Head-fake

"Why does exercise have so little impact on weight loss for so many people? The answer is almost certainly, as a number of the new studies say, “multifactorial,” and one of the most reverberant and bizarre of those multiple factors is that, as a species, we're astonishingly efficient at clawing back lost calories, or, in scientific parlance, compensating. “People's systems are pretty good at recognizing when they have entered negative energy balance and doing something about it,” Dr. Ravussin says, “which usually involves regaining weight.” Compensation can take many forms, but in the context of exercise and avoirdupois, none is more devious than what has been called “non-volitional exercise-induced inactivity.” People relying on exercise to burn calories sometimes, without deliberate intent, begin moving less during the rest of the day. They grow more sedentary. They sit when they once might have stood or walked around the house. A similar dynamic occurs when you reduce food intake. The body tries hard to maintain its weight."—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)

“The message of our work is really simple,” although perhaps not agreeable to hear, Dr. Melanson says. “You don’t get any freebie calories.” Exercise, or at least moderate exercise, doesn’t rev up your metabolism and turn you into a fat-burning furnace for the rest of the day. The extra calorie burning ends with e exercise session. So if you follow up your workout with a Mars bar, you likely will have replenished the calories you just burned (and possibly then some). “It all comes down to energy balance,” says Dr. Melanson—or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning two hundred or three hundred calories” in a typical thirty-minute exercise session, he points out. “You replace that with one cookie.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)

"Should you choose not to warm up at all, you will be in fine company. Jack LaLanne famously scoffed at the idea of pre- exercising. “Warming up is the biggest bunch of horseshit I've ever heard in my life,” he once told an interviewer. “Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry? ‘Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.’ No! He just goes out and eats the sucker.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)