If you are intensifying your running regimen in hopes of losing weight, you might be running around in circles: There is a limit to how many calories we can burn through exercise, a new study suggests.
But, Church pointed out, there appeared to be relatively few study participants who got much more exercise than that.
"There is tons of evidence that exercise is important for keeping our bodies and minds healthy, and this work does nothing to change that message", says Professor Herman Pontzer from City University of NY who led the study. Rather, he argues, each individual should arrive at their own personal "sweet spot".
Amy Luke, a public health researcher at Loyola University in Chicago and a co-author of the study, first noticed in the 2000s the cracks in the accepted understanding that more activity means more calories burned.
They found that the amount of spent energy does increase with physical activity levels, but only in the low ranges of exercise o verall.
To put it simply, Pontzer and his team found that higher weight loss with higher activity levels only happens when subjects who are not always active adopt a more active lifestyle with high-intensity activities.
Why? Evolution. "All animals, not just humans, would be expected to have evolved mechanisms to keep energy expenditures in check, so our daily energy expenditures don't outstrip the available food resources", Pontzer explains.
But the better tool for weight loss, he said, is a well-balanced diet. As participants expend energy, carbon dioxide and water are produced; the difference between the elimination rates are then used to calculate total energy expenditure, giving the researchers a precise measure of calories expended per day. "We tend to think that if [patients] eat less than 800 calories, the body's metabolism shuts down to a level that weight loss slows down quite a bit", Lofton said.
For the new study, Pontzer and his colleagues measur ed daily energy expenditure and activity levels in more than 300 men and women over the course of a week.
Long story, short summary: it seems doing significantly more physical exercise burns no more calories than moderate exercise--over the long haul.
Two researchers who were not involved in the study agreed that exercise alone isn't enough.
"We know that exercise is important for our hearts, our mental health and immune system health", he said.
"I see patients training for a marathon and they ask me, 'Why am I not losing weight?' " even though they are exercising more and eating the same number of calories, Lofton said. But "over time, as you do higher levels of activity, you don't increase your energy expenditure [or calories burned] in a linear way", she said. People living similarly to traditional hunter-gatherers in African countries, for example, burn roughly the same number of calories as desk jockeys hunched over keyboards for 12 hours a day. Just one of them separated won't be of much help. They say their lifestyle is much more arduous than those of most people in the USA and United Kingdom, but at the end of the day, their energy expenditure is nearly exactly the same.
Pontzer agrees the study is not an excuse to skip your workout.
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