According to John Cloud, you’d be better off watching another episode of Glee than sitting on one of these babies. Photo by Alex Castella, licensed under the Creative Commons.

You wipe your sweaty brow and wish, not for the first time, that a) you had inherited your father’s skinny genes and b) that you never had to see the inside of Blomquist ever again.

What if you didn’t? What if the American Heart Association’s recommendation of 30 minutes, 5 days a week, were a big fat fiction?

If you stumbled across Time staff writer John Cloud’s most recent article, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” you may have already canceled your EAC membership.

According to Cloud, exercise may actually prevent us from losing weight. Despite a slight increase in the number of Americans who regularly exercise, our waistlines have increased at a far higher rate. If we are solely concerned with losing weight, is exercise the answer?

The problem with exercise, claims Cloud, is that it stimulates hunger. So if you eat more than you burn off, you aren’t going to lose any weight. You may even gain a few pounds.

Cloud bases his argument on a study in which 464 overweight women with high blood pressure were separated into three groups that exercised for varying amounts of time per week. All the participants lost weight, but the women who exercised the most did not lose significantly more weight than the other two groups.

Cloud suspects that the women who exercised indulged afterward, either because they were hungrier or because they felt entitled to a reward. While Cloud acknowledges the health benefits of exercise, he argues, “From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting.”

Even if we take this bold statement at face value, what about those health benefits that Cloud glosses over?

Timothy Church, chair of health wisdom at Louisiana State University, was head supervisor for the study Cloud cited. Church told North by Northwestern, “[Exercise] is the most powerful thing we have for maintaining health in aging the way you want to. Modern medicine is going to help get people to where they want to be, but it won’t guarantee you to have the life you want to have.”

Church expressed his displeasure with the Time article, and said that the author misquoted and misrepresented his findings. “[Exercising] increases the likelihood of healthy aging, reduces the risk of dementia, diabetes, depression, and certain cancers,” he added.

He doesagree that maintaining a proper diet is essential to weight loss.

“Exercise does not give you a free pass to eat what you want,” he said.

The most important lesson from his study is not that we don’t exercise, but that we don’t become “overcompensators” after working out. Church defines overcompensators as “people who overestimate the amount of calories they burned during exercise.” If you’re hitting up hot cookie bar right after your workout, chances are, you fall into that category.

But what if you want to reap the health benefits of exercise andlose weight?

To combat hunger and avoid making poor food choices, SPAC personal trainer Malcolm Rogers recommends “putting together your own snack bag of stuff you like” to bring with you to the gym. He says that an ideal healthy snack bag would consist of raw, unsalted nuts and some sort of dried fruit. Rogers considers working out to be “a balancing act and it all comes down to what you’re putting in your body.”

Instead of discontinuing your exercise regimen, reconsider those workout “treats.” If you’re starving after a vigorous workout at SPAC, fight the hot-cookie urge and bite into an apple.