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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

#211

Post by eloff »

CryoLogic wrote: post #206

The title to this article is very manipulative and misleading. Weight loss seems to be a mysterious science to the everyday man and woman, but is well known by most top athletes and has been for many years. It is simple chemistry. The calories you eat are stored in fat, which is comprised of O, H and C. Roughly ~3500 calories will become one pound of bodyfat. By this logic, yes you can eat less calories and lose weig…

While I appreciate the logic behind this, and agree in principle, it's an overly simplistic picture.

If you decrease your calorie intake your body compensates by lowering your metabolism. Between this and the decreased metabolic burden of carrying less fat and muscle, this is why many dieters find that their weight loss plateaus after a while of making progress.

As far as low-carb diets in particular, there are also additional factors. If you get the carbs down under about 20 carbs a day you can go into ketosis, which is a wasteful metabolism. You literally piss away some 10-20% of your calories.

But the biggest benefit of low-carb is you don't have those blasted carbs (and especially sugar!) adding calories to your diet without triggering the satiated response in your brain - you just eat less on a low-carb diet, without feeling hungry.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#212

Post by [deleted] »

spinlock wrote: post #207
kazinator wrote: post #201

Exercise didn't work for me until I stuck with it consistently, and progressively. The problem is that what doesn't work is "strawman exercise": for instance, the kind of exercise that a sedentary volunteer test subject is able to handle in some study. Before exercise works for fat loss, you have to train up to the intensity and volume that is required. That takes months. Consistent months during which you not only d…

The other thing that the article doesn't address is how much weight you gain in muscle when you exercise. When I go from out-of-shape to back-in-shape, I know that I've increased my muscle mass as well as loosing fat. That doesn't show on the scale but it definitely is what I'm going for. Also, increasing your muscle is going to increase your resting metabolic rate. So, as you exercise and get stronger, you'll burn m…

[deleted]

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#213

Post by dpark »

spinlock wrote: post #205
tomp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? If I had to choose between thermodynamics and medicine being wrong, and people not being able to accurately estimate how "much" they eat and how "little" they exercise, I'd bet all my money on the latter. The simple reality is, people have vastly different appetites. I eat fast and am always hungry. I have two coworkers, one eats qui…

Your body is not a bomb calorimeter. If you're looking to thermodynamics to explain weight loss or gain you'll be disappointed.

It's not that far off. If you're not looking at calories in and calories out first, you'll be disappointed. Thermodynamics doesn't cease to operate inside the human body.

Sure, if you're tracking your food intake closely, maintaining a significant deficit, and not losing weight, talk to a doctor about your thyroid. If you're putting in hours in the gym and eating a lot and not gaining any muscle, talk to your doctor about your testosterone level. But if you're looking to hormones and whatnot first, you're probably just deluding yourself.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#214

Post by amckenna »

ape4 wrote: post #195

I like the iterative method. Everyday look at a scale. If your weight has gone up, you did something bad the day before... don't do that again.

As someone who has tracked their weight on a daily basis for the better part of 8 months, I wouldn't suggest doing that alone. Your weight will fluctuate by a few pounds day to day and sometimes will trend up for a few days, then down for a few. What time of day you weight yourself and factors like your hydration level will play a part.

What I did was weigh myself every morning and record my weight and body fat %. Then calculate a rolling 10 day average. That was nice because if my weight went up for a day or two but overall was trending downwards it was visible. Graphing it and watching the graph go downwards was very motivating.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#215

Post by beloch »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #197
beloch wrote: post #166

What other people see when they look at you is determined almost entirely by your diet. Nobody can see your muscles if they're buried under blubber. How you feel, on the other hand, is hugely impacted by your physical activities. Not only does exercise give you energy and focus, it has a huge impact on mood. Exercise is more effective at fighting depression than most medications. There's more to being healthy than be…

An idea that carries some weight (heh) with me is that your weight consists of four 'compartments' Skeletal: Hard to argue that more skeletal mass is 'bad' Muscle: Also hard to argue more is bad Subcutaneous Fat: This is what people don't like. Visceral Fat: This is the stuff that kills you. If you're judging the progress of your cunning diet and exercise plan using a bathroom scale, you're going to be disappointed b…

People who build up a lot of muscle sometimes fall into odd BMI classificiations.

e.g. Phil Heath, Mr. Olympia winner of 2015, is 5'9" and 250 lbs at competition weight, which would classify him as severely obese (BMI 36.9), even though at that weight his body fat is probably close to the minimum a human can tolerate.

