Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss? 978
antdude writes "The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"
Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Hackers Diet makes it clear: Exercise just doesn't burn that many calories. You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html [fourmilab.ch]
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much, not sure why this is a story. There's a little to be said for increasing muscle mass, and that's about all.
“It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”
In other news, water is wet and the sun is bright.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Informative)
Hacker's Diet is the best way to lose weight IMHO. It explains the basics (consumer less calories than you burn), and offers some good strategies for eating and exercise and geeky tools (inlcuding a web-based tracker) to aid in your descent into fitness. I lost close to 30 lbs on the "diet" and while it wasn't painless, it was pretty straightforward. I did gain a good amount back 2 years later when I quit smoking, however.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Informative)
Muscle mass is a really important point. I don't understand the obsession with weight. I went from 32% body fat to 15% body fat and weighed exactly the same. Guess which one of those left me feeling and looking better?
The researchers in the story ignored all the signs from the last ten years which point to strength training being the most important part of a regimen designed to reduce fat. When you do cardio (especially that slow, "fat-burning" cardio), you burn a few calories, and when you step off the machine, you're done. When you train for strength, you burn fewer calories, but your body spends the next twenty-four hours burning extra calories trying to repair the damage you've done. Doing anaerobic / aerobic intervals on a cardio machine has a similar effect, and when you put the two together, you really shed the fat.
You also need to watch your food intake so that your insulin levels stay as constant as possible. That means eating difficult-to-digest (generally "whole") foods instead of processed ones. Your body isn't just a black box. Eating some amount of calories in oatmeal and eating the same amount in breakfast cereal will have different results: your body works harder to digest the oatmeal so your metabolism is higher, resulting in lower total calories; the added fiber changes how your body digests the other food in your digestive system.
Cutting calories is a myth. In fact, while losing about 20kg of fat and putting on the same amount in muscle, I ate more than I had eaten before I started the program. I ate more. I exercised more. The ratio of calories coming in to those going out probably didn't change, but that increase in the total drove my body into overdrive and tricked it into ramping up my metabolism even further than the exercise amounted to.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting 150 calories from a Twinkie certainly is less beneficial than 150 calories from oatmeal, for the exact reasons you describe, but they both give your body 150 calories to use (or store...).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I misspoke. You can use calories as your only measurement. Generally, though, when you simply cut calories, you lose lean mass first, and don't start burning off fat for a long time.
Sure, you lose weight, but keeping that weight off is harder than ever, and who wants to be the skinny, flabby guy? Not me.
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I think this is somewhat exaggerated. You have to tailor your advice to the audience. Remember that 1/3 of americans are obese, and that our tendency to over-consume is our main problem. Exercise won't fix this.
I've done my share of weightlifting and add muscle fairly easily. That said, at 5'11 and 255 at the start of this summer, the last thing I was going to do for weight loss was lift weights. Sure, I could have built up quite a bit of muscle starting with that base. But in the end, I still would h
Telling that to someone starving to death (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Telling that to someone starving to death (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who fights with this, it's not a full feeling that's the problem. Feeling full doesn't keep me from wanting something like ice cream or chips. Desire is more of a problem than feeling full. I can eat to satisfaction and not be full or even eat to bursting but see ice cream or smell ribs or bacon and immediately want some. It takes thought and discipline. It's why I can't leave a bag of chips close by and eat them. I'll mindlessly eat them while programming until I realize I've eaten a whole bag of chips and not remembered doing so.
[John]
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, I know where you're coming from, but surely feeling full would help? I work night shifts a lot at a hospital, and for months I was running on sugar buzz - every time I felt tired I bought something from the vending machine to wake me up for 30 minutes. I've been overweight almost all my life - not massively - but enough to always feel self-conscious and not want to go to the beach etc.
In the end I realised that I had to do something (or else go shopping as all my clothes were getting too tight). I decided I really wanted to do something, made a plan (which as I said was along the lines of the Hacker Diet) and also told all my friends. The last bit really helped - whenever they saw me with food (other than a meal) or on a webcam or whatever I'd feel guilty and get rid of it.
The other thing is, I found that if I cut out all of the high calorie snack foods, there's no reason at all that I can't enjoy a good meal whatever the calorie content. Since I started trying to loose weight, I've still had a takeout meal about once I week, I still eat whatever I want at a restaurant. If, like me, you eat loads of snacks, then you're actually in quite a good position to cut those out and still enjoy a decent meal when you want to. The other week I went out for a meal with my wife and sat and watched her eat cheesecake at the end - I didn't fancy any so I didn't have it - which would have been impossible for me six months ago.
Please don't think I'm being egotistical - I'm rubbish at being self-disciplined - but I just decided that I really wanted to feel OK about myself in this regard, not to suddenly be a male model but to get it under control. It is possible, harder for some than for others, but if you want it then you can do it. I think the Hacker Diet is great because it's not about a two-month crash but a long-term plan.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You didn't sound that way to me. I appreciated your honesty, and I congratulate you on finding something that works for you. I'm in a pretty similar boat - I'm 38 and just starting to feel like I really need to change my diet. Your story was inspirational to me, so thanks.
Another thing lots of people don't consider (Score:5, Interesting)
Even more people (including researchers) don't seem to think about the energy excreted in the feces (or other ways).
I hardly ever see any mention of it in studies related to weight loss, diet etc.
Go check out how many researchers actually take samples and work out how much a subject is excreting.
Then there's was also a study which showed that mice in a bacteria free environment could eat a lot and not put on weight.
See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95900616 [npr.org]
And another which had the bacteria free mice getting gut bacteria from obese mice and ending up fatter than if they got gut bacteria from skinny mice.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6654607 [npr.org]
Based on these, it should not be a surprise that some people will actually find it hard to lose weight despite eating and exercising the same as skinny people. Of course, your diet also affects your gut bacteria populations. I bet consuming lots of "sugar water" isn't going to help breed gut bacteria that makes it easier for you to be skinny.
