Exercise is good, even necessary, but it doesn't really help you with weight loss since your body compensate for it in other ways.
It's what and how much you eat that matters.
It's what and how much you eat that matters.
> There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories.
It's pretty widely accepted that nutrition trumps exercise in weight loss. I will say that my observations align with OP, urban lifestyles tend to be less sedentary then suburban/rural. But my observations could also be skewed by age differences, which presumably this study controlled for (didn't read the whole thing).
I spend a decent amount of time in a small (~3k) town in the American west that's the largest place for about two hours in any direction. It has one grocery store. Prices and selection in this (non-chain) store are genuinely appalling. Fresh fruit and veg is expensive and generally low in quality. As a result, nobody but the occasional out-of-towner fisherman buys it, so there's no incentive to stock more/better stuff. It's kinda like a slightly scaled up version of the basket of brown bananas in the bodega: a desultory corner of the store where there's visible dust on the apples.
What do many folks buy instead? TV dinners. Lots of them. It's not uncommon to see a cart in the checkout line that's nothing but about twenty TV dinners, cheap beer and maybe a loaf or two of wonder bread. Not everyone lives like that, but it's common enough that it's rare for me to leave that store without feeling kinda sad.
So, yeah, food deserts aren't just an urban problem.
n.b. on reflection, a partial counterexample: the Walmart in the nearest larger (~20k) town, despite having more produce and similar goodies on offer, also does a very brisk trade in TV dinners. Access to nutrition is probably relevant, but there's got to also be broader cultural/economic/wellness issues at play.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/26/717665452/epis...
I've lost and kept off about half my bodyweight, so I feel entitled to the opinion that that's horseshit dreamed up by marketing to tell people what they want to hear. There is one definitive way to lose weight, time tested and provably infallible: consume fewer calories than you expend.
Now certainly there are some factors involved in both sides of that equation that can be adjusted by what you eat, but take it from a food addict that weight loss is most definitely more about how much you eat.
I hear a lot of people use the word the same as I do. It's not that I'm arguing "100 calories of kale will effect your weight differently from 100 calories of powdered sugar" or any other fad-diet nonsense. But I would certainly argue that one of those options will lead to eating fewer calories over the course of a day.
I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle.
If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy).
A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard.
People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese.
This is bad advice, it's been shown over and over again that in the long term people don't manage to lose weight by exercising. They give up, don't exercise enough, overestimate how many calories they burnt, over-compensate by eating more and/or unhealthier ('because I earned it after taking a run'), etc.
You don't have to 'diet' to lose weight, just try to eat a little less each day, and watch what you are eating. Only 100 calories less than what you need each day, and you'll steadily lose maybe ~3KG a year.
For weightloss _diet and exercise_ is the way to go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4429709/.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/
>Prospective studies, however, find little evidence of the more physically active members of a population gaining less excess weight than those who are the least physically active.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract
>TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level.
Citing a bunch of studies about obesity changes nothing about the fact that _exercise_ is more important to health outcomes than _weight_.
Another source for you: https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/1/83
> There was no significant trend across BMI categories for mortality after adjustment for fitness.
Being skinny isn't being healthy, being _fit_ is being healthy.
This is pretty funny. They directly address and contradict the point your trying to make. Even the source you posted contradicts what you are trying to argue. Nice try though
Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. Research suggests that your body compensate for any activity expenditure to maintain caloric burn within that specific range. This is known as constrained total energy expenditure.
I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle.
If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy).
A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard.
I don't trust smartwatches and other devices to track caloric expenditure accurately given that they seemed to have constantly overestimate how much I burn.
This does not dissuade me from making sure that I get at least an hour of exercise everyday.
People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese.
I agree that people should not do anything special, but here we are in a food environment that makes this difficult.
>> Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. My research suggests that...
Can you cite your research. It's hard to criticize someone for giving an anecdote then going on to cite 'your research without citing it.
>Objectively measured physical activity may not be the key determinant of unhealthy weight gain in children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/
>Prospective studies, however, find little evidence of the more physically active members of a population gaining less excess weight than those who are the least physically active.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract
>TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level.
