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Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss?
antdude writes "The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"
The Hackers Diet makes it clear: Exercise just doesn't burn that many calories. You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html
Putting stuff in your mouth is just step one. How you chew your food, how well it is digested, how active your metabolism is, all these will affect how much energy you actually get out of your food.
Still, physics still stand: Use more energy than you get through food you _will_ lose weight.
.: Max Romantschuk
Well, a 3.5 to 7 pound weight loss over 12 weeks isn't such a bad result. You can't just diet, you have to change lifestyle. TFA seemed kind of whiny, like one expects to magically melt the pounds off if you run around a while. Even moderate physical activity only burns a couple of hundred calories per hour - that's one brownie.
Then there is the issue of converting fat to muscle (which weighs more) and the fact that people in general don't exercise as much as they think they do. For most people, weight control is hard, it's basically a lifetime commitment to minimizing calories and maximizing physical work.
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Give up.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
if you are still munching your way through 6 soft drinks, 2 packets of doritoes, a couple of chocolate bars and fried chicken each day you are still sucking in a hell of a lot more calories than you can burn off with just exercise?
The main role of exercise in weight loss is to help you maintain your metabolic rate ( or increase it a bit) while eating a normal amount of calories.
For a regular guy this should be about 2500 to 3000 Calories depending on your body size.
If you just cut your calories, your body is going to tend to just drop it's metabolic rate, so it's harder to lose weight with diet alone.
Oils and fats have 4 times the energy packed in them as carbs and protein, so if you are eating a lot of fatty food it is going to give you a lot of calories without filling you up much.
a normal healthy diet (ie. balanced protein/carbs and healthy fats, like from nuts, fish & avocados) plus exercise is the way to really succeed. Have a big heap of non-starchy veggies and it will really help fill you up without too much extra calories compared to having say, fries with your steak.
Oh. and diet drinks have been found to have a tendancy to fool your body it is starving, which gives you a bigger appetite, so avoid those & just drink fewer sugary beverages instead.
Losing weight isn't rocket science. Increase /maintain your metabolism a bit with 30 min excercise a day and reduce your calorie intake to below what your body burns is all you need to do - and be patient. Don't expect to lose more than about 2 pounds a week - any more is too fast and unsustainable in the long term.
The muscle you put on with exercise also helps you maintain your weight loss because muscle burns more energy than fat.
Break out of the overweight geek stereotype and be a healthy fit geek - you will think better too when you improve your circulation.
Like all good science, that's true in an ideal world. In reality, it's a bit more complex. Stop eating so much and your metabolism slows, which means you burn less and need to eat less still. In fact, it's quite possible to starve to death with excess body fat still in place, simply because your metabolism slows too much and available energy stores aren't being depleted.
Weight loss requires the one-two punch of diet and exercise. Dieting reduces intake, and exercise burns energy and, crucially, maintains metabolic rate. Dieting can't do it alone, and nor can exercise, for that matter.
The report tells us nothing new - this has all been known for a long time.
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Even if you're a tub of lard, the body reduce your metabolism and metabolize unused muscle mass before using fat reserves.
McDonald's hasn't been around long enough to have an evolutionary impact. Starvation has.
Show me a overweight Olympic level marathon runner, and I might believe it.
Me thinks you have cause and effect mixed up here. People are Olympic runners because they have a body that's optimal for it, not vice versa.
Yup, burning muscle sucks.
I've had two major weight loss periods in my life:
First was from 130 kilos down to 80 kilos. I did this through eating 1500 kcal per day exclusing green veggies AND doing intensive cardio on the treadmill five times a week, hitting 500kcal on the calorie counter each time.
Now I did drop a load of weight, but a good portion of that was muscle. I did regular max-lift tests on biceps and my legs, and over the course of my weight loss the weights I could lift more than halved.
Second major weight loss is from 108kg to 94kg. It's still ongoing, with the final goal being 80kg again. This time I didn't want to loose muscle, so joined the local gym and took professional advise. This resulted in a combination of diet and mixed training plan being made. For the food, my intake drops to 1500-1700 kcal per day for six days a week, split into 6 meals. For the training, I do 3 weight sessions a week (upper body, lower body, upper body, lower body etc etc), 3 cardio sessions doing interval training and 1 session which combines cardio and weights focusing on endurance.
The result? At the half way point I'm stronger than when I started. I've increase my weights by about 30% since the start (about 4 months now). I'm also getting some muscle definition. Weight loss is now steady - it's slower than my first but the actual inches being lost around my waist more than the last time.
So through my experience you're right. Cardio training combined with diet for weightloss is really counter productive. Adding weights in there is clearly the way to go.
Its kind of like watching an ice berg melt, it takes a long time for not much to happen, and then all the sudden it accelerates and disappears.
