"Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin"
 

This is a couple of years old, but it's very interesting:

http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...4857-1,00.html

Two salient points I got from this article:

1) Exercising makes us hungrier, making it more difficult to make healthier food choices and/or eat sensible portions. This might seem easy to overcome if you calorie count (as I do), but I know that if I'm physically hungry, I more easily give in to temptation.

2) Formal exercising tires us, and we may compensate by doing less activity throughout the day that we normally would have. I can bear witness to the truth of this. Many a time when I used to do a bootcamp class at the local gym, I would come home wiped out and plop on the couch. Even though there was always housework to do, I would make one excuse after another for putting it off until "tomorrow."


Now, some might find the article discouraging, but I had the opposite reaction. For years, I would start a diet AND exercise program (because the two always went hand in hand) and be gung ho about it for a while. Then, eventually, all the energy required to keep up with it all would discourage me. The exercise would become drudgery, a chore, no matter what I did---treadmill, elliptical, bootcamp classes, spinning, etc. Then, I would just give up on it all---including the eating habits.

I think because exercise has been marketed right along with diets, it was ingrained in my mind that one was irrevocably linked to the other. I never imagined until the last couple of years [when these studies started appearing about exercise's negligible effects on weight loss] that I could lose weight without busting my butt doing formal exercise. It is such a relief to me to know that I can. Now I'm more focused on working activity into my everyday routine rather than having to set aside 1 - 2 hours, 5 - 6 days a week for formal exercise. Obviously, I care about my health and exercise helps with that, so I'm conscious of moving more---I have my treadmill set up so that I work on the computer while walking (2.5 mph, 5 elevation), I bike to the library when the weather permits, I park my car in the farthest parking spot from where I shop, etc.

The one exception I make to all this is strength training. That type of exercise can actually change your shape, so I believe in it. I've seen it firsthand with my sister. She is about 180, but she looks MUCH smaller than that and is tight and toned because she has regularly done strength training for at least three years now.

And see for me:

1. Exercise is an appetite suppressant. I'm not any hungrier with exercising and if anything, it suppresses my hunger and I NEVER eat back exercise calories and I don't feel I've earned a snack, whatever because I have exercised.

2. I am much more active the rest of the day if I have exercised. It gets the blood moving and the adrenalin up and then I feel great and want to do more!

And for me, every single time I have gotten more physically active - even from things like walking more, I drop weight and drop it fast.

Last month was the first month that I didn't lose a lot of weight in one month and even though my caloric intake was low, I didn't exercise 6 times a week, but more like 4 times a week AND I was less active at home overall too.

For me exercise is key to losing weight and for feeling better, but that makes sense for me - less hungry, more active overall. How could it not help me lose?

Yes to this. I'd even take it a step further. Also, not changing our eating habits to account for needed protein can make you a lot hungrier too. When I'm exercising I DO get hungrier but that's a pretty good sign for me that I need to increase my protein intake, since I've started really eating more meat I've noticed my hungry levels have decreased drastically.

one thing to consider too is that just changing your eating habits is going to make you lose fat AND muscle (and you don't want to lose that muscle), strength training will help you maintain that much needed muscle and certainly improve your look at a higher weight. You probably can't tell I'm a big proponent of weight lifting or anything. ;)

Agree 100%

Same here to the bolded. I'm actually not just more active but I'm more organized too and it helps to regulate my mood. My house is waaaayyy cleaner when I'm exercising consistently!

I have to agree with this! Although I understand the points made in the article, however for me without exercise, eating right is nearly impossible. I don't think that it is necessarily the cardio/weight lifting that makes me lose the weight but it what motivates me to eat better. If I'm exercising, I feel better about myself and that leads me to making better food choices.

Eating healthier and exercise aren't married in my mind, but I recognize that together they are... almost like kindred spirits.

When I exercise I don't want to "undo" all my hard work by eating things I'd rather not, and when I eat better I don't want to "waste" all the glorious energy by loafing about.

When I eat better I want to exercise more. When I exercise more I want to eat better. In that sense, to me, they are linked.

