Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

I've found online reaction to this article quite interesting. Normally data and study minded folks bring out the "anecdotally, this doesn't seem true" responses, and people seem think the article is attacking exercise as a concept.

It's not.

It's saying that if a person's goal is to lose weight, then adjusting to a good diet is far more important than (a reasonable amount of) exercise.

The article does not claim that exercise is harmful. In fact, it explicitly states that there are very many health reasons why exercise is important, and that exercise+diet is still better than diet alone.

It also goes into the culture surrounding exercise, and how it tends to be misleading. The education in popular culture around exercising presents it as a magic pill, as being a major driving force behind weight loss. You see this on magazine covers and on tv, "belly fat exercises", "toning exercises", all sorts of exercises that serve to reinforce the idea that weight is primarily a result of physical activity rather than (for most people) food consumption.

Ultimately though, I think the studies referenced back up the conclusion pretty well: weight loss effectiveness goes diet+exercise > diet > exercise, given standard amounts of each.

I went from 190 lbs. to 138 lbs. over 6 or 7 months. The only exercise I did was jogging for 45 min a day. What I noticed was that jogging made me feel better, which somehow got me to consistently eat better. After a days jogging I didn't want to put crap food in me and ruin what I had accomplished and by doing it everyday I felt good enough, often enough to stick with it.

So, based on my experience, I simply can not agree.

Anecdotal evidence from being a gym rat for 20 years, although I'm sure there are studies out there to prove this. Maybe :)

No doubt that diet+exercise is the way to go when it comes to long-term weight management. The thing is, "weight loss" in and of itself is a misleading metric. You're losing weight! Great! But hold on a minute - your gut is the same size but your biceps is smaller and your strength is way down. What happened? You lost weight alright but its muscle you're losing, not fat.

So where I'm going with this is exercise is very important to make sure you don't negatively impact your body composition by losing muscle weight when dieting.

But, wait....

#10 - eat less fat? That runs counter to science too...

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-con...

What other people see when they look at you is determined almost entirely by your diet. Nobody can see your muscles if they're buried under blubber.

How you feel, on the other hand, is hugely impacted by your physical activities. Not only does exercise give you energy and focus, it has a huge impact on mood. Exercise is more effective at fighting depression than most medications.

There's more to being healthy than being a healthy weight. It's probably better to be active and a little bit overweight than it is to be skinny and inactive.

Note: I said a litle bit overweight, not obese. Health risks add up quickly if you're obese. Being cut and defined like a fitness magazine model is not realistic for most people and confers few benefits beyond aesthetics. Getting out of the obese range is realistic for most people and does confer statistically significant health benefits.

FWIW, my experience disagrees with this. I was overweight, started running (starting around 9mi/wk, when I got bored and stopped I was up around 24mi/wk), and started losing weight quickly, lost a ton of it over a year, after which I was at a very good weight for me. Now, as the piece touches on, that exercise did change my eating, but the outcome of that isn't clear to me -- I stopped eating/snacking for a few hours before a run so I wouldn't cramp. But I also started eating a lot more outside of those exercise windows, as running so much made me quite ravenous at times. Ate anything and everything I wanted and I just kept dropping weight as long as I kept running.

Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.

Depends on how quickly you want to lose weight, and whether that's your only goal. If, as a 150 pound male, your RMR is about 1500 kcal/day, and you eat at least 1000 kcal/day (anything less probably isn't healthy - you do need to supply your body with nutrition, and also avoid going into starvation mode) - then you are running a 500kcal/day deficit - about 3500 kcal/week, or 1 pound of weight loss. If you want to lose any more than that, eating less, outside of a metabolic lab environment, is probably not going to be effective (you either have your RMR drop as your body goes into starvation mode, or you end up binge eating as your body reacts to the massive deficit of calories).

This only allows for increased caloric output - and it's relatively simple to do 500 kcal/additional aerobic exercise/day - an hour of brisk walking, with maybe 30 minutes of stair climbing does the trick. This gets you from 1 pound of weight loss a week, to 2 pounds, and has the additional benefit of increasing your VO2 Max.

This doesn't even touch on the importance of resistance strength training exercise, and how key that is to maintaining a healthy body while dropping weight - it's all to easy to turn into a lightweight flabby weak person by just not eating/exercising.

