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
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
I assure you european peasants were not eating pizza and cheesecake multiple times a week
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Go walk. Or if you want to burn a lot of energy, swim.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not saying losing weight is easy, but it is a simple math problem.
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.
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