Scientific studies have shown overwhelmingly that a 25 percent reduction in daily calorie intake will significantly improve your health far more effectively than exercising.
Therefore, the results of [a] new study provide a critical bit of information that should influence our expectations about exercise on general health.
The results of this study, combined with the findings from numerous similar studies, explains why most people who begin to exercise actually lose less weight than would be expected for any given effort expended.
Bodies evolved complex compensatory mechanisms to balance the energy necessary to contract muscles with the energy available for other critical biological processes.
This new study reported that the body automatically compensates (with some variation from person to person, of course) during exercise and holds back at least a quarter of the calories we might expect to expend.
Related on the SLP
Scientists have speculated that energy expenditure is not linear. A nine-year-old study of African hunter-gatherers discovered that people who regularly walked or jogged for hours burned about the same number of calories each day as relatively sedentary Westerners.
Apparently, the active tribesmen’s bodies compensated by reducing the overall rate of calorie consumption in order to avoid starvation while hunting.