The article claims that

>We have no control over our basal metabolic rate

and then links to a page[1] that explains

>Muscle cells require more energy to maintain than fat cells, so people with a higher muscle to fat ratio tend to have a higher BMR.

and

>Muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue, so increasing your muscle mass will help you lose weight.

It doesn't seem to address this discrepancy, though (that by exercising to build muscle mass one can affect their BMR and thus the lion's share of the calories burned).

[1] http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/loseweight/Pages/how-can-I-speed-...

HN threads on this topic tend to be repetitive and superficial, but this article appears to be so much more substantive than the usual media pieces that we've provisionally turned off user flags on the post.

This article misses a key point: increased muscle mass correlates with increased calorie burn.

Not all exercise is created equal. Exercise that doesn't build muscle is indeed ineffective at burning fat. But exercise that DOES build muscle has a compounding effect on burning fat. Your muscles require more energy to maintain, so they will burn more calories just by existing.

Does anyone actually still think that the extra energy consumption caused by exercise will cause you to lose weight and not just eat more?

A more contemporary discussion would include the idea that the different state of being caused by exercise causes less food intake ... which incidentally is true for me personally.

It is entirely possible that people that exercise regularly never have any trouble with their weight and thus never show up in these studies.

At the beginning of this year I was easily 100 lbs overweight. Decided it was all coming off this year. Started counting every calorie with myfitnesspal, later started looking at macros as well.

Weight started coming off but it really accelerated when I got serious about exercising. Swimming a mile 3x per week. Weight training 3x per week, and I've been on the treadmill a lot in the evenings, probably another 15 miles per week fast walking. Down 60 lbs as of now and consistently losing around 3-4 pounds per week.

It's hard to keep calories at less than 1800 per day with all the exercise, but it's just a hard psychological limit I've set for myself and the myfitnesspal app (and a kitchen scale) make it doable.

It seems to me that the exercise has made me lose about 1-2 pounds per week more than just diet, but who knows.

I miss pizza.

Often ignored aspects to exercising as an obese person are that it plain sucks, is difficult, and likely to result in injury; it's harmful.

Whenever I see obese people out running in public, obviously attempting to lose weight, these thoughts come to mind:

1. Impressive; that's a lot of hard work, not to mention embarrassing. Nobody fit I know could do the same carrying the equivalent weight in a backpack full of sand.

2. Doomed; you're killing yourself, imagine the long-term effects of such stress on your lower joints.

3. Futile; you're probably just going to eat too much of the wrong stuff now with all the appetite stimulated by the hard work, combined with the comfort sought in the immobilized and depressed days of joint and muscle pain.

Lose the extra baggage before you start exercising! Your body will thank you.

I used to weigh ~225# in my mid 20s. That weight was dropped to ~170# in under a year by simply removing sugars and refined/processed carbohydrates from my diet, which is a good weight for my build and height of 5'9". My experience was the desire to be active and exercise simply emerged once my weight was down, because doing physical things became fun and easy again, which also meant it was perfectly safe.

In my mid 30s now and ever since that initial drop I've stayed around ~165#, but with more muscle now that I'm more physically active. I continue to diligently avoid sugars and processed carbs, processed foods in general really, and exercise every day for the fun and fitness, because it's easy and seems to combat many of the negative effects of aging.

Exercise seems optional to me. If you eat correctly, without even exercising you'll have a normal weight, and preserve the ability to be physically active. If you eat poorly, you trap yourself, and the only way out of the trap is a slow process of eating correctly, the duration being proportional to how far you've let yourself go.

It frustrates me how we've structured the food environment such that all the convenient/affordable options surrounding us are bad for us. It takes constant discipline to not eat poorly as a result.

Good luck.

The best way to lose weight is to fast. People are so accustomed to not going without food for a few hours it becomes a phobia. Our ancestors did not live like this.

If you practice fasting long enough, you'll eventually get used to your stomach being empty, and it won't bother you anymore. Then it becomes trivial to lose weight.

I eat only one meal a day, and I don't even notice it when its been over 24 hours I have gone without food. As an added benefit, I can have an absolute feast everyday, including a large dessert, without gaining any weight.

