The key is to not eat the quarter pounder after exercise, even if your body cries for 3.
Yup, that’s the problem. If you run 5 miles you burn about 500 calories. Hardly enough to make up for even the fries in the meal. A lot of people overestimate calories burnt and underestimate calories consumed.
A bit of exercise every day is good for your heart, lungs, circulatory system etc. but it won’t make up to overcome an otherwise sedentary lifestyle if you don’t change your diet.
Yep I’ve lost 30kg and by far the biggest thing that allowed me to achieve that was to start counting my calories. At first that’s all I did, only later I started to introduce weight lifting and exercise to prevent losing too much muscle and to start making them stronger and more visible.
Weight training also helps considerably, as while it doesn’t directly burn as many calories as intense cardio, bigger muscles require more calories to maintain, so by building muscle you’re increasing your resting calorie consumption
Totally. Also while you may not burn as many calories during the session itself compared to the same time doing hard cardio, your muscles stay “activated” for up to 48hrs after the session, continually making you burn more. And then like you said eventually once you have bigger muscles your daily expenditure is higher at all times.
Exactly this, like obviously you should exercise, but when it comes to losing weight it’s really the diet that matters most.
I actually, within the span of about a year, went from 280 to 179 lbs through diet alone, I literally did no exercise. I’m 6’ btw.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t exactly recommend that, without exercise you’ll also be losing tons of muscle. But my point is that diet is incredibly powerful.
It’s the diet only in the sense that if you’re not careful you will just eat the extra that you’re burning, but if you keep eating the same and start being active when you weren’t, we can say that it’s being active that made you lose weight.
Sure, we can say it, people try to convince themselves of lots of things.
Input stays the same
Output changes
Me: “What changed? The output.”
You: “Sure, your can convince yourself of that”
Kilos in the kitchen,
Grams in the gym.
People should stop seeing food intake as transactional (ie, I’m doing extra cardio so I can eat a muffin later) and just focus on maintaining a calorie deficit.
Nah the key is to get rid of insanely calorie dense ultra processed garbage that digests in minutes and makes you feel like shit. Roast chicken breast with tons of herbs and it’s delicious - you can quite literally eat as much of that as you can physically handle and you wont gain weight. Plenty of ways to cook veggies that make them delicious. Fruits arent that many cals and fill you up. Unsweetened yogurt is the same cals per protein as protein powder. Dont eat cereal or half the packaged garbage in the grocery store. Just eat real food and it’s a million times easier to lose weight.
Well the issue here is that food companies have been pushing the calorie balance mantra, you can eat more as long as you exercise more, except studies have shown you cant, the mantra “you can’t outrun your diet” exists for a reason.
Kurzgesagt has a good video on the workout paradox https://youtu.be/lPrjP4A_X4s?si=KQUibk9D3Cj8sYyi
Renesaince Periodization is a good youtube channel for science backed methods for losing weight if you are interested, but spoiler alert, it takes a long time and you need to eat less for periods of up to 3 months then stay at that weight for the same amount of time before continuing your weight loss to avoid bounce backs and excessively diet fatigue
Ah, good. Yes. I haven’t been completely ignoring my weight loss goals and just managing to not get any fatter over the last several months… I’ve been using SCIENCE. BITCHES. 😤🧪✨
Well actually Dr Mike from RP does talk about that, sometimes you need time to reset and not to think about your diet to help to clear your mind and then you get back to weight loss when you can, when you are feeling like, you know what, I am feeling good, I want to eat healthier and lose weight.
It is an interesting video. My main takeaway was that we burn the same amount of calories regardless of activity, but when we are sedentary our body uses the calories for evil (inflammatory) purposes.
Well inflammation is a bit overblown as to how bad it is, it is literally required for muscle gain, so those people doing cold plunges are literally killing their gains as they say.
But yeah interesting video, I do wonder if the prevalence of anxiety and depression is more due us having access to way more calories than needed and doing way less exercise than needed and our brains going into overdrive rather than due to mental health awareness
Kurzgesagt vid goes into some specific and recent research about how our body uses calories, but the idea that exercise can’t help much with weight loss seemed obvious to me just by looking at the numbers.
A brisk pace on a treadmill will burn 260 calories per hour. At a fast pace–which most people wouldn’t be able to keep up for an hour when starting out–it’s 680 calories. Meanwhile, a single 12oz can of Mountain Dew is 170 calories; simply cutting one can of soda out gets you more than halfway to a decent hour’s workout.
As the vid also states (and is supposedly to be covered more in an upcoming part 2), there are other benefits to exercise, but burning more calories that way is a fool’s errand.
But I want that can of Mountain Dew…
I admit to not watching that video, at least not yet. But the idea that a person can’t eat more while exercising seems to conflict with the first law of thermodynamics.
I cordially invite you or anyone else to sell the lazy among us on watching the video above. Dispel our concerns… if you dare.
Edit: I gotta say. At -22 currently (sure to increase after this), and with a ton of really great, informative responses below… What are we doing here?
I asked an open question encouraging discussion if anyone is interested in doing that. So why all the down votes? Was it the “if you dare”? Didn’t think a /s would have been necessary but maybe it wasn’t clear?
And look. This isn’t about my imaginary comment score. It’s about community. The comment section is for discussion. Feels like once a comment gets one or two down votes everyone else just adds to them without considering the content. Do we want Lemmy to be a place for interaction or not?
The problem is that practical advice is often misinterpreted or misconstrued.
“the idea that a person can’t eat more while exercising”
You can, of course, eat more while exercising.
But you can’t eat much more while exercising, because running while eating is a choking hazard.
