The‘ exercise causes weight loss’ myth 91 Okay, so we have looked at the physiology, but what about the psychology of exercise? Exercise overcompensation eating Most people I work with grossly overestimate how much they burn off with exercise. But the story gets worse. Exercise can increase our appetite! Now this is no news flash. I think we all realize that in a normal world people who exert themselves physically‘ work up an appetite’. But now you can appreciate the complexity of the problem with exercise and weight loss. If we burn off less than we think we do when we exercise and then it makes us hungrier than we would be otherwise, we have a problem. Recent research has looked at this process in detail. At the Florida International University they asked overweight women who were dieting to walk on a treadmill for an hour at 60 % to 70 % of their maximum heart rate( very brisk walking) and then they measured how this affected their eating. 14 What the researchers found was that after the women in the study, had been to the gym there was a significant increase in the amount of food they then ate over the rest of the day. They also found that dieting or not, they thought they ate less calories than they really did after exercising. In point of fact, they underestimated how many extra calories they were eating after exercise by 30 %!( All of the women also completely underestimated how many calories they burnt off by doing nothing. They guessed it was around half of what it really was.) As another point of reference, these women were eating, on average, 165 more calories after they had burnt off only 105 calories in the gym i. e. 60 calories more than they had burnt off. This research demonstrates that when we diet, our minds look for every opportunity to trick us to over-eat – to sabotage our weight-loss plans. 14 Visona C & George VA. Impact of Dieting Status and Dietary Restraint on Postexercise Energy Intake in Overweight Women. Obesity Research 2002:10:1251-8.