It’s gotten harder to lose weight and not for the reasons you think
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Obesity is an issue, we simply have way too much opportunity to indulge and little reason to move to entertain ourselves. Go out and play seems to have fallen on deaf ears, why should kids do that when adults don't?
lastly, exercise is not they key to weight loss, proper eating is. if anything exercise contributes because it changes your lifestyle, you get out more or you spend less time eating and sitting
This is very true in my personal experience, too. I can quite easily binge-eat an extra 500 calories for dinner because I'm feeling a bit too hungry, but to work that back off with exercise might take 30 - 45 minutes of cardio. With hectic work schedules, it's also very easy to skip exercise sessions, but good eating habits are "working" even at these times. Of course, sometimes we don't have time to eat well, but I find that it takes a lot less time (per calorie) to eat well, than it is to work it off.
Another point I'd make is that small differences add up scarily quickly over time, as someone else pointed out. When I was just out of university, I started putting on 1 - 1.5 kgs of weight per year, nice and slow that it was hardly noticeable. Then, just a handful of years later, I was 10 kgs overweight - it creeps up on you. The opposite is also true, a nice steady decline is easy to arrange, and gives your body all the more time to adjust to your new eating habits, without it breaking your willpower.
I'm advocating a much slower approach, based on a little bit of knowledge about what you're eating, plus some convenience tricks like swapping out your heavy staple meals for something a bit healthier (that's still easy to make). My guess is that most people want to see rapid, drastic changes, and are demotivated when that doesn't happen (or takes too much effort), hence the failure.
And exercise just makes you hungry.
Fat people should eat less until they're a healthy weight (BMI of < 24.9). Then think about exercise.
Exercise, when thrown in with the typical "calories-in calories-out" context, is absurdly terrible for fat loss. It makes people hungrier, and then they eat more.
However, when viewed in the context of many people who are struggling with losing fat, it can be an excellent complement to dietary changes. Why?
Because obesity and fat storage in general are extremely metabolically driven, and metabolism is itself driven by numerous endocrine system factors. The effects of exercise on the body can cause someone who is already eating a healthy (minimal sugar/refined carbs) diet to have even better results due to the increase in insulin sensitivity for a 16 hour period after exercise.
Anecdote here, but I've found that for me the key to weight loss has been exercise-first. I decided that I'd never be very good at reducing my dietary input (I really enjoy food) so I focused instead on increasing my energy output by incorporating progressively more physical activity into my lifestyle.
Over the past few years I have steadily and gradually ramped up my activity through walking, running, cycling, body-weight exercises, plyometrics, stand-up desk, and so on, and I've been progressively losing weight and feeling better physically, mentally and emotionally. As a result, other complementary aspects of health - sleeping, eating - have also tended to fall into healthier patterns in a positive feedback loop.
It's hard to believe that exercise isn't the key to weight loss when I burn 2,000 calories on my Saturday morning run.
For myself, if I focus on diet and not worry about exercise I find that I have to eat very little if I want to lose more than a few pounds. So little that I'm miserable all the time. Forever. On the flip side, if I exercise[1] I not only burn calories but increase muscle mass which burns more calories. Other people seem to do well with a focus on diet and not so much exercise. Weight loss should be about losing weight in a healthy, sustainable way, however that works out for the individual. To continue doing something that's not working because it's supposed to be The Right Way is counterproductive and demotivating. I think most people can find some balance between eating healthier/less and exercising more, in a way they can keep up.
1. I've only had two effective exercise regimens: resistance training (weight lifting) and martial arts. If I try to jog, walk, or whatever I will become more and more irregular and eventually quit. Other people love to run. Whatever works.
You specified that you were only speaking for yourself but I think that for most people, a healthy steady-state weight is easier to achieve by smart food choices rather than exercise.
Recommending exercise is good advice for overall health such as increasing endurance, bone strength, sexual performance, managing stress, etc. However, saying that exercise is a "key" to weight loss is very misleading because the act of exercise also causes an increase in appetite.
