Time's article - Exercise & Weight Loss

I've seen a couple of commentary pieces on Time's article,Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin, by John Cloud (9 August 2009). People have been touting their weight loss and increased fitness achieved by incorporating exercise into their diet plans... agreeing that the trip to the gym gives them a free pass to indulge in high calorie foods... and saying that exercise - regardless of the weight loss outcome - should be encouraged for the cardiovascular and mental fitness benefits.

Personally? Uh, yeah. Exercise isn't making me thin. I ride my bike to work every day and I exercise 5-7 days a week. Some of that is pretty long, or intense - track workouts on Tuesdays and long bike rides on the weekend come to mind first. And my weight? It's even climbing a little, now that I'm in my 30s. I do LOOK fit (and am, damnit), but I do not look, or feel, thin.

Now I'm trying to actually look thinner* - and it's challenging! I have a huge appetite. Mostly for healthy foods, but I like my desserts and drinks. As pointed out in the article,

"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.

Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll be more likely to opt for pizza. "

Good think I'm taking up knitting. Now I just need to get a sofa ;)

Seriously. While I'm not opting for pizza again and again, as the author implies, I will eat something that's probably calorically equivalent - though whole grains, veggies, good proteins, etc.
...............
Anyway, this article is well-timed for me, as it is a good reminder that it really is all about calories IN! I've been loosely tracking my eating habits and am moving towards a more calculated approach, using the iPhone app "Lose it!". I'll be essentially counting calories - which means measuring portions (ugh). However, I'm not doing it for non-starchy fruits and veggies. Just because I'm lazy. It'd be nice to have this stuff in there for the nutritional info (vitamins, minerals, etc), but I don't really care about the 10 calories in a cup of lettuce.

Thoughts? Advice? Experiences to share?

*I want to be thinner NOW while I'm in my early 30s because I don't think that it'll get any easier as I get older. And I would like to keep the (genetically hopeless cause) cellulite at bay. And I really want to be a faster triathlete. And I want to wear skinny jeans. And I want to test the "Looking good is the best revenge" theory at an event in October. And I mean thinner like athlete-thin, not model-thin.