Exercise is good for you, but won’t keep the weight off

We’ve all been there. You’ve been following a new diet and putting in your 10,000 steps a day – but when you heave yourself up onto those scales the number’s gone up. That’s when you acknowledge some glaring blind spot you failed to log over the weeks of what you resentfully characterise as “deprivation”. The “false friend” morning muesli bowl that, upon closer inspection, contains more sugar than a Mars Bar; the glass of wine with supper that turned into three. Usually, there’s no one to blame but yourself, but if you were one of the millions who sought help from the NHS’s “healthy weight” calculator, you’d be entitled to feel cross.

According to a report in this paper, that calculator has been wrongly advising overweight Brits to eat hundreds of excess calories a day because it overestimated the impact of very small increases in exercise. The scale of the blunder is such that a typical dieter could have gained nearly two and a half stone a year simply by following the advice given to them.

As someone who has exercised five to six days a week for years, this is a particular bugbear of mine and I constantly find myself correcting the many people who still proudly declare that they run, swim or work out “so that I can eat whatever I want”. Yes, exercise is good for you in a million different ways, but 90 per cent of weight loss is diet and unless you’re an Olympian, you cannot eat whatever you want.

There’s only one way to lose weight and nobody summarised it better than a member of a 90s girl band whose name I forget. Asked how she kept her figure, the perky popstrel told one journalist: “I just don’t put very much in my mouth.”