That'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.
This. I know many folks who have a 30min - hour commute each way (pre-pandmaic). If they lived a bit closer, and spent that time walking to/from work instead of driving, there you go.
Well, 6 miles sounds about right for a 30min bike commute to work. Do that each way and you’ll have a daily hour of exercise without having to step foot in a gym.
But walking is rather easy and does not really count as demanding exercise, at least if there's almost no elevation change.
Also, I only need about 12-13 minutes for my walk to work, so I get only 25 per day - surely better than nothing but not enough to really counter work sitting at a desk 8 to 10 hours a day.
Only because the purpose of modern life is to work rather than working to live life.
There’s no need for people to work 8 to 10 hours a day, and commute 30+ min in an automobile.
Rather than use our technological efficiencies to improve quality of life now, we use them to compete with others to increase probability of securing quality of life in the future.
We only use them to compete with others because others use them to compete with us, keep up or starve. The equilibrium is whatever people are willing to do, strangely meaning that nobody has a choice in this thing that we’ve all chosen.
No idea how to switch to new dynamics so that defecting (in the sense of working less) is the stable equilibrium.
You have to legislate standards. For example, overtime payrate multipliers after 6 hours of work in a day / 24 hours in a week / 4 days in a week. Minimum PTO accrual such that people get at least 30 days per year.
And yet, the population of people who commit to this is pretty solid. Every gym is populated with regulars who show up most days, no matter the kind of jobs or the size of family they have at home. You have to be slightly more creative now, with gyms being closed... but a little equipment can go a long way.
It's completely doable, as long as you see it that way.
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.
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.
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 specifically attempting to increase your "in" by making you hungrier. Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out".
> 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.
The real issue is that sometimes in life you need to have discipline and willpower, and people are very resistant to that idea. I would counter that the advice is helpful, it's just not what people want to hear because it requires more effort than they want to put in.
Look at film reels or images from, say, the 1950s. Better yet find one of relatively rural parts of the US. You'll be hard pressed to find an obese person, yet if you took the same picture today in many of those places you'd see a majority of obese people, many grotesquely so.
So what, did people magically lose all willpower and discipline in the past 60 years? Of course not, but we have instead build up a society, both around industrialized food and sedentary lifestyles, that is basically geared to make people fat.
Similarly, while "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice, mainly because it's been proven over decades that this advice (again, societal-wide) doesn't work: we've been saying this same thing for years and yet Americans are as fat as ever. What's that definition of insanity again?
> Of course not, but we have instead build up a society, both around industrialized food and sedentary lifestyles, that is basically geared to make people fat.
This is why I said you need willpower and discipline. These are some of the reasons that make them needed for the average person to stay fit.
> "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice
This is why I address individual readers on HN. I'm not interested in fixing society, but I'm happy to offer my personal experiences if it can help one person out there. There are plenty of people nowadays who combat the idea of accountability, and if that helps others, then great. I believe in accountability, discipline, willpower, etc, and I offer my perspective for others who believe the same
You can, but it takes a LOT of work, and you still need to hit macros.
Honestly, high level endurance or strength sports make eating a chore. You simply need a LOT of food with decent macros, and you need to be eating all the time. I was once a fairly competitive 100mpw runner. It's eating before you go to bed, so you can wake up at 5 and eat before going back to bed to wake up at 6 so you can do a long run and eat 150+ calories an hour during that, then immediately hit a protein shake and some rice/pasta after the run, then lunch, so you can be prepped to go out again at like 6pm for an evening shakeout run, then you do dinner, then snack before bed, and repeat. 4k+ calories a day is a grind unless you're hammering a lot of really empty calories.
Note that the article describes "walking moderately for 30 or 60 minutes". I'd be curious to see how high-impact exercise like running would make a difference.
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).
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.
Yeah, it would be interesting to have HIIT, running and walking with the same calorie count, to see whether the type of exercise makes a difference, too.
A few years ago I decided I was sick of being overweight and decided to make a change. My approach was two-pronged: 1) eat better, 2) exercise.
For eating, I cut out as much sugar as I reasonably could. For exercise, I made sure I "moved vigorously" for 30 minutes per day, every day.
I was never a runner. And in my early shape, that 30 minutes was just me walking. Eventually, though, I stopped sweating and being out of breath, so I started walking more briskly. Then eventually I moved to a treadmill and started jogging for bits of it.
And then I could jog the whole time.
And then I could run while taking jog breaks.
About 7 months in, I was able to run 5 miles in about 35 minutes. I did it every day.
The point was that I went every day. It wasn't about how much I did, but that I was sweating and moving for 30 minutes. Lost 75 pounds in about 9 months.
I took the winter off last year and fell into sugar again, so I restarted this past summer. A 5k every day, as many days as I can. I have to run outside instead of at the gym, so weather controls a lot.
All of this is to say I agree, mostly. 30 minutes per day every day can fix a lot of problems. It did for me. :)
I’m jealous, I’ve been jogging since May this year and 5 miles in 35 minutes is way faster than I can go. You could easily break a 20 minute 5k at that pace!
I've been running for 30 years, and 5 miles in 35 minutes was barely possible at the very peak of my training. There's no chance of pulling it off now, even though I'm in ultramarathon shape.
The point being, you run your pace. Congrats on starting and keeping up your running. It's a really good form of exercise -- inexpensive, readily available, and low-overhead. There will always be faster people, and there will always be slower people. You'll meet both at races (when races are a thing again), and mostly what you'll feel is camaraderie that you're all in it together regardless of your pace.
Agreed. My note on times wasn’t to brag, but to say that I never thought I’d run that far or that fast. Before this whole ordeal, my fastest mile was in fourth grade and it was 9:12.
And my favorite part of running is waving to other runners running the opposite way. I assume it’s the same way motorcycle people feel when they wave to each other.
