Recently I posted my reaction to the John Cloud’s Time Magazine story discussing reasons why exercise doesn’t lead to weight loss.
While I critiqued parts of Cloud’s article, I do believe his main point that “exercise won’t make you thin” is a VERY IMPORTANT message for Americans to hear. There are some who can be, and in fact are, successful using exercise to lose weight. But, as a public health professional, I’m more concerned with how to help “the masses” than I am about helping those who are the “exception to the rule”.
Cloud challenges how scientists and fitness professionals have promoted exercise to Americans for many, many years. The actual answers to the questions “did it work?” and “was it sustainable over time?” can be answered by most Americans themselves who have tried to use exercise as a vehicle for weight loss. The answers to these questions have implications for whether exercise should be promoted as a “good” way to lose weight as is typically done, or whether we need to promote other reasons for exercising that busy Americans will find more compelling and motivating.The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) responded to the piece, and criticized Cloud for not talking about the differences between the effects of exercise on weight maintenance and the effects of exercise on weight loss. Although I agree that maintaining one’s weight is a very important issue, weight loss and weight maintenance are two very different phenomena, as anyone who has lost and gained their weight back multiple times knows. Because of that, I think there is value in specifically critiquing the role of exercise as it relates to weight loss only.
The ACSM response quoted a leading researcher, for whom I have great respect, who said:
“The statement [by Cloud] ‘in general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless’ is not supported by the scientific evidence when there is adherence to a sufficient dose of physical activity in overweight and obese adults (The bolded words are my emphasis.) The underlying assumption in the ACSM critique is that when overweight people exercise sufficiently, evidence suggests that they will lose weight. However, long-term studies, and most importantly,
