Is Exercise and The Fact It Makes You Thin a Myth? |

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

time-magazine-august-17 Something caught my eye the other day, which was a link that somebody gave me, to a story it was on Yahoo shines website. It spoke about a recent article that was written by Time magazine, which briefly says that exercise does not actually make you thin.

Now writing about this can always seem a bit controversial, however I thought it might be of interest to. People because not everybody is always of the same opinion. And here is what it said. It starts by saying that approximately 45 million Americans, belong to either a gym or health club.

To keep themselves fit and healthy. In America , they spend a incredible 19 billion pounds a year on going to health clubs, and gym memberships. That is a staggering amount of money and just goes to show, how big the health/keep fit industry is.

Many people do join these, gyms and never actually go. And a lot of us do say that we exercise regularly. Yet the world over. And predominantly in America , obesity rates continue to soar. And, shows no signs of slowing down.

The author said, once he has done his exercise he tend to get hungry afterwards. So he tends to eat more on the days, when he has done it. And less on those days when he hasn’t.

The normal statement that we hear, which is exercise is essential for losing weight is quite a recent one would you believe. During the 1960s, doctors advised their patients not to do vigorous exercise.

If you fast forward to today, doctors these days even encourage their older patients to get some kind of exercise.

Even if it is only gentle and of course we know that, the benefits of it are too numerous to mention. But to mention a few such as, lower cholesterol levels, far less likely to contract diabetes, and have heart problems later on in life.

Now it seems from what he says, that exercise has become somewhat overrated. Eric Ravussin, whom is a prominent researcher, in exercise at a university in the United States .

Says “In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,”

which myself I do find quite hard to believe. However, there again that is my opinion sorely. What he says is that exercise isn’t important as people think. When it comes to losing weight, as stated in so many gyms/health clubs etc.

Eric says, the problem isn’t necessarily the fact that exercise doesn’t help you burn calories, which it does. It is more about the fact that it can make you hungry as well, so a knock-on effect of this is you eat more hence gain weight.

A study was conducted, which monitored people who didn’t exercise to see what happened to them. They were then, split into four groups, one group had 464 women who did no exercise whatsoever, some women in three of the groups had a personal trainer, and worked out as follows, for the following time periods; two minutes, 136 minutes, and 194 minutes.

And the remaining women which were in the fourth group were told to, carry on as normal, none of the women what so ever were told to change what they ate. Whilst doing the study they were asked to fill in a medical questionnaire, in order to track results etc.

The results came back which were quite interesting, all the women in all the groups lost weight, including the ones in the controlled group. The interesting thing is the women who had the personal trainer, which you would of thought would have lost substantially more weight, surprisingly didn’t.

So why is this happening then? one of the researchers, has a theory and calls it compensation. The odd thing here is the women who were exercising vigorously ate more food, before they started their routine, one of the reasons given for this is. They used it like a reward system because they have just done something that is good for them so hence the need to eat.

Church says who is the researcher for the study, says he noticed that his friends would go out jogging, and then go on to say that they weren’t losing any weight. However, as it turns out they were going to Starbucks and buying calorie-laden muffins afterwords.

Another of the theories is that when we were, less domesticated you might say. And cave dwellers we would have been moving around all the time, especially in the summer foraging for food. And this is why we can tend to gain weight, more movement is better throughout the day.

Nowadays we are advised to exercise vigorously for a day up to an hour and that is it. However, if you think about it most of the work we do these days is not very labour-intensive.

During the war, people did far more a labour-intensive jobs than we do these days, they were far healthier and ate less food. When go jogging next please try and avoid the following landmarks, Domino’s pizza, your local chip shop, anywhere that sells muffins, your local kebab house etc.

Source and references

http://www.time.com