“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser – or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.
The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.
Interesting article, but it doesn’t mean that I can eat the way I have been doing AND skip the gym, unfortunately 
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It is pretty depressing just how few calories exercise burns anyway… you have to be in the gym a long time to make any meaningful dent on those calories!
Yup, I see people at gym with bigger bellies than mine and have to wonder …
I’m still surprised by how many people still believe the myth!
I use exercise with my clients in either a corrective or performance application. Exercise can induce muscle wasting and thus weight loss, but fat loss is most effectively accomplished with diet.
That being said, I design programs that are highly individualized and think that taking a general approach with exercise and nutrition will deliver a mediocre result.
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