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I wouldn't say it's a myth. I'm not portly by any means (people think I'm thin--but most people are fat), but I've been steadily dropping weight (fat--I have a fat-checking scale) for a few weeks just by kind of tracking what makes it go up and down for me. I've found that if I eat like my wife (Japanese), i.e. tons of carbs (rice), I just keep putting on fat. I cut that rice and other carbs--the major source of my calories on the Japanese diet I have (she cooks for me, and she's great!) is from those carbs
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I happen to be in peak physical condition and my basic routine consists of about 15 hours a week of moderate to high intensity activity. I split about 50/50 between aerobic and anerobic activity.
Anyways only about 2 hours of that total time is spent doing "stuff" at the gym like running on the 'mill and lifting. The gym is godaweful boring, SOOO boring, after about an hour I want to shoot myself. Just about its only redeeming value is that its 5 minutes away and open every day 'til 10pm. Everyone compla
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is the point, more than your point about muscle mass (though that's a valid point, too...). TFA says that these people did supervised cardio without changing their diets. If your body requires 2500 caloreis per day to maintain a healthy weight, and you're consuming 4000, then burning an extra 500 calories in cardio isn't going to make a difference.
You're right that with a high muscle mass, it's possible to be in the "morbidly obese" category while not actually being fat or unhealthy. Professional athletes are frequently in that category, for example. But most people don't have such large amounts of muscle, and when they tip the scales at 250lbs, it's because they have much more body fat than they should. Doctors tell them thatt they should lose weight, not because they necessarily need to lose the weight, but because it's easier than testing their body composition and telling them that they have too much fat in their body. But the doctor is supposed to apply some common sense... if a male is tipping the scales at 250lbs, but wearing a 34" waist, then even though he's in the "obese" category, he's obviously not actually obese.
If you want to lose body fat, you need to look at the big picture. It's fine and well for you to say that you ate more in exchanging 20kg of fat for muscle... but I can tell you first-hand that it doesn't work that way for females. We have to put in twice as much work to build muscles due to lower testosterone levels, and people tend to look at you weird if you're muscle-bound. Having muscle tone, and adequate strength is much better than building muscle mass, thanks to societal pressures... and that comes from cardio. But the only way you're going to lose weight through cardio is by not consuming way more calories than you need. It's well and good that you're in the cardio zone, and burning fat calories (I run 6 miles a day, and usually finish under 45 minutes, for example), but if you're still consuming way more calories than your body actually needs (including the extra 500-700 you'd burn from that level of cardio workout), then you're not going to lose weight. It's becoming a tired mantra, but it's no less true: eating less and exercise is the only way to do it.
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> I don't understand the obsession with weight
IMO, it's because your weight is the easiest thing to measure.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. The easiest thing to measure is "how loose are my pants." I have to put them on every weekday to go to work, and I have no reason to step on a scale other than to check my weight.
Which is a very small part of why my goal is to lose inches around my waist, not pounds. (The pounds will be a nice side effect, but they're certainly not the goal.)
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Informative)
"The researchers in the story ignored all the signs from the last ten years which point to strength training being the most important part of a regimen designed to reduce fat. When you do cardio (especially that slow, "fat-burning" cardio), you burn a few calories, and when you step off the machine, you're done."
I run marathons in the summer and do strength training in the winter. Without a doubt I can say marathon training burns far more calories than strength training ever will. I actually bulk up and put on fat when I do strength training. Marathon training on the other hand presents me with the challenge of trying to keep weight on, but that's to be expected when you burn through ~3,000 calories in an afternoon.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Informative)
The majority of fat gain as you get older, is due to deterioration of muscle mass leading to a lower resting metabolic rate. Having muscle helps keep the weight off. As well as reduces the risk if impact injuries and helps actually doing things.
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Why would a bunch of sedentary muscle affect your metabolic rate if it's not *doing* anything?
Muscle_tone [wikipedia.org] :
Unconscious nerve impulses maintain the muscles in a partially contracted state.
Be careful, when ignorant, of how forcefully you push your opinion.
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People told me to lose weight to help my knees. I lost 60lb.
My knees still hurt.
Fucked knees are still fucked, no matter your weight.
Density (Score:5, Funny)
It's called "density", you know, dense...
Oh, wait, maybe you're already quite familiar with it...
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with the comment about muscle density though. I stopped weight training when I graduated from high school (I took weight training for my mandatory phys ed credits). I weight the same now as I did then, but I look a lot fatter because I haven't been to the gym in forever.
I remember that I was quite fat before I started weight training. I was very surprised by the gain I saw when I started. 2-3 times per week of 50 mins. of weight training and within a month I already looked noticeably more fit. No amount of running around in phys ed classes has ever shown such an improvement.
That said, some people much prefer running to weight lifting. Personally, I hate running and I have thus hated every single phys ed class I have ever taken with the exception being weight training. But there are other people that run to work, run from work, run for fun on the weekend and they are some of the most in-shape people I know. It really depends on what kind of person you are. There's no one universal solution to weight loss.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you only ate 2000 calories a day (be it 2000 calories of salads, ice cream, lard or refined white sugar), you'd definitely lose weight. Calories in - calories burned gives you a great idea of if you'll gain or lose weight, regardless of what "kind" of calories they were.
It s
Re:Fat loss is more important than weight loss. (Score:4, Insightful)
...if you run the numbers and then understand them you will realize that Adkins is a pretty intense "starvation" diet. It's pretty easy to lose weight on a starvation diet assuming that you can tolerate the "starvation" part.
It takes rather a bit of effort to flee carbohydrates to that degree.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Interesting)
Muscle mass is also a good way to lose weight long term. Short term, it weighs more than fat, so you get the surprising (to naive people) result that exercise can make you put weight ON if nothing else changes (and subconsciously you get more hungry due to the calorie burning).
Long term, muscle mass needs feeding. That's why your body gets rid of it if you don't use it - it's a waste of energy. You put muscle mass on, you burn calories whether you use it or not. Granted, it takes a lot. The best to focus on (so I'm told) is leg muscle, as they're already big and building them up is relatively easy (running/cycling/walking all do it).
But sure - exercise alone and diet alone isn't going to lose you weight. You need to do both.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
OK, so how do we double our brain size?
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can't be "ripped and obese"--obese means very fat--but I know what you meant.
