Reading 115 – ArnettName _____________________________Point o.docx

Reading 115 – Arnett Name
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Point of View - Venuto
Directions: Read the sheet below (there’s a back side). After,
read the article “Why Time Magazine Owes the Fitness Industry
a Big Fat Apology” on your own. When you finish, answer the
questions. Stay focused here and work towards responding to
the questions with concrete details. If you do not understand a
question, check with another group or your instructor.
1) What is the topic of the article?
2) What is your opinion of the article’s topic (for this to work,
you have to be totally honest)?
3) What is the author’s opinion on the topic? What are the
author’s credentials on the subject? (Tom Venuto is a lifetime
natural body builder and fitness writer. He runs the Burn the Fat
Blog.) The information in parentheses is his brief bio. You still
need to determine his credentials on the topic.
4) What does the author have to gain by writing this article?

5) Does the author use Fact or Opinion (or both) as support? If
both, which is more effective and why?
6) Are the facts selected slanted to reflect the author’s bias?
Explain your response.
7) What is the author’s purpose for writing the piece?
8) What is the author’s tone? List some words or phrases from
the article that you think suggest the author’s tone.

9) React to the author’s point of view. Do you think it was
objective and that he was “right?” Or do you think he was
biased and “wrong.” After reacting, explain why you reacted
this way.
“Summary Points” from College Reading pp. 415
➤ Does a textbook reflect the author’s point of view?
Authors have opinions, theories, and prejudices that influence
their presentation of material. When facts are slanted, though
not necessarily distorted, the material is biased in favor of the
author’s beliefs.
➤ What is the author’s point of view?
A bias is a prejudice, a preference, or an inclination. The bias,
in a sense, creates the point of view—the particular angle from
which the author views the material.
➤ What is the reader’s point of view?
The reader’s point of view is the prejudice or bias the reader
has concerning the subject. Readers should not let their
viewpoint impede their understanding of the author’s opinions
and ideas.
➤ What is the difference between a fact and an opinion?
A fact is a statement that can be proved true; an opinion is a
statement of feeling or a judgment. Both facts and opinions are
used persuasively to support positions.
➤ What is the author’s purpose?
The author’s purpose may be to inform, to persuade, to
entertain, or to achieve some other goal. An author always has a
purpose in mind, and to be a well informed consumer, a
sophisticated reader should recognize that purpose.
➤ What is the author’s tone?

The tone of an author’s writing is similar to the tone of a
speaker’s voice. The reader’s job is to look for clues to
determine the author’s attitude about the subject.
RD 115 – Arnett Name
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Point of View
Background: “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” is an
article not unlike something you would encounter on your own,
outside of this classroom. Imagine, for example, you had just
sat down in the waiting room of the doctor’s office and you
chose to read this article. You would most likely find yourself
engaged in one way or another because health and body
concerns are a part of modern life.
Directions: Read the assignment sheet below (there’s a back
side). After, on your own read and annotate the article “Why
Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.” Next, look for answers to the
questions below. Use your group partners as a resource. You
will turn in your work at the end of class. Please refer to
Bridging the Gap CH 8, pages 422-423 and 431.
1) What is the topic of the article?
2) What is your opinion of the topic (for this to work, you have
to be totally honest, and your opinion may differ from those
around you)?
3) What is the author’s opinion on the topic (i.e. what is the
main idea of the essay)? What are the author’s credentials on
the subject? ( at the time of publication, John Cloud was a staff

writer for Time magazine, where he had worked since 1997.
Before going to Time, he was a senior writer at Washington
City Paper.) The information in parentheses is his brief bio.
You still need to determine his credentials on the topic.
4) What does the author have to gain by writing this article?
5) Does the author use Fact or Opinion (or both) as support? If
both, which is more effective and why?
6) Are the facts selected slanted to reflect the author’s bias?
Explain your response.

