As always there is no silver bullet, you need to have a balanced lifestyle to be healthy.
"Exercise: You can’t out-exercise a bad diet, but regular exercise helps keep weight off, and changes your attitude for the better. And exercise has enormous health benefits beyond any impact on weight. What exercise? Something. Anything. “Some is good, more is better, everything counts” Freedhoff suggests."
But people forget that they burn more calories during a single night of sleep than they do doing 3 hours of cardio a week. Balance is important, but shedding nutrition & health mythology is even more so.
The only hitch is that fads are by their nature transitory, so at some point the stupid people will flit away from gluten-free to some other fad, and the market of gluten-free products will collapse. Which will kind of suck for those who actually need them.
It's a great book, and more accessible than you might think.
Read them all, or only the topics that matter to you; Lyle is one of the best in the world.
I inherit high cholesterol (above 220 at one point), but I've managed to lower it through diet alone by drinking a lot of fruit juice (but I also have to watch out for diabetes . . . ), and I've also got it lower through very heavy exercise alone (but I also have to watch out for skeletal/joint injuries . . . ).
As I've gotten older, I've noticed more and more that what I eat has a noticeable effect on my mood, alertness and just physical feeling of well-being. I've also noticed that every time I exercise now, I feel really good afterwords.
I don't think that diet and exercise are a panacea, but they could at least go a very long way to alleviating symptoms and preventing illness. I also think there is way too much pseudoscience and BS going on around exercise and diet that it makes it that much harder, and a lot of programs (high intensity workouts like CrossFit and exclusionary diets like Paleo) are completely irresponsible and very likely worse for people in the long run. It also doesn't help that most of these programs are faddish and very dogmatic, with no tests to back them up.
>Sweating is the next myth, with The Biggest Loser epitomizing the belief that exercise can contribute to significant weight loss. You can’t outrun your fork- not in the long run.
Edited my original comment to reflect this.
For those who have a controlled weight already, is a higher metabolism actually something to aim for?
People who practice calorie restriction for life extension do seem to exercise but not to raise the metabolism, they view that as a tradeoff.
Perhaps not; as I get closer and closer to my ideal weight, I wonder if I should taper off my exercise routine. The problem is that exercise has more benefits than just higher metabolism. There are hormones that get released by exercising, not to mention that functional fitness is necessary if you are trying to reach a goal.
I'm not an expert, nor have I seen any research along these lines, but I've heard arguments made that since exercise speeds up metabolism and gets the blood flowing, it should clean out things like histamine (reducing allergic reactions) and disease faster. There's all sorts of reasons to not take my experience as scientific, but I certainly seem to have less allergies, heal faster and get sick less often the more regularly I exercise. I also tend to be more relaxed, have higher clarity and am on more of an even keel emotionally after I workout (and it tends to last most of the day, so I prefer to workout first thing in the morning).