It's not true that the only way to lose fat is to combine weight lifting and exercise with a low calorie diet. Plenty of people lose fat without weight lifting. Although including strength training (it doesn't have to be with weights) is probably the best way. There are a variety of magic tricks in the creation of lean body mass. Here is what they are, and why they work:
1. Weight lifting, particularly big lifts like squats and
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to ebrag but when I go to the gym I burn around 700-900 calories...
Burning only 300 calories isn't go to do much of anything. You could replace that with a walk.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to inject reality into your rant, but a) how do you know you're burning 700-900 calories? That counter on the treadmill? Those aren't exactly known to be really accurate... and b) you do realize that the amount of calories a person burns depends on their existing body mass, their existing muscle mass, and their heart rate during the exercise.
In other words, two different people can hop on a treadmill, do the same "3 kilometers" in twenty minutes, maintaining the same speed and the same distance travelle
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The thing about exercise is, until you get to the point where you are pushing yourself to the limits you wont see drastic results. Most of the obese people I see in my gym spend half their time sitting around, or cycling on the lowest level while reading a magazine. 12 weeks is NOT enough time to reach your peak physical condition, especially if you are just starting out. And if you do hit the point where you are pushing yourself to your limits you will see insane results if you can maintain your exercise p
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Informative)
The thing about exercise is, until you get to the point where you are pushing yourself to the limits you wont see drastic results. Most of the obese people I see in my gym spend half their time sitting around, or cycling on the lowest level while reading a magazine.
The folks in this study were under close supervision, exercising fairly intensely. It's fun to trot out your favorite lines about exercise but that's not really applicable here.
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Those people are also the ones that are intimidating to those who aren't ripped. I wish there were periods of time like for beginners at gyms...or some such. Swimming is another good option, but for those who are embarrassed to be seen in a suit...
Course, this may be more of a girl thing.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
Course, this may be more of a girl thing.
No, no, it's absolutely not a "girl thing". There's plenty of guys that are embarrased about how they look in a gym outfit or in a pair of swimming trunks, and therefore do not go to the gym or the pool.
Exercising next to all the ripped guys by the mirrors is intimidating for us guys as well.
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for your claims of weight loss: of course it works, not eating will cause you to loose weight. It also causes other health problems. I suggest you talk to your doctor rather than whatever unlicensed moron (a.k.a "diet expert") looked up what happens when your body goes into starvation (one of those things is ketosis) and called it a "health plan".
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense. Someone who is 40lbs overweight or has never weight trained can make much faster gains to begin with than someone who has been training for years and has to work far, far harder for that last lb or extra 5kg.
The only thing holding you back is your own shame. Do you think really fit guys at the gym are going to walk over and beat you up? Do you think they care that you're not as fit as them? Do you think for some reason they're offended by being fitter than you?
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite possible that they are trying to be friendly / helpful. If you're doing free weights, it's even quite possible that you are doing the exercise wrong whether you think you are or not. Often it's hard to see what you're doing incorrectly yourself. That's one of the reasons people watch themselves in the mirror when they do weights - they can see if their back is swinging when they do a barbell biceps curl or if its straight when they do a squat. You can always just have a conversation about it with whoever has offered the advice. Mistaken or not (and if they're obviously an experienced "iron pumper" why do assume they are incorrect?), they're offering help.
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Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, exercising makes me fucking hungry.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, exercising makes me fucking hungry.
Really? I'm finding that I'm anything but hungry when I come home from training. Thirsty, yes. Hungry, no.
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I didn't read the article, but +1 insightful. That's EXACTLY why exercise doesn't help you lose weight. It also doesn't help that many people exercising with the goal of losing weight will say, "Gee, I just spent 10 minutes walking on the treadmill. I'll reward myself by supersizing my triple bacon cheeseburger and milkshake."
Want to lose weight? Eat healthy. Eat healthy foods and eat healthy portions. Eating healthy food actually tends to make the body crave
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Informative)
Good point. Also some studies have shown that those who exercise don't lose as much weight because they perceive exercise as this great calorie burning activity, then they go and eat more to reward themselves for the 'great job' they've done.
While it's fun to trot out pet peeves, the study in this article controlled for that.
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IMO the whole "fat (duh)" thing is a myth - I'm not a doctor or anything but from what I've read so far, the amount of fat you can store is affected by the amount of carbs you eat at the same time. And I've been eating a relatively high fat diet for a couple of months now, with no sign of it all being dumped directly into my fat reserves. There was a whole lot of bull bandied about about fat by the US govt in the second half of the 20th century, and anyone who questions it is treated like a lunatic. Pretty
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Interesting)
You need only one article [nytimes.com] to refute the idea that fat makes you fat — Taubes has done the work for the rest of us. Some asshole wrote a big ugly rebuttal to his article, but it was entirely filled with falsehood; if you are really interested (which you might be if you want to cite Taubes' article, because people will come along with the uninformed rebuttal and quote it like it was the bible — irony intended) and you may need to shoot them down.
Short form: We've known for decades to centuries that eating carbs makes you fat and raises your risk of heart disease. You can see it strongly amongst italians (greeks, who are intermixed heavily with them due to the wages of history, eat less fat and have less problems) and amongst peoples of the carribean. Mixing fat and carbs is the problem, because carbs regulate energy storage, period the end. Also, unburned carbohydrates are actually more likely to be converted and stored in a fat cell than unburned fat! Finally, carbohydrates are addictive in that your brain becomes more resistant to them over time (very simplified, but bear with me) and it takes more carbs to feel full, causing the eating of more and more food. Eventually you burn out your pancreas and become a diabetic.
Exercise is, however, absolutely necessary for health. You have about as much lymph fluid as blood but there is no organ tasked to moving it around. This is why you see fat people with super fat ankles; there's not much actual fat there as you know if you've hit those protruding ankle joint bumps on things, but if you don't move around the lymph just settles in your body.
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You get ripped off very badly in health food shops. If you're in the UK, you can get some really good quality stuff here [myprotein.co.uk]. Alternately, just eat a proper meal after your workout which is best anyway. Work out before breakfast, before lunch or before your evening meal. Carbs after workout helps stimulate muscle growth and it also means that you'll be more likely to exercising on an empty stomach which hel
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. I wonder why so many people think they have to physically suffer in order to lose weight. Probably for the same reason people think we must suffer and make sacrifices to save the planet.
