Exercise Doesn’t (Does) Help You Lose Weight

“The rubbery rubric: If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. The remorseless reality: Few can shed embonpoint permanently by doing either.”—Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—1/20/2014—The rubbery rubric: If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more.

The remorseless reality: Few can shed embonpoint permanently by doing either.

Let’s concentrate on the exercise bit.

Most people don’t realize that purposeful physical activity consumes only about 15 to 20 percent of our daily caloric budget.

Another 10 percent is spent digesting and metabolizing food and drink.

The remaining energy is burned during our diurnal routine: sleeping, sitting, standing, and, on occasion, shuffling about.

Holding food intake and the calories needed to process that intake constant, the motivated exerciser would have to rev up activity by some substantial fraction of the norm, while preventing an offsetting fall in the energy expended while not exercising.

It turns out that this is biochemically rather difficult.

And the difficulty is closely related to our inability to achieve weight reduction through dieting.

The body craves homeostasis—a return to the mean of energy expenditure after some departure from that mean: e.g., the beginning of an exercise regimen.

Read this: Fat cells won’t surrender without a fight.

Curiously, these cells are, in some senses, programmed to surrender because they secrete a hormone, leptin, which is supposed to tell the hypothalamus gland in the brain when the body is sated.

But the typical, sugar-loaded American diet leads to a build-up of insulin, which interferes with the action of leptin.

Mistaking repletion for imminent starvation, the brain becomes the fat cell’s unwitting ally. It instructs the overfed body either to seek more food or to cut back on energy expenditure. At this point, the individual who is both dieting and exercising will be tempted to stop both activities.

Even if she/he manages to stay on the diet, however, the fat cell usually will still get to sing the last aria.

That’s because, given the abrupt change in life style and the fact that food is presumably off-limits, the body will slow the pace of resting energy outlays.

In other words, it will become more energy efficient, sometimes running itself with as many as 15 percent fewer calories.

Thus the extra calories burned through exercise are often offset, if not by commensurate overindulgence in food, by the calories saved by an unwanted increase in caloric thrift.

One key to surmounting this obstacle to improved health through exercise is to re-educate the body, acclimating it to a new, and higher, mean of resting energy expenditure.

People should intensify their exercise regimens, while recognizing that the result may not mean immediate weight loss.

Over time, however, the body will build more muscle. More muscle means more mitochondria, which are the body’s energy factories, insatiably greedy for caloric raw material.

By forcing ourselves to exceed our mean of energy output for a long enough period of time, we, of course, raise that mean.

The body will abjure its slothful past.