I do the Slow Burn, too. I really think it is a great workout - very high intensity, but you only have to do it every five days so your body has adequate rest in between high intesity strength training, which is optimal for full repair of the microtears that occur in your muscles when you strength train. If you give your muscles this opportunity to fully repair from the microtears, you will have maximum gains in strength. I intersperse 1-2 days of HIIT in there - mainly because I crave movement and on days when its raining (I live in the Pacific NW, so that's ALWAYS a possibility), I need to do something. HIIT gives me the movement my body craves - but it is usually relatively short in duration, so I'm not spending hours working out. The rest of the stuff (sports - hiking, golf, tennis, biking) - I just do for fun.

That might be a clue. I never carried weight in my stomach. I was always a pear and the first place I lost weight was my waist and I did it doing nothing but running on a 2000 calorie ADA diet after I had a baby.

LOL!

I met a coroner who told me he could always tell the people who were runners/joggers. He said their internal organs were all over the place (jumbled). I didn't know until then that many of our internal organs aren't really held in place firmly by anything, it's mostly soft tissue. That sorta freaked me out.

Even when athletic I never ran unless chased. I would really have liked to play basketball but for all that damned running...

People who like running are just weird, weird, weird.

When I was on low-fat and working out 6x/week, I devoted 3 days a week to strict cardio (elliptical/ski machine) and the other three to weights (but also threw in 20 minutes of cardio before/after lifting). I did lose about sixty pounds, but the thing with ellipticals/ski machines is that unlike a treadmill where you're just running you can set resistance levels, so basically you're strength-training. The treadmill is Satan's creation IMO. I've maintained my current weight with pretty much zero exercise, so it does play a role in weight loss for me.

I don't see it as discouraging exercise, although I do believe that exercise can make you gain weight in some situations.

I see it as telling people who cannot or will not exercise that they don't have to give up hope. Because it is true that you can lose weight without exercise. I lost 75 lbs while decreasing my formal exercise by ending my physical therapy sessions.

No one disagrees that the right exercise for your condition can be beneficial, but the Atkin's phrase that "exercise is non-negotiable" is false. People could lose weight in bed. They wouldn't be fit, but they would weigh less.

Yup! Same experience here. The only thing I still consistently do now is belly dance. One class a week. Practice one other day.

I am developing a ripped looking stomach now. Back when I was doing crunches, going to the gym, working out and dancing...nothing. Now with low carb and NO crunches, NO gym...muscles. Go figure.

Well that's just not true. Most of my weight lost was laying on the floor, because I couldn't get up easily and I was tending an infant. We lived on a pile of pillows with me mostly on my side with my neck in a brace for 16 hours a day.

As for muscles, hibernating animals don't seem to lose muscles. You may lose strength, because that is partly neurological, but it's not like the muscle loss caused by starvation. For instance, Concentration Camp exercise/diets make you stronger, while eating out your muscles by converting it to fuel. You have less muscle, but more strength.

After laying in bed you still have the muscle cells, they just need retraining.

There's actually quite a bit of research on muscle loss with lack of usage. I don't have it to quote, but I know it exists, as in the past I've tripped over it when looking at various things in the bodybuilding world.

However it may be that like much other research, the results when eating lowcarb/full protein are different than when eating normal/highcarb. Unless I looked at the research detail with that in mind I wouldn't know if the research that exists has addressed that or not.

But there IS science on this... I understand people have different personal experiences, because experience is a spectrum, but there's been a good chunk of work done on this subject.

There may be some muscle loss in some situations, but the whole statement was that you would be stripped of muscle and not fat. That's obviously not true on a LC diet.

As far a I am concerned as someone with PPS Exercise should be reduced or discontinued if additional weakness, excessive fatigue, or unduly prolonged recovery time is noted by either the individual with PPS or the professional monitoring the exercise. additional exercise was not an option. I believed, until I read "Why most of us believe that exercise makes us thinner—and why we're wrong. that it was physically impossible, dangerously misguided for me to increase to amount of exercise I did it and it was inevitable I would gain weight or exist on a starvation diet regime.