People don't get fat because they eat junk food, they get fat because they eat too many calories, junk food or not. It just happens that junk food is the best way to eat lots of calories (you can effortlessly eat yourself 1,500 kcal by picking the right meal at McDonald's). The recommended daily intake for an average
Re:Hackers Diet FTW. (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't recommend skipping meals, it's pretty much the opposite of what you need to do if you want to lose weight.
Eat less each meal, yes, but also snack between meals on something healthy to keep your metabolism going.
Less caloric intace and more exercise is the only way to reliably and healthily lose weight - and be able to sustain your new weight afterwards.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say all diets are doomed to failure, the only thing that will work is to change your lifestyle.
Do not diet. Change your lifestyle. Yeah, it's a nice soundbite, I'll go with that :)
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Your body doesn't have a 100% conversion factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Putting stuff in your mouth is just step one. How you chew your food, how well it is digested, how active your metabolism is, all these will affect how much energy you actually get out of your food.
Still, physics still stand: Use more energy than you get through food you _will_ lose weight.
It's not that simple (Score:5, Informative)
Your body is not a simple machine. How much you eat impacts how much you use; simply cutting calorie intake will just cause your resting metabolism to drop. Worse, you might start metabolizing muscle.
Re:It's not that simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, burning muscle sucks.
I've had two major weight loss periods in my life:
First was from 130 kilos down to 80 kilos. I did this through eating 1500 kcal per day exclusing green veggies AND doing intensive cardio on the treadmill five times a week, hitting 500kcal on the calorie counter each time.
Now I did drop a load of weight, but a good portion of that was muscle. I did regular max-lift tests on biceps and my legs, and over the course of my weight loss the weights I could lift more than halved.
Second major weight loss is from 108kg to 94kg. It's still ongoing, with the final goal being 80kg again. This time I didn't want to loose muscle, so joined the local gym and took professional advise. This resulted in a combination of diet and mixed training plan being made. For the food, my intake drops to 1500-1700 kcal per day for six days a week, split into 6 meals. For the training, I do 3 weight sessions a week (upper body, lower body, upper body, lower body etc etc), 3 cardio sessions doing interval training and 1 session which combines cardio and weights focusing on endurance.
The result? At the half way point I'm stronger than when I started. I've increase my weights by about 30% since the start (about 4 months now). I'm also getting some muscle definition. Weight loss is now steady - it's slower than my first but the actual inches being lost around my waist more than the last time.
So through my experience you're right. Cardio training combined with diet for weightloss is really counter productive. Adding weights in there is clearly the way to go.
Re:It's not that simple (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately not (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you're a tub of lard, the body reduce your metabolism and metabolize unused muscle mass before using fat reserves.
McDonald's hasn't been around long enough to have an evolutionary impact. Starvation has.
Re:Unfortunately not (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately not (Score:4, Informative)
The body is quite complicated. It's not like it burns just one thing at a time. The proportion of fat/protein/carbs burned depends on a lot of factors. If you look at starving people, you will also note that they are not over muscled. Experienced body builders *will* reduce their calorie intake to get down to 1 or 2 percent body fat, but they have a lot of tricks to avoid burning too much protein (thereby cutting down their hard won muscle).
A lot of people want to lose weight in order to look good. I would hazard to say that they are less worried about health issues than looking good (thus the crazy diets people go on). Muscle is *really* difficult to put on. Fat is relatively easy to lose. Putting on a pound of muscle means going to the gym and lifting weights for a good 10-30 hours (depending on a lot of factors). Losing a pound of fat is as easy is avoiding drinking that can of coke every day for 25 days. You should be careful of crash diets that will end up burning muscle.
Without going into details, aerobic exercise is a good way to protect your muscle mass when losing weight (the body shifts to burning a larger percentage of fat directly when doing aerobic exercise). Running 3 miles a day will burn about 400 calories each day. If you run 6 days a week that will be about 3/4 of a pound a week. But you have to be
careful of diet since you will be more hungry.
Unless you are crazy into running (which is unlikely if you are overweight), anything more will have to be done with diet. But you really do have to be careful of losing muscle. Especially people who can't exercise very much (due to lack of fitness, or ill health) really need to be realistic about what they can accomplish in a short time.
Lately I let myself get a bit overweight. But I lost about 30 lbs in 3 months. Unfortunately I now realize that nearly 5 lbs of that was muscle. I was too aggressive in shedding the weight. Now I'll have a fun time trying to get it back (especially since I'm over 40 now... sigh...)
Re:Unfortunately not (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll just add a little to what you wrote if I may, for the benefit of anyone looking for advice. If you drop your calorie intake more than around 15% of what you actually need to maintain your weight, you're pretty much guaranteeing that you'll put your body into mild starvation mode, reducing your resting metabolism to conserve weight.
And on the subject of fat or muscle going first, yes - it does make sense if you're not needing that muscle for running or weights to start shedding it at the same time you shed fat. You might think that it makes sense to save the muscle for last, but you know that your not actually in a famine. All your body knows is that there's an unspecified amount of time with less food ahead of it. If it waits until the last minute to shed all that massive muscle of yours, then its going to have lots of muscle cannibalizing itself. Whereas if it starts early with the muscle, then that reduces the calories it needs for its daily activities and it can eek out both the muscle and fat a bit longer. If you lost your job and didn't know when you were going to get a new one, you wouldn't wait until you'd exhausted all your savings before you cut back on your spending, would you? Fat is your savings, muscle is your spendings. Your body is the one in charge of your finances, not the conscious mind saying "the diet will only last 1 month". That's why you convince your body that the spendings are necessary purchases by exercising, rather than just letting it all go to waste.
Re:Unfortunately not (Score:5, Informative)
No it isn't and you are posting potentially harmful information. When your body goes past a particular point of calorie reduction, it starts metabolising both its fat reserves and underused muscle. Your body doesn't know how long the "famine" will last. If it burned away all the fat first, then at the end of that process it would have a great load of expensive to maintain muscle for little benefit. If you lose your job, you don't wait until you've used up all your savings (fat) before you start cutting down on unnecessary spending (muscle that isn't being used a lot for exercise). Instead, you are more careful with your savings and you cut back on spending. Do you see?
