To Lose Weight with Exercise, Aim for 300 Minutes a Week
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I started exercising with some light running, gym use, breaking a little sweat. Didn't do anything, didn't show any noticeable result over like 4 months.
Then I hopped on a rowing machine (above preparation probably helped to be ready for it) because I wanted to see something happen. I'm not that special. Do something to your body and it will probably do the same for you as it does for other people, you just have to stick with it. I stopped thinking "eh, it won't do anything for me".
I rowed each day before the weights workout, 10 minutes super intense, until I felt like I was gonna puke as I fell off the machine. Heartbeat way elevated, out of breath, blood coursing through body, and soaked.
In conjunction with not eating quite as much (that rowing machine does something to your appetite) I dropped I would say 1 pound per week. Doctor asked if anything was wrong the next time I went in for physical and got weighed. Felt great.
Exercise is a part of my routine now. I don't eat junk any more. I now say the thing people always say after such things, but you don't internalize or believe it until you try: "I wish I had done it sooner".
This is why, when talking about health and fitness with friends, I always try to deemphasize weight loss. When I decided to finally stop being overweight and inactive (I played rec league soccer, which was miserable because it was my only exercises and I was grossly out of shape) I lost 40 pounds, then I put on 20 as I incorporated more strength (bodyweight) training into my routine.
And a couple colleagues who started weightlifting + moderate cardio saw initial losses of maybe 5-10 pounds before their weight became stable, but they were getting in obviously better condition even though they were still above their initial target weights by quite a bit.
"Put the fork down" is easy advice, but for many it's a lot more challenging than it sounds.
For me, and I suspect a lot of people, focusing on exercise first is the key. I can plot the number of miles I post on the bike against my weight. Of course I absolutely do more than 300 minutes a week on the bike.
Diet is super important, likely more important that fitness, but diet is vastly more difficult for me. Also, when I'm working out regularly, my diet naturally shifts. If I'm sitting at my desk or on the couch for weeks at a time, food intake increases.
I'm sure if I could ever properly reign in my eating I could change this, but I've tried so many times and it never works. Working out on the bike does, and as I mentioned above, the intake adjusts correctly when I do it.
My current target is feeling hungry most of the day, usually eating a ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast and lean meats/vegetables for other meals, and if I'm still very hungry by the end of the day I may indulge in a protein or granola bar and possibly a small glass of milk. I feel like my target of feeling hungry helps put the hunger pangs into perspective, and helps me stay on track.
None of what you described changes the example solutions you gave. An alcoholic does need to not drink to improve their health, just like to lose weight you do need to eat fewer calories. The way to solve a problem is to find the solution, and empathy doesn't cure being overweight or addiction. Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
No, but it would prevent a lot of insensitive, boneheaded forum posts.
EDIT: Wasn't trying to suggest your post was insensitive or boneheaded.
Maybe it wasn't, but I think your original sentiment wasn't far off from my reaction to the same OP.
While I haven't struggled all that much with my weight, I know people who have. One of the most important things for weight loss (and anything else for that matter, up to and including break ups, as was in the original example) is support networks. I learned that lesson rather harshly when I went through a really ugly break up earlier this year.
Humans are social creatures, after all, and I can't fault you for your original response.
We need others around us who are a positive influence.
I specifically said that the advice was _correct_. My point is that fact isn't that useful. Knowing the solution (i.e. eat less, drink less, think less) is the _easy_ part. It's the part these people have usually been told many times. It's rarely a lack of advice that is missing.
It's true that empathy doesn't cure these problems. But it is through empathy that you can understand what someone's true obstacles are to the "obvious" solutions.
Do you think the fact isn't useful to the people who don't know it yet?
Pretty much everyone who drinks needs to not drink to improve their health, but whether alcoholics have a particular need to not drink is controversial and largely widely accepted because of quasi-religious doctrine that has been well marketed.
> Only when you know the solution can you work backwards to find the steps to get you there from where you are today
Yes, but here’s the thing. Lots of research has actually gone into the steps for weight loss, its not something people need to work out from scratch. Its a lot more productive to follow a path that works even without deep understanding of the rationale than to start with a target and try to work it out from first principles, which most people will fail, and fail very badly, with.
Sure, “eat fewer calories” might be generally part of a solution (and “eat fewer calories than you use” definitely will be). But neither of those are particularly useful advice on their own for people who want to lose weight.
Did you mean 500?