These days, I exercise less than half the amount I did a decade ago and I still weigh 10 pounds less. The difference is that I eat oatmeal for breakfast and vegetables + olive oil for dinner instead of sugary corn flakes and pizzas.
Optimizing eating habits (without causing starvation) is much easier than running an extra 10 miles on a treadmill. This disparity in effort is obvious if you ask obese people if it's easier to eat a glazed donut (consume 200 calories) or run 6 mph for 20 minutes (burns 200 calories).
Anecdotally, I find that the initial bit of exercise makes the biggest impact. The added benefit of the "exercise first" approach is that after exercising, I find that I don't even want the donut. If I try to tame food first without exercising, I crave worse food which makes that effort considerably harder.
Yes, this exactly! The real challenge of getting in shape isn't the physics or chemistry nearly so much as it is the psychology.
I'm guessing this approach is something like swapping dopamine triggers. You get a good rush from exercising such that you don't need a dopamine release from eating a donut.
However, I still believe your and RyanMcGreal's anecdotes are the minority. Most obese people do not find exercise to be pleasurable. Getting sweaty is "work". For these people, if they exercise, they'll end up getting hungrier which triggers more eating and the end result is a weight change that nets to zero. In contrast to your scenario, instead of skipping the donut after exercise, they feel that they can "reward" themselves with a donut because they had the discipline to exercise!
For most people, switching out bad food for good food such that they are satisfied without starving is a far easier and more realistic lifestyle adjustment. To be clear, I'm not suggesting people eat "less", but that they eat "differently". Drink a kale smoothie instead of a glass of sugar-laden orange juice, etc.
Telling obese people that exercise will strengthen their heart is more truthful than selling it as a key to weight loss.
These days I run around 25 miles a week - two 6-mile runs during the week and a 13 mile run on Saturday. I also bike around 25-60 miles a week in order to cross-train and give my body a break from running.
Before I started, I was 70 lbs overweight with sore knees and a general malaise after two decades of sedentary living and too much food. I'm in much better shape today than I was two years ago, but I was already noticing significant improvement in my fitness, well-being and body shape after just a few months of what now seem like very slow, short-distance runs.
One thing to remember to account for with massive people: the bigger you are the more you burn moving the same distance. It takes effort to move that mass from place to place. I burn a lot less doing a 5K or 10K run now I weight approximately 10 stone than I did back when I was around 16.
Well, to be honest it's a non-solution. It's just something adults say to relieve themselves of the problem
Easier when most parents weren't helicopter parents, litigation happy to sue for every scratch their kids had.
The bias against obese people that the article refers to is very, very real: It's all of the assumptions people make about obese people, e.g. it's all their fault, they are lazy, they are to blame, and so on.
The information raised in this article is one way amongst many in which obesity is not as simple as that. In this case it rather reminds me of the meme where the older generation judges my generation as lazy because we rent instead of owning houses: as well as individual responsibility, it has gotten harder in real terms to earn enough to own a house.
Likewise, someone eating the same things and exercising the same amount now, compared to 30 years ago, would be fatter. That's extremely interesting, and needs to be factored in to any efforts to fight the obesity crisis.
No, it's not. Maybe it's more difficult to measure calories (that salad ranch dressing has more calories than that hamburger), but people should be encouraged to balance their calorie intake everyday. For what it's worth, here's why Americans are obese:
50 extra calories / day x 365 days / year x 1 lb / 3,500 calories = 5 lbs / year
Multiplied by 10 years, and you get 50 lbs over weight. In twenty years you are 100 lbs over weight.
Bottom line is that people are eating just a little too much every day, and that adds up over time. My advice for losing and maintaining weight: Have 5 x 400 calorie meals each day and exercise for 30 minutes. The chore of finding 400 calorie meals is well worth the effort because you'll see just how many calories each item you consume contains.
