Buzz McLain wanted to find out if it was possible to maintain or lose weight without exercise. He kept close track of all calories he took in and used up.

As an experiment, I resolved to do nothing that smacked of purposeful exercise for nine days. That’s right, Richard Simmons, nothing. No power walking, no getting friendly with a Nautilus machine, no yoga-robics, no daily workout besides the motion of normal activities. I decided to keep the exercise — I mean, the calculation — simple: Forget about fat calories, metabolic rates and all that; this was just subtracting the in from the out. There would be no dietary modification, either; my regular fare would suffice. The test, I thought — somewhat wrongly, but more about that later — would be to see whether balancing the input and the output would keep my weight constant. I’d prove that the power of arithmetic could overcome the problem of exercise!

At the end of the experiment, he found that he could indeed maintain or lose weight without exercise. He talked to a fitness trainer at the Cooper Institute who told him that he would eventually start gaining weight without exercise.

“You’ll lose muscle mass, your metabolism will slow down,” she says. “You gain a lot more things with exercise than just maintenance of weight. You get an increase in energy, an increase in metabolism; you decrease the chance of cardiovascular diseases; you get a reduction in blood pressure, things of that nature. If you don’t work out, if you only consume as many calories as you burn, you’re missing out on all that.”

This article is just part of what annoys me about the whole fitness space. You can absolutely lose and maintain weight without exercise. Are we expected to believe that every thin person on the planet gets plenty of exercise? Of course not - and its misleading for the fitness instructor to claim otherwise.

Its pretty clear that exercise a) helps you lose weight, b) makes it easier to keep off, and c) makes you healthier in other ways than just weight. There’s enough data out there to make that point very clearly without having to imply that its simply not possible to remain at a healthy weight without exercise.

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