I’m kidding, but that is the nature of what I’m getting at.
But really–you can’t eat much more during the day because exercising just doesn’t burn much more calories. And eating a lot more calories is relatively trivial.
The gist of the video is that the brain is a really powerful regulator of how much energy you use. Do a ton of exercise and it’ll find energy savings elsewhere.
But as you build up muscles you constantly need more, even when not doing anything
I’m not sure I understand your point.
Each human has an amount of calories they burn even when they do nothing (the amount of calories you burn obviously goes up when doing things)
This basic calory burning or whatever it’s called in English is influenced by a few factors, one of them is how much muscle mass you have, those muscles need energy to simply exist, even when not exercising.
So people who regularly do sports indeed can eat more - they not only can eat more, they have to eat more (even when they do the exact same things as someone with less muscles)
Yes. But this is talking about trying to lose weight. The video is saying there seems to be a hard limit on how much you can burn over what you eat as long as you’re eating the minimum requirements for your body. Before burning fat your brain will make subconscious changes to your behaviour (and even automatic systems like your immune system) to use less energy.
Yeah the video talks about that. Compare two people with the same muscle mass, one has a sedentary lifestyle while the other has an active lifestyle. They both burn about the same calories in a day. Many people are only doing cardio training when they train to lose weight. Because they don’t want bigger muscles. Thus they don’t lose any fat anymore after the first few months since their muscles hardly get any bigger.
A really fat person who wants to lose fat in a reasonable amount of time needs to gain serious muscle mass to lose weight without reducing their caloric intake. While if they just adjust their diet they will lose fat much fast.
Cardio alone will allow you to lose weight for sure. If you have a net higher energy expenditure through a day, you will burn more calories and if the diet stays the same you will lose weight.
The argument is just about how you increase that expenditure. Having more muscle mass and just existing will burn more calories and regularly doing cardio will burn more calories.
Will you be more lazy and thus expend less ‘base’ energy on days that you do cardio? Probably. That just means that you have to do enough cardio to offset that difference.
You know what’s even easier than both cardio and gaining muscle though? Not drinking calories, using lean ground beef instead of full fat, replacing some of the carbs in your meals by more veggies, eating fruits instead of sugary snacks, getting more protein in your diet, … If you’re consuming a fuckton of calories a day, there’s no amount of muscle that’ll allow you to lose weight.
As far as I understood the video this is true but not right away, our body ‘normally’ wastes a ton of calories on things like excessive immune responses so at any level of fitness between modern office worker and hunter gatherer your calorie requirement is unchanged as its just shifting that calorie consumption back to where its supposed to be. Past that point yeh you need a higher baseline amount to keep going.
Building muscle raises your daily maintenance calorie requirement.
Raising your daily burn rate makes it easier to be in a calorie deficit.
Core issue is that physical exercise might move the needle 5 or so percent in terms of your total energy consumption in short term, a tad more longer term if the exercise builds some nice energy hungry muscle mass.
Though exercise helps on a lot of other fronts (insulin resistance, cardio vascular health, joint health, its not enough change in activity to counteract much extra food intake.
I would posit if you are lazy, you aren’t doing the kind of work that would be required to out eat a bad diet. There are plenty of skinny people who have organs that look more like force fed geese than human, and there are fat people than finish the Ironman.
The people who can “out eat” a bad diet probably don’t eat like you think they do, or even they say they do. Even when Michael Phelps said he ate 10,000 calories of junk food, he was getting likev maybe 2,000 of the 10,000 calories he ate a day from pizza at night.
Most people won’t out work out a bad diet cause they don’t actually know how many calories they are taking in and they aren’t training 8-12 hours a day 50-52 weeks of the year.
I haven’t yet watched it either, but I’ll take a punt. It’s very hard to apply the first law to bodies, because we ingest, burn, store, and excrete in very complicated ways. It’s not as simple as calories in vs calories burned.
In the end, it is though. Over time, If you create a calorie deficit, you lose weight and if you create a surplus, you gain weight.
However, how much you lose or gain depends on a lot of factors. And most importantly, when we lose weight, we are fighting millions of years of evolution to not eat. So the diet fatigue is real.
But if you take your current weight, measure your daily calorie intake for a week or two and then slightly reduce your daily calories below that intake, you will lose weight.
but- my doctor told me that although i’m bedridden, if i just start fasting, i’ll be able to walk without pain again 🧐🤌 /s
edit: this is a joke about the american healthcare system frequently deciding that overweight patients would not have a problem if they weren’t overweight, and many doctors also preaching the CICO (calories in, calories out) method, it is a joke agreeing with the poster
The video says your immune systems and glands go into hyperdrive when you’re not working out, and give you chronic inflammation and stress. When you work out, your body’s other systems chill the fuck out and stop killing you, and in total you burn the same amount of energy.
I thought the same thing, but turns out the body is really damn complicated. Worth skimming the papers they link in the video - basically your body adapts over the course of ~6 months or less if you become more active by saving energy elsewhere. Things like inflation and basic metabolic functions can burn way more energy than they need to.
it likely doesnt violate thermodynamics since caloric intake isn’t likely to be super representative of actual converted energy. Likewise, an individuals energy consumption is also likely to vary as well, even in the case of certain consumed foods. Wouldn’t suprise me if there was data suggesting asian people consumed food in a marginally different manner to american people, for example. There are just certain things the body adapts to, and over time engages with biased selection for.
So I have not watched the video, but I have read the book Burn by herman pontzer. And it seems that the body makes up for it in other ways as described in other comments. But your body can and will burn more calories than your normal amount if you do lots of exercise.