When you do a low impact cardio exercise (walking below 4 MPH), your body doesn't want to burn that sugar you have, saving it for an emergency (flight/fight). It sees you have all this fat and determines that your energy burn rate can be sufficiently supplied by burning it. So it ends up using fat instead of sugar. Maybe burning through this fat (walking long walks) and not burning through your sugar reserve, remodels appetite hormones (Leptin).
Leptin is secreted mainly by white adipose tissue, and levels are positively correlated with the amount of body fat
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829242/
The trick is keep it low impact, slow walking, for 2 or more hours a day. Combined with short 48 hour fasts and a 2500 Kcal re-feed day, it's a game changer.
For me... cycling works wonders. I burn calories twice as fast as walking and so long as I focus on good post-workout foods I avoid the trap of undoing all the good that I just did. Eating proteins and fats after a workout fills me up and lets my body repair torn muscle tissue.
Of course, the best way to lose weight is to clean up a bad diet. One unhealthy meal--or even a snack--can completely undo the calorie deficit of all but the most intense workouts.
I gained a lot of strength and some muscle mass in the gym. But as for losing extra fat, exercise could not move the needle more than 2-3 pounds. What worked, and was surprisingly easy, was intermittent fasting.
Also, you might spend maybe 200cal lightly cycling during a zoom call. You will get that back in a few seconds of eating, if you choose something heavy like a chocolate bar. Your best bet then is to just control the incoming calories, because even an all-out workout of an hour will do you maybe 800cal if you're a bit bigger and stronger than me, and even if you did that you'd feel super tired for a long time after and maybe even decide to eat up that amount again.
In my case, it was all about calories. I've done this, and a friend did this as well: get one of those electronic scales that's got a couple of decimals on it, eg says 92.15kg. Then you can get used to understanding how much weight you lose while sleeping, how much you are carrying as pee and poo, and how much a meal tends to weigh. This will tell you how much you actually weigh, because you can take out the noise.
Have a look at an online calculator that tells you how much you should be eating for a given target. Find out the calories in everything you eat, and eat that budget.
I did this, and amazingly, the weight loss was just as expected. Thermodynamics seems to work.
Exercise isn't just about the calorie differential, it improves heart function, posture, flexibility, bone mass, mood, etc.
I don't have any advice here; just commiserating. Keep on trucking.
This is why you have to be smart about how you do it. Ride your bike to work or run/ hike/ play with your kids. There are a million ways to double up and get fit while doing something else.
How much time do you spend playing video games or watching TV? That is time you can convert into being fit.
Dying of heart failure at 50 clears up all those "Not enough time" issues.
> Even if you find the time, you might be quite tired and that also eats into your time budget.
Exercising when you are not fit wipes you out. Regularly exercising gives you more energy in the long run as normal activities become easier and less stressful.
For eating, I cut out as much sugar as I reasonably could. For exercise, I made sure I "moved vigorously" for 30 minutes per day, every day.
I was never a runner. And in my early shape, that 30 minutes was just me walking. Eventually, though, I stopped sweating and being out of breath, so I started walking more briskly. Then eventually I moved to a treadmill and started jogging for bits of it.
And then I could jog the whole time. And then I could run while taking jog breaks. About 7 months in, I was able to run 5 miles in about 35 minutes. I did it every day.
The point was that I went every day. It wasn't about how much I did, but that I was sweating and moving for 30 minutes. Lost 75 pounds in about 9 months.
I took the winter off last year and fell into sugar again, so I restarted this past summer. A 5k every day, as many days as I can. I have to run outside instead of at the gym, so weather controls a lot.
All of this is to say I agree, mostly. 30 minutes per day every day can fix a lot of problems. It did for me. :)
The point being, you run your pace. Congrats on starting and keeping up your running. It's a really good form of exercise -- inexpensive, readily available, and low-overhead. There will always be faster people, and there will always be slower people. You'll meet both at races (when races are a thing again), and mostly what you'll feel is camaraderie that you're all in it together regardless of your pace.
And my favorite part of running is waving to other runners running the opposite way. I assume it’s the same way motorcycle people feel when they wave to each other.
Many places, walking to work is a joke.
Also, I only need about 12-13 minutes for my walk to work, so I get only 25 per day - surely better than nothing but not enough to really counter work sitting at a desk 8 to 10 hours a day.
There’s no need for people to work 8 to 10 hours a day, and commute 30+ min in an automobile.
