Judy Foreman of the L.A. Times recently wrote an article concerning calorie intake and how it stands up to routine workouts. She said people constantly overestimate how many calories they burn during a workout and underestimate the amount of calories eaten each day. Foreman explains that she swims hard for an hour regularly for exercise — a workout that burns roughly 400 to 600 calories. However, she says she enjoys a blueberry muffin regularly, as well — a treat that gives her about 400 calories.
Further, Foreman asks the questions, “if it takes an awful lot of exercise to make a dent in the calories in-out equation, is exercise pointless?” She sites the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for America to show that exercise isn’t just a way to lose weight, but it’s essential for good health. “Regular physical exercise reduces the risk of early death, coronary heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, colon and breast cancer and depression,” Foreman writes.
Another necessity of exercise is the potential to keep weight off once it is dropped. Dr. Timothy Church, the director of preventative medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., says there are a lot of ways to lose weight, but the only way people lose weight and keep it off is if they are physically active.
The University of Pittsburgh found last year that it takes quite a bit of exercise to maintain 10 percent of weight loss, with a low-calorie diet. The study noted that the amount of exercise would be somewhere around 2,000 calories which translates to about four or more hours of exercise per week.
The Harvard School of Public Health, the Pennington Research Center and the National Institute of Health, published a study in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, that showed more than 800 overweight adults that could lose weight by reducing calorie intake, without focusing on the percentages of fat, protein and carbohydrates in their diets.
Clearly, eating more causes a gain in weight. However, Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of the Division of Nutrition, says exercise can help reduce the appetite. He says, exercise triggers chemical dopamine that governs the brain’s reward system and endorphins that help us feel good. “You don’t need cigarettes or drugs or food, all those things in the pleasure areas of the brain, because exercise has already activated them,” Blackburn told Foreman. “It takes about 20 minutes for food to get digested and formulated into hormones for your brain to know what you did, to get that signal to the brain.” By hurrying through a meal, you will over eat before your body registers the initial amount of food put into the body.
Foreman says it all boils down to her personal mantra: “You have to do both — diet to keep caloric intake under control and exercise for fitness (and fun).