Reading Good Calories, Bad Calories' or The Diet Delusion as it's sold in the UK enabled me to understand how I could lose weight and not reduce my calorie intake to such an extent I felt deprived.
I've achieved my target weight in 20 weeks without doing any additional exercise and without going hungry.

I find it difficult to understand why others here do not seem to have achieved the same results in the same time period.

I don't think saying "You do not need to exercise in order to lose weight" is the same as saying " Exercise is bad for you".

I think exercise is imperative for attaining and maintaining optimal brain health. If I had may way I'd prosecute everyone who drove their kids to school for child abuse as I think preventing your children getting 20 minutes aerobic exercise before school damages their learning potential. We know that those children who walk/run/cycle to school also are more active at school and thus maintain a higher learning profile throughout the day thus driving your kids to school is actually harmful to their learning potential.

That's a three part causality chain which is not proven in any of the links.

We don't know that children who walk to school are more active in school, and if we did we don't know if their activity is caused by walking or if the more active child is more likely to choose to walk.

We don't know that more active children have a higher learning profile, in fact, some of the most active get the least learning while absorbing a larger share of the class resources. Meanwhile the quiet little girl is getting straight A's.

So we cannot conclude that driving your kids to school, which may be for a variety of reasons other than sloth, will harm their learning potential.

At least not with enough certainty to chastize parents who make that choice based on the needs of their family.

And the rich kid would be fed better so he would be more prone to be active and he would be encouraged to do sports which incidentally cost quite a bit in equipment even if it's only soccer because we gotta drive this kid to the field which isn't automatically next door but we would have a car to do this and if we didn't have a car then that kid would not be so encouraged to do sports in the first place. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Not because a kid walks that he wants to or that it even makes him more active elsewhere or that it makes him more healthy or more intelligent. Diet comes first. But that comes only with adequate parenting, whatever that means but it mostly means enough money to buy the food that feeds that kid properly. The rest follows.

Lack of exercise is not what made us sick or weak or fat or stupid. What made us sick, fat, weak and stupid is the high carb diet. It's the diet. So it doesn't make sense to advise to exercise for the purpose of becoming healthy. It doesn't make sense either to advise to exercise for the purpose of losing fat. Diet comes first. The rest will follow and it will follow quickly enough as health improves through diet alone. Health won't automatically improve quicker with exercise. In fact, if exercise stalls fat loss and the loss of fat is one factor of improving health than exercise will hinder health improvement.

When I was a kid, we walked to school because it was just uncool not to. Walking to school was a big part of the social scene and no one wanted to be seen being driven by their mommies. We hung out together after school outside for the same reason.

Now kids are driven everywhere and play-dates arranged. No wonder they want to escape to their computers/TVs. Meeting up with your friends on mySpace is better than being shuffled around by your parents.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'exercise.' The amount of exercise I do now (lots of walking, mostly) isn't really going to speed up my weight loss.

When I went to basic training & pretty much exercised all day every day for 9 weeks, the weight fell off of me, and I was eating A LOT of food. I imagine 3000+ calories a day. I ended up losing 25 lbs over 9 weeks (from 180 to 165; certainly a combination of fat loss & muscle weight gain). I also had the same experience when I started working at UPS loading trucks, working HARD 5+ hours a day & eating everything in sight. The weight just fell off. I was younger then, also (age 22 at UPS, age 26 at basic training).

In high school, I weighed around 145, was very active & probably close to single digits on fat % (I carry a lot of muscle). I started doing some distance running in addition to all the basketball & tennis workouts I was already doing. I GAINED 5 lbs, up to 150. Muscle weight, I'm sure, because I didn't really have any fat to lose.

Anecdotal stuff, but I agree with the OP on not discouraging people from exercising.

Heh... I walked to school too. First thing I did when I arrived every day? Head down on desk... napped for the first four periods.

Can't really see that as more active in school