Rather than use our technological efficiencies to improve quality of life now, we use them to compete with others to increase probability of securing quality of life in the future.
No idea how to switch to new dynamics so that defecting (in the sense of working less) is the stable equilibrium.
It's completely doable, as long as you see it that way.
- Start weighing yourself daily (once a day -- smart scale helps, but a notepad to track will work). You start here to build the habit.
Do this for a 3 weeks just to understand how much your weight will fluctuate +/-. On any given day I seem to fluctuate 2 lbs or so. You will be similar. if you only weigh yourself once a week you might get encouraged/discouraged while in one of these micro-cycles.
- Then after 3 weeks, calculate your macros -- and then understand what in your 'normal' diet is throwing your macros out of wack. If you eat labeled food, look at the labels. If you eat more whole foods, google around for some data. It sounds hard, but you'll build an intuition quick.
For my partner and I, we both needed MORE protein. We weren't getting enough. I ate MORE meat, and they added a pea protein smoothie (which sounds lame but they are really good.) My partner started to eat less nuts as well, because they were getting too much fats.
- Control for your macros with your normal diet.
- Eat whatever you want in your macros, balance yourself by watching the scale. if your macros are off, you will trend up for about 4 days in a row. Anything less in my experience is "expected". I can reverse 3 days of small weight gains (3-5 lbs) in about 1-2 days.
Once my partner mastered this, they eat 1 cookie and ice cream every night, guilt-free, to hit their sweet tooth, and we have combined lost close to 40lbs by doing this.
- You can work out to firm up, but depending on how much you wanna lose, diet alone could be enough.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/51de4cba6ffe48b0886cf9b2c7a6ba8a
Try not to take it quite so literally. The point is it’s much more work to overcome a poor diet with exercise than the other way around.
I dislike it as an expression because while fixing your diet is probably the easier thing for most people, it completely disregards the possibility of finding a form of exercise that you enjoy enough to want to do it.
While CICO is a useful generalization, there’s other factors at play like hormones and how our diet affects those other systems
There are some "cheats" that you can do with macro profiles, especially with no or low carb diets (carnivore/keto), however these solutions rarely work long term, especially in athletic circles. For non-athletes it _might_ work a little longer term but if you look at those studies (with non-athletes) they are very short lived and typically on a very specific cohort. Hormonal levels adapt over time and the initial "gainz" you see are relatively short lived - this is most evident in the studies done on athletes. That and you have to stay on top of your bloodwork. In my personal experience it's about six months. I've tried keto, paleo, and carnivore for fairly long periods of time (paleo is much more forgiving long term for a variety of reasons). There are most certainly diminishing returns. Unfortunately, as I said, there's no long term studies here with large cohorts so it's all anecdotal.
Show me a guy who runs 10km/ day and weighs 250 pounds and I'll buy that.
A Whopper combo from Burger King comes in at a little over 1500 kcal.
So it's certainly possible, but I have a hunch those who run 6+ miles a day generally self-select themselves out of the population that overeats calorie dense food.
Regardless, like most colloquialisms, it isn’t meant to be taken so literally. It’s speaking to the general truth that it’s easier to limit calories in than increase calories out
Brain says eat your are staving to death, eat it'll make you happy, eat... or else.
You can't control urges to eat, you can only do your best to resist them.
However, exercise, is always under your control, so it is a great tool. Exercise also has all sorts of non weight loss health benefits that aren't tangential but complementary to weight loss, including staving off weight-loss induced muscle loss. Without a doubt, you can't lose weight without getting a grip on diet, but I don't think a diet only approach is a good one.
I had problems keeping a healthy weight in my past and the method that worked best for me was to target a diet a bit below my metabolic rate, one that would have me losing weight at a slow but steady clip (and would also start to trigger the lizard brain to eat eat eat), then add moderate exercise to the equation.
This is going to depend from person to person. Like most things, you can train yourself to control your hunger/appetite. Some people will have no real issue, others it will be an uphill battle.
For me, this is a big part of it. I can schedule a daily ride. While I can schedule not eating from 8am until 8pm, I'll usually wind up in the kitchen at some point when I'm thinking about something else.
My experience says that I feel a lot less hunger on intermittent fasting than trying to eat small meals frequently. Most other IF practicioners say the same. Hunger feelings ("brain says eat") are hormonally driven and not entirely mechanical in their occurence.
If you only work out a few times, it's easy to over-eat to compensate, but if you are working out regularly—5-6 times a week—your desire for food changes.
