I have written in past blogs about the futility of exercise as a weight reduction method. This is an update from 5 years ago!

The Washington Post and other sources corroborate what I have been telling my patients for years: exercise is no good for weight loss. The WP article mentions several medical studies which show that weight loss is essentially independent of exercise and that one does not lead to the other. Even all that stuff about getting a higher metabolic rate because of exercise ends up being false: Tanzanian bushmen running around all day in hunts have no higher metabolic rates than, say, couch potatoes in Cleveland!

Here is the link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/15/take-off-that-fitbit-exercise-alone-wont-make-you-lose-weight/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

I tell my patients that exercise is good for lowering blood pressure, decreasing cholesterol and decreasing chances of diabetes -that is all its been proven to do – nothing else.

Exercise has also recently been proven to be beneficial for your brain because it releases endorphins which make you feel good.

It may, in my opinion, lubricate the machinery of the body and that can’t be bad. Even then, as the article points out, those that exercise daily and hard, don’t live any longer than moderate exercisers… which means you need to get your heart rate up above  100 beats per minute for 20 minutes a few times a week (3-5 times) — that is all!

You can do that with micro-bursts of exercise. A recent study showed that even 1 minute of intense exercise a few times a day gives you as much benefit as an hour long routine.

Also, remember this about why exercise is no good for weight loss: one hour of hard spinning (cycling) makes you loose 360 calories.  One gin and tonic has 240 calories!

To lose weight all you need to do is…eat less!!!  Now isn’t that a novel thought!

Morad Tavallali, M.D., FACS