The title to this article is very manipulative and misleading.

Weight loss seems to be a mysterious science to the everyday man and woman, but is well known by most top athletes and has been for many years.

It is simple chemistry. The calories you eat are stored in fat, which is comprised of O, H and C. Roughly ~3500 calories will become one pound of bodyfat. By this logic, yes you can eat less calories and lose weight. If you are burning 2500 calories per day, and you opt to eat only 2000 calories per day you should lose aprox. 1 lb of body fat per week (500 * 7 = 3500).

On the other hand, exercise is very important in weight loss. Muscle mass is expensive to maintain, and every lb of muscle mass can take 30-50 cals per day just to maintain. This increases your daily calories burned, allowing you to eat more food w/o weight gain or keep the same food and lose weight.

Additionally, when you exercise and convert the fat to energy the fat is released in various forms of O, H and C. Most of it is breathed out, and some comes out in liquid form. This is literally weight you are losing. Each atom has a molecular weight, be it O, H or C. And if you want to do the math you can figure out how much weight you are losing per exercise per hour.

The reason some people believe low carb diets are the best for weight loss, is directly tied to exercise. Quickly avail. energy known as glycogen is stored in your muscles and used up before fat. It is created from carbohydrates. Without glycogen in your muscles, you will burn fat first.

One of my trainers once said... I'm helping you for 1 hour a day, you have 23 other hours to ruin it all.

Healthy eating is super super important.

> The calorie restriction groups lost more weight than the group the dieted and exercised.

Yes, and anything else would have surprised me. Exercise leads to muscle build-up. Muscle is heavier than fat.

The right metric to use here would have been body fat, not body weight. Similarly, the fitness goal should not be to "lose weight" but to get into good shape overall and feel healthy.

I've lost over 130 pounds in the last two years and I deliberately avoided high intensity exercise during that time. I find it very hard to moderate my hunger when doing regular high-intensity exercise. I would take long, slow walks a few times a week, and would rarely feel hungry while maintaining a very high daily caloric deficit. (In fact, I often felt quite full. I drank beer frequently, indulged in a pint of Ben and Jerrys a few times a month, ate out a lot, etc.)

In my experience it's most important to find a way to eat at a caloric deficit that feels natural, do-able, and fun. Even rapid weight loss takes a very long time, so you need to build it into your lifestyle. If you're like me and you like beer, ice cream, and dining out, then it's mainly a matter of portion control. I ate what I liked, but I learned to moderate portions and listen to my body. I ate until I was no longer hungry, and then no more.

I've noticed in some cases that exercise can actually stave off hunger pangs - both while doing it and afterward for a while (you want water more than food) - and in this manner it can act as an appetite suppressant.

As long as you ignore the body's impulse to eat more than usual when you finally do sit down for a meal, it can very much work in your favor. There's also a phenomenon people refer to as "shrinking stomach" (that I've observed first hand) where your body adapts to feeling more full on less food. I don't know if your stomach actually shrinks, but it feels like it.

If you don't sufficiently often resist the urge to eat more than you need, your body will adapt to that intake level and there will most likely be a rough patch when you try to change the trend. I believe most people can push past this uncomfortable period and stop feeling deprived after a while.

I'm surprised the ketogenic diet is not mentioned at all. It's becoming clearer and clearer that obese people are likely much more insulin resistant than the rest of the population and as a result much more carbohydrate intolerant than the rest of the population. The insulin response these people are experiencing is causing them to store much more of the energy that they consume, especially if it contains fat. However, if you get rid of the carbs but still consume the fat, your body instead becomes adapted to burning ketones for fuel instead of glucose. So as a result, any fat that you may ingest while in ketosis gets burned for fuel instead of becoming plasma. Just saunder over to reddit.com/r/keto and you can already see the amazing transformations taking place.

Based on all the other comments in the thread, I wonder if we updated to language we used if our goals would be clearer.

Why not replace the phrase "lose weight" with "become slimmer"?

We're not actually concerned with losing weight, but in fact with losing a specific TYPE of weight.

