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Welcome to Show Me the Evidence, where we go beyond the daily headlines to take a deeper look at the state of the science around the most pressing health issues of the day.
Losing Weight When Not Working Out
“I’m going to make you work hard,” a blonde, perfectly muscled fitness instructor yelled at me during a recent spin class, “so you can have that second drink during happy hour!”
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By the end of the 45-minute workout, my body was dripping with sweat. I felt like I worked really, really hard. And according to my bike, I burned over 700 calories. I definitely deserved an extra margarita.
The spinning instructor reiterated the message we’ve been getting for years: As long as you’re on the bike or treadmill, you can keep having fun—and still lose weight. It has been boosted by fitness gurus, celebrities, food and beverage companies like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, and even public health officials, doctors and the First Lady of the United States. Countless gym memberships, fitness trackers, sports drinks and workout videos are sold on this promise.
There’s just one problem: the message is not only wrong, it’s leading us down the wrong path in the fight against obesity.
To find out why, I read more than 60 studies on exercise and weight loss. I also spoke with nine leading researchers in the field of exercise, nutrition and obesity. Here’s what I learned.
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When anthropologist Herman Pontzer of Hunter College in New York went to Tanzania to study one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes on the planet, he expected to find a group of calorie-burning machines.
Unlike Westerners who spend more and more waking hours glued to their chairs, Hadjis are on the move most of the time. People usually go hunting – chasing and killing animals, climbing trees in search of wild honey. Women feed the plants, dig tubers and comb bushes for berries. “They are at the highest level of physical activity of any population ever observed,” Pontzer said.
By studying the lifestyle of the Hadza, Pontzer thought he would find evidence that would support conventional wisdom about why obesity has become such a big problem around the world. Many have argued that one of the reasons we have collectively gained so much weight over the past 50 years is that we are far less active than our ancestors.
Of course, Pontzer thought, the average Hajja would burn far more calories than the typical Westerner today; They would certainly show how lazy our bodies have become.
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On several trips in 2009 and 2010, he and his colleagues went out into the middle of the savanna, packing a Land Rover with camping gear, computers, solar panels, liquid nitrogen to freeze urine samples and respirometry equipment to measure breathing.
In the dry, open landscape, they found subjects among several Hajji families. For 11 days, they tracked the movement and energy burning of 13 men and 17 women, between 18 and 75, using a technique called double named water, the best-known way to measure the carbon dioxide emitted when energy is burned.
“We were really surprised when Hajja did not use more energy than people in the US. Although hunter-gatherers are physically active and lean, they actually burned as many calories per day as the average American or European, even after the researchers controlled for body Grace.
But this raised a tantalizing question: How could the Hajja burn as much energy hunting and foraging as lazy Westerners?
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First, scientists have shown that energy expenditure, or the calories burned each day, includes not only movement, but all the energy needed to perform the thousands of functions that keep us alive. (Scientists have long known this, but few have considered its importance in the context of the global obesity epidemic.)
Burning calories seems to be a trait that humans have developed over time that has little to do with lifestyle. Perhaps, Pontzer suggests, the Hadza used as much energy as Westerners because their bodies conserved energy for other tasks.
Or maybe the Hajj rested more when they weren’t hunting and gathering to compensate for their manual labor, which would also reduce their overall energy expenditure.
The science is still developing. But it has profound implications for how we think about how energy expenditure is deeply connected and the extent to which we can hack it with more exercise.
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If the “calories out” variable cannot be well controlled, what could explain the difference in this weight?
“The Hadza burn the same amount of energy, but they are not as obese [as Westerners],” Ponzer said. “They don’t overeat, so they don’t burn.”
This fundamental concept is part of a growing body of evidence that helps explain a phenomenon that scientists have documented for years: that people have an extremely difficult time losing weight when they have gained weight simply through exercise.
Before we get into why exercise isn’t so good for weight loss, let’s get one thing straight: Regardless of how exercise affects your waistline, it’s good for your body and mind.
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A Cochrane review of the best available studies found that although exercise led to only modest weight loss, study participants who exercised more (even without changing their diet) saw many health benefits, including lower blood pressure and blood triglycerides. Exercise reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart attack.
Several other studies have also shown that people who exercise have a lower risk of developing cognitive impairment from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. They also score higher on tests of cognitive ability—among many other benefits.
Once you’ve lost weight, exercise can also help you keep it off when used in conjunction with calorie tracking. In an October 2017 study published in the journal Obesity, researchers looked at what happened to 14 contestants on the Biggest Loser weight loss reality show six years after they tried to lose weight for the TV show. They again found that there is no relationship between physical activity and weight loss during the active weight loss program.
“So the people who lost the most weight on the show weren’t necessarily the ones who exercised the most, but the ones who ate the least,” said study author Kevin Hall, a mathematician and obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Health. . But they also found a strong link between exercise and weight maintenance. (Study participants who managed to maintain their weight loss after six years were given 80 minutes of moderate exercise per day or 35 minutes of vigorous exercise per day.)
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“Consistent with previous reports, long-term maintenance of weight loss may require large and sustained increases [in physical activity],” the researchers concluded.
The benefits of exercise are real. And stories of people who have lost massive amounts of weight while riding the treadmill abound. But most of the evidence tells a less impressive story.
Consider this review of exercise intervention studies published in 2001: it found that after 20 weeks, weight loss was less than expected and that “exercise energy expenditure was not associated with weight loss in the longer studies.”
To study the effects of increased exercise on body weight, researchers followed people from men training for a marathon to young sedentary twins to postmenopausal overweight and obese women who increased their physical activity through running, cycling or personal training. Most people in these studies typically lost only a few pounds at best, even in highly controlled scenarios where their diet was constant.
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Other meta-analyses that looked at a bunch of exercise studies came to similarly mixed conclusions about exercise for weight loss. The Cochrane review of all the best available evidence on exercise for weight loss found that physical activity alone led to only modest weight loss. Ditto for another review published in 1999.
David Allison, an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama, summarizes the study this way: adding physical activity has a very modest effect on weight loss – “a smaller effect than you would predict mathematically,” he said.
We’ve long thought about weight loss in simple terms, “calories in, calories out.” In a much-cited 1958 study, scientist Max Vishnofsky outlined a rough rule of thumb that many organizations—from the Mayo Clinic to Livestrong—still use to predict weight loss: A pound of human fat represents about 3,500 calories; Therefore, 500 calories per day through diet or physical activity will result in a weight loss of about half a pound per week. Likewise, adding 500 calories per day will result in roughly the same amount of weight gain.
Today, scientists consider this rule too simplistic. They now think that human energy balance is a “dynamic and adaptive system,” according to one study