Alex has said previously how aerobic exercise has been proven ineffective. The most effective way to get rid of fat and increase your overall health is to build up your muscle mass.

The ideas behind this can be simplified to be that the more muscle you have, the more energy it needs. This is the fundamental reason why men on average have higher energy requirements than women at baseline; testosterone-driven differences in muscle mass. If you build up your muscle: not only do you look good and have better strength, you are increasing the amount of energy you consume by doing the same things you normally do.

At its basics, it's not a hugely difficult concept. I had a chance to talk to a few male friends and colleagues about it recently. The conversation somehow went into weight loss, usually after noting the changes I'd made to my own diet for different reasons. I was surprised at the resistance to it I got. I felt the difference stemmed from one important thing: a concern with losing weight as an absolute.

A common argument presented to me in defense was that muscle weighed more than fat. Well... so? That's a fact to note when you're having a workout, so that you aren't deceived by the scales. In itself, losing weight isn't an end goal. Being healthy, looking good and feeling good is the goal, right? What do the scales and balances you weigh yourself on have to do with it?

When I mention weight-lifting, I instantly get a worried reaction: 'you aren't turning into a muscle builder, are you?' Well, no, I can't really. I'd have to try much harder. I don't have the right hormone. Building up muscle is more than natural for a man. You can take it easy and save money by investing in a couple of weights and doing some basic exercises based on youtube videos. Upper body, lower body then abdomen or core. You can pretty much do it while watching television.

When you're committed to a pretty rigid food schedule like me, it's pretty interesting to see what'll happen when you don't eat. Since last week, I began to exercise a soft form of fasting by only eating maybe three times a day. Sometimes I went five hours without food. One evening and night I ate nothing at all, save for glasses of water. I also cut down on certain exercise by 50 percent.

The physical results are as follows. I've lost some mass on the chest. I've become much leaner around the stomach and have thus more accentuated abs. I have lost little to no mass on back, arms and thighs. I've begun to experience sleeping problems and sometimes feel unusually low on energy. I also get tipsy more easily.

The bottom line is that it's extremely important to eat correctly when you lift weights, maybe not so much in terms of what you eat, but how much you eat and when. My week-long fasting not only proves how fast your physique can change when you don't consume enough energy. It also highlights how the body interacts with the mind and how important it is to eat before you go to sleep. I don't want to get any leaner, and so I currently recharge with loads of raw spiced salmon and beer.

The pattern is to me pretty obvious at this point, having worked out at several different gyms at completely different parts of the country. The guys who are really big work out a lot less than the rest of us. They take long breaks between sets and are often seen just talking with people on the bench. I could think of a bunch of reasons why this seems to be the case:

(a) They don't feel like putting on much more weight than what they already have.

(b) They train less but more often.

(c) They've reached the point where they don't need to put much energy into exercise to get good results.

(d) They've lost the spirit.

(e) They've got superior genes and thus can achieve more by doing less.

I suspect it's a mix of (b) and (e). Some people obviously have bodies that enable them to build really good muscle mass if they train right. Unfair, it might seem, but I would stress that the beauty of lifting weights is the lifestyle itself and not only the effects it has. Work hard, eat a lot, and challenge your mind. Choosing a specific way of life and following it through should be part of every man's destiny.

Every time guys discuss weight lifting, they compare how much they max out on the bench. It's a quite ridiculous competition, all pretension aside, because in relation to a serious exercise program, it's pretty irrelevant.

I never max out when I work out. After I've been on the bench, I need to continue lifting for about 1,5 hours. That'd not be fully possible (with good results) if I maxed out on the bench. And for what reason? If you want to collect injuries, maxing out is a good way of doing it. Maxing out is a pseudo-macho game that spells I-am-not-really-working-out-for-real. If you did, you'd look more at sets, reps, technique--and food.

If guys want to compare bench marks at the gym, I don't see a problem with that. It's just annoying when they confuse their activity with real weight lifting or body building, because that is more lifestyle than one time achievement. Without continuation and technique, you won't go anywhere.

John Cloud at Time presents an interesting article on exercise and weight loss. His main thesis: exercise is pretty useless for weight loss. Cloud argues that we need to focus on how we eat and not so much on exercise. Is he right? Let's look at the arguments presented in his article:

One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out?

You can never isolate exercise and suggest that determines whether you'll become fat or lean. Weight depends on your lifestyle as a whole, where exercise is one key component, but hardly the only one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

This is what Cloud calls "the compensation problem." Your metabolism increases when you commit yourself to hard exercise, so you end up having to eat more food after work out. How do you fix this problem?

First of all, it's important not to eat too much. The easiest way to do this is to spread out your meals during the day, so that you at least have four meals a day, preferably more. This means maybe breakfast, one large meal and two smaller meals. Those who engage in really hard training four days a week or more, a group to which I belong, you'll naturally need to have more large meals.