I get why there's an article like this, though. For most people exercise alone is not enough to reach their goals. It might be good for a start, and movement is great for the body, but at some point food intake comes into play. Or what types of exercises a person is doing.

Actually, immediately following exercise, I'm not hungry. However, an hour or so later, I feel very hungry. Case in point: I rode my bike to the library this afternoon. Prior to that, I wasn't hungry at all. It took me 20 minutes to get there. I stayed only about 20 minutes. Then, obviously, the ride home took 20minutes. I came home, took a 30-minute nap, and by the time I got up, I was SO hungry.

See, that's the way I used to feel, but it wasn't a lasting feeling for me --LOL! I would soon tire of the drudgery of formal exercise, and when that happened, I would just throw up my hands in the air and give up on it all. I'm so glad that I'm starting to see that I can do one (eating right) without the other (formal exercise).

Losing weight is such a mind game. I'd love to see more studies done on that.

What I took from this is that different things work for different people, and you just have to find the combination that works best for you.

When I began WW in January, I decided to give myself a month to adjust to the dietary changes. I felt that one of the mistakes I'd made in the past was to try and do everything at once. Also, knowing that sore muscles retain water, which can cause the scale to tick up, I wanted to see the numbers drop a bit before exercising in the hopes that a lower number would motivate me to keep going. I know, for sure, if I didn't see any changes, or even an increase and I'd throw in the towel.

I think it's extremely important for women to strength train. I see women come into the gym, do 30 minutes on the cardio machine of their choice, then leave. I suspect these same women wonder why they don't get the results they want. Lift the weights, ladies. You aren't gonna look like a female version of Arnold! :)

At the end of the day, it really is all about calories in vs. calories out. I have a good friend who lost 60 lbs on WW in 14 months with little to no additional exercise. It can be done, for sure. However, now she's unhappy with flabby areas. I keep telling her to lift the weights. :)

I thing the article's main point is (or should be) that you can't expect to lose weight through exercise alone, not that exercise is bad for weight loss (if that's there point, they're misinformed).

My husband believed that he could lose weight through exercise alone. He didn't like controlling his food, so whenever he wanted to lose weight, he'd go nuts with exercising (sometimes spending 4 or more hours at the gym), and eat more because of it. Then he'd get frustrated that the exercise "didn't work" (he still was a very active guy, even at his highest weight, even without formal exercise).

I don't think you have to become a gym rat to lose weight, but I think that it's just as wrong to believe that exercise is bad or unnecessary (for health, if not weight loss).

Becoming more active has been a very important component not only of my weight loss, but to my health as well. I started this journey with accidental weight loss (a happy side-effect of sleep apnea treatment). The first two years of my commitment to making healthier choices, I focused on what I was eating (not how much) and exercise. And while I didn't lose weight for those two years, I experienced a great deal of improvement in my health. I went from being essentially bed-ridden to "just" very sedentary, but that still felt like a miraculous change. Just not needing help to get dressed, and being able to leave the house was an amazing life-changing experience, even without weight loss.

Would I have made faster progress if I'd started with diet and not bothered with exercise? I can't really say that, because every time I dieted that way, I ended up giving up. 40 years of failure inspired me to try something different. Maybe I had to focus on activity first, in order to succeed.

Yes, for weight loss, exercise does little for me (when diet isn't also involved). But for feeling good about myself, for strength and stamina and general well-being, activity was important. I never felt the pride or sense of accomplishment for sticking to a calorie budget as I do for accomplishing physical tasks I couldn't before.

Do you have to exercise to lose weight? No. You can lose weight without it.

Can you be healthy without exercise? I don't think so. I think it's just as dangerous for a thin person to be very inactive as a fat person (maybe more so, because thin folks may assume they're healthier than they are, because they "look ok").

That doesn't mean you have to sweat for three hours to be healthy or to lose weight. Just doing a little more today than you did yesterday or last week, moves you towards better health. But that's true of dieting too. You don't have to go on a starvation diet ot lose weight, you just have to eat fewer calories than you usually do. And when the weight stalls, you have to cut a few more calories.

