When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?
bmj.com
bmj.com
When you realize that you have to breathe out all the weight you lose, I think it gives you a bigger appreciation for how difficult weight loss can be.
So you can only increase your "burn rate" by 20%?
Exercise is still a good way to drop in weight, but not simply due to burning up the fat; that could happen anyway. What seems to be happening is that the exercise improves the body's budgeting logic, probably by putting you back in a regime evolution already dealt with.
The way to drop in weight isn't to exercise (as such), and it isn't to eat less. All the logic that says those count, is valid, but you have to account for the body fighting back. The goal is to eat less because you don't feel hungry, not despite feeling hungry. Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves.
Yep, tried this recently with closed loop weight control. After about 8-10kg (from 116kg) lost it's almost impossible to keep on going, you can't control yourself enough to not eat.
I'm not sure if I understand this correctly, but isn't this a bad practice? I mean, I can agree with the sentiment of eating too many times per day. E.g. if you tend to eat snacks and then soon after a real meal, then you should definitely use your willpower to just skip the snacks before your upcoming meal.
But as far as I know, if you don't exercise and instead just starve yourself, the body first burns through your muscles before it gets to fat. If that's so, then some exercise is crucial to upkeep your muscles even while on a calory deficiency.
An average human exercising is about 22% efficient, that's worse than some ICEs. An electrical engine is >80%.
You can definitely increase your burn rate by way more than 20% with heavy exercise. A Tour de France bicyclist will burn several thousand calories (4,000-7,000 depending on the stage and rider) in only about six hours. For comparison, a typical sedentary person will burn 2,000-2,500 calories per day. It can be physically difficult to eat enough at that rate, and riders lose a substantial amount of weight over the race. (A friend once told me about an endurance cyclist he knew who would eat a big bowl of cereal each morning, except instead of milk he'd use olive oil. Disgusting, but an effective way to get enough calories in.)
It's pretty tough for most of us to achieve anything like that much exercise, of course. Even Tour de France riders only do it for a few weeks at a time.
"Calories in, calories out!"
"You can't outrun a bad diet!"
"Weight is lost in the kitchen!"
Sure, things ultimately boil down to intake-vs-expenditure. However, it IS more complicated than that in practice. As software developers, we complain when management makes decisions based on inadequate or poor metrics. But likewise there so many more benefits to physical exercise that aren't captured by a diet and exercise tracking app.
During times when I've been 100% sedentary for long periods, I experience overwhelming cravings for sugar and crappy foods. When I force myself to take up any consistent exercise, even just a 30 min walk in the morning or lunchtime... then the cravings subside and regular meals are sufficient. This is fairly common.
Exercise has so many physical and mental health benefits. But even just looking at weight management alone, exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session. Something that doesn't get captured by your tracker app or wearable gadget.
So often, when I hear somebody smugly minimizing the importance of exercise to health and weight management, it's a person who is too-clever-by-half. They're constantly dabbling with soylent shakes or paleo/keto fad diets... because the truth is they're just lazy and don't want to get off their ass, and look to rationalize that.
EDIT: At least half of these replies are completely missing my point altogether. I'm not saying that there is a binary choice to be made between "good diet" OR "exercise", and that you should make the latter choice rather than the former. I'm saying that treating this as a binary choice in the first place is ridiculous.
Exercise correlates with proper eating, it's not incidental or ancillary. It's ineffective to tell someone to "go the gym" without changing their eating habits? Well sure, but telling them to "go keto" without worrying about physical activity will be no more successful a year out. It's the pretense that most people can consistently stick with one of these things, and not both together, that is absurd.
On the flip side, the people that are told this are the ones that are annoyingly attempting to maintain their bad eating habits while just adding exercise, or adding fab foods, or anything really to delude themselves into thinking they can continue to eat the same way.
MAYBE if you're still in school, or a new grad in your 20's, you might know people who are physically active but also like to drink heavy / party. But by the time you're 30 or so, exercise and decent eating habits tend to correlate one way or the other.
Whenever someone strikes up a conversation with me about exercise being of minimal importance compared to diet... it's usually when I'm heading downstairs for a workout in the company gym, and some brogrammer with an energy drink in his hand takes it upon himself to justify why he isn't.
Plus I have met distance runners with ridiculous diets. Some of them run 50 miles a week just so they can eat a pint of ice cream every week and pizza multiple times per week. It happens, but those are always at the extremes. A balanced approach is needed for most mortals.
