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Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

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Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#81

Post by tzs »

revelation wrote: post #23

The title says "you shouldn't exercise to lose weight", which seems to suggest that exercise will negatively affect your ability to lose weight. There isn't a single study here that proves this rather lofty hypothesis.

You are taking the title as meaning

  lose weight => ! exercise
or equivalently

  exercise => ! lose weight
That's not what the title is saying. What it is saying is

  ! (exercise => lose weight)

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#82

Post by tossaway1 »

keithpeter wrote: post #79
yuzi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://www.pcosfoundation.org/5K%20Running%20Guide.pdf 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 Salt…

> I'm a teacher and timetabling systems seem to have a Saltationist bias

Are you a biology teacher? I had to look that one up...

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#84

Post by misterspaceman »

paulsutter wrote: post #67
ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #46

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.…

Exactly - percent bodyfat is a much better target metric than weight.

Agreed. The problem is that weighing yourself is easy, but measuring body fat is way harder. Most of the at-home measurement tools are wildly inaccurate; the accurate ones are either expensive or inconvenient.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#85

Post by pascalxus »

Our body's software is so hopelessly out of date. It's programmed to preserve fat at all cost: something quite useful, say 2 million years ago when famines were happening almost every day.

Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are barely aware of the basic mechanisms which govern our fat production, not even understanding how it works. So far, all we have is theories, hypothesis, correlations and some compelling experimentations.

Personally, I'm waiting for the iBody app to come out. iBody, will allow us to control our metabolism at a cellular level, dialing it up or down at will. We'll be able to control our appetites and hungers at the push of a button too. But, at this rate, who knows how long it will take to get this off the ground: 100s of years, thousands? Come on investors, this is a multi-trillion dollar market.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#86

Post by cwyers »

criley2 wrote: post #41
falcolas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. This thinking empowers so much over-eating in today's diet world. There's a trope with the broken low-fat wisdom that when you buy low-fat foods, you're almost always buying high-sugar high-salt foods (have to replace flavor somehow). Even worse, upper intestinal lipids trigger a feelin…

If you buy processed foods that are advertised as fat-free or low-fat variations of foods that would typically be expected to be other than low- or non-fat, yes. A head of cabbage doesn't have sugar added to it to make some kind of low-fat cabbage.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#87

Post by soundwave106 »

yuzi wrote: post #43

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…

The article title is kind of clickbait-y, isn't it?

I kind of agree with the article that the diet changes are more important for the weight loss angle. However, when it comes to being healthy overall, I actually think exercise is more important. You can be overweight by BMI, physically fit, and better off overall health-wise than a thin person who is a couch potato. http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/05/can-you-be-fat-and-fit...

Anecdotally, I know someone who has gone from 300lbs to 140lbs using a combination of exercise (walking) and diet changes (Weight Watchers). I think both were equally important to her success, personally.

Some of the article to me was, er, a bit of a stretch. Take point 7: "Exercise may cause physiological changes that help us conserve energy". And the only linked citation is to a paper outlining that people with different genetic composition respond differently to exercise, and a meta study that involved both diet and exercise? "Starvation mode" to extreme diets is well documented, so where's the paper that links to just exercise causing slower metabolic change? I mean, perhaps it's possible, but it runs against the consensus I've heard, so basically, [Citation needed], because what was provided doesn't say what that paragraph said.

I do agree with the article that policy should focus on the low-quality food angle.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#88

Post by billmalarky »

ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #46

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.…

Muscle requires a lot of energy to maintain, so when your calories drop your body starts shedding it to be more efficient so long as you are also inactive.

If you stay active you will lose strength on a calorie deficit but you will not lose muscle mass. That's why you can do a cut, and your lifts will go down but you still look great at the lower body fat. The muscle mass is still there.

http://fitnessblackbook.com/main/starvation-mode-why-you-pro...

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#89

Post by keithpeter »

tossaway1 wrote: post #82
keithpeter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.pcosfoundation.org/5K%20Running%20Guide.pdf 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 Salt…

> I'm a teacher and timetabling systems seem to have a Saltationist bias Are you a biology teacher? I had to look that one up...

Nope, I teach basic Maths to adults: many nursing students so I collude with the real Biology teachers to link up the lessons.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#90

Post by dota_fanatic »

pascalxus wrote: post #85

Our body's software is so hopelessly out of date. It's programmed to preserve fat at all cost: something quite useful, say 2 million years ago when famines were happening almost every day. Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are…

It's utterly easier to just make and advertise addictive food, completely throwing nutritional quality out the window. What if you could even claim your addictive, mostly empty junk is healthy? Therefore funding and studies with the intention of obfuscation and the control of the progress of understanding.

The world would have to look very, very different than today's for something like an iBody app to come into being. Where's the money to be made in people having that much control over themselves? The goal is to sell more (eg) donuts, not less. To defect is the norm.

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