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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!
But..but...it's just thermodynamics! There's no way that the human body could be a complex organism that adapts to it's environment or anything like that! If you're fat it's because you're lazy! Exercise and you must lose weight! 2nd law says so!
Oh, wait...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
And I've been doing so for the last 6 months. I've been keeping track of what I eat in a database, and I can tell you that if you're not, you're constantly changing your diet. Eating till you're full will have drastically different nutritional values, and you're just not equipped to gauge that.
I've also been exercising. I wasn't losing weight until I did both.
That doesn't account for the absence of change in metabolic function that is supposed to accompany a regimen of aerobic physical exertion. The article does not mention at what time of day the exercise took place, though. My personal experience has been that exercise undertaken first thing in the morning transforms the whole day, allowing dietary or controlled substance ingestion choices throughout the day to be dealt with more effectively.
Your body is not a simple machine. How much you eat impacts how much you use; simply cutting calorie intake will just cause your resting metabolism to drop. Worse, you might start metabolizing muscle.
Just to be clear though .. did you mean eating as much AS the villagers, or the villagers themselves?
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.
If you just cut your calorie intake, your body will adjust. You have to exercise so you're body doesn't decide that your muscle mass is more expendable than your energy reserves (fat).
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.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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As a computer nerd who lived with a body builder in college let me put this into perspective. 1.) If you eat a lot of food, or if you eat food with a lot of fat in it, then you gain weight. 2.) Losing weight requires a fundamental rethinking of your lifestyle. 3.) If you start doing push-ups, sit-ups and running daily but don't change your lifestyle then you will probably put on additional weight (muscle weighs more than fat). To lose weight you just need a healthy simple plan. Change the types of food you eat and cut calories, then take three days a week to begin working out. I personally lost 55 pounds in 12 months because I was dedicated to the process of getting into shape.
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.
well - actually about 0.6 or so, and since a pound of fat is about 3500 kcal of energy, an average sized person (150 lbs) would need to run/walk 38 miles to burn a pound of fat - or I could just eat half portions for 3 days.
The study says they just lost a little weight, not none at all.
..........FULL STOP.
The sole purpose of fat reservoirs is to extend the time of survival in times of malnutrition. On the contrary people who do "exercise" in pre-historic times (meaning to do what everyone had to do) and were not able to retain or even gain weight, are more likely going to die in times of need. So people who fall into that pre-historic ultimate winner group and who want to loose weight need to eat less, much less.
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)?
Everytime I exercise I gain weight, I started overweight about a year ago and am now 16 pounds heavier. I lost fat and gained muscle and I feel better for it.
Obsessing over weight is pointless as muscle is 3 times heavier per unit of volume than fat. BMI is a really stupid measure as it can't tell muscle from fat.
It's called "density", you know, dense...
Oh, wait, maybe you're already quite familiar with it...
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.
Actually, this is very well known. As for evolutionary concerns, It is basic atrophy. You don't use your muscle mass (Because you are not excersising), and so your body deems it expendible. Muscle mass consumes a lot of standing calories, and so, if the body is 'starving', will eliminate the "unneeded" body tissue. fat cells take comparatively little energy to maintain.
Fat burning requires a whole series of biochemical signals to be continuously produced in order to happen; Your muscles must be actively releasing stress hormones (from activity), energy demand on the body must be high, and food intake needs to be reduced, but not totally depleted. This triggers the body to start using stored energy (fat.)
Fat cells are directly tied to the endocrine system, and secrete hormones that play a role in regulating hunger. They require lots of chemical signals to change gears from "No, I only store energy" to "Ok, I need to release energy to the body now." Normally, when the cells are not at capacity, they tell the body to go seek food to restock the larder. There is actually a disorder where the rest of the endocrine system is unable to silence the hormones produced by the body's fat cells, and the persons are perpetually hungry with uncontrollable hunger pangs, despite being morbidly obese (from over-eating.)
The major benefit of a good muscle building exercise regimen is the production and maintenance of raw muscle mass. Muscle mass, as earlier stated, is expensive for the body to maintain, and consumes lots of "standing calories", which means it causes your body to burn more energy when doing nothing. This allows your body to better rid itself of the energy stored in that naughty little bite of doughnut you just had, than say-- the person with very little muscle mass. It makes your body more fault tolerant to over-consumption, (at the deficit of actually NEEDING a higher calorie intake.)
