Is Exercise Pointless for Fat Loss?

While it is accurate to say that people generally don’t lose a ton of weight with just exercise and the math generally doesn’t ever add up [1-5], the weight subjects do lose is often pure adipose tissue [6-8]. Furthermore, we know that on average diets with exercise outperform diets alone [9].

In a 2020 analysis of the MIDWEST-2 study, participants in the most adherent group who burned 400 to 600 kcals per session, five days a week, lost an average of 13.5 pounds of pure body fat in 10 months with zero dietary intervention [6].

Read that again…ZERO dietary intervention.