I did one sub-20 5k and know I will never get back to that again. It was pushing it then, and I’m happy I did it, but it crushed me for a week or two. Also, that was treadmill time. I’ve come to learn that outdoor running is much more challenging for me. My best 5k outdoors is 22:46, and that’s good enough for me. :)
A half hour a day while improving your diet (Pick one: cut booze, fast until afternoon, cut bread, cut soda) is a lot easier to maintain. I ride an exercise bike for a half hour a day while working from home.
I mean, cut soda, period. The other options you mention have downsides, but there is no downside to cutting soda out of your life. Get rid of that trash. (Coffee-flavored milkshakes, too.)
Oddly enough, an actual coffee flavored milkshake has the same calorie count as those fast food coffee drinks (~400 cals) and if you use light ice cream you can probably get it quite a few calories less...
The 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-Takes-Burn-Off-Hallowe...
An 8 minute mile is definitely not fairly pedestrian. Someone who is out of shape and trying to lose weight is probably going to be doing 13-18 minute miles typically.
I can double this. Weight loss depends 85% on food. I am under stress, my eating pattern is terrible. I am training 500 minutes a week and it does barely affect weight loss.
My personal experience was that it was entirely incorrect. I was gradually gaining weight due to being sedentary and not paying attention to my calorie intake. Once I started exercising regularly I started having to pay attention to my calorie intake because otherwise I didn't eat enough. I significantly outrode my mouth without that even being an explicit goal.
I dislike it as an expression because while fixing your diet is probably the easier thing for most people, it completely disregards the possibility of finding a form of exercise that you enjoy enough to want to do it.
It comes down to CICO. Burning a 1000 calories on a five mile run will help, and there are lasting metabolic effects from it, but if you have a SAD and consuming 4000 calories per day on fast food then you're not going to outrun it. I daresay my example is more the case than yours.
Yeah this floats around a lot in the bodybuilding/powerlifting/fitness community. The general rule is CICO works for everyone. Because it does.
There are some "cheats" that you can do with macro profiles, especially with no or low carb diets (carnivore/keto), however these solutions rarely work long term, especially in athletic circles. For non-athletes it _might_ work a little longer term but if you look at those studies (with non-athletes) they are very short lived and typically on a very specific cohort. Hormonal levels adapt over time and the initial "gainz" you see are relatively short lived - this is most evident in the studies done on athletes. That and you have to stay on top of your bloodwork. In my personal experience it's about six months. I've tried keto, paleo, and carnivore for fairly long periods of time (paleo is much more forgiving long term for a variety of reasons). There are most certainly diminishing returns. Unfortunately, as I said, there's no long term studies here with large cohorts so it's all anecdotal.
Curious if you've ever heard of any scenarios that could cause long-term hormonal changes? I'm thinking of a Peter Attia podcast where he (anecdotally) noticed that after women have their third child (or so), there's a marked change in their ability for their body to bounce back.
I don't know of any scenarios. That certainly doesn't mean that there isn't any, but I haven't seen any in studies or anecdotally that could be directly attributed to change in diet (which is what I'm assuming what you are referring to). Even as I've gotten older I've noticed my cut phases tend to have to run a little longer than they used to, and any bulking I do has to contain better quality food (no more Chik-fil-A binging :(), and I'm pretty sure that is directly related to hormonal changes (free testosterone) for men between the ages of 40-50. It's been a couple of years since I've done a round of no carb, I should give it another round.
In theory, that would be the same guy who eats more than 1200 kcal above their base metabolic rate.
A Whopper combo from Burger King comes in at a little over 1500 kcal.
So it's certainly possible, but I have a hunch those who run 6+ miles a day generally self-select themselves out of the population that overeats calorie dense food.
Regardless, like most colloquialisms, it isn’t meant to be taken so literally. It’s speaking to the general truth that it’s easier to limit calories in than increase calories out
The problem with this is that the lizard brain takes over.
Brain says eat your are staving to death, eat it'll make you happy, eat... or else.
You can't control urges to eat, you can only do your best to resist them.
However, exercise, is always under your control, so it is a great tool. Exercise also has all sorts of non weight loss health benefits that aren't tangential but complementary to weight loss, including staving off weight-loss induced muscle loss. Without a doubt, you can't lose weight without getting a grip on diet, but I don't think a diet only approach is a good one.
I had problems keeping a healthy weight in my past and the method that worked best for me was to target a diet a bit below my metabolic rate, one that would have me losing weight at a slow but steady clip (and would also start to trigger the lizard brain to eat eat eat), then add moderate exercise to the equation.
> You can't control urges to eat, you can only do your best to resist them.
This is going to depend from person to person. Like most things, you can train yourself to control your hunger/appetite. Some people will have no real issue, others it will be an uphill battle.
For me, this is a big part of it. I can schedule a daily ride. While I can schedule not eating from 8am until 8pm, I'll usually wind up in the kitchen at some point when I'm thinking about something else.
"You can't control urges to eat, you can only do your best to resist them."
My experience says that I feel a lot less hunger on intermittent fasting than trying to eat small meals frequently. Most other IF practicioners say the same. Hunger feelings ("brain says eat") are hormonally driven and not entirely mechanical in their occurence.
A large person will burn way more calories from simply going for a walk than a small person. I'm 6'5', 270 lbs, went for a 3 mile walk this morning, and burned maybe 460 calories. A person weighing 135 going for the same walk would burn 230 calories. In either case, me and 50%-me would have burned off a 230 calories candy bar.
If you only work out a few times, it's easy to over-eat to compensate, but if you are working out regularly—5-6 times a week—your desire for food changes.
Dieting does not change the amount of activity you do.
Also, it is more important to be healthy and fit than skinny.
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.
This general statement makes no sense. How can it not depend on the size of the person?
What about the other food he consumed in that day, or the goal. Does a powerlifter needs the same outcome as a climber? Is it the same for someone which tries to lose weight?
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.
is a useful approximation but vastly over generalizes. The human body is a complex system with many more inputs. Hormone levels, inflammation etc. all can play a role.
