A new study, which got attention from slick Time Magazine, purports to show that moderate exercise won't help you with your long-term weight goals. How scientific was this study?
The study, led by John Jakicic at the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, followed nearly 200 overweight or obese women ages 21 to 45 through a two-year weight-loss program. The women were given free treadmills to use at home, regular group meetings and telephone pep talks to help keep them on track...I love that phrasing: "A slightly different data set than they had planned for."
The problem was that not enough of the women stuck with their assigned exercise categories for the researchers to gather enough meaningful data. Within a few months, most of the participants had resorted to exercising as much as they chose to. That left researchers with a slightly different data set than they had planned for...
Actually, I think what the scientific study has definitively proven is that laziness is very hard to overcome. Even with free treadmills, regular group meetings, and telephone pep talks.
The rest of the study's data, breathlessly reported in a major news magazine, are called into serious question by the utter breakdown of their methodology. I'd love to know who was responsible for funding a program for two years when "within a few months" it was clear the methodology had failed, and the results from the study would therefore be entirely unusable for the intended purpose.
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