This is why people that do super absurd hard physical labor (and thus, build and maintain a large amount of muscle mass) can get away with eating "lumberjack" sized breakfast and dinner portions, without resembling jabba the hutt; while your typical slashdotter office jockey cannot.
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
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.
Wait a minute...
Let me get this straight. You're saying that doing lots of high jumps won't make me 7 feet tall?
I stole this Sig
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 the actual very top level, like the Olympics, that may be the case, but in general, he's got the cause and effect chain right. I know a girl who in high school was really overweight and dumpy, then in college she started running and eventually lost about 80 lbs, joined the college track and cross-country teams, and became a ranked women's runner in the state. Apparently she had an aptitude for running, but never the less, her previous sedentary high-calorie lifestyle had left her in poor shape, and a lot of hard work put her into great shape.
Maybe the very top competitive runners in the world could only reach that status due to genetics PLUS tons of hard work, I think the jury's still out on what the contributions of each are. Surely not just anyone could be an olympic runner by working really hard, because lots and lots of runners who work really hard can't make the Olympics. But if you're talking about just being in good shape vs. being fat, ANYBODY, short of people with certain diseases and similar constraints, could be thin and strong and in good cardiovascular condition if they just ate enough less and exercised enough more for long enough. Likewise, any Olympic runner or other athlete could be fat and unhealthy by sitting around eating all day.
Certainly some people have a much easier time of it than others, but I know people who are obese and in terrible health who actually have a hard time putting on weight but absolutely stuff themselves like gluttons nearly continuously, people who eat more calories at dinner than I eat in a day, almost always of terrible food, and who drink almost as many calories again each day in soda as I consume all together. (Seriosuly - a "blooming onion appetizer with dip, 16oz steak with baked potato with sour cream, a 16 oz Coke, bread and butter, and a slice of cheese cake for dessert is over 3,000 calories - I eat about 2,000 a day, and 4 liters of Coke a day is 1,690 calories.) I also know people who put on weight very easily, but who keep themselves under 2,000 calories a day, with lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains and such, and exercise regularly, who are thin and fit. People who often WANT to eat more, but don't. People have a tremendous amount of control over their weight, which most choose not to bother with.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The biggest mistake the majority of people who go on a diet is that they approach it as a way to lose weight.
Actually the only way to do this effectively is to approach it as a change in lifestyle, and accept that this is how you are going to be eating for the rest of your life (if you want to stay in good health that is). The next step is to find a diet that can match this requirement. diets like weight watchers do work, but the most effective diet that I have found is a Low Glycemic Load diet. Stabilizing ones blood sugar automatically creates an environment where the body begins to rid itself of excess weight. I use the word diet in the context of a way to eat, and not as a means to an end. The next step is to learn to eat correctly and stick to
It. It takes about 3 months to learn to eat correctly, and can take about 6 months to become acclimatised to the new lifestyle. On a low GL diet one can lose 1 to 2 pounds a week. This continues until you are within your normal body weight range, and then it stabilizes.
I would really recommend a low GL diet to anyone who is serious about wanting to switch to a healthy and vibrant lifestyle.
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Cut sugar, sugar contained foods. Potato, bread...
Drop your blood sugar to burn your fat.
Plain simple.
Or mock me with your high knowladge about this than.
And while you mocking me, I'm melting just sitting down here and slasdotting...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
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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That's your problem right there. Let's see:
Fat is a long term storage form of energy. Everything (proteins, glucose) can be converted to fat, but fat cannot be converted back to glucose (unless you count the lone glycerol molecule that holds the 3 fatty acids together on the triglyceride). It's NOT a reverse reaction. Thus the problems begin. It's easy to make fat, and hard to get rid of it.
So how is exercise supposed to get rid of fat then? Well, fat CAN be converted to acetyl-COA and shoved into the Krebs cycle. Only the Krebs cycle is an AEROBIC process and takes place in the mitochondria, not in the cytoplasm of the cells. Aha! Problem #2. Sedentary people have fewer mitochondria than athletic people. Therefore their ability to "burn" fat as acetyl-CoA is limited. An athlete can burn fat just as efficiently as glucose, the only difference being he'll lose out on the couple ATP from glycolysis.
