The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Why exercise actually does matter for weight loss.

If you follow health news, you might be thinking exercise doesn't matter when you're trying to lose weight.

Vox just published a big piece showing how useless exercise alone is for weight loss.

The New York Times says eating less is way more effective than exercising more. Obesity researchers like Gary

Taubes and Yoni Friedoff, who don't agree on much else, both think using exercise to fix

obesity is futile. I've always said that 80% of your body composition is determined by your diet,

not how you exercise.

And everyone knows it's really hard, bordering on impossible to out-exercise a bad diet.

You might be able to out-exercise a bad diet if all you care about is abs and race-times

and make it your job, but eventually your poor health will catch up with you. That doesn't mean exercise doesn't matter for weight loss though. It does.

What is true?

The value of exercise doesn't depend on this caloric burn.

The studies cited in the media pieces make it clear that energy expenditure through exercise has very little

effect on weight loss.

To focus on that and discard the effectiveness of exercise in general is misleading and wrong

because fat loss isn't just about mechanistically burning calories.

Notice we're not trying to burn bone or dissolve muscle or shave a few pounds

off our internal organs. All those things will reduce your weight, but also your health,

performance, and lifespan. We're trying to burn fat to take a couple notches off the belt. To look good

naked. That's what nearly everyone means when they say lose weight.

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