The example used in the book is a study the author did where he tracked the calorie usage of people running across the US. They were burning a ton of calories every day (and eating a bunch too). And somehow over the course of this ultra marathon thing, people actually started burn less calories as their body adjusted to the load.
But yeah, do lots of exercise and you’ll feel tired and conserve energy. Do a ton of exercise and your body will burn lots of fat.
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You are not immune to the basic laws of thermophysics. Weight loss is literally calories in < calories out.
No shit. That’s not some great revelation and I’m kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch. Your body is very good at conserving energy. Not to say exercise isn’t beneficial, it is, it’s just not a great weight loss tool. Not at last as good as common wisdom might suggest.
The caveman in your skull is also very persuasive, and wants you to eat far more than you need, because it thinks you might not be able to find food again for a while. The caveman really likes carbs, and foods high in sugar and fat, and will ask for more the second you have any.
Ignoring the caveman is hard, harder for some than others. It’s also taxing and after a while the caveman will wear you down.
Effective weight loss isn’t just about putting less food on your plate. Fucking anybody can do that and it’s exceedingly obvious to those trying that that’s what they need to do.
Losing weight is about beating back the caveman in your skull, convincing him that he’s had enough, and feeding him in a way that also nourishes the body you both live in.
There’s a reason most people fail, and fail repeatedly to lose weight. It’s as simple as eating less but it turns out, eating less for people who eat a lot isn’t actually that simple. There are psychological and physiological drivers causing them to keep going back for more, to lie to themselves about how they’re doing, and to ignore the obvious cues that something isn’t working.
It really is the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or “just don’t take any drugs, duh” of weight loss. Like, you can’t just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. It’s reductive and unproductive.
People aren’t having trouble with math or willpower, they’re having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on “most”) readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
It’s almost identical to saying “just stop taking drugs.” Or “just stop drinking.”
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, they’re literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
It’s also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. I’m slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.
Not really, evidence suggests that between average people you will see at most 4% difference in BMR
If it’s not a big difference, how does it lead to such divergent results? I’d suggest that a 4% difference is in fact pretty big, as that’s the equivalent of over 500 calories a week.
Do you have a link for the evidence? I’d be interested to see what it says about calorie absorption, as I suspect that has an even greater effect. Unfortunately, everyone just seems to repeat CICO as though it’s easy or simple to measure either of those inputs with accuracy. People just hope they’re average and that it will work normally for them. Most people are average, so that works for a lot of people, but not everyone.
I personally don’t digest animal fat well, so anything other than white meat chicken will give me the shits. I don’t eat animal products anymore, but when I did, I obviously wasn’t receiving 200 calories from 200 calories worth of beef. My sister has celiac’s, and when she realized it and stopped eating gluten, she gained a bunch of weight, because she was finally absorbing calories from her diet.
just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work
That’s literally exactly how it has worked for me. Obviously it takes some will power and discipline, but so does basically everything.
Our individual stories do not always translate to the bigger picture, gmtom. You might have grown up in a household where you were insulated from the predations of the processed food industry. You might have had better habits instilled in you as a child. You might have had a positive body image at one point in your life, to serve as inspiration for your weight loss journey. Maybe none of those are true and you truly are one of the lucky (and hard working!) ones who escaped this situation just like the addicts who recover through willpower alone. Regardless, we cannot all rely on being gmtom.
My final paragraph is not focused on the individual but on the epidemic of obesity. We cannot solve this through brow beating about CICO just like Republicans aren’t going to solve the drug addiction crisis through jailing everyone with an addiction. People are using food to fill a hole in their lives, just like drugs, and we have to do the hard work of figuring that root out. Otherwise, we are doomed to become ineffective and unhelpful, leaving people to suffer.
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There have been many times that I justified gaining weight via alcoholism because I thought maybe if I was disgusting no one would assault me again. Turns that that’s not only not true, I’ve become disgusted with and hate my own body. So now I have a crippling alcohol addiction in addition to hating myself, and being afraid of interacting with certain people.
I’ve done a lot of therapy. And I will continue to do a lot of therapy. I almost graduated from therapy this spring, and had curbed my alcohol intake. But, then I had to get a restraining order and my brain fell right back into it’s old habits. It shouldn’t be this hard to feel safe as a middle aged adult lol
Hey friend. I’m on your team here. I can’t help you but I’m rooting for you so hard.
It’s hard. Fuckin hardest thing you’ll ever do. You don’t have to succeed in one try, or all at once. Every day is another chance to succeed just a little bit more, even if you stumbled yesterday.
Shit’s hard, it sounds like you have come a long way. I’m rooting for you ❤️
Thank you 💜
You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch.
Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
That’s serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it’s far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
What is serious athlete level of performance? 10x for at least 30 minutes/day seems pretty manageable for someone without significant medical conditions to work up to in a short period. Even if you eat back 80% of that, it can still lead to an equilibrium weight that’s like 20lb less.
I can’t believe the number of people on here who keep repeating that exercising can’t replace eating less… If you eat the same amount of calories as before but increase the calories you burn by 500 the result is the same as reducing how much you eat by 500 calories while maintaining the same daily needs. Heck, long term doing it through exercising is better for you as well!
Burning 500 extra calories working out is an extremely intense workout, especially considering how sedentary most people are.
The benefits are also short lived, you can burn some extra calories for a bit but your body will adjust, and after a while the number of calories you burn during a workout tapers off and you return to about the same number you were burning before.
This is a well documented phenomenon. Human bodies are really good at conserving energy.
You lose weight in the kitchen, you tone up in the gym.
