The metabolism myth – and why exercise won't make you thinner
inews.co.uk
inews.co.uk
This is all one really needs to know. Sometimes cargo-culting works.
This article gets close to what I suspect is the truth about exercise and weight-loss, but it's so focused on the premise of dismissing metabolism, it fails to say anything truly interesting.
For ages I listened to these ideas about exercise and weight-loss, and dismissed its role, focusing instead on "simply eating less calories". And then I realised I was being kind of dumb.
I've since formulated some ideas about the connection between exercise and weight-loss, and in particular, running and weight-loss.
So far, my subjective experience of starting running have born these out and I plan to write about them at length.
But for now, be careful taking such research and applying it to your actual life. As someone with a graduate level education, and a natural born academic, I've realised these researchers are far too clever for your own good.
They are also more likely to eat better and have healthier lifestyle habits, not to mention the social affluence correlation. That being said, a caloric deficit is a sure way to lose weight. The whole and unprocessed plant based foods the article aludes to can help bridge the gap between the caloric deficit and satiety.
That said, while I recognise that there's a psychological reason for that correlation, i.e., someone looking to exercise more for health or aesthetics reasons is probably more likely to also make similar choices aroung their diet and general lifestyle, the crux of my fledgling theory is that exercising itself can change things in your body in such a way that you, for example, start to crave certain foods and disprefer others.
I'm excited to explore the idea and my experiences testing it further. But with that said, the real lesson is that, whether your theory as to why something works is true or not, it doesn't effect the fact that it works. So, when a scientist (or secondary source like this) comes along and suggests that you don't need to do that thing, there's good reasons to be sceptical of such certainty when your observations seem to suggest it is in fact effective.
Here’s my weight logged daily
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wwc6tfji54emxmkb4n876/IMG_623...
The entire experience made me feel like the fitness industry is bordering on fraud with the promises.
The other thing is that the doctors are not believing this is done with diet alone and in a span of just a few weeks. As part of this experience I learned that most doctors don’t take nutrition classes in college, at the level of depth required to address problems with food. It made me believe diverting patients to nutrition specialists should be often a first step instead of drugging people up.
Take it for what you want but this has been my experience so far. Change diet, workout less. The big deal is that I never knew how to eat properly. It sounds so strange coming out of my mouth even to me right now. I had zero clue how to eat because nobody taught me and I had no habits. I knew the theory but had zero clue how to apply it in practice.
I suspect it has something to do with either unable to sustain it due to lowered sugar consumption or some nutrient being dual use for metabolism of fat and for glycogenesis to provide energy to muscles ? But I don’t know. I’m speculating here way beyond my area of expertise.
https://idealprotein.com/science/
https://idealprotein.com/healthcare-providers/
The website addresses some of the myths including of calorie in/out because not all calories are equal and also every type of food can lead to weight gain.
My own experience is that I eat much more and don’t go hungry. I eat every 4 hours.
Btw ketogenic is not equal to keto diet. Sometimes people confuse the terms. Most of my fat comes from two spoons of olive oil I eat daily.
The fitness industry is very broad and is by no means just about weight loss. There's a large amount of people who are a normal weight, but not "fit" (ie. skinny fat).
It has been established for a long time that weight is generally diet based ("abs are made in the kitchen" etc), and every diet under the sun is some variation of CICO. Nobody is hiding it, nor is it a secret. It's just hard, and it takes work.
That said, exercise can boost weight loss. If you run 5 miles, you burn 500-ish extra calories which can be used to eat more or accelerate weight loss. I burn around 1500-2000 extra calories a day as a semi-professional athlete (3/4 hours per day).
Having lost a similar amount of weight (12kg) in a similar timeframe (2-3 months) last year, it's important to realise that a big portion of the initial weight loss upon a sudden diet change is water weight. You're probably eating less salt, which means your body isn't retaining as much water (which is very heavy in the body). It's important to keep doing something (like your resistance training) so your body doesn't burn off muscle mass as well, and it's important to ensure that the diet is sustainable, and as a side note, at some point weight loss will hit a slowdown or plateau somewhere above your target weight. Keep at it!
A lot of people lose a lot of weight, then go back to their former habits and put it all back on, plus extra. You have to be careful and make sure the changes you make are sustainable. Unless you're a very heavy weight, it's better to steadily lose weight than lose it very quickly, as this makes it more sustainable.
Exercise can make weight loss more sustainable because it can give you different goals that take your mind off of the number on the scales. For example, if you take up running and work up to 5k, 10k, half marathon, marathons, and improving your own time, you can stay slim without really thinking about it, and reap the benefits of better cardiovascular health and a stronger body.
I'm surprised your doctor/nutritionist expresses shock at the weight loss. If they have a rough idea of what you eat, they shouldn't be shocked. I'd advise finding another.
All that said, great job on the weight loss so far! What's your end goal if you don't mind me asking?
As for water and salt, I’m supplementing salt and drinking about 4-5 times more water than I used to. I used to live on coffee and tea. No actual pure water. I don’t know if that’s more or less salt than before but I’m drinking waaaay more water than I used to. This seems to help digestion and with metabolic processes.
My goal was to address my health comprehensively and eliminate feeling like crap and chronic low key inflammation of the whole body.
This is what can be called a “correlation not causation.” Control for eating, and the picture would likely look different.
In the same way as “people who ride subway are more healthy than those driving cars.” It isn’t that riding subway on its own produces some miracle health benefits, riding subway usually means that you walk more and sit less (compared to driving a car as your primary commute method). If you control for that and start walking the same amount even if you drive, you will likely find the difference in health outcomes between driving and using subway disappear.
Modern, Western scientific thinking always tries to isolate variables, our medicine is always trying to isolate that one specific molecule, etc. This has given us fantastic insights, and allowed us to see the trees for the forest, but we also then start to miss the forest I feel.
The forest is a complex and difficult to quantify system of interrelation and interconnection. We may never fully understand the forest, but that doesn't mean the route to effective knowledge about navigating this landscape is to ignore forests, and concentrate on individual trees. I hope the metaphor is clear enough.
There are different ways of knowing, and to jarringly switch metaphors, just because you've built a hammer, doesn't make every form of knowledge a nail.
Surely someone who sits at home for a all day would burn fewer calories than someone who exercises?
I can understand, that if someone does exercise for 1 day and then quits, that day the body may compensate for the extra energy requirement by reducing its own metabolic activity, but I assume that couldn't last if someone exercised regularly.