7) What is the author’s purpose for writing the piece?
8) What is the author’s tone? List some words or phrases from
the article that you think suggest the author’s tone.
9) React to the author’s point of view. Do you think it was
objective and that he was “right?” Or do you think he was
biased and “wrong.” After reacting, explain why you reacted
this way.
Sunday, Aug. 09, 2009
Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

By John Cloud
As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll
spend five minutes warming up on the
VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move
your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30
minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will
work me like a farm animal for an hour,
sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I
pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week.
Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another
exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from
which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour.
Friday will bring a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-
mile my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences
during the week.
I have exercised like this — obsessively, a bit grimly — for
years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I
doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an
unhappy relationship — a period when I self-
medicated with lots of Italian desserts — I have never been
overweight. One of the most widely accepted,
commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you
exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the
time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those

desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163
lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that
hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the
exercise wiping it out? (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008:
From A to Z.")
It's a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million
Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23
million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym
memberships. Of course, some people join and
never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart
Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise
regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of
respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to
2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.
And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same
period: a third of Americans are obese, and another
third count as overweight by the Federal Government's
definition. Yes, it's entirely possible that those of us who
regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised
less. But like many other people, I get hungry
after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than
on the days I don't. Could exercise actually be
keeping me from losing weight? (Watch TIME's video "How to
Lose Hundreds of Pounds.")

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding
pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the
1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise,
particularly for older adults who could injure
themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients
to exercise, which is sound advice for many
reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly
lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the
heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and
many other illnesses. But the past few years of
obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss
has been wildly overstated. (Read "Losing Weight:
Can Exercise Trump Genes?")
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"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says
Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at

Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher.
Many recent studies have found that exercise
isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so
regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like
The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like
this one.
The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns
calories and that you must burn calories to lose
weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger.
That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate
the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other
words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It
may even be making it harder.
The Compensation Problem
Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE — PLoS
is the nonprofit Public Library of Science —
published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of
Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the
rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church's
team randomly assigned into four groups 464
overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in
three of the groups were asked to work out with a
personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week,
respectively, for six months. Women in the

fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their
usual physical-activity routines. All the women
were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out
monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.
See the most common hospital mishaps.
See how to prevent illness at any age.
The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the
groups, even the control group, lost weight, but
the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer
several days a week for six months — did not lose
significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The
control-group women may have lost weight
because they were filling out those regular health forms, which
may have prompted them to consume fewer
doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups
actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.
What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you
and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation
of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip
to the gym. Whether because exercise made them
hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both),
most of the women who exercised ate more than
they did before they started the experiment. Or they

compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less
than usual after they got home. (Read "Run For Your Lives.")
The findings are important because the government and various
medical organizations routinely prescribe more
and more exercise for those who want to lose weight. In 2007
the American College of Sports Medicine and the
American Heart Association issued new guidelines stating that
"to lose weight ... 60 to 90 minutes of physical
activity may be necessary." That's 60 to 90 minutes on most
days of the week, a level that not only is unrealistic
for those of us trying to keep or find a job but also could easily
produce, on the basis of Church's data, ravenous
compensatory eating.
It's true that after six months of working out, most of the
exercisers in Church's study were able to trim their
waistlines slightly — by about an inch. Even so, they lost no
more overall body fat than the control group did.
Why not?
Church, who is 41 and has lived in Baton Rouge for nearly three
years, has a theory. "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." (Read "Too Fat? Read
Your E-mail.")
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You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn't
matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly.
After all, doesn't exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn't muscle
process excess calories more efficiently than fat
does?
Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often
misunderstood. According to calculations published in the
journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in

2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six
calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories
that a pound of fat burns. Which means that
after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to
muscle — a major achievement — you would be
able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount
in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain
weight. Good luck with that.
Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose
of many extra calories beyond what we need
to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to
cope with excess calories than we do because
they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown
fat helps produce a protein that switches off
little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells'
power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy.
When they're switched off, animals don't get an energy boost.
Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as
their temperature rises, calories burn effortlessly. (See TIME's
health and medicine covers.)
Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it's very difficult to
make them obese, even when you force-feed them
in labs. But humans — we're pathetic. We have so little brown
fat that researchers didn't even report its

existence in adults until earlier this year. That's one reason
humans can gain weight with just an extra half-
muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we
don't need in our regular ("white") fat cells.
All this helps explain why our herculean exercise over the past
30 years — all the personal trainers,
StairMasters and VersaClimbers; all the Pilates classes and
yoga retreats and fat camps — hasn't made us
thinner. After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like
those in muffins or in "sports" drinks like
Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130
calories. If you're hot and thirsty after a 20-minute
run in summer heat, it's easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds,
in which case the caloric expenditure and the
caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss
perspective, you would have been better off sitting on
the sofa knitting.
See pictures of what makes you eat more food.
Watch a video about fitness gadgets.
Self-Control Is like a Muscle
Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower
— that we can learn both to exercise and to
avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did