Eating less and burning more doesn't have to be done together. You can eat less. You can burn more, but you can't eat more and burn more. And neither can you eat less and burn less. I've often done the latter - eaten so little that I had virtually no energy to move (and then I'd wonder why I wasn't losing).

Kaplods, what sort of exercise did you do when you were at the bedridden stage? I'm curious because of the usual controversy with exercise for ME/CFIDS. As far as I can tell, one of the crucial things is going at your own pace, instead of letting someone else dictate it (e.g. graded exercise programmes, renowned for making people worse), and when you hit points where the exercise is causing you to get worse, stop immediately, rest it out, and then build it back up very slowly only once you really can. And of course, for us exercise can be anything from turning over in bed upwards. Right now I've had to take about ten days off my exercise regime, where I'd previously built up to five minutes, and am just now starting back with 1 min on the exercise bike and shortish periods of quilting.

Going back to the original post, a good point I saw on the Hacker's Diet website was that a lot of people think that they can lose weight simply by increasing their exercise levels and not watching what they eat. There tend to be a few problems here. They are rarely exercising to the tune of a 500 calorie deficit daily, which requires a lot more exercise than most people will do, and indeed is more than you need if you're just trying to increase strength and generally make your body happier (not that it's bad to exercise that much, but you can get happily fit on less). Then there are the people who don't realise how easy it is to eat back the calories you burned, especially the ones who do get hungrier after exercise (which isn't everyone). I hear that swimming is particularly bad for making you ravenously hungry. So he recommended that you don't use exercise as a way of losing weight, you do that with the calories, and add in 15 min daily of exercise as a general measure for good health and improving metabolism (bear in mind he's writing for a target audience which is generally quite sedentary). Of course, he also thinks that what you eat is completely irrelevant as long as you have that calorie deficit, which most of us here would disagree with.

The most important factor, to me, is that if you only cut down on calories your metabolism will just drop and compansate, which means you will lose slower your weight and have to lower calories even more, until you go crazy and overeat just a bit and gain a lot of weight because you have the metabolism of a baby at that stage and you gain back twice the weight plus you have a ruined metabolism.

Imo excersize is important to keep your body alert, healthy and burning.

I've known a lot of people who gain weight while training for a marathon. It's pretty common, actually. The amount of activity needed to make up for your increased appetite is pretty high. Diet is much more important than cardio for weight loss.

With that said, losing weight doesn't always translate to a higher quality of life. I'd much rather lose a bit less weight and be fit than be at goal and unfit.

Or, like others have mentioned, you can add in weight training and get the best of both worlds ;)

Hasn't this been disproven?

I find that moderate exercise (I run 15-20 miles a week and do not regularly lift weights) keeps my eating honest.

As for weights being a stand-alone cure-all for fat, look at NFL D tackles and Olympic heavyweight lifters. Strong, superstrong. Lots of weight work there. And often also fat. Google Cheryl Haworth or Albert Haynesworth.

If you're worried that you'll eat more after exercising, just time it with a normal meal time. Try to include a lot of protein in that meal to help build muscle and replenish some of the carbs (with good carbs). Eating that way after exercise is not a bad thing!

As for the rest, sure we all plop on the couch for a little while, but for me, when I have exercised that day I feel amazing and want to do everything.

Also, I have found that the type of exercise that you do dictates how you feel about it. I truly believe in finding something you like. For me, it's weight training. Not just the little circuit but actually pushing myself to my limits with free weights. I feel so strong and powerful. I get the endorphin rush from heavy exertion. I hate cardio on the gym equipment and so I don't do much of it. I do enough to warm up or I get some when I do a leg superset or something like that. My heart rate is up when I am lifting. Exercise is a huge mood booster for me - and that keeps me making good food choices.

