Myth 4: Exercise to Lose Weight

“I can’t do yoga!” said the voice that clanged in my head. “I need to burn calories!”

There was a time when the voice ruled. I was convinced that unless I did some vigorous aerobic activity—running, biking, swimming, or walking—I was sure to balloon out. I needed to exercise and daily, so that I could eat without worry.
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It is a familiar line—a causal link drawn between exercise and weight. We hear it and barely blink. It seems so reasonable, the flip side of the diet myth (Mar. 18). If the difference between energy in and energy out determines the heft of our fat stores, then all we need to do is add more exercise to our lives and the pounds we don’t need will disappear. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that we exercise to maintain weight. The American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine agree. Nutritionists say so too. Because science says so. Or does it?

Another diet myth is fading. The exercise-equals-weight-loss hypothesis took root in the late 60s, and since that time its veracity has been impossible to prove. (In preceding decades, it was assumed that exercise promotes weight gain or at best, slows the rate of loss.) When the myth hatched, it was based on two studies that have not been replicated. Still, it spread rapidly and for decades it has reigned, despite the lack of clinical evidence. A review of relevant literature in 2000 concluded that the relationship between exercise and weight is “complex.” While exercise may help some who lose weight keep it from coming back as quickly; it helps others who lose weight pack it on again. (See Taubes)

Why the lack of confirming evidence for what seems like common sense? A story line is emerging.

For one, experts say, the vast majority of us don’t exercise enough to make a difference. We overestimate our calorie expenditure—often forgetting to subtract our base metabolic burn off, for example—and then overcompensate in what we eat. We run a quarter mile (expending 25 calories) then “treat” ourselves to a piece of pie (for 400). (See Kolata)

Second, even when we do exercise strenuously, our hunger keeps pace, holding our body weight in place, if not immediately then in the next day. In the case of lean athletes, moreover, it may be that a biological propensity to spend energy propels them into extreme sports in the first place, rather than the reverse.

Thus, just as scientists are discovering that diets don’t work and offering an explanation based on a body’s weight-maintaining powers (Mar 18), so too they are discovering that exercise doesn’t work, and for a similar reason. Our bodily processes for metabolizing food are so crafty and complicated that they defy our efforts to control them, whether we diet, exercise, or both together. Desire is to blame.

Are we doomed to a fruitless struggle with a voracious desire and an expanding waistline? Is there no way to guarantee that we can and will have the bodies we want?

The questions betray the anxiety that our diet culture breeds. We are obsessed with food, with the pleasure we might have or miss, with the shape and size and look of our bodies, and spurred on at every turn by a sensory education that trains us to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. If our bodies defy control, what will become of us?

When we shift to the perspective of bodily becoming, however, these apparent “failures” appear in a new light: offering proof that our mind over body strategies for navigating our relationship to food are not giving us what we want.

How so? The movements we are making are making us. From this perspective, the apparent resistance of our bodies to diet or exercise is what we are creating. This resistance is not an unfortunate obstacle we encounter on our path to pleasure; it is what our practices are generating in us. We are creating ourselves into people who are addicted to diets, anxious about our fitness, and arduously at war with ourselves in the name of our own well being. The movements we are making as we attempt to reduce our energy intake or increase output are creating us into people who sense and respond to our desires with suspicion and dread—as if they were alien creatures, rather than who we are. We learn to believe that we can and should hold this stance over and against our desires for food, and feel guilty when we cannot. Yet doing so is like trying to hold our breath. If we go too long, we black out. Our bodies take over and we breathe—or eat—again.

The problem, then, is not that our bodies lie beyond our control. The problem is that we are creating a relationship with ourselves in which our bodies feel like they are out of control. We act as if they are, failing to cultivate their potential to guide us in eating in ways that will nourish our health and well being.

From the perspective of bodily becoming, our desires for food are us. They are who we are. And how we sense and respond to these desires, whether we move with or against them, creates us as the bodily selves we are.

We are born needing to eat, but not knowing how. The genetic potential is there, but not its expression. We know enough to suck and swallow, but not much more. Our sensations of pleasure and pain guide us in popping in and spitting out. Over time, as we move towards what gives us the pleasure of being nourished and away from what doesn’t, we create and become the patterns of sensation and response that focus and refine what it is we want. We not only learn what to desire, we also learn how to sense and respond to our desire when it wells in us.

It is this learning process that scientific methods have yet to map or measure. It is this learning process that has proven exceedingly vulnerable to the myths of our desire-denying diet culture. And it is this learning process that we can choose to participate in consciously by cultivating our sensory awareness. As we do, we can shift our experience of our desire for food, strengthen its powers of discernment, and learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.
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It took a while, but the lived experience of practicing yoga finally won out. Yoga, I realized, doesn’t just exercise my muscles. Its value is much greater. Moving in and out of the yoga postures exercises a sense of myself that counters my mind over body training—and the voice that screams "burn calories!" My movement is making me (Feb. 13).

My experience of my desire for food shifts. Suddenly it is no longer a question of struggling to control calories in and out. It is a question of learning to honor and trust the rhythms of my hunger, the subtleties in my experiences of eating. Then I know too what good any "exercise" can be: an opportunity to move, to breathe, to open our senses, and to drop in to what our bodies know about how, when, and what to eat. This wisdom is the best resource we have in finding the satisfaction we seek.

Next week: what we desire from food, and why we can and should develop our capacity to trust it.