Want to lose weight? Stop exercising!

By Ranjan Yumnam *

Here's a paradox of the modern lifestyle. Even as we are becoming more health conscious and hitting gyms and joining aerobics session more than ever before, we are also getting heavier. Are our chromosomes getting haywire and mutating, turning us into overweight X-Men and Y-women—and hideous ones at that?

I know this because I have joined health clubs and trained on weights in gyms in my own struggle to lose weight, with less than glorifying results. And what I have found out is this: our antics in the gym don't necessarily make us thin; those may even make us wider at the girth. I am so convinced of this as to confidently tell you that if you were a film producer looking around to cast some rotund characters in your film, I would suggest you go scouting at a gym. Believe me, you would find maximum number of obese men and women under the same roof. Sounds heretic? Let me explain.

Don't get me wrong. I know physical exercise is good on many counts and doctors routinely advise patients to go out and shake their butts. It keeps us healthy, prevents diabetes, disciplines blood pressure, invigorates the condition of heart and boosts our overall sense of well-being.

Not only that, it's therapeutic; regular exercise makes us feel a lot smarter than the sedentary slobs and nothing can be better than a brisk walk in the morning, inhaling fresh air and planning ahead for the little battles of the day. The health benefits accrued to us by physical exercise are undisputed and I would be the last one in this planet to contest it.

Despite these proven health benefits of exercise, when it comes to using exercise as a means of losing weight, it goes kaput, at least for most people. We always assume that exercise is the best way to knock off the excess pounds from our system. This premise has been universally ingrained and has gone unchallenged for decades. This line of thinking may soon change. New studies have corroborated that exercise may even abet and contribute to the rising trend of obesity in the population.

There are three main reasons, research found out, why exercise is pretty useless as a strategy to lose weight. One, whether you realise this or not, most of us end up eating more after working out to reward ourselves in the belief that we have burned off enough calories. Here's a usual scenario: After a session in the gym, we would feel totally tired and in the resulting hunger pangs we would have less compunction eating junk food laden with all sort of evil fat.

Second, our willpower is a zero-sum game. It weakens after a prolonged period of physical stress that is endured during exercise, and with the will-power expended thus, we can't resist the temptation of food, no matter what our New Year's resolutions say—of refraining from meat and fast food. Third, we tend to move a lot less and become more sedentary after exercise because of exercise-induced fatigue and other self-serving psychological reasons.

At the end, it is simple arithmetic that can explain the phenomena of weight loss. One loses weight when the calorie expended is more than the calorie consumed, which is called 'energy gap' in the scientific parlance. True, exercise is a fat slayer, and in an ideal world where we may have the will to absolutely control what we stuff into our mouth, it could be the best way to shed those kilos from our tummy.

Unfortunately, what usually transpires in a gym is that most people would run for 20 minutes on the treadmill, lose 100 calories and then gorge on a masala dosa that packs in it 250 toxic calories, not knowing that one delectable dosa will undo all the hard work they would have done in the gym!

Worst, our body is not programmed to burn calories but to conserve excess energy as fat, a characteristic which has been evolutionarily inherited to us from our ancestors who were never certain about their next meal.

That exercise seldom makes us lighter and slimmer is now scientifically proven. In a defining experiment at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr Timothy Church, hundreds of overweight women were made to undergo different regimes of exercise. They were divided into three groups, each of which were made to work out for 72 minutes in a week, 136 minutes, and 194 minutes respectively. A fourth group—the control group—kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise. The result was surprising and paradigm-changing in the history of weight loss research. It turned out that exercise didn't have any significant effect on the weight of the women across all the groups. Some women who exercised even gained weight. (Proof that this article aint a lazy man's manifesto).

If lifting weights and jogging is not the answer to our quest for a perfect weight loss programme, then what in the world is? As with all solutions to complex problems of life, the mantra for this weighty problem is also simple. Diet control, eating less calories then we spend, is the most effective way to be thinner.

Yes, we can include some form of exercise in the diet-based weight loss regime to accelerate our body's metabolism, but that's easier said than done. As mentioned earlier, in actual real life situations, we are like pigs after an exercise session with the appetite of, well, pigs—and this tendency throws a spanner into our most carefully designed diet plan. You can tweet this: Exercise sabotages the inner George Clooney in us and wakens the Sumo champion in us, flab by flab.

To get a perspective, I have put together a rudimentary chart showing the duration and kind of exercise it takes to burn off some of the common favourite food that we partake after sweating it out in a gym.

One fried egg (90 calories): 20 minutes of weightlifting.
One slice of pizza (198 cal): 45 minutes of swimming
One coca cola (105 cal): Dancing for one hour
144 grams of Kurkure (785 cal): Playing basketball for one hour
One serving of ice cream (300 cal): 1 hour and 10 minutes of body pump
1 pint of beer (182 cal): Scrubbing the floor for 58 minutes
One samosa (150 cal): 20 minutes of skipping
300 grams of white rice (420 cal): 50 minutes of aqua aerobics
2-3 pieces of aloo bora (175 calories): Aerobics (4 steps) for 30 minutes

Let me wrap up by stating the message that I am trying to convey: If you are really intent on getting rid of weight, tailor a diet plan for yourself, not necessarily the mass market commercial one, but something doable with no fancy goal like trying to reduce 10 kgs in a week. Start small, don't do anything radical. Don't starve. Cut down the portion size of your meals gradually. Embrace vegetables. Adopt the philosophy: Eat to live, not live to eat. And of course, stop exercising.

But not everything is lost for all the exercise lovers. Manoeuver those dumb bells and count your push-ups for all you want, but eat as if you are not doing any exercise and that you are relying only on a restricted diet to achieve your weight loss goal. I bet this would be a herculean task and you will soon discover it's not easy cheating your own mind. Why? Read this article again. That may just knock off 90 calories per hour!

As for me, my reading exercise is done for today. Phew!



(Views expressed are personal and do not represent official position)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was posted on March 09, 2011.