I think a lot of people force themselves to do exercise they hate. Find something you like. And just do it. Maybe it's the Dance Revolution on the wii or taking a long walk at the end of the day to relax (my favorite cardio) or maybe it's taking a dance class or rekindling your relationship with your bicycle. It doesn't have to be punishment or go on for hours. It can be 30 minutes of fun.

Like kaplods said, exercise is about health. Yeah, we are all here because we want to be thinner but it's not the whole story. Maybe doing that physical activity won't give you all of what you are looking for, but even if you do it and eat back the calories, you've still done something positive for yourself.

I have known many people who have gone to the gym and worked out to death only to gain more weight. And folks, it wasn't muscle weight.. We are talking about going up in sizes, gaining fat. The reason is because they used it as a license to eat more. The assumed that they were "burning it off" at the gym and overestimated how much. So, as many have stated, the bottom line is to watch consumption and portion control. I see exercise as a boost to my weight loss and a lift in my mood. It's not the main entree, so to speak, but more like a side dish to the weight loss :)

I have, too. Appropos to your comment, though, another interesting aspect of the article was how overblown the idea of "muscle burns more calories than fat" is. According to the article, the amount is neglible (I think the example he gave was if you gain ten pounds of muscle, that only translates to about 40 calories more per day that your metabolism burns off). So many times, I see people advising others to up their calories because they've put on "muscle" (this is usually in response to a post by someone who starting walking two weeks ago).

I couldn't agree more with all the posts about the health benefits of exercise. As I mentioned in my original post, I'm making a concerted effort to get in some activity every day (I'm shooting for at least an hour of informal exercise). Health aside, I also agree that strength training is the miracle exercise [IMHO] for making the most difference in one's appearance, and the benefits to bone health are also important. But I do think that the dieting and exercise industry has and continues to oversell the idea that exercise plays a MAJOR part in WEIGHT LOSS (not just health, but WEIGHT LOSS). I'm glad to see that debunked lately in articles like the one in Time.

Even today, what I consider "exercise" smaller and fitter people would call "barely moving."

I actually prefer the word movement, because it doesn't have the connotation of sweat and intense effort that "exercise" does.

The first movement I added was getting out of bed to get the meals my husband had prepared, rather than have him bring them to me. Then I started getting up to eat meals with him in the living room. Then I started spending more and more time out of the bedroom.

The first "exercise" that resembled exercise was in the local warm water therapy pool. Just getting to the water was more work than being in the water. Getting dressed as a chore. I'd put on my swimsuit at home (I needed to buy a two piece, because getting in and out of the one-piece swim dress styles I preferred was too much work). Then I'd put on a t-shirt dress. Sometimes getting dressed was so much work, I'd have to rest before we drove to the pool. My husband dropped me off at the closest door and would then go park.

In the water, I was so much more comfortable that I could do a lot more. But there was a big downside to that. It was so easy to do a lot in the water, that I'd get excited and push myself without realizing it because the pain the normal pain gravity caused was gone. If I swam until I was tired, it was too late. Getting out of the water was sure torture. My legs would hurt so bad on land, that getting dressed wasn't even possible. I'd just throw the t-shirt dress over the swimsuit and go home wet.

I learned to set time limits and only gradually increase my activity. I'd clip on a step-counting pedometer (onto my jammies, if necessary) and try to match or beat the step-count from the previous day. I remember that some of my first pedometer days were under 100 steps (what is it the experts recommend, 10,000 steps?)

Even today, if I exercise until I feel even slightly tired, sore, or winded, I usually end up in bed or severely incapacitated for three or more days.

"Pushing myself," really isn't a good idea. I have to go buy more subtle clues, such as my face color (when it starts to turn pink, I've got to slow down). I can't see my own face, so my hubby is my exercise monitor. He'll report to me on the color of my face. If my cheeks get pink, he'll tell me, and it means I have to slow down. If it progresses to my whole face, it's time to rest and head home. If I wait until my whole face is fuchsia or dark red, even if I don't feel tired, I'm going to suffer severe consequences. It's a weird reaction, but my face is like an exercise version of a moodring.

