Everyone seems interested only in weight loss. But the scale is just a poor proxy for what people actually care about ( looks, health or physical aptitude ). Your bodyweight remaining the same while gaining muscle should also be a huge win since that's building muscle, bone density and losing fat.
Do people actually just want to lose weight momentarily through diet? Instead of keeping it off long term, which is way easier achievable through diet + exercise?
Also no mention of body composition, bone density and cardiovascular health, which should be the actual metrics, instead of the proxy used for them.
I'm interested in weight loss because my BMI is over 30 which is considered obese regardless of whether it's muscle or not. I should not have a third of this weight. A couple years ago, I bought an electric scooter and it could not carry me because of the weight, so I ended up having to return it. Nowdays I have one that costs four times more and can carry me, but I still weigh much more than I should!
this is true for weight loss while in a mostly health range. it isn't true for people with high BMIs. for them the scale is a mostly direct match to health and how they look
human bodies are incredibly optimized to store energy for bad times and maintain a good balance at the ideal level. this is why the whole "calories in calories out" is technically true but mostly useless for a lot of people as the calories out is a very hard to compute variable. it also ignores entirely the negative effects of muscle loss.
there is a lot of complexity and difficulty in long term weight loss, we are fighting biology hard there. that's why glp1 agonists are having such a success, they allow to fight hormonal homeostasis with proper weapons.
I have yet to see any research showing a way to durably affect the body's set balance, which would be the revolution.
but this research all in all confirms what we know:
* high intensity muscle fiber tearing exercise is much better at not affecting metabolic compensating mechanisms
* cardio might be good for health and other things, it's very much neutral or possibly negative for weight loss, as cardio does not build muscle mass
* pure diet changes are difficult to make sustainable for many. I have seen it first hand where a constant 300 calories deficit a day resulted in weight gain and muscle mass loss despite cardio.
Look at overweight house cats and dogs. How did they get overweight? How do they lose weight?
Calories in / Calories out is the definition of survival or not for wild mammals.
Calories out is also exceedingly easy to calculate- on any given week if you gain weight the out is less than the in. If you maintain its ahout equal. If you lose weight out is higher than in.
as a simple example consider eating 100 calories of vegetables vs 100 calories of pure sugar. your body has to work a lot harder to digest one of those vs the other
Diet is king but exercise is not to be underestimated in its contribution.
I have found major success with fasted cardio. That is to say, timing when the exercise occurs relative to your most recent meal seems to dramatically modulate the effects.
If I do an hour of cardio within 12 hours of eating, it feels "normal". Nothing to write home about. If I do the same routine but I've been fasting for longer than 12 hours, I can feel my mitochondria light on fire after about 40 minutes in. The first few times I did this I stopped because I thought I was going to die. It felt super weird to me. Like a very strong parasympathetic response. You do get used to it though. I think this is one thing that can actually affect certain fixed points in your metabolism. If you go from zero to 80% VO2 max and keep it there for an hour on an empty stomach, that energy has to come from somewhere. And it has to happen pretty damn quickly. I think the time pressure for energy delivery under adverse conditions is what makes this so impactful.
What point are you even trying to make? The energy comes from your glycogen reserves and then from fat, both in a fasted vs non-fasted state. And if calories are equated at the end of the day, you just made your workout way harder because you didn't fuel properly.
This is just my own observations, but I find that when cutting calories I need to really optimize the rest of my life to avoid crashing in energy. Sleeping well, no alcohol, plenty of caffeine, lots of water and electrolytes, and time my carb intake. Doing a simple deficient will usually either not work, or lead to my energy completely crashing.
By how much are you cutting calories? At first glance it seems somewhat excessive if it affects your life so much. Also do you live in a very hot area or do a lot of cardio? Otherwise thinking about electrolytes is way too overrated
Exercise burns extra calories, just not as much as one would expect based on simple calcs.
At least this time the article is mostly okay, last article I saw here a while back was basically saying exercise doesn’t burn extra calories despite his works actually showing levels of activity influencing ~1,000 calorie difference in energy expenditure. Although speaking from experience, good luck trying to maintain high activity levels if one underfuels.
You can run a marathon a month or not drink a coke a day or eat one less slice of bread. Exercise is important for your health but it’s not how one loses weight.
This ignores metabolism. If you are in a state of high caloric excess (i.e. you eat more than you need every day, like most modern humans) and then you reduce your calories a bit, you'll see some initial minor weight lots, but then your metabolism will simply compensate.
To see real weight loss over a period of months you need to push past the point of metabolic adaption and stay there. Dropping a slice of bread won't cut it. That's why weight loss is so hard.
That's why exercise is useful for weight loss even though it won't do much by itself. You'll need to use every tool at your disposal to burn those excess calories.
A marathon a month is less than a mile a day. Semi regular exercise is an excellent way to burn some extra calories. Especially when your weight is relatively stable and your diet isn’t completely awful (so it’s not trivial to make huge improvements for little effort).
This isn’t even getting into the many benefits of exercise in general, or the virtuous circle of "well I didn’t particularly enjoy that hour on a bike in shitty weather so I refuse to waste the benefit on a shitty donut purely out of spite".
"Exercise" in these studies could be something like leisure walking for a couple of hours. That can only affect your weight by keeping you away from your snacks for a couple of hours, its energy expenditure is not moving your weight in any direction. If you look up, the energy cost of light activity is exaggerated. You can get numbers as high as 1 kcal / (kg*km) so somebody who is 100kg (220lbs) supposedly burns 500 kcals in a 1 hour of walking at 5 km/h (20 minutes mile). I know people who believe these numbers, think themselves at a caloric deficit and, when still gaining weight, doubt the Thermodynamics instead of the exercise "science".
