Me: Exercise does not cause weight loss. This is a fact that has been demonstrated so robustly in research that even doctors, who hate and fear evidence, are grudgingly starting to admit this.
Someone reading that post: Cool, but have you considered that exercise leads to weight loss?
Me: I am going to eat you
lololol “does too”
does it? not for women after childbirth
does it? not if you want to see an effect size of greater than 1 kilo (2.2lbs)
does it? not if you’d like to see a maintained loss greater than 3.3% of your body weight
does it? not for people with type 2 diabetes
does it? not for people exercising for their non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
Interactive computer-based reminders to diet and exercise are useless.
I mean, I literally went to Cochrane Reviews, one of the best-respected sources for massive meta-analyses, and I just input the keywords “weight loss” and “exercise,” and I’m tooling through the results. Every one of the damn things shows that we do not have high-quality research indicating that exercise leads to weight loss. So no. I’m right, and you need to adjust your worldview–ask yourself, if not for weight loss, then why? Re-read those sources: exercise improved muscle density, insulin sensitivity, and cholesterol. It’s good for your blood vessels, it’s good for your strength, it’s good for your brain.
But it won’t make you thin. Maybe two pounds, maybe five, but that’s about it. If you’re looking at short-term, like a year, sure, you can lose weight–but the effort will almost always result in your body going “oh shit, we’re living in a famine” and you will regain it, and now, with your body at a new set-point, losing it will be harder. Regaining will be easier. Welcome to the life-destroying yo-yo.
#then what the fuck are we supposed to do?
Exercise and eat lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains because those things will keep you healthier longer, regardless of how much you weigh, and pick up your pick-axe in the ongoing horribly slow and frustrating fight of chipping away at the idea that being fat is a bad thing that means you’re a bad person. I recommend the book Fat Talk for a good place to start.
Lotta people going “the authors say different things about their data than you do!” Yep. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Means the authors have an axe to grind and they’re ignoring the implications of their own data. Back when I worked as, you know, a coordinator for an Institutional Review Board for an R-1 institution, checking that was my job. So you need to be able to look at data and understand things like confidence intervals and effect sizes. It’s not enough to let researchers tell you what their data mean; they may have lots of reasons to come to conclusions their data don’t actually support.
This is, by the way, one of the most frustrating parts of experimental psychology, which was my background before medicine. People like to believe that they would change their mind based on evidence, but in practice, once you make someone pick a position, they’ll defend it long past the point at which it would make sense to switch. This is why it’s important to repeat and repeat and repeat things: I didn’t believe that exercise doesn’t cause weight loss the first, oh, probably half a dozen times I heard it. I had to get to a point where I was in medical school watching a professor talk about all the data on weight loss and slowly feel it dawn on me that he was saying one thing when he was explaining the data, and then saying THE EXACT OPPOSITE THING when he was drawing conclusions. It was so clear to me that what he had just said was “there is no widely scalable weight loss program that works” and then he said “but we should still be encouraging patients to exercise and eat less to lose weight” as if those weren’t DIRECTLY CONFLICTING.