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This article, including the title, is a bit of a mess. Nothing in it refutes the commonly accepted principle that if you burn as many daily calories in exercise

This article, including the title, is a bit of a mess. Nothing in it refutes the commonly accepted principle that if you burn as many daily calories in exercise as you consume in food, you will not get fatter. The point of the article seems to be simply that the modern Western diet is so high in calories that it's difficult to do enough exercise to make up the difference. The survey study they cite talks about exercise in the range of only a couple of hundred calories a day, and even then, contrary to what the article implies, the study's conclusion clearly states that weight loss was proportional to the amount of exercise. So, sure, if you're eating 1000 calories/day more than you're burning, throwing in an extra 30-minute walk on the treadmill isn't going to do much. But try a real exercise regimen like P90X where you are burning an extra 800 calories or so a day, and you absolutely will see results even if your diet remains unchanged.

pjlegato 11y ago
The point of the article is that the relationship between "amount of exercise you do" and "calories you burn" is probably not linear, as has traditionally been believed. According to the scientist's theory, you get diminishing returns, where you have to do ever more and more exercise to burn the same number of calories.
- vannevar 11y ago
  But the study they cite to support that view talks about very low levels of exercise (1100 calories a week) in the long term studies. If the diet calorie surplus was comparable in both long and short term, it's not surprising that the results were disproportionately low in the long term compared to the short-term studies: with such a low level of exercise, it wouldn't be surprising if the measurement error was significant. In a longer term study, it's tough to control for what people do the rest of the time. And in their discussion of the Hadza tribe, they admit that the Hadza could be resting enough at other times of the day to offset the increased calories they expend for food gathering. All that does is tell us that given two populations that exercise about the same amount, the one that eats less will be leaner. That says nothing about whether the Hadza could remain lean on a Western diet if they also exercised more, which is the real question. Nowhere in the article is that question actually directly addressed. The study of marathoners they cite points out that the subjects increased their intake while they trained, which unsurprisingly limited their weight loss. If you eat the same amount but exercise significantly more, you will lose weight. If you eat significantly less with no increase in exercise, you will lose weight. Nothing in this article supports with data the conclusion that the latter approach is better than the former.

pjlegato 11y ago

The point of the article is that the relationship between "amount of exercise you do" and "calories you burn" is probably not linear, as has traditionally been believed. According to the scientist's theory, you get diminishing returns, where you have to do ever more and more exercise to burn the same number of calories.

vannevar 11y ago
But the study they cite to support that view talks about very low levels of exercise (1100 calories a week) in the long term studies. If the diet calorie surplus was comparable in both long and short term, it's not surprising that the results were disproportionately low in the long term compared to the short-term studies: with such a low level of exercise, it wouldn't be surprising if the measurement error was significant. In a longer term study, it's tough to control for what people do the rest of the time. And in their discussion of the Hadza tribe, they admit that the Hadza could be resting enough at other times of the day to offset the increased calories they expend for food gathering. All that does is tell us that given two populations that exercise about the same amount, the one that eats less will be leaner. That says nothing about whether the Hadza could remain lean on a Western diet if they also exercised more, which is the real question. Nowhere in the article is that question actually directly addressed. The study of marathoners they cite points out that the subjects increased their intake while they trained, which unsurprisingly limited their weight loss. If you eat the same amount but exercise significantly more, you will lose weight. If you eat significantly less with no increase in exercise, you will lose weight. Nothing in this article supports with data the conclusion that the latter approach is better than the former.