The Bad Science blog from the respected Guardian newspaper in the UK says it was cherry-picked:

http://www.badscience.net/2009/08/health-warning-exercise-makes-you-fat/

[I wonder if the people who exercised and lost more weight than the non-exercisers also ate fewer calories. -- Scott]

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There are other advantages to changing diet as well:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fatty-foods-affect-memory-and-exercise

Needless to say this highlights the stupidity of my trip to Burger King this morning.

I beg to differ. DH went on an intense work-out routine for 2 months and dropped 40 lbs. He did NOT change his diet. I, on the other hand, hired a personal trainer to lose 20 lbs. and did not lose a pound despite a grueling routine. Not one damn pound! :(

I'm not sure how this concept fits with my own personal experience. In high school I was a cross country runner in the fall and a swimmer in the winter, and in November, when swimming started, I always dropped weight. I'd put on weight in the spring and summer, lose some when I started running, then drop even more when swimming started.

Swimming was undoubtedly a better workout, and I was consuming calories about as fast as I could to try to maintain a healthy weight.

However, this might be exercise of a different scale than what we're talking about here. Spending 2 full hours in the pool each night, with about 90% of the time spent swimming hard following the directions of a screaming coach is a lot different than 20 minutes on the treadmill 3 days a week.

Not that 20 minutes on the treadmill is bad. If I put in 20 minutes of exercise 3 days a week today I imagine I'd feel better, sleep better, and be healthier overall.

Well, let's be honest. A lot of people, including my ex-wife, claim to be on some kind of diet and some kind of exercise program, but it's often just something less than effective and often dismissed in the face of M&M's or chocolate cake or an afternoon of sitting on the couch watching Oprah reruns. That is, people start out with lame programs that they don't stick with, and then they claim they didn't lose any weight or get stronger or anything. I've seen it too many times and even lived with it.

I agree, I think exercise could be helpful for avoiding gaining weight though. But diets don't work very well either in the long term. This is just one example of a study that found after 2 years people 9 pounds on average. For people who are seriously "overweight" that's not a very significant amount. And as an example of cognitive dissonance, I've seen this different places, always with the headlines "All diets work".

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2009-02-25-diets-calories_N.htm

The referenced article and your response to it, Scott, demonstrate that neither of you know what you are talking about. As a former certified personal trainer and a former Command Fitness Leader for the Navy, I can tell you that you are missing the point. I've always told my friends and clients that you are exercising and building muscle and losing fat, and therefore, there will not be much weight loss involved. In fact, since I started lifting back in 1988, I have put on 30 lbs. That said, I am nowhere near fat or obese. In fact, at 42, most people think I'm 32, and I get a lot of "how do I get a body like that" comments. How? Get to the gym and get off the scale. Your workouts are not about your weight; they are about your body fat percentage, your bone density, muscle density, cutting out fat deposits around your major organs, like your heart, and making your body stronger and healthier and therefore more resistant to sickness and disease, and even injury. Working out is not about weight loss. Dieting is about weight loss; working out can just help.

So, that's a really short version of what I want to say, but it should be good enough for this crowd. Stop worrying about the scale. If you are still 152lbs eight weeks later but you are wearing size 32 pants instead of size 36, then something positive has happened, and that's all that matters.

Knew it already from personal experience.
First thing when you start exercising is, you become hungrier.
On the other hand, replacing fat with muscles redistributes the weight, typically away from your belly.

It all depends on how significant a number on the scales is for you.

Last May, I read an article in which a woman described how her doctor had pointed out to her that she was exercising like crazy but hadn't lost weight in YEARS, and that all she was doing was working to maintain a few extra pounds of muscle, muscle which made her feel hungrier and eat more and thus provided no weight loss benefit, and possibly ADDED weight from the extra food... and, that that muscle had weight and bulk which was itself making her body bigger. At his advice, she radically reduced her exercising, and, as she was far less hungry, ate less as well. She promptly dropped a nice chunk of weight, much to her amazement, and MINE as well.

Literally less than a week later I discovered that even my biggest pants no longer fit, despite MY heavy exercise schedule and only eating when I was hungry, and even then less than I was hungry for. Taking my cue from that article, I stopped exercising cold turkey, ate significantly less because I was far less hungry, and went from size 12 to size 8 in FOUR WEEKS.

It's over a year later, and I've stayed the same size; I do occasional rounds of "touch up" exercises so I don't get flabby and jiggly, but that's it... it's MUCH easier to maintain a decent weight now that I'm not forcing myself to first exercise and then to not eat what I want when I'm starving afterwards. I also eat healthier now because my body isn't screaming for fat and simple carbs due to my forced exertions.

Different people's metabolisms work in different ways, though, and there are obviously folks who do NOT get hungry enough to compensate for the calories they're exercising off... but clearly these fortunate types are a small minority, given the failure most people have when they try to use a bunch of exercising to lead to long-term (in other words past the point where their willpower is used up and they go back to eating when they're starving) weight-loss.

I'm a seasonal exerciser, and I find that whenever I exercise regularly, I tend to crave healthier foods. I also tend to lose weight. I suspect there might be a correlation.

When I rode my bike to work (9 !$%*! each way, 18 !$%*! a day) my thighs became huge sexy hunks of muscle. But I didn't lose any weight so I went back to driving my Prius to work.

You weren't in aerobics class. Those people lose weight, big time.

Some years ago, I was in pretty good shape. I ran a mile a few times a week and I looked pretty good. A new gym opened near my house, an all female gym, and I decided to sign up for a few months, to see if it made a difference. They started you out doing only a few reps of about 20 different weights/machines/exercises and increased by 2 reps with each visit. They measured about 12 or 15 places on my body. After one month, I had lost 11 and a half inches, total. I did not change my diet. The second month, I lost only about 4 inches, but was even firmer than I had been; the third month, I gained inches, but it was all muscle. In that 3 months, I lost maybe 5 pounds. But like I said, I was in pretty good shape to begin with. But losing 11 and half inches was awesome - and really made a difference in how I looked.

Every year when the surf gets good, I exercise rigorously every day and drop an average of 10 pounds in 2 months while eating tons more calories (i.e. I eat pints of Ben & Jerry's every day). I tend to keep the weight off for about 3-4 months afterwards then gain it back gradually over the rest of the year. I am very active year round and always have been and my diet is not what you would consider healthy (lots of meat and very little vegetables)

Granted, I'm not your typical "join local gym to lose a few pounds" guy, but there is definitely a direct corellation between amount of exercise and weight loss that is independent of diet.

Maybe the point is that fitness and weight control is not about one thing or another, but about a lifelong commitment to being healthy.

Very true. I've lost 20 pounds using an online tool called MyPlate to track what I eat and eat less. I don't exercise any more than before I started and it's a lot less stressful losing weight this way.

I'm over 60 and I started biking regularly a few years age. Since that time I've lost a little weight while I think eating the same or a little more. Perhaps older people don't gain as much muscle mass from exercise as younger people do, and are more likely to see weight loss from exercise as a result? (My weight is in the normal range both before and after the biking started.)

Rocky