No shit. That’s not some great revelation and I’m kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch. Your body is very good at conserving energy. Not to say exercise isn’t beneficial, it is, it’s just not a great weight loss tool. Not at last as good as common wisdom might suggest.
The caveman in your skull is also very persuasive, and wants you to eat far more than you need, because it thinks you might not be able to find food again for a while. The caveman really likes carbs, and foods high in sugar and fat, and will ask for more the second you have any.
Ignoring the caveman is hard, harder for some than others. It’s also taxing and after a while the caveman will wear you down.
Effective weight loss isn’t just about putting less food on your plate. Fucking anybody can do that and it’s exceedingly obvious to those trying that that’s what they need to do.
Losing weight is about beating back the caveman in your skull, convincing him that he’s had enough, and feeding him in a way that also nourishes the body you both live in.
There’s a reason most people fail, and fail repeatedly to lose weight. It’s as simple as eating less but it turns out, eating less for people who eat a lot isn’t actually that simple. There are psychological and physiological drivers causing them to keep going back for more, to lie to themselves about how they’re doing, and to ignore the obvious cues that something isn’t working.
It really is the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or “just don’t take any drugs, duh” of weight loss. Like, you can’t just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. It’s reductive and unproductive.
People aren’t having trouble with math or willpower, they’re having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on “most”) readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
It’s almost identical to saying “just stop taking drugs.” Or “just stop drinking.”
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, they’re literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
It’s also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. I’m slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.
Not really, evidence suggests that between average people you will see at most 4% difference in BMR
just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work
That’s literally exactly how it has worked for me. Obviously it takes some will power and discipline, but so does basically everything.
Our individual stories do not always translate to the bigger picture, gmtom. You might have grown up in a household where you were insulated from the predations of the processed food industry. You might have had better habits instilled in you as a child. You might have had a positive body image at one point in your life, to serve as inspiration for your weight loss journey. Maybe none of those are true and you truly are one of the lucky (and hard working!) ones who escaped this situation just like the addicts who recover through willpower alone. Regardless, we cannot all rely on being gmtom.
My final paragraph is not focused on the individual but on the epidemic of obesity. We cannot solve this through brow beating about CICO just like Republicans aren’t going to solve the drug addiction crisis through jailing everyone with an addiction. People are using food to fill a hole in their lives, just like drugs, and we have to do the hard work of figuring that root out. Otherwise, we are doomed to become ineffective and unhelpful, leaving people to suffer.
There have been many times that I justified gaining weight via alcoholism because I thought maybe if I was disgusting no one would assault me again. Turns that that’s not only not true, I’ve become disgusted with and hate my own body. So now I have a crippling alcohol addiction in addition to hating myself, and being afraid of interacting with certain people.
I’ve done a lot of therapy. And I will continue to do a lot of therapy. I almost graduated from therapy this spring, and had curbed my alcohol intake. But, then I had to get a restraining order and my brain fell right back into it’s old habits. It shouldn’t be this hard to feel safe as a middle aged adult lol
Shit’s hard, it sounds like you have come a long way. I’m rooting for you ❤️
Hey friend. I’m on your team here. I can’t help you but I’m rooting for you so hard.
It’s hard. Fuckin hardest thing you’ll ever do. You don’t have to succeed in one try, or all at once. Every day is another chance to succeed just a little bit more, even if you stumbled yesterday.
You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch.
Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
That’s serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it’s far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
What is serious athlete level of performance? 10x for at least 30 minutes/day seems pretty manageable for someone without significant medical conditions to work up to in a short period. Even if you eat back 80% of that, it can still lead to an equilibrium weight that’s like 20lb less.
I can’t believe the number of people on here who keep repeating that exercising can’t replace eating less… If you eat the same amount of calories as before but increase the calories you burn by 500 the result is the same as reducing how much you eat by 500 calories while maintaining the same daily needs. Heck, long term doing it through exercising is better for you as well!
Burning 500 extra calories working out is an extremely intense workout, especially considering how sedentary most people are.
The benefits are also short lived, you can burn some extra calories for a bit but your body will adjust, and after a while the number of calories you burn during a workout tapers off and you return to about the same number you were burning before.
This is a well documented phenomenon. Human bodies are really good at conserving energy.
You lose weight in the kitchen, you tone up in the gym.
A kind of ‘side benefit’ to muscle-building exercise, is that it increases the amount of calories your body burns ‘by default’, because by weight, muscle takes much more energy to maintain than fat.
So on top of eating less (fewer calories going into your body), you can ‘attack’ it from the other side at the same time by increasing your body’s ‘consumption’ of the calories/energy stored in it.
This is a commonly repeated myth. One I believe myself until talking to my doctor about it.
https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitness-muscle-myth-20110516-story.html
Seems like its a “technically true” but in practice irrelevant because muscle and fat only make up a tiny percent of total energy usage (because things like the brain, heart and liver are so energy intensive):
For fun, let’s run the numbers in even more detail, adding the role played by body fat. Bouchard sent me a follow-up email explaining that — based on the biochemical and metabolic literature — a pound of muscle burns six calories a day at rest and a pound of fat burns about two calories a day, contrary to what the myth states. So, muscle is three times more metabolically active at rest than fat, not 50 times.
Again, let’s use me as a guinea pig and do the math. The 20 pounds of muscle I’ve gained through years of hard work equate to an added 120 calories to my RMR. Not insignificant, but substantially less than 1,000. However, I also engaged in a lot of aerobic activity and dietary restriction to lose 50 pounds of fat, which means I also lost 100 calories per day of RMR. So, post-physical transformation, my net caloric burn is only 20 calories higher per day, earning me one-third of an Oreo cookie. Bummer.
Anecdotal, and I agree with you overall, but I hit the gym hard (2-3 hour jiu jitsu/MMA sessions) 4 times a week for 3 months and lost 18 lbs. I didn’t change my diet at all, though I will admit it’s possible I ended up eating less overall. But my point is I think exercise can definitely be a pretty good weight loss tool if you’re working your ass off. Just depends on the amount of exercise and the intensity etc.
That’s not some great revelation and I’m kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
I wasn’t posting it like some revelation, it’s literally the most easy to understand concept ever. You cannot create mass from nothing. Stop taking in more mass than you expel. It’s dead simple. The only counterpoint to this is examples of extreme medical anomalies.
They explained it to you on a level a four year old could understand.
It’s about as simple as telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking or a depressed person to maybe just be happy.
Everything in your body is built against losing weight. If it wouldn’t be that way, we would not exist right now.
Tbh I think the importance of shape is overstated. It’s much more important that they pass a vibe check
So what’s the point of posting it? If it’s so obvious and all that you really need to know, why are so many people still fat?
The unsaid part of “it’s simple, it’s just calories in calories out” is the implied “and people who don’t get this are just lazy/dumb/it’s a moral failing.” Maybe this isn’t what you are intending, but it is kinda at the root of a lot of hate that fat people get.
The discussion around weight is changing because we’re starting to look into and understand the psychological components of weight, IN ADDITION TO the actual phsysiological processes of weight loss. Lots of “normal” day to day tips and “common sense” is being investigated and debunked. Shit is hard and complicated. Food is being engineered to be addictive. Some people literally don’t have easy access to healthy food.
