I get on the treadmill for 1 hour and consume 700 calories in that hour.
Heavy exercise also causes improved appetite and sleep regulation as it fixes your blood sugar levels. This leads to your demand for food and especially the worst kinds to paradoxically go down for most fat people (they were already eating too many calories)
Calories in and calories out shows that I will durably lose weight over a several month period with 1 hr on the treadmill every other day - a totally doable number for motivated people.
I swear to gosh that all the people who say “you can’t outrun your fork” are fatties.
The issue is that the willpower to exercise for most people is trash. Most people who claimed they did high impact exercise and didn’t see weight loss simply didn’t actually do high impact exercise.
Also, it’s very easy to eat an extra 700 calories especially if you are in the “I worked out so I deserve a treat” camp.
Your lack of understanding comes across in your stance as well as the attitude.
Yes exercise is fantastic for your quality of life years and all cause mortality, but it’s not the whole story.
This is sort of like trying to fly a plane using Newtonian physics. Like, you can do it. But it’s more an exercise in pedantry than practicality.
My body, for example, loves to frivol away weight. I can eat like a pig and lounge around and my basal metabolism will spike and I won’t gain weight (nor lose much strength, though I do lose definition). Similar for people with metabolic syndrome: their bodies will literally start starving themselves by cutting basal metabolism in reaction to less food or more exertion before they’ll give up some fat cells. Not everyone who is obese has metabolic syndrome. But you’re going against the science if you insist all we need is diet and exercise education.
This is not true for more people in the US than the populations of most other countries.
It's also weird to ask why people would do the obvious easy thing that takes no time or effort over the thing that takes more time and more effort. I bet you also make the exact same decision in a bunch of other contexts every day. Just use the pattern matching part of your brain to apply the same motivation to a new context.
Also even though the US has high wages, everybody feels vaguely poor and stressed about money for some reason. There are a lot of little nickel-and-dime fees because we don’t have a good safety net, consumer protection, and we don’t have public healthcare.
(I’m not on Ozempic and I recently lost weight by just eating less, but I get why people want it, the alternatives are annoying).
The drug avoids the need for any kind of willpower. You don't have to go out of your way or make lifestyle changes to lose weight. You don't even have to eat different food, but you'll almost certainly eat a lot less of it.
That's just a dramatically preferable proposition than changing one's lifestyle, diet, and habits manually, and then keeping all that going for the rest of one's life.
I mean, they work for a lot of people all the time. But they’ve existed forever, and over the past 50 years the obesity epidemic has only gotten worse.
Clearly, just offering things as available to people is not a systematic solution to this.
Our entire food chain is full of preservatives, carcinogens, and things that should not be consumed by living beings .
I've spent small amounts of time in Europe, and each time literally just eating whatever junk food I wanted, I came home losing 10 or 20 pounds. The food outside of the US is just fundamentally better.
Let's say you're a teenager and you want to buy yourself some soda, in America the vast majority of the time you're not getting real sugar, you're getting hyper processed corn syrup. Before you know it all types of weird crap isn't everything you eat. And this has disastrous effects .
Ozempic is really a shortcut to an extremely complicated problem. Realistically if you want to eat quality food you have to move to another country, it's that bad.
Sandwich, US >:|
Sandwich, Japan :O
I don't know what to believe anymore. I think sugar isn't good for you, whether it's "real" processed sugar, or HFCS which is a fructose ratio that is the same as honey, or agave syrup which has even more fructose.
And, other countries have obesity problems too - e.g. Mexico and the UK. Are they tainted by... whatever... is the actual problem (or problems) with the US's food supply?
The US does use more additives like BHA or potassium bromate (possible carcinogens—can you name others you’re thinking of?), but their link to obesity isn’t clear. As for soda, ‘hyper processed corn syrup’ I suppose just means high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—what’s the big difference you see from sugar? Research, like this meta-analysis (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/), shows HFCS and sugar are metabolically similar in typical amounts, no disaster there.
Your weight loss in Europe might be more about activity than food quality. Short trips often mean more walking and exploring, which burns calories, even if you’re eating junk.
I have had exactly the same experience as you every time I travel outside of the USA (luckily I’m already in good shape). I always come back skinnier than I left.
It’s infuriating that the only politicians who I can rely on to significantly regulate the ingredients in our food supply to remove slop will be hard left folks like Bernie Sanders - a breed of politicians which are going extinct.
But yes RFK, moving us to butter and tallow instead of fking seed oils will fix everything!!! (eyeroll)
And that goes for almost everything in the United States. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to say food created using natural ingredients is probably better for you than something that came out of a lab. In the name of extending shelf life, everything is just saturated with as many preservatives as possible.
While this is great for something like emergency rations you shouldn't eat this stuff every day.
It's all about maximum profit. They sell us food that's optimized to remain sellable later.
Then this food makes you sick and depressed, so they sell you a bunch of drugs to "treat" that. The goal isn't healthy happy people. It's all about return customers.
Maybe you caught some bug or something?
> The food outside of the US is just fundamentally better.
Meh... I'm from Europe and it's about the same, if you are at least somewhat selective about what you eat (and it might be much harder and/or expensive to do that in some places).