Time.com Reports: Why Exercise WON'T Make You Thin....

You sir are an idiot. First of all saying that no one under 40 knows anything about it when there are obviously thousands of people who view and post on this board whose whole lives revolve around training\teaching others to be healthy and fit through diet and exercise. And many of them have advanced degrees and years of experience in the field that I am guessing you do not have. Secondly your one case of losing weight by ceasing to gorge your self while exercising regularly does not constitute the total wealth of human knowledge. And ironically it partially backs up the argument you were trying to refute. Saying that the equation 50/50 is wrong makes no sense. If you only had 50% of the parts in your car how well would it run? The point is you need both a healthy diet and a good amount of healthy exercise to maintain a healthy body. Starvation diets might work in the short term for weight lose but if that is your only goal not trying to have a body that is healthy and fit in the long term. You obviously run on a regular basis (if you were/are doing 50 mile weeks in your 40's) so you should know better than to say that exercise is not important.

What passes for "exercise" in this country is really a joke. Going to the gym and "working out" on "cardio" machines gets you exactly nowhere. Machines introduce leverage and make it a lot easier to loaf which is what most people require. Where are the studies showing that any of these machines have any benefit? The people who attend gyms are there mostly for social reasons and are clueless about what exercise is about. They have been duped into believing that struggling with some machine for 20 mins. is exercise. Of course, if they actually break out in a sweat, there is the proof that true exercise has been done. LOL.

Sir Lance-alot wrote:

Earlier you wrote: "being an athlete is not healthy." Firstly, there are a million different types of "athletes", so please define, but in general, someone who is an "athlete" is healthier than someone who is not. I can quote 100 studies demonstrating this. So again, you are wrong there.

Furthermore, you wrote that 65% carbs is "crazy". Now that is probably not the ideal % for most people (would be more like 45-50%), but you have absolutely no proof to state that a "higher" carb diet such as 65% for someone who eats very nutritious meals (who is getting most of their carbs from whole grains, legumes and fruit), doesn't eat too many calories, and performs endurance exercise is "crazy." None, zero, zilch.

yes, in general athletes are healthier, but athletes are young people. being young and healthy is not hard. the most healthy old people are not athletes.

what is particularly not healthy about being an athlete is the mindset that everything is about performance. that is not a healthy attitude towards life in my opinion. health is not about performance.

there's tons of evidence that having a high glycemic load diet is not healthy. extra sugar in your blood causes glycation. glycation is considered one form of aging.

finnishguy wrote:

yes, in general athletes are healthier, but athletes are young people. being young and healthy is not hard. the most healthy old people are not athletes.

what is particularly not healthy about being an athlete is the mindset that everything is about performance. that is not a healthy attitude towards life in my opinion. health is not about performance.

there's tons of evidence that having a high glycemic load diet is not healthy. extra sugar in your blood causes glycation. glycation is considered one form of aging.

Why are you guys so stuck on this young vs old debate. Huge amounts of the population in America are over weight young people old people and everywhere in between. You old guys just ranting its harder to keep weight off when your old brings nothing to the table the article is about diet vs exercise. It is trying to say that exercise is not important in healthy weight loss. The point is that is stupid advice. Losing weight by starving your self will only make you fatter in the end. Exercise whether or not you are an athlete is healthy, there are countless study's to prove it. There is one ridiculous study that makes the assumption but does not prove that exercise is not helpful in weight loss because some fat people ate more crap food than usual after they got on an elliptical for 20 min a day.

As far as high glycemic load is concerned when you say carb loading you are not supposed to have sugary sports drinks or gu or what ever else. The idea is to eat low glycimic foods like whole grains, pastas and potatoes all of which give you the vital energy you need when doing a healthy exercise regime without spiking your blood pressure. The Attkins diet is a great way to make your self feel tired and bloated while you starve your body and then afterwords you gain twice as much. Think about it did America suddenly get skinny after the Attkins diet craze? No they got even fatter.

finnishguy wrote:

the most healthy old people are not athletes.

Not true:

there's tons of evidence that having a high glycemic load diet is not healthy. extra sugar in your blood causes glycation. glycation is considered one form of aging.

A "higher carb diet" does not have to be "high glycemic load diet". Most would agree that it should not be. The message should be that there are "bad carbs", especially for sedentary people, not that all "carbs are bad". It seems a symptom of the dumbing down of society that a bowl of oatmeal is thrown in the same category as a 64 oz Big Gulp of Coke.

THE KEY TO BEING HEALTHY AND FIT:

DIET AND EXCERCISE

IT WILL NEVER CHANGE.

Gym PE classes in schools used to be about sports and games and competition. Softball, Dodgeball, Volleyball, Soccer, Touch Football, Field Day...but I think Federal Government got involved and now it is about Health and Fitness.

It seems once the Federal Government gets involved in Health, Fitness, Sex Education....the kids seems go the opposite direction.

72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week

So the groups in this study exercised an average of 0 ("control group"), 10, 19, and 27 minutes per day. Not a single person averaged over 30 minutes of exercise per day. And like someone else noted, they don't explain what type of exercise it is. It does say that their exercise was with a personal trainer. Not many people pay a PT to tell them to go outside and run 30 minutes (or even a treadmill). Most likely they were doing a lot of weight lifting if they were woking with a PT! For not more than 30 minutes per day!

And all subjects logged the food they ate? After I got out of college I noticed I was eating out too much. In my running log right next to my mileage, I noted whether I ate fast food that day. It was eye opening at first because I had fast food in some form almost every day. It was a huge motivator to cut it out. So there is this control group that does not exercise but suddenly starts monitoring the food they eat and their weight loss is similar to that of the exercising group? Not surprising at all. Logging the food in and of itself is a good weight loss motivator.

This study would get a C- at a middle school science fair. You want to do this thing? Hire a spy to monitor and log food intake of the subjects. This may not be practical in many cases, but it's a lot more scientifically sound. That way the subjects will not know that their intake is being monitored as a part of the study. Then we will see if the control group's weight loss is comparable to the exercising groups and we will see if the conclusion of the study holds any water. I believe in the conclusion that the old fat women would reward themselves for the small amount of exercise they are doing, but I think if someone else was monitoring their diet, you would see more of a curve with the 30 minute per day group losing the most and the control group losing the least. But ideally, I'd make sure they aren't just lifting weight during every session and the groups would be more like 45 minute, 30 minute, and 15 minute per day weekly averages so that at least one of the groups is burning a good amount of calories.