from the Weight Control Registry (WCR) demonstrates that individuals who have lost a substantial amount of weight and have maintained weight loss typically achieve 45 or more minutes a day of moderate intensity activity. [30] These data from the WCR provides further data that there are individuals that either are not prone to compensation or who have developed strategies to combat compensation. Developing methods to identify individuals likely to compensate, and developing/testing strategies to combat this compensation are areas deserving of future work.

Emphasis mine.  Experiencing true, physical hunger is very different from experiencing a craving, and people dedicated to losing excess weight learn to distinguish between the two.  They also learn that healthy food is far more satisfying.  In the end, choosing muffins or Gatorade post-workout isn’t about hunger (or thirst)… the folks who do so are using exercise as a rationalization.

But this is Cloud’s problem in a nutshell: he’s trying to make the case that choosing muffins and/or Gatorade is involuntary.  This is because we’re being whipsawed by… (wait for it!)… evolution.

Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you’ll be more likely to opt for pizza.

This is so stupid it burns.  As someone who’s spent many years jogging/running, I can say with perfect confidence that you can’t simply “force” yourself to jog for an hour.  It takes a bit of  training to be able to jog for even 10 minutes continuously, much less 60.  By the time you’re capable of jogging for a full hour at a crack, it’s a well-tolerated habit – not some grueling act of sheer willpower akin to self-flagellation.  Most habitual runners enjoy it.  If it’s really that hateful by the time you’ve worked up to that time/distance, then the solution is simple: you should stop ”weakening” your willpower on it.  You’re doing the wrong f**king exercise, and you should ditch it ASAP in favor of something more congenial: cycling, skating, swimming, circuit-training, whatever…doesn’t matter.

Look peeps, beyond the physiological benefits, exercise ideally contributes to fat loss in two important ways.

The first is that it helps to create a caloric deficit: both Ravussin’s and Church’s work confirms this.  So when it comes to establishing that caloric deficit, dancing the Charleston can be just as effective as plodding on a treadmill.  If the latter bores you to tears, feel free to try the former.  You can even do several different things over the course of the day – it doesn’t have to be done in one loooong session. 

Secondly, done the right way, exercise can have a signficant impact on your body composition.  Cloud is focused (overfocused) on body weight, but the real issue is body fat.  Allow me to illustrate:

The difference between the left and right pics is three decades, two large (36 lb./38 lb.) pregnancies and 10 pounds of total bodyweight.  But if you’re thinking that I’m 10 pounds lighter now than I was then… you’re wrong: it’s the other way around.  I was 16 years old when the pic on the right was taken, and I always maintained my weight between 110 – 116 pounds…118 was my “fat” weight that told me it was time to diet.  Yet, I weighed in at 126 pounds when the pic on the left was taken, just two weeks ago.

How could I be 10+ pounds heavier now, yet look leaner than I did at 16?  It’s pretty simple, really… I AM leaner. Back then, I was a “skinny fat” type, who was normally active, but never exercised if I could help it.  Now, I lift weights, so I’ve added muscle mass (which is more compact than fat) and lost a significant amount of body fat.  I may be heavier than I was in high school, but there’s a lot less padding.  Needless to state, I could NEVER have achieved this through diet alone.  Dieters typically lose muscle, not gain it.

Thus, this observation:

“Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.”

…is arrant nonsense, since the kind of heavy lifting you have to do to build and maintain 10 additional pounds of muscle mass will allow you to eat far more than an extra 40 calories/day without gaining fat.  And do I really have to mention how much more calorie-burning work you can accomplish with an extra 10 pounds of muscle, for the same amount of perceived effort?

Seems to me that the only point to this otherwise pointless article, is to weave excuses for the author’s own inability to lose his gut.

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body’s muscles but the brain’s self-control “muscle” as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren’t eliminating all my fat.

Gee, would you like some cheese with that whine, John? :-D

A physician colleague of mine once pointed out the difficulty of managing certain patients with Type 2 diabetes… As he put it: ”They [patients] can always ‘out-lifestyle’ you.”  But it’s not “our culture” that makes these patients believe they can live as they please as long as they take their meds.  It’s willful blindness.  Same deal with exercise and weight loss… if you’re determined to “out-lifestyle” your efforts, then you will.

So what’s Cloud’s deal?  The dude obviously despises his workout regime, but has decided that exercise itself is the problem, rather than his own lack of imagination.  He’s looking for excuses to opt out, and thinks he’s found a winner…if exercise actually keeps people from losing weight, why bother?   Unfortunately, he’s written himself into a corner on this point.  As he concludes:

“You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual postexercise reward.”

If it makes you happy, John, then more power to ya, but it’s still a zero sum game as far as weight loss is concerned.  If that’s your plan for getting rid of your gut, then all I can say is “Good luck with that.”