Dieting does not change the amount of activity you do.
Also, it is more important to be healthy and fit than skinny.
When your body has a glucose spike, it is very important that its billions of muscle cells are willing to say "yes" to insulin and uptake that glucose. Otherwise, the body lacks an efficient disposal mechanism. If you don't contract muscles throughout the week, insulin production has to go up to yell louder at muscle cells to please, please take the glucose. High insulin levels also sends two messages to fat cells: 1. do not release current fat stores for energy, and 2. absorb glucose to create more fat. When all that glucose finally is taken up by cells, and if insulin does not fall quickly enough, fat cells do not release energy (because insulin is telling them not to), and so the body becomes hungry even though it has excess fuel available.
Our bodies evolved under the conditions that we exercised to an extreme quantity everyday. Without exercise, its energy management systems get all nutty. Some level of exercise is important to avoid perverse, counterproductive feedback loops that undermine our goals.
I've spent 30 years bouncing between 260 and 185 pounds. Every single time I've successfully lost weight it started with exercise. Diet alone has absolutely never worked for me.
weight loss = (calories in - calories out)
is a useful approximation but vastly over generalizes. The human body is a complex system with many more inputs. Hormone levels, inflammation etc. all can play a role.
Scientifically true, but in order to successfully pilot the plane, not very helpful. Keeping the plane in air and keeping your body fit requires knowledge of its mechanisms, not just the physical principles of operation.
I think it's far more important knowing what actions work for an individual to achieve weight loss. Most everyone knows that X calories in and X calories is the end target. Knowing how you can reach that balance is the hard part.
Every time I see some kind of forum about weight loss there are a million people popping in talking about "Putting the fork down" or "Calories In < Calories Out". But this is worthless because in the end, having a solution that a person is capable of doing is far more important than theory.
Of course human bodies are complex and there is no one size fits all. My anecdotal weight loss won’t match with yours. We can provide our experience so others can draw their own ideas and conclusions from our stories.
It wasn’t really an either or situation for me. Both diet and exercise are needed. The way I looked at it is with the simple model of calories in - calories out = weight change. I think there should be some factor that accounts for sedentary or active, but I don’t know where to fit it in. Like any model, it’s not perfect.
You and you’re used below do not reflect the poster I’m responding to.
If calories in exceeds calories out and your level is sedentary, you’re going to gain weight in the form of fat.
If calories in exceeds calories out and you’re lifting weights, you gain muscle probably with some fat. Think of this as bulking.
If calories in are less than calories out, you’re going to lose weight. If you’re active, then it’s going to have an interaction effect where you lose more weight.
Calories in would be quantity times frequency and would come from the sum of solid and liquid calories (calories in = quantity liquid * frequency liquid + quantity solid * frequency solid). We can manipulate quantity by reducing portion size or reducing calorie content through substituting different, healthier choices. This applies to both liquid and solid calories. We can manipulate frequency by fasting, or eliminating things altogether.
Calories out = calories burned * frequency + base metabolic burn rate. Calories burned should be a rate over time. We manipulate the rate by using more strenuous forms of exercise. We manipulate the time by changing the duration of our sessions. We increase the frequency by having more sessions. We increase the base metabolic burn rate by lifting weights and gaining muscle.
You start by figuring out what your baseline is for both calorie intake and exercise expenditure and then make small adjustments to either increase or decrease. You weigh yourself at the same time on the same day once a week. You look to see progress on a weekly basis. If you’re hitting 1-2 pounds loss, you’re on the right track. When you plateau for a couple of weeks, you need to adjust the parameters. The process needs to be followed.
We probably need some sums and indexes in the above model, and we could probably differentiate between something like steady-state (e.g., walking and meals in the normal course of a day) and perturbations (e.g., cheat meals, fasted days, long hikes, running, gym). Again, it’s a model, and weight loss stories are anecdotal, but I think the point is illustrated. Change your diet and change your exercise regimen to lose weight and have body composition changes.
For me anyhow, the fun aspect is critical.
Less Cal in than out is the way to go.
That mantra always drives me nuts. Not because it's false (on the contrary, by the laws of thermodynamics it's trivially true), but because it's not helpful for people trying to lose weight as it ignores the dynamic homeostasis systems of the human body. I.e. as reported by this article, if you try to increase your "out" energy expenditure, your body releases hormones specifically attempting to increase your "in" by making you hungrier. Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out".
...as well as torturing you and trying to trick you into gorging.
