Exercise or Diet?

Kimmer, the creator of the starvation diet Kimkins, insists that exercise is not helpful for weight loss. “No Exercise” seems to be a good selling point, or at least she thinks so. It is boldly stated in all the newsletters she sends out and frequently repeated on her blog. That Kimmer so strongly opposes exercise is, to me, evidence of how little concern she has for her member’s health.

While it is possible to lose weight without exercise it might not all that healthy. Especially not if the weight loss is achieved by starvation level of calories. There are “Kimkins Survivors” that can testify to that.

Kimmer justifies her recommendation by referencing to calorie calculators to point out how little we burn by exercising.

I can agree that calories burned during light or moderate exercise is not going to make much of a difference. This is also commonly repeated on diet boards where they typically say that weight loss is 90% diet and 10% exercise.

Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories) is often incorrectly quoted as saying that exercise has no effect on weight loss. That’s not really what he said. Gary Taubes said that there are no studies that support that exercise makes any difference. But what subjects would the studies have been made on? Morbidly obese people on a weight loss program, I’m sure. So, to me, it is more correct to say that exercise does not make a difference for the weight loss of morbidly obese people. That doesn’t mean that the same is necessarily true for people closer to their goal weight.

Kimmer wouldn’t know as I doubt she has ever been anywhere near goal weight. She doesn’t know anything about the challenge to take off the remaining 10 pounds. This is where I think exercise makes a huge impact.

Speaking from my own, anecdotal, experience, exercise makes all the difference in the world. The scale wouldn’t budge at all until I added exercise. Granted, I didn’t follow a starvation diet. I do eat lowcarb but without any restriction of the amount of food I eat.

All slim people I know at my age are exercisers. Every single one of them. Exercise is also pointed out as an important factor for the maintainers reporting to the National Weight Loss Registry. To keep the weight off, they had to exercise.

So should you exercise or diet? In my opinion, both. Perhaps exercise is not required, or even practical, when starting out but for reaching goal it will be necessary. For staying at goal, even more so.