Health and Fitness

After reading the Time article “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin”, you can easily come away with the impression that exercise has little effect on weight loss, or may be the cause of you gaining more weight. Even though I agree that exercise alone will not make you thin – unless of course you have the time to exercise several hours each day-, the article’s somewhat dismissive tone that exercise is of little value in losing weight is false.

Yes, if you look at exercising from the point of view of the studies used in the article to make the argument of exercise’s limited effect on weight loss, then their assessment is true. Numerous studies have shown that exercise alone has a limited effect on weight loss, so in that aspect their argument is true.

However, the major study used in the article to make the argument about exercise’s effect on weigh loss limited itself to looking at only exercise versus non-exercise as variables. More complete studies looked at not only exercise and non-exercise, but also included diet as a variable. When caloric restriction is included, the results are totally opposite.

Those participants in these studies who would either just diet or exercise, did lose weight. However, when the two parts were combined into a test group, this group would see significantly more weight loss than those who would alone just diet or exercise.

Health experts skilled at helping people lose weight, like those on the show The Biggest Loser, know that without changing your eating patterns, you are not going to get the results you are looking for. They understand that exercise alone will not allow you to see your well-sculpted abs. You must eat properly to see these types of results.

Instead of pointing out that exercise won’t make you thin, a better focus would to be to address what actually does promote effective, as well as faster weight loss, namely diet and exercise. Exercise or diet is not meant to be looked at as its own separate entity in weight loss. They are designed to work together, not as an either/or proposition.

Most people focus on exercise because it something that they can do in less than an hour a day. On the other hand, learning new eating behavior is more challenging and is an all day endeavor. If you want to get thin, do not take the easy route of blaming exercise. Instead focus more on the real culprit: your eating behavior.

So remember, if you are in that group who exercises ferociously, but still can’t seem to lose weight, than it’s your eating that is causing you not to lose weight, not your exercising.