Picture from Time Magazine August, 2009.Time Magazine published an interesting article called "Why exercise won't make you thin." The cover of this issue showed a woman on a treadmill dreaming of a cupcake. The online version shows this picture - a woman doing a back bend over a donut. The author, John Cloud, suggests that going to the gym does not make people lose weight. (See my earlier post Out of the Gym and Into the Garden under March 2009.) One of the studies Cloud points to is the "Minnesota Heart Survey." Its statistics show that obesity continues to rise in this country despite the fact that the number of gym memberships also continues to climb.
The article proposes that going to the gym makes people eat more. After a workout most people consume more additional calories than they burned off. "Whether it's because exercise makes us hungry or because we want to reward ourselves, many people eat more — and eat more junk food, like doughnuts — after going to the gym" writes Cloud.
Cloud also gives a great example from a researcher named Church. ' "I see this anecdotally amongst, like, my wife's friends," he says. "They're like, 'Ah, I'm running an hour a day, and I'm not losing any weight.'" He asks them, "What are you doing after you run?" It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward. Says Church: "I don't think most people would appreciate that, wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you're going to neutralize with just half that muffin." '
Personally, I find the exact opposite psychological effect after working in the garden; I want a salad.
The article's author doesn't discourage exercise altogether. He does tout the disease prevention and mental health benefits of physical activity. "But there's some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded — But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?"
Read the Article at: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.html