People will justify their beliefs in a whole bunch of different ways. Until someone has actually lived it and dropped 40+ lbs and kept it off for years I immediately down grade whatever advice they are giving as they are simply less credible (unless they are well versed on the actual science and literature of the topic, in which case they likely never gained excess weight to begin with or fall into that category of someone who has lost weight and kept it off).
The number of people I have met or know personally who diet it all off with no exercise and are convinced how right they are "I lost 100 lbs!" only to balloon back to their start weight or close to it is ... a lot.
When I was going through a divorce over 10 years ago in my early 30s, I was still active (like I said in a previous post, I was a part time fitness instructor) but I ate with abandon and my weight shot up. It was easier back then - eat like a normal person and the weight dropped.
I could do that then when I was working out 10-12 hours a week. But that wouldn't happen now.
Being less stressed and routinely expending large amounts of energy simply causes your body to run differently (because of the hormones produced and burned off), which in turn changes how it processes food and fat stores, what it craves, etc.
I think proper hormone regulation is far more sustainable than the calorie restrictions necessary to offset out-of-whack hormones.
Sure. As long as you have time to work out. Or you don't get hurt. Or you can afford to go to a place to work out (much of the US isn't even walkable).
That's not a priority for some people, but that's a choice they're making.
It's absolutely not about access or time -- it's about choosing to do it or not. Frankly, given how much more efficient it makes everything else, I think it's harder not to.
Other people feel differently.
This is very much a YMMV deal. I am like you in that when I train a lot my appetites for food become healthier leading me to crave more fiber and protein.
My wife, however, is the exact opposite. When she's sedentary she's fine eating whatever. When she's active and training she starts craving junk food and snacks which she has learned to use as a coping mechanism for stress.
I suspect this depends a lot about how you're socialized around eating. She grew up on processed food and her family used sweets and junk food as a rewards when she did well at things. In contrast, my mother regularly cooked from scratch and we only ever ate those "dopamine-hit" foods and snacks on special occasions so in my mind, those are more tied to times of year and social context rather than personal reward or fulfillment.
This is a stretch to me. Doesn't matter how much I exercise: aggressive keto diets are the only way I've ever lost weight (though not necessarily maintained it, I can maintain on a normal diet) in my life. Playing two games of full-court basketball a day or sitting around playing video games, I'm just not as hungry and the food I eat when I'm going that route just doesn't stick the way it can otherwise.
I certainly feel better, you're not wrong about that, when I exercise even moderately. But the diet matters plenty, too--it's yet another one of those more complicated in practice things that you're claiming exist in the first place.
> "Calories in, calories out!"
Well, sure, but those calories on the label are calculated by burning the components in a machine and measuring the heat output. The human body isn't going to convert the input food at 100%. That percent is going to depend on a lot of factors!
If you're not losing weight, cut what you eat until you see results.
But more importantly, those things are TRUE. Anybody with significant weight to lose will not be able to out-exercise a bad diet. What fat people hear a lot more often is, "oh, you gotta hit the gym". Hitting the gym is great if you're 15 lb overweight, but at 50 or 100 it's all but useless.
> exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session.
Yep. If you spin hard for 45 minutes you get an extra 170kcal through the rest of the day. That is... 2 fun sized Snicker bars, 19 grams of butter, or 17 Pringles chips.
Caloric intake is the absolute key to weight loss. Everything else is complementary. Telling people who are more than a few pounds overweight to hit the gym as the base of their weight loss strategy is complete un-based in science and almost always self defeating.
Running is a double edged sword on appetite. It tends to shut down your gut for a while, making you less hungry for a period after the workout. But, people tend to misjudge how much they burn on shorter workouts or runs.
Often people only need 2 or 3 habit changes to create a long term deficit. Example: run a few times a week (30 mins, 3 miles each time, -900 kcal). Cut out sugar drinks (2 per day? -1400 kcal / day easy). One per day? (-700kcal) / week). Exercise is likely to simply make you feel better and in my experience causes me to at least think about healthy eating choices. Many people who don't exercise and drink sugary drinks can do just those two and end up with an easy 1600-2500 kcal deficit without thinking much about diet change etc. Even doing that is a huge change, and to sustain that over the course of years is a huge undertaking for anyone.
These are some simple things, yet even then most people will completely fail at a diet. A sobering statistics: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/1/222S.long -- only approximately 20% of individuals are successful at sustaining weight loss.