So you need mitochondria, in quantity, to burn up acetyl-CoA and therefore fat. If you don't get rid of the acetyl-CoA somehow, the whole catabolic process starts backing up. How do you obtain mitochondria? Increased exercise - over a sustained period. 12 weeks is hardly enough to increase the number of mitochondria in your muscle cells, much less expect them to burn through a dozens of kilos of fat. But the title of this article is misleading - according to the study the cited article is based on -
Mean reduction in body weight was -3.3 ±3.63kg (P less than 0.01). However, 26 of the 58 participants failed to attain the predicted weight loss estimated from individuals' exercise-induced energy expenditure. Their mean weight loss was only -0.9 ±1.8kg (P less than 0.01). Despite attaining lower than predicted weight reduction, these individuals experienced significant increases in aerobic capacity (6.3 ±6.0ml.kg-1.min-1; P less than 0.01), decreased systolic (-6.00 ±11.5mmHg; P less than 0.05) and diastolic blood pressure (-3.9 ±5.8mmHg; P less than 0.01), waist circumference (-3.7 ±2.7cm; P less than 0.01) and resting heart rate (-4.8±8.9bpm, p less than 0.001). In addition, these individuals experienced an acute exercise-induced increase in positive mood.
So they ALL lost weight. Only some (probably cheated on their diets/lied about their original diet) lost LESS weight than others. Continuing the exercise for more than 12 weeks would probably have caused further reduction in weight. I don't know HOW the submitter can turn that into "Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss?". Oh yeah, but this is slashdot- news for nerds. This site should be renamed to "Slashdot - news for trolls: engage critical thinking now".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Thing is, though: They're right.
If you haven't read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, you should. This book outlines how 40 years of bad science and personality cults in nutrition research has lead to a serious misunderstanding of the causes of heart disease and obesity.
At the very least you should read his eye-opening NY Times article, which pre-dated the book by a couple of years.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Genetic doesn't matter much for most people: if your genetics is a bit worse than average for some task, you can compensate with practice and skill to become a bit above average. For the extreme ends of the spectrum, it matters a great deal. Two decades of continuous training are unlikely to turn either you or me into an olympic style athlete.
That's not "geneticism" (which is an outdated and disproven theory) but simple biological fact.
This post is extremely misleading and dangerous. Why anyone would want to propagate this lie is beyond me.
Exercise does lead to weight loss. The article cited clearly says it does. It's just that a small amount of exercise -- aerobic exercise for short periods over a mere three months, without strength training or diet changes -- is less effective than you'd want it to be. Well duh. But even in those circumstances, with all those factors stacked against weight loss, the participants still lost some weight.
A counterexample: A mildly overweight or average person, who has no heart problems and is otherwise healthy, can engage in much more vigorous exercise. An hour on the elliptical can burn approximately 700 calories. An hour in an intense gym routine can burn more (ever see those ads for LA Boxing touting the one-hour 1000 calorie workout?). Lets say you do an hour of 700-calorie cardio every morning and dont change your diet. That's an additional 3500 calories you're burning per workweek. If you give yourself weekends off and don't change your diet and don't strength train, you're still losing a pound a week, mostly of fat. If you add in proper diet -- not calorie restriction per se but just switching from soda to water or cutting out one or two greasy meals a week -- you're doing better. Add in strength training and you're be doing amazingly.
But it's not enough to just diet. The health benefits of good cardiovascular health and muscle strength are important in their own right. Things like the Hacker's Diet work to lose weight, but they are very unhealthy, even possibly dangerous. It condones a quantitative instead qualitative approach; the Hacker's Diet seems to take the position that you can eat microwave pizzas for every meal as long as you keep it under about 2000 calories. What it doesn't tell you is that in the process you'll be failing to provide muscular support for an aging skeletal system, adding cholesterol to your body, hardening your arteries, and atrophying major muscles.
I lost 25 pounds this year, and it mostly came from a diet change. Excersizing is great, and can speed things up but the biggest factor to losing weight and keeping it off was just eating less. Cut out the crap like snacks and pop soda, try to "feel hungry" more often it won't kill you. Excersize makes you look great and develop some muscule but that alone won't take off the weight until you change your diet.
did you forget to take your meds?
the book by that title has pointed this out for years.
I have gone through large weight swings at different periods throughout my life. I was ectomorphic growing up, and matured into a mesomorph. Because my job is IT, I'm sedentary for long periods of time, and as such, will accumulate fat, especially given that in my mid-30's I still eat just like I did in my mid-teens.
Due to my particular personality - mild OCD, extremely impatient - I am very, very good at modifying the way I look in short periods of time. I lost 19 pounds in a week, just to prove a point. I ate 3 hard boiled eggs per day, 1 slice of whole wheat toast, lots of water, lots of coffee, and never stopped chewing sugarfree gum. I also exercised for 4-5 hours per day. It takes incredible willpower. It absolutely sucks. You'll feel like shit. But it does work.