It makes it a lot easier to come to terms with instructions like: "keep your insulin down and your fat cells will empty"

The scale is an imperfect measure for slimness and lose weight is the wrong phrase to describe what we're generally trying for.

Obviously these are sweeping generalizations, if you feel the need to poke holes, you're probably right. I'm going for brevity as opposed to a "think piece" - please feel free to take the comment with a grain of salt.

>Surely I had earned an extra margarita.

You can stop reading right there, that's the problem. You have to both eat well and exercise to lose weight. You don't get to eat extra things just because you exercised.

Focus on two things: First, portion control. I know it's wasteful for the environment but I get the single serving versions of (healthy) things (e.g. pre-sliced cheese, single cups of greek yogurt instead of the big tub, etc) so you know exactly how much you're eating. Get a kitchen scale and some measuring cups for everything else, the odds are excellent that you're a crappy estimator. And bring your lunch to work.

Second, blocking out time in your day for exercise, even if you don't work that hard. It's important to put on your workout clothes and at least go through the motions until it's an ingrained habit (1-3 months in my case but ymmv). Once it's an ingrained habit it's much easier to keep going. I start to feel gross and unclean if I go more than three or four days without some kind of strenuous exercise.

It's a lot of work and it's very difficult, but it's not complicated. With these two things I have lost 70 pounds and kept it off for seven years.

Exercise didn't work for me until I stuck with it consistently, and progressively.

The problem is that what doesn't work is "strawman exercise": for instance, the kind of exercise that a sedentary volunteer test subject is able to handle in some study.

Before exercise works for fat loss, you have to train up to the intensity and volume that is required. That takes months. Consistent months during which you not only don't give up, but pile on the challenges. If you quit, you lose your progress and slide back to the start.

You can't measure exercise just by the time put in and the theoretical calories, by the way. There is a quality component to it.

Another thing is that once you have a decently low body fat, the remaining areas where fat accumulates on your body will show to be "exercise resistant". It's very hard to get rid of that centimeter of fat from the back of your thigh, calves, upper back and arms, or central abs. Or that pesky "love handle" area. That, I can attest, either can't be done with exercise, or requires exercise to be a full time job. But that's not what this article is about; the claim is that exercise isn't effective against obesity.

I started working out heavily to lose weight, but also to "feel better." I succeeded at both points, but it took an extremely long time to hit my goal weight. Looking back, it's clear I was eating too much to compensate for the additional work I was doing.

I gained half of that weight that I lost back pretty quick because I couldn't keep up the strenuous exercise routine. So, the next time I instead focused on my eating habits and skipped formal exercise entirely (mostly just went for walks instead). I had much more consistent and predictable weight loss week-over-week and now I'm about to surpass the goal I had the first time I tried in 1/3 of the time. It really came down to small portions -- I didn't have to give up many types of food, I just didn't eat nearly as much of it as I would have in the past.

This echoes experiences from people I know. They start out with a strenuous exercise routine and it's fun in the beginning to push yourself, but most people can't sustain it. Or they get injured and that sets them down a path of being lazy and gaining the weight back.

You should exercise to prevent diabetes and a swath of other health problems, though.

Our body's software is so hopelessly out of date. It's programmed to preserve fat at all cost: something quite useful, say 2 million years ago when famines were happening almost every day.

Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are barely aware of the basic mechanisms which govern our fat production, not even understanding how it works. So far, all we have is theories, hypothesis, correlations and some compelling experimentations.

Personally, I'm waiting for the iBody app to come out. iBody, will allow us to control our metabolism at a cellular level, dialing it up or down at will. We'll be able to control our appetites and hungers at the push of a button too. But, at this rate, who knows how long it will take to get this off the ground: 100s of years, thousands? Come on investors, this is a multi-trillion dollar market.

This a harmful, eye-catching, title.

Whereas exercise is not required to lose weight, you still can use exercise to optimize the process.

Of course this article focuses on cardio. It's almost become conventional fitness wisdom that cardio will not help you lose weight.

Weight lifting will also not help you lose "weight" but it will help you lose fat. Diet #1, lifestyle #2, weight lifting #3 (optional), cardio #infinity

Anytime this comes up in conversation, I enjoy pointing people to John Walker's Hacker's Diet (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/). I enjoy the bits of Autodesk trivia he tossed in as well (he was a co-founder and wrote much of AutoCAD, as he then thinks "So if I can do that, why can't I learn to lose weight?").

