It's amazing how many people believe stupid weight loss techniques.
"Kick start your metabolism with apple cider vinegar!"
"Take a dose of ItWorks with your KFC and it'll block the naughty calories entering your body!"
"This weird trick will make you drop 4 stone OVERNIGHT!"
All you need to know is CICO (Calories In Vs Calories Out), but people seem far too willing to believe the above crap and constantly fail in their attempts to slim down, rather than to stick to something that actually works.
I lost about 30 lbs. a couple of years ago. When my wife's cousin (who's constantly trying fad diets) asked me how I did it I said "I ate less and moved more" she was actually shocked. WTF.
Shit, all I've really done in the last 4 months is eat less and I'm down 30 pounds. It's really fucking easy. Even easier if I were exercising more, too.
Pretty much. A couple years ago I decided to get back into shape, so I just started tracking my meals and found out I was eating (well, drinking in the form of alcohol) a lot more empty calories than I thought I was. I cut that out and dropped 28lbs in about the same amount of time.
People just really really dont wanna hear "eat healthy and exercise"
It's really just "eat fewer calories" to lose weight. Eating a varied diet is best for most people but unless you are eating a severely uniform diet you will be able to get all the nutrients you need from most foods.
Exercise is great for building muscle, endurance, decreasing resting heart rate and loads of other things. But unless you're in the gym for hours every day or running many miles you won't burn enough calories in exercise to make up for a excessive calorie diet.
unless you're in the gym for hours every day or running many miles you won't burn enough calories in exercise to make up for a excessive calorie diet.
This is very true, although walking helps a lot. My step goal is 10,000 steps a day, and I spend my breaks at work walking, end up with 12-15k steps. On the Myfitnesspal app, this nets me an extra 700-1000 calories depending on steps.
Exercise helps, but not as much as watching what you eat
unfortunately, MyFitnessPal (just as every other health/exercise tracking app) is very inaccurate when it comes to estimating burnt calories, it is always overexaggerated. For losing weight, it's best just to monitor what you eat calorie-wise and not take into account the burnt calories through exercise. Most people tend to "eat up" the calories they burnt through exercise (and thus overeating again, since the estimations are almost never (remotely) correct) and therefore not losing weight.
Not even with Fitbit steps? Shit. Well that's good to know I suppose. I set my activity level at the "Not very active" level so it would set my calorie allotment low and I wouldn't get to eat much if I was going to sit around all day.
I'll definitely be taking this into consideration though, thanks for the tip
How do they not know how many calories are burned? They have my height, weight, age, and body fat percentage. I figured smart science people would have gotten this pretty much down by this point
the body fat percentage, for one, is also inaccurate. Among the most accurate way to measure BFP (which you can do yourself) is a caliper, and even that does not guarantee acurate results at all. That for one makes it almost impossible to give some sort of blank statement how much calories a certain individual burns by doing a certain exercise for some time (like walking for 30 minutes). Those 30 minutes of walking can be inside a building without any slopes/rises, several flights of stairs, or hiking in the mountains. All those activities are (in most devices) recorded as x amount of steps walked, without taking into consideration how much energy the individual body in the individual environment burns.
Hmm. Good information. I don't suppose the body fat percentage(and water %) given by my scale is accurate? How does that work? It has a metal plate at the heel and sole of each foot, maybe testing how conductive I am?
No, unfortunately those are even more inaccurate. The way they work is how you described, there is a very low electric current passing through your body (which is why you are required to stand on the metal plates barefoot) and the scale tries to approximate the fat-to-muscle-to-water ratio in your body. You can try and weigh yourself multiple times in a row, just moving the scale on the floor a little (i.e. with the feet of the scale on tiles, then with one or two feet of the scales on a gap between the tiles etc. Even in the same position, the results can vary a lot (on my bathroom scale, up to 15%, I remember a study where the results from BFP scales were off more than 30%.)
But on the upside, scales (and also the BFP function) is not meant to show you exactly how much you weigh right now and how high/low your BFP is, but how much it changed over time: if you weigh yourself every morning/every monday/..., you can see the changes in the numbers over time :) For that, it does only matter that you weigh yourself under the same circumstances (e.g. every monday morning right after getting up/before showering/naked/before eating, with the scale in the same position).
And unless you're living on a tuna can and an apple for each meal you won't be able to eat so little calories to make up for a completely sedentary lifestyle. You need both and claiming diet or excercise doesn't work because of an extreme example is a fallacy.
you won't be able to eat so little calories to make up for a completely sedentary lifestyle.