Personal anecdote time: I dropped about 45 lbs through calorie counting and a lot of running. Eventually the running allowed me to eat more food than I was eating before I started running. This greatly contributed to satiety and addressing the psychological and mental battles anyone faces undergoing an effort to cut fat. I have maintained the weight loss for 10+ years. It is very hard to separate where the exercise stopped and the nutritional plan started in terms of addressing all of the facets of sustained weight loss. One thing that is clear to me now is that my approach was extreme and probably only a very small fraction of people can or ever will be able to adopt such an approach. I ran at least 20 miles per week, typically 30-40, and at my weight that was for sure 2500-5000 calories per week burned from exercise alone. It put me in a position of actually having to eat more than was comfortable some days just to not push things to a relatively unhealthy range of calorie deficit. My take away is this: you can't out run a diet [^1]. I like to think of myself as "not exceptional"... I am not a fast runner and I have no real gift for it. I just like doing it. (side note: it turned out to have been very effective self medication for ADHD, so it was probably much more rewarding for me than the average person, who would probably not have the same elevated positive feelings surrounding their exercise activity as I probably get).
1: Unless you turn your body into a machine capable of obliterating calories at a rate that outstrips your ability to eat yourself fat.
Also, the whole "ups your metabolism for hours after the activity" that is factored into almost any calorie calculation and the actual burn from that is almost trivial. Its a few calories, but it is mostly your heart rate recovering down to a normal resting range. It doesn't change the basic calculations (100kcal / mile of running, etc.). You nailed that one, but people tout it as an exercise benefit when... it is just calories out and not many at all.
My point about all of this is that many slogans are correct or correct enough to be a reasonable model (calories in, calories out, can't outrun a bad diet, etc.). But the shocking lack of success in sustained weight loss is something you need to look down the barrel of the moment you decide "I will lose some weight" because if you want to keep that weight off what you are really saying is "I will lose some weight; I am going to need to make moderate to significant changes to my lifestyle... forever." It really is that meaty of a decision. Many people don't succeed their first attempt, but learn enough to succeed eventually. Most people never succeed to the degree they desire. It is because completely changing your lifestyle and mentality as an adult is very hard.
So we know all of these true things about weight loss, but I think it is a mistake to narrow it too much down to any one rule aphorism. It must be tackled on all fronts simultaneously (mental, exercise, diet). Most people will try just one and fail. Some people adopt two, but lose the habits because they weren't real change. The mental approach is the hardest to "prescribe" because each individual will have different issues and triggers for their eating. Mileage will vary, but these are some things I have observed.
If you're obese you will knacker your knees. Swimming is better, but be careful to exercise complementary muscle groups too.
Beyond that I am not sure about how running impacts the joints of heavily overweight people. I would advise a very slow and conservative ramp of up mileage. I think as long as the body is given time to adjust it can do so with minimal risk of serious injury (even if you are running). The problem with running is your aerobic capacity will likely outstrip the rest of your bodies ability to absorb punishment. This is why so many "I am going to run a Marthon, but have no prior running experience" people end up injured and then wander about telling people how bad running is for your joints, etc.
(https://www.runnersworld.com/general-interest/runners-have-m...). Could just be a self reporting bias, but it is interesting. Several studies over the years have looked at life long runners knees and they seem to be fine compared to a non runners.
I didn't even go into some of those "soft" benefits of regular exercise, such as the mental boost it gives (which seems like it would support weight loss), along with the obligatory lymph system circulation which is likely to improve immune health and help with waste cycling. As long as someone isn't overtraining, that is :)
YoYo effect guaranteed, cravings guaranteed, lesser ability to focus at work guaranteed and so on and so forth. And you will be miserable and won't keep it long term.
You don't just loose fat when you exercise, you build muscles, your cardio system is getting better etc etc. The way people here talk about it all sounds as if they would be putting on makeup - there is more to health and performance (including mental) then just how quick you lost few kilo.
A couple years after deciding that it's time to get serious about taking care of my body and I'm very close to reaching a healthy weight, and additionally have become reasonably strong due to a weight training regimen. But I wouldn't be here if I hadn't seen the results of calorie counting and taken the next step after the benefits of that started slowing down.
It's more or less the only possible step: unless you have an absolutely freaky metabolism, exercise will not be able to mitigate an unhealthy diet until long-term (through increasing basal metabolism by building up muscle mass), and when significantly overweight it's easy to exercise "wrong" and hurt yourself.
People don't like being uncomfortable and we all actively avoid pain. Exercising at a level that significantly impacts weight loss is hard. It can be extremely uncomfortable and even painful at times. We are soft and we have a universe of terrible pre-processed foods at our disposal. It is just a fact of life that people actively avoid uncomfortable situations and so much of modern life is all about YOU being the star of your own universe and your comfort.