I'm an example of the first category. I'm 6'2'' and 160 lbs, and have been like this for years. At age 27 I spent a whole year working from home, eating at McDonalds 1-2 times every day, going to sleep at 5am, and not exercising at all. Resulting weight gain? About five pounds, which I promptly lost after joining a gym. More recently, at age 32, I took a two-week vacation and literally spent it all in bed, playing video games and eating large amounts of chocolate and pastries. Resulting weight gain? Zero (actually a slight loss). This happened last month.
Since I'm at one extreme end of the scale, it's very easy for me to believe that there are people at the other end, who won't be able to follow your plan at all. Restrict them to 2K calories/day, and they just won't fall asleep unless they get a snack. They need a different way.
The laws of thermodynamics are true as far as they go, but they don't have anything to say about genetics, metabolism, hunger, or willpower. These are the real important factors in weight loss. The sooner we move away from a virtue-based worldview, the sooner we can start actually solving it.
For people like you who are tall and skinny and it seems impossible to gain weight, you are either not eating as much as you think you are consistently (i.e. not correctly tracking your calorie intake) or you are grossly underestimating how many calories obese people consume on a daily basis.
Just eating at McDonalds 1-2 times a day doesn't mean anything if you are just getting a burger, but if you get three burgers, a large fry and large coke on a daily basis, that is going to make a difference.
Along with mental factors, poor dietary upbringing, as well as horrible (and consistently changing) nutrition advice are strong contributors to problems with weight gain.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/
The author's theory is that the issue is not on of metabolism, but that people overeating do not have a good "I'm full" mechanism.
Most people like you that "can eat all they want and not gain weight" in reality... don't. They balance out their intake naturally, if not in the scope of a meal, over a day or so.
For example the concept of leaving unfinished food on the plate it completely alien to me (or not going for seconds if available), while most normal people just stop when they feel they are ok.
In my very personal and anecdotal experience every time I started dieting counting calories and exercising I have always lost weight, consistently, while when I stopped I gained weight back (again, consistently and predictably).
Most other diets that have a scientific basis should be efficient as well, since what they all have in common is to enforce some sort of control on your intake.
Either way I agree that it's about genetics and willpower but, not having the possibility to change genetics, the mechanism to counter it exists and it's not a mystery, it's really a psychological issue, IMHO.
And there are people like me who rarely feel hungry. I eat because the clock tells me to.
First, I never eat in the morning. And I mean never, I can't eat after waking up, I always need a few hours before being able to eat without being disgusted, I know it's bad but I don't think it has an effect really (I don't do it since I'm like 12 or 13).
Second, I NEVER eat between meals. I don't do snacks, unless someone give one to me or whatever, but you get the point, I don't fucking eat some chocolate bar everyday at 4pm, or eat chips all day because I'm bored.
I often only eat good food, or what I think is good food at least. I never use the microwaves, always buy "fresh" meat, eat vegetables aswell (only recently, not when I was a teenagers).
So in the end, I may eat like a savage during the meal earning my reputation, but in the end I don't really eat a lot of shit.
Anyway since I watched Fed Up I understand while US kids are obese. Their public cafeteria in school literally are fast food. Not to mention the retards crying out for freedom when the gouvernement even think about taking action into kids diet.
I won't even start on the sugar and science thing because it sound very threatening but I don't know enough to judge how accurate it is, even though I have no doubt it's very likely given history (hello smoking industry).
I'm the same way.
> First, I never eat in the morning. And I mean never, I can't eat after waking up, I always need a few hours before being able to eat without being disgusted,
I'm the same way.
> I know it's bad
Why do you think it is bad? Because everyone has told you that you need a good breakfast? That it's the most important meal of the day? That's all recent and new ideology. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692
> I often only eat good food, or what I think is good food at least. I never use the microwaves, always buy "fresh" meat, eat vegetables aswell (only recently, not when I was a teenagers).
Here we are different. I eat good and "bad" food.