The "calories in / calories out" people make me angry too. There's an old joke that goes: "Q. How do you carve a statue of an elephant? A. Take a big stone, and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." Technically true, completely useless in practice.
What people need is methods which take into account these regulatory mechanisms. Fasting one day a week (dinner until breakfast the day after) may give you the same calorie deficit as eating 300 less calories per day than you're burning, but it's a heck of a lot more pleasant to have 1 day of complete abstinence and then 6 days of homeostasis, than spending 7 days a week wrestling millions of years of evolution, and being blamed as having "no willpower" when you inevitably fail.
So what, did people magically lose all willpower and discipline in the past 60 years? Of course not, but we have instead build up a society, both around industrialized food and sedentary lifestyles, that is basically geared to make people fat.
Similarly, while "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice, mainly because it's been proven over decades that this advice (again, societal-wide) doesn't work: we've been saying this same thing for years and yet Americans are as fat as ever. What's that definition of insanity again?
This is why I said you need willpower and discipline. These are some of the reasons that make them needed for the average person to stay fit.
> "discipline and willpower" may work for any one individual, it is completely useless as societal-wide advice
This is why I address individual readers on HN. I'm not interested in fixing society, but I'm happy to offer my personal experiences if it can help one person out there. There are plenty of people nowadays who combat the idea of accountability, and if that helps others, then great. I believe in accountability, discipline, willpower, etc, and I offer my perspective for others who believe the same
Buy I've found that when you exercise more, my diet automatically gets better. Not great, but significantly less bad.
Honestly, high level endurance or strength sports make eating a chore. You simply need a LOT of food with decent macros, and you need to be eating all the time. I was once a fairly competitive 100mpw runner. It's eating before you go to bed, so you can wake up at 5 and eat before going back to bed to wake up at 6 so you can do a long run and eat 150+ calories an hour during that, then immediately hit a protein shake and some rice/pasta after the run, then lunch, so you can be prepped to go out again at like 6pm for an evening shakeout run, then you do dinner, then snack before bed, and repeat. 4k+ calories a day is a grind unless you're hammering a lot of really empty calories.
I have been exercising 3 days a week with a PT for 3 years before with no results on the weight (but many other great results like fixing my knee and back problems, getting really strong, etc.)
The article mentioned the participants could exercise however they wanted and "many chose to walk". I don't understand why walking is considered exercise. I understand it burns more calories than sitting still, but it doesn't elevate your heart rate nor push your muscles to grow/develop in any real way, and it feels like trying to "cheat" your way into exercise.
Also, this bit was really interesting to me: "Those burning about 3,000 calories a week showed changes now in their bodies’ levels of leptin, an appetite hormone that can reduce appetite. These alterations suggested that exercise had increased the exercisers’ sensitivity to the hormone, enabling them to better regulate their desire to eat." I would bet that those who burned the most amount of calories weren't just walking farther than the others, but instead their choice of exercise was just more intense.
I've always heard that running isn't a great way to lose weight because it just makes you want to eat more, but that hasn't been my experience. After running somewhere between 3.5-5 miles, my appetite is gone for at least a few hours after the run. I have no desire to snack, and while I might eat slightly more at dinner, the overall calories for my day don't change too significantly.
I have had family members lose 60+ pounds from introducing daily walks into their lifestyle.
I am still a proponent of more vigorous exercise and particularly resistance training, but you cannot discount the benefits that going from not walking to walking can have.
My key takeaway is that we consume up to 1000 kcal per week to compensate for exercise but not more and that the mechanism works through appetite hormones like leptin [3]. This is a good reference point but I suspect the results don't mesh with the studies on insulin sensitivity, high-intensity interval training, and oxidative stress. There is probably a more optimal workout strategy in terms of time and frequency to achieve the same health benefits but perhaps this is an optimal weight loss strategy.
[1] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpregu.000...
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135910532091407...
(1) https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2020/11000/Exerc...
Yes, it’s possible and people do it. But it’s got a whole host of dependencies that are ordinarily subject to breaking changes.
I also only gain weight for 1kg after all these 8 months lockdown/not allowed to open (pre lock down I did karate about 3 times a week).
Practically you're more efficient walking than you are running, but walking is nearly as effective as a calorie burner as running, it just takes longer.
But don’t exercise without seeking advice from a physician and/or completing a physical!
should be titled
"To Lose Weight with Exercise you're gonna need to workout more if you eat more too"