It is like saying that for an airplane to fly level, the force of gravity must be precisely counteracted by the lift generated by the wings.
Scientifically true, but in order to successfully pilot the plane, not very helpful. Keeping the plane in air and keeping your body fit requires knowledge of its mechanisms, not just the physical principles of operation.
It’s important to separate the mechanism of weight loss from the method you use to achieve it. The mechanism is consuming less calories than you’re expending. How you do that is up to you. For example, I’ve lost weight on a fast-food only diet, because I like eating burgers and pizza. I just make sure I’m consuming less than 2200 calories, which puts me at approximately 15% caloric deficit. If you want to eat more, say at 2500 calories, then you’ll have to exercise enough to burn another 300 calories so you’re still in deficit. You can bump up your “maintenance” calories by putting on more lean mass, by weight training for example.
> It’s important to separate the mechanism of weight loss from the method you use to achieve it.
I think it's far more important knowing what actions work for an individual to achieve weight loss. Most everyone knows that X calories in and X calories is the end target. Knowing how you can reach that balance is the hard part.
Every time I see some kind of forum about weight loss there are a million people popping in talking about "Putting the fork down" or "Calories In < Calories Out". But this is worthless because in the end, having a solution that a person is capable of doing is far more important than theory.
I’m convinced most people are still not aware of the mechanism. They equate eating healthy and exercising with being the “cause” for losing weight. I avoid avocados and nuts on a diet because it’s so caloric dense. Yet how many people order some stupid avocado, nut “healthy” salad drizzled in olive oil because they’re on a diet.
I have. I went from 235 pounds to 150 pounds in a one year time period. It was consistently between 1-2 pounds lost a week.
Of course human bodies are complex and there is no one size fits all. My anecdotal weight loss won’t match with yours. We can provide our experience so others can draw their own ideas and conclusions from our stories.
It wasn’t really an either or situation for me. Both diet and exercise are needed. The way I looked at it is with the simple model of calories in - calories out = weight change. I think there should be some factor that accounts for sedentary or active, but I don’t know where to fit it in. Like any model, it’s not perfect.
You and you’re used below do not reflect the poster I’m responding to.
If calories in exceeds calories out and your level is sedentary, you’re going to gain weight in the form of fat.
If calories in exceeds calories out and you’re lifting weights, you gain muscle probably with some fat. Think of this as bulking.
If calories in are less than calories out, you’re going to lose weight. If you’re active, then it’s going to have an interaction effect where you lose more weight.
Calories in would be quantity times frequency and would come from the sum of solid and liquid calories (calories in = quantity liquid * frequency liquid + quantity solid * frequency solid). We can manipulate quantity by reducing portion size or reducing calorie content through substituting different, healthier choices. This applies to both liquid and solid calories. We can manipulate frequency by fasting, or eliminating things altogether.
Calories out = calories burned * frequency + base metabolic burn rate. Calories burned should be a rate over time. We manipulate the rate by using more strenuous forms of exercise. We manipulate the time by changing the duration of our sessions. We increase the frequency by having more sessions. We increase the base metabolic burn rate by lifting weights and gaining muscle.
You start by figuring out what your baseline is for both calorie intake and exercise expenditure and then make small adjustments to either increase or decrease. You weigh yourself at the same time on the same day once a week. You look to see progress on a weekly basis. If you’re hitting 1-2 pounds loss, you’re on the right track. When you plateau for a couple of weeks, you need to adjust the parameters. The process needs to be followed.
We probably need some sums and indexes in the above model, and we could probably differentiate between something like steady-state (e.g., walking and meals in the normal course of a day) and perturbations (e.g., cheat meals, fasted days, long hikes, running, gym). Again, it’s a model, and weight loss stories are anecdotal, but I think the point is illustrated. Change your diet and change your exercise regimen to lose weight and have body composition changes.
I lost weight because I found something I truly enjoy and it isn't hard to motivate myself to do it. What you are talking about sounds like work. I've used more analytical ways for a while and I get bored and lose track. Scheduling a weekday where I always go mountain biking with friends is fun and keeps me fit.
Bad title. The study referenced is claiming that the compensatory rise in appetite that comes with exercise seems to be about 1000 calories per week. So only working out 1000 calories worth doesn't help, but working out more does.
Of course, the best way to lose weight is to clean up a bad diet. One unhealthy meal--or even a snack--can completely undo the calorie deficit of all but the most intense workouts.
I gained a lot of strength and some muscle mass in the gym. But as for losing extra fat, exercise could not move the needle more than 2-3 pounds. What worked, and was surprisingly easy, was intermittent fasting.
I wanted to not have to wonder why my weight was suddenly 30 pounds more than in college, without me remembering how that ever happened.
I started exercising with some light running, gym use, breaking a little sweat. Didn't do anything, didn't show any noticeable result over like 4 months.
Then I hopped on a rowing machine (above preparation probably helped to be ready for it) because I wanted to see something happen. I'm not that special. Do something to your body and it will probably do the same for you as it does for other people, you just have to stick with it. I stopped thinking "eh, it won't do anything for me".
I rowed each day before the weights workout, 10 minutes super intense, until I felt like I was gonna puke as I fell off the machine. Heartbeat way elevated, out of breath, blood coursing through body, and soaked.
In conjunction with not eating quite as much (that rowing machine does something to your appetite) I dropped I would say 1 pound per week. Doctor asked if anything was wrong the next time I went in for physical and got weighed. Felt great.
Exercise is a part of my routine now. I don't eat junk any more. I now say the thing people always say after such things, but you don't internalize or believe it until you try: "I wish I had done it sooner".
+1 for a rowing machine. I started ~3 weeks ago, at first could barely do 5 minutes. Now I do 20. One thing to keep in mind is the weight might not change much because while fat is going away, muscle mass increases.
> One thing to keep in mind is that the weight might not change much because while fat is going away, muscle mass increases.
