You are not immune to the basic laws of thermophysics. Weight loss is literally calories in < calories out.
No shit. That’s not some great revelation and I’m kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch. Your body is very good at conserving energy. Not to say exercise isn’t beneficial, it is, it’s just not a great weight loss tool. Not at last as good as common wisdom might suggest.
The caveman in your skull is also very persuasive, and wants you to eat far more than you need, because it thinks you might not be able to find food again for a while. The caveman really likes carbs, and foods high in sugar and fat, and will ask for more the second you have any.
Ignoring the caveman is hard, harder for some than others. It’s also taxing and after a while the caveman will wear you down.
Effective weight loss isn’t just about putting less food on your plate. Fucking anybody can do that and it’s exceedingly obvious to those trying that that’s what they need to do.
Losing weight is about beating back the caveman in your skull, convincing him that he’s had enough, and feeding him in a way that also nourishes the body you both live in.
There’s a reason most people fail, and fail repeatedly to lose weight. It’s as simple as eating less but it turns out, eating less for people who eat a lot isn’t actually that simple. There are psychological and physiological drivers causing them to keep going back for more, to lie to themselves about how they’re doing, and to ignore the obvious cues that something isn’t working.
That’s not some great revelation and I’m kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
I wasn’t posting it like some revelation, it’s literally the most easy to understand concept ever. You cannot create mass from nothing. Stop taking in more mass than you expel. It’s dead simple. The only counterpoint to this is examples of extreme medical anomalies.
So what’s the point of posting it? If it’s so obvious and all that you really need to know, why are so many people still fat?
The unsaid part of “it’s simple, it’s just calories in calories out” is the implied “and people who don’t get this are just lazy/dumb/it’s a moral failing.” Maybe this isn’t what you are intending, but it is kinda at the root of a lot of hate that fat people get.
The discussion around weight is changing because we’re starting to look into and understand the psychological components of weight, IN ADDITION TO the actual phsysiological processes of weight loss. Lots of “normal” day to day tips and “common sense” is being investigated and debunked. Shit is hard and complicated. Food is being engineered to be addictive. Some people literally don’t have easy access to healthy food.
They explained it to you on a level a four year old could understand.
It’s about as simple as telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking or a depressed person to maybe just be happy.
Everything in your body is built against losing weight. If it wouldn’t be that way, we would not exist right now.
It really is the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or “just don’t take any drugs, duh” of weight loss. Like, you can’t just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. It’s reductive and unproductive.
People aren’t having trouble with math or willpower, they’re having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on “most”) readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
It’s also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. I’m slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.
It’s almost identical to saying “just stop taking drugs.” Or “just stop drinking.”
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, they’re literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work
That’s literally exactly how it has worked for me. Obviously it takes some will power and discipline, but so does basically everything.
You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch.
Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
I can’t believe the number of people on here who keep repeating that exercising can’t replace eating less… If you eat the same amount of calories as before but increase the calories you burn by 500 the result is the same as reducing how much you eat by 500 calories while maintaining the same daily needs. Heck, long term doing it through exercising is better for you as well!
That’s serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it’s far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
A kind of ‘side benefit’ to muscle-building exercise, is that it increases the amount of calories your body burns ‘by default’, because by weight, muscle takes much more energy to maintain than fat.
So on top of eating less (fewer calories going into your body), you can ‘attack’ it from the other side at the same time by increasing your body’s ‘consumption’ of the calories/energy stored in it.
This is a commonly repeated myth. One I believe myself until talking to my doctor about it.
Anecdotal, and I agree with you overall, but I hit the gym hard (2-3 hour jiu jitsu/MMA sessions) 4 times a week for 3 months and lost 18 lbs. I didn’t change my diet at all, though I will admit it’s possible I ended up eating less overall. But my point is I think exercise can definitely be a pretty good weight loss tool if you’re working your ass off. Just depends on the amount of exercise and the intensity etc.
There have been many times that I justified gaining weight via alcoholism because I thought maybe if I was disgusting no one would assault me again. Turns that that’s not only not true, I’ve become disgusted with and hate my own body. So now I have a crippling alcohol addiction in addition to hating myself, and being afraid of interacting with certain people.
I’ve done a lot of therapy. And I will continue to do a lot of therapy. I almost graduated from therapy this spring, and had curbed my alcohol intake. But, then I had to get a restraining order and my brain fell right back into it’s old habits. It shouldn’t be this hard to feel safe as a middle aged adult lol
Except that the human body is way more complicated than that. Whenever you try to increase calories out by exercise, your body just finds somewhere else it can economize, because it wants to operate on a fixed budget. This can include pulling calories from your immune system, or making you subconsciously move less throughout the day, or even sleep more. You can only overcome this for a limited time. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this phenomenon. What you actually want to do is reduce calorie intake.