On Saturday, we took a relatively short walk, but the temperature was very high and my face turned red must faster than we expected or planned for. I got home and was worthless for the rest of the day. Just absolutely exhausted, and after almost no effort.

I cringe when I see shows that push very overweight people to exercise to the point of pain. I don't think I ever was able to do that. Even before I had health problems, and when I was quite active, I still had the weird redface thing when I overexerted myself (only it took a lot more time and effort for my face to turn pink. And my face never turned dark red like it sometimes does now). It's a such an odd, deep color people will stare and I'll feel like the girl who turned purple in the Willy Wonka movie.

But at least it gives me an early detection system. A little pink means be careful and slow down, a lot of pink means stop, and red means Uh,oh too late you're really going to pay for this now.

This is me EXACTLY too!!!! I can totally tell when I skip even 2 days of working out......I think everyone's body is just different and responds differently to exercise and dieting.
I always make sure to work out before a meal (usually lunch) so I don't over eat, and I don't find myself feeling more hungry.

My sister lost a ton of weight with just dieting, she never did a minute of exercising and lost, but I know for ME, that just wouldn't cut it.

I think it comes down to the individual.. interesting read though, nonetheless!

I think what happens though and maybe this is what the article is getting to, is that many people tend to treat exercise as torture. A chore. They do it because they have to and they don't get the enjoyment out of it. The walk on the treadmill even though they hate it and then they feel they've done their duty and now they can relax and eat and be a couch potato. "Maybe" that is what they are hinting at. That, or maybe it's some people overdo it. They hit the gym so hard that they are so exhausted that they really don't have the energy to do more later.

Exercise (like everything else in life) should be done in moderation and should be enjoyable if you want to make it a natural part of life. Like, I HATE machines. I won't ever go near them. I like classes with other people and I like to walk and I like to bike ride. So that's what I do. I thoroughly enjoy it and so I feel refreshed afterwards and then I have more energy, my appetite is suppressed, I feel good about myself and so on. The exercise is a highlight of my day, not a dreary blot in the day.

So, I think the mental side of exercising is key.

I say this as I am getting ready to take two classes tomorrow - Body Step and Body Pump. I love these two classes and I'm looking forward to them. I am a little worried that I might miss the first one because my son has been sleep deprived and I'm afraid he might actually sleep in and I'll miss my class! I don't want to miss that class because I like it!

WIth that kind of attitude towards exercise, how can it not aid in weight loss? My reward is the class whereas I think for many they reward themselves for going to the dreaded class.

Well this is going to sounds crazy... But I believe a BIG part of why I've been able to lose weight the last few months is b/c I gave up exercise, and the notion that it greatly helps weight loss. I started to realize that 80% of the time after exercising (I would get on my elliptical for 20-30 minutes, nothing too strenuous), I would feel great... then wind up binging on food, I was sooo hungry! Yes I tried eating healthy protein rich snacks (with some carbs too) or meals before or after working out, but it still was the same. I would get almost shaky and just EAT and EAT within a few hours of exercising. Not worth the 200-300 cals I burned on the elliptical! The only time I felt was 'safe' to exercise was late at night right before bed, but frankly with two kids I do NOT have the energy for that. So I gave up exercising and my binging has majorly decreased. I hardly ever feel really famished anymore. I do feel guilty as far as my health is concerned, but I figure running around with two little ones is good enough for now :)

If you want to watch two experts in the field discuss this issue and you have 90 minutes to invest you can check this debate out.

I personally agree with the forks side of the debate especially when he talks about the messaging that people get.

As for exercise giving anyone more energy I'm fairly certain you could graph it out and it would look like a parabola. In other words, a little bit of exercise gives you a little extra energy and it increases up to a certain point after which your energy levels decreases.

No one is going to feel more energy after running a marathon, for example. On the other hand 5-10 minutes of exercise is likely to perk most people up a little. In between those extremes is most likley going to be highly variable.

Kaplods, thanks for telling me that, it's fantastic to hear of someone with ME/CFIDS who has succeeded in building up their exercise level like that. Though I still can't imagine ever being able to cope with swimming, merely washing my hair has been horrendously exhausting for years now!