When you have more muscle mass, you also burn more calories at rest, and can reach higher levels of exertion thereby burning more calories per hour. So the whole process starts to accelerate.
Fat is less dense than muscle. You may weigh a bit less but it'll be muscle, not fat so you'll be significantly smaller.
It takes about 12 weeks to see results. Then you just have to keep it up, which is why I chose karate and jujutsu. You get fit and it isn't mind numbingly boring.
Btw, the failure rate for diets is something like 95%[1] which it pretty bloody significant scientifically.
[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2725943.stm
Deleted
I was once obese, 300 lbs. I lost 100 pounds over an 18 month period by going on a low carb diet, with no significant extra exercise. My thoughts on that are that if your body is capable of going into ketosis (the mode where it gears up for using fat as energy, both from food in the stomach and fat stores throughout the body) then it is effective for weight reduction. Also, eating a low carb diet got very boring for me, and I found myself eating less because of this (was never hungry or starving myself though). This of course is different for everyone.
Next major body change was when I joined the Navy. I went into boot camp weighing 199, I got down 8 weeks later weighing 199 but with vastly less body fat. My physical structure changed significantly. I started off not eating to much, but ending up consuming pretty large amounts of calories (and drinking tons of water, that is very much forced on new recruits to avoid dehydration problems which are very common when you are exercising in one form or another for most of the day.) Most of the people in my division did not lose weight, some gained a few pounds, all were in vastly improved physical condition. Not big body builder type musles, but lean endurance muscles.
The best method of weight control/weight loss I know is to not eat until I feel full. If I am hungry I will eat until the hunger stops, and then wait 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes I find there is more room, usually I find that I am full. It seems to take food some time to settle in and for my stomach to give the feedback to the brain that it is doing alright. The stomach is actually a pretty small organ and the digestive system seems to operate best when working on small loads. Full loads both have the effect of stretching and enlarging the stomach (thus making it more difficult to feel full) and diverting energy to digestion (alot of energy is consumed for digestion, thats why people go on health fasts, to give the rest of the body a period of time where the body's energy can be continuously applied to other systems for repair and maintenance. Thats the idea anyway) that could be used for other things, like keeping one alert and full of energy and providing for the immune system to do its job.
My $0.02
you forget the fundamental psychological effect.
7 pounds, in 12 weeks - some claim it's not bad, some claim it's weight loss so it's okay and so on.
First off, if you weight 238 pounds, going down to 232 pounds is just a pathetic joke. It took you 3 months to get there. It will take you 5 years to get there at current speed. It would be a reachable goal if it was fun, but...
But the second problem is that it's a dull, boring, miserable exercise. From a slim person's point of view, exercise makes you feel far less miserable than from an obese one's.
The thermal isolation makes you sweat like a pig and overheat in matter of minutes.
If lifting a weight uses 50 joules of energy, a fit person will easily lift it, expending the 50 joules distributed equally throughout the volume of thick muscles. A person with poor muscles will expend the same 50 joules but concentrated in thin, weak muscle that aches, hurts and throbs with exertion, it uses the same insignificant amount of energy but feels vastly worse.
The fat gives you extra weight for exercises like push-ups, sit-ups or pull-ups. Sure you use more energy but don't neglect the psychological effect, how miserable and ashamed you feel without breath after two push-ups.
Then you start feeling hungry, and the body which has a tendency to gain fat, usually gains it because your hunger feels more intense to you than to most slim people who just shrug it off. Take it from an obese person, getting really hungry feels somewhat like drug starvation, you feel ultra-miserable. And still you need to cut on the calories.
Oh, with even little strong will you will go like that for a month easily, suffering and feeling miserable, but telling yourself you're doing it to lose weight to be able to do all the things you can't do because you are obese.
After second month of being miserable like that you start having second thoughts.
After third month, when you went from 240 pounds to 220, you can see it will take you another 3 years of feeling miserable before you get out of this swamp. You say "fuck it", drop the exercise and start eating again.
If you can devise a diet that is low-calorie but filling and tasty, if you can devise exercises that are fun, it could work.
And even worse if eating is your method for stress. It becomes a habit. Something stresses you out and you won't calm down until you fill up your stomach. It's a habit like smoking or drinking. Unfortunately, the fundamental rule of dropping any habit is to drop it entirely. If you're a chain smoker, no one smoke a day, you just have to stop. If you're an alcoholic, you can't drink one and stop, you can't drink alcohol at all. But what about eating? You can't drop eating entirely. It's a horrible habit to drop, really.
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...if you run the numbers and then understand them you will realize that Adkins is a pretty intense "starvation" diet. It's pretty easy to lose weight on a starvation diet assuming that you can tolerate the "starvation" part.
It takes rather a bit of effort to flee carbohydrates to that degree.
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