An estimated 1000 extra calories in about an hour for me is an extremely intense workout (the only time I estimated to have done that, my average heart rate during it was 173 - it was only based on HR and some basic data input like height and weight). I’m not a particularly active person and I’m overweight.
500 though? If you spread it out of 2 hours, its hardly anything at all. When I commuted by ebike daily, I was probably burning double that 6 days a week compared to driving and it felt very casual.
500 though? If you spread it out of 2 hours, its hardly anything at all. When I commuted by ebike daily, I was probably burning double that 6 days a week compared to driving and it felt very casual.
“probably”. Like most people, you are severely over estimating what you burn. This morning I cycled 40km without assistance and climbed 500m along the way. It wasn’t my hardest workout ever, but not “very casual” either. That was 850 kcal.
Roundtrip commute was 55-60kms. A bit hilly during parts and frequent slowing and speeding up during parts because part of the ride is on a hike & bike trail with frequent pedestrians. Assist does a lot of that work, but I also probably have a broken idea of what counts as casual because I get bored really easily. If I’m trying to exercise for an hour, I aim for an average HR above 160. Anything less and I consider it casual. On the way to work, I’m generally trying minimize sweat, so I probably aim to stay under 130bps (but I fail sometimes), so I’d call that very casual. Still 1 hour at 130bps is about 650-750 Calories/hr for someone of my size (about 210 lbs) according to various calculators vs about 110-120 Calories/hr mostly sitting and standing (if it was just sitting, probably under 100). On the way home, I don’t have to worry about sweating, so I exert myself more (guess that was would only be casual instead of very casual?). So overall, the lower estimate of those calculators put it at like 1100 calories above mixed sitting/standing.
In general, I’m hesitant to believe those types of calculators and generally consider HR a mediocre estimator, which is why I express some doubt. Still, about 1000 calories above pure sitting seems quite reasonable.
People really don’t want to be told that exercising isn’t as hard as they think…
I’ve been at a BMI of nearly 40 just a few years ago. Fast walking to the car like 100 ft away left me out of breath (which is when I decided I was going to lose weight that time). It certainly can be hard when you get to the point like that. And any attempt at doing so just makes you feel embarrassed to be in the state you are in without actually burning a useful amount of calories. Exercising certainly is not how I started - I just stopped eating as much and that’s also unpleasant when you start and it takes time to get your body to eating less (and it pretends its starving in the meantime). Also, not everyone is my size nor does everyone enjoy pushing themselves to their cardio limit (or at least, they don’t know what activities they enjoy enough to do that or they aren’t able to regularly do that).
For me, exercise has had mixed results for me. Sometimes, I’ve used it to justify eating so much more that I probably put on weight. This was particularly true when I started doing long-distance bike rides (like 100km rides); I tended to mistake being tired as needing calories, so I’d overeat just because I needed rest or sleep - the goal wasn’t to lose weight though, I just liked riding. When I combined it with intermittent fasting, its been pretty effective because I’m more limited by stomach space when eating all my calories for the day at once. So I couldn’t really eat any more. But its not a method for everyone.
Also, there’s a time commitment. I haven’t biked in a while because I’m at work like 70+ hours a week during the summer. Probably unsurprisingly, I’ve put on a fair bit of weight this summer. The only way I’ve been able to get consistent exercises is being a NEET or via a commute. Guess when I first got a VR headset, there was a few months where I was probably averaging an hour or more per day of at least moderate intensity exercise (and eventually intense exercise as I got better). For people who have other commitments like children, I’d hope they’d get at least a fair for of exercise playing with them during their younger years, but eventually that goes away for many and there’s still the time that you need to spend with them.
That’s because your weight goes down so even at rest your daily needs are lower than they were before, you can still go a long way by just doing exercise you weren’t doing before and keeping the same diet.
Also, 500 extra calories isn’t that much if you’re doing cardio intensive exercises, that’s a 5 miles, jogging that’s under an hour at a very conservative pace, walking that’s two hours…
If you eat the same amount of calories
That’s an important distinction qualifier. Its really easy to at least consume more and at least partially offset some of the gains.
A kind of ‘side benefit’ to muscle-building exercise, is that it increases the amount of calories your body burns ‘by default’, because by weight, muscle takes much more energy to maintain than fat.
So on top of eating less (fewer calories going into your body), you can ‘attack’ it from the other side at the same time by increasing your body’s ‘consumption’ of the calories/energy stored in it.
This is a commonly repeated myth. One I believe myself until talking to my doctor about it.
https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitness-muscle-myth-20110516-story.html
Seems like its a “technically true” but in practice irrelevant because muscle and fat only make up a tiny percent of total energy usage (because things like the brain, heart and liver are so energy intensive):
For fun, let’s run the numbers in even more detail, adding the role played by body fat. Bouchard sent me a follow-up email explaining that — based on the biochemical and metabolic literature — a pound of muscle burns six calories a day at rest and a pound of fat burns about two calories a day, contrary to what the myth states. So, muscle is three times more metabolically active at rest than fat, not 50 times.
Again, let’s use me as a guinea pig and do the math. The 20 pounds of muscle I’ve gained through years of hard work equate to an added 120 calories to my RMR. Not insignificant, but substantially less than 1,000. However, I also engaged in a lot of aerobic activity and dietary restriction to lose 50 pounds of fat, which means I also lost 100 calories per day of RMR. So, post-physical transformation, my net caloric burn is only 20 calories higher per day, earning me one-third of an Oreo cookie. Bummer.
And that’s why I referred to it as a ‘side benefit’. It doesn’t do much more, but it’s not nothing, you know?