not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the
journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by
psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which
they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each
day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog
for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately
enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll
be more likely to opt for pizza.
Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic
psychology, but most of us won't be very successful. "The
most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy
expenditure," says Steven Gortmaker, who
heads Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and
Physical Activity. "If you're more physically
active, you're going to get hungry and eat more." Gortmaker,
who has studied childhood obesity, is even
suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. "Why
would they build those?" he asks. "I know it
sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if
a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories,
he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even
1,000." (Read "Why Kids' Exercise Matters Less
Than We Think.")

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Last year the International Journal of Obesity published a paper
by Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville of
Children's Hospital Boston noting that "there is a widespread
assumption that increasing activity will result in a
net reduction in any energy gap" — energy gap being the term
scientists use for the difference between the
number of calories you use and the number you consume. But
Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18-
month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise,
they end up eating more — not just a little more,
but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.
If evolution didn't program us to lose weight through exercise,
what did it program us to do? Doesn't exercise
do anything?

Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and
helping prevent disease, exercise improves your
mental health and cognitive ability. A study published in June
in the journal Neurology found that older people
who exercise at least once a week are 30% more likely to
maintain cognitive function than those who exercise
less. Another study, released by the University of Alberta a few
weeks ago, found that people with chronic back
pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability
than those who exercise only two or three days a
week.
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?
Look at kids. In May a team of researchers at Peninsula Medical
School in the U.K. traveled to Amsterdam to

present some surprising findings to the European Congress on
Obesity. The Peninsula scientists had studied 206
kids, ages 7 to 11, at three schools in and around Plymouth, a
city of 250,000 on the southern coast of England.
Kids at the first school, an expensive private academy, got an
average of 9.2 hours per week of scheduled,
usually rigorous physical education. Kids at the two other
schools — one in a village near Plymouth and the
other an urban school — got just 2.4 hours and 1.7 hours of PE
per week, respectively.
To understand just how much physical activity the kids were
getting, the Peninsula team had them wear
ActiGraphs, light but sophisticated devices that measure not
only the amount of physical movement the body
engages in but also its intensity. During four one-week periods
over consecutive school terms, the kids wore the
ActiGraphs nearly every waking moment.
And no matter how much PE they got during school hours, when
you look at the whole day, the kids from the
three schools moved the same amount, at about the same
intensity. The kids at the fancy private school
underwent significantly more physical activity before 3 p.m.,
but overall they didn't move more. "Once they get

home, if they are very active in school, they are probably
staying still a bit more because they've already
expended so much energy," says Alissa Frémeaux, a
biostatistician who helped conduct the study. "The others
are more likely to grab a bike and run around after school."
Another British study, this one from the University of Exeter,
found that kids who regularly move in short
bursts — running to catch a ball, racing up and down stairs to
collect toys — are just as healthy as kids who
participate in sports that require vigorous, sustained exercise.
See nine kid foods to avoid.
Read "Our Super-Sized Kids."
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Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing
to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes.
Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the
brain's self-control "muscle" as well, many of us
will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that
lazy time after we get back from the gym. This
explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least
why even my wretched four hours of exercise a

week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more
sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I
would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury. If I
exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of
hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for
food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a
satisfyingly greasy burrito.
Closing the Energy Gap
The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way
we've come to define it. Many obesity
researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical
activity — the kind humans did for tens of
thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may
actually work better for us than the occasional
bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all
day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise
without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf
Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington
Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20
years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not
want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements
don't have to be extreme. It would be better to
distribute the movements throughout the day."