It's unlikely a 30m run and a 30m walk is going to burn off their excess calories.
An Olympic level athlete might burn 30 kcal per minute at their best. I would bet a regular person burns at most 15 kcal per minute while running, so that's 450 kcal for a 30 min run, and maybe a couple hundred more for a walk. People consume that in a single large sugary coffee or soda drink. You can't ignore inputs.
Let's take a 5"10 male aged 25 weight 170 pounds. According to some calculator they will have a basal metabolism (how much you use if you stay in bed all day) of 1850 kcal / day. Lets say they eat 450 kcal / day too much. i.e. 2300 kcal / day. By running the metabolism calculator backwards we find that they stabilize on a weight of 245 pounds.
Thats a seriously overweight, to be sure, but it is also well below 200 pounds of extra weight.
Anyway I could have been clearer, but my point wasn't to suggest that you would end up exactly 200lb heavier, but that your calorie surplus adds up to roughly 200lb - exactly what happens to it depends on a lot of things.
This is response to someone who suggested they hadd seen a lot of clearly obese people who couldn't have got there on a few hundred extra kcal per day - however that doesn't seem accurate.
My personal numbers for my regular training runs are about 11-12 kcal per minute. I can exceed 15 kcal per minute for very hard workouts or racing but I cannot train appropriately while doing that regularly. I'm a relatively seasoned runner but I don't focus on 800m-1500m which is where it might be possible to see numbers exceeding 20 kcal per minute.
In order for this to make sense for the purposes of lifestyle modification, you also have to subtract the calories that you would have burned had you not been exercising. IE if you had not run for that 30 minutes, you would still have been burning calories, either completely sedentary BMR or some other NEAT. This makes it even a worse deal to exercise for the sake of burning calories.
I recommend to get an Apple Watch (or any good fitness tracker) and a smart scale. After some time you can pretty easily and reliably predict your daily weight development simply based on your most recent diet and exercise.
I have heard some anecdotes of professional athletes who have horrible diets. I believe Chad Johnson survived off of multiple Mcdonald meals a day during his career. Those are unique cases of individuals having the required genetics and being able to spend hours a day with elite trainers
> > Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelette. One bowl of grain. Three slices of French toast topped. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
> > Lunch: One pound of pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread, plus energy drinks.
> > Dinner: One pound of pasta, an entire pizza, and even more energy drinks.
It's only how much you eat. Conservation of energy still applies, and 3500 kcal are still a pound of fat. It doesn't matter where the calories come from, they always end up either burned or as fat.
The "how much" is regulated by negative feedback. Whenever you eat sugar, insulin is secreted, which ends the craving. Whenever you eat fat or protein, leptin is secreted, which causes a feeling of satiation. Leptin is secreted by fatty tissue, so the fatter you are, the earlier you are satiated. As a result, everyone has an equilibrium weight at which he will eat exactly enough to replace the expended energy.
But that's not what's happening right now. We tend to constantly gain weight. Slowly, but without an apparent limit or any kind of feedback. That's where the "what you eat" comes in. Something is fouling up the feedback mechanism. Maybe something that causes the release of neither insulin nor leptin. Something we now consume in bulk, but didn't use to. Maybe we shouldn't do that.
And to the person you're replying to's point, where the walking/stairs/etc. involved in city life might serve keep that expenditure constant for someone who's otherwise sedentary, that's not the case for someone driving everywhere and topping out at 1000 steps a day.
Research shown that those expenditure doesn't matter. Your body adjusts. Nevertheless, we should create an environment that encourages everyday physical activity.
There's a floor to how far your body can compensate for reduced intake - starvation. There's not such a simple ceiling to stop you from eating back up to what you exercise.
No, it won't. You need about 2000 kcal/d just to maintain body temperature. That's assuming a constant heat output of 100W. A bit less is surely possible, muss less isn't. Reduce food intake below that, and you will lose weight. Because physics.
However, when it comes to supporting your current weight, it is fairly easy to hit equilibrium with exercise.