If you severely cut back on calorie intake (around 15% or more below what you need for maintenance) and you're not offsetting muscle loss with exercise, you lose muscle along with the fat.
The rest of your information is hopelessly out of context. Don't advise people on health matters when you don't know what you're talking about. It's not like talking misinformed crap about Linux or Microsoft. It can harm people's health.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Show me a overweight Olympic level marathon runner, and I might believe it.
Me thinks you have cause and effect mixed up here. People are Olympic runners because they have a body that's optimal for it, not vice versa.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Show me a overweight Olympic level marathon runner, and I might believe it.
Me thinks you have cause and effect mixed up here. People are Olympic runners because they have a body that's optimal for it, not vice versa.
Wait a minute...
Let me get this straight. You're saying that doing lots of high jumps won't make me 7 feet tall?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Genetic doesn't matter much for most people: if your genetics is a bit worse than average for some task, you can compensate with practice and skill to become a bit above average. For the extreme ends of the spectrum, it matters a great deal. Two decades of continuous training are unlikely to turn either you or me into an olympic style athlete.
That's not "geneticism" (which is an outdated and disproven theory) but simple biological fact.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a difference between a runner and an Olympic runner.
Yes your good competitive runner likely isn't fat and their training probably got them that way.
An Olympic level runner on the other hand combined that training with some genetics or with some drugs/etc. Either way it was more than just the training.
1/2 cal per mile per pound is lost walking/running (Score:3, Informative)
well - actually about 0.6 or so, and since a pound of fat is about 3500 kcal of energy, an average sized person (150 lbs) would need to run/walk 38 miles to burn a pound of fat - or I could just eat half portions for 3 days.
The study says they just lost a little weight, not none at all.
How can that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there is the issue of converting fat to muscle (which weighs more) and the fact that people in general don't exercise as much as they think they do. For most people, weight control is hard, it's basically a lifetime commitment to minimizing calories and maximizing physical work.
The world continues to deteriorate
Give up.
Re:How can that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget weight loss. It's *size* loss which matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Fat is less dense than muscle. You may weigh a bit less but it'll be muscle, not fat so you'll be significantly smaller.
It takes about 12 weeks to see results. Then you just have to keep it up, which is why I chose karate and jujutsu. You get fit and it isn't mind numbingly boring.
Btw, the failure rate for diets is something like 95%[1] which it pretty bloody significant scientifically.
[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2725943.stm
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I was grossly overweight to the point that the doctor was worried so I said to myself that this cannot go on. I changed the amount of food I ate from large dishes to normal dishes and skipped any evening meals except vegetables. I also picked up daily one hour walks or swimming. During 4 months I lost somewhere close to 100 pounds and felt great.
Re:How can that be? (Score:4, Insightful)
I changed the amount of food I ate from large dishes to normal dishes
How do you do that with US restaurant portions?
"I'd like a small meal, please." "OK, one supersized-mega kids' meal coming right up!"
You don't eat the whole serving they give you and take the rest home to eat another day. You CAN do that you know. ;)
Re:How can that be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or go with the flow. As TFA points out, whether you lose weight or not, work out a few hours a week and you're healthier.
My own experience confirms this. All my life, I was too thin. Then I left school and got an office job about 5 years ago. All the sudden I'm not having a problem keeping on the pounds. I never got noticeably overweight but I was getting a little soft around the center. Signed up for a 24-hour fitness membership a couple years ago and was surprised that my weight continued to inch up.
Finally, earlier this year, I changed up my workout. More cardio, less weightlifting. Also went from around 4 1.5-hour workouts a week to 6. I just treat it like my job. As soon as I get off work, it's off to the gym for two hours (which has the advantage of waiting out traffic.) I also made some adjustments to my diet. Less fast food. Replaced cola with coffee (caffeine) or lemonade (sweet). And though my sweet tooth is as sweet as ever, I am more conscious about eating that extra snack or the dessert that was left in the break room, and consequently, I probably eat a few less calories on average.
But my real secret weapon: the Nintendo DS. I needed something to distract me from the drudgery of the stairmaster and lifecycle and I can only gawk at the girls for so long. I don't play video games otherwise, so I look forward to an hour or so playing with the DS while I sweat. Turned-based games like Advanced Wars (or chess) are perfect for the stairmaster.
The result: for the last 6 months, I've been shedding a pound or so every 2 weeks, about the same as the study. A few months of that will add up.
Re:How can that be? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How can that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem with exercise and diet: it's like a job that pays $1 per hour: a lot of work and sacrifice for tiny results. Diet food tastes like shit. The box it comes in is tastier than the contents in my opinion. Repeated studies show that even fairly intense diet and exercise result in only about a 15 pound reduction over the longer run. People then think, "Why should I bust my ass chasing that 15 lbs? I'm still overweight. Fuck it, I want a donut!"
Re:How can that be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shortcuts are never tasty
I highly recommend getting a book called "The Okinawan Program" which is a study of some of the healthiest people on the planet and their diet and lifestyle.
It contains some delicious healthy recipes that leave you feeling very full, are exotic and tasty as hell and yet keep you below that horrific calorie level needed for weight loss
To take what someone said earlier and expand on it. "Stop eating so much fatty, and learn to cook!"
Re:How can that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
The longer you do without junk food, the less you crave it. Real food tastes much better after you've given up donuts, burgers, and MSG. Rather than a $1/hr job, think of a diet as starting college as a broke student. It takes a while to graduate.
Re:You're half right (Score:4, Insightful)
Its kind of like watching an ice berg melt, it takes a long time for not much to happen, and then all the sudden it accelerates and disappears.
When you have more muscle mass, you also burn more calories at rest, and can reach higher levels of exertion thereby burning more calories per hour. So the whole process starts to accelerate.
But it's all physics? *snark* (Score:3, Insightful)
But..but...it's just thermodynamics! There's no way that the human body could be a complex organism that adapts to it's environment or anything like that! If you're fat it's because you're lazy! Exercise and you must lose weight! 2nd law says so!