This is why, when talking about health and fitness with friends, I always try to deemphasize weight loss. When I decided to finally stop being overweight and inactive (I played rec league soccer, which was miserable because it was my only exercises and I was grossly out of shape) I lost 40 pounds, then I put on 20 as I incorporated more strength (bodyweight) training into my routine.
And a couple colleagues who started weightlifting + moderate cardio saw initial losses of maybe 5-10 pounds before their weight became stable, but they were getting in obviously better condition even though they were still above their initial target weights by quite a bit.
BTW your phenomenon of 1 lb/wk is quite sustainable. Trying to lose significantly more than that (more than say 5 lbs/2 kg per month is not only hard to achieve but usually results in vpreverting to the prior weight.
Semi-related life hack: as gyms are closed and I am a tad too heavy to run (screwed up knees from my youthful pursuits), I have decided to emulate the walk to work. I recently started to rent an external office (they come super cheap right now) and leave my work laptop there. It forces me to walk 2x25 minutes everyday. I need to do something after hours? Well, back to the office it is (although in this case I usually dash there on my supercool kick scooter).
I lost roughly 30kg since Corona started by changing my lifestyle to Keto and OMAD.
I have been exercising 3 days a week with a PT for 3 years before with no results on the weight (but many other great results like fixing my knee and back problems, getting really strong, etc.)
This pandemic I've been eating at most twice a day (light breakfast, skip lunch, then dinner). Sometimes I eat only once a day (dinner). I was surprised how quickly my body adjust and I don't feel as hungry anymore. I don't think humans need to eat three times a day.
I also only gain weight for 1kg after all these 8 months lockdown/not allowed to open (pre lock down I did karate about 3 times a week).
I 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 important, likely more important that fitness, but diet is vastly more difficult for me. Also, when I'm working out regularly, my diet naturally shifts. If I'm sitting at my desk or on the couch for weeks at a time, food intake increases.
I'm sure if I could ever properly reign in my eating I could change this, but I've tried so many times and it never works. Working out on the bike does, and as I mentioned above, the intake adjusts correctly when I do it.
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.
"Eat less" is the correct advice for weight less just like "don't drink" is for alcoholics and "don't think of him" is for someone going through a breakup. It's just basically useless advice totally lacking empathy. People are different. They have different bodies, different psychological dispositions, different experiences, etc. I think more people should ask themselves some basic questions. What would need to happen in my life to put me in the position of being 100 pounds overweight? What type of person would I be? How would it feel to try to fight my way back? How can I gain a bit of perspective?
> Eat less" is the correct advice for weight less just like "don't drink" is for alcoholics and "don't think of him" is for someone going through a breakup. It's just basically useless advice totally lacking empathy. People are different. They have different bodies, different psychological dispositions, different experiences, etc.
None of what you described changes the example solutions you gave. An alcoholic does need to not drink to improve their health, just like to lose weight you do need to eat fewer calories. The way to solve a problem is to find the solution, and empathy doesn't cure being overweight or addiction. Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
> EDIT: Wasn't trying to suggest your post was insensitive or boneheaded.
Maybe it wasn't, but I think your original sentiment wasn't far off from my reaction to the same OP.
While I haven't struggled all that much with my weight, I know people who have. One of the most important things for weight loss (and anything else for that matter, up to and including break ups, as was in the original example) is support networks. I learned that lesson rather harshly when I went through a really ugly break up earlier this year.
Humans are social creatures, after all, and I can't fault you for your original response.
We need others around us who are a positive influence.
> Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
I specifically said that the advice was _correct_. My point is that fact isn't that useful. Knowing the solution (i.e. eat less, drink less, think less) is the _easy_ part. It's the part these people have usually been told many times. It's rarely a lack of advice that is missing.
It's true that empathy doesn't cure these problems. But it is through empathy that you can understand what someone's true obstacles are to the "obvious" solutions.
In fact I do. To the people who don't know it yet it is useful. However, to the people who already know it, it's really just useless information. Information they've heard many times before and potentially only makes them feel worse about themselves and less likely to follow the recommendations given. If you're making the argument that most people don't know that eating less leads to weight-loss, then okay. I admit I don't have statistics, but I find that quite suspect. If we can at least both agree that telling it to people who already know doesn't help anything, then I'm content here.
I don't agree with that. 1) because knowing a fact doesn't mean that you really understand it or that it's really made an impact beyond a theoretical awareness. Repeated exposure can hammer it home. And 2) because a lot of people don't know things you know. Even the simplest thing you know, you didn't know until a certain point, and some people haven't reached that point yet. And every day people are born who don't know it yet, or people can be convinced that things are different. For these reasons I think it's important to keep broadcasting the message
> An alcoholic does need to not drink to improve their health
Pretty much everyone who drinks needs to not drink to improve their health, but whether alcoholics have a particular need to not drink is controversial and largely widely accepted because of quasi-religious doctrine that has been well marketed.
> Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
Yes, but here’s the thing. Lots of research has actually gone into the steps for weight loss, its not something people need to work out from scratch. Its a lot more productive to follow a path that works even without deep understanding of the rationale than to start with a target and try to work it out from first principles, which most people will fail, and fail very badly, with.
Sure, “eat fewer calories” might be generally part of a solution (and “eat fewer calories than you use” definitely will be). But neither of those are particularly useful advice on their own for people who want to lose weight.
Five hours a week is way more than most people who work and have a family can do. Even if you find the time, you might be quite tired and that also eats into your time budget.
Also, you might spend maybe 200cal lightly cycling during a zoom call. You will get that back in a few seconds of eating, if you choose something heavy like a chocolate bar. Your best bet then is to just control the incoming calories, because even an all-out workout of an hour will do you maybe 800cal if you're a bit bigger and stronger than me, and even if you did that you'd feel super tired for a long time after and maybe even decide to eat up that amount again.