Swimmers who cross the English Channel and Florida Straits also lose huge amounts of weight in very short periods of time. Susie Maroney lost 22 pounds in just over a day when she swam from Cuba to Key West. Not all of it fat, to be sure, but a lot of it was.
Much hype was made about Michael Phelps' diet when he trains. He consumes between 10,000 - 12,000 calories per day while training. So imagine your daily food intake, and quadruple it. That's how much he eats. And that's just to prevent him from losing weight. He has to eat that much to stay the same.
I also freedive. Freedivers are some of the leanest athletes in the world. They tend to stay away from gyms as too much muscle burns too much oxygen. The repeated depletion and replenishment of O2 across the cell membrane really burns the calories. After a 4-day freediving training session off the coast of Florida, I had lost 6 pounds of fat in 4 days.
As others have noted, most people feel like they're doing a lot of exercise, but they simply aren't.
Exercise absolutely works. Just just aren't doing it intensely enough or long enough if you aren't burning fat.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
There's a difference between a runner and an Olympic runner.
Yes your good competitive runner likely isn't fat and their training probably got them that way.
An Olympic level runner on the other hand combined that training with some genetics or with some drugs/etc. Either way it was more than just the training.
If you weighed 380 pounds, I'm going to guess 6'2", 30 years old (wild guesses). Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) would have been 3170, that is you would burn 3170 calories in a day just laying in bed, before any physical activity.
If you only ate 2000 calories a day (be it 2000 calories of salads, ice cream, lard or refined white sugar), you'd definitely lose weight. Calories in - calories burned gives you a great idea of if you'll gain or lose weight, regardless of what "kind" of calories they were.
It sounds weird, but if you consume just 100 calories more than you burn in a day, in a year that's 10 pounds. That's assuming you keep increasing your consumption as your BMR rises when you gain weight, but it's close to that and I don't feel like calculus this early in the morning. But do that for a period of time and suddenly you're 100 pounds overweight.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
...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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can't be "ripped and obese"--obese means very fat--but I know what you meant.
It's not true that the only way to lose fat is to combine weight lifting and exercise with a low calorie diet. Plenty of people lose fat without weight lifting. Although including strength training (it doesn't have to be with weights) is probably the best way. There are a variety of magic tricks in the creation of lean body mass. Here is what they are, and why they work:
1. Weight lifting, particularly big lifts like squats and deadlifts. Why it works: 1) because these lifts increase body hormones associated with muscle mass creation, and 2) it requires a great many calories to build and sustain muscle.
2. Cardiovascular training in the early morning, before eating. Why it works: because in the early AM your body is high in lipases, which promote the burning of fat.
3. Eating of low glycemic index foods, and/or the eating of frequent small meals (as opposed to less frequent large meals). Why it works: prolonged periods of the day with low blood sugar cause the release of neurotransmitters, hormones, and peptides associated with starvation, causing your metabolism to drop. Basic dietary changes can prevent.
4. Lower, but only slightly lower, calories consumed than expended. Why it works: same reason as above; prevents the starvation response described above.
5. Avoidance of compensation behaviors. After exercising intensely, the body has two natural inclinations: 1) eating of reward foods, and 2) a tendency towards compensating rest. Solution is to avoid the reward foods and make certain to stay active regularly. I.e., did you lift weights in the morning? Consider a walk before bed.
6. Are you crash dieting? If so, know that your body will compensate with a starvation hormone response, lowering your metabolism (and increasing your hunger!) in response. If your diet is very low in calories, you must exercise to keep your metabolism high. Stimulants work, too, but are only secondary.
7. On a diet, hunger tends to increase. If you exercise enough, you will need to eat more. It is better to acknowledge this and plan for the eating of healthy foods than attempt to fight it, fail, and eat crap. Plan ahead. Eat more lean protein sources when you can, and keep low glycemic foods around for snack attacks.
C//
Have you never seen those pictures of obese mothers in the 3rd world with starving, emaciated children? It's more complicated than calories in, calories out--because under certain circumstances your body CAN'T burn fat (specifically, when insulin levels are kept high by a diet too rich in carbohydrates and too low in protein/fat.) Now, I grant you that in a true starvation diet you'll lose weight--but you have to get to VERY low calorie levels for that to happen.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
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.
There a few points which should be made about the first story and the Denver study (didn't bother reading the second).
Firstly, they did lose weight. On average about 3kg (7 pounds) over 12 weeks.
