Weight loss has very little to do with exercise and way more to do with diet despite common conception. If you run three miles in 30 minutes (10 min/mile, not fast, just jogging), you will burn 540 calories. Running at 220 sucks balls, but you can do it at least once. The real problem is getting out there every time and keeping consistent. 540 calories four times a week (let's say you're really motivated) is 2160 calories. That's literally not even a pound lost since a pound of fat is 3500 calories. Sure, there are added benefits to exercise which are not weight loss like better cardiovascular health and improved muscle, but you want to lose weight. So what you need to do is track your calories to stay at a set deficit. If you choose a 500 cal/day deficit, you will lose 3500 calories per week, safely. You don't even have to exercise, you just have to put down the McDonald's (I love McDonald's and fries, they're just a lot of calories). Get one of the calorie tracker apps that have already been suggested here. Here's the most important part: YOU WILL FAIL. You must not let that stop you. Don't avoid logging your calories just because you drank 12 beers and ate a whole pizza. Bouncing back is the most important part of this. You want to be 180? It's very simple, calories in - calories burned = calorie surplus/deficit. When there's a surplus, you gain weight. When there's a deficit, you lose weight. If anyone tells you anything that differs from this, they are trying to break the laws of thermodynamics. There are a jillion websites out there that will lie to you and convince you that this is something you can cheat. There isn't. The only thing diet pills do is jack up your heart rate to make you burn more calories. It's unsafe and the opposite of the right way to do it. All that being said, working out sucks, but if you want to get a sexy body like in the magazine you can't just lose weight. You have to lift. Cardio is good for the heart/lungs and endurance, but weight lifting is how you develop your arms and chest and ass. Abs don't happen until you are really low body fat, so don't even worry about that. I don't know how tall you are but if you're shooting for 180 and you're 6', your abs won't happen until you're 170 unless you're just blessed. I jacked up my back and legs in the Air Force so it's a terrible ordeal for me to run anymore, but I can still lift. I used to not lift and I wish I would have started a long time ago. And to be clear, I'm not a jacked roid fueled muscle beast. I do the PHUL plan (google it). It's awesome, straightforward, and does exactly what I want it to. It's not caught up in buzzwords and marketing (muscle confusion LOL). Everyone at my gym is super nice, and it's the time of year when a lot of new people are there (resolutions and summer coming up). You missed it this year, but to give you an idea of what current gym atmosphere is like, January 2nd is Support a Newbie Day. Honestly, I can't think of a bigger compliment I could get at the gym than if someone saw me working out and asked me to help them with their form or how to use a machine etc. Fuck getting my number, tell me you notice that the bar touches my chest when I bench unlike Half-Rep Harry next to me who puts up twice the weight. Anyway, eat lighter and you will become less heavy. Lift heavy and you will be enlightened. If you have any questions and don't want to ask them in a reply, just PM me.
I agree with this I would just add that exercise plays another important role. Muscle burns calories. When you strength train, not only do you lose calories from the activity but you continue to lose calories from fueling the muscles you've built. Cardio is great for overall health but for weight loss muscle is the way to go. As for the failures to me there are no failures, just experiments with unexpected results. When I chow down on a candy bar at work rather then beat myself up I look at what I've eaten for the day. Usually there's an obvious reason, it's been too long between meals, didn't bring a healthy snack, or didn't get enough protein and fiber early in the day. There's lots of reasons people cheat on their health goals, usually planning ahead can help you not repeat that in the future.
Excerpt From: Mark Sisson. “Primal Endurance" You're accurate in framing weight loss as an issue more to do with diet than with exercise, but it goes even further. The simplest principle to diet is that the quality of your calories matter as much, if not more, than the number of calories. There are high quality calories; nutrient-loaded vegetables; fats from animals, plants, and oils; and protein-high foods like meats and veggies like quinoa and beans. And then there are calories that come from "dirty" foods, namely processed carbohydrates and sugars. But even natural foods like pasta and bread (though the "6-11 servings a day" foundation of the food pyramid) aren't very good for you. That's because carbohydrates (or rather, glucose, the sugar that all carbohydrates break down into) trigger an insulin response in the body, flooding the bloodstream with it, which then commands the body to convert any excess calories from that meal into body fat. For an excellent treatment of this subject, namely weight loss, nutrition, the insulin response and it's relationship to body composition, and exercise, I'd highly recommend Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint. And if you'd like to get a sample of his approach before buying the book, Mark just recently appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast, The Joe Rogan Experiment Episode #752 with Mark Sisson. It's fascinating.Weight loss through portion control and devoted calorie burning is ineffective. Calories burned through exercise stimulate a corresponding increase in appetite. The secret to weight loss is hormone optimization, primarily through moderating excess insulin production.
