Exercise may help people avoid regaining weight after successful dieting, according to a new study. It shows that exercise can crucially alter the body’s response to weight loss and potentially stop unwanted pounds from creeping back on.
The study, published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, offers rare good news about exercise and body weight. As readers of the Phys Ed column know, the relationship between the two is tangled. Multiple past studies have found that exercise alone — without food restriction — rarely reduces weight and frequently adds pounds, since many people feel hungry after workouts and overeat.
In general, most nutrition experts agree that to lose weight, you must reduce calories, whether you exercise or not. Take in fewer calories than your body burns and by the ineluctable laws of math, you will drop pounds.
Unfortunately, that same heartless math dictates that weight loss then makes it difficult to stay thin. After losing weight, your body burns fewer calories throughout the day than it did before, because you have less body mass using energy.
Meanwhile, for reasons that are not fully understood, many people become more sedentary after they lose weight. Studies show that non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or N.E.A.T. — a measure of how much energy people use to stand, fidget, walk to the car and otherwise move around without formally exercising — often declines substantially after weight loss, perhaps because the body thinks you are starving and directs you to stay still and conserve energy.
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