I think exercise and doing physically uncomfortable things consistently and at a high volume (with appropriate and healthy ramp up, of course) can shock a system into being able to cope with discomfort, the kind of discomfort required to break through previous weight loss barriers and habits. Along with understanding the problem and displacing unhealthy eating habits (and those habitual triggers) I think a lot more people would be successful at sustaining weight loss. A very small percentage of people will sustain weight loss (studies put it at 5-20%).
The sayings and weight loss facts are all missing a very large component and that is focusing on how to make weight loss sustainable per individual. No one wants to hear "You are about to embark on one of the most difficult tasks human beings in western society regularly undertake. Your chances of a failure are very high. In order to succeed you will have to learn to be uncomfortable. You will have to dedicate time and real effort to this over a course of years." That said, there are plenty of diet only programs that can sustain weight loss as exercise heavy programs.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/1/222S.long -- This is a great look at what things are more or less successful over a longer period. One of the most interesting things is that triggers (medical events) are very good at starting and sustaining weight loss. To me this is one of those system shocks that can tilt the balance in favor of "okay, I have to tolerate this lesser discomfort now because I now I will face a much greater and debilitating discomfort in the future". Only, unhealthy eating for most people is almost always a major medical event 10-20 years down the adult road. It takes it being shoved into the forefront of the mind before people take it seriously. Anyway the summary is gold:
"Findings from the registry suggest six key strategies for long-term success at weight loss: 1) engaging in high levels of physical activity; 2) eating a diet that is low in calories and fat; 3) eating breakfast; 4) self-monitoring weight on a regular basis; 5) maintaining a consistent eating pattern; and 6) catching “slips” before they turn into larger regains. Initiating weight loss after a medical event may also help facilitate long-term weight control."
That is it. I think you need to have a plan in mind that incorporates all of these and I think from the outset they should all be a part of your weight loss habits for the most success. My own experience bears this out, having beaten the odds by (unknowingly) doing almost all of these things save for having a medical trigger (I did have a "looking in the mirror" type trigger somewhere after my first son was born and I realized I was an out of shape lazy ass that could never keep up with my kids at the rate I was going). I am pretty passionate about this topic because so much of my family got stuck in the Jenny Craight / Weight Watchers / Atkins -- just do this one thing and lose weight habit and it has never worked. I think folks on hacker news that have high enough emotional intelligence can probably work it out with just food management, but I think long term that is just as hard as trying to exercise out your bad habits. These strategies all go together to address all the areas people are likely to fail creating a safety net to prevent habit relapse.
I was mostly trying to address the direct cause-and-effect conclusion the parent comment was making with breathing hard == losing weight
There's a lot of reverse causality in that relationship. Being badly overweight makes exercise more unpleasant and prone to cause injury.
I was a part time fitness instructor for over a decade, but when people asked about losing weight, I would minimize the importance of exercise for weight loss - to the surprise of many.
Sure I ate like crap and maintained my weight, but between teaching 10 hours a week, training for runs and occasional weight lifting, I was easily burning an extra 1000+ calories a day. Most people aren't in the type of shape to burn that much in a reasonable amount of time.
Since I was being paid to workout, I was very consistent. How many people will consistently work out an average of two hours a day no matter what?
When I stopped teaching and started doing the minimum amount of exercise, I had to be much more careful about what I ate and I'm still 10-15 pounds heavier than I was at my prime.
I'm not trying to dismiss the other benefits of exercise, but weight loss isn't high on the list of benefits for most people - especially not walking or low impact exercise.
There are infographics and whatnot out there detailing the caloric density of different kinds of food, that make it clear that, depending on the diet you already eat, you can reduce your calorie intake by vast amounts just by switching up what kinds of food you eat. But it's potentially a more expensive way to eat, and probably a more time-consuming one if you don't already enjoy cooking.
It does NOT work well at all. Don't get me wrong, it helps a little, but your stomach is extremely smart and it knows alot more about calorie counting than we do. Like it or not, it keeps it's own account of your calorie intake and adjusts your hunger and appetite accordingly.
If you're like me and you're already eating a very healthy diet and you exercise regularly and your still gaining weight, you only have one option: go hungry. Very hungry. Right now, it's the only way. You could exercise a lot more, but either way, you're going to suffer.
Even with not microwaved but easily made, pre-made soups or veggies are easy to heat and more filing.
Even eating only snacks I can stay under 1.5k per day by just not eating anything on the side.
