newoldme wrote: I'd look through the 5:2 Lab area for links to the research or watch some of MMs videos on food and exercise for summaries.
Exercise is good for you, no doubt, but it doesn't do much for weight loss in most people. It seems to make folks more hungry and people tend to overcompensate for their "good behavior" of exercising by rewarding themselves with more treats.
More importantly, I would say that your basic assumption, the "calories in and calories out" model is wrong, or at least terribly over simplified. This has been shown in studies where timing of eating is so important, such as the rat study where genetically identical rats fed the same diet but the group that grazed all day gained 26% more weight than the ones who ate the same amount during their 8 active hours a day. The thin, fasting rats weren't more active, but they had better insulin responses and were WARMER (burned more calories through thermogenesis). The point is that other factors such as efficiency and WHEN you eat come into play. It has also been shown in studies of people (twins) where they ask folks to eat extra calories and look at the net gain (far more variability between nonrelated folks plus a tendency for many to fidget away the extra calories).
Anyway, what goes in your mouth (calories in) is the most important part of the puzzle. If you add exercise and build muscles AND can resist the tendency to indulge because of it (or overestimate how many calories you really burned) do it. Exercising on fasting days gives you a double bonus since you are already in fat burning mode!
HTHs!
Well, I think with exercise is like with food. Eating 4 snickers a day does not equal having plenty of healthy unprocessed food with the same calorie content.
Analogically, not all types of exercise brings the equal results. The effectiveness of exercise depends on time of the day, length and intensity. Sweating in the gym/on aerobics class for 45mins or longer is much less effective than high intensity exercise lasting 10-15 mins. Also, if you exercise in the morning, you break down glycogen stores in your body straight away rather than burning through fuel flowing in your blood from the meals you've had during the day. Also to make up for the energy lost during the exercise you need to stock up again, but if you chose a banana with some nuts and yoghurt or a grilled meat with salad, you wont be hungry and you will till get benefits of the exercise. Another option is exercising in the evening, which still is better than not exercising at all.
It's a little disappointing to see people's attitude towards exercise and using fasting as a way out of it. Fasting, with all its benefits, won't improve your fitness or muscle tone, flexibility etc. These thing decline with age and if you want to be healthy, you will need to invest in one or other form of physical activity.
You will look slim and have better eating habits but you will still get knackered after walking a flight of stairs. And as muscle mass goes down with age, your metabolic rate goes down with it, you will end up having a slow ass metabolism at 60 and will have to starve yourself on normal days in order to maintain your weight.
It also helps to maintain cognitive performance. Don't deprive yourself of that!
Sue
