'Exercise Makes You Fat' - says The Sunday Telegraph
Posted: 01/09/2009 at 06:25pm by Rich Leigh, founder of Fat Free Fitness
Ben Goldacre is a journalist and medical doctor I have a lot of time for. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper, called 'Bad Science' (a great read every Saturday), where he exposes poor science reporting within the mass media.
His article today revolves around a recent headline the Telegraph ran, entitled: 'Health warning: Exercise makes you fat'. Definitely not a typical broadsheet headline, I'm sure you'd agree!
The Telegraph pieced together a couple of trials and some highly speculative assertions, to come to the conclusion that supervised exercise, including personal training, doesn't really help you lose weight.
In seriousness, I'm personally pretty disgusted by this, and having had the pleasure of working with journalists from the Telegraph can only assume that this story was a direct result of needing a space-filling article to inspire a bit of comment, which it certainly has.
The article goes on to mention one study from Dr Timothy Church of Louisiana University. It
had three groups of overweight people train with a personal trainer at different intensities. The study found that there were no real differences between the
weight lost in any of the groups despite the fact there were different levels of intensity being tested, including the "control" group, who
were not given a personal trainer at all. First of all, it must have been ridiculously hard to find this study given the sheer number of published reports of personal training being the best method of weight loss.
I have personally trained clients in the past who had lost less than hoped for or even put weight on for short periods of time, which when looked into had been as a direct result of an 'I thought I could reward myself' attitude. Finding the source of the lack of weight loss in every single case meant that the client achieved their goal eventually. After a couple of clients mentioning this was their reasoning, I and others cracked down on it.
The second trial mentioned by the Telegraph resulted in much the same apparently, saying that 15% of the people doing supervised exercise put on weight. Only the trial doesn't show this, not in the way you're led to believe. The trial actually showed that people put lean muscle on as weight as opposed to fat tissue. The fact that the people doing supervised exercise lost 3.2kg more weight, on average, over just 12 weeks was totally ignored by the journalist.
So, don't tear up your gym membership yet, or tell one of our trainers that you're cancelling your sessions for a life of TV repeats, Pringles and alcoholism, it turns out this personal training lark isn't all that bad, despite hastily hashed together media reports.
Next week by Richard Gray, 'Chain-smoking found to drastically improve health; new study finds'.
Too much personal training can lead to obesity, apparently.
Comments
Great post, anything to make a story!
Posted by: Danny, 01/09/2009 at 09:50pmAdd a Comment
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Fat Free Fitness Weight Loss
Launched in 2009, fatfreefitness.co.uk is the UK's only weight loss specific personal training agency. Fat Free Fitness helps you stop dieting and counting calories, by teaching you how to improve your nutrition, increase your activity and exercise levels and lose weight. Fatfreefitness.co.uk is a great way to lose weight and save money. fatfreefitness provides you with expert diet, fitness, exercise, gym and personal training advice and support, similar to ivillage.co.uk, weightlossforall.com, thecolumn.org, weightlossforgood.co.uk, tescodiets.co.uk and weightlossresources.co.uk. Win diet, exercise and fitness products by entering fatfreefitness.co.uk competitions. Fatfreefitness.co.uk is not a weight loss support group like Weight Watchers weightwatchers.co.uk or Slimming World slimmingworld.com. Fat Free Fitness is updated regularly with new information. Fatfreefitness.co.uk and weight loss expert, personal trainer and fatfreefitness.co.uk founder Rich Leigh disagree with and discourage fat loss tablets, diet tablets and weight loss aid tablets, fad dieting and crash diets such as the Atkins diet, the Cambridge diet, the cabbage soup diet, the Beverley Hills diet, the baby food diet and all other carbohydrate and calorie restricting diets.