The most accurate critique of any of these "calories in minus calories out" arguments is that those vary from person to person and from food to food. So if you do have a particularly hard time losing (or gaining!) weight, it might be a bit of genetic variation.

>The spinning instructor was echoing a message we've been getting for years: As long as you get on that bike or treadmill, you can keep indulging — and still lose weight

Who is saying this? Anyone who has spent an hour educating themselves on the subject knows that it's all about calories in v calories out. That can be accomplished via the gym and the kitchen, or the kitchen alone.

Exercise provides additional benefits; higher caloric deficit assuming the same diet, muscle tone (appearance and burns more calories when you're doing nothing), and general cardiovascular health.

As a fatass who walks 2 to 3 miles a day for exercise, and is seeing little in the way of progress, I know this to be true. I know what must be done, but man, it's hard to break bad food habits.

You diet to lose weight. You exercise to get in shape.

So that's an interesting long read, I guess all the details end up making sense. Some physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes is the best way to go. The most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully.

Don't expect to be able to exercise enough to lose much weight.

You shouldn't exercise to lose weight, because for most people you shouldn't be aiming primarily to lose weight; weight loss should be a component of the broader goal of improving overall health. For which you probably should exercise, regardless of whether it's optimal for the narrower goal of weight loss.

I'd like to see that last graph split out into "fat loss/gain" and "muscle loss/gain" - because reducing food intake can also make your body break down muscles, which is equally bad. Doing exercise to stimulate the body to make more muscles can counter that effect.

I guess people go to the gym for different reasons. Me personally I don't care about losing weight. I want to convert my body fat into muscle. If I don't eat a lot I can lose tons of weight, but I also look and feel weaker. So for me, exercise is very important.

You can't out-run the fork.

When I started exercising, it made me hungrier. But my crappy eating habits made me sanna stuff my face with more crap. Developing better eating habits, then adding exercising, works better for me.

"Despite going from being mostly sedentary to spending a couple of hours exercising almost every day, the participants only lost about 11 pounds on average"

I would love to lose 11 lbs

I like the iterative method. Everyday look at a scale. If your weight has gone up, you did something bad the day before... don't do that again.

The best way to put this idea that I've heard is this: "you can't out run your fork"

People get fat not because they eat too much. But because they eat junk food. That's it. The amount of calories is irrelavant here.

If you want to be a good shape, eat fruit. Without GMO and hemicals. That's simple. Yet most people go to McDonalds, drink Coca-Cola, eat different kinds of shit and wonder "What should I do to lose weight? Hmmmm, maybe I should work out more?"

Biggest flaw in article: assuming all "weight" is fat.

tl;dr: Why you shouldn't use exercise as an excuse to overeat, it doesn't burn enough calories.

I feel that those who think that exercise is a solution for weightloss either have an absurdly good metabolic rate or have an unrealistic view of how much time people can devote to exercise.

I had tried to lose some weight a few years ago and everything O tried had failed, including exercise. At one point, I purchased a digital scale and performed multiple measurements a day of my weight. They confirmed that additional exercise (e.g. walking a few miles) had negligible impact on my weight.

Afterward, I decided to redesign my diet for weight loss. I was able to lose 50 lbs in roughly 3 months by that alone. The idea was that my body had an abundance of energy such that all I needed were nutrients to keep my body going and a certain volume in my stomach to trick it into signaling my brain that I was eating sufficiently. I ended up consuming a multivitamin pill, egg whites, tofu, brocolli and fruits each day for the better part of those 3 months. I calculated that doing that lowered my daily caloric intake 800 calories a day.

Sadly, I ended up regaining about 30 of them after pressure from certain relatives to eat more got to the point where being fatter was preferable to having to deal with it. The entire time, I had been considered overweight to obese by my BMI so the pressure to eat was in no way because I had gone overboard, although I had come within 5 lbs of attaining a "healthy" BMI before I regained some of the weight. My mistake was switching to Soylent after deciding that I did not want to lose weight so quickly. The idea that I was not eating food triggered my relatives' "lets try to feed him" reaction.

