What the article is basically saying is that if you exercise, you will not lose weight because exercise makes us hungry afterwards and tend to eat more and eat junk food after exercise.
This is TIME Magazine! Are you kidding me!?
As a fitness professional, I encourage people to exercise. I also advise people that the should eat AFTER they exercise, however, as a responsible fitness professional and many of my very well respected peers in the industry, advise people that they should have either a whey protein shake with a piece of fruit or a lean source of protein with a carbohydrate. It’s basic common sense that if you go to your local burger chain drive through, or eat donuts after your work out, you WILL gain weight. Exercise and diet go together. Weight management is most successful when careful attention is given to both physical activity and proper nutrition. The article said nothing about all the benefits of exercise and referred to exercise as “punishing .”
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) put out a statement in response to this article Experts Debunk Myth about Exercise, Weight Loss.
The other day, I received an e-mail from one of the most highly respected fitness professionals in the industry, and best selling author, Tom Venuto about why Time Magazine Owes the Fitness Industry an Apology.
I’m going to share with you excerpts from the email I received from Tom:
The truth about exercise, appetite and weight loss
John Cloud, a writer for Time magazine, says that he gets hungry after exercise, so he often eats more on the days he works out than on the days he doesn’t. Therefore, he proposes that exercise won’t make you thin and might actually prevent you from losing weight.
You don’t say? You mean that you don’t lose weight if you put the calories you just burned right back in by stuffing your face with muffins and doughnuts! Who’d have thunk?
It’s tough not to pick on a “fitness journalist” who thinks that exercise turns fat into muscle. But sarcasm aside for a moment, exercise can increase hunger in some cases. Hunger is a normal regulatory response of the body to maintain energy balance and weight homeostasis anytime you’re in a calorie deficit and losing body mass, whether that is achieved through exercise or dietary restriction.
That doesn’t mean exercise is ineffective for weight loss, it means you need DIETARY RESTRAINT to lose weight! Dietary restraint means that if you want to lose weight, sometimes you have to feel hungry and NOT EAT! (even while stressed, emotional, tempted, etc.)
This takes work, and part of that work is to practice the self-discipline to not eat every time you feel the urge and to pursue the self-education to understand the realities of the energy balance equation.
You’ll have to provide the self-discipline, but let me see if I can help with the education part (pay attention, Time magazine!)
Not exercising = not smart
The International Journal of Obesity recently published a review of the effects of exercise on appetite regulation. Dr. Martins of the Obesity research group in Norway explained that in our obesogenic environment today, NOT exercising is likely to lead to weight gain:
“It has been systematically shown that the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle inevitably produces a state of positive energy balance, as the physiological system is unable, at least in the short to medium term, to compensate by decreasing energy intake.”
Translation: if you sit on your butt, and you live in a Western society in this technologically-advanced, convenience-based world, surrounded by eating cues and temptation, it is hard NOT to gain weight, especially for people with a genetic predisposition to obesity.
The bottom line from Tom:
The effectiveness of exercise for weight loss was never really in question. The real issue is compliance to a calorie deficit.
Exercise IS effective for weight loss – significantly so – especially when you combine weight training and cardio training with an effective nutrition plan, as recommended for years in my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program.
The health benefits of exercise are indisputable. Not to mention that training makes you look good naked. No amount of dieting will ever make you stronger, fitter and more muscular. Only training can do that. Dieting without exercising turns you into a skinny fat person. You may look thin in clothes, but when you take off the shirt, you will still look soft and flabby.
But no matter how much you exercise, you can’t lose weight if you eat yourself into a calorie surplus. Just because you start an exercise program doesn’t mean you have free license to abandon all restraint and freely indulge in eating anything you want.
I recently did a tribute to Jack LaLanne and what he taught back in the 1950’s and 60’s still holds true today. When it comes to health, fitness and wellness, utilize common sense. When you come across information such as the Time Magazine article, if it sounds questionable, chances are it is.
If you are not familiar with Tom Venuto and his best selling book, Burn the Fat, I highly recommend it. I learned a lot from it during my transformation.
Wishing you all exceptional, health, fitness, wellness and happiness,
ShariFitness
