Exercise is great. Makes you health, your heart stronger, and improves your mood. As a tool for losing weight, it isn’t all that useful. Exercise and the majority of people end up being hungry and eating a lot more than if they just sat around watching TV.
That said, I’ve never lost significant weight without exercise but then maybe it was the life style change in general that had more impact. That said, I may talk to my doctor about my options since I haven’t been able to really exercise for the past couple of years.
I don’t think it’s a case of “stop exercising”. The article says if you do a load of exercise and then eat more, you’re unlikely to see a change. It’s just your usual lifestyle pages attention-grabbing headline on top of some fairly standard arguments. Diet, in terms of appropriate quantity and quality, and exercise. If your weight is at an equilibrium and you want to change it, maintain one and alter the other as appropriate. Common sense stuff. It’s the willpower and everything being so damn delicious that makes it hard to balance the books for some people.
The study that started all this was first published in Time Magazine. Here is the LA Times response, which basically says if exercise made you fat, why are athletes all thin? I have no clue why Time didn’t vet that article a lot better. In the end, it’s simply calories in/calories out. This is why I’m still tempted to trademark my new diet called “Eat Less, Move More”. This diet will have the backing of thousands of doctors around the world, has been shown to work since before the birth of Jesus, and is very easy to do. I’ll go on the speaker circuit, charge everyone $100 to listen, and make millions, I’m sure.
That’s fairly basic stuff. If you burn an extra 500 calories exercising and then eat 600 extra calories because you’re really hungry afterwards you’ve basically wasted your time, in terms of weight loss.
Not to mention that weight is kind of a stupid metric to use to gauge fitness. It’s much better to use bodyfat percentage. I’m disgusted if I put on 10 pounds of fat, but elated if I put on 10 pounds of muscle, even though the scale wouldn’t show any distinction between the two.
Yeah, it’s a stupid point that has been brought up in all the other dieting threads and then quickly shot down.
As I’ve mentioned before, I was in a medical experiment as part of a control group where one group (the one they were looking at) kept the caloric intake leveled but exercised a lot more, one group (mine) didn’t exercise but lowered caloric intake by quite a bit, one group exercised, but ate more and the last group did fuck all.
The goal was to have the main group and my group lose the same amount of weight on average, but then look at a number of other factors to gauge if one weight loss was “better”. The test clearly showed that the group who lost weight and exercised were healthier (cholesterol, insulin and a number of other factors I’d have to look up).
“I don’t think they’re hungry, I think it’s a reward issue,” Church says.
I’m not sure what normal cardio exercise does to true appetite, but dedicated weightlifting will obviously ramp it up through the roof. The bitch there is you can’t merely avoid junk food; I found that I had to make a conscious effort to consume food that offered the most nutrients for the calories. There are other problems with gaining fat while weightlifting but that’s not a concern for the average overweight person.
I’ve finally reached the point in my life where I’ve gained a few pounds from my normal weight. I haven’t exercised consistently in a while but still blame it on the availability of junk food. My wife took over grocery shopping and loves to buy the stuff, take one bite, and then let it sit for a week until I gobble it up. :)
Yeah, generally. But exercise does increase your basal metabolic rate, so in addition to the number of calories you burn from the exercise, there’s some additional burning of calories that occurs afterwards.
Yeah, it’s pretty simple. Exercise can make you hungry + people often eat some ice cream or whatever that night as a reward (I used to too sometimes before I really started thinking in basic terms of calories consumed vs burned). Which can completely void whatever calorie deficit they might have achieved. But of course the exercise will still have been beneficial, just maybe not weight loss wise.
Indeed. Consuming all of it with clean calories is tough. About a year ago I did Mark Rippetoe’s program, eating 4000-5000 calories/day and trying not to put on much fat weight. So I was very strict with the diet, spreading the calories out over the day (every 3 hours) and eating only good fats. In addition to feeling like a 2nd job, it got pretty boring after a couple months since I didn’t want to put more time into the diet. So I largely stuck with the same stuff every day.
I’ve never been really hungry after exercising. Ever. I mean, extra hungry, from exercising, not just because it was dinnertime, or 7 hours after I ate last, or whatever. Except maybe after running 20 miles, but that was because it took hours and hours and I just got hungry as normal. This is just me, your experience may vary.
I don’t buy that exercising makes you hungry. Maybe on some macro level. But I do think it’s a valid argument that it’s way easier to lose eight by eating less caloric food than yo exercise. You have to run for an hour at a moderate pace to lose 500-600 calories, which is the same as not having a handful of cookies or a large croissant with butter. Or two 20 ounce bottles of coke. I mean, cut out a few cookies or bottle of coke, or run for an hour. That seems like an easy effort choice (though admittedly it takes a lot of willpower).
Watching all that was an interesting… exercise… at one point in my life but now I just lift weights casually out of enjoyment without getting real dedicated to it. I still get very cranky with low blood sugar but have finally gotten into the habit of carrying hard candy around, so I’m able to calm down my hunger while avoiding the quick calorie dumps from oversized junk food portions.
If the amount of calories you burn through exercise is greater than the amount of calories you eat then you will be hungry. This is indisputable. Your body will want to replace what it lost. The trick is feeding your body what it really needs to achieve your goals. Want to build mass? Match your caloric loss with a ton of high protein, high carb food. Want to lose a lot of weight? Eat lots of vegetables and cut out empty carbs and fats. Want to gain muscle AND lose fat? This take a lot more work and experimentation as you find the foods that let you keep the muscle with a minimum of fat.
Yeah, true, but if the average person eats say, 2000 calories a day, they would have to run at a brisk pace for 3 to 4 hours per day to offset that amount of calories. Even if you were only consuming 1200 calories a day, that’s still 2 hours of brisk running, per day. That’s a whole lot of exercise while not eating a whole lot.
Of course you also burn calories just existing and walking around. But I bet you have to exercise a lot for it to actually make you hungry. I suspect if you get hungry after exercising a moderate amount (say 30 minutes on a cardio machne at the gym), it’s just because you haven’t eaten in a while.
Sure, but just like caloric intake is cumulative, so is exercise. Let’s say you walk to and from the train station, sprint a block to catch a bus, walk a few flights of stairs while at the office and then move some furniture BEFORE you do your official running for the day. It all helps.
On the other hand, if you eat 2,000 calories a day and literally don’t move at all (go straight to your desk and sit in front of a computer for 15 hours) you need to lower your caloric intake. Chances your body is already trying to make you do so. Have you ever skipped lunch and had a light dinner just because you weren’t that hungry?
I would add to caloric intake the need to space out your meals. Never put your body into starvation mode. You’ll just drop metabolic rate and store fat.
Exactly. This article is retarded. I should make my own counter study that concludes: Eating less doesn’t make you lose weight. Then I can argue that if you eat less, but also do less exercise, you won’t lose any weight…
