Obesity is not necessarily associated with a lack of exercise
January 2 2014 by Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD![Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD]()
in Exercise
in Exercise 
Exercise is not a very effective cure for obesity. We already know that from study after study showing small or even non-existant weight loss from exercise programs.
Here’s a new telling illustration: Americans exercise the most in a a new survey of 8,000 people in 8 countries. And yet Americans have the biggest problems with obesity.
Huffington Post: Countries That Exercise The Most Include United States, Spain, And France
Obesity is not primarily caused by a lack of exercise. Much more important is the quality of your food, which determines how much you want to eat.
Exercise is not very effective for weight loss. But it has many other amazing benefits: More about exercise.
Sure at least a little exercise is useful for everyone.
The fat we have in our body is handled by the brain and it tries to mantain at the same level, so an helthy body can mantain same amount of fat over time.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/09/0509portnick.html
Second, having followed athletics since the 1950s, I have never seen a fat top-class runner. And I do not believe that's because they are all naturally thin. (Brendan Foster had to stick to a diet in order to keep his power-to-weight ration high enough, but he broke world records). There are just as many testimonials from people who lost weight by exercise as from those who lost weight by low-carb dieting.
I didn't just observe elite runners and read testimonials, I tried to control my weight with exercise and conventional healthy eating myself for many years,actually,for several decades, and I feel very passionate about the motto "Eat less, Move more" because it is a trap for most people. All my life till 46 years old I believed that exercising and eating low fat with a lot of vegetables would keep me thin. I found myself cornered in a dead-end situation when I was doing 10 hours of cardio a week, being always hungry, slowly gaining weight, having frequent infections and sport injuries. Excessive exercising makes your leptine go down, and many former professional sportsmen have weight problems. Besides, you will want to use your joints till the rest of your life, and exercising is causing a lot of excessive wear and tear. Most older runners had to have knee surgeries.
I have my exercise routine now which I do for fan and in order to stay strong and flexible. I keep myself healthy and at reasonable weight with a LC diet.
Well, of course not! If the runner for some reason would be fat, he/she wouldn´t be top-class. But that doesn´t mean that running makes you (or anyone else) lean. It´s just that lean people are more likely to take up running than fat people.
Likewise, I have followed competitive swimming for the past 40 years and have never seen a thin top-rank swimmer. Elite swimmers tend to have about 12% body fat, which optimizes to make them more streamlined and buoyant without adding excessive volume. So would swimming fatten up top-class runners?
It does not surprise me that Americans, in the aggregate, spend more time exercising. However, there is a fallacy of composition, so to speak. The "average" number may be higher, but I expect there is a larger standard deviation in the United States, with plenty of obese people who do little or no exercise. So if half exercised 100 minutes a day and half zero, this would yield a higher average than if everyone exercised 45 minutes per day. This illustrates the difficulty I have making dietary and exercise decisions based on herd statistics.
My experience is that weight management is about 80% diet and 20% exercise. in fact, I lost most fat when I was injured and could not exercise. I just wasn't hungry during recovery.
For starters, yes, obesity is not caused by lack of exercising, as you can not ’sit yourself obese’, you can only eat your way to it.
Next, Huff post article title can be read very out of context. Just because someone engages in formal exercise does not mean he/she actually moves more, that is, expends more calories that the person who doesn’t exercise, and it doesn’t even have to be hard labor. I am positive that 3 hours of walking a day burns quite a bit more calories than a 45min pilates class.
Lastly, what’s the point of the article, anyway? I assume just to calm down those who prefer sitting around rather than being active (that sadly is the case for the majority of people, and those newspapers need to make some money). We should popularize exercising, not saying it doesn’t matter!
If your diet is good adding exercise will certainly improve the resilts. And isn’t exercise one of the best ways to improve insulin sensitivity, a matter so very important in LCHF community?
Other than speeding up weight loss exercising has a ton of other health benefits which makes it very useFULL.
PS This might be irrelevant, but let’s be honest, extra 5 or 10 or maybe even 20lbs of flubber is not a disease maker, so most people desire to lose weight to ’look good’. And skinny is not the most desired form, it is lean and fit with some muscle (is it shoulders or biceps for men or glutes for women is irrelevant, the point is we all want some muscle). So yeah, you definitely need to exercise for that, because ’lack of exercising’, is the cause of someone not looking the way they want.
People who live traditional life have more components of their life-style to be different than washing clothes by hands and walking everywhere. They also have different way to eat (for example, they don't eat snacks) and cook food.
That said, there are significant metabolic benefits to modest periods of heavy-breathing aerobic and surprisingly modest amounts of anaerobic exercise on a regular basis. Apart from that, one would be training for something in particular (to do a marathon, for example) rather than general metabolic fitness. If I am asked whether I am fit, my standard answer is "fit for what?" I like to do a variety of outdoor activities (lake swimming, snowshoeing, mountain biking, skiing, etc.) and do enough regular exercise to be fit enough to enjoy my activities, which requires surprisingly modest amounts of intense exercise.
http://www.naturalnews.com/036049_magnesium_weight_loss_cure.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25576400
Yet, governments, doctors, industries and the media keep on advocating thermodynamics as well as low fat diet arguing that carbs are good for you. They have been failing for the past 40 years given the figures in the article mentioned above.
