Why exercise does not always help you lose weight.

We all know exercise helps you lose weight. Right? So why do some of us fail to shed centimetres even though we do plenty of exercise?

Jeff and Liz are like many couples in their early 40s – they love good food, drink a little too much wine and do not do enough exercise. Unfortunately, their lifestyle started taking its toll on their waistlines. Therefore, last year they decided to do something about it together and embarked on a new regime of healthy eating, drinking less, and exercising regularly. Three months later Jeff had lost four kilos, whereas Liz's weight was the same. It is an all too familiar story yet it is one we do not really know the answer to. Why is it that some people can slog their hearts out at the gym several days a week to discover their scales are telling them the same story?

Exercise can be an effective way to lose weight, says Dr Nathan Johnson, an exercise physiologist based at the University of Sydney. This has been illustrated by plenty of scientific studies that placed people on exercise programs and calculated, based on the energy cost of the exercise, how much weight they should lose. More often than not, study participants lost weight as predicted. "On the whole people do lose weight when they stick to an exercise plan and nothing else changes," says Johnson. However, in the real world what tends to happen is people who exercise either do not lose weight, or lose a small amount that they then put back on over time.

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This study is also a good illustration of what typically happens with exercise.

Source:  http://www.abc.net.au/health/features/stories/2015/01/15/4162890.htm; 3 February 2015