Fitness IQ: Does Exercise Help You Lose Weight? 

ITseems straightforward — if you want to boost your metabolism and lose weight, burn calories by moving and exercising more. But the latest research shows exercise has little to no effect on the rate of your metabolism.

Dr. Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Duke University, is an expert on human metabolism and energy expenditure. Through his research, he discovered that the average daily expenditure — the amount of calories we burn per day — is the same for everyone, regardless of how much you move.  This means the office worker and the personal trainer both burn the same amount of calories a day, and the amount of time one spends being active has very little to do with the speed of metabolism. Not only is the rate of metabolism the same from person to person regardless of gender, it also remains steady for most of a person’s life. The biggest metabolism drop is at your first birthday, followed by a drop in your twenties. There is a drop again when you hit 60, accompanied by an overall slowdown throughout the body.

Dr. Pontzer’s studies included a wide range of subjects — a modern-day tribe in Tanzania, marathon runners who raced across the US, and people who are sedentary. Study after study showed that active people and sedentary people use the same amount of calories per day.

Before beginning his research, Dr. Pontzer assumed exercise pushes your body into to a calorie deficit, forcing it to burn more calories than you put in. That’s why he chose to study the Tanzanian hunter-gatherers. He assumed that because of the enormous energy they put into their daily activities, they’d be burning thousands of calories a day. However, the research showed otherwise.