The trick for most people starting is to not drink your calories: switch to 0% calorie sodas and replace sugar in coffee and tea with aspartame. No fruit juice and check calories as "0% added sugar" usually mean there are a lot of calories.
For some reason unbeknownst to me, exercise makes eating less a lot easier.
There are absolutely people who are successful at losing (and maintaining) more than that, but they are a pretty small minority.
I don't have sources in front of me, but this is based on many conversations with my sister-in-law, who is just wrapping up her dietetics internship (after completing her undergrad in nutrition). I'm sure I can get some sources from her later in the day if you would be interested.
Had a friend take notice, so he took it up himself. Dropped the best part of 60lbs (27kg) over the course of the year. Very different diet, but again tracked everything he ate (again, often to the gram) and lifted weights instead of walking. He was baffled with how simple it ended up being, but was pleased with himself nonetheless.
Dropped 25kg (45ish lb) 3 years ago. Gained 12kg back the next 2 years which I removed during the last 6 months. Still more weight to shed but I know what works for me and what kind of effort it requires: going hungry by eating less.
Like lot of fat-logic people I used to think that exercising was required and even the only thing needed to get fit. "I'll just start exercising and be back to an healthy weight" is just a fantasy. There is no miracle way of doing it.
It can be hard to do this if you don't have awareness over what you typically eat.
I love stuffing myself full of food, and I suspect others enjoy this too. Knock yourself out with as many carrots as you can have. Eat a full pound or two of cauliflower.
Not much of a difference. Skipping some food can do much more.
Apparently experiments show it pretty much stays the same. To remove more CO2 from your blood your body just breaths faster. Maybe the process of exhaling can't achieve higher concentration.
(if you figure ~2000 calories worth, it doesn't seem like the breathing weight out is so much the issue...)
A pound of fat is about 3500 calories, and typical sedentary metabolic rate is about 2000 calories per day, so you'd expect to lose about 0.57lbs ~= 260 grams per day if you didn't eat. The article says that CO2 makes up 84% of weight lost (the rest is water), so that fits fairly closely to the 200 grams/day of CO2 breathed out.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22work%20a%20little...
A useful exercise: What's the difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr?
The difference between answering the title and writing a tl;dr is that the former doesn't use the character sequence "tl;dr." Apparently this is important. From your first link:
> PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The concern is the symbol—symbols matter.
I'm a bit confused as to what happened in the second link. Going up the comment chain, apparently the original title spelled out what happened but was editorialized, so it got changed, and "There's a downside to spelling things out completely" was part of the explanation of why it was OK to switch to a less editorialized title with much less information in it. Yet the title of the post is the one they said they changed. Did they change it back later?
If you're interested, have a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20bookish&sort=byD... to get a sense of the reasoning.
It seems worthwhile to preserve the bookishness of HN. One of the best ways to do this is to make HN seem boring. Reading, writing, and good conversation take time and effort.
"For anyone coming straight to the comments looking for an answer to the question:" seems like a macroexpansion of "tl;dr:".
The fourth one places a lot of emphasis on the specific implications of "tl;dr" as opposed to other terms like "summary." Given such precision, I'd say the macroexpansion of "tl;dr" would be "too long; didn't read" since that's what it actually stands for.
I'm persuaded that "tl;dr" is best avoided. I'm not persuaded that my comment would or should fall under this guideline.
You can lose more than that, (see boxers before a weigh-in), but that's all water loss, and is temporary. And, with a strong likelihood of death.
The normal expectation is maybe 10-25% change. Any more than than would require things likes 8 hours of exercise per day.
[0] http://marathonswimmers.org/forum/discussion/90/when-to-gain...
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a240839.pdf
I will update this if I find it again.
How many calories can you max burn per day, around 8000? That would be ~1.1kg of fat loss at 7 kcal per g fat. At a normal day of not eating it is ~300g afaik (2100 kcal at 7kcal/g).
This is noted in the article, in the caption under the second figure.
(That's about 2 lbs every 3 days).
[0] https://www.diapedia.org/metabolism-insulin-and-other-hormon...
Not a viable alternative to dieting and exercise, of course, but maybe an alternative to liposuction or gastric-bypass surgery.
I bet I breath out more on Saturday's marathon than Sunday's recovery day.
That is why you weigh less when you wake up in the morning (pre-bathroom -/+ yes some sweat).
For practical purposes no. When you breath faster your body just gets rid of less CO2 per breath. The amount of CO2 your body creates for a given exercise level can be considered a constant.
