Some weight lifting sources (e.g. http://stronglifts.com/) say that cardio-exercise is almost useless for losing weight. They hold that building muscles with, say, weightlifting will work much better, because you will have a higher base metabolic rate.
There should be studies about this in the literature.
There are two things going on: exercise, and eating. You have to get control of both, however you do that. If exercise makes you eat more, you have more work to do on the eating. If you do eat more because of exercise, at least make sure the food is good for you.
Re:Permanent Weight Loss
by mattmaroon on Monday May 03, 2010 @08:11PM
(#1316541)
Humans aren't robots. I'll skip the philosophical discussion about whether or not will power exists (as you'd clearly need it to) but the fact is that if exercise makes you lose 200 calories worth of weight, but then makes you consume 250 calories, it's not helping you lose weight.
It's helping you in a number of other different ways perhaps, I was certainly not saying someone should not exercise. It's just not an effective weight loss technique.
Also when you add up the calories burned, even vigorous exercise just isn't that much. It's FAR easier to cut calories out of your diet than to exercise them away even if you assumed exercise did not make you hungrier or affect you in any other way adverse to weight loss.
Exercise doesn't just burn calories during the period of time in which you are performing the exercise though. '200 calories' after 30 minutes of running doesn't mean that the run burned 200 calories. It means you burned 200 calories in that 30 minutes - over time, the running also builds leg muscles and encourages other physiological changes in your body that boost your base metabolic rate, allowing you to burn more calories even while sleeping.
To build that muscle, you have to feed it, so consuming more to burn more isn't necessarily out in left field as far as nutritional science goes.
Others state that unless you're carefully balancing your calories vs. your workout level, you can push your metabolism into "starvation mode" - for example: lets say you require 2300 calories to maintain your weight, but you want to slim down so you decide to consume 2000 instead. If you throw exercise into the mix you're burning off an extra 300-500 calories (a net of 1500-1700 calories) which may put your body's metabolism into starvation mode. Because different people's bodies response to exercise differently, actually tracking your net caloric intake is challenging and not fully understood.
And of course there's the studies that show exercising alone with no diet plans seems to have a negligible impact on weight loss.
I hope I didn't misrepresent their arguments, but that's the gist of them.