Not to mention all of the other more overt health benefits from exercise in general.
Effective weight loss isn’t just about putting less food on your plate. Fucking anybody can do that
Doesn’t seem like it
Anecdotal, and I agree with you overall, but I hit the gym hard (2-3 hour jiu jitsu/MMA sessions) 4 times a week for 3 months and lost 18 lbs. I didn’t change my diet at all, though I will admit it’s possible I ended up eating less overall. But my point is I think exercise can definitely be a pretty good weight loss tool if you’re working your ass off. Just depends on the amount of exercise and the intensity etc.
Yeah, massive amounts of exercise without a massive increase in consumption will work. But people act as if you can go for a jog 3 times a week and that will take care of it.
(also your last sentence is mangled)
That’s not some great revelation and I’m kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
I wasn’t posting it like some revelation, it’s literally the most easy to understand concept ever. You cannot create mass from nothing. Stop taking in more mass than you expel. It’s dead simple. The only counterpoint to this is examples of extreme medical anomalies.
They explained it to you on a level a four year old could understand.
It’s about as simple as telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking or a depressed person to maybe just be happy.
Everything in your body is built against losing weight. If it wouldn’t be that way, we would not exist right now.
What about the shape of the calories. Surely that matters.
Tbh I think the importance of shape is overstated. It’s much more important that they pass a vibe check
I only consume masculine-presenting calories.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/18/dr-peppers-bizarre-new-not-for-women-ad-campaign/
So what’s the point of posting it? If it’s so obvious and all that you really need to know, why are so many people still fat?
The unsaid part of “it’s simple, it’s just calories in calories out” is the implied “and people who don’t get this are just lazy/dumb/it’s a moral failing.” Maybe this isn’t what you are intending, but it is kinda at the root of a lot of hate that fat people get.
The discussion around weight is changing because we’re starting to look into and understand the psychological components of weight, IN ADDITION TO the actual phsysiological processes of weight loss. Lots of “normal” day to day tips and “common sense” is being investigated and debunked. Shit is hard and complicated. Food is being engineered to be addictive. Some people literally don’t have easy access to healthy food.
Because the tweet they’re commenting on is blatantly false and proposes a literal magical situation where exercising will somehow cause one to gain weight.
If people stop proposing actual fucking magic then maybe people won’t feel the need to state the obvious…
Except that the human body is way more complicated than that. Whenever you try to increase calories out by exercise, your body just finds somewhere else it can economize, because it wants to operate on a fixed budget. This can include pulling calories from your immune system, or making you subconsciously move less throughout the day, or even sleep more. You can only overcome this for a limited time. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this phenomenon. What you actually want to do is reduce calorie intake.
Exercise is good for lots of reasons, but it isn’t a good way of losing weight long term.
What you actually want to do is reduce calorie intake.
Is that not the exact sentiment when people bring up CICO, though?
Not exactly, as it implies more exercise will get the same result as eating less, but thats not guaranteed, for a variety of reasons
It’s how I’ve always interpreted it. The oft-cited saying is “you can’t outrun a bad diet”
No. The Internet is full of people who tell a commenter they’re wrong then say the exact same thing the commenter said.
Not really. Lots of people talk about excecising more when it comes to loosing weight, and many of those follow CICO. Not realising that isn’t how a human body works with regards to excercise. You also see people claiming that genetics are not signficant, or that slow and fast metabolisms don’t exist. Even though we know all of these things are a factor. It’s mental what some people believe about diet, nutrition, and excercise. Likewise everyone using BMI pretty much is an idiot, even in school I was told that isn’t a good metric otherwise every athelete or body builder would be obese.
Also still not convinced CICO is even a thing. Digestion is not a 100% efficient process. Calories are measured by burning something, and human metabolism isn’t a fire.
Also still not convinced CICO is even a thing.
So… you don’t even agree with the crux of your own argument?
Maybe I’m misinterpreting CICO, as I assumed it could be taken as just it’s initialism without having to be associated with any more complex fad diet.
I understand that when people reference something, interpretation is not universal. There’s always going to be variance. I just hadn’t had that experience.
I also know it’s a very hard metric to track. It will vary depending on body type, metabolism, and even psychology. I don’t recall that being disputed, though. Just that, at it’s core, it’s more about reducing caloric intake than increasing caloric use.
I mean for a start calories themselves are a bad unit to use. A human body is not a fire or an engine. It doesn’t actually burn stuff.
As I explained the whole Calories Out portion of CICO doesn’t actually work, because the body can adjust it’s various metabolic processes. Only the CI part has any real use.
I think you’re misunderstanding cico
Well can you explain it better then?
Eat less. Move more. Lose weight.
If the amount you move doesn’t change, eating less still will make you lose weight.
It’s just physics at the end of the day, regardless of how unhappy you are with units of measurement.
As I have explained the Move More part doesn’t actually do much long term. So that’s my problem with it. Fairly easy to understand. Again calories aren’t even a good measurement to begin with, you aren’t an engine or a fire. More like a fuel cell.
That doesn’t discredit calories in calories out? They didn’t even mention exercise or imply that you didn’t need to reduce your food intake. It works. When I am on a cut I can estimate down to within a few days how long it will take me to get where I want to be just following CICO.
Reducing Calorie Intake is only the first half of CICO. Not everyone can even absorb the same amount of calories from the same piece of food, because calories are about burning stuff not about human digestion and metabolism.
Yes there’s variation between humans but the principal is true. If you absorb less than you use you will lose weight. You might have to adjust your intake for your own body chemistry but that’s how it works.
