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It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

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Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to reduce weight, then lower your caloric intake. You don’t even need to workout. Just measure your calories and keep decreasing them until the weight falls off. If you want to add in exercise, that’s great too, and then you can eat more calories. But if you studiously count calories and reduce them, you will lose weight - it’s guaranteed. If I put you on a desert island and starved you, you would lose we…

It's not a mystery, but it also sort of pretends that humans are robots. That is, the human body has developed homeostatic mechanisms over billions of years, and a big part of that is that if your body thinks it's starving, it will try its hardest to (a) make you hungry so that you will do whatever you can to eat more, and (b) slow your metabolic rate so you don't die.

Yes you will be hungry but we are sentient beings who can ignore the urge to eat, just as we can control other base urges. You don’t see an attractive person and assault them, or someone with a desirable object and immediately steal from them. It’s called self control.

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Saturday night my kids went to sleep, wife goes to sleep, I work out for 2 hours at 10pm. What was everyone else doing? Watching Netflix? People pretend there’s no time but it’s all illusionary.

You answered your own question? It sound like everyone else was sleeping. It's odd to suggest that people will have enough time to exercise if they just cut into their bedtime. Is the idea here that you sleep in the next morning, and then your wife wakes up earlier to take up your slack? Is this your suggested solution for everyone? Increase your free time to exercise by reducing someone else's?

You don't exercise in your free time, just like you don't work in your free time.

edit: No, I do it in the time I set aside to exercise.

This might seem foreign to you but to me it's no different from someone saying "I need £100 to pay the rent" and so they make time and find a way to pay the bills (usually a job). They don't "work in their free time", they structure their life around it because income is important to them.

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#73
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One hour of reasonably intensive cardio burns 500~600 kcal. If you have two such workouts a week it comes down to an increased energy use of 2 600/(7 2500) = 7%. Or a large meal. Just looking at the numbers it seems spending some time at the gym is not going to do much for loosing weight. Or said differently: eating 7% less is easier. Not sure about this. Herman Pontzer's work shows that the body adapts by burning fe…

Not this again: “Burning 600 calories with exercise means burning 600 fewer later.” No it doesn’t. That work is highly misinterpreted. Because it doesn’t ELI5 how body mass and composition and steady vs unsteady state actually play into it, people take away a meaningless self serving interpretation. If you start running 4-5 times a week, I guarantee you’ll be eating significantly more and burning significantly more.…

I don’t think most people (besides some naive readings of that research) should come to that conclusion. The proper conclusion is that it will offset some of the calories burned by exercise through reduction in NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis), but not all of it. So a 600cal exercise may only have an effective net calorie addition of say, 400cal, due to reduction in NEAT.

The problem becomes when people do the naive calculation of exercise calories (Eg, I ran 2 miles so I burned 400cal, so I can eat 400 extra calories), and come to the wrong conclusion.

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question? It sound like everyone else was sleeping. It's odd to suggest that people will have enough time to exercise if they just cut into their bedtime. Is the idea here that you sleep in the next morning, and then your wife wakes up earlier to take up your slack? Is this your suggested solution for everyone? Increase your free time to exercise by reducing someone else's?

My point is that everyone is lifting excuses instead of lifting weights! Get to the gym and stop complaining

Do you tell your wife to get to the gym and stop complaining when you go off to exercise without her at 10pm?

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question? It sound like everyone else was sleeping. It's odd to suggest that people will have enough time to exercise if they just cut into their bedtime. Is the idea here that you sleep in the next morning, and then your wife wakes up earlier to take up your slack? Is this your suggested solution for everyone? Increase your free time to exercise by reducing someone else's?

You don't exercise in your free time, just like you don't work in your free time. edit: No, I do it in the time I set aside to exercise. This might seem foreign to you but to me it's no different from someone saying "I need £100 to pay the rent" and so they make time and find a way to pay the bills (usually a job). They don't "work in their free time", they structure their life around it because income is important t…

Right, you exercise in your bedtime instead.

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that everyone is lifting excuses instead of lifting weights! Get to the gym and stop complaining

Do you tell your wife to get to the gym and stop complaining when you go off to exercise without her at 10pm?

No I communicate with my wife and tell her things

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. A better way to word it might just be that I prioritise it. I find that a lot of people say "I can't do that because X". I see it more as, well, I have to do that, so I can't do X, then. As you say, scheduling time.

On Saturday night my kids went to sleep, wife goes to sleep, I work out for 2 hours at 10pm. What was everyone else doing? Watching Netflix? People pretend there’s no time but it’s all illusionary.

That’s terrible for your sleep.

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#78
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to stop maximizing income in order to get fit and healthy. I schedule time to work out in my calendar. My wife and I prioritize workouts as necessary time. You can eat at a restaurant and order healthy options and drink water. People who blame their work for being unhealthy are making excuses. I’ve worked 60 - 70 hours a week for 2 decades and I’m in excellent physical condition.

The problem is that top-level competitive work takes a lot of mental and emotional effort. So even if I’m spending time on health, I can’t do it work 100% effort, and so result is still suboptimal.

I have trained myself to shut off work when I stop working. This took a lot of time. Very rarely nowadays is my sleep or time outside work disturbed by what is happening at work. It’s a meditative practice, but once you really get in the mindset of work being for work, family for family, sleep for sleep, etc. then you stop being bothered.

Re: It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

#80
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is your rebuttal to Pontzer et al that it doesn’t match your personal experience?

My own experience matches closer to Potzner's work. I see some initial loss on the after exercising but the rebound is really fast. Perhaps if you keep it up everyday there can be some long-term weight loss but it will not be continuous, and if you stop the weight will come back fast.

Isn't that kind of like saying that the tooth decay will come back real quick if you stop brushing your teeth?

Most people need to supplement their activity with exercise nowadays because otherwise their lives are very sedentary. It's a forever thing, unfortunately for those that don't enjoy it.

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