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Show references Hensrud DD, et al. Ready, set, go. In: The Mayo Clinic Diet. Mayo Clinic; Duyff RL. Reach and maintain your healthy weight. In: Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Complete Food and Nutrition Guide. Losing weight: Getting started.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed Nov. Do you know some of the health risks of being overweight? National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Department of Health and Human Services and U. Department of Agriculture.

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Admissions Requirements. Degree Programs. Research Faculty. International Patients. Financial Services. Community Health Needs Assessment. First, scientists have shown that energy expenditure — or calories burned every day — includes not only movement but all the energy needed to run the thousands of functions that keep us alive.

Researchers have long known this, but few had considered its significance in the context of the global obesity epidemic. Calorie burn also seems to be a trait humans have evolved over time that has little to do with lifestyle.

Maybe, Pontzer thought, the Hadza were using the same amount of energy as Westerners because their bodies were conserving energy on other tasks.

Or maybe the Hadza were resting more when they weren't hunting and gathering to make up for all their physical labor, which would also lower their overall energy expenditure. This science is still evolving. But it has profound implications for how we think about how deeply hardwired energy expenditure is and the extent to which we can hack it with more exercise.

If the "calories out" variable can't be controlled very well, what might account for the difference in the Hadza's weights? This fundamental concept is part of a growing body of evidence that helps explain a phenomenon researchers have been documenting for years: that it's extremely difficult for people to lose weight once they've gained it by simply exercising more.

Before we dive into why exercise isn't that helpful for slimming, let's make one thing clear: No matter how working out impacts your waistline, it does your body and mind good.

A Cochrane Review of the best available research found that while exercise led to only modest weight loss, study participants who exercised more even without changing their diets saw a range of health benefits, including reducing their blood pressure and triglycerides in their blood.

Exercise reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes , stroke, and heart attack. A number of other studies have also shown that people who exercise are at a lower risk of developing cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's and dementia. They also score higher on cognitive ability tests — among many, many other benefits.

If you've lost weight, exercise can also help weight maintenance when it's used along with watching calorie intake. In an October study published in the journal Obesity , researchers examined what happened to 14 of the contestants on the Biggest Loser weight loss reality show, six years after they attempted to slim down for TV.

They again found there was no relationship between physical activity and weight loss during the active weight loss of the show. But they also found there was a strong relationship between exercise and keeping weight off. The study participants who managed to maintain their weight loss after six years got 80 minutes of moderate exercise per day or 35 minutes of daily vigorous exercise.

The benefits of exercise are real. And stories about people who have lost a tremendous amount of weight by hitting the treadmill abound. But the bulk of the evidence tells a less impressive story. Consider this review of exercise intervention studies, published in It found that after 20 weeks, weight loss was less than expected, and that "the amount of exercise energy expenditure had no correlation with weight loss in these longer studies.

To explore the effects of more exercise on weight, researchers have followed everybody from people training for marathons to sedentary young twins to post-menopausal overweight and obese women who ramp up their physical activity through running, cycling, or personal training sessions.

Most people in these studies typically only lost a few pounds at best, even under highly controlled scenarios where their diets were kept constant. Other meta-analyses, which looked at a bunch of exercise studies, have come to similarly lackluster conclusions about exercise for losing weight.

This Cochrane Review of all the best available evidence on exercise for weight loss found that physical activity alone led to only modest reductions. Ditto for another review published in University of Alabama obesity researcher David Allison sums up the research this way: Adding physical activity has a very modest effect on weight loss — "a lesser effect than you'd mathematically predict," he said.

We've long thought of weight loss in simple "calories in, calories out" terms. In a much-cited study, researcher Max Wishnofsky outlined a rule that many organizations — from the Mayo Clinic to Livestrong — still use to predict weight loss: A pound of human fat represents about 3, calories; therefore, cutting calories per day, through diet or physical activity, results in about a pound of weight loss per week.

Similarly, adding calories a day results in a weight gain of about the same. Today, researchers view this rule as overly simplistic. They now think of human energy balance as "a dynamic and adaptable system," as one study describes.

When you alter one component — cutting the number of calories you eat in a day to lose weight, doing more exercise than usual — this sets off a cascade of changes in the body that affect how many calories you use up and, in turn, your bodyweight.

One very underappreciated fact about exercise is that even when you work out, those extra calories burned only account for a tiny part of your total energy expenditure. There are three main components to energy expenditure, Kravitz explained: 1 basal metabolic rate, or the energy used for basic functioning when the body is at rest; 2 the energy used to break down food; and 3 the energy used in physical activity.

We have very little control over our basal metabolic rate, but it's our biggest energy hog. Digesting food accounts for about 10 percent.

That leaves only 10 to 30 percent for physical activity, of which exercise is only a subset. You can read more about this concept here and here. Using the National Institutes of Health Body Weight Planner — which gives a more realistic estimation for weight loss than the old 3,calorie rule —the NIH's Kevin Hall created this model to show why adding a regular exercise program is unlikely to lead to significant weight loss.