In my case, it was all about calories. I've done this, and a friend did this as well: get one of those electronic scales that's got a couple of decimals on it, eg says 92.15kg. Then you can get used to understanding how much weight you lose while sleeping, how much you are carrying as pee and poo, and how much a meal tends to weigh. This will tell you how much you actually weigh, because you can take out the noise.
Have a look at an online calculator that tells you how much you should be eating for a given target. Find out the calories in everything you eat, and eat that budget.
I did this, and amazingly, the weight loss was just as expected. Thermodynamics seems to work.
Dedicating 5 hours a week to keeping your body healthy and functioning seems pretty bare minimum expectation. Otherwise your lifestyle is just fully sedentary and you should expect the corresponding health outcomes.
Exercise isn't just about the calorie differential, it improves heart function, posture, flexibility, bone mass, mood, etc.
I'm right there with ya. Kiddo is very young and I can't justify shelling out even 3 extra nanny hours per week for fitness. I try to incorporate/papoose him for as much as I can but there's a lot of stuff I can't do with him attached. Couple that with winters increasing level of difficulty in getting walks in (still trying to figure out how long he can be exposed to the elements before it qualifies as child abuse).
I don't have any advice here; just commiserating. Keep on trucking.
> Five hours a week is way more than most people who work and have a family can do.
This is why you have to be smart about how you do it. Ride your bike to work or run/ hike/ play with your kids. There are a million ways to double up and get fit while doing something else.
How much time do you spend playing video games or watching TV? That is time you can convert into being fit.
Dying of heart failure at 50 clears up all those "Not enough time" issues.
> Even if you find the time, you might be quite tired and that also eats into your time budget.
Exercising when you are not fit wipes you out. Regularly exercising gives you more energy in the long run as normal activities become easier and less stressful.
I'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
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.
Everyone is a little different. So I'm not going to tell you what works for you.
For me... cycling works wonders. I burn calories twice as fast as walking and so long as I focus on good post-workout foods I avoid the trap of undoing all the good that I just did. Eating proteins and fats after a workout fills me up and lets my body repair torn muscle tissue.
Assuming 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.
I 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.
This article doesn't mention routine at all, and the only focus is on weight loss. This is extremely short sighted as a novice sticking to a routine of increasingly heavy compound lifts 2-3 times a week (~120-180 minutes) can expect improvements in body composition and coordination that will be a much bigger improvement in overall physical ability than just losing some arbitrary amount of weight. Even if weight loss is the end goal, having a solid foundation will help immensely.
Admittedly I haven't read tons of scientific research on this topic, but whenever the topic of diet/exercise comes up, I often find the way the question is researched to be lacking.
The article mentioned the participants could exercise however they wanted and "many chose to walk". I don't understand why walking is considered exercise. I understand it burns more calories than sitting still, but it doesn't elevate your heart rate nor push your muscles to grow/develop in any real way, and it feels like trying to "cheat" your way into exercise.
Also, this bit was really interesting to me: "Those burning about 3,000 calories a week showed changes now in their bodies’ levels of leptin, an appetite hormone that can reduce appetite. These alterations suggested that exercise had increased the exercisers’ sensitivity to the hormone, enabling them to better regulate their desire to eat." I would bet that those who burned the most amount of calories weren't just walking farther than the others, but instead their choice of exercise was just more intense.
I've always heard that running isn't a great way to lose weight because it just makes you want to eat more, but that hasn't been my experience. After running somewhere between 3.5-5 miles, my appetite is gone for at least a few hours after the run. I have no desire to snack, and while I might eat slightly more at dinner, the overall calories for my day don't change too significantly.
Just from moving to places where I generally walk everywhere (college, major city) to places where I can only really drive (various smaller towns and suburbs) I have fluctuated in weight up to 15 pounds without any change in diet. In both places, I would lift weights 4-6x a week.
I have had family members lose 60+ pounds from introducing daily walks into their lifestyle.
I am still a proponent of more vigorous exercise and particularly resistance training, but you cannot discount the benefits that going from not walking to walking can have.
If walking doesn't elevate your heart rate (and you want it to), you simply need to walk faster. Walking at 4 MPH is a moderate intensity exercise for most people.
if you wanna lose weight and love the idea of data:
- Start weighing yourself daily (once a day -- smart scale helps, but a notepad to track will work). You start here to build the habit.
Do this for a 3 weeks just to understand how much your weight will fluctuate +/-. On any given day I seem to fluctuate 2 lbs or so. You will be similar. if you only weigh yourself once a week you might get encouraged/discouraged while in one of these micro-cycles.
- Then after 3 weeks, calculate your macros -- and then understand what in your 'normal' diet is throwing your macros out of wack. If you eat labeled food, look at the labels. If you eat more whole foods, google around for some data. It sounds hard, but you'll build an intuition quick.
For my partner and I, we both needed MORE protein. We weren't getting enough. I ate MORE meat, and they added a pea protein smoothie (which sounds lame but they are really good.) My partner started to eat less nuts as well, because they were getting too much fats.
- Control for your macros with your normal diet.
- Eat whatever you want in your macros, balance yourself by watching the scale. if your macros are off, you will trend up for about 4 days in a row. Anything less in my experience is "expected". I can reverse 3 days of small weight gains (3-5 lbs) in about 1-2 days.
Once my partner mastered this, they eat 1 cookie and ice cream every night, guilt-free, to hit their sweet tooth, and we have combined lost close to 40lbs by doing this.
- You can work out to firm up, but depending on how much you wanna lose, diet alone could be enough.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadMany places, walking to work is a joke.
Also, I only need about 12-13 minutes for my walk to work, so I get only 25 per day - surely better than nothing but not enough to really counter work sitting at a desk 8 to 10 hours a day.
There’s no need for people to work 8 to 10 hours a day, and commute 30+ min in an automobile.
Rather than use our technological efficiencies to improve quality of life now, we use them to compete with others to increase probability of securing quality of life in the future.
