Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

The article itself it insightful. But, brother hackers, can we allow an article whose title is a <i>blatant</i> <i>lie</i> to be voted to the top of Hacker News?<p>Running is exercise.<p>Running 1600 meters, on average, burns 124 calories for a man. ("Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running", Syracuse Uni study). This only takes a few minutes.<p>Even if a person is taking in massively more calories than their body needs -- let's say, overeating by <i>1000</i> calories a day -- they <i>could</i> burn it all off with a few miles of jogging. Increase the amount of running they do still further, and you won't find anyone who will seriously suggest that they <i>won't</i> get thinner.<p>Or how do you think that cross-country runners got so skinny?<p>Olympic marathoners?<p>...<p>So ...<p>Exercise CAN make you thin; thus, the statement that it won't is incorrect.

I'm trying to lose weight right now. Actually, I'm trying to get in the best shape of my life, so that I feel better physically and enjoy the sports I play more.<p>I've been losing about 1/2 pound per week for most of this year, while spending about a half hour per day in the pool, and maybe another hour on the basketball court.<p>I took a two weeks off and went to France on vacation. I ate a bunch of great food (though never "stuffing" myself). I walked around to visit museums. I never thought about fitness. I lost 5 pounds in the two weeks.<p>There's probably a few reasons why this happened. I was on vacation, so there was no stress-triggered eating. I was getting lots of low-intensity exercise that burned calories without stimulating hunger. I was eating slowly, savoring the tastes of the different foods I was trying. I'm trying to bring these lessons back with me.

Here's my experience:<p>Running was <i>extraordinarily</i> effective in helping me lose weight. However, it took quite a bit to do it. I was on a cross-country team in high school. That took me from slightly chubby to rail-thin. Every single person on the team who started out over-weight made great progress. One fat kid lost at least 30 pounds in just three months. Nobody I knew who kept running stayed fat.<p>Still, I have to say that my experience fits with the results of the experiment mentioned in the article. At one point after spending a few years doing little but sitting in front of the computer, I decided to lose about 25 kilos. I went out and did about the amount the "high exercise" group mentioned in the article did, and I just ate more as a result. However, <i>after going over about 50km/week, I found my appetite suppressed</i>. It was kind of like my body had found its equilibrium and my hunger was based upon how much I actually needed. I lost weight really quickly after that.

&#62; As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, "The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less."<p>Bizarre irrelevant quote from that book. I think it was made while blasting the eat-less-exercise-more crowd which does not work. Taubes argues that the wrong theory comes from a misunderstanding of the conservation of energy principle, i.e., for anyone who gains weight it <i>has</i> to be true but it does not explain the cause. Growing teens eat more than they expend in energy and the reason is growth hormone. Same applies to gaining weight, the cause is insulin which is elevated when we eat carbs. Cut the carbs and lose weight and possibly a raft of other modern diseases. The science is very clear and the medical field is ignoring it because they owe us a huge mea culpa.<p>Read the book but here is more data. <a href="http://thras.blogspot.com/2009/08/diet.html" rel="nofollow">http://thras.blogspot.com/2009/08/diet.html</a>

I find it annoying that either through ignorance or a need to create an eye-catching headline the author interchangeably uses the words "thin" and "weight" to describe a metric used to measure some undefined-but-ideal body shape,<p>There is an incredibly difference between being a 180lb man who exercises regularly and one who does not.<p>Perhaps the author was never asked the "which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of lead?" question as a child.

Hmm I exercise daily and have been more tempted to eat healthier foods, rather than undo all the work my body has put in exercising. I'm down 30LB in the past 45 days. Time can suck it.

Let me summarise. If you exercise you'll feel hungrier and if you don't show some self-restraint, you'll probably eat more and either not lose anything or actually put on weight. As the saying goes "Abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym."

Actually, I suspect the point of the article is to help fat people feel better about being fat. People (especially American people) need reassuring that nothing is ever their fault.<p>You didn't get fat by eating too much because it's all determined by genetics, and you actually have a medical condition. You don't need to worry about trying to lose weight because it's been scientifically proven that you can't. That's why those diets failed. Not because of any fault or lack of determination on your part.<p>I have no idea why it works this way, but I've observed it happening all my life, so I've just accepted it as the way things are. Not surprisingly, living in Europe, where being fat is generally considered to be a condition you got yourself into all by yourself, you don't tend to see many fat people around.

