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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?"
Or go with the flow. As TFA points out, whether you lose weight or not, work out a few hours a week and you're healthier.
My own experience confirms this. All my life, I was too thin. Then I left school and got an office job about 5 years ago. All the sudden I'm not having a problem keeping on the pounds. I never got noticeably overweight but I was getting a little soft around the center. Signed up for a 24-hour fitness membership a couple years ago and was surprised that my weight continued to inch up.
Finally, earlier this year, I changed up my workout. More cardio, less weightlifting. Also went from around 4 1.5-hour workouts a week to 6. I just treat it like my job. As soon as I get off work, it's off to the gym for two hours (which has the advantage of waiting out traffic.) I also made some adjustments to my diet. Less fast food. Replaced cola with coffee (caffeine) or lemonade (sweet). And though my sweet tooth is as sweet as ever, I am more conscious about eating that extra snack or the dessert that was left in the break room, and consequently, I probably eat a few less calories on average.
But my real secret weapon: the Nintendo DS. I needed something to distract me from the drudgery of the stairmaster and lifecycle and I can only gawk at the girls for so long. I don't play video games otherwise, so I look forward to an hour or so playing with the DS while I sweat. Turned-based games like Advanced Wars (or chess) are perfect for the stairmaster.
The result: for the last 6 months, I've been shedding a pound or so every 2 weeks, about the same as the study. A few months of that will add up.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
That's because you shouldn't eat diet food.. It's pre-packaged crap for people who are too lazy to learn how to cook properly for themselves.
Shortcuts are never tasty
I highly recommend getting a book called "The Okinawan Program" which is a study of some of the healthiest people on the planet and their diet and lifestyle.
It contains some delicious healthy recipes that leave you feeling very full, are exotic and tasty as hell and yet keep you below that horrific calorie level needed for weight loss
To take what someone said earlier and expand on it. "Stop eating so much fatty, and learn to cook!"
If you eat a lot of food, or if you eat food with a lot of fat in it, then you gain weight.
I started a low carbohydrate diet last July and I found, to my amazement, that it doesn't work that way. I've been eating more fat than I ever did in my life and for some reason I am losing weight. But I almost completely cut down on carbohydrates eating only those on green vegetables. Although I don't count calories -- I feel that I am eating more calories now, compared to my previous eating habits which, while not excessive, lead to gradual weight gain.
I am not saying the body defies the laws of physics but obviously we are not storing everything we eat.
(The argument about the density of muscles isn't strong either: I had to buy new sets of clothes as well. That means I didn't simply replace "heavier" muscle with "lighter" fat)
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.
I was always under impression that fat is stored in body primarily to be burned when no food is available, as a survival mechanism; and secondarily, to provide thermal insulation. What you describe is essentially in direct contradiction to that. Can you provide any references to your claim (something explaining how such an arrangement could have evolved would also be interesting)?
Muscle mass is also a good way to lose weight long term. Short term, it weighs more than fat, so you get the surprising (to naive people) result that exercise can make you put weight ON if nothing else changes (and subconsciously you get more hungry due to the calorie burning).
Long term, muscle mass needs feeding. That's why your body gets rid of it if you don't use it - it's a waste of energy. You put muscle mass on, you burn calories whether you use it or not. Granted, it takes a lot. The best to focus on (so I'm told) is leg muscle, as they're already big and building them up is relatively easy (running/cycling/walking all do it).
But sure - exercise alone and diet alone isn't going to lose you weight. You need to do both.
I know a lot of people are going to talk about CoE. After all, that's the driving equation here. It is absolutely correct, but can we not glean more insight into the problem?
IWAHTE (I Was A Heat Transfer Engineer), so my guess is that what's going on is that people spend the vast majority of their calories maintaining body temperature. If you eat less, your body's first reaction might well be to reduce skin temperature, maintaining core temperature. This theory links the fact that women eat less then men by 20% with the observation that women are complain about being cold earlier than men. Less calories burnt to keep skin temperature high.
In the case of someone who is overweight, they have an additional layer of blubber (yes, basement /. denizens, you are coated in blubber) that insulates them and maintains their core temperature for free. Maybe there's a hysteresis? First the body weight comes down, then the body learns it can waste excess heat maintaining skin temperature, and then, and only then, the body is free to consume additional calories.