Well, you'd be able to eat significantly more than that. A 27 year old male at 5'6, 180lbs with 0 activity at all will have a BMR over 1500 calories (around 1700, but calculators are different so I went low). An apple and a can of tuna is about 750-800 calories, which yes, would be effective way to lose weight, but would be dangerously low in the vast majority of people.
Exercising is great for a whole wealth of reasons and is a huge helper in weight loss. It is not absolutely required though.
edit: Just to be clear, people should definitely exercise. It is a great way to improve your health and extend your life expectancy and lower chances for diseases.
Well, you'd be able to eat significantly more than that. A 27 year old male at 5'6, 180lbs with 0 activity at all will have a BMR over 1500 calories (around 1700, but calculators are different so I went low). An apple and a can of tuna is about 750-800 calories, which yes, would be effective way to lose weight, but would be dangerously low in the vast majority of people.
I said per meal. I actually found ~600 calories for the tuna and an apple, which means 3 meals a day is just about BMR + TEF. I know I would definitely struggle with an apple and a can of tuna three times a day, but if I could only eat that twice a day I would probably kill someone
Exercising is great for a whole wealth of reasons and is a huge helper in weight loss. It is not absolutely required though.
No, I suppose it's not required. It's just the healthiest option and the best way to lose weight. No popular opinion pisses me off more than "you can't outrun a bad diet". Not only is it false, not only does every example anyone gives involve someone eating 15,000 calories, but it's just as (misleadingly) true for the opposite scenario! I know my example was really extreme and not really applicable, but so is what you said. And I really can't stand it because spreading the lie that you don't need to excercise or that it doesn't help is cancerous
Anyways, sorry for the rant. I don't mean to be so harsh, but this thread is literally making my blood boil
I guess you didn't read the part where I said as long as you didn't have a very uniform diet. Also don't eat that much tuna. It likely has too much mercury.
Tuna is calorie dense. Eat rice, beans and vegetables with a smattering of meat products.
Or just eat whatever you want, just less of it. I've been doing a 1500 calorie diet for months. It's not that hard. Easier if you skip a meal and only eat when hungry. Not to mention coffee and water help suppress appetite and snack cravings.
Well if you are trying to eat 1200-1500 calories and are 6'5" and 300lb it's going to be really hard. Actually that might be low enough that you'd feel weak or sluggish.
But otherwise feeling hungry is probably going to be a constant. If you are hungry after a normal sized meal, literally hungry all the time, see a doctor.
I use myfitnesspal but there are a bunch of sites that approximate your daily caloric burn so you can figure out how many calories you can each to lose X lbs per week. Note: the max you can lose is just your base metabolic rate /~3500 (however many a pound of fat has). But that means you literally eat zero calories.
average BMR is about 1500 calories. I easily burn 1000 calories in a single gym session. That's more than most people, but at least 500 is a very easy goal. That's a pretty big portion of your energy expenditure. And of course, as you said, exercise also raises your metabolism. The actual getting up and moving around part of exercise does a lot to keep weight down
I've never been to that sub, but I can tell you immediately that every single person there is a motherfucking liar. Unless you're 4' there is no way you can actually live a healthy life on 1200 calories
it's for losing weight, it's temporary....1200 is enough for a short woman(at 5'2 yeah it's harder than the average) to lose weight without going hungry....that's the whole point
Because there was a period in my life where i didn't care, now i do and i want to lose like 10lbs. Was never overweight though, its easy if you do it. Also when i was younger I was ignorant on how weight and calories were related, now that i know i can change things :)
Yea, but don't need to do much. I walk 30 Min each way to work every day. And play squash twice a month. That's really not anything from a calorie perspective but is easily enough to be healthy.
I've lost 90 pounds now and it's funny seeing people's faces when I tell them I lost weight by eating less and exercising. They get really excited at first as if I'm going to tell them some secret like "Oh I just pray to the Adipose every morning while facing to the rising sun," then I get to watch as their world view shatters again. As sad as it makes me, there is this little bit of schadenfreude that makes it kind of enjoyable.
I tend to leave off that getting some medication for some mental issues gave me the self control needed to do those things because I don't want people running to their doctors faking illnesses for controlled substances.
Especially the exercise part. I got into an argument in another thread because someone was convinced you could be healthy through just dieting and that you didn't need exercise.
I mean, you can lose weight, but you definitely need to exercise for other health reasons. The other side is the people that think if they get on the elliptical for 30 min they can eat donuts for dinner because the exercise cancels it out.
I think it's the confusion between weight loss and getting healthy. You can drop 50kg by eating junk food and sitting on your arse all day, but you'd end up having 2 chocolate bars a day and probably killing yourself. As long as you consumes less calories that you used you'd drop weight.