Trees aren't light, by any stretch of the imagination. That solid mass is mostly water. Try lifting up a 1' or 2' section of a tree trunk that's 1-2' in diameter sometime.
1. being fairly strict with calorie intake - though I have gone over my limit a whole bunch of times
2. upping my running game - 80km+ most months
3. being diagnosed asthmatic (after 40 years of merely "you've got shitty lungs, sorry") and prescribed a morning+night inhaler
Dieting isn't new to me, I've been a fat bastard all my adult life. Previous attempts at losing weight have involved doing (1)+(2) and each time I lost weight and got faster. But with the diagnosis at the start of this year, and despite a higher calorie allowance, I've smashed my PBs at various distances - multiple times - and lost more weight (NB. because I started higher; I'm not at a record low, yet). So it seems pretty intuitive to me that "I'm better at breathing" has played a hell of a part.
I started bike commuting over 3 months ago now, but my weight was only increasing, and I was pretty sure my diet was the same as ever -- healthy breakfast, fairly healthy lunch, healthy dinner -- mostly homemade, rarely eat out, etc. My only real "sin" was drinking, but it didn't seem to matter if I drank every night or cut back to weekends only (which I had when I started biking, working out more, and again seeing no real benefit).
So I finally broke down and started using one a few weeks ago and it's made all the difference in the world. The biggest advantage is the immediate metrics. I HATED the idea that I could work my ass off for a week or three and see my weight go up, or down, and really have no idea what was happening on a day to day basis. By tracking my meals (plus workouts and commuting between Strava and Apple Health sync), I can immediately see if I'm ahead or behind. It's the feedback I had been craving for years. Where I thought the point of one of these apps was to try to learn what's healthy to eat and to be calorically restrictive (which was unappealing.. again, I don't want to be "that guy"), it's really the realtime data that's useful.
In my particular case, I've learned I actually eat amazingly well for the most part, and it's very easy to run huge caloric deficits during the week. Without even trying I was seeing a deficit of perhaps 1500kcal/day (during the week). What was killing me was beer (on weekends, but then again, 3/7 days is almost half the days of the week) and the occasional big consumption day. You know, have a big breakfast on the weekend, a big lunch, some drinks, and pretty soon 1 day could almost kill a whole week's progress. The tracking has given me the ability to say actually, yeah, one more beer really WILL push me over the edge from a deficit to a gain. I don't really need that 3rd bagel. And so on. And given that I tend to consume more on weekends, and typically I only got a single short run in one weekend day, those weekends were just killing my progress.
On the other hand, it's made me mind snacking a bit less -- the deficits I run during the week are so big that a couple fun size bag of Skittles (we just ran out of halloween candy at work) make almost no difference in my daily progress.
I'm just starting out with it, but again, the realtime feedback has made me realize how much EASIER it's going to be than I ever expected. When I felt I had nothing left to easily cut or change, I actually found the solutions were far easier than I realized, and it's helped me to quantify things that I knew were bad but didn't really appreciate the magnitude of.
And because I no longer have to just "do my best" or a month and hope it shows up on the scale, there's no more disappointment/discouragement.
But you realize, finding your macro deficit combined with an app like my fitness pal makes it SIGNIFICANTLY easier. Losing weight becomes simple arithmetic.
Alcohol is rough. So many people have no idea what a drink actually contains calorie wise. Even the new and popular alcoholic seltzers will list something like "100 calories", and then the nutrition facts will list something like "5 carbs". With 4 calories per carb ... 4 * 5 does not equal 100. It is more accurate to just take the calorie count of 100 and divide by 4. Now you have a 25g of carbs drink, which is fine, but you need to factor that into your daily tracking.
Alcohol has calories per gram, but it isn't required to be listed. This makes craft beers very interesting. Take a 16oz can of some double IPA at 8% and boom, you have around 320 calories in that one drink ... or 80 carbs if you look at it that way.
I've tried to simplify it a bit with this calculator that actually factors calories/g of alcohol.
I also hated the "if it fits your macros" type thing. I'm not a body builder, what do I care? But when you see the real impact of what you're about to eat it actually frees you quite a bit (assuming you generally eat well). I'm actually happy to grab that extra piece of cheese because I can easily take the calorie hit, I gotta eat something, and some protein and fat seems better than carbs.
