Day 167: Diet vs. Exercise

So I read something awful on the New York Time's health blog Well today (actually, the article was from November 2009, so I have no idea how I even came upon it).  The article's title really says it all: "Why Doesn't Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?"  Pretty depressing huh?  Apparently you can't eat whatever you want so long as you exercise, unless you are Michael Phelps (who eats about 12,000 calories per day while in training/competition).

The article discusses a British Journal of Sports Medicine article that tracked 58 obese people for 12 weeks.  These people were on supervised aerobic exercise plans (read:  someone was watching them exercise (and making sure they exercised right) for 84 days), and on average, lost seven pounds.  SEVEN POUNDS in 12 weeks.  That is ridiculous.  The moral of the article is that while we think exercise should make us thin, simply burning calories through activity is not enough.  One researcher in a different study summarized things this way:  It all comes down to energy balance or calories in-calories out.  People are only burning 200 or 300 calories in a typical 30-minute exercise session, and you replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.

This isn't to say that exercise is bad.  Obviously it is really good for us.  The problem is that on its own, we won't lose weight.  We have to eat right too.  In fact, research indicates that when we lose weight, we can attribute 80 percent of that weight loss to what we eat and 20 percent to the exercise we do. 

I don't know about you, but the exercising isn't hard for me.  I like it.  The real problem is not eating those free powdered donuts someone just left in the office kitchen.