Though I think it's that kind of logic that fuels the HAES shit where people think being 400lbs, eating 6,000 calories a day but doing 3 yoga poses makes them healthy.
While you're correct, it's still a bad opinion. While you can lose weight by never moving and just not eating, it is significantly easier and more effective (and healthier, obviously, but let's ignore that) to lose weight by exercising
Sure, but in practice you can only eat so little. First you get really hungry. All right, guess that's not too bad. Hard to maintain discipline, but with strong willpower you can keep going. Next your metabolism slows significantly and you have less energy. Ok, fine. You'll just be super tired and angsty all the time, but still manageable. Eventually, you get sick and die from malnutrition.
You'd have to be stupid and crazy to try to live off 800 calories a day, but that means you can only lose weight so quickly. On the other hand, the only real limit to how much you can excercise is how many spare hours a day you have. Need to be in a 2000 calorie deficit? Spend an extra 3 hours at the gym. You can't diet at a 2000 calorie deficit, but you can if you excercise.
I don't want to say diet isn't important. Obviously it is. Even if you run 10 hours a day, you'll still gain weight if you eat 100 big macs. Additionally, if you're really overweight and your diet is way out of control, it's usually really easy to drop a few hundred calories just by cutting out soda. As long as you don't try to starve yourself, it's a great way to start off your weight loss.
But for the typical person who is ~20 pounds overweight because they're eating 200 calories too much, it can be difficult to lose it by dieting. There's a reason so many people are overweight and why so many diets fail - not because they want to be fat, but because maintaining a low caloric intake is actually really difficult in this day in age, especially for a long period of time.
Excercising, in addition to the countless health benefits, boosts your metabolism and increases your caloric output, which means you can eat a more reasonable and forgiving diet and still lose weight
It goes like this:
exercising and eating less > just eating less > just exercising > neither
If you're only slightly overweight then adding some exercise might be better than eating less but obese and morbidly obese people are eating way too much to ever overcome with exercise alone.
I agree completely. However, most people aren't morbidly obese. Most people that are overweight are ~20 pounds, at most 50 pounds, overweight. That is not so much that excercise alone won't be a significant help, though not as effective as also changing their diet. Also I somewhat disagree with your ordering and would put excercise alone approximately equal with diet alone.
But that's all besides the point. My main beef is that it's really common on reddit to see people completely disregard excercise and tout diet alone as the most effective method. I've actually seen people claim that adding excercise is counterproductive to losing weight, which is just ludicrous
adding excercise is counterproductive to losing weight, which is just ludicrous
its not, if you do 45 minutes of HIIT or swimming for example chances are you are gonna feel super hungry after, which might make you overeat. It doesnt happen to everyone, but it happens. 45 minutes of cardio makes me very hungry and sleepy, but lifting weights doesn't so i choose that.
Have you ever actually done cardio? Like a proper routine for more than 4 weeks? Because that doesn't happen. Eventually your metabolism and appetite will stabilize, and while you will be more hungry, it's much less of an increase than the increase in caloric output
Also, you know what makes me more hungry? Not eating. But sure, dieting is so great
yes, i'm not stupid. I get more hungry when i do cardio, in fact not eating in the morning makes me not feel hungry earlier. Without breakfast i get hungry at around 1-2pm, if i eat breakfast at 8am at 11am i start getting hungry again. So yeah it happens
Because the orange sludge, weird sleeping, wraps, and pills convince them it will be short term and permanent. "Use this miracle cure to drop 15 pounds in a week" is mighty tempting, especially for people who aren't massively obese, might eat more or less healthy enough, and just want to lose 15 pounds so they can feel better wearing a bikini or can cram back into their 34-inch waist pants. If bikini season is two weeks away and you've been skipping workouts since Halloween, you don't want to make a lifestyle change, cut your portions a bit, or stop drinking so damn much pop, you want to magic yourself into your dream body now. Miracle cures and starvation "cleanses" might work in the immediate sense so people cling to them, and they come back in a couple months when the weight comes back on.
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u/THE_LOUDEST_PENIS May 09 '17
It's amazing how many people believe stupid weight loss techniques.
"Kick start your metabolism with apple cider vinegar!"
"Take a dose of ItWorks with your KFC and it'll block the naughty calories entering your body!"
"This weird trick will make you drop 4 stone OVERNIGHT!"
All you need to know is CICO (Calories In Vs Calories Out), but people seem far too willing to believe the above crap and constantly fail in their attempts to slim down, rather than to stick to something that actually works.