Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight. Try it or your money back!
Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
111–120 of 396 posts
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#112I cut out drinks with sugar in them, eating after dinner, and in general just eating healthy meals. I lift weights about 3 days a week, and am fairly fit strengthwise. All this lowered my fat levels down to a reasonable level, but still left me with about 23% body fat and a bit of a belly, and that remained consistent. Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change. What I found has helped is doing a 24 h…
> Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.
That's not a surprise. Changing diet composition can in the short-run lead to lower caloric intake than what preceeded (e.g. SAD diet), but doesn't guarantee a sustained caloric deficit, which is why controlling for macros like fat or carbs eventually hits a wall. What are you going to do when there are no more carbs to cut? If you have a lot of excess to lose, you can't "intuitively" eat your way down to your target.
The fasts work similarly owing to deficit: a fasted day lowers the average caloric intake for the week (assuming you don't overcompensate other days). As with macros, here again, what are you going to do to increase deficit further? Fast for 48 hours? If with a fast your caloric intake isn't dropping further week-to-week, weight loss will stagnate.
Whichever approach, one of the pitfalls is steep deficit followed by metabolic adaptation i.e. crashing metabolism. This is why it's helpful to keep a small caloric deficit, and incrementally change your intake target. That is only reliably achieved by tracking calories.
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#113I have been, rather lazily I suppose, trying to tweak my diet in such as way as to lose weight; and with little to show for it. I'm not sure that there is much if any processed food still in my diet (maybe just the English muffin in the morning?). I stopped buying/drinking soda pop decades ago (a low-hanging fruit indeed — I lost almost 10 pounds within a month of making that dietary change alone). And since I have t…
So I will first emphasize, try to avoid a "diet" and feeling the need to eliminate anything.
Unless you just really struggle with impulse control and you need those guard rails, for me the only way that I managed to loose about 45 lbs was by looking at things this way.
I did not cut a single thing out of my diet, what I did was make smart choices/swaps at home that still satisfied cravings most of the time so when I want to go to the store and get a candy bar I will go to the store and get a candy bar and not feel bad about it.
Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore, I have switched almost entirely to water outside of milk in my coffee. When I am out I may sometimes grab a soda but meh.
I make homemade peanut butter. I buy dry roasted unsalted peanuts, add in a small amount of salt and its great.
Trying a bunch of different apples and finding the sweetest apples I could find, and then eating that with peanut butter for some added protein.
Strawberries with chocolate humas.
I started making my own chicken stock which had more flavor and less sodium.
Making my own heartier soups that tasted great.
Also... Seasoning. More than just salt and pepper. Some really good (non American generally) seasoning will go a long way and is basically a zero calory way to really good food.
Other random small changes that are very situational for you. Look at your snacking habbits, that is where most of my issues came in.
Where I could I would choose things that would also increase my protein intake. I didn't go crazy. I never counted calories or anything and the weight just came off. Sure I could have lost a bit more had I done that, but I am at the point now that is the 10 more lbs going to make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things as I work towards gaining more muscle anyways.
I realize this may not work for everyone, but I am not on any sort of "diet" in any traditional sense of the word. What I am doing now is perfectly sustainable for the rest of my life because I can still live my life and largely eat what I want within reason. I had taco bell today and don't feel bad about it in the slightest.
I should add that during most of this weight loss I did not change my workout habbits. I was focusing on my nutrition first. I do live in a city and I walk everywhere, but that did not change in this time.
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can confirm the same from my messenger days. On days when deliveries were sparse, we found ourselves moving from cafe to bakery, eating more pastries than a doctor would recommend. Regardless of the day's activity levels we would generally drink large amounts of beer after work and sometimes during. Maintaining weight and satisfying our appetites was always a more pressing concern. I'm not a dietician, but when I r…
what is "processed" versus "highly processed" versus "ultra processed"? the way these things are described feels very much like people are using a dowsing rod to find where to dig a well, or something. mumbo-jumbo. I'm sure even "super ultra giga processed" foods are fine for you so long as you don't eat a lot of them. I'm not even sure that "processed" is bad at all. I don't want to eat raw cashews, I'll die (as wil…
The big thing about processed food is that it is “purified” in a sense to strip it down to just starches, sugar, and fats. Think sweet corn vs corn syrup.
If you eat only processed foods but limit your calories, you will not become overweight. But you will not be getting enough fiber or micronutrients, and you will probably not feel full either.
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#115This reminds a little of Usain Bolt famously having chicken nuggets before his final at the Beijing Olympics. Although hardly indicative of a bad diet that he may or may not have had. I think as well there is some difficulty with variability between people that isn't clear or maybe doesn't matter at scale. The article linked study was across 43 nations with 4213 adults. Yet there may still be individuals who can argu…
I always found it strange McDonalds was an Olympics sponsor and seeing their ads for Big Macs, etc.
Like I wonder what the Grimace's 400 meters time is.
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#116> "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice going on in the background," Pontzer says. I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that…
Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.
Some do this, some go on binge fast cycles. Others just eat the food. It's different for everyone. Binge fast cycles are probably the easiest way to train this though.
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#117I have been, rather lazily I suppose, trying to tweak my diet in such as way as to lose weight; and with little to show for it. I'm not sure that there is much if any processed food still in my diet (maybe just the English muffin in the morning?). I stopped buying/drinking soda pop decades ago (a low-hanging fruit indeed — I lost almost 10 pounds within a month of making that dietary change alone). And since I have t…
As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful. Commit to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself to better eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just 'eat healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of calorie content of food.
Like I straight up just don't eat nut butters anymore because they are a massive calorie bomb, and I find the loose nuts more satiating. When you track for a while you start building an instinct for optimizing the satiety/calorie ratio of your meals.
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet
Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram whatever I can into my body. It’s pretty much whatever I feel like eating, I’m going to eat".
How many hours per day was he swimming?
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#119Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason. The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so…
> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it. Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty o…
You very much can outrun a bad diet as far as weight loss/gain goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).
Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
#120Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason. The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so…
Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.
Totally agree with you here. The phrase "rounds to true".
Caveats for the pedantic:
If you've found yourself overweight and sedentary, you are unlikely to adopt a level of exercise needed to outrun your bad diet.
All else being equal, the person with the better diet will have a better body comp (or achieve a goal body comp easier).