How many times have we heard about the importance of diet and exercise when losing weight? Now it turns out that the experts were wrong, and exercise may have the opposite effect from what we had hoped:

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

The problem, in a nutshell:

“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

So, scratch exercise (at least as a weight loss tool). [Helpfully the article contains a link to the video: How to Lose Weight Like a Real Loser]

So it all comes down to diet. The problem with diet is that it involves will power, and willpower is not helping either because many humans, basically, have no willpower:

Why Willpower Often Fails – Power of Temptation Stronger Than We Think, Study Says

People who rely on sheer willpower to help them lose weight, stop smoking, or beat other addictions more often than not end up giving in to temptation, and now new research may help explain why.

The study found that people tend to overestimate their ability to resist strong urges, and that those who are most confident about their willpower are most likely to lose it…

The solution to this problem is not to resist temptation but to avoid temptation altogether. So, for example, you would lock yourself in your house and allow only fruits, vegetables and nuts in the house so you are not tempted to eat donuts, cake and ice cream.

Why fruits, vegetables and nuts? Because they work. See these articles for details:
- How to live to be 100 years old
- Broccoli cures cancer
- We can stop the cancer epidemic
- Going ape

From the last article:

Ms Garton looked for inspiration to the plant-based diet of our closest relatives, the apes, and devised a three-day rotating menu of fruit, vegetables, nuts and honey… In the second week, standard portions of cooked oily fish were introduced…

Overall, the cholesterol levels dropped 23%, an amount usually achieved only through anti-cholesterol drugs statins.

The group’s average blood pressure fell from a level of 140/83 – almost hypertensive – to 122/76. Though it was not intended to be a weight loss diet, they dropped 4.4kg (9.7lbs), on average.

Can you be happy living this way? According to the last article you can, as long as you are allowed to eat to satiety: “So the “moments of unhappiness and grumpiness” that the TV crew was primed to capture failed to happen…”

But if you then add calorie restriction to try to improve longevity… Then you have a good chance of becoming miserable:

The Meaning of Life

Which brings me to low-cal Canto and high-cal Owen [two monkeys in a long-term calorie restriction study]: Canto looks drawn, weary, ashen and miserable in his thinness, mouth slightly agape, features pinched, eyes blank, his expression screaming, “Please, no, not another plateful of seeds!”

Well-fed Owen, by contrast, is a happy camper with a wry smile, every inch the laid-back simian, plump, eyes twinkling, full mouth relaxed, skin glowing, exuding wisdom as if he’s just read Kierkegaard and concluded that “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”

It’s the difference between the guy who got the marbleized rib-eye and the guy who got the oh-so-lean filet. Or between the guy who got a Château Grand Pontet St. Emilion with his brie and the guy who got water. As Edgar notes in King Lear, “Ripeness is all.” You don’t get to ripeness by eating apple peel for breakfast.

So, if you cut way back on calories, you may live longer (that’s still not completely clear, although evidence is mounting), but you may not be very happy.