It has been thought for years that the best way to lose weight is to exercise rather than diet. The whole health club and personal trainer industries are based on this fact.

New research now suggests that this may not be so. The research highlights hat exercise won't make you thin or lose weight.

The reason? The idea that exercisers will simply eat more to compensate for the exercise they have completed. So on the days you exercise, as exercise stimulates hunger, you'll simply eat more food and calories on those days to compensate for the calories burnt during a workout.

One diet and exercise researcher of the Diabetes and Metabolism at the Louisiana State University, Eric Ravussin, suggests that weight loss via exercise is "pretty useless".

The weight loss / exercise study

A large group of women, over 400 participants, were split into 4 groups, a control group that didn't change their physical levels and three other groups that either exercised for 72 minutes, 136 minutes and 194 minutes with a personal trainer per week. Each group, including the control group, kept a journal to note all the food they ate during the six month study.

The findings: In general all the women, even in the control group, lost weight. The suggestion here is that because the women had to reveal their eating habits during the study they were less likely to eat extra junk or comfort foods like biscuits, cake, sweets or any other 'empty calorie' foods.

However, the exercising groups didn't lose significantly more weight than the control group. In fact, some women in each exercising group, actually gained weight. Again any weight gain suggests exercisers compensating through eating more calories after calories have been burnt during exercise.

Compensation

The reason why many exercisers don't lose weight regardless of the amount of exercise they do is that they simply feel like they can eat more because of the good work they do in the gym.

But if you think that even a few extra biscuits or an extra slice of cake can pack a few hundred calories, if a gym session burns 300 calories but the slice of cake includes 350 calories, it isn't hard to see how eating a little extra as a reward for exercise can actually ADD weight rather than burn excess weight from your waist line.

Other reasons to exercise

Of course exercise has great benefits including lowering the risk of chronic heart disease (CHD), lowering the risk of developing diabetes, as well as increasing overall fitness and physical performance.

Weight control vs exercise

Research is now emerging that weight control might actually be more important than exercise when it comes to preventing heart disease and cardiovascular health.

Exercise, on its own, has also been shown to do very little do help obese people lose weight, and as such very few researchers on obesity suggest their patients should exercise as the calories burnt during exercise isn't enough to compensate for the calories saved by obese people resting after their short bout of exercise.

Exercise might actually mean less calories burnt during the day!

Surely this statement can't be correct. Well it just might be. People who exercise, it has been shown, might actually reduce the amount of other physical activity they do after a gym session. This means that they'll get home and put their feet up to rest after exercise rather than go for a walk or do physical chores that would actually burn more calories in general then they do, or would ever do during their more formal gym exercise session.

This means that because of exercise a gym-goer may actually burn less calories then they would on a non-gym or exercise day.

What is the answer?

The research suggests that exercise should be built into atypical day and that exercise shouldn't be a substitute for normal physical daily activities including walking, talking the stairs or doing phsyical chores.

It also suggests that exercising for weight loss doesn't work unless it is part of a calorie controlled plan to lose weight. Drop 500 calories from your diet and burn 500 extra calories a day through exercise means a calorie deficit of a 1000 calories, which will ultimately lead to weight loss. But simply buring 500 calories at the gym only to eat an extra 500 calories to compensate will not.