Human body is open system
“Depressed? Just cheer up, bro.”
I assure you european peasants were not eating pizza and cheesecake multiple times a week
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I’m European and I did pull a few potatoes out of the ground more than once, so I guess that counts as being a peasant.
And I certainly did eat pizza not so long ago!
They were eating shitloads of butter and lard.
Also doing manual labour during summer and eating a lot less during winter
But why does excersize have to suck so much.
Like if I wanted my muscles to hurt I could just slap em with a belt or if I wanted to gasp for breath… I could also use a belt.
Like I have “slow-twitch” muscles which means I’m better running I guess, but then Jesus fuck that hurts my knees and feet, which I could probably use a belt to cause pain to as well.
… Do you want to be slapped with a belt? We can certainly accommodate that request
No, but I do see how you might get that interpretation.
Well your comment certainly gave off that vibe
When I get out of shape it takes a good 2-4 weeks of consistent exercise for things to transition from feeling like premature death to actually feeling good. If you’ve never made it to the feeling good part, I would imagine it’s rather challenging to motivate yourself through the “feels like premature death” phase.
I enjoy sore muscles, I know if I don’t go the gym I will feel worse, I know if I go I will be sore but feel better, still it takes conscious effort to go, though I may have adhd and an issue with developing habits
Muscle soreness mostly goes away after a while when doing strength exercise. I kind of miss it, to be honest - it’s a clear signal that you’ve accomplished something.
As for running, it is indeed quite hard on everything. I generally prefer biking, which I find a lot more fun and less straining on the body.
As for running, it is indeed quite hard on everything. I generally prefer biking, which I find a lot more fun and less straining on the body.
Until you crash, and then it takes you forever to heal as you get older. Swimming is good, but if you’ve spent your whole life in the water like I have, you wind up with burnt out rotator cuffs, etc.
Basically, any repetitive exercise will destroy you over time. Best to mix it up as much as possible
I guess you could go stationary if you want to eliminate the risk of crashing.
These days you can make cool setups where you turn and the resistance changes based on the slopes you get on-screen. I should probably get something like this to add more cardio on my mostly-strength current routine. I have a real bike and love riding it but I’m too sensitive to the weather conditions and use it as an excuse not to go out, I’ve been successful in my home gym because it’s there whether it rains, hails or snows, don’t even need to put on my shoes lmao.
Ever tried cycling? It’s relatively easy on the knees and you can vary intensity and duration to your liking.
Yeah I hate almost any and all forms of exercise. I picked up running back in March because people say exercise improves your mental health.
No it fucking doesn’t. I’m still doing it every few days and it does not at all improve my mental health. Also running fucking sucks. People who enjoy it are psychopaths.
Figured I’d keep at it for now though. I don’t run super far or fast. I run a bit over 3 miles every few days. It still sucks every time.
Running sucks ass, but cycling is fun. You just need to find something you enjoy
Cycling and swimming as well sucks less than both. Significantly better for your joints and exercises pretty much all muscles. Downside is that not everyone has access to a pool regularly.
Seconded. Cycling is the only form of exercise I can motivate myself to do. Without cycling I’d probably be dead already.
Nah cycling still sucks. Like I said, most forms of exercise suck ass. Y’all are just crazy.
3 miles is not that much. Less than a 5k. I didn’t really start to enjoy running until I got up over 10k (about 7 miles).
There’s a point you reach where instead of feeling like shit the whole time, you actually feel good and it seems like you can run forever. Then when you stop it’s because you’re tired, not because your body is screaming in pain.
Also are you panting / breathing from your mouth really hard in the middle of your run? That’s a sign that you’re not pacing yourself correctly. You should be able to run smoothly while breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. Pacing yourself incorrectly pushes you into the anaerobic zone which is only good for sprinting, not running long distances.
Imagine telling someone you hate doing something and they just tell you you need to work harder at it or do more of it. It’s a bit offensive, don’t you think?
Yes, I already said I don’t run that far or fast. No need to rub it in or brag at how much farther you can run. I do run a 5k each time, but “a bit over 3 miles” sounded less pretentious to say than “3.11 miles”. It takes me 32-36 minutes depending on the day, route, weather, etc. It’s slow.
I have no interest in running much farther of a distance. My time in the mornings before work is limited and I live in a very hot climate where I only get a very brief period after the sun rises before the heat is unbearable for running. In my area, people do run in the full sun when it’s 99F, but I personally cannot do that. If I accidentally start a run too late in the morning, I end up regretting it because of the heat. No, I don’t have any interest in running in the dark or running on a treadmill at a gym. Might eventually make my way up to 8k when it gets cooler out, but we’ll see. Def not going to be running farther than that.
Ahhh okay. Well I’m sorry for offending you, I didn’t intend to. I had no idea you live in such a hot climate. Where I live there are heat waves that get about 86F-100F but most of the summer the daily high is around 77. Even then I ran before dawn because I preferred the much cooler temperatures (as low as 57F).
I don’t run anymore though. I had a bad ankle injury at work a few years ago. Since then I’ve gained a lot of weight. I really miss running. I hope one day I can get back to it but I’d need to lose the weight first plus it’s tough with the long winters here.
Thank you for your honesty:)
Maybe swimming or cycling is more your kind of sport?
Nah, I hate them too. The only form of exercise I actually seem to enjoy is dancing actually. But unfortunately as an adult, I have a harder time with it. I found a dance studio last year that catered to adult students. But the drive after work was just so far (30+ minutes) and I was so wiped from work that I just found it not a great experience (despite enjoying the workout itself) so I stopped. If there was a dance studio down the street from me that did adult classes, I’d be on board.
