| I reversed diabetes with diet alone by doing my own research[1], taking charge of my health. I lost 180lbs in the process. No exercise (disabled). Very much a work in progress. I'm not rejecting the importance of exercise for health - I follow the general principal of eating to get healthy, exercising to get fit - but I think we skip over the absolute tragedy that is the Standard American Diet at our peril. Recovering from the consuequences of three/four generations of preaching the lipid hypothesis[2], as fast as we damn well can, is the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death. [1] http://www.thefatemperor.com/blog/2015/9/5/fat-emperor-produ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_hypothesis |
I've found that when I tell people this, they worry about my health even more than they did when I was 80lbs heavier. It's bizarre.
Never mind the fact that my blood pressure is now a pristine 110 over 70, all my pre-diabetic symptoms have disappeared, my sleep apnea is cured, my gastroesophageal reflux disease is completely gone, my cholesterol and triglycerides are back to normal, etc.
The fact is exercise has an almost negligible impact on weight loss.
Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories. If you're overweight, compare that to the 120 calories you burn per hour spent sitting in your chair. That's an extra 230 calories you burned by exercising for an hour.
That 230 calorie expenditure costs you:
* 1.5 to 2 hours of disruption to your daily life
* An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable
* An ever-growing amount of generalized aches and joint pains as you put together consecutive days of doing this
And at 230 calories per hour, doing an hour of exercise every single day nets you 1610 calories per week, which is less than 1 pound of fat loss every 2 weeks. You turn your whole life upside-down, make yourself miserable and in pain every single day, take significant time away from work and studying and family, and all you get is LESS THAN 1 additional pound lost every 2 weeks.
I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals.
As far as health impacts, I'm still not convinced on the cause-and-effect here. I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed, that's a result of me being less depressed because of all the weight I've been losing. All the studies I've seen on exercise and health draw the same sort of "playing basketball makes you taller"-conclusion.