I was saying

Just last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine published joint guidelines for physical activity and health. They suggested that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to 'promote and maintain health'. What they didn't say, though, was that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight. The best they could say about the relationship between fat and exercise was this: 'It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis is not particularly compelling.' In other words, despite half a century of efforts to prove otherwise, scientists still can't say exercise will help keep the pounds off.

I knew Taubes was going to pivot in this direction, but I didn't see this article until this morning when I was prompted to look after Corrie mentioned up a friend of the family who works out two hours a day and is still very overweight. Very.

There was a time when virtually no one believed exercise would help a person lose weight. Until the Sixties, clinicians who treated obese and overweight patients dismissed the notion as naive. When Russell Wilder, an obesity and difabetes specialist at the Mayo Clinic, lectured on obesity in 1932, he said his fat patients tended to lose more weight with bed rest, 'while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss'.

Personally, I would say that the more I work out, the more I weigh. It MAY not be true, but it's certainly more true than the opposite. There is no way working out has led to weight loss for me.   Oh, it has a couple of times, but the vast majority of the time the opposite has held, to my dismay, if I don't work out, I get skinny.    Not sure why, but I have my ideas.

Does this seem unfathomable to you? I confess that at times it seems too pat.  How could it not after a lifetime of indoctrination?    But unlike the conventional wisdom, what he says actually fits with the world I see everyday.   Yeah,  people SAY "I work out so I can eat whatever I want" but even if they added some residual post work-out energy expenditures to the equation, there just isn't  a way to work out enough to explain away an extra  burrito and a beer every day. I could tell you I drink and eat like I do but stay skinny because I work out,  and most people would say "that makes sense", but it doesn't. It's  patently ridiculous. I eat like a pig. I work out  on average less than 2 hours a week.  Not only does the calorie explanation not add up, as I said before I work out to keep weight ON.  You might then retreat to the "You have a high metabolism"  argument, to which Taubes and Myself would agree. But we would  disagree with you as to the cause and effects at play:  You might say that I am able eat so much because I have a high metabolism but I am almost completely positive now that I have I high metabolism BECAUSE I eat so much. And so well (when in fact I eat well).   I eat a lot because I want to gain weight, and my body , (which  has no interest in the proposition)  puts me to work.   Who wins , I have discovered, is a product of how many Carbohydrates I eat. (Which isn't to say that I couldn't gain weight on a low or no carb diet, just that to do so I would have to gorge myself in stark defiance and violation of  good taste and appetite)

I have noted time and time again that I can dry a shirt quicker by wearing it than by putting it the dryer. It's so true, but I have no illusions:  I know that if I were to drop my calorie intake by 1000 a day (which would then  be more inline with the conventional wisdom that has  little explanation for my litheness if they saw my diet and workout regime)  the  immediate and then  net result would be that I don't dry shirts as fast.  My body, and yours are essentially furnaces, and it is foolish to think that an extra log on the fire would have any other effect other than a brighter flame.    I have thought about this a lot and believe it to be absolutely true as long as I don't eat many carbs.  Why?   Basically carbs control insulin, which in turn  determines whether I should be a hyperactive Shirt Drying machine, or a fat containment unit.  .  I hate to say that it's that simple, but the evidence is that it is.   Go read Good Calories Bad Calories and see for yourself. The science HAS NEVER BEEN IN QUESTION.  It just got pushed aside. And when it got pushed aside, the obesity epidemic started.

This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it's quite possible that the foods - potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, fizzy drinks and beer - that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.

As for those people who insist that exercise has been the key to their weight-loss programmes, the one thing we'd have to wonder is whether they changed their diets as well. Rare is the person who decides the time has come to lose weight and doesn't also decide perhaps it's time to eat fewer sweets, drink less beer, switch to diet drinks, and maybe curtail the kind of carb-rich snacks - the potato chips and the candy bars - that might be singularly responsible for driving up their insulin and so their fat.

For the rest of us, it may be time to take a scientific or biological view of our excesses rather than a biblical one. The benefits of exercise include the joys of virtuousness. I worked out today, therefore I can eat fattening foods to my heart's content. But maybe the causality is reversed here, too. Maybe it's because we eat foods that fatten us that the workout becomes a necessity, the best we can do in the battle against our own fat tissue

I'm off to the Gym.