It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

This is borne out in essentially every sport which has weight classes at both the amateur and professional level.

Part of becoming healthy is calibrating yourself against other healthy individuals. No, not genetic freaks, just that neighbour who actually looks after themselves.

Because they do shit exercises, then drive home, gorge on high-carb trash, and sit on their asses until their next gym appointment.

As an example, say we are discussing someone whose average energy expenditure is 3000 kcal a day and they eat that much currently. Let’s say they start to exercise and their average expenditure rises to 3200 a day, and they start to diet, so their intake falls to 2500. The body wants to minimize that 700 kcal caloric deficit to maintain homeostasis. The person will lose weight, but by the time they’re down, say, 10 lbs, a normal person 10 lbs lighter than they started would expend maybe 2900 kcal, but they’ll be expending 2800, since their body will start to downregulate processes that expend energy to minimize the deficit. This is why when people are losing weight they might feel cold (thermogenesis has decreased), tired (mental processing has decreased), or any other number of negative effects. It’s the body going into self-defense mode.

Another factor is fat. Sadly, as weight is gained, fat cells grow, and split when they get too big. When weight is lost, they shrink, but they never re-combine. Fat is an endocrine tissue that releases numerous hormones that regulate energy balance, appetite, etc. This means that people who previously had more fat will never (without medical interventions) be “the same” as someone who is the same weight, but never carried extra fat to begin with.

This might sound like “why bother trying when there are so many things stacked against you?” but I couldn’t disagree more. Despite the propaganda masquerading as science that says “diet and exercise don’t work”, they do. Nobody is immune to the laws of thermodynamics - if more energy is consumed than is expended, weight gain results, and if more is expended than is consumed, weight loss results. The main reason all these studies are able to say “diet and exercise are a bust” is because people don’t maintain the lifestyle that reduced their weight to begin with, and usually return to familiar habits.

Luckily, our habits are mutable, and just like our body can play tricks like making us more hungry when losing weight, we can fight back if we know what we are up against. For example, caffeine is a commonly consumed substance that suppresses appetite. Staying busy rather than being idle also suppresses appetite. Not having junk food in your house/office/etc. reduces temptations to help aid healthy decisions. Having healthy food available and prepared makes making healthy decisions easier. Scheduling diet breaks or planning free meals (and calling them free meals, not cheat meals) improve diet adherence.

In my opinion, the way to sustainable weight loss is slight modifications to the environment and behaviors to nudge the system in the desired direction. Our culture is too focused on motivation and discipline and toughing out situations no matter what to achieve our ends. Meanwhile tiny differences compound and do not feel like an immense burden. It’s also worth mentioning the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy: have you ever known anyone who lost weight via diet and exercise, and said it is impossible to lose weight via diet and exercise? On the flip side of the same coin, there are a lot of people who think diet and exercise will not cause weight loss, and they’re disproportionately overweight. Believing something is possible is nearly always a precondition for achieving it. Thoughts become things.

Best of luck on your weight loss journey. You can do it.

Of course cardio and strength training are useful for building/preserving muscle mass and general fitness. But for weight loss looking at food seems more effective.

I often see people "jogging" that are basically just walking with a bit of a skip, for example.

I believe this is correlated with diet, which most people think is just nutrition, but it's a lot more complex now. There are petrochemicals and toxins in basically everything, avoiding them is expensive and incredibly difficult and you will still inevitably be exposed. There are many of these chemicals that have been shown to have a direct correlation to slow metabolism, so it can make it seem to make everything more difficult if you are consuming large quantities of say, glyphosate.

Most people also don't realize that the bioavailability of food is important. Probiotics, enzymes, etc are usually completely dead or stripped by the time they reach your mouth after the highly processed pipeline.

Another note, there are literally thousands of micronutrients that we barely know anything, so that's also another variable. This is also just not looked at often, so you have to actually know to look to even understand their are natural compounds that may be useful, and then you have to deal with the quality control problem in the industry, and find a reliable, preferably third party tested supplier.

And also just discipline, which is harder when you don't have good nutrition, or your body is constantly processing mass amounts of toxic material. It also just requires willpower though, and applying it will build will to wade through the complex landscape of not poisoning yourself constantly. If you want to get ahead, you are gonna have to push yourself to an uncomfortable position.

Most folks would rather walk for 2 hours than do sprints for 5 minutes, even the the later has been shown to have significantly more effect on your metabolism, and requires much less time.

So in a way I agree, it's not as simple as just activity, it is moreso intentional activity at a level that is just above your comfort zone enough to make consistent progress, and hopefully you can do that without constantly consuming mass amounts of toxins that makes that whole process harder.

Edit: My family doesn't understand why I haven't gotten the family beer belly most males in my family and extended family have.

People who blame their work for being unhealthy are making excuses. I’ve worked 60 - 70 hours a week for 2 decades and I’m in excellent physical condition.

The lifestyle shift the grandparent poster was referring to is typical of suburban and rural areas, but not really urban areas. I suspect people in more rural parts of the UK are very different from your London cohort.

Not the easiest thing to do, I know.

> Is it? That’s about 10 cups of cooked plain boiled rice.

Or two large milkshakes [1], or about 7 doughnuts or chocolate bars, such as Mars or Snickers, or about 500g of any random chocolate candies.

[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca/product/triple-thick-milk...