Rebuttal to the Time Magazine article 'Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin' (part 3 of 5)

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Self-control is like a muscle

Now that Cloud has laid out all the evidence, albeit false, for exercise’s opposing role in weight loss, he shifts the focus to poor food choice, which most of the research actually shows to be the culprit.  However, he blames the poor food choice to lack of will power which he attributes to exercise.  Once again, it feels like the entire article is a rationalization for his lack of fitness results.  He looks for outside sources to blame.  He mistakenly misinterprets two psychologists who claim that “self-control operates like a muscle or strength… [a] limited resource that is depleted afterward (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000).  Cloud states that “will power, like a muscle, weakens each day after you use it.”  First, muscle actually gets stronger after continual use, which is a basic, fundamental concept in exercise physiology.   Cloud also misrepresents Muraven and Baumeister’s will-power model.  Although the authors say that self-control is reduced under stress, Cloud interprets this as after a person goes for a run, s/he will eat a pizza rather than a salad.  However, once again, he fails to see the bigger picture. In their review, Muraven and Baumeister recognize  that “not only does self-control show short-term fatigue effects like a muscle does, it also shows long-term improvement, just as a muscle gets stronger through exercise.  In other words, there is a long-term effect of gaining strength with practice.”  Thus, over time self control can be strengthened when practiced.

Cloud once again tries to show that exercise does not promote weight loss by citing studies investigating children and their activity levels, and once again he misunderstands the research and what the researchers discovered.  Cloud interprets the fact that the structured exercise group did not have more weight loss than the unstructured exercise group as reason that exercise does not promote weight loss.  In actuality, the point of the study was not an investigation into weight loss but an investigation into activity levels of children.  The study found that children may have a set-point for activity level whether the activity is structured or not.   Furthermore, the director of the study, Dr. Terrance Wilkin, is on record stating that “[t]his doesn’t mean that more activity is not good for you, because it is good for you.  It raises the question of how do you create more activity (Fiore, 2009).”  The follow up would be how to promote exercise beyond the set-point, not that exercise is useless, as Cloud tries to purport.

As the article progresses, Cloud once again exclaims his contempt for exercise, and he additionally infuses the article with excuses for his own lack of self-control.  He claims that pushing people to exercise more actually contributes to the obesity problem because “exercise depletes not just the body’s muscles but the brain’s self control ‘muscle’ as well.”  Thus, he and others feel entitled to eat more or exercise less throughout the day.  This was already disproven above.  Cloud misses the point that exercise should be performed in addition to normal physical activity, not replacing it.  Plus, he says because of exercise he lacks the energy to do other things.  Contrary to what Cloud believes, research consistently shows that exercise improves feelings of energy.  A meta-analysis of 70 studies published in the Psychological Bulletin showed that chronic exercise increases feelings of energy and lessened feelings of fatigue (Puetz, O'Connor, & Dishman, 2006).” 
 

PART 1: Introduction

PART 2: The compensation problem

PART 4: Closing the energy gap

PART 5: References

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