The last time I went to Japan with an American friend, she commented that the portion sizes in Japan were so small. Combined with all the walking from using trains (we'd easily get more than 10k steps per day), we both lost weight during that trip.
Locals would say matter of factly “you only order the large when you want more.”
Also many restaurants offer Tabehoudai and Nomihoudai, “all you can eat and drink” respectively.
All the servers would come to see when the Americans would order nomihoudai and request a pitcher of beer.
“Okay, one pitcher for the table.”
We’d always get a laugh when we’d say, “Actually, one pitcher for each of us.”
It would interesting to see the effect of that here in Australia. Imagine the Homer Simpson at the seafood buffet episode but an entire country.
Japan does have a “drink to excess” culture too, but it largely seems to be more with intent. (Also, in my travels I have found harder alcohols, 35%+, and shots culture are mostly a US characteristic.)
If I’d eat out with only my Japanese friends and we’d get a tabehoudai/nomihoudai we would only consume until sated, usually only ordering about the same amount as a normal menu item, but take advantage of the “all you can” to try new foods and drinks we were unsure if we’d like.
With my fellow American friends we would certainly abuse the privilege by drinking and eating beyond excess without necessarily even setting out to do so.
But exercise has very little effect on weight compared to diet. It's a known fact, even for the fans of counting calories. Just see the tables of inputs and outputs.
Eating less and avoiding sugar and processed food is mostly enough, if not to be slim, at least to keep you reasonable healthy.
Also, some studies suggest that up to some threshold, exercise reallocates those calories from autonomic functions rather than actually adding to total expenditure [1]. It's been further speculated based on this that some of the health benefit of exercise might simply be a result of taking energy away from anxiety/stress responses.
It reduces the weight of all the fat you're carrying around. Even if exercise doesn't make you lighter it still makes you leaner.
I recognize that this is conventional wisdom, but it hasn't been borne out by my own results losing well over 100 pounds / roughly 40% of my body weight over the course of several years.
I've counted calories strictly, with the same methodology and same limit, and documented weight regularly, both during low-activity low-altitude winters and medium-activity, high-altitude summers. The results I got, over the major windows in which I got them, were as follows:
altitude | activity | loss | weeks | lbs/week | implicit daily caloric deficit @ 3500 cal/lb
high | high | 60 | 14 | 4.28 | 2140
low | medium | 0 | 6 | 0.00 | 0
low | low | 17 | 22 | 0.76 | 381
high | low-med | 47 | 30 | 1.57 | 783
low | low | -2 | 22 | -0.09 | - 45
high | medium | 10 | 4 | 2.50 | 1250
This is now data collected over years of weight loss and multiple seasonal changes in location and activity, and I find it difficult to explain this within the context of standard weight loss advice. Exercise at altitude seems to burn far more calories than it "should", by a factor of four or five times.
I walked a mile or two every other day on average across this period, meaning the only difference is a roughly 15 to 30-minute walk up a steep slope roughly every other day. A typical calculator will tell you this "should" burn on the order of 100-150 calories, but the data suggests it's closer to 500-1000.
I'm not a doctor, so I don't know why this is. I've largely ruled out:
- Diet, which is conserved across locations fairly well (I cook most of my own food using widely-available ingredients)
- Seasonal effects, unless they happen to produce very sharp discontinuities at the exact time I relocate each year
- Emotional state, since these results have been robust to both positive and negative emotional states in both locations
- Temperature, which is near-constant year round (because I live in warm places in winter and cold places in summer)
- Groundwater, because I drink almost entirely bottled water and not local water supplies
- Major underlying medical causes (my bloodwork is great and I don't have any reason to think I'm sick)
I have a working hypothesis that the studies that established calorie burn from exercise (which I believe largely did it by measuring CO2 exhalation) were missing a great deal of the actual energy cost, because the costs of anaerobic respiration take place over hours following exercise and not just during it. But I also can't imagine people with actual medical expertise haven't thought of this before. A negative correlation between altitude and obesity rates is well-established, so something is going on.
In any case, the data is the data, and it points very strongly towards altitude and exercise, synergistically, being almost exclusively the source of my own weight loss.
I dont get the point of saying excercise doesnt make you lose weight. It increases your caloric need, so if you dont eat to make up for it, then ya it absolutely helps.
I struggle greatly to diet hard enough to lose weight if im sedentary. Its extremely easy when doing 3 1hr strength workouts a week, and lik 20 mins of cardio a day. Like its a struggle to eat enough to maintain weight.
Yeah, many years ago as a student I spent a summer in Manhattan. The diet probably couldn't have been more different than Japan, but the combination of walking a ton compared to the suburbs where I grew up, and the fact that as a poor student in a very expensive city my portions were smaller out of necessity (e.g. my snacks were usually fresh fruit sold outside of a store/bodega) I got much healthier.
This is a stark contrast to North America where there are generally no trains to walk to catch, but rather simply a few steps from your door to your car.
My point being that the design of our society right down to the topography of our physical spaces is not set up to encourage walking.
We can’t even agree that obesity is a problem, instead choosing to talk about beauty in all shapes and sizes and other woke nonsense (to be clear: I consider myself a liberal) that masks true objective facts about health.
If we could agree on a goal, perhaps we could then have real conversations about how to get there. But instead we are so fractured and our governments so inept and conflicted that we subsidize the food that makes us sickest.
There are places where it's downright hostile, with areas with no sidewalks or crossings.
> But instead we are so fractured and our governments so inept and conflicted that we subsidize the food that makes us sickest.
There's actually a somewhat sane rationale for the agricultural subsidies. For the longest time in human history, famine was always looming, and the best policy to avoid it was to store excess calories in case of a bad harvest year.
Whether or not that still applies in the US can be debated though.
the food subsidy probably makes sense but not to the degree and bluntness of american policy. one of the instigations of nationwide school lunch was actually to provide a baseline level of demand for farmers and make cycles less severe.