If a hypothetical pound man added 60 minutes of medium-intensity running four days per week while keeping his calorie intake the same, and he did this for 30 days, he'd lose five pounds. More on these "compensatory mechanisms" later. So if one is overweight or obese, and presumably trying to lose dozens of pounds, it would take an incredible amount of time, will, and effort to make a real impact through exercise.

That's why Hall thinks researchers find again and again that exercise can help maintain weight loss, but it doesn't help people lose weight. Exercise can even undermine weight loss in subtle ways.

How much we move is connected to how much we eat. As Hall put it, "I don't think anybody believes calories in and calories out are independent of each other. One study shows that people seemed to increase their food intake after exercise — either because they thought they burned off a lot of calories or because they were hungrier.

Another review of studies from found people generally overestimated how much energy exercise burned and ate more when they worked out.

A single slice of pizza, for example, could undo the calories burned in an hour's workout. So could a cafe mocha or an ice cream cone.

There's also evidence to suggest that some people simply slow down after a workout, using less energy on their non-gym activities. They might decide to lie down for a rest, fidget less because they're tired, or take the elevator instead of the stairs.

These changes are usually called "compensatory behaviors," and they simply refer to adjustments we may unconsciously make after working out to offset the calories burned. The most intriguing theories about why exercise isn't great for weight loss describe changes in how our bodies regulate energy after exercise.

Researchers have discovered a phenomenon called "metabolic compensation. In other words, our bodies may actively fight our efforts to lose weight. For one fascinating study, published in the journal Obesity Research in , researchers subjected seven pairs of young, sedentary identical twins to a day period of intense exercise.

For two hours a day, nearly every day, they'd hit a stationary bike. The twins were also housed as inpatients in a research lab under hour supervision and fed by watchful nutritionists who measured their every calorie to make sure their energy intake remained constant. Despite going from being mostly sedentary to spending a couple of hours exercising almost every day, the participants only lost about 11 pounds on average, ranging from as little as 2 pounds to just over 17 pounds, almost all due to fat loss.

The participants also burned 22 percent fewer calories through exercise than the researchers calculated prior to the study starting.

By way of explanation, the researchers wrote that either subjects' basal metabolic rates slowed down or subjects were expending less energy outside of their two-hour daily exercise block.

In a more recent study, published in Obesity in May , Kevin Hall's group again looked at 14 of the Biggest Loser reality show participants.

They took a number of measurements — bodyweight, fat, metabolism, hormones — at the end of the week competition in , and again six years later, in Though all the contestants lost dozens of pounds through extreme diets and hours of exercise at the end of the show, by the six-year mark their waistlines had largely rebounded.

But the most remarkable finding was that the participants' metabolisms had vastly slowed down through the study period. They were essentially burning about fewer calories about a meal's worth each day than would be expected given their weight.

This metabolic effect persisted, despite the fact that most participants were slowly regaining the weight they lost. Dugas calls this phenomenon "part of a survival mechanism": The body could be conserving energy to try to hang on to stored fat for future energy needs.

Again, researchers don't yet know why this happens or how long the effects persist in people. We don't know how much compensation occurs, under which circumstances, and for whom.

Another hypothesis about why it's hard to lose weight through exercise alone is that energy expenditure plateaus at a certain point. In another Pontzer paper, published in in the journal Current Biology , he and his colleagues found evidence of an upper limit.

They cast a wide geographic net, recruiting adults from Ghana, South Africa, Seychelles, Jamaica, and the United States. Tracking the study participants for eight days, they gathered data on physical activity and energy burned using accelerometers.

They classified people into three types: the sedentary folks, the moderately active who exercised two or three times per week , and the super active who exercised about every day. Importantly, these were people who were already doing a certain amount of activity, not people who were randomized to working out at various levels.

Here, physical activity accounted for only 7 to 9 percent of the variation in calories burned among the groups. Moderately active people burned more energy than people who were sedentary about calories more each day , but above that, the energy used up seemed to hit a wall.

In other words, after a certain amount of exercise, you don't keep burning calories at the same rate: Total energy expenditure may eventually plateau. In the traditional "additive" or "linear" model of total energy expenditure, how many calories one burns is a simple linear function of physical activity.

Period, full stop. Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise, where the body burns more calories with more physical activity in a linear relationship also known as the "additive" model of energy expenditure.

Food Active weight loss and Food Systems Lsos. Instead, it involves a lifestyle with healthy eating patterns, regular los activity, and losx management. People with gradual, steady weigt loss Motivational training adaptations 1 Active weight loss weihht pounds per week Atcive more likely to keep the weight off than people who lose weight quickly. Sleep, age, genetics, diseases, medications, and environments may also contribute to weight management. If you are concerned about your weight or have questions about your medications, talk with your health care provider. Whether you have a family history of heart disease, want to see your kids get married, or want to feel better in your clothes, write down why you want to lose weight.

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