I continue running because it’s so easy to fit it in before work and easier to measure my metrics as opposed to some of these other forms of exercise. The park is a 5 min drive from me.
It’s like…yeah I could bike before work instead, but I don’t have a way to transport my bike to the local park, so it wouldn’t be as efficient of a bike ride waiting to cross busy intersections…not to mention significantly more dangerous with how fast the traffic goes (it’s a 45mph road, but cars like to go above 60mph and somehow don’t get pulled over by the police…).
I was biking a bit last year, but running just works out better for my particular scenario.
I do have access to a swimming pool, but I don’t have the technique and just find it so monitonous. At least with running in the park, I get to look at the trees and birds and other runners.
Simple, because you never do it. All forms of cardio are unpleasant when you are completely out of shape. It gets better rather quickly if you keep at it and once you have some endurance it is actually fun.
Athletic people tend to say that, but I really doubt it’s true for everyone. I have never enjoyed sport - being out of shape it sucked more, but while maintaining a sensible training regime I really dislike it as well. For me it’s about as enjoyable as doing housework. I do that too, but not for fun.
The only thing that has helped me is to accept that evolution is a bitch and biology is unfair; I will probably never enjoy working out, but I can do it anyway and find a form of exercise that is kinda okay and allows me to listen to good music while I do it.
For some people, “it will be fun one day” just sets a really unrealistic expectation.
This is all true however it is also true a fitness journey never ends, as you get better you need to keep pushing yourself more to maintain the health benefits, if you’re just relying on your progress to cruise you do not get the same calorie burning and other benefits after a while.
Because it does suck, but it’s necessary since we structured our society so that we sit around 90% of the time rather than naturally exercising by walking around all day.
Because you’re doing something you don’t like doing? My main exercise these days is hiking but I used to go to the gym 2h a day 5 years ago and 10 years ago it was rock climbing… You wouldn’t see me play hockey or soccer though.
Go walk. Or if you want to burn a lot of energy, swim.
Play a sport you enjoy or start rock climbing. It can be fun.
If your knees hurt, replace the insoles in your exercise shoes with some good ones. These are good, and not expensive:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IELL7IU
It’s a secret that most athletes replace their insoles. Also, skinny people who run a little might not do it because they don’t weigh enough to hurt their knees.
Shhh, don’t tell anyone.
Try climbing. I hated every sport I tried but climbing fixed it for me. It is strenght, endurance and stamina training all in one and you do it together with someone. It is also mentally challenging as you have to solve the routes you climb.
But why does excersize have to suck so much.
because exercise is the wrong way to do it IMO.
It’s the clinical version of, just being fit instead.
go running, do cardio, ride a bike, do some heavy labor, you’ll be equally as fit, with less muscle mass, and better equipped to do most things throughout life, plus you aren’t doing test or some shit, because you don’t care about the looks.
Also, as far as running goes, it really sucks when you’re out of shape, but if you keep doing it, eventually you’ll get in shape, and while it’s still tiring and makes you sweaty, and generally hard on your body, you will eventually start to run without feeling like utter shit. (also you should do it daily, just don’t overdo it on a daily basis and you’ll be fine) i’m not subscribed to the idea of work hard, recover, and then do it all over again, i’m more a fan of constant
If you’re essentially sedentary you should probably start with walking first, to build up some physical endurance in your legs. That’s one of the nice things about running, you can do it for whatever, however you want, whenever you want. You can’t run for 3 miles straight? Guess what, you don’t have to. You can just walk half of it if you want.
granted i’m a bit of a masochist and enjoy uncomfortable shit like this, i think it’s something you have to learn to enjoy. You just start to tune everything out and focus only on the running, it’s a nice experience. Personally, once i got past being physically fucking tired, i started to be able to focus on breathing and movement, and once you have a good stride, it’s generally very pleasant. Cycling is also good cardio, but it’s a lot easier on the body, you can take it pretty casually as well.
Says exercise is the wrong way to be healthy.
Recommends exercise instead.
i meant gym workouts lol
fuck that shit, it’s too clinical for me. I’ll stick to cardio and labor.
When I first started running, I jogged, which was actually barely more than my walking speed, for 10m, than walked 10m. Eventually you start jogging longer and walking less. If you find a good distance for you, for me it was 5k, I just started trying to go faster. Speed up for 20m, back to jogging, speed up, etc, etc until you can sustain that new speed throughout the run. Went from dying after 50m to running 5k in sub 20 min and 10k in sub 50 in like 8 months and losing 20 kg in the process.
I always hated the first 10 to 15 minutes of my runs, but once I got passed that I got into a flow state of sorts and it was meditative.
yeah this is a great TL;DR of half of my comment lmao.
See it’s a joke but that’s actually what happens with exercise.
It only burns additional calories at first, but unless you keep overloading your body adjusts it’s caloric budget to the new normal and you’re not burning the excess anymore.
Ya gotta be eating right and upping your game through training past your limits, not until you’re hurting, but until you’ve beaten your own records, even by a little bit. Don’t spiral if ya just can’t do it, but pushing the bar just a little higher has to always be the goal when trying to lose weight through exercise or else you’re just gonna be the same weight but able to run that status quo distance you settled on.
I love Kurzgesagt!
That was one of those videos that put my perspective on a 180. I was very much in the camp of “intake-expence= weight gain/loss”, but the body is much more clever than I thought.
