We need to unhitch exercise from weight-management.

Exercise is great for health,
but weight-loss comes from the kitchen.

Exercise is Not Likely to Be Your Ticket
             to the Weight-Loss Express 

 Among the most commonly held misconceptions about obesity, perhaps none does more harm than the notion that exercise is responsible for the lion's share of weight management.

Sure, it's true that exercise does burn calories, and yes, if you burn more calories you ought to lose weight. But unfortunately, it's just not that simple.

To put exercise into some perspective, to lose a pound of weight each week would require roughly a marathon of effort each and every week, as the calories burned running those 26.2 miles would likely be in the neighborhood of a pound's worth. Of course, it would also necessitate that not once did you "eat because you exercised" – neither as an indulgence to reward yourself for all that running, nor as a consequence to any running-induced hunger. Seems to me that'd be pretty unlikely.

Looking at real-world studies of exercise and its impact on weight, the results are underwhelming to say the least. Take this 2007 study published in the journal Obesity. Researchers instructed 196 men and women to exercise an hour a day, six days a week, for a year! And researchers weren't just telling people to exercise, they were supervising them and instructing them as well.

Compliance was incredible – only seven study dropouts – and over the course of the year, men averaged 6.16 hours of weekly exercise, and women, 4.9 hours. So did the 320 hours of exercise for the men and the 254 hours for the women lead to weight loss? Yes, but probably less than you might have guessed. Men lost, on average, 3.5 pounds, and women, 2.6. That translates to 91.5 hours of exercise per pound lost.

Now, to be very clear, there is likely nothing better for your health than exercise – truly nothing. There's no pill you can take and no food you can include or avoid that will give you the health benefits of regular exercise. I exercise regularly, and I strongly encourage all of my patients to do so as well. But I also tell them that they can't outrun their forks.

The notion that moving more will translate to weight loss is a dangerous one. For individuals, it may effectively discourage exercise when results aren't seen on scales. For the media and entertainment industries, it often leads to the perpetuation of the "people-with-obesity-are-just-lazy" stereotype. For the food industry, it allows an embrace of exercise b...

The number of calories we are advised to take in by BMR or RMR charts are based merely on Averages.

These Basal Metabolism Rate (BMR) or Resting Metabolism Rate (RMR) charts are based on the calculations of basic mathematical formulas such as Harris/Benedict or Mifflin, or some other less-accepted-but-very-similar formula.

There are a great many people who have a lower BMR or RMR than the posted Average.  There are also people who have a higher BMR or RMR than Average, but not very many of them choose to hang around in diet websites.

The standard BMR or RMR calculations might … or might not … apply to your individual body.

There is no predetermined calorie number that tells us whether or not we are eating in a deficit, eating at maintenance, or eating a surplus. The resulting changes in our bodies --- over time --- are what define the amount of how many calories our bodies are using as energy.

Here is an article explaining a few Key Definitions that might help some of us avoid becoming confused about Calories, Diet, and Nutrition.

Defining a Calorie Deficit
            by Brad Pilon, bodybuilder, author of Eat Stop Eat (Intermittent Fasting)

Eating at a calorie deficit.

From my understanding, by definition this means an amount of food that results in loss of body mass. By this definition you cannot be in a deficit if you are not losing body mass.

You can be eating less, a little, not much, like a bird, and not lose body mass since these are all subjective descriptions of an amount of food, but if you are eating less food than is needed to provide the energy you require to power your daily activities then a loss of mass must occur.

This loss may be masked by fluctuations in bodyweight caused by water or the weight of the food in your digestive track (at least for a little while), but make no mistake, it is the loss of body mass that defines the deficit, not eating below an estimated amount of needed calories. The Loss of body mass is what defines a Deficit.


Eating at maintenance.

The term maintenance can be confusing; it raises the question, maintenance of what?

From my understanding eating at maintenance does not mean maintenance of body weight, but maintenance of function.

When you eat at maintenance all of your body’s daily energy needs are equaled by the energy provided by the food and drink you consume. This includes the energetic needs for muscle growth since the energy needs of protein turnover are part of your basal metabolic rate.

In other words, if you were in some hyper-muscle-growth-mode induced by who knows what, the energy needs of that growth would be reflected in an increase in your metabolic rate. Meaning if you were not eating enough to cover these needs you would be eating at a deficit and loss of body mass would occur.

A good way to think of maintenance eating is an amount of food that does not result in an appreciable loss of body mass or an appreciable amount of body fat gain, since a gain in body fat is how we define a surplus, ...