It's not clear to me. Exercise is a good way to burn calories. But perhaps more significantly, if you do it regularly, you will burn more calories even while at rest.
http://www.cochrane.org/CD003817/ENDOC_exercise-for-overweig...
> The results of this review support the use of exercise as a weight loss intervention, particularly when combined with dietary change. Exercise is associated with improved cardiovascular disease risk factors even if no weight is lost.
cbass.com has this stuff dialed in. One im-gonna-puke strength session a week and one difficult endurance "cardio" session makes a ton of sense to me, when you take in the literature. Much more and exercise starts to look like a net negative in many ways. Suggesting to a fatty that they jog five times a week is at best a waste of time and at worst actively harmful.
You? My neuro-atypicality means I geniunely don't know if you're trolling and yours is a parody post, or if you actually think cbass.com - a comercial site selling get fit quick dvds and books - is a reputable cite.
One question: if they have it "dialed in" why are they selling ten different books?
Anybody who's actually tried, and succeeded, in losing weight and keeping it off will tell you that diet is way more important than exercise when it comes to fat loss. Exercise absolutely produces health benefits, but they are largely orthogonal to the ones produced by changing how you eat. If you can do one but not the other, then diet.
Most people with a lot of weight to lose have willpower problems, that's why they have a lot of weight in the first place. Not all, but most. These people are better served conserving their willpower and taking more effective courses of action than the one they can't take. (both diet and exercise)
Also consider... I'm a 33 year old 215lb man. An hour at the gym lifting weights is about 340 calories, or approximately the amount of calories you get by drinking a couple glasses of soda at lunch and dinner. You need 10 trips to the gym or 10 days without soda. Assuming you go to the gym 3 days per week, that's 3 weeks of exercising compared to 1.5 weeks of drinking water instead of soda.
One problem with exercise isthat it doesn't burn many calories, and some people "reward" themselves for doing that exercise with an extra bit of cake.
If you walked at 2.5 MpH and weighed 160 pounds, it would take you two and a half hours to burn your 500 calories. To me 2.5 hrs is not an "easy" workout. Somewhere between medium to hard (depending on fitness level).
A single Big Mac is almost 500 calories, two snickerdoodles are more than 500 calories on average.
> Of course it's not a substitute for a proper diet, but it can be a huge factor in weight loss.
That's just not true.
A single combo from McDonalds could set you back an entire weeks worth of exercise, literally. If you exercised for an hour a day every day, it only takes a single meal to undo most of that weight loss.
PS - Exercise is, of course, very important for overall health and a long life. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But for weight loss? Heck no. The maths simply doesn't work at all.
A 160 pound person could burn 500 calories in ~40 minutes jogging at a 10 minute per mile pace, and could easily offset a Big Mac in a single day's exercise (not saying that the person should use this to justify eating a Big Mac).
One hour of squash burns 600+ calories. One hour of running burns 600 ish calories. One hour of cycling burns something like 400-500 calories.
No citations for these figures, just going off memory
Burning 500+ calories per session is definitely doable - if you are doing the right exercise in the right ways for the right duration.
Not really. Probably even a bit the opposite. If you exercise hard daily the resting metabolic rate actually drops some as an adaptation to conserve calories: exercise induced hypothyroidism. Pro level cyclists have to count calories to keep their weight down and they don't eat nearly as much as you'd think.
Muscle mass preferentially burns fat, so you get a very small metabolic edge from having some extra muscle, but not much. Adipose tissue also burns a great deal of calories, believe it or not, so getting really fat is a good was to increase your metabolism. This is why when obese people start restricting calories the first 30 pounds or so pretty much melts off with not much difficulty.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259
The third chapter is all about why exercise isn't a good way to lose weight. It is generally a fantastic book.