Now, I don't do human anatomy, so a doctor would have to chime in and confirm just how much of the body's caloric consumption is lost to heat, vs. other bodily functions.
A personal example: on an average day, I eat some 3500 calories. But I am athletic, and only weigh 70, so this is a "good" 3500 kCal. What I notice is that my skin temperature is always warm, especially compared to women. In fact, I am very comfortable when the temperature is around 15deg inside. I go outside on a 5deg day in nothing more than a sweater and a top hat. I routinely mock my friends who wear a sweater, coat, and scarf when I'm sitting around in short sleeves. Certainly, my body is horribly inefficient, and if society falls in some sort of catastrophe, I will certainly be one of the first to starve (if my 20/800 eyesight doesn't make me walk off a cliff first). However, in a society that has mass amounts of overconsumption, it seems to fit me just fine.
A second personal example: I dated a German doctor who as a 16-year-old doing a year-abroad in Minnesota, had been anorexic. After she came back, she put on a lot of weight: obviously her body reacting to the extreme abuse she had given it. Now as a 25-year-old, she was in the Bundeswehr (German army), and this girl could RUN. She ran marathons. She ran 2 hours with 25kg of weight attached to her. And yet she was always, always overweight by 8kg or so vs. her pre-American anorexia bout. Not a lot, but she was... pudgy. She'd been to doctors, etc, and could do nothing to get her weight down. I lived with her for a while, I can guarantee she ate nothing but healthy food, and only somewhere around 1600-1800kCal/day. However, she liked her rooms warm.
So I am less physically active, yet consume twice as much. The only thing that can explain this is that physical activity just doesn't use that many calories, not compared to maintaing body temperature. Since I go outside without a coat, I burn more calories than she does to maintain the same core temperature.
My two cents, but I certainly welcome other /.er ideas, though.
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For a time, I jogged to and from work every day. When I was running, I could be more optimistic than usual. It allowed me to process stressful events in a positive way. Sometimes I didn't like the running itself, but I needed it to stay sane. YMMV
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
I'll just add a little to what you wrote if I may, for the benefit of anyone looking for advice. If you drop your calorie intake more than around 15% of what you actually need to maintain your weight, you're pretty much guaranteeing that you'll put your body into mild starvation mode, reducing your resting metabolism to conserve weight.
And on the subject of fat or muscle going first, yes - it does make sense if you're not needing that muscle for running or weights to start shedding it at the same time you shed fat. You might think that it makes sense to save the muscle for last, but you know that your not actually in a famine. All your body knows is that there's an unspecified amount of time with less food ahead of it. If it waits until the last minute to shed all that massive muscle of yours, then its going to have lots of muscle cannibalizing itself. Whereas if it starts early with the muscle, then that reduces the calories it needs for its daily activities and it can eek out both the muscle and fat a bit longer. If you lost your job and didn't know when you were going to get a new one, you wouldn't wait until you'd exhausted all your savings before you cut back on your spending, would you? Fat is your savings, muscle is your spendings. Your body is the one in charge of your finances, not the conscious mind saying "the diet will only last 1 month". That's why you convince your body that the spendings are necessary purchases by exercising, rather than just letting it all go to waste.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Not to ebrag but when I go to the gym I burn around 700-900 calories...
Burning only 300 calories isn't go to do much of anything. You could replace that with a walk.
Having recently lived in Tokyo gave me a new perspective. I always struggled with losing weight in North America, but once I moved to Japan the weight came off very quickly. What I think were the main contributing factors: 1) I walked everywhere, walked upstairs/downstairs at stations and work. 2) Small portions - your stomach gets used to ever-expanding portions. Portion control is unfortunately necessary. Miso soup is amazing for expanding rice in your stomach and making you feel very full for incredible low number of calories. 3) Good calories - There is, of course, processed foods in Japan, just not as in-your-face. Most grocery stores are super small and in your local market. Some only carry fresh produce and fish and meat. I cooked every meal in Japan. I did so in Canada too, the difference was that a lot of Japanese dishes are boiled / steamed instead of fried. I told one of my clients about Eggplant Parmesan and he looked nauseated. I picked up a Japanese cookbook and learned that they lightly boil/steam their eggplant. 4) I've heard that the more sugar you eat, the less flavor you can taste. I cut out all sugar while in Japan (except for alcoholic drinks - yum). For me, it was true that I could really taste food again. It's a hard sensation to describe something you hadn't been sensing before but were all of a sudden attune to. I have a feeling that this extra sugar leads to MORE extra sugar to taste said sugar and also to increased levels of 'flavor' in dishes. I've heard that the Japanese like their flavors subtle. This is definitely the experience I had in downtown Tokyo. Anyway, it worked for me - I went from 135 lbs down to 112 lbs. Now, back in Canada, I notice advertisements for HUGE portions of everything. Last anecdote, I got a Tall latte from the Starbucks in Shinagawa station and while walking to work I ran into a client who commented on my coffee, laughing, saying I had a big appetite. Considering a "Tall" is no big thing here, I both blushed and was taken aback. After that I really reconsidered if I needed so many fat and calories in my diet - don't we always upsize only because it's just a better deal, not because we actually want more food? Just my thoughts!
