Gina Kolata’s NY Times piece on the possibly exaggerated health benefits of exercise has this terrible news:

Jack Wilmore, an exercise physiologist at Texas A & M University, calculated that the average amount of muscle that men gained after a serious 12-week weight-lifting program was 2 kilograms, or 4.4 pounds. That added muscle would increase the metabolic rate by only 24 calories a day.

Oh no! Can that be true? In my head the muscle metabolic effect was MUCH bigger. I always felt, instinctively, when I was at my most “ripped” (ha!) from yoga, I could eat about an extra 200 calories a day - an extra big snack. Of course, now that I think about it, I was also doing yoga every day, so really, those were just the 200 cals I was burning anyway! It need have nothing to do with muscles. The mind plays tricks.

The NY Times also takes a tour of the Fatosphere today. I think the fat-acceptance mindset sometimes keels toward the extreme - small surprise, since it’s a response to an extreme, the anti-fat bias - but I do believe that feeling good about your body at any size is the right starting point to start exploring (and improving) your eating and activity patterns.

Don’t let Gina’s piece on exercise deter you from activity. It certainly hasn’t deterred her; she’s a competitive runner. Kate Harding, quoted liberally in the fat article, writes about exercise in a way that I LOVE — free of the piss and vinegar that sometimes occasionally puts me off her site, and generally making a point that I like to make myself: Any exercise you do should be enjoyed as an end to itself.

If it makes you feel good while you’re doing it, or the very least afterwards, who cares whether it’s making your heart unstoppable or your waist smaller?