Yes, but the much more important question really is why?
Today a new paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine again suggests that exercise is crucial for long term weight maintenance, but I think misses the boat on why.
The paper, written by one of the giants in exercise and its role in obesity treatment and prevention Dr. John Jakicic and colleagues, follows 201 women for 24 months randomizing them into one of 4 different exercise arms (having to do with intensity and duration) and giving all of them Calorie reduced diets.
They then subdivided the results into groups representing percentages of maintained weight loss at 24 months and analyzed scads of data.
Their results and conclusions?
The folks who maintained a weight loss of greater than 10% of their starting weights exercised more minutes per week than those who did not. The authors concluded that the magic number of weekly exercise minutes for weight maintenance therefore were 275 (an average then of 40 minutes daily or an hour 5 days a week).
The thing is, I don't think that's the whole story.
Looking more carefully at the data we can see that on a weekly basis the folks who exercised the most burned only 1,145 more Calories than the folks who exercised the least (illustrating that exercise really doesn't burn boatloads of Calories given that to burn those additional Calories those folks on average exercised 3.5 hours more a week). That's only an average of 163 Calories more burned daily - not much to write home about.
No, for me the story is elsewhere in the data.
Looking at those who exercised the most, on a daily basis they were consuming 444 Calories less than those exercising the least. Extrapolating that and those folks were eating 3,108 fewer Calories a week! That's almost a full pound of Calories less a week! They also had much better scores on an eating behaviour inventory meant to assess weight control eating behaviours.
Translation?
The folks who exercised the most, ate the least and controlled their eating the best and in fact the magnitude of their dietary interventions at 24 months were 3 fold higher in Caloric impact than their exercise interventions.
My conclusion?
Exercise works and is integral to most for weight maintenance, but not via its direct Calorie burning capacity (which is small), but rather through its remarkable ability to cultivate healthy attitudes about weight management and in so doing, support dietary restraint and thoughtfulness for the long run.
Therefore to truly harness the power of exercise, we need to explore how exercise leads these folks to consume less Calories and stick to weight control eating behaviours. If we can figure that out, perhaps we can create interventions that do not in fact necessitate seemingly other-worldly amounts of daily exercise.
Posts
I think you missed a very vital component in your analysis. The exercise does one more very key thing for overall health, including weight management. Exercising creates a healthier body and allows the body to do it's miraculous work with more ease. Better blood flow, which benefits the body from head to toe. Reduce the risks of a boat load of cancers and makes you feel good.
ReplyDeleteIt is often a huge oversight. The goal shouldn't be weight loss, it should be healthy lifestyle, because the bonus side effect of a healthy lifestyle is your body's natural order of things reducing your weight. Without a healthy lifestyle our bodies are in constant defense mode, trying to figure out whether we are living or dying. So it does what it thinks is necessary to keep us alive. Unfortunately with so many poor signals from us on the outside the inside eventually ends up killing us anyway. Produce a healthy, ALIVE environment and your body will respond accordingly.
Being healthy is a lifestyle for a lifetime. Setting out to lose weight is like putting a band-aid on a gun shot wound, it won't work. Becoming healthy will not only heal your ailing body it will also shed weight. It is about setting goals that create desired side effects not goals that are the side effects.
All I can tell you is that, for me, exercise* makes me feel better physically, emotionally and mentally. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and makes me feel alive (like a kid again, really), which in turn keeps me motivated and focused when it comes to making healthy, wise food choices. I don't want to undo the benefits of the exercise; instead, I want to nourish the vessel which allows me to do fun stuff like cycling, swimming and, yes, gym classes. (* I don't call what I do exercise; I choose activities that I really enjoy and call them fun.) Thanks again to you, Rob and Shauna for helping me achieve this huge mind-shift. Vera
ReplyDeleteI agree. Doing exercise makes me feel better, and keeps me more involved with my body and soul, and I'm more likely to take care of myself. Also, it gets hard to do some of these exercises when heavier. Also seems that if I'm exercising regularly, I don't dread the scale, so I can't be in denial
ReplyDeleteThis may seem irrelevant, but I also find that the more I exercise, the less time I have to eat. On nights when I exercise I get home around 7.30 and by the time dinner is cooked and eaten it's nearly time for bed. If I don't exercise then dinner is over by 6.30 and there's a whole evening of snacking temptation ahead of me!
ReplyDeleteAnd what about boredom? I am sure this is a factor as well. If you are exercising, out doing things, breathing the air, etc. you are not as bored as if you are sitting on a couch or at a desk, where it's easy to reach for a bag of chips or whatever. And yes, you do feel better, emotionally, too. So there would be less need for "emotional eating" one would hope. (You also have more energy to cook, instead of just getting drive-through take out.) But in general I think that people who take time to take care of themselves are more likely to do so in all ways. It's more about paying attention to yourself and doing things deliberately, rather than just living on auto pilot and doing the minimum to survive.
ReplyDeleteThere are some great points here! Too often the reel significance of a health study is obscured by the news reports, and often even by the report authors themselves. The bottom line in too many studies is that some expensive drug makes a slight difference for a few people, and the results get blown out of all proportion. There's just no good substitute for a total lifestyle that includes good nutrition and regular physical activity.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting piece, and I like your conclusions. Many people are under the impression that the calories burned during exercise govern weight loss. One thing that they (and possibly you?) don't seem to consider is the fact that rigorous exercises increases the metabolism hours later (as many as 36 hours depending on intensity). In several studies, this increase in metabolic rate has been demonstrated through the measurement of EPOC, or excess post oxygen consumption. Pardon me if you're already familiar, but I feel this is another essential factor here. Those people may not have burned many more calories DURING their workouts, but it is very possible that their metabolisms were significantly accelerated due to their exercise, contributing to further fat loss.
ReplyDeleteI am wondering about these surveys proving the amazing metabolism-boosting effects for exercise for the next 30+ hours.
ReplyDeleteI mean,I am a regular exerciser,I do supersets and interval aerobics,frequently changing my workouts,but I notice that my weight goes up or down according to my caloric intake 100%(and i am not talking about crazy flunctuations over there)or if I overdo it a little for a week or so with indulgences,it shows.
I am REALLY wondering,anyone comment on this?I guess the calories you supposedly burn 'even when you're sleeping',if any,may be around..3.