For his part, Berthoud rises at 5 a.m. to walk around his
neighborhood several times. He also takes the stairs
when possible. "Even if people can get out of their offices, out
from in front of their computers, they go
someplace like the mall and then take the elevator," he says.
"This is the real problem, not that we don't go to
the gym enough." (Read "Is There a Laziness Gene?")
I was skeptical when Berthoud said this. Don't you need to raise
your heart rate and sweat in order to strengthen
your cardiovascular system? Don't you need to push your
muscles to the max in order to build them?
Actually, it's not clear that vigorous exercise like running
carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous
activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly
hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories,
but if you read the academic papers on which these stories are
based, you frequently see that the research
subjects who were studied didn't clobber themselves on the
elliptical machine. A routine example: in June the
Association for Psychological Science issued a news release
saying that "physical exercise ... may indeed
preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning."
But in fact, those who had better cognitive
function merely walked more and climbed more stairs. They

didn't even walk faster; walking speed wasn't
correlated with cognitive ability.
There's also growing evidence that when it comes to preventing
certain diseases, losing weight may be more
important than improving cardiovascular health. In June,
Northwestern University researchers released the
results of the longest observational study ever to investigate the
relationship between aerobic fitness and the
development of diabetes. The results? Being aerobically fit was
far less important than having a normal body
mass index in preventing the disease. And as we have seen,
exercise often does little to help heavy people reach
a normal weight. (Read "Physical Fitness — How Not to Get
Sick.")
So why does the belief persist that exercise leads to weight loss,
given all the scientific evidence to the
contrary? Interestingly, until the 1970s, few obesity researchers
promoted exercise as critical for weight
reduction. As recently as 1992, when a stout Bill Clinton
became famous for his jogging and McDonald's
habits, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published an
article that began, "Recently, the interest in the
potential of adding exercise to the treatment of obesity has
increased." The article went on to note that

incorporating exercise training into obesity treatment had led to
"inconsistent" results. "The increased energy
expenditure obtained by training may be compensated by a
decrease in non-training physical activities," the
authors wrote.
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Then how did the exercise-to-lose-weight mantra become so
ingrained? Public-health officials have been
reluctant to downplay exercise because those who are more
physically active are, overall, healthier. Plus, it's
hard even for experts to renounce the notion that exercise is
essential for weight loss. For years, psychologist
Kelly Brownell ran a lab at Yale that treated obese patients with
the standard, drilled-into-your-head
combination of more exercise and less food. "What we found
was that the treatment of obesity was very
frustrating," he says. Only about 5% of participants could keep
the weight off, and although those 5% were
more likely to exercise than those who got fat again, Brownell
says if he were running the program today, "I

would probably reorient toward food and away from exercise."
In 2005, Brownell co-founded Yale's Rudd
Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which focuses on food
marketing and public policy — not on encouraging
more exercise.
Some research has found that the obese already "exercise" more
than most of the rest of us. In May, Dr. Arn
Eliasson of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center reported the
results of a small study that found that
overweight people actually expend significantly more calories
every day than people of normal weight — 3,064
vs. 2,080. He isn't the first researcher to reach this conclusion.
As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007
book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the
Controversial Science of Diet and Health, "The obese
tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable
height, sex, and bone structure, which means their
metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than
less."
In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off,
that matters more in losing weight. You should
exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of
vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I
love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the

VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar
that is my usual postexercise reward.
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
See a special report on the science of appetite.
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Why Time Magazine Owes the Fitness Industry a
Big Fat Apology
Tom Venuto
At first I was tempted to title this article, ―why John Cloud and
the editors of Time magazine are idiots.‖ But
then I thought that might be a bit harsh and decided to simply
call for an apology and a correction for all the
errors they made in last week’s article, Why exercise won’t
make you thin.
I wasn’t even going to write this at first, because I figured that
sending it to my 300,000+ subscribers would

only draw more attention to the TIME story, and they’ve gotten
enough free publicity from the blogosphere
already.
But after receiving countless e-mails from my Burn The Fat
subscribers, all imploring me to write a rebuttal,
and then after receiving the email from the American College of
Sports Medicine (ACSM) yesterday, I
reconsidered. The ACSM said:
“Last Friday, an article appeared in Time Magazine making
statements that we believe run counter to fact and
the public interest. The article claimed that exercise, contrary to
the research with which we are all familiar, is
not an effective health tool, particularly as it pertains to weight
loss…”
They continued, (addressing the fitness professionals on their
mailing list):
“Your assistance is needed in getting the right health message
out to the public. Also we encourage you to
adapt our letter to the editor and submit it to your local news
outlets, helping readers and viewers get the best
evidence-based facts and information. “
Assistance has arrived. Here is the right health message that the
ACSM was calling for. I believe you’ll find my

