You're not wrong because it's about calorie deficit of which exercise can help you achieve. Also since the way fat gets "burned" for weight loss is by exhaling carbon atoms, aerobic exercise can assist with this process.
Yes but then you have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. When something happens (e.g. you are busy in job or you get injured) you no longer can exercise as much as you need so you start gaining weight.
Fundamentally using exercise to lose weight is long-term unachievable because it is unpredictable. Losing weight via diet is much simpler you just eat less, there isn't anything that would objectively stop you from following diet, where as simple incident or scheduling issue can prevent you from exercise. Exercise is fundamentally wrong tool for managing weight.
Exercise is for building muscles, diet is for managing weight.
I can’t agree with this enough. From 2000-2012, I was a part time fitness instructor and I did heavy cardio at least 10 hours a week without fail. I also trained for half marathons later on. I was easily burning 3000-5000 calories a week and I could eat anything and not gain weight.
As soon as I stopped, my weight ballooned. Even when I started eating less, I still can’t get my eating habits in sync with my reduced (3-5 hours a week) exercise schedule. I’ve been consistency about 15-20 pounds over my personal ideal weight.
Besides, my body can’t handle the type and frequency of exercise that it could in my mid 20s to mid 30s.
I think the confusion here is understanding that my point was exercise is to assist with weight loss and not be the primary thing to induce weight loss. If you use it as the primary tool for your weight loss you will fall into the trap that you did anything that disrupts your exercise causes your weight loss to reverse.
If instead you used diet as the primary tool and exercise has the supplement when the supplement falls away it's easier to adjust the diet to compensate. For example a moderate exercise of 30 minutes or so a day can burn an additional 200 calories a day that's 10% of a 2000 calorie diet. If you're in a situation where you cannot exercise cutting out an additional 200 calories is a relatively small amount of food.
Humans are very good at throwing everything into one bag and expecting it to remain forever. Your example of your high amount of exercise to induce weight loss is an example of this. It works but it's also very short-term because it cannot be maintained. I almost like him this to exotic dancers as a profession. It is a good way for a relatively low skill person to achieve a high amount of money in the short term. For example they could go to college and pay for it in cash. But often times the returns are so great it's a difficult to see that this cannot last forever. But as with the body cannot exercise at a high level for ever exotic dancers cannot remain profitable forever. This is why these are tools to allow a short-term process to evolve into a long-term sustainable game. Earn a large amounts of cash when you're young and viable to invest in a education with a future payoff or invest in another long-term payoff. Exercise to supplement your dieting, but the main goal should be evolving your diet to adjust to your caloric needs because that is the long-term.
I don’t think you realise how calories can sip in unnoticed and calorie burning as well.
So, I’m fat. All my life I’ve been yoyo-ing in terms of weight. Sometimes methodically sometimes by the ear.
A few years back, I went from 130kg to 85kg methodically. Calorie counting, watching macros, targeted exercises, all the good stuff.
What I found out was, if I didn’t diet and just logged my calories, I was consuming 4000 sometimes even 5000 calories per day easily. And it didn’t feel like I was eating much.
Full English for breakfast, that’s about 1k right there. One or two lates, another 300-400 calories. Maybe pair that with a little pastry, another 300 on top of that. Lunch, burger and fries, big coke to drink, toss in another k. After work a couple of pins with the lads, another 300-400. Get back, have dinner, maybe snack something while falling asleep to Netflix, another 1k easy. Don’t get me started on getting pissed with 7-8 pints and then devouring 3 big macs like it’s nothing.
I also found out I’m burning far more calories then I was expecting for my sedentary lifestyle. Just the walk to work, climbing some stairs, moving around the office, going to lunch, doing some house chores put me in close to 1k burned. Without feeling like I was making any effort.
In my case, 4k input with 1k output still yields 3k which is 1k over what I should have.
It is very possible in your case your input is 3k, your output 1k so your staying exactly as you are.
Count your calories, wear a apple watch and you’ll find out precisely.
Because you're not eating enough? You can eat only McDonalds and still lose weight if you're eating below your daily resting calories. Your body composition will probably change for the worse though.