Exercise is good for lots of reasons, but it isn’t a good way of losing weight long term.
What you actually want to do is reduce calorie intake.
Is that not the exact sentiment when people bring up CICO, though?
Not really. Lots of people talk about excecising more when it comes to loosing weight, and many of those follow CICO. Not realising that isn’t how a human body works with regards to excercise. You also see people claiming that genetics are not signficant, or that slow and fast metabolisms don’t exist. Even though we know all of these things are a factor. It’s mental what some people believe about diet, nutrition, and excercise. Likewise everyone using BMI pretty much is an idiot, even in school I was told that isn’t a good metric otherwise every athelete or body builder would be obese.
Also still not convinced CICO is even a thing. Digestion is not a 100% efficient process. Calories are measured by burning something, and human metabolism isn’t a fire.
That doesn’t discredit calories in calories out? They didn’t even mention exercise or imply that you didn’t need to reduce your food intake. It works. When I am on a cut I can estimate down to within a few days how long it will take me to get where I want to be just following CICO.
Reducing Calorie Intake is only the first half of CICO. Not everyone can even absorb the same amount of calories from the same piece of food, because calories are about burning stuff not about human digestion and metabolism.
I’m not saying losing weight is easy, but it is a simple math problem.
Try getting into biking. I burn 1500-2000 calories (I’m not a small dude) in like 2 hours of road cycling. It’s relatively easy on the body compared to running as a bonus.
Are you sure about that number?
According to my tracker, I burn about 1000kcal per 60km, and I’m an normal dude. You probably won’t average 50km/h over 2h or something.
Given weight and road grade plays a role, they don’t need to average 50km/h necessarily. Still, 1kcal/hour seems quite intense for a regular exercise for me, but similarly large professional-level endurance athletes probably burn far more during serious training or competitions. 750kcal/hr seems manageable to me as a non-athletic person (supposedly I’ve burned 2340 calories over 2.7hours once… but I was totally wiped out afterwards IIRC). 1K/hr isn’t something I could maintain for more than about 1.5 hours even on the best of days.
Oh also another thing to check is weather your fitness tracker is reporting active calories or total calories burned. If it is the second one it’s giving you a feel-good number that includes calories you would have burned just by sitting on the couch staying alive. If your fitness tracker isn’t calculating a BMR you can estimate your Base Metabolic Rate fairly accurately with a calculator like this one.
The key is to not eat the quarter pounder after exercise, even if your body cries for 3.
Yup, that’s the problem. If you run 5 miles you burn about 500 calories. Hardly enough to make up for even the fries in the meal. A lot of people overestimate calories burnt and underestimate calories consumed.
A bit of exercise every day is good for your heart, lungs, circulatory system etc. but it won’t make up to overcome an otherwise sedentary lifestyle if you don’t change your diet.
Exactly this, like obviously you should exercise, but when it comes to losing weight it’s really the diet that matters most.
I actually, within the span of about a year, went from 280 to 179 lbs through diet alone, I literally did no exercise. I’m 6’ btw.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t exactly recommend that, without exercise you’ll also be losing tons of muscle. But my point is that diet is incredibly powerful.
It’s the diet only in the sense that if you’re not careful you will just eat the extra that you’re burning, but if you keep eating the same and start being active when you weren’t, we can say that it’s being active that made you lose weight.
Yep I’ve lost 30kg and by far the biggest thing that allowed me to achieve that was to start counting my calories. At first that’s all I did, only later I started to introduce weight lifting and exercise to prevent losing too much muscle and to start making them stronger and more visible.
Weight training also helps considerably, as while it doesn’t directly burn as many calories as intense cardio, bigger muscles require more calories to maintain, so by building muscle you’re increasing your resting calorie consumption
Nah the key is to get rid of insanely calorie dense ultra processed garbage that digests in minutes and makes you feel like shit. Roast chicken breast with tons of herbs and it’s delicious - you can quite literally eat as much of that as you can physically handle and you wont gain weight. Plenty of ways to cook veggies that make them delicious. Fruits arent that many cals and fill you up. Unsweetened yogurt is the same cals per protein as protein powder. Dont eat cereal or half the packaged garbage in the grocery store. Just eat real food and it’s a million times easier to lose weight.
I assure you european peasants were not eating pizza and cheesecake multiple times a week