Oh, wait...
Re:But it's all physics? *snark* (Score:4, Informative)
Also, in neither of the studies do they actually monitor the food intake. So while it says that the diet didn't change, the subjects very well could have eaten more.
Basically if you want to lose weight, you're going to have to do something with your diet. This is something that was common knowledge 25 years ago, but somehow we seem to have forgotten it.
I'm currently losing 2-3 kg/month (Score:3, Informative)
And I've been doing so for the last 6 months. I've been keeping track of what I eat in a database, and I can tell you that if you're not, you're constantly changing your diet. Eating till you're full will have drastically different nutritional values, and you're just not equipped to gauge that.
I've also been exercising. I wasn't losing weight until I did both.
Perhaps because... (Score:4, Insightful)
if you are still munching your way through 6 soft drinks, 2 packets of doritoes, a couple of chocolate bars and fried chicken each day you are still sucking in a hell of a lot more calories than you can burn off with just exercise?
The main role of exercise in weight loss is to help you maintain your metabolic rate ( or increase it a bit) while eating a normal amount of calories.
For a regular guy this should be about 2500 to 3000 Calories depending on your body size.
If you just cut your calories, your body is going to tend to just drop it's metabolic rate, so it's harder to lose weight with diet alone.
Oils and fats have 4 times the energy packed in them as carbs and protein, so if you are eating a lot of fatty food it is going to give you a lot of calories without filling you up much.
a normal healthy diet (ie. balanced protein/carbs and healthy fats, like from nuts, fish & avocados) plus exercise is the way to really succeed. Have a big heap of non-starchy veggies and it will really help fill you up without too much extra calories compared to having say, fries with your steak.
Oh. and diet drinks have been found to have a tendancy [sciencedaily.com] to fool your body it is starving, which gives you a bigger appetite, so avoid those & just drink fewer sugary beverages instead.
Losing weight isn't rocket science. Increase /maintain your metabolism a bit with 30 min excercise a day and reduce your calorie intake to below what your body burns is all you need to do - and be patient. Don't expect to lose more than about 2 pounds a week - any more is too fast and unsustainable in the long term.
The muscle you put on with exercise also helps you maintain your weight loss because muscle burns more energy than fat.
Break out of the overweight geek stereotype and be a healthy fit geek - you will think better too when you improve your circulation.
Exercise leads to weight gain (Score:3, Insightful)
Everytime I exercise I gain weight, I started overweight about a year ago and am now 16 pounds heavier. I lost fat and gained muscle and I feel better for it.
Obsessing over weight is pointless as muscle is 3 times heavier per unit of volume than fat. BMI is a really stupid measure as it can't tell muscle from fat.
Conservation of Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
I know a lot of people are going to talk about CoE. After all, that's the driving equation here. It is absolutely correct, but can we not glean more insight into the problem?
IWAHTE (I Was A Heat Transfer Engineer), so my guess is that what's going on is that people spend the vast majority of their calories maintaining body temperature. If you eat less, your body's first reaction might well be to reduce skin temperature, maintaining core temperature. This theory links the fact that women eat less then men by 20% with the observation that women are complain about being cold earlier than men. Less calories burnt to keep skin temperature high.
In the case of someone who is overweight, they have an additional layer of blubber (yes, basement /. denizens, you are coated in blubber) that insulates them and maintains their core temperature for free. Maybe there's a hysteresis? First the body weight comes down, then the body learns it can waste excess heat maintaining skin temperature, and then, and only then, the body is free to consume additional calories.
Now, I don't do human anatomy, so a doctor would have to chime in and confirm just how much of the body's caloric consumption is lost to heat, vs. other bodily functions.
A personal example: on an average day, I eat some 3500 calories. But I am athletic, and only weigh 70, so this is a "good" 3500 kCal. What I notice is that my skin temperature is always warm, especially compared to women. In fact, I am very comfortable when the temperature is around 15deg inside. I go outside on a 5deg day in nothing more than a sweater and a top hat. I routinely mock my friends who wear a sweater, coat, and scarf when I'm sitting around in short sleeves. Certainly, my body is horribly inefficient, and if society falls in some sort of catastrophe, I will certainly be one of the first to starve (if my 20/800 eyesight doesn't make me walk off a cliff first). However, in a society that has mass amounts of overconsumption, it seems to fit me just fine.
A second personal example: I dated a German doctor who as a 16-year-old doing a year-abroad in Minnesota, had been anorexic. After she came back, she put on a lot of weight: obviously her body reacting to the extreme abuse she had given it. Now as a 25-year-old, she was in the Bundeswehr (German army), and this girl could RUN. She ran marathons. She ran 2 hours with 25kg of weight attached to her. And yet she was always, always overweight by 8kg or so vs. her pre-American anorexia bout. Not a lot, but she was... pudgy. She'd been to doctors, etc, and could do nothing to get her weight down. I lived with her for a while, I can guarantee she ate nothing but healthy food, and only somewhere around 1600-1800kCal/day. However, she liked her rooms warm.
So I am less physically active, yet consume twice as much. The only thing that can explain this is that physical activity just doesn't use that many calories, not compared to maintaing body temperature. Since I go outside without a coat, I burn more calories than she does to maintain the same core temperature.
My two cents, but I certainly welcome other /.er ideas, though.
Lifestyle Change (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the only way to do this effectively is to approach it as a change in lifestyle, and accept that this is how you are going to be eating for the rest of your life (if you want to stay in good health that is). The next step is to find a diet that can match this requirement. diets like weight watchers do work, but the most effective diet that I have found is a Low Glycemic Load diet. Stabilizing ones blood sugar automatically creates an environment where the body begins to rid itself of excess weight. I use the word diet in the context of a way to eat, and not as a means to an end. The next step is to learn to eat correctly and stick to
It. It takes about 3 months to learn to eat correctly, and can take about 6 months to become acclimatised to the new lifestyle. On a low GL diet one can lose 1 to 2 pounds a week. This continues until you are within your normal body weight range, and then it stabilizes.
I would really recommend a low GL diet to anyone who is serious about wanting to switch to a healthy and vibrant lifestyle.