You need only one article to refute the idea that fat makes you fat — Taubes has done the work for the rest of us. Some asshole wrote a big ugly rebuttal to his article, but it was entirely filled with falsehood; if you are really interested (which you might be if you want to cite Taubes' article, because people will come along with the uninformed rebuttal and quote it like it was the bible — irony intended) and you may need to shoot them down.
Short form: We've known for decades to centuries that eating carbs makes you fat and raises your risk of heart disease. You can see it strongly amongst italians (greeks, who are intermixed heavily with them due to the wages of history, eat less fat and have less problems) and amongst peoples of the carribean. Mixing fat and carbs is the problem, because carbs regulate energy storage, period the end. Also, unburned carbohydrates are actually more likely to be converted and stored in a fat cell than unburned fat! Finally, carbohydrates are addictive in that your brain becomes more resistant to them over time (very simplified, but bear with me) and it takes more carbs to feel full, causing the eating of more and more food. Eventually you burn out your pancreas and become a diabetic.
Exercise is, however, absolutely necessary for health. You have about as much lymph fluid as blood but there is no organ tasked to moving it around. This is why you see fat people with super fat ankles; there's not much actual fat there as you know if you've hit those protruding ankle joint bumps on things, but if you don't move around the lymph just settles in your body.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sure, I know where you're coming from, but surely feeling full would help? I work night shifts a lot at a hospital, and for months I was running on sugar buzz - every time I felt tired I bought something from the vending machine to wake me up for 30 minutes. I've been overweight almost all my life - not massively - but enough to always feel self-conscious and not want to go to the beach etc.
In the end I realised that I had to do something (or else go shopping as all my clothes were getting too tight). I decided I really wanted to do something, made a plan (which as I said was along the lines of the Hacker Diet) and also told all my friends. The last bit really helped - whenever they saw me with food (other than a meal) or on a webcam or whatever I'd feel guilty and get rid of it.
The other thing is, I found that if I cut out all of the high calorie snack foods, there's no reason at all that I can't enjoy a good meal whatever the calorie content. Since I started trying to loose weight, I've still had a takeout meal about once I week, I still eat whatever I want at a restaurant. If, like me, you eat loads of snacks, then you're actually in quite a good position to cut those out and still enjoy a decent meal when you want to. The other week I went out for a meal with my wife and sat and watched her eat cheesecake at the end - I didn't fancy any so I didn't have it - which would have been impossible for me six months ago.
Please don't think I'm being egotistical - I'm rubbish at being self-disciplined - but I just decided that I really wanted to feel OK about myself in this regard, not to suddenly be a male model but to get it under control. It is possible, harder for some than for others, but if you want it then you can do it. I think the Hacker Diet is great because it's not about a two-month crash but a long-term plan.
Even more people (including researchers) don't seem to think about the energy excreted in the feces (or other ways).
I hardly ever see any mention of it in studies related to weight loss, diet etc.
Go check out how many researchers actually take samples and work out how much a subject is excreting.
Then there's was also a study which showed that mice in a bacteria free environment could eat a lot and not put on weight.
See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95900616
And another which had the bacteria free mice getting gut bacteria from obese mice and ending up fatter than if they got gut bacteria from skinny mice.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6654607
Based on these, it should not be a surprise that some people will actually find it hard to lose weight despite eating and exercising the same as skinny people. Of course, your diet also affects your gut bacteria populations. I bet consuming lots of "sugar water" isn't going to help breed gut bacteria that makes it easier for you to be skinny.