Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
By John Cloud Sunday, Aug. 09, 2009
http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...4857-2,00.html
"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.
The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.
If evolution didn't program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn't exercise do anything?
Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability.
Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat.
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Such is the "vicious cycle" of wanting to become a bodybuilder. You have to consume copious amounts of (good) calories, but you exercise just as much to burn the dead weight off.
Ultimately losing weight comes down to your diet first, and then your exercising. You may have a solid six-pack underneath just from everyday activities, but no one is going to see it unless you eat the right stuff, including vegetables and low-fat sources of protein.
And more so, you shouldn't be eating until you're
full; you should only be eating until you're
not hungry. Spread out 5 healthy little meals over the course of the day, and it's an ideal solution to weight loss