Secondly these folk were obese when they started out. Presumably they haven't been exercising much and on average their hearts, muscles and bones aren't that strong. 55% HR could probably be achieved just by raising themselves up out of a chair. If these people kept exercising for longer than the 12 weeks they would start to see physiological changes: 1. a stronger heart pumping a higher volume of blood per stroke 2. a higher volume of blood 3. stronger muscles and bones 4. more capillaries and mitochondria in muscle tissues etc .
A year later these people would be able to sustain much higher work rates at the same percentage of maximum heart rate, they would also be capable of exercising for longer periods and more often. The weight loss would quicken over time until their bodies came to reflect their new lifestyles.
Thirdly this stuff about low intensity leading to maximum weight loss because it's in the high "fat burning zone" is utterly wrong. Whilst the percentage of of calories taken from fat is higher at lower intensities, the total energy used at high intensities is so much greater that more fat is burnt overall (i.e 40% of 1000 is more than 80% of 300). Also it's really the total energy spent that matters.
The point is exercise DOES work. A little exercise only works a little. If you want big results you need to build up to higher intensity and more frequent workouts. Running is the best exercise for weight loss and general health. Cycling and swimming are also great.
The author of this article probably should read this study: Reduced disability and mortality among aging runners: a 21-year longitudinal study
His rather prolific research into the history of the science of obesity, diet, nutrition, and "diseases of civilization" are mind-blowing. (see link to video below)
Especially to geeks who know that sometimes EVERYONE gets it wrong.
In this case, the common (mis)understandings have tainted the understanding of an entire generation of scientists and thus the people they inform.
In a nutshell, it's all about the only hormone in the body that turns ON the fat storage system. All others, including dopamine, adrenaline, etc. tell the body, HEY WE NEED ENERGY NOW, and so energy flows OUT of the fat system. The one hormone that flips the switch to STORAGE is INSULIN.
So when the body has plenty of insulin, its IMPOSSIBLE for it to go back to RELEASE fat mode.
What causes insulin to be released? All carbohydrates do. The #1 of those is GLUCOSE. The others all do to a greater or lesser degree (read about GLYCEMIC LOAD/INDEX).
So without glucose (and the other oses) there is no insulin released. No insulin released means the body stays in the natural energy release when needed mode, not stuck in storage mode.
To add to the trouble, one effect of insulin release is actually HUNGER itself. Thus creating a feedback loop.
Bottom line is, and unbelievable as it sounds in the face of modern "nutrition science", humans don't need to worry about their blood sugar levels being too low. Too high, and chronically elevated, mean the body can't release the fat, no matter how much exercise is done.
Finally he shows how fat has been wrongfully vilified over the past 50 years, and so if you take fat (high-density energy storage) out of the diet, it is replaced with carbs, and that itself is what triggers the storage system.
Taubes has a great one hour video lecture that is very geek friendly.
http://dhslides.org/mgr/mgr060509f/f.htm
http://www.google.com/search?q=taubes+adiposity+101
Geeks, you're the only ones who can grok this easily as you RTFM -- well Taubes has wrote the book on it, and if you're curious about why science could be so wrong, start your search engines and know there's a huge revelation that you'll not only say WOW to, but you'll realize that you can help spread the word of how to stop the spread of obesity...
Good luck geeks!
p.s. the key to it all may be the GLYCEROL-3-PHOSPHATE (aka ALPHA GYLYCEROL PHOSPHATE) ... which is the backbone of the stored form of fat in the fat cell. The triple glyceride molecule is too big for the "loading dock" and so transportation in or out of storage necesitates the disassembly of free 3x glycerides down to 2x, and then reassembly inside the fat cell back to 3x. And the best ironic bit, the G3P/AGP is an EXHAUST PRODUCT of the "burning" of the sugars! So it's actually like some component of the car exhaust actually causing the "environmental change", so its not even the energy of the sugars (and starches; which are actually sugars our taste buds can get a 'grip' on to taste as sweet), but rather a by product of their use.
Without excerise I went from 300 lbs down to 165, so it must work... YMMV ;-)
Finally this comment is probably too late to get modded to visibility right now, but if you find this down the road and want to know more, don't hesitate to ask and send an email! The more geeks aware of this, the more ability we have to help others understand too.
In theory, practice doesn't matter...
In practice, many studies have been done, and none have shown notably higher weight loss from low card diets than from low fat diets.
In practice, reducing the amount of calories you eat will cause you to lose weight. Carbs, fat, doesn't matter.
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