No idea how to switch to new dynamics so that defecting (in the sense of working less) is the stable equilibrium.
It's completely doable, as long as you see it that way.
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 specifically attempting to increase your "in" by making you hungrier. 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.
So what, did people magically lose all willpower and discipline in the past 60 years? Of course not, but we have instead build up a society, both around industrialized food and sedentary lifestyles, that is basically geared to make people fat.
Similarly, while "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice, mainly because it's been proven over decades that this advice (again, societal-wide) doesn't work: we've been saying this same thing for years and yet Americans are as fat as ever. What's that definition of insanity again?
This is why I said you need willpower and discipline. These are some of the reasons that make them needed for the average person to stay fit.
> "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice
This is why I address individual readers on HN. I'm not interested in fixing society, but I'm happy to offer my personal experiences if it can help one person out there. There are plenty of people nowadays who combat the idea of accountability, and if that helps others, then great. I believe in accountability, discipline, willpower, etc, and I offer my perspective for others who believe the same
Buy I've found that when you exercise more, my diet automatically gets better. Not great, but significantly less bad.
Honestly, high level endurance or strength sports make eating a chore. You simply need a LOT of food with decent macros, and you need to be eating all the time. I was once a fairly competitive 100mpw runner. It's eating before you go to bed, so you can wake up at 5 and eat before going back to bed to wake up at 6 so you can do a long run and eat 150+ calories an hour during that, then immediately hit a protein shake and some rice/pasta after the run, then lunch, so you can be prepped to go out again at like 6pm for an evening shakeout run, then you do dinner, then snack before bed, and repeat. 4k+ calories a day is a grind unless you're hammering a lot of really empty calories.
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.
For eating, I cut out as much sugar as I reasonably could. For exercise, I made sure I "moved vigorously" for 30 minutes per day, every day.
I was never a runner. And in my early shape, that 30 minutes was just me walking. Eventually, though, I stopped sweating and being out of breath, so I started walking more briskly. Then eventually I moved to a treadmill and started jogging for bits of it.
And then I could jog the whole time. And then I could run while taking jog breaks. About 7 months in, I was able to run 5 miles in about 35 minutes. I did it every day.
The point was that I went every day. It wasn't about how much I did, but that I was sweating and moving for 30 minutes. Lost 75 pounds in about 9 months.
I took the winter off last year and fell into sugar again, so I restarted this past summer. A 5k every day, as many days as I can. I have to run outside instead of at the gym, so weather controls a lot.
All of this is to say I agree, mostly. 30 minutes per day every day can fix a lot of problems. It did for me. :)
The point being, you run your pace. Congrats on starting and keeping up your running. It's a really good form of exercise -- inexpensive, readily available, and low-overhead. There will always be faster people, and there will always be slower people. You'll meet both at races (when races are a thing again), and mostly what you'll feel is camaraderie that you're all in it together regardless of your pace.
And my favorite part of running is waving to other runners running the opposite way. I assume it’s the same way motorcycle people feel when they wave to each other.
should be titled
"To Lose Weight with Exercise you're gonna need to workout more if you eat more too"
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/51de4cba6ffe48b0886cf9b2c7a6ba8a
Try not to take it quite so literally. The point is it’s much more work to overcome a poor diet with exercise than the other way around.
I dislike it as an expression because while fixing your diet is probably the easier thing for most people, it completely disregards the possibility of finding a form of exercise that you enjoy enough to want to do it.
While CICO is a useful generalization, there’s other factors at play like hormones and how our diet affects those other systems
There are some "cheats" that you can do with macro profiles, especially with no or low carb diets (carnivore/keto), however these solutions rarely work long term, especially in athletic circles. For non-athletes it _might_ work a little longer term but if you look at those studies (with non-athletes) they are very short lived and typically on a very specific cohort. Hormonal levels adapt over time and the initial "gainz" you see are relatively short lived - this is most evident in the studies done on athletes. That and you have to stay on top of your bloodwork. In my personal experience it's about six months. I've tried keto, paleo, and carnivore for fairly long periods of time (paleo is much more forgiving long term for a variety of reasons). There are most certainly diminishing returns. Unfortunately, as I said, there's no long term studies here with large cohorts so it's all anecdotal.
Show me a guy who runs 10km/ day and weighs 250 pounds and I'll buy that.
A Whopper combo from Burger King comes in at a little over 1500 kcal.
So it's certainly possible, but I have a hunch those who run 6+ miles a day generally self-select themselves out of the population that overeats calorie dense food.
Regardless, like most colloquialisms, it isn’t meant to be taken so literally. It’s speaking to the general truth that it’s easier to limit calories in than increase calories out
Brain says eat your are staving to death, eat it'll make you happy, eat... or else.
You can't control urges to eat, you can only do your best to resist them.
However, exercise, is always under your control, so it is a great tool. Exercise also has all sorts of non weight loss health benefits that aren't tangential but complementary to weight loss, including staving off weight-loss induced muscle loss. Without a doubt, you can't lose weight without getting a grip on diet, but I don't think a diet only approach is a good one.
I had problems keeping a healthy weight in my past and the method that worked best for me was to target a diet a bit below my metabolic rate, one that would have me losing weight at a slow but steady clip (and would also start to trigger the lizard brain to eat eat eat), then add moderate exercise to the equation.
This is going to depend from person to person. Like most things, you can train yourself to control your hunger/appetite. Some people will have no real issue, others it will be an uphill battle.
For me, this is a big part of it. I can schedule a daily ride. While I can schedule not eating from 8am until 8pm, I'll usually wind up in the kitchen at some point when I'm thinking about something else.
My experience says that I feel a lot less hunger on intermittent fasting than trying to eat small meals frequently. Most other IF practicioners say the same. Hunger feelings ("brain says eat") are hormonally driven and not entirely mechanical in their occurence.
If you only work out a few times, it's easy to over-eat to compensate, but if you are working out regularly—5-6 times a week—your desire for food changes.