The first thing that jumped out at me is that weight is the wrong metric in the first place. I'd rather be the same weight but have more, and better proportioned, muscle mass. (Muscle burns calories even when you're resting...it's a much better knob to tweak than the number of calories burnt during exercise.)<p>The author might be better off by giving away his bathroom scale and thinking about his body as a system.

On a related note, has anyone found any studies examining how much your metabolism actually decreases when you diet?<p>I've been tracking my weight and calories/exercise for over a year, and I've noticed the oddest thing. I can eat up to 3000 calories/day with no exercise and not gain weight. But I have to eat under 2000 calories/day to lose any weight.<p>I seem to have this dead zone 2000-3000 calories where my body seems to set my metabolism to whatever I eat.<p>(Of course the math and statistics confused the bejezus out of me, so I may be completely wrong.)

Gee, I can eat more calories of pizza in ten minutes than I could burn off in two hours of running... if I could run for two hours at the same pace I can run for half an hour. What more explanation do you need?<p>On the other hand, exercise improves my mood and helps me limit my eating, and for that reason it's quite helpful.

Nobody is ever going to agree on this. Different things work for different people. Everyone's got their "I did this and lost loads of weight" or "this didn't work for me" story.<p>Some form of exercise combined with less and better food is probably going to get you somewhere. Learning to live with being hungry helps :-).

At the end of the day, you lose weight by using more calories than you take in.<p>While the results of the Time article may apply to some people, I've found that I do a better job of losing weight when I go to the gym at least 4 times a week, and I've lost 45 pounds so far this year, most of it since March. At the end of the day, though, you still have to be conscious about what you eat, and find things that satisfy cravings without destroying the work you've done.

The problem is that every few weeks an article comes out with some blanket statement like this, like "Excercise won't make you thin" which is only a partial truth. If you read many articles about fitness and nutrition you'll realize that there are no black and whites when it comes to nutrition and weightloss and there is no one easy answer.<p>Staying healthy and losing weight is a combination of good habits.<p>The reality is of course that exercise is a fantastic way to lose weight and stay healthy, but as this article says if you don't pair that healthy eating habits it means absolutely nothing.

I recommend the mono diet. Ingredients: 1 part dirty (ex-)girlfriend. I lost 15 pounds in one month! Highly recommended.<p>Now that I have that weight off I feel the need to keep it that way, so I've gone from 10 beers a week (ballmer peak..) down to 1 or 2 and cut out as much stuff that has High Fructose Corn Syrup from my intake as I can. And I'm trying to do the CRON thing and eat slower and eat like half of my meals or just have more, smaller meals. Keeps my metabolism up throughout the day and helps me convert more to energy. That seems to have done the trick.<p>PS - rice cakes and rice/whey protein are great

What I find interesting is that there may be an even better way to lose weight. Let's say you run five miles. That burns around 100 Calories or 100 kcal or 4.184 x 10^3 J.<p>Now, consider this. Let's say that a 165 lb (72.57 kg) human male is around 100% water (this is not true, its about 60% water, but for our purposes it'll be ok). Now, since this person is made of water, we'll consider that the specific heat of a human being is about that of water, thus 4.186 J/(g.C). Now, how much energy is expended in order to raise 72.57 kg 3 Celsius degrees? Q=c.m.dt = (4186 J/(kg.C)).(72.57 kg).(3 C) = 911,334 J.<p>What's interesting is this: by decreasing the temperature of your thermostat by 5.4 degrees fahrenheit, you can burn more than <i>double</i> what you get by running 5 miles. Of course, there are other benefits to exercise, but if your only gain is to lose weight, why not take advantage of the Laws of Thermodynamics? Of course, I'm simply restating what doctors have known for years. Unless you're a world-class athlete, your diet isn't providing energy for your various activity, it's providing "living energy." This is all the energy that your body requires simply to stay alive. The proper name for this term is the "basal metabolism." It makes up <i>far</i> more of the average person's metabolism than anything else. Thus, by using it to your advantage, you can lose weight quicker and easier.<p>Edit: You can also stop shoving calories into your face, but I don't get to do math/physics with that.

