How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss

by Michael Greger

Let’s say that after you wake up tomorrow, you go out and take an hour-long walk in nice weather. (See the Coming In from the Cold box here to see why this temperature-related caveat is necessary.) Over the rest of the day, you’ll likely end up eating and moving just as much as you would have had you slept in instead of gone for a walk. So if you walked off three hundred calories, at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a three-hundred-calorie deficit. Your body doesn’t like being in the red, though, since millions of years of scarcity-stress has been hardwired into our DNA. As a result, over the next few days, your body starts to chip away at that debt from both directions, nudging you to eat a little more and move a little less such that by the end of the week, all the walked-off calories are back on board. In terms of calorie balance, it’s almost as if you hadn’t taken that walk at all. This explains why so many exercise interventions fail to result in weight loss over time.3138