I Workout Everyday And Can'T Lose Weight

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Welcome to Show Me the Evidence, where we go beyond the frenzy of daily headlines to take a deeper look at the state of science around the most pressing health questions of the day.

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I'm going to make you work hard, a blonde and perfectly muscled fitness instructor screamed at me in a recent spinning class, so you can have that second drink at happy hour!

At the end of the 45-minute workout, my body was dripping with sweat. I felt like I'd worked really, really hard. And according to my bike, I had burned more than 700 calories. Surely I had earned an extra margarita.

The spinning instructor was echoing a message we've been getting for years: As long as you get on that bike or treadmill, you can keep indulging — and still lose weight. It's been reinforced by fitness gurus, celebrities, food and beverage companies like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, and even public health officials, doctors, and the first lady of the United States. Countless gym memberships, fitness tracking devices, sports drinks, and workout videos have been sold on this promise.

I Exercise All The Time. Why Am I Not Losing Weight?

To find out why, I read through more than 60 studies on exercise and weight loss. I also spoke to nine leading exercise, nutrition, and obesity researchers. Here's what I learned.

When anthropologist Herman Pontzer set off from Hunter College in New York to Tanzania to study one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes on the planet, he expected to find a group of calorie-burning machines.

Unlike Westerners, who increasingly spend their waking hours glued to chairs, the Hadza are on the move most of the time. Men typically go off and hunt — chasing and killing animals, climbing trees in search of wild honey. Women forage for plants, dig up tubers, and comb bushes for berries. They're on the high end of physical activity for any population that's been looked at ever, Pontzer said.

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By studying the Hadza lifestyle, Pontzer thought he would find evidence to back the conventional wisdom about why obesity has become such a big problem worldwide. Many have argued that one of the reasons we've collectively put on so much weight over the past 50 years is that we're much less active than our ancestors.

Surely, Pontzer thought, the Hadza would be burning lots more calories on average than today's typical Westerner; surely they'd show how sluggish our bodies have become.

On several trips in 2009 and 2010, he and his colleagues headed into the middle of the savanna, packing up a Land Rover with camping supplies, computers, solar panels, liquid nitrogen to freeze urine samples, and respirometry units to measure respiration.

At Home Workouts For Weight Loss

In the dry, open terrain, they found study subjects among several Hadza families. For 11 days, they tracked the movements and energy burn of 13 men and 17 women ages 18 to 75, using a technique called doubly labeled water — the best known way to measure the carbon dioxide we expel as we burn energy.

We were really surprised when the energy expenditure among the Hadza was no higher than it is for people in the US and Europe, says Pontzer, who published the findings in 2012 in the journal PLOS One. While the hunter-gatherers were physically active and lean, they actually burned the same amount of calories every day as the average American or European, even after the researchers controlled for body size.

But it raised a tantalizing question: How could the hunting, foraging Hadza possibly burn the same amount of energy as indolent Westerners?

Weightlifting Exercises For Weight Loss, Per Experts

First, scientists have shown that energy expenditure — or calories burned every day — includes not only movement but all the energy needed to run the thousands of functions that keep us alive. (Researchers have long known this, but few had considered its significance in the context of the global obesity epidemic.)

Calorie burn also seems to be a trait humans have evolved over time that has little to do with lifestyle. Maybe, Pontzer thought, the Hadza were using the same amount of energy as Westerners because their bodies were conserving energy on other tasks.

Or maybe the Hadza were resting more when they weren't hunting and gathering to make up for all their physical labor, which would also lower their overall energy expenditure.

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This science is still evolving. But it has profound implications for how we think about how deeply hardwired energy expenditure is and the extent to which we can hack it with more exercise.

The Hadza are burning the same energy, but they're not as obese [as Westerners], Pontzer said. They don't overeat, so they don't become obese.

This fundamental concept is part of a growing body of evidence that helps explain a phenomenon researchers have been documenting for years: that it's extremely difficult for people to lose weight once they've gained it by simply exercising more.

I Work Out Every Day

Before we dive into why exercise isn't that helpful for slimming, let's make one thing clear: No matter how working out impacts your waistline, it does your body and mind good.

A Cochrane Review of the best available research found that while exercise led to only modest weight loss, study participants who exercised more (even without changing their diets) saw a range of health benefits, including reducing their blood pressure and triglycerides in their blood. Exercise reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes, stroke, and heart attack.

A number of other studies have also shown that people who exercise are at a lower risk of developing cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's and dementia. They also score higher on cognitive ability tests — among many, many other benefits.

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If you've lost weight, exercise can also help weight maintenance when it's used along with watching calorie intake. In an October 2017 study published in the journal Obesity, researchers examined what happened to 14 of the contestants on the Biggest Loser weight loss reality show, six years after they attempted to slim down for TV. They again found there was no relationship between physical activity and weight loss during the active weight loss of the show.

So the people who lost the most weight on the show weren't necessarily the people who did the most exercise — instead, it was the people who ate the least, said study author and National Institutes of Health mathematician and obesity researcher Kevin Hall. But they also found there was a strong relationship between exercise and keeping weight off. (The study participants who managed to maintain their weight loss after six years got 80 minutes of moderate exercise per day or 35 minutes of daily vigorous exercise.)

Consistent with previous reports, large and persistent increases in [physical activity] may be required for long-term maintenance of lost weight, the researchers concluded.

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The benefits of exercise are real. And stories about people who have lost a tremendous amount of weight by hitting the treadmill abound. But the bulk of the evidence tells a less impressive story.

Consider this review of exercise intervention studies, published in 2001: It found that after 20 weeks, weight loss was less than expected, and that the amount of exercise energy expenditure had no correlation with weight loss in these longer studies.

To explore the effects of more exercise on weight, researchers have followed everybody from people training for marathons to sedentary young twins to post-menopausal overweight and obese women who ramp up their physical activity through running, cycling, or personal training sessions. Most people in these studies typically only lost a few pounds at best, even under highly controlled scenarios where their diets were kept constant.

Reasons Why You Are Not Losing Weight Even In A Calorie Deficit

Other meta-analyses, which looked at a bunch of exercise studies, have come to similarly lackluster conclusions about exercise for losing weight. This Cochrane Review of all the best available evidence on exercise for weight loss found that physical activity alone led to only modest reductions. Ditto for another review published in 1999.

University of Alabama obesity researcher David Allison sums up the research this way: Adding physical activity has a very modest effect on weight loss — a lesser effect than you'd mathematically predict, he said.

We've long thought of weight loss in simple calories in, calories out terms. In a much-cited 1958 study, researcher Max Wishnofsky outlined a rule that many organizations — from the Mayo Clinic to Livestrong — still use to predict weight loss: A pound of human fat represents about 3, 500 calories; therefore, cutting 500 calories per day, through diet or physical activity, results in about a pound of weight loss per week. Similarly, adding 500 calories a day results in a weight gain of about the same.

Physical Activity For A Healthy Weight

Today, researchers view this rule as overly simplistic. They now think of human energy balance as a dynamic and adaptable system, as one