So they eat like shit but are healthy because of a 30 minute jog. Right.
Well::
More recently, exercise physiologist Glenn Gaesser has championed a health at every size frame, writing that "people should be physically active, eat healthy foods, and not obsess about the numbers on the scale." Gaesser argues that physical activity and a diet high in fiber and complex carbohydrates and low in fat and sugar are more directly linked to good health than is weight and that improving diet and becoming more active do not always lead to weight loss for all people. He points to research showing that one can be "fat and fit" just as one can be unfit and thin and that it is fitness - not weight - that matters.
Gaesser heavily cites Steven Blair, who is a professor of exercise science and has published scores of peer-review articles in leading scientific journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showing that physical fitness better predicts health outcomes than BMI. In fact, Blair's work has shown that, among people with the same level of physical fitness, BMI has no effect no mortality from all causes. Blair says that he believes that "obesity travels in bad company," in that it is associated with higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and knee osteoarthritis, but that obesity itself is "the wrong target" of health interventions. The target, he says, "should be lifestyle," including a healthful diet and regular physical activity." He expresses frustration with the disproportionate focus on energy intake and relative inattention to physical expenditure in the literature on obesity and is adamant that "it's inexcusable now for scientists to study obesity and not take physical activity, carefully measured or cardiorespiratory fitness, into account."
And there has also been an epidemiological study which estimated that as many as half of those categorized as overweight and nearly a third of those categorized as obese had normal (e.g. healthy) cardiometric profiles); this is admittedly less than the nearly three-quarters of normal weight people who had normal cardiometric profiles but it certainly points to the
possibility of being both healthy and overweight.
People should be encouraged to eat well and exercise, I agree. And if they lose weight, great here's a cookie*. If not, at least they are living healthily. It has been suggested - and I think it makes sense - that the emphasis on exercising and eating more healthily for the express purpose of losing weight and not for its intrinsic benefits to your health can have a discouraging effect. If you repeatedly diet and exercise, lose weight and then fail to maintain that, you may well give up on it. If you are exercising and eating better not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, perhaps that wouldn't be a problem? I don't really know, myself.