Promote Health & Wellness

Although most people understand the fact that exercise burns calories, many do not realize how exercise and diet affects our bodies. Many experts now believe that while exercise alone is not an efficient way to lose weight, it can; however, help you maintain a healthy weight once you have already shed the pounds.

“In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss,” says Eric Ravussin, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and an expert on weight loss. His research has shown that people who eat poorly and exercise tend to eat more to compensate for the calories lost during exercise. The result is a “wash” when it comes to calories burned vs. calories consumed each day; this leads to no weight loss or even weight gain in some cases.

Other research has shown that exercise, especially for men, can help to suppress appetite, and thus lead to weight loss. This isn’t necessarily true for women, and most experts believe that it’s because women’s bodies are biologically designed to store energy (including fat) for reproduction purposes.

A study conducted at Harvard University, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, focused on middle-aged women and how exercise affects their lives. The results proved that exercise can help to reduce or eliminate weight gain in the long term, although as mentioned before, exercise alone is not the best tool for losing weight. A healthy diet is the best way to lose weight.

Experts also point out that when looking at the National Weight Control Registry, which is the largest investigation of successful weight loss maintenance in the country, 90 percent of those in the registry who have lost weight and kept it off exercise regularly. Again, this proves that daily exercise can help to reduce the chances of gaining the weight back in the long term.

Scientists are still not entirely sure why exercise is so important to weight maintenance. Some think that it has to do with the fact that those who exercise have much higher metabolisms, and their bodies tend to burn calories immediately rather than storing them as fat. Others believe that exercise stimulates chemicals in the body that aid in appetite suppression and in turn helps us to eat less. And some experts agree with both of these theories.

Whatever it is that makes exercise such a great tool for maintaining (not losing) weight, it’s clear that more research needs to be done in order to figure out exactly what happens within our bodies when we burn calories through exercise. No matter what the reason; however, the fact is that exercise is definitely a good way to maintain a healthy weight over the long term.

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