You can't outrun a bad diet
A funny twist on this saying: You can't outrun a cheeseburger.
too true. When I trained for a marathon I did not watch my food intake and figured I'd just automatically loose weight: I did not :/
To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
61–70 of 145 posts
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#62I've found I lost more weight walking (long walks) than doing intense exercise. Cole (Snake Diet guy), had an interesting comment/hypothesis, when your exercise is intense you burn sugar (easily accessible). Your body senses that it needs a lot of energy (fight or flight scenario)and this leaves you craving to replace that energy that you burned (sugar).
When you do a low impact cardio exercise (walking below 4 MPH), your body doesn't want to burn that sugar you have, saving it for an emergency (flight/fight). It sees you have all this fat and determines that your energy burn rate can be sufficiently supplied by burning it. So it ends up using fat instead of sugar. Maybe burning through this fat (walking long walks) and not burning through your sugar reserve, remodels appetite hormones (Leptin).
Leptin is secreted mainly by white adipose tissue, and levels are positively correlated with the amount of body fat
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829242/
The trick is keep it low impact, slow walking, for 2 or more hours a day. Combined with short 48 hour fasts and a 2500 Kcal re-feed day, it's a game changer.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#63The majority of weight is lost through respiration, that's the C in CO2. Exercise is great for health, and does help weight loss. But diet is the only thing that is going to resolve this. You consume far more calories in a regular sized Milkyway then you're going to burn exercising in 50 minutes that's for sure. Here's a chart of just those tiny "fun sized" Halloween candies. https://www.popsugar.com/fitness/What-Tak…
While it is true that exercise cannot solve excessive calorie consumption (since exercising makes us eat more), it is important for weight management. A lack of exercise screws with the body's feedback loops, undermining its "metabolic flexibility": its ability to handle sugar and fat efficiently. Let's take a look at just one perverse feedback loop.
When your body has a glucose spike, it is very important that its billions of muscle cells are willing to say "yes" to insulin and uptake that glucose. Otherwise, the body lacks an efficient disposal mechanism. If you don't contract muscles throughout the week, insulin production has to go up to yell louder at muscle cells to please, please take the glucose. High insulin levels also sends two messages to fat cells: 1. do not release current fat stores for energy, and 2. absorb glucose to create more fat. When all that glucose finally is taken up by cells, and if insulin does not fall quickly enough, fat cells do not release energy (because insulin is telling them not to), and so the body becomes hungry even though it has excess fuel available.
Our bodies evolved under the conditions that we exercised to an extreme quantity everyday. Without exercise, its energy management systems get all nutty. Some level of exercise is important to avoid perverse, counterproductive feedback loops that undermine our goals.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#64That's 50 minutes per day with a day off per week. Two pomodoros. E.g. cardio in the morning and resistance in the afternoon. That sounds like a lot to fit into a busy life, but a low price if it's all it takes to emulate the health of the hunter gatherers we evolved from.
It sounds like a lot because it is a lot. You don't need to workout six days a week to reap the benefits. With fitness, the difference maker is being consistent in the long term and not burning yourself out.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to say although last time I looked into this literature really deeply, it seemed like distance was kind of the key. That is, most health gains could be equated by distance in that whatever gains you'd get from 1 hour of walking, epidemiologically speaking, would be accrued by running the same distance that's covered in that hour of walking (on average or whatever).
Work = Force * Distance. Practically you're more efficient walking than you are running, but walking is nearly as effective as a calorie burner as running, it just takes longer.
When it comes to muscles, is force times distance particularly useful? If it were, holding a plank or a squat for hours would be zero work.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#66Assuming fifty percent efficiency, that’s ten hours a week. Or basically a part time job without considering the time it can take to eat a healthier diet. And fifty percent efficiency is probably high considering clothes and showers and travel and equipment acquisition and maintenance and distribution of these throughout a week. Plus recovery time after working out.
Yes, it’s possible and people do it. But it’s got a whole host of dependencies that are ordinarily subject to breaking changes.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#67The majority of weight is lost through respiration, that's the C in CO2. Exercise is great for health, and does help weight loss. But diet is the only thing that is going to resolve this. You consume far more calories in a regular sized Milkyway then you're going to burn exercising in 50 minutes that's for sure. Here's a chart of just those tiny "fun sized" Halloween candies. https://www.popsugar.com/fitness/What-Tak…
Have you ever struggled with weight loss? I mean serious 60-80 pounds overweight and done it successfully?
I've spent 30 years bouncing between 260 and 185 pounds. Every single time I've successfully lost weight it started with exercise. Diet alone has absolutely never worked for me.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#68I see a lot of comments from people I suspect have never struggled with weight loss here. "Put the fork down" is easy advice, but for many it's a lot more challenging than it sounds. For me, and I suspect a lot of people, focusing on exercise first is the key. I can plot the number of miles I post on the bike against my weight. Of course I absolutely do more than 300 minutes a week on the bike. Diet is super importan…
My failures in dieting have always been from losing sight of my goal, and my successes in dieting have always been from making a proper decision.
My current target is feeling hungry most of the day, usually eating a ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast and lean meats/vegetables for other meals, and if I'm still very hungry by the end of the day I may indulge in a protein or granola bar and possibly a small glass of milk. I feel like my target of feeling hungry helps put the hunger pangs into perspective, and helps me stay on track.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#69I found that the psychological impacts of only creating a deficit via diet are over long term not negligible, and this gets worse as you get leaner. At low body fat percents (low teens and below) you'll start to feel hungry all the time and it will impact moods/productivity. So I find myself forced to eat more but claw it back with exercise, which is great anyway because of all the other benefits of exercise. The degree to which you do this is the big question mark. In addition, the net achievable deficit while remaining happy as a function of exercise ratio is in my experience a U shape - if I exercise too much (e.g. a few ~2K cal hikes) I become ravenous, to the point that eating large amount of food barely makes me any less hungry, and almost always net out in the wrong direction. So this is a great kind of study, though my current happy setting all things considered is hovering around 150min/week.
Re: To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Exercise is a hilariously inefficient way to lose weight (but it's really good for you, otherwise). The metabolic boost that vigorous, regular exercise will give you will also make you hungrier, so you're still in the woods if you can't moderate what/how much you eat anyway. Less Cal in than out is the way to go.
> Less Cal in than out is the way to go. That mantra always drives me nuts. Not because it's false (on the contrary, by the laws of thermodynamics it's trivially true), but because it's not helpful for people trying to lose weight as it ignores the dynamic homeostasis systems of the human body. I.e. as reported by this article, if you try to increase your "out" energy expenditure, your body releases hormones specific…
> Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out".
...as well as torturing you and trying to trick you into gorging.
The "calories in / calories out" people make me angry too. There's an old joke that goes: "Q. How do you carve a statue of an elephant? A. Take a big stone, and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." Technically true, completely useless in practice.
What people need is methods which take into account these regulatory mechanisms. Fasting one day a week (dinner until breakfast the day after) may give you the same calorie deficit as eating 300 less calories per day than you're burning, but it's a heck of a lot more pleasant to have 1 day of complete abstinence and then 6 days of homeostasis, than spending 7 days a week wrestling millions of years of evolution, and being blamed as having "no willpower" when you inevitably fail.