I did the math on craft beer last winter, and cut back on beer for a bit, but it never stuck. 2.5cal per ounce per % abv. It would not be unheard of to drink half a POUND of calories in an afternoon, say, watching football. As I've switched to wine, even when I have more than I should and input the numbers, I simply cannot believe my eyes in terms of how FEW calories it has. I overestimate my consumption to be "conservative" and yet it still barely makes a dent in my diet. It's amazing.
I've done dry january a few times, and never saw a bit of benefit. But a month is a short time to see a trend, and it's not a time when I'm training for a race or doing much cycling; most of us are indoors a lot, maybe you have a dessert once or twice a week when normally you'd have none, and bam, you get discouraged and it feels like cutting out alcohol entirely makes no difference at all. Again, when you can see the data on a day-to-day (or even minute by minute) basis, it's so freeing.
Looking at myfitnesspal right now, my 'goal' is 2220kcal (which I think is a 500kcal deficit since I set it to lose 1lb/week). goal 2220, -470 food, +1141 excercise and I've got 2934 left to 'spend' for the rest of the day. It's amazing to get to work and have more than your entire BMR left to eat.
The first two times were a success as I was doing Weight Watchers and they stress always 'tracking' - meal logging and accounting for your meals before eating - and planning your meals ahead. All of my failures came after stopping Weight Watchers for one reason or another (inconvenience of weekly meetings, wanting to save some money instead of paying for the subscription, etc).
Moving into medically supported weight loss has changed my view toward some of the pseudo-science of Weight Watchers, but one thing both approaches have in common is keeping a food diary or accounting of what you are going to eat and holding yourself accountable to that. I'm down ten pounds over the last two months and well on my way thanks to getting back into using a food diary (in my case, MyFitnessPal).
I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to lose a lot of weight over the long term, but it's also good for generally accountability. After I lose the amount of weight I'm trying to I will continue to keep a food diary.
In 2012 I had a really bad lung infection that resulted in an asthma-like attack and ambulance taking me to hospital in the middle of the night. Months of tests resulted in them diagnosing me with Small Airways Disease, which my layman brain recalls as meaning "your big pipes are fine, but your thousands of small pipes are terrible". Not much to be done medically, but they were astonished that I had at that point run a couple of half marathons and essentially prescribed "keep running!". My readings when keeping a peak flow diary were "lungs of an 80-85yo female", rather than the 35-40yo male I was. That's pretty bad: https://patient.azureedge.net/media/Default/_Profiles/4e4362...
At the end of 2016 I had reason to visit my surgery's nurse about another matter and she said "can I hear a wheeze?". A few tests later, and (apparently) some kind of threshold for one of the measurements has changed in the last few years, and hey presto: I'm officially asthmatic.
Even in my earlier year of youth when I was fit I could never run a marathon. Or even 10km. But i was never diagnosed as one with Asthma. I had always felt the air was lacking "oxygen", I am now guessing may be again my big pipes is good, but small pipes are bad.
You exhale same percentage of CO2 no matter how active you are so to burn more fat you have to make yourself breathe faster. You can do that with excercise which, if it's intense, can triple your rate of breathing. But if you do intensly excercise for an hour each day you just burn 26 hours of fat instead 24.
Not much of a difference. You can do much more with skipping some snacks or soda you ingest daily.
I'm not saying you shouldn't excercise to get healthier or build some muscle but don't expect to loose weight from excercise.
a) the soil
b) water
c) the air
d) other
I'm astonished for ignorant the doctors of the survey are!
But here you remind me that the process of burning hydrocarbons nets some water, making me question myself. Of course metabolizing body fat is more complex than that, so this doesn't disprove it, but now I'm wondering if anyone else has more concrete information.
If you were to exercise outdoors during a cold rain, you'll probably not loose any water at all.
But what do I know? I've never exercised in my life.
Veritasium has a fun video demonstrating how unintuitive this is:
(The answer to both questions is “mostly atmospheric CO2.”)
I once saw a documentary about "big animals" in the past.
Like, why did we have giant spiders and insects while they have a rather simple respiratory system that doesn't scale very well.
Because: trees!
Somehow plants managed to create wood, which bound the C from CO2, but the rest of the biosphere didn't know what to make of the wood. So there were more and more trees and more and more C got removed from the atmosphere. A much bigger part of the atmosphere was O2 and so the insects could grow bigger.
But in the end the fungi figured out how to make short work of wood and in turn released much of the C again into the atmosphere as CO2, so the animals shrunk again.
Maybe it was both? The documentary just told about the fungi.
