It seems that every document about weight control must contain the obligatory - get more exercise! Well this one does not! Exercise will NOT help lose weight. Exercise will help your get healthier. Exercise will help you have more stamina. Exercise will make you stronger. Exercise will help reduce stress, but exercise is a poor way to lose weight.

When you exercise, you use up the food in your body. This makes you hungry so you stop by the 7-11 on the way home from the gym and load up on carbohydrates. Your blood sugar rises for an hour or so and you feel great then the carbs are all used up and you crash. To get moving again you search out more carbohydrates (Yes, they are addictive). The end result is you take in more calories than you burned. If you do not eat, you feel bad and are grumpy after the exercise high wears off. In addition, exercise increases your muscle mass. While increased muscle mass helps you burn more energy it also weighs more than the fat it replaced so you are fighting your weight loss goal. To summarize: Light exercise is good and helpful, strenuous activity with the goal of losing weight is mostly a losing proposition (Or non-losing depending on your point of view).

To look at the problem another way. Consder how much exercise would you need to burn off the calories in a single Big Mac? When you have a good idea, check out the following web site:

http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-sandwiches-burgers-big-mac-burger_f-ZmlkPTEwMTAyOA.html

We see in the chart the amount of various exercises needed to burn off a single 550 calorie hamburger. No one has the time to walk for over one hours and few can cycle for over an hour and ½ just to burn up one hamburger. Clearly exercise is not what happens to the calories from a 2500 calorie “Standard” meal (2000 for females). Still, all mainstream medicine spouts the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the energy entering a closed system (Like the human body) equals the energy leaving the closed system.

Any imbalance in energy results in either the storage of energy (in humans it is stored as fat) or it results in the release of energy from storage (weight loss)) Next, they make the leap that the energy used by the muscles must be greater than the intake from food in order to lose weight, Said another way, if you want to lose weight you must exercise more.

As a Georgia Tech trained engineer, I can assure you they are wrong. While the law of thermodynamics has not yet been proved wrong, there is another way the human body uses up energy. It is called basal metabolism. Every cell in the body gives off heat every hour of the day. Some times more and sometimes less, but the heat generating functions is always active and it uses up calories. In fact, it is the largest consumer of calories in the body. It is why you do not have to continuously exercise to use up the 2000 calories you eat each day.

The question is how do we speed up this heat producing process. Here are a few. Exercise increases the heat output for a few hours. Increased thyroid function raises the heat output. Eating fat increased the heat output. Eating carbohydrates lowers the heat output. This is why a low-carb diet can cause you to lose weight without lowering the calories you consume. In short, all calories are not all the same. To read all the gory details check out a book by Gary Taubs.

There are three books listed here. Why We Get Fat is an easy read with few citations. Good Calories Bad Calories is mostly the same information with all the links to the actual research, and The Case Against Sugar reads like a lawyer’s brief with all the gory details spelled out. I suggest starting with Why We Get Fat.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259