Why exercise won't make you thin

August 10, 12:13 PMBoston Fitness ExaminerSarah Dussault

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"Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin" Time Magazine (Ben Bloom / Getty)

The headline on Time Magazine this week reads, "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin."  The bottom line is that exercise alone will not make you thin, but recent emphasis on rigorous activity may be contributing to the obesity influx. 

This is a disturbing headline for a number of reasons.  First, people who are overweight will see the front page and pass along this information without buying or reading the article.  They will stop exercising and their health will go kaput! Second, the information inside could very well be true but only to an extent.  It's rather scary when you think about it.

The gist is that when you exercise you tend to eat more.  The more active you are, the more energy you use to move, which makes us hungrier.  If you never worked out, you wouldn't have that hunger surge.  After you workout, your body asks for more food naturally.  Previous studies have created an illusion that your body is a metabolic furnace after a workout.  This after effect has been proven insignificant from a weight loss standpoint.  People tend to over-exaggerate the number of extra calories they burn after a workout.  A pound of muscle only burn 5-8 more calories a day than a pound of fat.  If you gain 10 lbs of muscle, at most, your body will burn an extra 40 calories, the same amount in a teaspoon of butter. 

"A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you're hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it's easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash," writes John Cloud the author of the piece. 

Other key points he makes in the article are:

• Gym membership is way up in recent years, but so is the number of obese Americans.
• The American Heart Association has unrealistic guidelines for exercising at 60-90 minutes on most days of the week.
• The more you move, the more you eat.  Rigorous exercise creates a feeling of entitlement to unhealthy treats, which may be feuling the obesity crisis.

The article concludes, "In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the VersaClimber - and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual postexercise reward."

Very interesting.  What is your take? I would love to hear what Jillian Micheal's has to say and have put a request on Twitter to hear from her.  We will see.

From experience, when I do not exercise after work, I am not as hungry for dinner and do not eat as much.  When I do workout, I tend to eat more but feel like I did earn it.  If I was trying to lose weight, the will power to not eat as much would kill me.  I love that scoop of ice cream at the end of the night.  I workout so that I can have those treats but I make sure that I do not consume more than I burned for that day.  I know that if I workout I can pretty much eat 2000 calories without gaining weight.  If I do not workout, I can have 1500.  If people realized this and took it into consideration when trying to lose weight, we would not have such an obesity problem.  However, many people do not realize the amount of calories they are consuming and they overestimate how many they are burning which creates the illusion that they can eat more than they really should be.