Top Editors ... Will Exercising make you Fat?

Title: Will Exercising make you Fat?
Date: 18/09/2009
Autor: AFIC

Recently the American publication Time Magazine carried a cover story entitled “Why exercise won’t make you slim”.
This story has subsequently been carried around the world in various forms and created quite a sensation but what are the facts behind this headline?
The story is full of interesting anecdotes and does cite two studies where it was shown that subjects who exercised tended to eat more additional calories than they had burned with their exercise, thus causing them to gain weight. Clearly the science supports the assertion that if you eat more calories than you burn with exercise or your daily activities, you will gain weight. However, two important factors were underemphasized in this article with the result that the overall impact can be considered misleading.
First, while it is true that eating more calories than you use will result in weight gain, it is also true that using more calories than you eat will result in weight loss. So the important lesson should be not to abandon exercise as useless or even counterproductive but rather that you should be conscious of balancing the calories that you eat so that you will not exceed the calories that you need. One simple tool to do this can be found on the AFIC website at http://www.afic.org/Burner.htm. This simple tool will allow you to calculate how many calories you use, or burn, in a day and will help you understand how many calories you can eat without gaining weight.
The Indian Express, in looking at the Time Magazine article quoted an expert in sports medicine in the U.S. as follows

(http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?title=Exercise%20does%20not%20lead%20to%20overeating&artid=04QW465yJkI=&type= )

"There is strong evidence from the majority of the scientific literature that physical activity is an important component for initial weight loss," said John Jakicic, fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).
Responding to a statement recently published online and in print, Jakicic said: "The statement 'in general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless' is not supported by scientific evidence when there is adherence to a sufficient dose of physical activity in overweight and obese adults."
Second, exercise and physical fitness are key contributors to longer lifespans and increased mental ability even if a person is overweight. Rather than arguing against exercise for overweight people, the public could have been better served by increased understanding of the benefits of exercise and fitness regardless of weight.
So the short answer to the headline question is that while exercising probably won’t make you fat, paying too much attention to the Time Magazine story might.