I like the approach of some bodybuilders when trying to lose weight. They just count the cardio as extra, and multiplying the calories burnt by 0 to 0.5 when cutting.
Losing weight also becomes quite straight forward when one tracks their calories and activity in minutes and uses weekly averages. That way changing one side while maintaining the other can get them to losing weight again.
I agree totally with you, people try to find the perfect equation and tracking method for everything, otherwise it's pointless to them. Honestly I like how it is like a game, where losing weight initially is simple and then it gets incrementally harder and you have to find better methods and how there's variations from person to person.
TLDR - your body compensates by using less energy in all other activities if you do aerobic exercise, more so if you cut back on calories in. This appears not to happen with weightlifting. They directly measured energy burned with doubly labeled water.
It sucks that losing weight is just impossible unless you change every habit you have instantly and totally and sustain that for the rest of your life. Otherwise your body will balance out anything you ever try to do in a way that makes it totally ineffective.
One could just start slowly with something like learning to make delicious food that's not as calorie dense or going for an activity like rock climbing or basketball with friends once a week instead of going to a restaurant.
Yes, you have to sustain them for long periods of time, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.
For me its hard to just eat healthy, I need to also be working out to get into the "groove". Like I'm less inclined to eat something I shouldn't if I've worked out.
edaus|16 days ago
Do people actually just want to lose weight momentarily through diet? Instead of keeping it off long term, which is way easier achievable through diet + exercise?
Also no mention of body composition, bone density and cardiovascular health, which should be the actual metrics, instead of the proxy used for them.
LoganDark|16 days ago
fcpk|16 days ago
unknown|16 days ago
[deleted]
fcpk|16 days ago
there is a lot of complexity and difficulty in long term weight loss, we are fighting biology hard there. that's why glp1 agonists are having such a success, they allow to fight hormonal homeostasis with proper weapons.
I have yet to see any research showing a way to durably affect the body's set balance, which would be the revolution.
but this research all in all confirms what we know: * high intensity muscle fiber tearing exercise is much better at not affecting metabolic compensating mechanisms * cardio might be good for health and other things, it's very much neutral or possibly negative for weight loss, as cardio does not build muscle mass * pure diet changes are difficult to make sustainable for many. I have seen it first hand where a constant 300 calories deficit a day resulted in weight gain and muscle mass loss despite cardio.
testing22321|15 days ago
Look at overweight house cats and dogs. How did they get overweight? How do they lose weight?
Calories in / Calories out is the definition of survival or not for wild mammals.
Calories out is also exceedingly easy to calculate- on any given week if you gain weight the out is less than the in. If you maintain its ahout equal. If you lose weight out is higher than in.
Nothing else matters.
b0rtb0rt|15 days ago
as a simple example consider eating 100 calories of vegetables vs 100 calories of pure sugar. your body has to work a lot harder to digest one of those vs the other
bob1029|16 days ago
I have found major success with fasted cardio. That is to say, timing when the exercise occurs relative to your most recent meal seems to dramatically modulate the effects.
If I do an hour of cardio within 12 hours of eating, it feels "normal". Nothing to write home about. If I do the same routine but I've been fasting for longer than 12 hours, I can feel my mitochondria light on fire after about 40 minutes in. The first few times I did this I stopped because I thought I was going to die. It felt super weird to me. Like a very strong parasympathetic response. You do get used to it though. I think this is one thing that can actually affect certain fixed points in your metabolism. If you go from zero to 80% VO2 max and keep it there for an hour on an empty stomach, that energy has to come from somewhere. And it has to happen pretty damn quickly. I think the time pressure for energy delivery under adverse conditions is what makes this so impactful.
zorked|15 days ago
What is this supposed to mean?
edaus|15 days ago
zeroCalories|16 days ago
edaus|16 days ago
mint5|16 days ago
Exercise burns extra calories, just not as much as one would expect based on simple calcs.
At least this time the article is mostly okay, last article I saw here a while back was basically saying exercise doesn’t burn extra calories despite his works actually showing levels of activity influencing ~1,000 calorie difference in energy expenditure. Although speaking from experience, good luck trying to maintain high activity levels if one underfuels.
conception|16 days ago
esperent|16 days ago
To see real weight loss over a period of months you need to push past the point of metabolic adaption and stay there. Dropping a slice of bread won't cut it. That's why weight loss is so hard.
That's why exercise is useful for weight loss even though it won't do much by itself. You'll need to use every tool at your disposal to burn those excess calories.
goworkout|16 days ago
This isn’t even getting into the many benefits of exercise in general, or the virtuous circle of "well I didn’t particularly enjoy that hour on a bike in shitty weather so I refuse to waste the benefit on a shitty donut purely out of spite".
blinded|16 days ago
pandaman|15 days ago
edaus|15 days ago
Losing weight also becomes quite straight forward when one tracks their calories and activity in minutes and uses weekly averages. That way changing one side while maintaining the other can get them to losing weight again.
I agree totally with you, people try to find the perfect equation and tracking method for everything, otherwise it's pointless to them. Honestly I like how it is like a game, where losing weight initially is simple and then it gets incrementally harder and you have to find better methods and how there's variations from person to person.
stevenwoo|16 days ago
chistev|16 days ago
LoganDark|16 days ago
edaus|16 days ago
Yes, you have to sustain them for long periods of time, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.
blinded|15 days ago