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That being said, I think the author of this article tries way too hard to be counterfactual. If you put an obese male or female on the treadmill with modest caloric restriction, over time they will lose weight on a log scale.
This article misses a key point: increased muscle mass correlates with increased calorie burn. Not all exercise is created equal. Exercise that doesn't build muscle is indeed ineffective at burning fat. But exercise that DOES build muscle has a compounding effect on burning fat. Your muscles require more energy to maintain, so they will burn more calories just by existing.
Anecdotal evidence from being a gym rat for 20 years, although I'm sure there are studies out there to prove this. Maybe :) No doubt that diet+exercise is the way to go when it comes to long-term weight management. The thing is, "weight loss" in and of itself is a misleading metric. You're losing weight! Great! But hold on a minute - your gut is the same size but your biceps is smaller and your strength is way down.…
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But calories from fat are more satisfying and might very well let you eat less calories over all.
This is why I can't see anyone eating 4000 calories of fat without feeling so full they'll throw most of it back up.
I went from 190 lbs. to 138 lbs. over 6 or 7 months. The only exercise I did was jogging for 45 min a day. What I noticed was that jogging made me feel better, which somehow got me to consistently eat better. After a days jogging I didn't want to put crap food in me and ruin what I had accomplished and by doing it everyday I felt good enough, often enough to stick with it. So, based on my experience, I simply can not…
Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.
I went from 190 lbs. to 138 lbs. over 6 or 7 months. The only exercise I did was jogging for 45 min a day. What I noticed was that jogging made me feel better, which somehow got me to consistently eat better. After a days jogging I didn't want to put crap food in me and ruin what I had accomplished and by doing it everyday I felt good enough, often enough to stick with it. So, based on my experience, I simply can not…
I should note I spent the first month ramping up from 20 min of jogging to 45 min of jogging which is why I put 6-7 months. If anyone decides to start jogging based on what I wrote, please don't go from nothing to 45 min a day. I didn't do that.
I'm about to start something like this as I have the 'losing weight but losing it from the wrong bits' issue mentioned in another post.
I am physically active, I don't drive, I walk around 3 to 4 miles a day as part of my commute, I go up and down three or four flights of stairs quite a lot of times a day (I'm a teacher and timetabling systems seem to have a Saltationist bias as they have us jumping between lessons) and I work mostly standing up and moving around a large room. So I imagine a vaguely similar activity profile to the hunter gatherers mentioned - I'd love more detail on miles walked per day &c.
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Fat is very dense in calories, so if your goal is to reduce caloric intake, reducing the fat will go a long ways towards that goal.
I'm regretting commenting now. Like a bikeshed next to a nuclear plant, anybody who has ever lost any amount of weight has an opinion on how it's done. Reducing fat reduces caloric intake. Note the word reduce (I even emphasized it), instead of remove, or replace. Yes, fats are a healthy part of a good diet. No, you should not omit them. Of course, don't take my word for it. RTFOP, which made the recommendation in th…
The way I view it is to maximize the enjoyment out of food. Don't just view it as fuel to be ingested as fast as possible; savor it! Appreciate the flavor of that rice, that bacon. It may sound like becoming a food snob—which it can if one has elitist tentencies—but it's more about appreciating the components that make up the food we eat, and turning it into an art.
An implied requirement for that is to slow down and take the time to eat. There's about a 20m delay for the feedback loop of satiation to occur. So eating slowly and in courses gives our bodies the time to appreciate what is coming in and for the mechanisms to provide better feedback. I'm always amazed at how some can ingest a 1800 kcal meal in 15 minutes: no feedback can happen that fast.
(Disclaimer: yes I'm French)