The Life Ledger

Fitness is a way of life.

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Reuters has an article focusing simply on loss of body mass, not general health or fitness. And surprise, surprise they say something that most everyone should know.

“What we found was that it did not matter whether a reduction in calories was achieved through diet or burned everyday through exercise.”

The study consisted of 3 groups. One reduced daily caloric intake by 25% while another reduced their intake by 12.5% and increased their exercise by 12.5%. The remaining people were the control group and did nothing. At the end, both test groups lost the same amount of weight, and apparently in a very similar manner.

These results lend credence to methods of dieting like the Hacker’s Diet. Simply eat less calories than you use. And it is fairly easy to see math behind it, which dovetails into the philosophy of this site. So I’m going to translate it over into banking math. It’s different than normal financial goals because you want to decrease the value “stored”, but from an equations point of view it works similar enough.

Consider your body like a Checking account. Anything you eat is a deposit. Anything you do, at all, is a withdrawal. So we end up with something like this:

C.account(today) = C.account(yesterday) + Consume - Life - Exercise

That would be the equation for control group. Most people eat approximately the same amount every day, so C.account doesn’t change from day to day. And just living life uses up some calories. The beating of the heart, breathing, heck even digesting food takes work. At the same time, these people might get a certain amount of exercise already. The study indicates that they are healthy, just overweight.

For group one, the scientists modified the equation this way.

C.account(today) = C.account(yesterday) + 0.75 * Consume - Life - Exercise.

Since you are not taking in as many calories as before, while still maintaining everything else, your body has no other choice but to convert stored energy back over. If your paycheck got cut you would have to start digging more and more into savings.

What about group two?

C.account(today) = C.account(yesterday) + 0.875 * Consume - Life - 1.125 * Exercise.

In this case your income/caloric intake hasn’t reduced as much as group one, but at the same time you are spending more above basic necessities. So the over all loss is the same as group one.

The Reuters article does raise a good point, that I think alot of people miss. It just focuses on weight loss. There are lots of supplementary benefits from exercise. For example exercise improves aerobic fitness and lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. And that’s just the short list. A full thousand words could be written about the benefits of exercise without breaking a sweat. It’s just nice to see people acknowledging the underlying properties what has to happen.

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1. Tim Ferriss’ 4 Rules for losing fat without exercise