bikerjpwrote:

"Most doctors would say that is the best way to lose weight."

Can you back that up?

I'll stick with my assertion that exercise will not help lose weight. Exercising only makes us want to eat back the energy expended by exercise.

I'll back up my assertion. For example, from the Mayo Clinic here.

Here are some excerpts:

"Most studies have demonstrated no or modest weight loss with exercise alone (2 kg) or with exercise added to diet (3 kg)."

This means that with the best case scenario, we can expect to lose up to 4.4 pounds with exercise, and up 6.6 pounds with exercise and diet. That will be a drop in the bucket to someone who is 50, or 75 pounds or more overweight.

However, as the Mayo Clinic paper points out, it's possible to lost up to almost 18 pounds with two hours of daily exercise.

That's two hours, every day, to lost a maximum of 17.6 pounds. Come on, who's going to do that, for the rest of their lives? Very few people.

It gets worse: Even with "regular and vigorous exercise," we can gain weight over time, although at a slower rate than if we try to diet. Even so, we're still gaining weight with exercise.

For those who have lost weight, exercising half an hour to an hour 5 to 7 days a week can help long-term weight maintenance, not loss. In fact, exercising an hour a day, 7 days a week, "is unlikely to result in short-term weight loss beyond what is achieved with dietary change." And I believe more recent studies indicate that well over an hour of exercise is needed just to maintain weight, lost or otherwise.

Exercise is good for us. Exercising to lose weight, though, is almost to completely worthless.

Digging into google will bring up more evidence, in the form of scientific papers, making the same claim as the Mayo Clinic paper; these studies also show that most people gain back weight after losing it with the help of diet, exercise, or a combination of the two (and we're talking about very modest loses of weight for most people).