If I had to guess why I can eat anything and everything (including lots of sugary drinks) with little to no exercise and not gain weight it would be this: food passes through me. My digestive tract doesn't absorb food that well, a lot of calories just go through me. (TMI: Honestly, some foods can go through me in 2 hours.) That's what I think. (No, I don't care to go to the doctor to figure out if its true or to "fix" it because frankly, it doesn't negatively affect me as far as I'm concerned.)
Why is Hacker News so fast to pooh-pooh the study in the linked article and declare it as fake science, but we're happy to accept a completely unproven and untested theory from someone with no expertise in the field? Because it's called "The Hacker's Diet"?
You wouldn't give a nutritionist's opinion on Javascript frameworks much credence, so don't take your diet advice from programmers.
This is just not true. I find that the people who say that actually eat a lot less calorie wise than they think. Eat 4500 calories per day for 2 years and see if you stay skinny. McDonalds 2 times a day is more like 2000 calories at the very high end. It takes time to eat 4500 cals per day, most skinny people can't do it at all but it's easy for fat people. Eating only unhealthy food every day doesn't really say anything about energy in vs energy out
People aren't capable of "judging" how many calories they consume. I bet if we compared you to someone who's gaining weight we'd find your ideas of "portion" are off by a factor of 2-3 and that's why they're gaining weight and you're not.
Also I think it would be more normal to eat +/- 50 cal from maintenance each day then occasionally go way over, gaining weight that way.
Also when I fall off the wagon for a day and eat a ton of bread or b-day cake or whatever I can't tell the difference between indigestion due to systemic shock of my digestive system vs the stereotypical "binge and fall asleep on the couch" I remember from my self and observation of others. A pizza makes me lay on the couch in a tired state like many other people I've observed, but I can eat a steak then go to the park with kids full of energy no problem.
There's all sorts of poorly understood processes happening in our body that affect the amount of energy stored as fat. That "1 lb / 3500 calories" figure you quoted isn't an absolute law, but more like a rule of thumb. What we don't fully understand is to what extent things like gut bacteria, environmental toxins, sleep cycle etc alter that figure. The body's a hugely complex system.
The recent study explicitly says that people on the same diets today are fatter than they were 40 years ago. Assuming their finding is true, that means that either metabolisms are slower or the rate at which bodies gain fat from excess calories is higher than it used to be.
We as a society have been filling the world with all sorts of never-seen-before chemicals which our bodies and the huge interdependent ecosystem we live in are unable to deal with. We've spent the last 60 years pumping our livestock full of drugs to make them bigger and live longer. It's not outwith the sphere of possibility that one or a combination of these contribute to changes in the way humans store fat.
And it's not even a very useful rule of thumb. Research suggests [1] that because of how the energy dynamics work in practice (i.e. a sack of ideally functioning fat cells is a pretty unrealistic model for human metabolism), most people need an estimated deficit of much more than 3,500 calories to actually burn a pound of fat.
[1]: http://www.runnersworld.com/weight-loss/biggest-weight-loss-...
In a Low Corb High Fat diet, excess dietary fat is burned out and excreted. On the other hand High Corb diet, corbs are stored as fat causing obesity.
I have personally seen many people who have transformed their heath with this basic understanding. Ref: http://thepaleodiet.com/stop-counting-calories-start-assessi...
Human beings exist on such a wide spectrum, on so many attributes, that simply declaring that what is good for the ideal median person is exactly what everyone else should do is insane.
[1] http://espn.go.com/blog/houston-texans/post/_/id/12059/bacon...
The fact is that a man in 2006 burns less energy than the man in 1988, so if they ate the same diet the 2006 man should weigh more (as the study finds). We move less, have more comfortable environments (energy is cheaper so we can afford to keep our homes at a better temp). A man in 1988 had to walk down the hallway to send a fax, now we just send emails. A man in 1988 used to physically move to attend meetings, now we just [video]teleconference. Life was just a little bit harder in 1988, and that means that we burned more energy then. Coupled with the increase in average height (healthy tall people have higher BMIs than short people, and height increase is a trend in humans that has existed for a long time), people in 2006 are clearly going to be bigger. If you want to weigh the same amount you either have to burn more calories to make up for the fact that your life is easier now or you have to eat less.
aabajian has pretty much hit the nail on the head. I will point out that as you gain weight your resting metabolic rate increases to support keeping your extra mass alive, so 50 calories extra per year may not exactly turn into 100 lbs of extra weight, your energy expenditure to keep the mass alive and to move it all around may catch up to that extra 50 calories.
