zmktwzrd,

Anything can backfire. heck eating broccoli made me hungry beyond belief. Now I avoid that and snow peas.

But you won't know until you try.

And if you are that concerned, then you start off with light exercise just to get moving and go from there.

I have exercised all my life, I was a scholarship athlete in college. Since 3rd grade I have been in sports. Hard core exercising. Peak training.

I have never known exercise to do this.

Strangers things have happened though, so I won't say never

Everyone is different.

But I will ask the question when you are active more than normal do you get hungry?

I.E. go out to the mall walking around shopping? When you clean the house? Mow the lawn? Snow shovel? Go out for a night of dancing? Walk around the city? Garden?

That is exercise.

As I said it is all in moderation.

The fact is you can analyze it to death and until you try it, you won't know. We all have different DNA

And BTW I am not talking about going out and doing Zumba or a marathon bike session or running 3 miles.

I moderately exercise 30-45 minutes a day and that is it. My heart rate doesn't go above 130-135. And I started off slow to get back in the groove and it adds .5-.75 of weight loss extra a week for me.

If you are at a platuea have you considered trying to go back to the induction phase of atkins? Lowering your carb intake?

Or have you logged and counted your calories at all? Possibly lowering calorie intake? Same with protein?

What are you doing?

SeeJay,

From my understanding he is not doing any exercising he is doing hypothecticals...

A Quote from his original post.

<<<<I am at a plateau and considering exercise to blast through it but concerned that this could backfire. I understand that exercise has benefits beyond potential weight loss, but in this case my primary concern is body fat.>>>

So he hasn't gained any weight from exercising...

I think exercise is vital to health: mood, strength, use it or lose it, a body in motion stays in motion, etc. I do enjoy the fact that I no longer feel guilty if I don't get exercise on any one particular day and definitely don't feel the need to go to any silly aerobics classes. And yes, exercise does increase my hunger.

Exercise by itself will NOT contribute to fat loss, but the effect (building muscle, increasing insulin sensitivity) can aid fat loss.

Exercise increases your hunger because it increases the need for fuel. It does not, by itself, make you fatter or thinner.

Exercise has enough benefits to make it worth doing. Building and maintaining your functional ability is one of them.

I work in law, so I know how easy it is to find evidence to support whatever it is we want to prove to ourselves and others. So I recommend throwing away the books, keeping an open mind and listening to your body, not the "experts."

Exercise does make a difference with weight loss -- certainly in my experience it does! when I ran, I could eat whatever I wanted and kept 30 pounds off with ease for years! when I didn't exercise, I was always chubbier! -- but even exercise experts agree that 80 percent of weight loss success comes from diminishing how many reps you do with your fork, not increasing how many reps you do with weights. It's industry standard nowadays for fitness buffs to say that most results come from the kitchen, not the gym.

Also, I think it's just as wrong to dismiss exercise just as it is to rely too heavily on it. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Exercise helps the body in a number of ways, not just relating to weight loss. Many use it to manage hormones/diabetes/stress/depression. Exercise becomes more imperative as we get older, not optional as it is when we are younger. Most people would like to be able to lift themselves from the toilet when they are elderly. Exercise supports that goal. Non-exercise doesn't.

There are lots of thin people who restrict calories/carbs and never exercise. My mother is an example of that. She gained 100 pounds by her fourth child, lost it through low carb in the late sixties - while giving herself a small daily treat each day - and never gained it back. She also never exercised if she could help it. LOL.)

However, if a more toned aesthetic is the goal, that will only happen with exercise.

So I'd recommend throwing away the books and just experimenting with your own body. Some people do a lot better with steady state cardio (long, easy walks) than with HIIT training while others have experienced the opposite.....

Also, keep in mind that lots of stuff passed around as gospel in the 90's by the "experts" (low-fat, etc.) is being discredited today. "Experts" ordered my grandfather to use margarine rather than butter after open-heart surgery in the 70's and now we know how lethal that is ... The "experts" say I should weigh 115, but my periods always stop when I go below 125. (When I weighed 115 for 3 years, they stopped completely. No "expert" made the connection to my low weight because I fell within the "perfect" chart range.) I now weigh 142, which shocks most people because I look much smaller. I look smaller because I weight train. Weight training tightens everything up and makes us look smaller and causes things to get looser, even if the scale goes up (because muscle weighs more).

Anyway, everything in moderation, including exercise & books by people with fancy initials!

Doing exercise that you don't like will increase your stress levels, exercise you like will probably do the opposite.

There are some studies with rats on high fat diets (some of them ketogenic). If you design the diet right, you can make rodents fatter on a ketogenic diet. But if you provide a running wheel, so that the rodents can exercise voluntarily, they'll exercise and be protected from the overweight. They didn't see an infomercial and decide to turn over a new leaf--they just like doing it. Most humans don't enjoy running in wheels, but we have our equivalents.

This may be a factor in the observation that groups that are more chronically active may have higher carb tolerance by Taubes--maybe being a subsistence farmer isn't what we'd call fun--but something it is, is purposeful. There's more going on then just movement. I take a contrarian view on The Biggest Loser. The problem isn't six hours of activity, I don't think this would have been strange to our ancestors. It's six hours of pointless activity.

Phinney makes the observation about reduced metabolism with exercise that Nancy noted--but I've also seen him report that in his own case, he tends to be a little slimmer during the part of the year when it's warm enough for him to go on extended bike rides. Neither here-nor-there, since he's never what you would exactly call overweight.