information below more accurately reflects the facts than
TIME’s one-sided story. Feel free to forward this
information to your friends and colleagues. Link to this, Digg
this, re-tweet this and share this on facebook. I
also encourage you to send your letters to the editors of TIME.
The truth about exercise, appetite and weight loss
John Cloud, a writer for Time magazine, says that he gets
hungry after exercise, so he often eats more on the
days he works out than on the days he doesn’t. Therefore, he
proposes that exercise won’t make you thin and
might actually prevent you from losing weight.
You don’t say? You mean that you don’t lose weight if you put
the calories you just burned right back in by
stuffing your face with muffins and doughnuts! Who’d have
thunk?
http://www.burnthefat.com/
http://www.burnthefatblog.com/
It’s tough not to pick on a ―fitness journalist‖ who thinks that
exercise turns fat into muscle. But sarcasm aside
for a moment, exercise can increase hunger in some cases.
Hunger is a normal regulatory response of the body
to maintain energy balance and weight homeostasis anytime
you’re in a calorie deficit and losing body mass,

whether that is achieved through exercise or dietary restriction.
That doesn’t mean exercise is ineffective for
weight loss, it means you need DIETARY RESTRAINT to lose
weight! Dietary restraint means that if you want
to lose weight, sometimes you have to feel hungry and NOT
EAT! (even while stressed, emotional, tempted,
etc.) This takes work, and part of that work is to practice the
self-discipline to not eat every time you feel the
urge and to pursue the self-education to understand the realities
of the energy balance equation.
You’ll have to provide the self-discipline, but let me see if I can
help with the education part (pay attention,
Time magazine!)
Not exercising = not smart
The International Journal of Obesity recently published a
review of the effects of exercise on appetite
regulation. Dr. Martins of the Obesity research group in Norway
explained that in our obesogenic environment
today, NOT exercising is likely to lead to weight gain:
“It has been systematically shown that the adoption of a
sedentary lifestyle inevitably produces a state of
positive energy balance, as the physiological system is unable,
at least in the short to medium term, to

compensate by decreasing energy intake.”
Translation: if you sit on your butt, and you live in a Western
society in this technologically-advanced,
convenience-based world, surrounded by eating cues and
temptation, it is hard NOT to gain weight, especially
for people with a genetic predisposition to obesity.
Exercise does NOT always increase appetite
Dr. Martins’ review, based on 110 related studies, also
explained that exercise does not necessarily stimulate
energy intake:
“There have been a multitude of studies published in the last
two decades exploring the association between
exercise and food intake. The majority of them have shown that
acute exercise does not increase hunger or
energy intake.”
In the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, Dr. Neil King of
The Human Appetite Research Unit at Leeds
University Psychology department agreed with Martins’
findings:
“Despite the commonly held belief that the energy demand
created by exercise automatically generates a drive
to eat, the evidence for this is weak.”

That’s right, some studies do show that exercise increases
appetite, but the majority say it doesn’t. Cloud has
committed the journalistic sin known as ―cherry picking,‖
where he selectively reported the few studies that
supported his viewpoint, while conveniently ―forgetting‖ to
mention the many that didn’t.
Exercise may even DECREASE appetite
To further throw a wrench in Cloud’s argument, some studies
even suggest that exercise DECREASES appetite.
Cloud’s article in TIME says, ―Be warned: fiery spurts of
vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain.‖ That’s
not what the research says. Studies confirm that high intensity
exercise in particular, will reduce hunger. In The
Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, Dr. King wrote:
“In contrast to the idea that a compensatory rise in hunger
should follow exercise, many studies have shown
that following a bout of intense exercise (> 60% of maximum 02
update), hunger is actually suppressed.”
A study from Laval University in Quebec (Yoshioka) concurred:
“Indeed it would seem that in the post-exercise period, high-
intensity exercise seems to inhibit energy intake to

a greater extent than a low-intensity exercise session of the
same caloric cost.”
You may have heard that high intensity interval training (HIIT)
is a very time-efficient form of exercise and that
it not only leads to increased levels of fitness, but is also
effective for fat loss. Now you can add to the list of
benefits for HIIT — it helps support fat loss by suppressing
energy intake after the workout. Does this mean
you should abandon low or moderate intensity cardio?
Absolutely not. Although low intensity exercise burns
fewer calories per unit of time than high intensity cardio, there
is plenty of research which proves that steady
state exercise such as walking or cycling is also effective for
weight control. A study from the School of
Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at the University of Surrey
in the UK found that after 60 minutes of
cycling, hormones released from the gut were responsible for a
suppression of appetite after exercise:
“Acute exercise, of moderate intensity, temporarily decreased
hunger sensations and was able to produce a
short-term negative energy balance.”
Exercise is the key to long term weight maintenance
When it comes to long term weight maintenance, the importance
of exercise is even more critical. Virtually all

