Calories Don’t Count. Not in Exerciseland.

Today’s New York Times:

Putting Very Little Weight in Calorie Counting Methods.

Gina Kolata goes on to describe how the so-called science of assessing your caloric expenditure (or more precisely, how the hamster wheels at your local New York Sports Club calculate calories burned) is far from scientific.

From my days as an undergrad in the Exercise Science department at Rutgers and Temple, I knew this to be true (”That 12 minute test burned 157 calories? Fat chance.”). Now, with years of experience, application, and practice behind me, I not only know that trying to estimate your expenditure by looking at the little window of the Precor machine is nonsense, trying to exercise to lose fat (independently of changing diet) is worse than useless.

In the time I’ve been a personal trainer, I’ve personally had reported to me:

• at least 10 cases of Morton’s neuroma
• 3 Spinning accidents (where people fell off of their bikes for whatever reason)
• 8 ankle sprains from running
• at least 100 reported “tweaked my knee doing (insert cardiovascular/Aerobics activity here).”
• 50 hurt lower backs from sporting activities over the weekend

and so on and so forth (it’s time to stop when I can’t remember exact figures and start guesstimating).

The point is that all of these reported injuries occurred as a direct result of the person performing too much cardio (Example: Morton’s neuroma often occurs when a person does excessive exercise on an elliptical machine. If you push through the balls of your feet when striding, over time the fat pad overlying the connective tissue of the foot squishes outwards, like what happens when you squeeze a slightly deflated balloon. The now exposed soft structures of the foot take the full brunt of each step, irritating the nerve. The resulting pain and inflammation can be bad enough as to require surgery to alleviate.) The reason they were doing all this exercise? 9 times out of 10: “I need to lose weight.”

If you need to lose weight, eat in a manner that provides for a proper hormonal environment for fat-burning, and strength train to increase muscle mass and prevent muscle loss. Stop doing all that cardio; it’s hurting you and isn’t doing you much good anyway.

Articles like this one are useful in helping to dispel this nonsense that losing fat is a simple matter of hopping onto an exercise bike and cranking away. It’s far simpler (and yet, seemingly more difficult) than using the gym to undo the damage done in the dining room.

Some selections from the article:

1. “There also is a seldom mentioned complication in calculating calories burned during exercise: you should subtract off the number of calories you would be using if you did nothing. Almost no one does that, Dr. Bouchard said.”

In other words, how many more calories will you have burned running for 30 minutes above and beyond someone settling in and enjoying an episode of Ninjawarrior? The answer: Not that many. Will this dissuade some folks from exercising altogether? Probably – and if it saves them from overuse injury, then all the better.

Bottom line: Exercise (in the form of strength training) is important to fat loss as it prevents utilization of proteins for energy (conversion to glucose). But generalized exercise (in the form of running, ballroom dancing, archery, kickboxing, etc.) doesn’t really bring that much to the table in terms of burning extra calories. The saving grace? Exercise of all kinds improves insulin sensitivity (which is good for your health, as well as your waistline). And which form of exercise imparts the greatest improvement in insulin sensitivity? Strength training.

2. “My husband and I will never forget a mathematician at a meeting we attended when we were graduate students. He proudly announced that he could eat a piece of pie because he had just run a quarter-mile on the track.”

This is exactly the kind of idiocy that needs to stop. First, while it helps to think of it in these terms for ease of understanding concepts, the body isn’t a simple ATM machine based on a calories in/calories out model – hormonal factors muddy up the waters a great deal. Secondly, if you’re looking to lose fat, it takes far less time to not eat the pie than to run the quarter-mile (and it saves a great deal of wear and tear on the joints as well). Lastly, exercising to lose weight just doesn’t work. It doesn’t. Many have tried (you probably know some of them), and most have failed. Even Dr. Stephen Blair, whose life’s work is studying the benefits of exercise, can’t seem to make it work. In those lucky individuals who have been successful by controlling weight “through exercise”, two things are usually true:

a. They are insulin sensitive, and so the exercise serves to amplify that effect, and

b. They have changed their diets as well.

Mostly b.

3. “But for most people, calories burned should not matter, Dr. Clifford said.”

Agreed, 100%. Do the activity because you enjoy it, not because you think you have to (because you don’t). Attend to fat loss mainly through dietary means, since that’s the path with greatest success anyway.