Secondly, what you eat makes all the difference. Cloud mentions he munches on muffins and greasy burritos after exercise. That's simply not going to work. There's no "reward" coming for exercising if you want results from all your hard work. You will need to predominantly eat healthy food. I, and most food experts today, recommend a paleo-oriented diet, which includes:

• Lean meat (pork, chicken and beef)
• Offal
• Fish
• Seafood
• Eggs
• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Nuts (not peanuts)
• Spices

Drink mostly water (spice with lemon or lime juice). Sure, you can drink beer, munch muffins and eat pizza, but rarely, and after that the compensation game sets in: more exercise, more healthy food. Remember that exercise, unless you've already achieved a program of maintaining your weight, is not about finding a balance. It's about progressing, meaning you cannot do exercise and then "compensate" that with candy, because then you're reverting back to your post-work out state. Cloud's got a point in highlighting this feature of our psychology, but unless we completely remake our entire lifestyle, we cannot succeed with anything.

The third thing I want to mention here is how you exercise. Many people, like Cloud, figure they'll burn lots of fat by simply doing cardio for 30 min. Especially women fall for this. While everyone's gotta do cardio, one way or the other, it's not the ultimate fat burning exercise. This is what body builders have known for decades: if you want to lose fat (and increase muscle strength), you engage in resistance training. I recommend warming up with cardio for 10 minutes, then doing various forms of resistance and strength exercise the rest of the time, for ultimate fat burning effect. You'll feel a lot stronger, too, and the body will keep burning off energy for days after the exercise (opposed to most aerobic exercise).

Church, who is 41 and has lived in Baton Rouge for nearly three years, has a theory. "I see this anecdotally amongst, like, my wife's friends," he says. "They're like, 'Ah, I'm running an hour a day, and I'm not losing any weight.'" He asks them, "What are you doing after you run?" It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward. Says Church: "I don't think most people would appreciate that, wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you're going to neutralize with just half that muffin."

Nice anecdote. The only problem is that running is pretty useless for burning fat (although it's great for increasing your lung capacity), and you have to run for at least 40 minutes before you even begin burning fat in the first place.

You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn't matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn't exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn't muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does?

Fat tissue can never become muscle tissue, and muscle tissue can never become fat tissue. What happens when you exercise hard enough is that fat is burned, and if you strain your muscles and then supply them with enough protein after work out, you will increase in muscle volume. The classic myth goes that body builders will look like jiggly slobs when they quit exercising, because their muscles will transform into fat. What has happened in those cases is that they've not cut down on their diet when their metabolism has decreased.

After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in "sports" drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you're hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it's easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting.

That sounds like a nutty lifestyle. First of all, let's be clear here: products like Gatorade more or less contain expensive fructose and syrup. I don't understand why people buy this stuff, and if you've only been running for 20 minutes, you're not going to need 130 calories, which would be an overtake even for most extreme body builders. After work out you quickly need to consume proteins and fast carbs, which is why many people use gainers. You have to think about what you eat after you've taken one of those, and so it's obviously nuts to bulge 130 g of fructose and sugary syrup after a quick jog around the neighbourhood. Let go of those sugary drinks, find quality products, and get enough exercise to justify use of such products in the first place.

But there's some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded.

I think this is the one positive truth expressed in this article. Working out hard at the gym or running a lot is always good, but you still need your daily exercise. This means you should consider:

• Walking or taking the bike to most places you regularly visit, including work, boy/girlfriend, and the supermarket (carry those heavy 4-kilo-bags baby!).
• You've got a good reason cleaning the house/apartment. Don't forget to get under the bed and suck up those dust balls with the cleaner.
• Gardening is awesome, even if done in the kitchen, keeping herbs fresh and flowers alive.
• Walking around your neighborhood is good for two things: (a) basic exercise and (b) getting to know your close community by heart.
• Building stuff. Yeah, this especially applies to men. Remember how fun it used to be creating that bird box or stool when you were a kid? It still is, you simply need some wood, tools, and an hour or two of your free time with buddies in the garage. Decorating your house with home made things will drive your woman crazy, and the kids will enjoy it.

What's the conclusion?

I'm going to bring it to you factually simple and hard:

- Exercise is great for your mental and physical health. Try to eat less and more often, and when you do, aim for a paleo-oriented diet.

- Exercise outside the gym or aerobics hall is very important.

- You cannot exercise and then compensate with calorie bombs for dinner.

- Exercise, whether you're burning fat, building muscles, or both, is always about progression until you reach a level of satisfaction, at which point you switch to maintenance mode.

Of course, if you're a Nietzschean or Faustian, chances are you're not going to become satisfied unless you reach the top of your abilities. I wish everyone good luck maintaining your weights and reaching for the stars.