A big thing they hit on though is what exercise is good for. Exercise doesn’t make you lose weight or live longer, but it does improve your quality of life. My parents are overall super happy people, and at 69 and 70, my parents were taking me on a 20 mile bike ride before they hit the pickleball court and then to the gym. My old folks can run me ragged, and knowing my grandparents and great grandparents lived until their 90s, I know they are doing everything they can to try and make sure the last 20 years of their lives aren’t stuck inside.
For me, I was diagnosed bipolar after a manic episode at 20, and now at 30 I’m considered 8 years in remission. I owe that to meds, being soberish (It comes and goes like the tide), but most importantly is that I run a 5k 3 days a week, hit the climbing gym the other three, and yoga once a week for recovery and stretching my poor I.T band.
When I’ve been high and on the couch, I’ve been miserable. When I was high and at the gym, much less so. Studies show that exercise is as effective if not better than most SSRIs, at least according to every psych I’ve talked to.
My mentality to it is a) I love the happy chemicals and b) I’m curious of what my body can do.
So I have a very physical job and medication that makes me not like food.
I went to a weight loss clinic known locally for their fantastic results and uh… anyways now I have a minimum calorie limit.
There are exceptions to this advice, but if you’re not absolutely working your entire ass off for your work, you’re almost certainly not the exception.
Exercise doesn’t lose weight. Weight is 99% controlled by diet. Exercise will make you not feel like shit so you don’t use food as a dopamine hit. Which is why moderate exercise is better for weight loss. If your workout is making you feel like shit, that might be good for fitness and performance, but it still won’t lose weight faster, and now you are eating more to support recovery.
So there are two pathways exercise can impact weight.
Exercise -> psychology -> diet -> weight
Exercise -> calorie consumption -> weightThe first one just happens to be more impact because the second one does almost nothing at all. Any useful pathway has to hit diet because that’s 99% of weight (at least of the factors you have control over).
The best weight loss advice I ever got was when my doctor said “Based on your BMI you’re eating about twice what you should.”
Since I was extremely house-poor at the time, I thought “Sweet, I can cut my grocery bills in half.”
That, combined with living alone and a lot of yardwork keeping the house presentable got me to my ideal weight in about six months.
I’ve since moved and am no longer at my ideal weight.
I’m part of a whole-foods plant-based potluck group. A number of people are eating that way to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight. Most people in the group are maintaining a healthy weight without any major exercise plan.
This is the way.
Yes, having a support group of people eating the same way helps. Everyone seems to have stories about their own friends and family that don’t get it even when they are on statins or have other health or weight problems.
Damn I wish I had this group in my area
I ran into the guy from the group this morning. He is in 60s and had just finished in the top 3 in his age group at a local 5k race.
I came in maybe 4th in my age group but I ran an extra 5 miles to get to the race.
They are all over. Search for the closest one here: https://plantpurecommunities.org/find-a-pod/
Thanks! Sadly my closest pod(?) is the next town over. I joined in case I ever get the time to join in person.
Cool!
my body thinks I’m a generational athlete or something, I eat like a pig but it all goes into muscles and energy, so now I’m 52kg but hey if you need someone to run for an hour straight I’m your girl…
The number doesn’t matter - composition does. Workout a few times a week and eat like a human instead of a cow… Shockingly most people will end up fit.
But the real issue is that people are either too lazy, ignorant, or just plain stupid to figure out how to count calories and/or estimate their BMR.
It’s also funny how many people seem to not realize that they have to change habits permanently if they want permanent change.
Or ya know. Actually be stupid. Just lower the portions. If it doesn’t work, lower again. Do not starve yourself, but eat maybe half of what you eat normally if you are severly overweight - if not, drop 1/4th.
That and stop effing snacking.
Try getting into biking. I burn 1500-2000 calories (I’m not a small dude) in like 2 hours of road cycling. It’s relatively easy on the body compared to running as a bonus.
Bruh unless you’re like 900 lbs barefoot uphill in the snow both ways you are not burning 1000 kcal/hr on a bicycle. Make sure you’ve input all your vital stats onto your fitness tracker correctly, and consider comparing it to a few others.
Are you sure about that number?
According to my tracker, I burn about 1000kcal per 60km, and I’m an normal dude. You probably won’t average 50km/h over 2h or something.
Given weight and road grade plays a role, they don’t need to average 50km/h necessarily. Still, 1kcal/hour seems quite intense for a regular exercise for me, but similarly large professional-level endurance athletes probably burn far more during serious training or competitions. 750kcal/hr seems manageable to me as a non-athletic person (supposedly I’ve burned 2340 calories over 2.7hours once… but I was totally wiped out afterwards IIRC). 1K/hr isn’t something I could maintain for more than about 1.5 hours even on the best of days.
The key here is elevation. I’m 183 cm and weigh 95 kilos, and I live in the Alps. For sure, I’m not always hitting those numbers, but throw a couple of big climbs in there and it starts to make sense.
Yes cycling is the absolute best endurance sport, and it’s fun. Swimming is also great but very few people can swim to work or swim to the bar or swim to the grocery store.
And fuck running. Your knees and ankles will thank you for cycling.
Those numbers seem to be a bit on the high end, but otherwise I generally agree about cycling being awesome.
Oh also another thing to check is weather your fitness tracker is reporting active calories or total calories burned. If it is the second one it’s giving you a feel-good number that includes calories you would have burned just by sitting on the couch staying alive. If your fitness tracker isn’t calculating a BMR you can estimate your Base Metabolic Rate fairly accurately with a calculator like this one.
This sounds great but what if you can’t cycle at 55mph for 2h? These numbers are nutty.
Talk to your DNA, maybe you can convince it that the world has changed and there’s no need to be an european peasant anymore.
Bet she doesn’t lift. Lift heavy women.
