If you were gaining weight regularly and start exercising to lose it, you'd have to do a ton of exercise to compensate.
But if you're on the verge of losing weight and start exercising, it would be possible to tip the scales, so to speak. So long as you don't start eating more because of it.
I'm 205 lbs, and the charts say I need to eat between 1500 and 1800 calories per day to lose weight. I can eat 2600 and maintain my weight.
So if I'm just barely maintaining my weight at 2600 calories and I want to lose weight, I'd need 800 calories worth of exercise.
Moderate-pace walking burns 300 calories per hour for me. I'd need almost 3 hours of deliberate walking at a good pace to lose that extra weight, every single day. And I couldn't reward myself with a treat afterwards.
I got the exercise numbers from MyFitnessPal. The food calories I got from a site I found the other day, but I don't remember which.
People act as if Arnold got his body by once accidentally picking up a barbell, then eat a bunch of food that immediately gets converted into fat and wonder why running on a treadmill to destroy their muscle & eating sugar to produce fat isn't giving them the results they want.
And that is more complicated than 'eat less, move more'.
Because maintaining anything for a lifetime is really easy (building a business, keeping a marriage together, keeping the weight off...)
> Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily foiled by relatively small quantities of excess food.
> Our calculations show that the lungs are the primary excretory organ for fat. Losing weight requires unlocking the carbon stored in fat cells, thus reinforcing that often heard refrain of “eat less, move more.”
"Eat less, move more." If anyone isn't aware of that by now, I don't know what to say.