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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

#241

Post by lazylizard »

davidw wrote: post #109
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…

I've been riding my bike a lot lately, and I have lost weight. I find that exercise, for whatever reason, also makes me want to eat healthier. Sometimes it also actually takes the hungry away: I recently did a 6 hour bike ride, leaving at 1000, and getting back at around 1600, and I was not all that hungry, despite having eaten only a few energy bars during the ride.

those 'energy' bars are like 1000 calories each? u ate a few of them?

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#242

Post by driverdan »

billmalarky wrote: post #88
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/…

> If you stay active you will lose strength on a calorie deficit but you will not lose muscle mass.

That's not true. If you're on a calorie deficit you will lose muscle mass. You'll lose less if you exercise.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#243

Post by orionblastar »

thedz wrote: post #114

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…

I went from 260 pounds to 199 pounds in about a year or so simply by eating less food and cutting out junk food. Only eating fast food when in a hurry and then only a small sandwich like the McDouble which only had one slice of cheese and the Double Cheeseburger had two slices of cheese.

I didn't exercise much just did some walking.

I took in less calories by eating less food for the tl:dr people.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#244

Post by adriand »

zaroth wrote: post #236
brashrat wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can put your hunger to work for you, but you need to remind yourself that, if you carry extra pounds, hunger is what weight loss feels like. That ravenous feeling if you can keep it going, that right there is the success. celebrate it, and stop killing it.

it's interesting reading the hunger vs. no hunger debate. Personally I can't imagine losing weight without feeling hungry. Of course not constantly, of course not to the point of crashing, but you have to moderate the feeling. For some people it can pass in about a week, and you adjust to just eating less, and you hopefully stop feeling hungry. But I think almost everyone goes through at least an adjustment period.

I think this is true. I've never been very overweight so I admit it was easier for me to do this than it would be if I had to do it for longer, but I dropped ten pounds primarily just by drastically cutting the amount of food I ate for lunch. This led to feeling hungry at work, but when I'm working I'm very focused and able to ignore what my body is telling me. I suspect many other people here are the same way - if you find you're able to work for long periods of time without a break and you can drop into "flow", you may be able to lose weight by just eating less during those periods.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#245

Post by davidw »

lazylizard wrote: post #241
davidw wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been riding my bike a lot lately, and I have lost weight. I find that exercise, for whatever reason, also makes me want to eat healthier. Sometimes it also actually takes the hungry away: I recently did a 6 hour bike ride, leaving at 1000, and getting back at around 1600, and I was not all that hungry, despite having eaten only a few energy bars during the ride.

those 'energy' bars are like 1000 calories each? u ate a few of them?

Nope - 200 it says:

http://us-store.bouncelifestyle.com/collections/balls/produc...

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#246

Post by Aelinsaar »

thedz wrote: post #114

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…

The issue sadly, is that a lot of people online just respond to the headline, not the content of the article.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#247

Post by tew28 »

vacri wrote: post #225
fizx wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really important to stay hydrated, because your body often mistakes thirst for hunger. Drink water every 10m in the pool. Also, I often take a small amount of heavy protein immediately after the workout (~1/2 of one of those 33g protein bars is typical), then jump in the shower. Between these two habits, I've killed the post-swim binge. Hope it works for you too!

> Drink water every 10m in the pool That means you'd need 5 drinks to complete just one length of an olympic-size swimming pool! :)

Seems like the m here means minutes

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#248

Post by ryao »

I feel that those who think that exercise is a solution for weightloss either have an absurdly good metabolic rate or have an unrealistic view of how much time people can devote to exercise.

I had tried to lose some weight a few years ago and everything O tried had failed, including exercise. At one point, I purchased a digital scale and performed multiple measurements a day of my weight. They confirmed that additional exercise (e.g. walking a few miles) had negligible impact on my weight.

Afterward, I decided to redesign my diet for weight loss. I was able to lose 50 lbs in roughly 3 months by that alone. The idea was that my body had an abundance of energy such that all I needed were nutrients to keep my body going and a certain volume in my stomach to trick it into signaling my brain that I was eating sufficiently. I ended up consuming a multivitamin pill, egg whites, tofu, brocolli and fruits each day for the better part of those 3 months. I calculated that doing that lowered my daily caloric intake 800 calories a day.

Sadly, I ended up regaining about 30 of them after pressure from certain relatives to eat more got to the point where being fatter was preferable to having to deal with it. The entire time, I had been considered overweight to obese by my BMI so the pressure to eat was in no way because I had gone overboard, although I had come within 5 lbs of attaining a "healthy" BMI before I regained some of the weight. My mistake was switching to Soylent after deciding that I did not want to lose weight so quickly. The idea that I was not eating food triggered my relatives' "lets try to feed him" reaction.

Lately, I have started to try doing this again by consuming a daily multivitamin pill, water, spinach, "beyond meat" fruits and a daily bag or two of popcorn (to clear the pantry). The popcorn will be eliminated as soon as I have finished the remaining supply, but even eating the popcorn, I am losing weight by doing this, although it is definitely not as fast as it would be had I not decided to finish off that popcorn.

The first time that I lost weight, I had a relative who attended weight watchers. The people at weight watchers were horrified when told how quickly I managed to do it and talked about studies about the dangers of rapid weight loss. My feeling was that they did not want to lose a source of revenue and that being as fat was worse for me. In hindsight, I think that they would have been right had I been anywhere close to a healthy weight at the time as what should matter is the percentage of weight lost rather than the raw numbers. The closer that I approached a "healthy" weight, the slower my weight loss became and when I was within 5 pounds of it, I had started to feel somewhat light headed, which is when I decided to try lose by weight more slowly rather than force it through a large deficit in my daily caloric intake.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#249

Post by vannevar »

pjlegato wrote: post #116
vannevar wrote: post #65

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…

The point of the article is that the relationship between "amount of exercise you do" and "calories you burn" is probably not linear, as has traditionally been believed. 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.

But the study they cite to support that view talks about very low levels of exercise (1100 calories a week) in the long term studies. If the diet calorie surplus was comparable in both long and short term, it's not surprising that the results were disproportionately low in the long term compared to the short-term studies: with such a low level of exercise, it wouldn't be surprising if the measurement error was significant. In a longer term study, it's tough to control for what people do the rest of the time.

And in their discussion of the Hadza tribe, they admit that the Hadza could be resting enough at other times of the day to offset the increased calories they expend for food gathering. All that does is tell us that given two populations that exercise about the same amount, the one that eats less will be leaner. That says nothing about whether the Hadza could remain lean on a Western diet if they also exercised more, which is the real question. Nowhere in the article is that question actually directly addressed. The study of marathoners they cite points out that the subjects increased their intake while they trained, which unsurprisingly limited their weight loss.

If you eat the same amount but exercise significantly more, you will lose weight. If you eat significantly less with no increase in exercise, you will lose weight. Nothing in this article supports with data the conclusion that the latter approach is better than the former.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#250

Post by HappyTypist »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #180
yuzi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trick I've learned is to not have pop in the house. My girlfriend hates me for it :). Honestly I couldn't have quit pop if I did have it there. At one point she would buy it for her, but somehow I found myself drinking it so we had to have a discussion; thankfully she accommodated me. Ideally you and your family can get on the same page in terms of diet, but I imagine with kids that can be extremely challenging.…

This works, but then if you have a job with free soda...discipline is still needed.

I like water more than soda. If you'd like some flavour then try squeezing a few drop of lemon juice
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