Is It True That Exercise Won't Make You Thin?

Today is Wednesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill or if I'm up to it, it's 45-minutes RPM cycling. On Thursday, it's a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-mile - my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week. If I'm in the mood, I'll join the "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. On Friday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on food in a fortnight.

I have exercised like this — obsessively at times and a bit grimly — for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the dramatic end of a pointless relationship — a period when I self-medicated with lots of oily mamak food and the company of girlfriends — I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those mamak food, my weight has returned to the same 128 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have baby fat here and there eventhough it has been more than 30 years since I was last called a baby. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out?


It's a question many of us could ask. I read somewhere that more than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. They spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a study revealed that a third of Americans are obese and in Malaysia, the rate has more than doubled in the last 6 years! Yes, it's entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don't. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight? Or has the role of exercise in weight loss been wildly overstated?

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 me to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits I've just painstakingly accrued. I'm about to reach a conclusion where exercise doesn't necessarily help us to lose weight. It may even be making it harder!

But still, I won't stop exercising since doing something about it is still better than sitting around complaining to your girfriends over a chocolate chip mocha frappucino with whipped cream and two servings of American cheesecake.