Dieting does not change the amount of activity you do.
Also, it is more important to be healthy and fit than skinny.
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.
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.
weight loss = (calories in - calories out)
is a useful approximation but vastly over generalizes. The human body is a complex system with many more inputs. Hormone levels, inflammation etc. all can play a role.
Scientifically true, but in order to successfully pilot the plane, not very helpful. Keeping the plane in air and keeping your body fit requires knowledge of its mechanisms, not just the physical principles of operation.
I think it's far more important knowing what actions work for an individual to achieve weight loss. Most everyone knows that X calories in and X calories is the end target. Knowing how you can reach that balance is the hard part.
Every time I see some kind of forum about weight loss there are a million people popping in talking about "Putting the fork down" or "Calories In < Calories Out". But this is worthless because in the end, having a solution that a person is capable of doing is far more important than theory.
Of course human bodies are complex and there is no one size fits all. My anecdotal weight loss won’t match with yours. We can provide our experience so others can draw their own ideas and conclusions from our stories.
It wasn’t really an either or situation for me. Both diet and exercise are needed. The way I looked at it is with the simple model of calories in - calories out = weight change. I think there should be some factor that accounts for sedentary or active, but I don’t know where to fit it in. Like any model, it’s not perfect.
You and you’re used below do not reflect the poster I’m responding to.
If calories in exceeds calories out and your level is sedentary, you’re going to gain weight in the form of fat.
If calories in exceeds calories out and you’re lifting weights, you gain muscle probably with some fat. Think of this as bulking.
If calories in are less than calories out, you’re going to lose weight. If you’re active, then it’s going to have an interaction effect where you lose more weight.
Calories in would be quantity times frequency and would come from the sum of solid and liquid calories (calories in = quantity liquid * frequency liquid + quantity solid * frequency solid). We can manipulate quantity by reducing portion size or reducing calorie content through substituting different, healthier choices. This applies to both liquid and solid calories. We can manipulate frequency by fasting, or eliminating things altogether.
Calories out = calories burned * frequency + base metabolic burn rate. Calories burned should be a rate over time. We manipulate the rate by using more strenuous forms of exercise. We manipulate the time by changing the duration of our sessions. We increase the frequency by having more sessions. We increase the base metabolic burn rate by lifting weights and gaining muscle.
You start by figuring out what your baseline is for both calorie intake and exercise expenditure and then make small adjustments to either increase or decrease. You weigh yourself at the same time on the same day once a week. You look to see progress on a weekly basis. If you’re hitting 1-2 pounds loss, you’re on the right track. When you plateau for a couple of weeks, you need to adjust the parameters. The process needs to be followed.
We probably need some sums and indexes in the above model, and we could probably differentiate between something like steady-state (e.g., walking and meals in the normal course of a day) and perturbations (e.g., cheat meals, fasted days, long hikes, running, gym). Again, it’s a model, and weight loss stories are anecdotal, but I think the point is illustrated. Change your diet and change your exercise regimen to lose weight and have body composition changes.
For me anyhow, the fun aspect is critical.
Of course, the best way to lose weight is to clean up a bad diet. One unhealthy meal--or even a snack--can completely undo the calorie deficit of all but the most intense workouts.
I gained a lot of strength and some muscle mass in the gym. But as for losing extra fat, exercise could not move the needle more than 2-3 pounds. What worked, and was surprisingly easy, was intermittent fasting.
I started exercising with some light running, gym use, breaking a little sweat. Didn't do anything, didn't show any noticeable result over like 4 months.
Then I hopped on a rowing machine (above preparation probably helped to be ready for it) because I wanted to see something happen. I'm not that special. Do something to your body and it will probably do the same for you as it does for other people, you just have to stick with it. I stopped thinking "eh, it won't do anything for me".
I rowed each day before the weights workout, 10 minutes super intense, until I felt like I was gonna puke as I fell off the machine. Heartbeat way elevated, out of breath, blood coursing through body, and soaked.
In conjunction with not eating quite as much (that rowing machine does something to your appetite) I dropped I would say 1 pound per week. Doctor asked if anything was wrong the next time I went in for physical and got weighed. Felt great.
Exercise is a part of my routine now. I don't eat junk any more. I now say the thing people always say after such things, but you don't internalize or believe it until you try: "I wish I had done it sooner".
This is why, when talking about health and fitness with friends, I always try to deemphasize weight loss. When I decided to finally stop being overweight and inactive (I played rec league soccer, which was miserable because it was my only exercises and I was grossly out of shape) I lost 40 pounds, then I put on 20 as I incorporated more strength (bodyweight) training into my routine.
And a couple colleagues who started weightlifting + moderate cardio saw initial losses of maybe 5-10 pounds before their weight became stable, but they were getting in obviously better condition even though they were still above their initial target weights by quite a bit.
(1) https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2020/11000/Exerc...
I have been exercising 3 days a week with a PT for 3 years before with no results on the weight (but many other great results like fixing my knee and back problems, getting really strong, etc.)
I also only gain weight for 1kg after all these 8 months lockdown/not allowed to open (pre lock down I did karate about 3 times a week).
But don’t exercise without seeking advice from a physician and/or completing a physical!
"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 important, likely more important that fitness, but diet is vastly more difficult for me. Also, when I'm working out regularly, my diet naturally shifts. If I'm sitting at my desk or on the couch for weeks at a time, food intake increases.
I'm sure if I could ever properly reign in my eating I could change this, but I've tried so many times and it never works. Working out on the bike does, and as I mentioned above, the intake adjusts correctly when I do it.
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.
None of what you described changes the example solutions you gave. An alcoholic does need to not drink to improve their health, just like to lose weight you do need to eat fewer calories. The way to solve a problem is to find the solution, and empathy doesn't cure being overweight or addiction. Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
No, but it would prevent a lot of insensitive, boneheaded forum posts.
EDIT: Wasn't trying to suggest your post was insensitive or boneheaded.