For most people, there's simply no way to build up that amount of muscle without some form of chemical assistance (e.g. steroids). If your BMI falls into the obese range, it's exceedingly unlikely that you're just big-boned and muscular.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#216

Post by [deleted] »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #197
beloch wrote: post #166

What other people see when they look at you is determined almost entirely by your diet. Nobody can see your muscles if they're buried under blubber. How you feel, on the other hand, is hugely impacted by your physical activities. Not only does exercise give you energy and focus, it has a huge impact on mood. Exercise is more effective at fighting depression than most medications. There's more to being healthy than be…

An idea that carries some weight (heh) with me is that your weight consists of four 'compartments' Skeletal: Hard to argue that more skeletal mass is 'bad' Muscle: Also hard to argue more is bad Subcutaneous Fat: This is what people don't like. Visceral Fat: This is the stuff that kills you. If you're judging the progress of your cunning diet and exercise plan using a bathroom scale, you're going to be disappointed b…

[deleted]

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#217

Post by dpark »

Scramblejams wrote: post #128
fattylite wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a bad title. The title should have been "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight without changing your diet". If you eat the same amount as you did before, assuming that was maintenance calories, you will lose weight if you begin exercising. The problem is when you're intaking 1500 more calories than necessary before you start exercising. You can't burn that off to the point of a deficit with exercise alo…

Except I didn't eat the same as before. I ate more, way, way more.

I bet you didn't, and this is the problem with anecdotal evidence. People are terrible at tracking their actual caloric intake and expenditures.

24 miles a week is a decent bit, but it isn't that much. If you add 24 miles a week but eat a lot more, you will gain weight.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#218

Post by agrona »

The article claims that

>We have no control over our basal metabolic rate

and then links to a page[1] that explains

>Muscle cells require more energy to maintain than fat cells, so people with a higher muscle to fat ratio tend to have a higher BMR.

and

>Muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue, so increasing your muscle mass will help you lose weight.

It doesn't seem to address this discrepancy, though (that by exercising to build muscle mass one can affect their BMR and thus the lion's share of the calories burned).

[1] http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/loseweight/Pages/how-can-I-speed-...

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#219

Post by dpark »

pjlegato wrote: post #132
fattylite wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that. My point was that I've never seen a plan where people tell you to eat as much as you want as long as you do x hours of activity per day. The only plans I've seen like that are for strong men competitors or where the Rock ate like $300 worth of food every day and worked out for six hours daily.

That is exactly the nutrition advice that has been promoted in various government and school health programs for decades: eat what you like, just do X amount of exercise and you'll be fine. Calories in, calories out. The article goes into some detail about this, mentioning that a great deal of that research was funded by companies that make sugary drinks and other high-calorie food.

That is not the advice that's been given by health programs. Everyone has said "diet and exercise" for decades.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#220

Post by Axsuul »

I'm surprised the ketogenic diet is not mentioned at all. It's becoming clearer and clearer that obese people are likely much more insulin resistant than the rest of the population and as a result much more carbohydrate intolerant than the rest of the population. The insulin response these people are experiencing is causing them to store much more of the energy that they consume, especially if it contains fat. However, if you get rid of the carbs but still consume the fat, your body instead becomes adapted to burning ketones for fuel instead of glucose. So as a result, any fat that you may ingest while in ketosis gets burned for fuel instead of becoming plasma. Just saunder over to reddit.com/r/keto and you can already see the amazing transformations taking place.
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