Here is a repost from Charles Washington over at his Zeroing In On Health Blog. Charles has been on a role lately with some really great posts. I have added bolded text to the post to indicate importance.

"The experts all suggest that the obese would ameliorate their problem or even prevent it if they merely exercised, perhaps sixty or ninety minutes per day, as prescribed by the USDA Dietary Guidelines. By this logic, they need to create a negative energy balance by increasing energy expenditure and eating less. This doctrine is re-enforced in public-health messages, popular writing, and even on electronic displays on stair climbers, treadmills and other exercise apparatus that tell us how many calories we allegedly expended in our latest workout.

The belief in physical activity as a method of weight control is relatively new but it has been contradicted long ago by the evidence. In 1932, Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic lectured on obesity and reported that his patients lost more weight on bed rest than they did with strenuous physical exercise. In fact he said strenuous physical exercise actually slowed the rate of loss. He said

“the patient reasons quite correctly that the more exercise he takes the more fat should be burned and that loss of weight should be in proportion and he is discouraged to find that the scales reveal no progress.”

Until the 1960s, clinical investigators routinely pointed out that moderate exercise would lead only to insignificant increases in energy expenditure and these could easily be matched by slight and comparatively effortless changes in diet. In 1942, Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan calculated that a 250-pound man will expend three extra calories climbing a flight of stairs which is equivalent to depriving himself of one-fourth of a teaspoon of sugar or a tenth of an ounce of butter. “He would have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread.”

Strenuous exercise burns more calories but it leads to a significant increase in appetite. This is the implication of the phrase, “working up an appetite.” Thus, men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations. Those who change occupations soon develop corresponding changes in their appetite.

In 1960, Alvin Feinstein wrote in the Journal of Chronic Diseases that

“there has been ample demonstration that exercise is an ineffective method of increasing energy output since it takes far too much activity to burn up enough calories for a significant weight loss. In addition, physical exertion may evoke a desire for food so that the subsequent intake of calories may exceed what was lost during the exercise.”

By the time this was said, the Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer would almost single-handedly overturn a century of clinical evidence and anecdotal experience. In the 1950s, Jean Mayer established himself as the leading authority on obesity in the United States. This was mostly based on the romance of his background; the son of French physiologist Andre Mayer, who fought in the French resistance during World War II.

Mayer represented a new breed of obesity authority which would come to dominate the field. His predecessors all treated clinical patients but Mayer was not a clinician. His training was in physiological chemistry. His hypotheses were not generally based on anecdotal or real-life experience.

As early as 1953, after just two years of research on genetically obese mice, Mayer was extolling the virtues of exercise for weight control. The New York Times gave him credit for “debunking” the popular theories argued by clinicians and their obese patients, that exercise had little influence on weight. Mayer knew that the obese ate no more than the lean and even ate less. His mice demonstrated this; however, he reasoned that since those mice were more sedentary, therefore their lack of exercise must have been the culprit.

Through the 1960s, Mayer documented this relationship between energy intake, inactivity and obesity in a series of human studies. He noted that overweight high-school girls ate several hundred calories less that those who weren’t. Mayer said “the laws of thermodynamics are not flouted by this finding” because the girls spent only a third as much time in physical activity as the lean girls. They spent four times as many hours watching television. He also found that obese girls expended less energy than lean girls whereas lean babies ate more than fat babies.

Mayer also believed that the link between physical activity and overweight explained another troubling conflict. Calorie consumption was down according to the USDA but obesity and overweight went up. In Britain, they found the same phenomenon. In 1880, Anthropologist Eric Ross wrote that breakfasts by British gentry of the late nineteenth century “frequently assumed prodigious proportions.” Historian Hillel Schwartz wrote that the situation was similar in the United States.st during the exercise.” 

“The 75-cent special at Fred Harvey restaurants in the late 1870s included tomato puree, stuffed whitefish with potatoes, a choice of mutton or beef or pork or turkey, chicken turnovers, shrimp salad, rice pudding and apple pie, cheese with crackers, and coffee.”

Mayer concluded that caloric intake had actually fallen since the nineteenth century and then he pioneered the practice of implicating the sedentary nature of our lives as the “most important factor” in obesity and the chronic diseases that accompany it. He claimed Americans were more inert than their forbears. He blamed it on modern conveniences from the car to the extensions on our telephones and even the electric toothbrush only served to make us more sedentary.

In 1968 Mayer wrote “the development of obesity (and of heart disease as well as a number of other pathologic conditions) is to a large extent the result of the lack of foresight of a civilization which spends tens of billions annually on cars, but is unwilling to include a swimming pool and tennis courts in the plans of every high school.”

It’s quite easy to see how we got here. Now the question remains, how do we move forward from this nonsense? I eat more than the obese people at my job and I work out less than they do. I only go to the gym Monday and Thursday for about 45 minutes each session. I run sprints on Wednesday and I run long either Saturday or Sunday (unless there is a race). That’s it. I certainly don’t spend 90 minutes a day in order to maintain my leanness. I lost 73 pounds by changing my diet. Eliminate the carbohydrates and you not only will lose weight, but you will control cravings and hunger which can kill any diet. Once you lose the urge for the sweet you’ll find it’s very easy to maintain your weight loss and live a life of true freedom where food returns to its rightful place as merely fuel."

-Charles Washington