the weight loss experts and research studies agree: a high level
of physical activity is the number one key to
maintaining your ideal weight after weight loss. One of the best
examples of this comes from the National
Weight Control Registry (NWCR). The NWCR has been
tracking the habits of successful maintainers for years.
They published a new report in 2008 revealing that people who
are successful at maintaining their weight loss
are an extremely physically active group.
Exercise may increase appetite over time, but not enough to
cancel out the weight loss benefits
Even if exercise did increase appetite 100% of the time, that
STILL wouldn’t mean exercise is ineffective.
When there is an increase in hunger and energy intake after
exercise, the increase is not significant enough to
cancel out the benefits. In a review paper published in the
journal Sports Medicine, Alan Titchenal of
Department of Nutrition and Food Intake Laboratory at UC
Davis wrote:
“When energy intake increases in response to exercise it is
usually below total energy expenditure, resulting in
negative energy balance and loss of bodyweight and fat. Thus,
if energy intake is expressed relative to energy

expenditure, appetite is usually reduced by exercise.”
In a study titled, ―Cross talk between physical activity and
appetite control‖ JE Blundell confirmed it:
“There exists a belief that physical activity drives up hunger
and increases food intake, thereby rendering it
futile as a method of weight control. There is however, no
evidence for such an immediate or automatic
effect…”
“The immediate effect of taking up exercise is weight loss.
Subsequently, food intake begins to increase in order
to provide compensation for about 30% of the energy expended
in activity. The compensation is partial and
incomplete.”
Blundell’s comments underscore the fact that you have to go on
quite an unrestrained eating binge in order to
completely undo the effects of an effective exercise program. I
still can’t help but laugh at Time magazine’s
article, which was mostly journalistic sensationalism passed off
as science, when you consider how utterly
obvious and intuitive all these research findings are. Binge after
working out and you don’t lose weight? No
kidding? Listen, it’s not my intention to be purely sarcastic or

suggest that some people aren’t experiencing
exactly what the article described: some people are doing a lot
of exercise and still not losing weight. I don’t
dispute that. The problem is in their explanation about why
they’re not losing weight. It’s NOT because
exercise doesn’t help with weight loss. It’s because some people
over-compensate for the calories burned
through exercise by eating more. However, that is an argument
for proper nutrition, not an argument against
exercise.
Why doesn’t all the research agree?
Why do some studies say that exercise isn’t effective for weight
loss? Part of the answer is due to experimental
designs. Some studies did not include a control group and many
estimated energy intake by self report, which is
notoriously inaccurate, as most people underestimate how much
they eat (Lichtman 1992). And why do a few
studies say that exercise increases appetite and excess food
intake? That too depends on study designs as well as
individual differences: Lean or obese? Male or female? Under
what conditions? Fed or fasted exercise? Dieted
down or just starting the diet? Under stress or without stress?
With or without social support? The

macronutrient composition of the diet and timing of the meals
can also influence the outcome. When discussing
weight loss, exercise and appetite, not just in the mainstream
media, but even in the scientific literature as well,
it’s also a common mistake to generalize and the type of
exercise is often not specified. High, medium or low
intensity? Aerobic exercise or strength training? (the latter can
increase lean body mass, offsetting weight loss).
And what kind, specifically? Certain types of exercise, such as
swimming in cold water, are well known to
increase appetite, while others like HIIT, can suppress appetite.
And why research scientists in this day and age
think exercise only means aerobics is beyond my
comprehension. What about weight training? The relationship
between exercise and appetite is complex. Every one of these
factors can influence whether exercise affects
energy intake and subsequently, the amount of weight loss.
Individual variability uncovered: Compensators vs non
compensators and restrained vs unrestrained
eaters
Studies show that a fixed amount of exercise will not lead to the
same amount of weight loss in all individuals.
On the surface, this leads one to think that indeed exercise
doesn’t work or there are differences in individual

