- cross-posted to:
- me_irl@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- me_irl@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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I assure you european peasants were not eating pizza and cheesecake multiple times a week
Yeah, that’s what the tweet said. That’s why the fact that the epigenetics haven’t reset yet is a big problem in some family lineages. Some entire families just have broken hunger reflexes / hormones that make the psychological aspect of dieting almost impossible.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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…
Bet she doesn’t lift. Lift heavy women.
Claims to be European
Oh! instead of Oi!
*Dinnae fash yerself
Sames
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.
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