Food Fight Part 5: Exercise ≠ Weight Loss

Myth #8 If I exercise enough, I can eat whatever I like

Myth #9 You can exercise enough to lose weight

“Wow, you look amazing!” I swooned over my friend Gianni, as she put her mince and veg fry up into containers for lunch the next day, carefully sizing out the portions. 

“Yea, I’ve taken up marathon running.” 

“Oh! Hard core.”

“Yea, now I can eat whatever I want to, and still look great!” She’d transformed herself from tubby teen to ravishing runner. Dropped about 4 dress sizes. I was astounded. I didn’t think it was possible. No one I knew had done anything like that before. 

“I run the 1.5km to the gym as a warm up, do an hour at the gym, then run home and shower before work. Then I’m in a running group after work, and I’m training for a marathon. I did a triathlon last year and came second!” Gianni was blowing my mind. This was the person that would avoid going for walks when we were at camps, and generally detested moving. Now she ran marathons?

Could I do that? Would I want to?

My parents were the opposite of two extremes – my Mum seldom exercised, viewing it very much as a chore, but my Dad took great joy in movement, playing tag, squash, tennis with us, and coming on Pathfinder expeditions that involved hiking mountains, kayaking around bays or cycling around islands. 

Dad had a high energy in, high energy out constitution. There was none of this saying ‘no’ to cake business. Like any good Dad, if you couldn’t finish your food, he would do it for you, happily playing human garbage disposal. He would run it all off playing squash and remain slim enough to be getting on with.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty incapable of sitting still.

At 14, I got a paper run that my brothers and I divvied up between us, played football, and walked everywhere. 

I had a pretty good equilibrium, until I started driving, gave up the paper run, and couldn’t play football because I had injured my ankle. It took a lot of intentional effort to keep exercising after that. So I started running before school most mornings – I was so glad to be able to move pain-free again! 

I moved to Laos when I was 21, and spent the first year utterly homesick, largely miserable. Saturday afternoon walks were replaced by sitting and calling home on Skype. Walking to and from uni was replaced with motorbiking to work because it was too hot to walk. 

I became incessantly hungry, and ate my feelings, putting on something like 12 kgs in a year. I was sitting on the couch about May, eating a packet of digestive biscuits, thinking to myself ‘I don’t even want these anymore, they taste like cardboard’ but I could not stop myself from eating them. I downed the whole packet, felt slightly gross, but was otherwise fine.

I was still exercising loads – I took up swimming because the pool was the only refuge from constant sweating. I played Ultimate Frisbee, had a go at rugby with some American girls, and frequently went for evening walks. But I was also trying an entire city’s worth of new restaurants and culinary delights, and I had a decent amount of money for the first time in my life.

The exercise didn’t make any difference though, and the weight just kept piling on.

There were also loads of new situations, provoking anxiety. I got invited to a colleague’s house for lunch when I was living in Xieng Khong. I stopped at a shop on the way and downed two ice creams before I went out for lunch. Why? I wasn’t sure there would be anything on offer I would like, and also because I was anxious.

So I would eat. 

It helped. 

It calmed me down.

I came home for Christmas, and Mum was on this diet and she’d lost loads of weight, and was nearly slimmer than me (heretofore unheard of). My competitive streak kicked in again, and I decided that if she could do it, so could I. I cut sugar, cut portion size, swam 1km every morning. I lost all the weight I put on since moving to Laos, and more in about 4 months. 

In July 2009, I came back to NZ and continued with my new obsession: swimming, and stayed off sugar entirely. Not so much as a conscious decision: I was so happy to be home. Eating became optional. I had found the not-hungry nirvana again. I worked at Parliament for a couple of months, walking mile upon mile every day for 12 hour shifts, and usually only having a coffee all day because we weren’t really given breaks. 

The traditional remedy for weight gain is eat less and exercise more.

As if our bodies are robotic.

Unfortunately it is not at all that simple.

“In what has become a defining experiment at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr Timothy Church, hundreds of overweight women were put on exercise regimes for a six-month period. Some worked out for 72 minutes each week, some for 136 minutes, and some for 194. A fourth group kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise.

Against all the laws of natural justice, at the end of the study, there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who had exercised – some of them for several days a week – and those who hadn’t. (Church doesn’t record whether he told the women who he’d had training for three and half hours a week, or whether he was wearing protective clothing when he did.) Some of the women even gained weight.” (Ref)

The sad truth is then that “exercise is never going to be an effective way of slimming, unless you have the training schedule – and the willpower – of an Olympic athlete.” (Ref)

Does that mean you shouldn’t bother with exercise?

That is, of course, your choice.

I look at this and think 194 mins a week isn’t even half an hour a day. That is barely longer than a warm up – of course it didn’t work!

People generally think that it’s 50:50 diet and exercise that will make the difference when using the diet+exercise combo to sort out weight gain. In reality, it is more like 80:20 diet and exercise.

But then I found this:

This graphic helps to explain why exercise doesn’t help as much as we think it might. The lion’s share of our energy is used from our body just doing what bodies do, heart beating, kidneys kidneying, brain thinking, tummies digesting (that’s the orange bit) and just being. Obviously, the more you move, the more energy is expended sure, but an hour’s worth of running burns about 400-550 calories.

“The implication here is that while your food intake accounts for 100 percent of the energy that goes into your body, exercise only burns off less than 10 to 30 percent of it. That’s a pretty big discrepancy, and definitely means that erasing all your dietary transgressions at the gym is a lot harder than the peddlers of gym memberships make it seem.” (Ref)

Not to mention that your body will naturally get more hungry after exercising to compensate – your body is trying to keep you the same size – so as soon as there’s more food intake, any exercise is nullified.

“A single slice of pizza, for example, could undo the benefit of an hour’s workout. So could a cafe mocha or an ice cream cone.” (Ref)

There are loads of reasons to exercise other than weight loss – mental health, stamina, fitness, cardiovascular health, bone density, energy, better sleep, muscle tone, fun, sport, relaxation, mental clarity – but weight loss shouldn’t be your primary one. Research shows that without diet change as well, exercise makes NO impact on losing weight. This podcast talks about how many studies have shown that your body will initially lose weight from exercise, but within 6 months, it will be back where it started. 

In fact, with loads of cardio exercise, you can actually damage your joints from too much exercise. 

My anecdotal experience definitely corroborates this finding. Without significant dietary change, exercise makes nearly no difference for weight loss.

Much to my disgust, my mother was right: you can’t outrun your fork.

Alongside significant dietary change, exercise is a game changer, for me at least. If for no reason other than I go ‘but I’ve worked too hard to ruin it by eating crap‘.

Read more about this here, here and here.

Whatever the exercise ratio was at age 23, I had found my niche, and I looked and felt amazing.

I had a great thing going! I was young, beautiful, joyous, the skinniest I’d ever been in my life, playing footy again, going for runs, and doing martial arts. I was fit. I was healthy. I was happy. I was home.

Until I broke my little toe bone. 

And then a couple weeks later, my brother died.

Everything changed forever.

That’s next week’s story.