I agree with what Valerie, Regina and PJ say. There are benefits to exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss, may change insulin resistance over the long run but if you hate it you are not going to do it for anything other than short periods of your life. Frankly, if I have to use the word "exercise" to describe an activity then I need to just skip it. I ride a bike and go on bike rides, I do not exercise by riding bikes.

I am not going to start running, in part because I don't enjoy it, and in part because my knees and ankles have had the "benefit" of carrying over 300 pounds around for an extended number of years. The benefits include injury induced arthritis in my ankles and cartilage destruction in my knees. I think others who have benefit from gaining strength by carrying a lot of weight would do well to know what their benefits have been before attempting to run, particularly when you've heard "no pain, no gain" for 20 years.

What I worry about on the pro-aerobic side, particularly the "HIIT is very beneficial and you should try it" is that you take a fat, out of shape person who's been told they are a lazy slug and then tell that person to push themselves. Fine. Except that person is *predisposed* to think they don't make enough of an effort and *ignore* the warning signs from their body that they are pushing too hard. That happened to me. I got a heart rate monitor and discovered that doing low level aerobics, like Sansone's Walk Away The Pounds, had my heart rate going at dangerous levels. So I slowed down and built up to it. Not everyone builds up at the same rate, either -- my improvements were slow but steady and did not conform to any timetable I've seen.

I guess I see problems on both ends of the spectrum. Happy middle anyone?