Lose Weight Program > Exercise is a Practical Joker

Why do we have the temerity to say, "Don't depend on exercise to reduce your weight"? That's easy to answer because, practically speaking, exercise alone doesn't reduce weight dependably and few doctors prescribe it except as an accessory to diet.

Theoretically, strenuous exercise will take off pounds. Actually, however, if you are accustomed to strenuous exercise it is most unlikely that you are overweight. If you aren't accustomed to it but embark upon a violent calisthenic program, the strain on your heart may prove disastrous. Doctors are always having to warn their obese patients against unwise overexertion. They're carrying an extra load of twenty or thirty or more pounds like a sack of potatoes (maybe that's where it came from) whenever they make a move.

Mild exercise is good for practically anybody. It tones you up, makes you feel better. It is certainly to be encouraged whether you want to reduce or not. But the jokes it plays on you!

Suppose you are of average weight and you take a brisk two-mile hike on level ground. You figure pridefully that you have burned up a few ounces of fat. The sad truth is that your two-mile hike consumes an excess of a mere 115 calories, which are replaced by a mild snack consisting of three graham crackers.

The worst trick of exercise, however, is the one it plays on a portly friend of mine who swears he can take off two or three pounds any time he wants to by playing tennis.

He can. His scales prove it. What he loses isn't fat, though, but water in the form of perspiration. A long, tall drink of water or two and his tissues sop up weight again like a sponge. Even if by superhuman effort he refrained from drinking, he would nevertheless get water from his meals-few foods are less than half water.

As for exercise machines - mechanical horses and the like that shake and toss you while you sit in or on them - they are first-rate slenderizers of the pocketbook but dubious aids to scaling down the human frame. The idea that an electric motor can burn up energy for you is illusive. It's like expecting to lose weight by going up in an airplane, because you've heard that mountain climbing keeps one slim.

No Drugs, No Sweat, No Charge

Bamboozling and bewildering are some of the gadgeteering methods touted as easy ways to weight reduction. Hot baths, steam cabinets, cathartics, rollers to put you through a wringer of gullibility to which there is no end.

Turkish baths and baking in steam cabinets (which have perfectly legitimate purposes aside from weight reduction) will drive water out of your tissues until you can get a drink. Hot baths, with or without bath salts, will do the same thing, but they have no effect on actual fat unless you stay in the tub long enough to miss a few meals.

A cold bath is different. You can really lose weight under a cold shower, if you can stand it. Lowered skin temperature demands increased heat production from your body, and that means digging into your calorie reserves. Every time you shiver you use up calories.

The plan of hiring an expert to massage away your fat has always been alluring. It is a splendid way to reduce the masseur. The masseur will assure you with honest conviction that he can knead off as much fat as you can spare. Ministration at the hands of an expert has certain tonic qualities.

Ask a doctor about it, however, and watch him shake his head. There is nothing in his studies of physiology and biochemistry that makes it conceivable for fat to be disposed of in this way. No way is known of squeezing or poking fat out of the body, or even of making it shrink under insult. Of course, you might breathe a little harder, or yelp stridently, and thus burn up a little energy. At best - and this is highly debatable - a masseur can cause fat to migrate from one section of your body to another. One scientist went so far as to fatten laboratory animals and then to massage their abdominal walls with all degrees of vigor. Microscopic examination disclosed that there was no change whatever in the fatty tissues other than severe hemorrhages.

No Drugs, No Sweat, No Charge continued

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