The redface thing sounds annoying but a very useful way of monitoring your exertion. Have you tried wearing a mirror in some way? It'd only need to be a compact one, perhaps as a pendant or like a wristwatch, and you could probably get one with a lid so that you wouldn't be getting caught unawares by reflections. You can get mirror pendants, or mirror locket pendants if you don't want it to be open.

I think I'm more likely to go white when I'm exhausted, but by that point I'm too far gone to realise that I'm exhausted at all, if that makes sense.

I recently got myself two timers, a stopwatch and a countdown timer. The latter is attached to my keys and I use it for the rare occasions when I'm up to going for a short walk. I decide how much I'm up to in advance, set the countdown timer for half that time, and when it goes off, that tells me to head for home. Like you, and indeed everyone with ME/CFIDS, it's so easy to get carried away when you are finally doing an activity you've been yearning for for ages. My home exercising is easily timed already, the mini exercise bike has an inbuilt timer and I count repetitions for other exercises, but the stopwatch sits by my quilting kit. As well as the overall exhaustion, I've had a lot of trouble with RSI and tendinitis over the last year or so, so I need to be excruciatingly careful about how long I spent sewing at one time.

At least I now know to avoid deadlines. I made a quilt for a competition last summer, which is when the RSI really hit along with a fairly bad bout of tendinitis, and I had to keep taking a month off here and a month off there. Thankfully my GP and physio were supportive of my desire to get the quilt done, especially once they saw it and agreed that it would be criminal not to get it into the competition! I got it finished in time, it won the competition, and it toured the UK quilt shows for six months. It's the most I'd achieved in years. It also taught me that I absolutely had to be disciplined, starting with embroidering for just a few minutes a day if need be.

You can eat your way out of any excercise routine.

You have to combine diet with excercise to achieve weight loss.

This is true.

This is NOT true.

I think the "marriage of diet/exercise" is what has confused so many people. I know it did me, for many years. But FACTS are simple, we just need to recognize them.

*You CANNOT "out-exercise" bad eating habits.
*Exercise IS good for you.
*Proper diet/nutrition IS good for you.
*Over-eating (anything!) can make you fat.
*Reducing caloric intake, no matter the method you use, is what it takes to lose weight.

I have learned that I use DIET for weight loss and EXERCISE for fitness. For what good is weight loss if my body is flabby & out of shape? To me, "exercise" is when you do something physical that you don't really like but you do it because you know you should :rolleyes: Such as the elliptical or treadmill. Ugh, boring-boring-BOW-RING! :dunno: I mean, even with a good book/magazine, TV, whatever... just the thought of "movement without going anywhere" is boring to me. (Altho I do have a recumbent bike, for those days when weather doesn't permit me to be outside.)

I no longer feel it necessary to spend an hour exercising "every other day". I WANT TO BE FIT. I want to look good, but my main goal is GOOD HEALTH. I want to be able to walk around the house by myself when I'm 75 years old, unlike my mother who can barely move due to muscle atrophy!! Therefore I do "exercise" -about 30 minutes of weight lifting 2x a week, and I bike, swim, walk on the beach or around my hood usually 2-4x a week, and always on weekends. This is not "exercise" to me; it is something I enjoy, therefore it is "fun" & a HUGE stress release!!! I LOVE IT! :dizzy: :D

I'm enjoying this debate. I started to reply yesterday but couldn't quite get my thoughts together. I'm loving how the thread is coming together with more points of agreement than disagreement.

1. You can't out-exercise bad eating habits.
2. Exercise, or movement, is more effective if it's something you enjoy rather than a torture routine.

I basically agree that diet is more important than exercise, but I had some issues with the article in the OP. First, I didn't think it gave much evidence for the compensatory eating it was premised on. Also this line "The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure." Huh? This may be true of most people, but it's not true of me. Maybe it's just a question of the target audience of this article, but I'm pretty sure most of us aren't here because we worked out too hard and therefore ate too much.

