Can you exercise enough to lose weight?

The answer to this question is NO. From the attached article here (Still No Giraffe) and a recent article in the Scientific American (June 2017), it is clear that our metabolic rate is relatively stable regardless of how much we exercise.  The attached article has a scientist who followed a ‘primative bushman’ from Africa as he burned calories after he shot a giraffe with a poison dart and followed the giraffe for a few days on almost a constant run 12+ hours/day.  He collected the bushman’s urine for the days he followed the giraffe.  The bushman was fed a special  type of water which was excreted in his urine indicating the calories he burned.  He found out that the number of calories burned by this bushman was only about 10% above the calories burned by someone who sat at his desk all day.  Our brains use the most calories we consume, following by our heart, our kidneys, out liver and our intestine. Our muscles are only responsible for about 10% of the calories we burn so if an average man burns 2680 calories per day and doubles his calorie burn from skeletal muscles (not really practical to do this), then he would bun only another 268 calories. That turned out to be a surprise for the researcher and the author who ran along side the bushman for a few days as he chased the giraffe. In the Scientific American this month (June 2017), another article focused on the number of calories burned by men or women and were shown to be relatively constant, regardless of the exercise program undertaken by either of them.

So you might ask, why exercise if you can’t lose weight? Why not just sit and watch TV all day and night?  The answer is that exercise makes you healthier, lets you live longer and develop less diseases such as cancer, heart disease,  stroke, diabetes and other diseases.  The conclusion of both articles is that if you want to reduce weight, you must reduce your caloric intake.  Sitting on a couch by the TV all day will just take all of what you eat (for example, eating just two small cookies per day can translate to a weight gain of one to three kilograms per year) all of which gets turned into fat. Of course, that is the problem in America today as 1/3rd of the population is obese (expected to be half of the US population by 2030) and about another 1/3rd may be overweight. Just like a car cruising at 50 miles per hour, if you overfeed it gasoline, it will overflow the tank (your body’s fat reserves here reflect that tank). There is no substitute for good eating and controlling your obsessive need to stuff foods into your mouth every-time you see a good ice cream cone or some extra BBQ ribs or a third hamburger with french fries until you feel stuffed. This type of obsessive eating increases your risk to dying with cancer, heart disease and stroke, especially if you don’t exercise. Add to that, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and almost every disease we humans develop by being alive, and overeating leads us to an early grave.