My diet/exercise experiences (Score:5, Insightful)
Next major body change was when I joined the Navy. I went into boot camp weighing 199, I got down 8 weeks later weighing 199 but with vastly less body fat. My physical structure changed significantly. I started off not eating to much, but ending up consuming pretty large amounts of calories (and drinking tons of water, that is very much forced on new recruits to avoid dehydration problems which are very common when you are exercising in one form or another for most of the day.) Most of the people in my division did not lose weight, some gained a few pounds, all were in vastly improved physical condition. Not big body builder type musles, but lean endurance muscles.
The best method of weight control/weight loss I know is to not eat until I feel full. If I am hungry I will eat until the hunger stops, and then wait 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes I find there is more room, usually I find that I am full. It seems to take food some time to settle in and for my stomach to give the feedback to the brain that it is doing alright. The stomach is actually a pretty small organ and the digestive system seems to operate best when working on small loads. Full loads both have the effect of stretching and enlarging the stomach (thus making it more difficult to feel full) and diverting energy to digestion (alot of energy is consumed for digestion, thats why people go on health fasts, to give the rest of the body a period of time where the body's energy can be continuously applied to other systems for repair and maintenance. Thats the idea anyway) that could be used for other things, like keeping one alert and full of energy and providing for the immune system to do its job.
My $0.02
All you slim theoreticians... (Score:4, Insightful)
you forget the fundamental psychological effect.
7 pounds, in 12 weeks - some claim it's not bad, some claim it's weight loss so it's okay and so on.
First off, if you weight 238 pounds, going down to 232 pounds is just a pathetic joke. It took you 3 months to get there. It will take you 5 years to get there at current speed. It would be a reachable goal if it was fun, but...
But the second problem is that it's a dull, boring, miserable exercise. From a slim person's point of view, exercise makes you feel far less miserable than from an obese one's.
The thermal isolation makes you sweat like a pig and overheat in matter of minutes.
If lifting a weight uses 50 joules of energy, a fit person will easily lift it, expending the 50 joules distributed equally throughout the volume of thick muscles. A person with poor muscles will expend the same 50 joules but concentrated in thin, weak muscle that aches, hurts and throbs with exertion, it uses the same insignificant amount of energy but feels vastly worse.
The fat gives you extra weight for exercises like push-ups, sit-ups or pull-ups. Sure you use more energy but don't neglect the psychological effect, how miserable and ashamed you feel without breath after two push-ups.
Then you start feeling hungry, and the body which has a tendency to gain fat, usually gains it because your hunger feels more intense to you than to most slim people who just shrug it off. Take it from an obese person, getting really hungry feels somewhat like drug starvation, you feel ultra-miserable. And still you need to cut on the calories.
Oh, with even little strong will you will go like that for a month easily, suffering and feeling miserable, but telling yourself you're doing it to lose weight to be able to do all the things you can't do because you are obese.
After second month of being miserable like that you start having second thoughts.
After third month, when you went from 240 pounds to 220, you can see it will take you another 3 years of feeling miserable before you get out of this swamp. You say "fuck it", drop the exercise and start eating again.
If you can devise a diet that is low-calorie but filling and tasty, if you can devise exercises that are fun, it could work.
And even worse if eating is your method for stress. It becomes a habit. Something stresses you out and you won't calm down until you fill up your stomach. It's a habit like smoking or drinking. Unfortunately, the fundamental rule of dropping any habit is to drop it entirely. If you're a chain smoker, no one smoke a day, you just have to stop. If you're an alcoholic, you can't drink one and stop, you can't drink alcohol at all. But what about eating? You can't drop eating entirely. It's a horrible habit to drop, really.
12 weeks? (Score:5, Informative)
That's your problem right there. Let's see:
Fat is a long term storage form of energy. Everything (proteins, glucose) can be converted to fat, but fat cannot be converted back to glucose (unless you count the lone glycerol molecule that holds the 3 fatty acids together on the triglyceride). It's NOT a reverse reaction. Thus the problems begin. It's easy to make fat, and hard to get rid of it.
So how is exercise supposed to get rid of fat then? Well, fat CAN be converted to acetyl-COA and shoved into the Krebs cycle. Only the Krebs cycle is an AEROBIC process and takes place in the mitochondria, not in the cytoplasm of the cells. Aha! Problem #2. Sedentary people have fewer mitochondria than athletic people. Therefore their ability to "burn" fat as acetyl-CoA is limited. An athlete can burn fat just as efficiently as glucose, the only difference being he'll lose out on the couple ATP from glycolysis.
So you need mitochondria, in quantity, to burn up acetyl-CoA and therefore fat. If you don't get rid of the acetyl-CoA somehow, the whole catabolic process starts backing up. How do you obtain mitochondria? Increased exercise - over a sustained period. 12 weeks is hardly enough to increase the number of mitochondria in your muscle cells, much less expect them to burn through a dozens of kilos of fat. But the title of this article is misleading - according to the study the cited article is based on -
Mean reduction in body weight was -3.3 ±3.63kg (P less than 0.01). However, 26 of the 58 participants failed to attain the predicted weight loss estimated from individuals' exercise-induced energy expenditure. Their mean weight loss was only -0.9 ±1.8kg (P less than 0.01). Despite attaining lower than predicted weight reduction, these individuals experienced significant increases in aerobic capacity (6.3 ±6.0ml.kg-1.min-1; P less than 0.01), decreased systolic (-6.00 ±11.5mmHg; P less than 0.05) and diastolic blood pressure (-3.9 ±5.8mmHg; P less than 0.01), waist circumference (-3.7 ±2.7cm; P less than 0.01) and resting heart rate (-4.8±8.9bpm, p less than 0.001). In addition, these individuals experienced an acute exercise-induced increase in positive mood.
So they ALL lost weight. Only some (probably cheated on their diets/lied about their original diet) lost LESS weight than others. Continuing the exercise for more than 12 weeks would probably have caused further reduction in weight. I don't know HOW the submitter can turn that into "Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss?". Oh yeah, but this is slashdot- news for nerds. This site should be renamed to "Slashdot - news for trolls: engage critical thinking now".