Lately, I have started to try doing this again by consuming a daily multivitamin pill, water, spinach, "beyond meat" fruits and a daily bag or two of popcorn (to clear the pantry). The popcorn will be eliminated as soon as I have finished the remaining supply, but even eating the popcorn, I am losing weight by doing this, although it is definitely not as fast as it would be had I not decided to finish off that popcorn.

The first time that I lost weight, I had a relative who attended weight watchers. The people at weight watchers were horrified when told how quickly I managed to do it and talked about studies about the dangers of rapid weight loss. My feeling was that they did not want to lose a source of revenue and that being as fat was worse for me. In hindsight, I think that they would have been right had I been anywhere close to a healthy weight at the time as what should matter is the percentage of weight lost rather than the raw numbers. The closer that I approached a "healthy" weight, the slower my weight loss became and when I was within 5 pounds of it, I had started to feel somewhat light headed, which is when I decided to try lose by weight more slowly rather than force it through a large deficit in my daily caloric intake.

From the article: "If a hypothetical 200-pound man added 60 minutes of medium intensity running four days per week while keeping his calorie intake the same, and he did this for 30 days, he'd lose five pounds. 'If this person decided to increase food intake or relax more to recover from the added exercise, then even less weight would be lost,' Hall added. (More on these 'compensatory mechanisms' later.)

So if one is overweight or obese, and presumably trying to lose dozens of pounds, it would take an incredible amount of time, will, and effort to make a real impact through exercise.”

OK. I exercise more than that every month and have for years. It's painless to do because it's the only time I spend watching TV shows like Game Of Thrones--I look forward to my exercise sessions.

So, this article is telling me that (unless I exhibit compensatory mechanisms' such as eating more than I do), and if I started at 200 lbs, I'd lose 5 lbs a month, just doing what I actually want to do (because I enjoy watching entertaining TV shows like GoT). I'd go from 200 lbs to not being overweight in less than a year. The article's take on this is "it would take an incredible amount of time , will, and effort to make a real impact through exercise". That seems like an incredible amount of negative spin the authors are trying to put on it. To me, it sounds like a fantastic deal. And one I've taken advantage of.

My own weight loss path is pretty complicated, but I was at 225 and now my weight stays between 173 and 183, generally up and down depending on life events and whether I have temporarily keep more sodas in the fridge than I normally do.

EDIT: I just want to emphasize that the key for me is that I enjoy my exercise sessions, because I look forward to watching the most entertaining TV produced in the English language. So it takes almost no will power or effort. It's a matter of choosing not to watch that TV when not exercising, which gets to be a habit--similar to not picking up an apple pie every time I go to the grocery store so there's no such pie sitting around the house. If if DID take willpower and effort to do that exercise, I probably wouldn't do it! It helps enormously that I have an elliptical trainer in the house. But that's a small investment compared to the health benefits--not just weight loss and maintenance, but the fact that exercising is great for the brain, and many other benefits as well, including a reduction in cancer risk.

EDIT 2: I don't even know if I'd find that TV all that enjoyable if I wasn't exercising. I can imagining thinking "why am I wasting this time watching this crap when I could be doing something useful??" But when exercising, there are so many benefits that I give myself total permission to watch it, and I do enjoy it!

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.

TLDR; Exercise alone won't help you lose weight, you need to combine exercise and diet changes.

In certain Vedic traditions, physical exertion is seen as a form of meditation. The concept there is if you can discipline your body, you can discipline your mind.

That being said, I think the author of this article tries way too hard to be counterfactual. If you put an obese male or female on the treadmill with modest caloric restriction, over time they will lose weight on a log scale.

Nice to see an article that explains common-sense ideas with some effort to collect data.

My theory about how the Biggest Loser contestants lose weight - get this - they're not allowed to snack during their all-day workouts.

Exercise makes your face and overall aesthetics look better even if you don't lose weight.

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I guess it's just a coincidence that most athletes aren't overweight. It doesn't have anything to do with them exercising?

The title says "you shouldn't exercise to lose weight", which seems to suggest that exercise will negatively affect your ability to lose weight.

There isn't a single study here that proves this rather lofty hypothesis.