No, coal has formed after fungi found how to break down lignin (lignite is usually "young" coal, having generally formed between the disparition and the dinosaurs and modern day, generally speaking the better the coal the older it is as coal is a metamorphic process, so given similar conditions time is the factor for the rock going through the grades), lignin isn't the only organic component even in carboniferous coals, and these coals have lignin-rich and lignin-poor epochs and locations. And peat lands exist today which perform the first "step" of coal formation.
The trees today are unlikely to form coal because that first requires quickly putting the trees in anoxic conditions (e.g. acidic waters or low-permeability soils) over a sufficiently long time that good-sized layers can build up, then shifting those layers way down so they can be converted by heat and pressure over millions of years.
Carboniferous had lots of low-lying forested wetlands and swamps which provided the vegetable matter in anoxic conditions, and the subduction zones of the forming pangea proceeded to shove much of it under (when both happened in the same place), that is why it's the source of so much coal.
But few of our peatlands are in subduction zones, and even if they were it's unlikely we'd give them the time to accumulate and slide down for processing.
> Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily foiled by relatively small quantities of excess food.
> Our calculations show that the lungs are the primary excretory organ for fat. Losing weight requires unlocking the carbon stored in fat cells, thus reinforcing that often heard refrain of “eat less, move more.”
"Eat less, move more." If anyone isn't aware of that by now, I don't know what to say.
If you were gaining weight regularly and start exercising to lose it, you'd have to do a ton of exercise to compensate.
But if you're on the verge of losing weight and start exercising, it would be possible to tip the scales, so to speak. So long as you don't start eating more because of it.
I'm 205 lbs, and the charts say I need to eat between 1500 and 1800 calories per day to lose weight. I can eat 2600 and maintain my weight.
So if I'm just barely maintaining my weight at 2600 calories and I want to lose weight, I'd need 800 calories worth of exercise.
Moderate-pace walking burns 300 calories per hour for me. I'd need almost 3 hours of deliberate walking at a good pace to lose that extra weight, every single day. And I couldn't reward myself with a treat afterwards.
I got the exercise numbers from MyFitnessPal. The food calories I got from a site I found the other day, but I don't remember which.
People act as if Arnold got his body by once accidentally picking up a barbell, then eat a bunch of food that immediately gets converted into fat and wonder why running on a treadmill to destroy their muscle & eating sugar to produce fat isn't giving them the results they want.
And that is more complicated than 'eat less, move more'.
Because maintaining anything for a lifetime is really easy (building a business, keeping a marriage together, keeping the weight off...)
Mass-energy conversion isn't a special thing, it's universal. All energy has mass. When energy moves, mass moves, always.
For the purposes of general relativity, stress-energy is the mass/energy hybrid quantity, but the equivalence is not literal in the sense that in a given inertial reference frame momentum does not attach to energy, but only to mass.
> We suspect this misconception is caused by the “energy in/energy out” mantra and the focus on energy production in university biochemistry courses.
I understand from the article that chemistry (Which I can't understand) tells you that it is converted on CO2.
But still. Clearly I can move because I have energy that I acquire from food. How is this wrong ?
The chemical energy of the original molecules is more than the chemical energy of the resulting molecules leaving some energy to do work and to generate heat.
I would not call it a misconception but simplification. Otherwise it is a very surprising article.
0 doctors were willing to admit they didn't know.
0 dieticians thought sweat was involved.
Those results seem unsurprising.
Only dieticians correctly answered CO2.
The question itself is shit, too, which is what happens when you dont have survey epidemiologists eyeball your questions. In “losing weight,” you’re doing a number of things - chucking the actual carbons (mass), and removing the potential energy stored as carbon-carbon bonds (heat). Given the widespread colloquialism of “losing weight,” people failing to interpret it as regarding the removal of carbons specifically isn’t unreasonable.
Sweat and urine are also correct answers, for that matter. Some of the carbon is used to create bicarbon and carbonic acids, via co2, which are lost in urine and sweat. Whether you want to count that as co2 or not is an argument about semantics - it goes through co2, but isn’t lost -as- co2. Of course, from the perspective of “it’s all breathed out as the result of perfect oxidation,” it’s wrong... but why let biology get in the way of undergraduate chemistry, right?
This isn’t a reflection on docs, PTs, or dietitians. This is GIGO.
From doctors, this should not happen.
not sure it's this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE but close
Yes, that’s a joke, but it’s also a completely factual statement (except for the Microphone thing) and a good reminder that with enough page views even extremely low probability events will happen with great frequency and predictability to someone in your audience (you just can’t predict to whom they will happen)
It's an interesting reiteration of HS chemics, but of no practical concern.