As someone who's been trying to lose weight for a while, I have to say that trying to control your diet without working out is hard. Ever since I started working out and playing squash (for the last 2 months) I have significantly reduced my daily calorie intake (from ~3500 calories to between 1200 - 1500 calories). I tried this in the past but could never keep it going beyond a couple of weeks.<p>I think the reason working out has helped me is 'cause in the back of my head, I'm thinking about all the work I'd have to put in at the gym to make up for those 1000 extra calories I had. So, while controlling your diet is essential, doing some physical exercise to support that is just as important IMHO.

Now I know why I can't hack it as a radio talk show host or freelance writer. I just don't have the ability to stretch a single sentence - "Losing weight requires a calorie deficit." - into four pages.

My favorite part of this article was a part in another article linked in the "Related stories" section:<p>Indeed, exercise was more strongly associated with weight loss than any other factor, including diet. Overall, the more the women exercised, the more weight they lost.<p><a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827342,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-bottom" rel="nofollow">http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827342,00.ht...</a><p>So yeah, diet is more important than exercise, and exercise is more important than diet. Glad we solved that, thanks Time.

Actually, intense thinking, as I recall, burns a lot of calories.<p>The trick is diet, as mentioned on here (next to moderate levels of exercise). Eat mostly veggies, rice, pasta, avocados, fruit. Drink water and no pop.<p>The other thing: look up glycemic index of foods. The easier it is for the body to turn something into sugar (processed foods, e.g. white bread), the more likely the body will create an insulin rush, which wrecks havoc by flipping a switch to make your body store fat. Many people don't know about this fact.

All I know is when I exercise regularly, I'm thinner. Just about everyone I know that exercises regularly is thin (and healthier). There are a few exceptions.

Ok, I'll speak as someone who has actually lost 70 pounds without diet pills, surgery or anything unhealthy. I had to change how I thought about food, eat stuff thats less processed, and find things that I really liked to do for exercise.<p>I love to bicycle and some days I will be on the trails for 3 hours. I burn 1000 calories per hour while exercising. Also by exercising more and eating better I actually started eating less.

Yea, that is why (if you took off those numbers they wear) you wouldn't be able to tell marathon runners from random people at walmart...

The article mentioned the energy gap. Energy gap is the only metric that matters for weight loss. Anything else is just a means to that end, and the wrong abstraction can lead to the wrong medium-term goals and short-term decision biases ("Should I do this right now or this?").

I remember the days when I was on the collegiate crew team and I worked out twice a day for 3 hours. At the end of the season I gained 20 lbs (probably of muscle) but I remember distinctly eating about 5 times a day compared to my normal 2-3 times a day now.

So you need to BOTH watch your eating and exercise. Color me surprised...

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A lot of bad logic in this article. The main point being - that author feels like she's exercising a lot. 30 minutes cardio a day is not a lot (the biggest exercise being an 1 hour intensive interval training), otherwise the author runs 5.5 miles (1 hour?).<p>That is not a lot of training. Lets assume that this is mostly all exercise the author is doing (she's probably sitting through most of her day). That is barely making up for the lack of exercise.<p>If she (or anybody else for that matter) stopped loosing weight at her current intake/expenditure level it's merely an indication that she either eats too much or exercises too little.<p>But the basic problem being that people believe that 30 minutes or 1 hour is a lot exercise. At those levels you don't even get your body going yet. What a person thinks about their fitness level is irrelevant. A person doing only 1 hour of exercise a day is barely fit. Really fit people (athletic - thin) can go on for 3-5 hours without problem.<p>So if you want to lose weight drop any meals after 4 pm (4 pm being last snack - a fruit). Start eating in the morning, eat every 3 hours (breakfast - snack - lunch - snack - over) and exercise at least 1 hour a day (2 being super good). Don't work yourself too hard. Go for low intensity workout (walking, light running, cycling). You HAVE to stay under 70% HR (sub 140 BMP for 20-30 yr old).<p>You can eat anything in any combination. This kind of diet is kinda hard for first two weeks but then it becomes a habit.