Furthermore, we need to consider excercise as a consequence of being lean or loosing weight as opposed to a necessity to loosing weight. The leaner we are the more active we are. It is just like Dr ATTIA said in the TED Talk, we need to shift paradigm and consider obesity and weight gaining as a symptom not a "CAUSE" of malnutrition. This talk was enlightening to me as it allowed me to overcome self fulfilling profecy as well as self denial and made me shift paradigm as I turned to a LCHF lifestyle.
This from someone who lost over 120 pounds doing LCHF and exercised (heavy barbell training only, no long slow endurance exercise) religiously three days per week. Its the diet that does it. You cannot out exercise a bad diet.
Not true. I lost 30% of weight through jogging. In fact I was on low fat high carb diet during my weight loss period. I read the LCHF diet in October 2013 and decided to experiment it for 2 months. My weight remained unchanged during the 2 months period. Human body is too complex. No one weight loss formula applies to everyone.
Here is some evidence you will find fascinating
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4zcZHHICE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF_fOHjWJMo&list=PL5F9ll_-AatzCAe...
However, with the exercise comes additional metabolic burdens, such as tissue repair, replacing lipids in membranes oxidized by the free radical load of exercise, additional workload for the liver and generally increased micro-nutrient requirements. This will affect appetite and craving, and the nature of the foods selected will affect metabolic response. So the observed outcome of people in real life, outside clinical controls, is that for a large percentage of people, exercise does not assist much in efforts to shed weight and that dietary choices are far more important, in terms of nutrient density for tissue repair and other metabolic needs, metabolic signalling and metabolic response (such as fuel partitioning). Without eating more or at least differently, the increased exercise could not be maintained, as there would be inadequate recovery. Likewise, a lot more exercise would likely require more sleep. Keep sleep constant, and the person might not be able to sustain the exercise and the effort would eventually fail.
This is not to say exercise is irrelevant or cannot be the primary factor for weight loss in some individuals. But as a general strategy, it has not proven successful on average. LCHF has its own compliance dropout percentage, but I personally have found it more successful than previous attempts employing fanatical amounts of exercise and so have many others. Dr. Peter Attia, for example, reports he was getting chubby doing 3 hours distance swimming per day trying to watch his weight, so metabolically driven appetite seems to override conscious efforts at caloric restriction while exercising, even for an obsessive data geek like Dr. Attia. For people like us, the better strategy seems to be to learn to manage the metabolically driven appetite that unconsciously directs behavior, which would implicitly enhance the "willpower" to manage caloric consumption.
I want to add however, I am running every day. Not to burn calories. Rather to reverse the insulin resistance that caused the overweight problem to begin with. I believe exercise is not required to lose weight yet vital for long term success.
As far as I see it. low carb, high fat is the treatment. Exercise is the cure.
http://youtu.be/bcCVcSxJa7g
Regarding insulin resistance, just in case you are not aware of it, add 0.5-2 grams/day of cinnamon to your menu.
To the people mentioning top level athletes- they are "weeded out." People like the Kenyans, professional Marathoners, NBA players, NFL players- they have their particular build to begin with.
There are MANY AMATEUR Marathoners , swimmers, and exercisers who are over-fat. Google Images will reveal this. I see it all the time in real life. MOST amateur exercisers are fat. It's rae that I actually see an exceptionally lean person who exercises.
Lastly, it is worthy to note that TOP Olympic level athletes, usually women, have been known to get LIPOSUCTION for stubborn arm and abdominal fat. These are professional Triathlon, Marathoners and swimmers- elite. Some of their videos are on Youtube
Fat behaves similar to a tumour. Exercise is not the solution for it. But, we need to exercise moderately to keep our health reasonable. Those benefits are well studied.
Exercise as a cure for obesity is a belief system. It's not supported by evidence. There are many obese people who are very active. I know many in my own life and have seen many in my travels- even maids at tropical motels. They work all day and are fairly fat.
I don't fuel my rides on a LCHF, I just use the usual crap all other endurance athletes use (not that you can't fuel them up in a ketogenic diet, but bananas and such are really easy to eat while riding).
The amazing thing is that I GAIN WEIGHT when I cycle a lot (600km on a single week) and fuel on carbs. And it's not like I gain weight from muscle, I just feel that i got more subcutaneous fat on my belly.
Other side effects are mild tooth ache and decreased concentration.
When the weather gets really bad, I stick to a more strict LCHF diet, cycle for shorter stretches, and watch a lot of movies under a blanket. Then i lose weight, feel like I could chew a pack of rocks and feel really clear minded.
Needless to say that i'm working on staying ketogenic on my longer rides.
It's a combination of diet and exercise and staying with it. Once I attained my goal it was easy to keep it off as long as I continued to exercise (though it didn't have to be six days a week anymore to stay slim).
I quit eating wheat (per the book "Wheat Belly") and noticed my hunger level automatically started to decrease. I could eat a normal sized meal and feel full for HOURS. Gradually I reduced the number of carbs I ate, and started "carb-cycling". I became more active, however I never actually started an "exercise routine". I would say that 90% of my weight loss came from changing the composition of what I eat. Lower carb, Higher fat, moderate protein. I went from 274 lbs to 145 lbs without counting a single calorie. I am 5'4" and a woman.