Maybe it wasn't, but I think your original sentiment wasn't far off from my reaction to the same OP.
While I haven't struggled all that much with my weight, I know people who have. One of the most important things for weight loss (and anything else for that matter, up to and including break ups, as was in the original example) is support networks. I learned that lesson rather harshly when I went through a really ugly break up earlier this year.
Humans are social creatures, after all, and I can't fault you for your original response.
We need others around us who are a positive influence.
I specifically said that the advice was _correct_. My point is that fact isn't that useful. Knowing the solution (i.e. eat less, drink less, think less) is the _easy_ part. It's the part these people have usually been told many times. It's rarely a lack of advice that is missing.
It's true that empathy doesn't cure these problems. But it is through empathy that you can understand what someone's true obstacles are to the "obvious" solutions.
Do you think the fact isn't useful to the people who don't know it yet?
Pretty much everyone who drinks needs to not drink to improve their health, but whether alcoholics have a particular need to not drink is controversial and largely widely accepted because of quasi-religious doctrine that has been well marketed.
> Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
Yes, but here’s the thing. Lots of research has actually gone into the steps for weight loss, its not something people need to work out from scratch. Its a lot more productive to follow a path that works even without deep understanding of the rationale than to start with a target and try to work it out from first principles, which most people will fail, and fail very badly, with.
Sure, “eat fewer calories” might be generally part of a solution (and “eat fewer calories than you use” definitely will be). But neither of those are particularly useful advice on their own for people who want to lose weight.
Did you mean 500?
Also, you might spend maybe 200cal lightly cycling during a zoom call. You will get that back in a few seconds of eating, if you choose something heavy like a chocolate bar. Your best bet then is to just control the incoming calories, because even an all-out workout of an hour will do you maybe 800cal if you're a bit bigger and stronger than me, and even if you did that you'd feel super tired for a long time after and maybe even decide to eat up that amount again.
In my case, it was all about calories. I've done this, and a friend did this as well: get one of those electronic scales that's got a couple of decimals on it, eg says 92.15kg. Then you can get used to understanding how much weight you lose while sleeping, how much you are carrying as pee and poo, and how much a meal tends to weigh. This will tell you how much you actually weigh, because you can take out the noise.
Have a look at an online calculator that tells you how much you should be eating for a given target. Find out the calories in everything you eat, and eat that budget.
I did this, and amazingly, the weight loss was just as expected. Thermodynamics seems to work.
Exercise isn't just about the calorie differential, it improves heart function, posture, flexibility, bone mass, mood, etc.
I don't have any advice here; just commiserating. Keep on trucking.
This is why you have to be smart about how you do it. Ride your bike to work or run/ hike/ play with your kids. There are a million ways to double up and get fit while doing something else.
How much time do you spend playing video games or watching TV? That is time you can convert into being fit.
Dying of heart failure at 50 clears up all those "Not enough time" issues.
> Even if you find the time, you might be quite tired and that also eats into your time budget.
Exercising when you are not fit wipes you out. Regularly exercising gives you more energy in the long run as normal activities become easier and less stressful.
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.
For me... cycling works wonders. I burn calories twice as fast as walking and so long as I focus on good post-workout foods I avoid the trap of undoing all the good that I just did. Eating proteins and fats after a workout fills me up and lets my body repair torn muscle tissue.
Yes, it’s possible and people do it. But it’s got a whole host of dependencies that are ordinarily subject to breaking changes.
The article mentioned the participants could exercise however they wanted and "many chose to walk". I don't understand why walking is considered exercise. I understand it burns more calories than sitting still, but it doesn't elevate your heart rate nor push your muscles to grow/develop in any real way, and it feels like trying to "cheat" your way into exercise.
Also, this bit was really interesting to me: "Those burning about 3,000 calories a week showed changes now in their bodies’ levels of leptin, an appetite hormone that can reduce appetite. These alterations suggested that exercise had increased the exercisers’ sensitivity to the hormone, enabling them to better regulate their desire to eat." I would bet that those who burned the most amount of calories weren't just walking farther than the others, but instead their choice of exercise was just more intense.
I've always heard that running isn't a great way to lose weight because it just makes you want to eat more, but that hasn't been my experience. After running somewhere between 3.5-5 miles, my appetite is gone for at least a few hours after the run. I have no desire to snack, and while I might eat slightly more at dinner, the overall calories for my day don't change too significantly.
I have had family members lose 60+ pounds from introducing daily walks into their lifestyle.
I am still a proponent of more vigorous exercise and particularly resistance training, but you cannot discount the benefits that going from not walking to walking can have.
- Start weighing yourself daily (once a day -- smart scale helps, but a notepad to track will work). You start here to build the habit.
Do this for a 3 weeks just to understand how much your weight will fluctuate +/-. On any given day I seem to fluctuate 2 lbs or so. You will be similar. if you only weigh yourself once a week you might get encouraged/discouraged while in one of these micro-cycles.
- Then after 3 weeks, calculate your macros -- and then understand what in your 'normal' diet is throwing your macros out of wack. If you eat labeled food, look at the labels. If you eat more whole foods, google around for some data. It sounds hard, but you'll build an intuition quick.
For my partner and I, we both needed MORE protein. We weren't getting enough. I ate MORE meat, and they added a pea protein smoothie (which sounds lame but they are really good.) My partner started to eat less nuts as well, because they were getting too much fats.
- Control for your macros with your normal diet.
- Eat whatever you want in your macros, balance yourself by watching the scale. if your macros are off, you will trend up for about 4 days in a row. Anything less in my experience is "expected". I can reverse 3 days of small weight gains (3-5 lbs) in about 1-2 days.
Once my partner mastered this, they eat 1 cookie and ice cream every night, guilt-free, to hit their sweet tooth, and we have combined lost close to 40lbs by doing this.
- You can work out to firm up, but depending on how much you wanna lose, diet alone could be enough.