Quote

"To get rich, never risk your health. For it is the truth that health is the wealth of wealth."

-Richard Baker, American Congressman

Monday, August 10, 2009

Time: Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

That's the most read and most emailed article on time.com today. It's no surprise that the topic concerns many. That there's so much disagreement about what it takes to lose weight is pretty amazing, considering how much medicine and health care have advanced. The conclusion of the article is basically this -

"The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. 'You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles,' says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. 'The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day.'"

So what the article argues is that what you eat is more important than how much rigorous exercise you do. You're better off keeping moderately active and eating less rather than working out feverishly and then rewarding yourself with ice cream and a cigarette (though there isn't one mention of cigarettes in the entire article, which I find somewhat surprising).

2 comments:

brendan said...

should say:
exercise _alone_ won't make you thin

Colin said...

Agreed, but I think the author wants readers to be enticed by a title that gives them an excuse to not exercise. It does point out how much healthier people are when they do exercise. After all the reading I've done on the subject it seems that body type and genetics are the largest determinants of body size/shape, and that thin people can be unhealthy and heavy people can be healthy.