Likewise the person who struggles to lose weight with diet and exercise is very likely eating more than they think they're eating (or opting for healthy options that aren't actually healthy, like salad covered in 600 calories of ranch dressing)
Let's go with the standard 3,500 calories to gain a pound of weight. Let us suppose that an individual's ability to accurately gauge daily caloric consumption is off by a mere fifty calories. Now, for a 2,000 calorie per diemm budget, that is a mere 2.5% error rate. Rather trivial, sounds like. But over a year, that adds up to a little over five pounds.
Not even half a can of soda off and you gain five pounds a year, or fifty in a decade. The math matters, but does does the calibration and the ability to accurately estimate consumption. Even a tiny error amount means long-term weight gain. It's pretty easy to be glib about it.
A fidgeter, someone who wiggles, bounces their feet, etc., can burn perhaps three hundred extra calories per day. You can also see how that adds up.
I think you know the answer to that question, but are trying to make a point, which is IMO very valid. I don't care if you call it genetics or luck or just who you are, but people have different bodies and tend to default to different sizes. This idea of "one diet fits all" does not work. You need to do what is and feels right to your body.
This is just not true; people are different, but we're not generally that different from one another. It's vastly more likely that an underweight person isn't eating enough than it is they're genetically predisposed to being underweight.
I've always been slightly below average weight my entire life (late 30s now), and it's a bit of a struggle to maintain that weight. I typically eat a little extra each day, not because I'm particularly hungry or interested in eating, just because I don't want to fall underweight.
I've counted calories closely before and it's not black magic at work, I just don't eat enough. It feels like I eat a lot (probably because it's mostly food I cook myself and not calorie dense fast food) and I feel full, but the calories don't lie.
I'm guessing it's the reverse for people struggling to lose weight. I feel full and comfortable 200 calories below the daily recommended amount, and they likely feel that same way 200 calories above. I easily fall underweight if I stop paying attention to my diet, and they likely become overweight when they do the same and listen to their body.
Metabolic rate isn't the same for everyone. I also can eat in large amounts and not get fat.
Also don't think that because you are not getting fat that your body is in a healthy state.
You can be really skinny yet get insulin resistance, as I did.
That was my whole point... the calories you eat is the main factor... but even if you are thin, you have to watch other things like cholesterol, vitamins, etc...
I think that if you're going to make such a strong statement you should back it up with data. Are you really convinced there is some misterious thing at play that keeps your weight down? Then actually record everything you eat in a week and what physical activity you do and see if your perception matches reality
It actually does go both ways; while overweight people who struggle to lose weight are undercounting their calories, you're likely overcounting your calories.
Saying exercise can help you reach your calorie deficit is fairly misleading. Yes, exercise burns calories, but even a hard workout is a small part of your daily calories spent at best.
And if you do find yourself in circumstances where you're burning a significant enough amount of calories on a daily basis (say, a highschool water polo player treading water for 3 hours a day, working out to somewhere between 1000-2000 calories), then it just builds bad eating habits, because you get used to eating too much.
The only real long-term solution to weight management is not wanting to eat too much. Willpower controlled diets work on the short term, which might be fine if an individual's level of desired consumption is sufficiently close to their daily caloric needs, but are doomed in the long term.
25-30 minute jog is about 200 calories buried. That can amount to 7-12% increase depending your body size. This is not small or insignificant amount especially for the amount of input work done.
Small boosts add up to big changes. It's always still about deficit.
it's four oreos. or two slices of cheese. 200 calories a day is significant long-term, but it's also trivially easy to eat that much without even thinking about it.
Yes, but the most calories consuming activity we do is just living.
Your body spends calories to digest food and get more calories. Your brain needs around 400 daily calories. If you want to burn 400 calories doing some cardio, you'll need an intensive 30 min session or so.
If you don't fix your eating, the effort you'll have to put into exercising will be huge, sometimes even unachievable.
Exercise may not actually help achieve calorie deficit, based on some relatively new research saying that when you exercise, your body compensates by burning fewer calories in other areas, like your lungs and your brain. [0]
As always do not add more mass than you expel.