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.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/51de4cba6ffe48b0886cf9b2c7a6ba8a
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.
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.
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