"One late night, I had had enough of the infomercials and turned on PBS to find, sure enough, a fitness guy talking about diets. ... The fitness expert explained to the studio audience that the quick fixes lauded by late-night infomercials didn't work and that they weren't sustainable. He said that what we really need are simple lifestyle fixes that do not require us to change our natural tendencies, changes that make an impact before we have a chance to screw it up with our unhealthy food choices. And his first suggestion? Smaller plates.
Now riveted, I watched as the man explained that our natural human behavior is to fill our plates with food and, because Mom said so, clean that plate right up by eating everything on it. I still don't get Mom's logic--there are children starving in Africa, so I need to get fat? But the "clean-your-plate club" was instilled in me and probably in you, too. The message is ingrained. Changing that habit for a day is a no-brainer. But changing it permanently? That's hard. Some would say it's nearly impossible. This is why so many people who diet gain the weight back, why people rarely follow through on New Year's resolutions past the end of January, and why it's so difficult to be disciplined with your spending.
As I continued to watch the program, the expert went on to say that rather than work to change our "eat everything on the plate" behavior we simply need to change the size of our plates. When we use smaller plates, we dish out smaller portions, thus eating fewer calories while continuing our natural human behavior of serving a full plate and eating all of what is served.
...
A 2012 report by Koert Van Ittersum and Brian Wansink in the Journal of Consumer Research identifies the average plate size in America as having grown 23% between the years 1900 and 2012, from 9.6 inches to 11.8 inches. Running the math, the article explains that, should this increase in plate size encourage an individual to consume just fifty more calories per day, that person would put on an extra five pounds of weight... each year. Year after year, that adds up" [1]
Start will smaller plates and work on disciplining yourself to only one plate.
[1] Profit First: A simple System to Transform Any Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz ( http://amzn.to/1RkuTIO affiliate link )
They're all good things do to but if you want to lose weight you need to move more and eat better.
I know if I burn 500 calories of fat I'll loose 1 lb in a week. And this is a 500 cal deficiency. But since I don't know how much of the burger I've digested or how much intensely my body is working to, say, regulate my T; I have no clear idea how much less I should eat
That being said N. Americans eat horribly and I agree they should put some thought into what they eat.
(Btw, I'm 6ft 2, trying to loose a few lb to get back to the mid 170s)
A positive read would be: if you want to be healthy, don't focus solely on energy intake, but also what chemicals you are subjecting your body to.
The links are dubious, but they are there. Plastic Packaging contains a high amount of BPA (Bisphenol A) which acts as a xenoestrogen - slightly unrelated: the generational drop in testosterone in males has been tied to this[0].
Back on topic, cells containing the metabolite of BPA, BPA-Glucoronide, have been found to accumulate more fat than untreated cells.[1] [2]
This is part of the reason why "BPA-Free" plastic products (think: Nalgene water bottles) use this tagline in sales.
[0] http://www.livescience.com/29401-bpa-testosterone-levels.htm...
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-may-prompt-mor...
study relies on SELF REPORTING, need I say more?
I get this study isn't perfect but it seems silly that so many commenters here are disregarding it entirely yet are perfectly happy to listen to completely untested theories from people with no expertise whatsoever in the field.
You can sit around all day and blame it on leaky gut, artificial sweeteners, pesticides, gluten, carbs, fat, red meat or whatever the latest "fad villian" is, and you'll just keep failing to lose weight.
