No need to diet and exercise to lose weight Says Study?

A new study from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge claims that you don’t need to diet AND exercise to lose weight.

Dr. Leanne Redman of the research center says “For weight loss to occur, an individual needs to maintain a difference between the number of calories they consume everyday and the number of calories they burn through metabolism and physical activity”.

And we say – Duhhhhh! How much are these people getting paid to conduct these studies? It comes down to simple thermodynamics, and can be explained to a five-year-old like this:

Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight.
Consume more calories than you burn and you will gain weight.
Consumer the same amount of calories that you burn and you will stay the same weight.

Nevermind the difference between fat, protein and carbohydrates or that fat has more calories than protein and carbohydrates. Nevermind all of that. What this totally asinine study does not tell you is that diet without exercise is going to take off the pounds, BUT

You will put them right back on when you’re finished dieting because you have not done anything to speed up your metabolism, such as gaining muscle or improving cardiovascular health. Furthermore, dieting can actually SLOW DOWN your metabolism (through a feedback mechanism that tells your body to use less calories so it doesn’t starve while you are dieting) which is what causes silly fad dieters to gain more fat on the rebound than they had in the first place before their diet.

Here is what happens in the media today:

College professor wants to get his/her name in the paper and conducts a completely pointless study for the purpose of publishing controversial findings.
Press release is sent to news papers.
Editors see an opportunity for an attention grabbing headline like :No Need to Diet and Exercise to Lose Weight” which the headline of this article in MSN News via Reuters.
Consumers read the article without thinking about it too hard and are either given false expectations, bunk information, or nothing at all.

And the sun sets, another day goes by, people are still getting fatter and dying of heart attacks, people are still too lazy to exercise and want a magic pill, and I’m still getting pissed off at the whole damn circus.