Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

Quote:

Originally Posted by mike_d

Walking for 12 minutes or rock climbing for 7 only burns off one bannana!

But wait, it's even worse than that. This is a quote from the book "Shape Up" by Jonny Bowden:

Quote:

When I taught personal training at New York's Equinox Fitness Clubs, we had an exercise physiology lab that contained an apparatus called a metabolic cart. You would get on a treadmill and put on a mask attached to a computer that would measure your oxygen intake and your carbon dioxide output at different levels of exercise intensity. Then the computer would calculate your caloric expenditure as you exercised. The individual variations were absolutely astonishing, and they would often vary enormously from what the standard equations would predict.

Suppose I rented a car in Los Angeles and wanted to buy just enough gas to get to San Diego. The distance is 120 miles. If I fill the tank and only use 1/3 of it, there's no refund and I will have wasted money, so I want to get an idea of how much gas to buy. Think about it for a minute and see if you can guess the answer to this question: How many gallons should I purchase?

...There's no correct answer unless you have one missing critical piece of information, which I didn't give you. Before you can answer the question of how many gallons of gas I need, you have to answer another question: What kind of car did I rent?

If I rented a jeep I met get only ten miles to the gallon, but if I rented a Volkswagon I might get thirty. And it's the same thing with calories. ... we are all metabolically unique.

So the whole idea of "how many calories you burn per hour" is actually as wrong as the whole "how many calories you eat = how much you weight" concept. It's different for everyone and, I'd be willing to bet that the people with the low vs. high metabolism would be burning off fewer vs. more calories from the same exercise -- even when it was harder for them.