Somewhere else on this board, someone posted a link to and article talking about the difference between weight loss and maintenance. A pretty large survey showed that maintainers were likely to follow a constant exercise routine. I thought that was interesting, in light of this thread. http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/age-...different.html

This is a really excellent sentance. Simple, accurate, and conveys a great message. In fact, I think I will make it my new sig.

Awww, shucks, John! :cloud9:

:eating2: + :strong: :bike2: :swim: = :goodscale :woohoo: :D

I cannot lose significant amounts of weight while exercising. Even while strictly calorie counting my body just won't drop weight. I dieted this far while walking and now I'm cranking up the fitness routine. The scale is stuck and I expected that. It's interesting how everyone is so different.

One of the fittest people I know isn't skinny. She can run a half marathon in 1:45 but is easily a UK size 14. I think she has a sweet tooth but I don't think she cares that much (not sure I would if I could run that fast!!).

When I got on this journey (the one where I actually kept the weight off!!!!!) I started with food portion only. In the past, all my attempts went with both diet and exercise and this time around, I realized that I could really only realistically handle one major life change at a time. And that was an important realization, that it was a life change, and not just a temporary period of time where I would lose weight magically and then resume eating whatever I wanted.

Once my diet habits were solid and I had a routine going on, I added exercise until I ramped up to the amounts that I exercise now (an hour/day/every week on average). But I still struggle with the diet/exercise balance.

I know that my weight loss will come from my diet, not my exercise and I have to remind myself not to use the exercise as an excuse to eat poorly.

Very Interesting
 

Just read the article and found it very interesting. Is willing to give that approach a try. I go to Curves now and as a former athlete, I have begun to wonder if so little time spend can make a feel difference. This article says YES. Will starting going more consistently to see if it will help. But I love my Zumba, not giving it up!!

Thanks for great article reference,

LFG

For me, I find exercise to be a great appetite 'moderator'. It really makes a difference in the kind of foods I'm drawn to also. I tend to not hunger for the junk food when I've been exercising regularly (apart from all that effort feeling like it's been wasted if I put crap into my body) I feel a kind of 'nutritional wisdom' kick in and naturally opt for healthier choices.

I also find exercising gives me MORE energy for the rest of the day, not LESS. I'm dancin' around the house like a freak :dizzy: on the days I do exercise, probably just because I feel better. In the mornings, however, I'm a little slow to get going but that normally wears off after a couple hours.

I'm wondering whether, if someone did the research, they could find distinct groups of people who respond to exercise in different ways. After all, we see that with diet, for instance with some people doing better on high-protein and some worse, some people finding that IF is fantastic for them while others couldn't stand it for a moment. To start with, I wonder whether there's a correlation between finding that exercise makes you hungrier and makes you drowsier, and conversely finding that exercise is an appetite suppressant which gives more energy as well?

I found the article's tone annoying, even though I think that it made good points. I usually find that a lot of people I know with weight issues do not like to say that they want to make dietary/activity changes-a real routine, but they'll say things like "eh yah, I'll just try to eat a little healthier, work on moving a bit more" which works for the first few pounds, but I find that real strategies work for reaching goal weight.
The part that I didn't like was this
"Self-Control Is like a Muscle
Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll be more likely to opt for pizza."
Personally, I do not feel this way. I opt for pizza when I am emotionally drained and I need relief-not after I work out. In fact, I am more fearful of ruining any progress, and I find that I really feel like I worked out after going to a gym, not casual walking around exercise-maybe its because the gym gives me that mentality "OK I really worked out here, don't screw this up with junk food" I just found that part of the article self-defeating lol and I rarely see this happening with a successful dieters, sure there are lapses, but overall, more successes than failures and people eventually reach their goal weight-once they get past the bumps in the road because that whole "self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it." didn't happen for them all the time, or even most of the time, and the "muscle" got stronger.
Personally, it was LIFE that made me fat-it was my family, then work stress then school stress. I allowed that to control my diet-it was never going to the gym that affected anything.