response to exercise and biological ability to lose fat (genetics,
etc.). The truth is, most of the variability in
results can be accounted for by the type of exercise and study
designs as I mentioned above, by behavioral
factors and lack of compliance. That’s right, most people just
don’t stay on their diets consistently - they may
exercise more, but also eat more, and move less the rest of the
day, which cancels out the calorie deficit.
Researchers call these individuals ―compensators.‖ There are
people who appear to compensate ―automatically‖
for genetic or biological reasons, but there are also non-
compensators who adjust their nutrition and training
according to their results. You are never influenced only by
genes, but also by behavior and environment. How
well you comply with your diet and exercise programs and what
kind of results you get are ultimately up to you
and your level of dietary restraint. Some people choose to eat
inappropriately after exercise because they think
they deserve a reward or they over-estimate how many calories
they burned during their workout. That has
nothing to do with exercise not helping with weight loss. That is
called a dietary blunder! It is entirely possible
for an un-educated or unrestrained eater to out-eat even the best
workout program and highest levels of physical

activity.
The bottom line:
The effectiveness of exercise for weight loss was never really in
question. The real issue is compliance to a
calorie deficit. Exercise IS effective for weight loss –
significantly so – especially when you combine weight
http://www.burnthefatinnercircle.com/members/341.cfm
training and cardio training with an effective nutrition plan, as I
have recommended for years in my Burn the
Fat, Feed the Muscle program.
The health benefits of exercise are indisputable. Not to mention
that training makes you look good naked. No
amount of dieting will ever make you stronger, fitter and more
muscular. Only training can do that. Dieting
without exercising turns you into a skinny fat person. You may
look thin in clothes, but when you take off the
shirt, you will still look soft and flabby.
But no matter how much you exercise, you can’t lose weight if
you eat yourself into a calorie surplus. Just
because you start an exercise program doesn’t mean you have
free license to abandon all restraint and freely

indulge in eating anything you want. So whaddya say, TIME
magazine? Do you acknowledge your errors? Will
you write a retraction? Thousands of fitness professionals and
hundreds of thousands of fitness enthusiasts are
eagerly awaiting your answer.
- Tom Venuto, author of:
Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle
Founder & CEO,
Burn The Fat Inner Circle
References
Blundell JE, cross talk between physical activity and appetite
control: does physical activity stimulate appetite?
Proc Nutr Soc, 62, 651-661. 2003 Catenacci VA, Phelan S,
Wing RR, Hill JO. Physical activity patterns in the
national weight control registry. Obesity research. 16: 153-161,
2008 Donahoo WT, Variability in energy
expenditure and its components. Curr Op Clin Nutr Metab. 7:
599-605. 2004. Hubert P, et al, Uncoupling the
effects of energy expenditure and energy intake: appetite
response to short-term energy deficit induced by meal
omission and physical activity. Appetite. 1998 Aug;31(1):9-19.
King NA, et al, Individual variability following

12 weeks of supervised exercise: Identification and
characterization of compensation for exercise-induced
weight loss. Int J Obes, 32, 177-184, 2008. King NA, effects of
exercise on appetite control: Implications for
energy balance. Med Sci Sport Exer, 29(8): 1076-1089. 1997
King, NA, The relationship between physical
activity and food intake. 57: 77-84. 1998. Lichtman, S.,
Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric
intake and exercise in obese subjects. NEJM. 327: 1893-1898.
1992 Lluch A, Exercise enhances palatability of
food, but does not increase food consumption, in lean restrained
females. Int J Obes, 21: supp a129. Melzer K.,
effects of physical activity on food intake. Clin Nutr, 24: 885-
895. 2005 Slentz CA. Effects of the amount of
exercise on body weight, body composition, and measures of
central obesity. Arch Intern Med. 164: 31-39.
2004 Titchenal A., Exercise and Food Intake: what is the
relationship? Sports Med, 6: 135-145. 1988 White, L.,
Increased caloric intake soon after exercise in cold water. Int J
Sport Nutr Exer Metab, 15: 38-47, 2005.
University of Gainesville, FL USA. Yoshioka M, Impact of
high-intensity exercise on energy expenditure, lipid
oxidation and body fatness. Int J Obes. 25, 332-339. 2001.

http://www.burnthefat.com/
http://www.burnthefat.com/innercircle

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