Plain and simple. Eat nutritious food that actually fills you up and satisfies you, track your calorie intake, and find a sustainable way to just eat less every day.
When you consider hormones affect everything, from how and where you put weight, to sexuality, to behavior it's incredible how little thought lay people give to them and the endocrine system. (The Intercept has a very interesting 3 part series about an endocrine disruptor that DuPont splashed all over WV and Ohio causing thousands of cancers [2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_blood_components
[2] https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...
In 2012, I was weighing in at 215 pounds. In May of that year, I started on Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body Slow Carb diet. It worked for a while but I plateued at 195 pounds. I figured that was it for me - that I wasn't going to be able to lose any more weight.
I told my primary care doctor about this in January of 2015 and he recommended ditching the Slow Carb Diet and tracking my calorie consumption in the app My Fitness Pal. He said to continue using My Fitness Pal until I figured out the right balance of food and exercise I needed to eat to drive weight loss or maintain my weight.
Just by guessing calories of the food I was eating, I was able to lose 30 pounds
This may seem like a pain in the ass, but it only added on 5 minutes to my daily routine.
I got a good scale (the WiThings WS-50). It not only tracks your weight, but it tracks your weight loss / weight gain trend over the last 30 days in its app.
In 2015 from CES to SXSW I dropped from 195 to 182 pounds.
From SXSW to June 1st I dropped from 182 to 169 pounds.
I stopped using the app in July and am now weighing 165 pounds.
I've put a few of my friends on to this, and they've also lost weight.
Hope this can help someone else who wants to cut through the noise of fad weight loss advice.
- Watch what you DRINK, not so much what you eat. Drink water or black coffee/cold-brew or tea most of the time, and turn other beverages into rare treats. Soda is perfectly fine once a week but buy the smallest size and sip it without a straw so that you enjoy it a lot more. (I was shocked at how I could barely finish a tiny Coke by sipping it but somehow I could practically chug one 3x the size just by using a straw. Don't use straws; they increase consumption and keep you from even tasting most of the calories that you're consuming.)
- Cook most of your meals, multiple meals at once. Yes, this takes time and it'll take awhile to become any good at it but it's worthwhile. Pick a day, spend 1-2 hours cooking your lunches for the rest of the week. You will tend to fill your shopping lists with more raw vegetables and meat that go a long way. This also keeps you from finding excuses to head to the nearest fast-food place at lunch time.
- Do not ever skip a meal, no matter what your weight is. Prefer breakfasts high in protein, like eggs and chicken sausage, with few carbs (not too much of cereal or muffins or similar).
- Take every excuse to walk. Find someplace to go a few times a week, like a coffee shop, and walk the entire way. Even when I drive somewhere, I'm never afraid to park the car and walk in (no drive-through, no spending 10 minutes to find that "good" parking spot; just walk from somewhere a bit further out). Same thing with stairs versus elevators; and if you take an escalator, walk up the escalator instead of riding it.
- Make some effort to build muscle to get some "free" calorie consumption. You don't need a lot. The biggest muscles in your body are better at working off calories so if you have limited time, start with your legs. A gym isn't strictly required for a lot of good exercises; you just need to read up on a few things to do and be really consistent about doing sets a few times a week.
I'm 5 kg overweight, and should lose another 10 kg to get the ideal weight. My goal is not to gain any weight, and I've kept it stable for about 10 years. I know when I overeat, and I feel really bad when I gain another kg. If that happens, it takes a week or so to lose it again.
In a study of people who claimed to be "diet resistant" (some of whom were taking medication based on what they reported to their doctors) it had been determined that each and every one of them were underreporting their calorie intake and overreporting their exercise to the doctors.
Here's the study (PDF)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701
It's been duplicated again and again.
The last paragraph says:
"In conclusion, all the obese subjects we studied who had a history of self-reported diet resistance had appropriate energy expenditure, but they misreported their actual food intake and physical activity."
It's sounds shocking to me, but people would rather lie to their doctors, and get medication they don't need, than count calories accurately.