It’s True, Exercise Won’t Make You Thin
A Trainers Response to “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” by John Cloud in TIME Magazine and “For Losing Weight, Diet Beats Exercise” by Erin Allday in the SF Chronicle.
Recently, TIME Magazine published an article written by a man named John Cloud about how we have all been misinformed about exercise. In his argument, John suggests that “Exercise isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.” John then goes on to site various studies from experts such as Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University who says, “In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless”.
As you can imagine, after this article was published, hundreds of personal trainers and exercise experts from all over the world published on the web their bitter responses as to how this article was by far doing the public a great disservice. Think about it…how hard have these trainers had to work to motivate their clients to sweat out their long hours in the gym? How many personal trainers, fitness magazines, fat loss experts, and exercise gadgets have their existence at stake in the name of the all glorious, all righteous path of exercise as being the holy grail of weight loss? I would say quite a few people’s lives might be affected by this controversial angle on exercise – even mine.
Then, if TIME Magazine wasn’t enough, on August 27, 2009 one of my loyal clients tells me about how the San Francisco Chronicle published “For losing weight, diet beats exercise”. The Chronicle? Now this was getting a lot closer to home. And if all my boot camp and personal training clients were privy to this info, I had better start looking into this! So I got ahold of both articles. I read them. I read them again. I came to a conclusion.
However, before I came to a conclusion my first gut reaction, as a fitness trainer of 10 years and owner of Fit For Life Solutions, a business specializing in fitness and fat loss boot camps and making exercise a way of life (www.FitForLifeSolutions.com), was that this was a bunch of bull! How dare these writers use this fitness propaganda to twist the minds of these poor misguided people who already have it hard enough, and now have to struggle through the dark and angled musings masked in highly-credible columns of TIME Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle! Couldn’t I just as easily publish an article on how water isn’t necessary for good for hydration, and how it can even kill you!
So, as I said, I read the articles. And I read them again. And I came to a conclusion.
And my conclusion is…they are both absolutely right!
Exercise is not the key to weight loss. I tell my clients this all the time, “if you’re looking to lower the numbers on the scale, you have to focus on nutrition!” But here’s where I differ from the columnists, exercise IS MY LIFE – and the quality of my life has been improved tremendously through living a fitness lifestyle – so much so that words cannot express. Therefore, on behalf of myself, other personal trainers helping people around the world, the hundreds of people who’s lives we have touched here at Fit For Life Solutions, and the millions of people who love exercise, I have to say the following statement:
Exercise and fitness are not about losing, they are about gaining. Gaining energy, gaining muscle, gaining confidence, gaining respect for ourselves and our bodies, gaining friends, and gaining a power over our lives than we otherwise wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for this wonderful experience we call exercise and all the benefits it brings us.
There’s also another very important piece to exercise as it relates to weight loss. Here’s the thing…do people want to lose weight or lose fat? Fat of course! Instead of fat though, people often use the word weight, but losing weight could mean something quite different thing than losing fat. For example, let’s say you went on a diet without exercising and more specifically, lifting weights. Well, what would typically happen is you would lose weight, but not necessarily fat.
Let’s say you lost 8 lbs in two weeks. Sounds good, right? Not necessarily. You see, that 8 pounds you lost were probably a combination of fat, muscle and water weight (most diets have you severely restrict salt intake…that’s because they want you to think you’ve lost more fat than you really have!). So if you lost 3 pounds of fat, 3 pounds of muscle and 2 pounds of water weight, that would mean you lost 8 pounds on the scale. But losing that 3 pounds of muscle really means you’ve lowered your metabolism. That’s why when people go on diets, without exercise, they end up gaining the weight right back…and then some! (TIME Magazine didn’t tell us that, did they!).
I say stick with weights training to promote or at the very least maintain muscle mass. If you’re on a caloric restriction, you lift weights regularly (and properly), and you have adequate essential fat and protein intake, you’re on the road to successful FAT loss, not just WEIGHT loss. See the difference?
Thank-you Time Magazine and SF Chronicle for helping us to revisit why exercise is so important to our fitness lifestyle, how we indeed must focus on nutrition to lower the weight on the scale, and how we can choose merely to lose weight, or to really make a change and lose fat by transforming our bodies and our lives through exercise.
Your Trainer For Life,
Forrest Folen, MCT
This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 4:01 pm.
