111–120 of 293 posts
Why not replace the phrase "lose weight" with "become slimmer"?
We're not actually concerned with losing weight, but in fact with losing a specific TYPE of weight.
It makes it a lot easier to come to terms with instructions like: "keep your insulin down and your fat cells will empty"
The scale is an imperfect measure for slimness and lose weight is the wrong phrase to describe what we're generally trying for.
Obviously these are sweeping generalizations, if you feel the need to poke holes, you're probably right. I'm going for brevity as opposed to a "think piece" - please feel free to take the comment with a grain of salt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's literally just calories in vs. calories out. If 400 calories/day meets your weight loss goals, all you have to do is make sure that the calories you expend + the calories you no longer intake = 400. The ratio of those two factors completely varies from person to person on what their motivation levels are going to be, but as long as it works for you it will result in the same amount of weight loss as any other ra…
The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong. "Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
That's why I said that you have to find some compromise that works for yourself, I didn't say where that balance lay for most people.
It's not.
It's saying that if a person's goal is to lose weight, then adjusting to a good diet is far more important than (a reasonable amount of) exercise.
The article does not claim that exercise is harmful. In fact, it explicitly states that there are very many health reasons why exercise is important, and that exercise+diet is still better than diet alone.
It also goes into the culture surrounding exercise, and how it tends to be misleading. The education in popular culture around exercising presents it as a magic pill, as being a major driving force behind weight loss. You see this on magazine covers and on tv, "belly fat exercises", "toning exercises", all sorts of exercises that serve to reinforce the idea that weight is primarily a result of physical activity rather than (for most people) food consumption.
Ultimately though, I think the studies referenced back up the conclusion pretty well: weight loss effectiveness goes diet+exercise > diet > exercise, given standard amounts of each.
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.
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…
Indeed, but people who want to "lose weight" actually don't care how heavy they are, they care how they look and want "to be slimmer" which is the actual result we're trying for while colloquially using the term "lose weight" to describe that effect.
(this is of course a sweeping over-generalization where there are actually a number of other reasons, related to health, fatty liver etc...)
With a goal of "BEING SLIMMER" we're actually more interested in draining triglycerides from our fat cells so they shrink. (after that we can induce apoptosis and kill them off via freezing but that's another story).
Since the goal is to drain fat cells, we're actually better served by keeping our bodies in the state where they are "emptying the fuel tanks (stored fat)" as opposed to "burning the cheap stuff (carbohydrates)"
By reducing CARB intake we can keep the fat-cells open and draining. BUT in order to reduce carb intake, we have to replace it with a macronutrient which will induce satiety.
Dietary fat is that macronutrient.
This article, including the title, is a bit of a mess. Nothing in it refutes the commonly accepted principle that if you burn as many daily calories in exercise as you consume in food, you will not get fatter. The point of the article seems to be simply that the modern Western diet is so high in calories that it's difficult to do enough exercise to make up the difference. The survey study they cite talks about exerci…
According to the scientist's theory, you get diminishing returns, where you have to do ever more and more exercise to burn the same number of calories.
As long as you ignore the body's impulse to eat more than usual when you finally do sit down for a meal, it can very much work in your favor. There's also a phenomenon people refer to as "shrinking stomach" (that I've observed first hand) where your body adapts to feeling more full on less food. I don't know if your stomach actually shrinks, but it feels like it.
If you don't sufficiently often resist the urge to eat more than you need, your body will adapt to that intake level and there will most likely be a rough patch when you try to change the trend. I believe most people can push past this uncomfortable period and stop feeling deprived after a while.
FWIW, my experience disagrees with this. I was overweight, started running (starting around 9mi/wk, when I got bored and stopped I was up around 24mi/wk), and started losing weight quickly, lost a ton of it over a year, after which I was at a very good weight for me. Now, as the piece touches on, that exercise did change my eating, but the outcome of that isn't clear to me -- I stopped eating/snacking for a few hours…
I'd bet there is some exercise intensity threshold step function at work. The article says exercise is, "only around 10 to 30 percent [of total energy expenditure] depending on the person (and excluding professional athletes that workout as a job)," implying that when you are doing lots and lots of hardcore exercise almost every day, it will use up a greater percentage of calories.
I recall another study -- no idea where I'd find it now -- which did body scans of runners. They found that runners which averaged 11mi/wk had substantial interior fat deposits. Runners that averaged 17mi/wk had very little.
Actually, did a bit of Googling, looks like it might have been a study by Dr. Uwe Schütz published in 2009, found a mention of it here: http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/weight-loss/running-the-life-s...
I've found online reaction to this article quite interesting. Normally data and study minded folks bring out the "anecdotally, this doesn't seem true" responses, and people seem think the article is attacking exercise as a concept. It's not. It's saying that if a person's goal is to lose weight, then adjusting to a good diet is far more important than (a reasonable amount of) exercise. The article does not claim that…
diet & exercise >> diet >>>>>>>> exercise
I like this quote: "You work hard on that machine for an hour, and that work can be erased with five minutes of eating afterward"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's literally just calories in vs. calories out. If 400 calories/day meets your weight loss goals, all you have to do is make sure that the calories you expend + the calories you no longer intake = 400. The ratio of those two factors completely varies from person to person on what their motivation levels are going to be, but as long as it works for you it will result in the same amount of weight loss as any other ra…
The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong. "Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
Furthermore, the graph of energy expenditure over time (in section 10) directly agrees with what calories in/calories out predicts. See, for example, how perfectly the "very low calorie diet" agrees with the exponential decay predicted by theory.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.htm...