Cue the low-carbers in 3... 2... 1... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thing is, though: They're right.
If you haven't read "Good Calories, Bad Calories [amazon.com]" by Gary Taubes, you should. This book outlines how 40 years of bad science and personality cults in nutrition research has lead to a serious misunderstanding of the causes of heart disease and obesity.
At the very least you should read his eye-opening NY Times article [nytimes.com], which pre-dated the book by a couple of years.
Sociopath (Score:3, Informative)
This post is extremely misleading and dangerous. Why anyone would want to propagate this lie is beyond me.
Exercise does lead to weight loss. The article cited clearly says it does. It's just that a small amount of exercise -- aerobic exercise for short periods over a mere three months, without strength training or diet changes -- is less effective than you'd want it to be. Well duh. But even in those circumstances, with all those factors stacked against weight loss, the participants still lost some weight.
A counterexample: A mildly overweight or average person, who has no heart problems and is otherwise healthy, can engage in much more vigorous exercise. An hour on the elliptical can burn approximately 700 calories. An hour in an intense gym routine can burn more (ever see those ads for LA Boxing touting the one-hour 1000 calorie workout?). Lets say you do an hour of 700-calorie cardio every morning and dont change your diet. That's an additional 3500 calories you're burning per workweek. If you give yourself weekends off and don't change your diet and don't strength train, you're still losing a pound a week, mostly of fat. If you add in proper diet -- not calorie restriction per se but just switching from soda to water or cutting out one or two greasy meals a week -- you're doing better. Add in strength training and you're be doing amazingly.
But it's not enough to just diet. The health benefits of good cardiovascular health and muscle strength are important in their own right. Things like the Hacker's Diet work to lose weight, but they are very unhealthy, even possibly dangerous. It condones a quantitative instead qualitative approach; the Hacker's Diet seems to take the position that you can eat microwave pizzas for every meal as long as you keep it under about 2000 calories. What it doesn't tell you is that in the process you'll be failing to provide muscular support for an aging skeletal system, adding cholesterol to your body, hardening your arteries, and atrophying major muscles.
because you need to eat less to lose weight? (Score:3, Insightful)
I lost 25 pounds this year, and it mostly came from a diet change. Excersizing is great, and can speed things up but the biggest factor to losing weight and keeping it off was just eating less. Cut out the crap like snacks and pop soda, try to "feel hungry" more often it won't kill you. Excersize makes you look great and develop some muscule but that alone won't take off the weight until you change your diet.
BURN BABY, BURN (Score:3, Insightful)
I have gone through large weight swings at different periods throughout my life. I was ectomorphic growing up, and matured into a mesomorph. Because my job is IT, I'm sedentary for long periods of time, and as such, will accumulate fat, especially given that in my mid-30's I still eat just like I did in my mid-teens.
Due to my particular personality - mild OCD, extremely impatient - I am very, very good at modifying the way I look in short periods of time. I lost 19 pounds in a week, just to prove a point. I ate 3 hard boiled eggs per day, 1 slice of whole wheat toast, lots of water, lots of coffee, and never stopped chewing sugarfree gum. I also exercised for 4-5 hours per day. It takes incredible willpower. It absolutely sucks. You'll feel like shit. But it does work.
Swimmers who cross the English Channel and Florida Straits also lose huge amounts of weight in very short periods of time. Susie Maroney lost 22 pounds in just over a day when she swam from Cuba to Key West. Not all of it fat, to be sure, but a lot of it was.
Much hype was made about Michael Phelps' diet when he trains. He consumes between 10,000 - 12,000 calories per day while training. So imagine your daily food intake, and quadruple it. That's how much he eats. And that's just to prevent him from losing weight. He has to eat that much to stay the same.
I also freedive. Freedivers are some of the leanest athletes in the world. They tend to stay away from gyms as too much muscle burns too much oxygen. The repeated depletion and replenishment of O2 across the cell membrane really burns the calories. After a 4-day freediving training session off the coast of Florida, I had lost 6 pounds of fat in 4 days.
As others have noted, most people feel like they're doing a lot of exercise, but they simply aren't.
Exercise absolutely works. Just just aren't doing it intensely enough or long enough if you aren't burning fat.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Just to be clear though .. did you mean eating as much AS the villagers, or the villagers themselves?
No (Score:4, Informative)
If you just cut your calorie intake, your body will adjust. You have to exercise so you're body doesn't decide that your muscle mass is more expendable than your energy reserves (fat).
Re:Simple formula (Score:4, Insightful)
Weight loss requires the one-two punch of diet and exercise. Dieting reduces intake, and exercise burns energy and, crucially, maintains metabolic rate. Dieting can't do it alone, and nor can exercise, for that matter.
The report tells us nothing new - this has all been known for a long time.
Re:Simple formula (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, it's quite possible to starve to death with excess body fat still in place, simply because your metabolism slows too much and available energy stores aren't being depleted.
I was always under impression that fat is stored in body primarily to be burned when no food is available, as a survival mechanism; and secondarily, to provide thermal insulation. What you describe is essentially in direct contradiction to that. Can you provide any references to your claim (something explaining how such an arrangement could have evolved would also be interesting)?
Re:Take it from the horses mouth (Score:4, Interesting)
If you eat a lot of food, or if you eat food with a lot of fat in it, then you gain weight.
I started a low carbohydrate diet last July and I found, to my amazement, that it doesn't work that way. I've been eating more fat than I ever did in my life and for some reason I am losing weight. But I almost completely cut down on carbohydrates eating only those on green vegetables. Although I don't count calories -- I feel that I am eating more calories now, compared to my previous eating habits which, while not excessive, lead to gradual weight gain.
I am not saying the body defies the laws of physics but obviously we are not storing everything we eat.
(The argument about the density of muscles isn't strong either: I had to buy new sets of clothes as well. That means I didn't simply replace "heavier" muscle with "lighter" fat)
Re: (Score:3)
In theory, practice doesn't matter...
In practice, many studies have been done, and none have shown notably higher weight loss from low card diets than from low fat diets.
In practice, reducing the amount of calories you eat will cause you to lose weight. Carbs, fat, doesn't matter.