I literally trust nothing I read so I researched what you were saying to understand the science behind the second paragraph for about an hour. After eating, blood glucose levels rise, which triggers the pancreas to release insulin into the blood. Insulin is the signal for the body to absorb glucose from the blood. Most cells just use the glucose to supply them with energy. The liver has a special job when it comes to glucose. When levels of glucose (and consequently insulin) are high in the blood, the liver responds to the insulin by absorbing glucose. It packages the sugar into bundles called glycogen. These glucose granules fill up liver cells, so the liver is like a warehouse for excess glucose. Processing the body's fat is a key job for the liver. Once the liver is full of glycogen, it starts turning the glucose it absorbs from the blood into fatty acids, for long-term storage as body fat. The fatty acids and cholesterol are gathered as fatty packages and delivered around the body via the blood. Much of the fat ends up stored in fat tissues. More concisely: 1. You eat. 2. The body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose. 3. The pancreas monitors levels of glucose, releasing insulin when the levels reach a certain point. 4. The insulin signals the liver to begin collecting glucose (this does not happen in people with diabetes which is why they have high blood sugar. Super interesting point). 5. Glucose is then stored as glycogen. 6. When the liver gets full of glycogen, glucose is turned into fatty acids and cholesterol. 7. These fats are distributed for storage in the rest of the body. Even if everything so far is true, what you end up with is a calorie deficit, and those calories that were stored as glycogen and fat now have to be burned or you would die of actual starvation. Because those calories were inefficiently turned into fat, and now also have to be turned into glucose, you would end up burning more calories than if your body would have turned them into glucose and glycogen in the first place due to the breakdown process. My point is, that weight loss will occur no matter what you eat if you don't eat more calories than you burn. If the idea here is that by avoiding eating carbs you don't signal your body to produce fat cells that's ignoring that your body directly converts lots of things into fats. Actual fats, for example, are transformed into body fat (fatty acids) like this: 1. Large fat droplets get mixed with bile salts from the gall bladder in a process called emulsification. The mixture breaks up the large droplets into several smaller droplets called micelles, increasing the fat's surface area. 2.The pancreas secretes enzymes called lipases that attack the surface of each micelle and break the fats down into their parts, glycerol and fatty acids. 3.These parts get absorbed into the cells lining the intestine. 4.In the intestinal cell, the parts are reassembled into packages of fat molecules (triglycerides) with a protein coating called chylomicrons. The protein coating makes the fat dissolve more easily in water. 5.The chylomicrons are released into the lymphatic system -- they do not go directly into the bloodstream because they are too big to pass through the wall of the capillary. 6.The lymphatic system eventually merges with the veins, at which point the chylomicrons pass into the bloodstream. Protein can't be turned into fat, but I'm actually having trouble finding out what happens if you eat more protein than your body can handle at once. Do you just pass it, or what? My point is that even if I literally ate 2000 calories of refined sugar (assuming I didn't vomit) it simply doesn't make sense that somehow I stored a large proportion of the energy as fat and then did not immediately start burning that fat through natural processes. Your body CANNOT both make energy and store energy as fat with the same calories. If it could, it would be a perpetual motion machine, producing more energy than it consumes. Another test outside of nutritional science is even easier. Does the person who wrote this idea profit from it? The answer is yes. Mark Sisson sells a metric shit ton of dietary supplements and Paleo Mayonnaise on his website He also sells certification in his nutritional philosophy. It costs $995. That's right, a thousand dollars. So with all due respect, I disagree with you for the above reasons.
I think you're both essentially right. Yes, you can lose weight eating twinkies. If you are taking in less calories then you burn, you will lose weight. But figuring out those two numbers is pretty complicated. And, as the Times put it - That's where modern diets like paleo and keto come in. If you can sustain them, they can be a great tool for weight loss, because reducing sugar reduces insulin spikes and helps control hunger. Most people can't sustain them though. Reddit exacerbates this problem, because people who are currently on the diet are the only ones active in those subs, and those who drop out aren't included in those perspectives. So the discussion is entirely driven by people who are on these diets, most of them who will only last a few weeks to a month. The answer for most I believe is somewhere in the middle. If you cut all carbs for a month it won't do you much good long term. But if you structure your meals with less carbs and more food that helps with satiety, you'll see lasting health benefits.That humans or any other organism will lose weight if starved sufficiently has never been news. The trick, if such a thing exists, is finding a way to do it without hunger so weight loss can be sustained indefinitely.
The nutrition/fitness industry doesn't help stop these problems. There's a new fad, 'scientific breakthrough', or some other bullshit every week and it completely over writes everything that came before it without deference to actual conflicting research. Hell, this very article that ooli posted today is a perfect example of how gullible people are, and how easy it is to push pseudo-science on those who are looking for an easy out. The Times article repeats exactly, word for word exactly, the flaw that the chocolate study points out. They used a very, very small sample size (19 people) to see if they got any results. The author then couches this against a starvation study to make it seem like hunger at starvation levels is the same thing as a small caloric reduction. That's like saying being almost dead from dehydration is the same as being thirsty. So let's the do the second test. Does this author make money form the ideas that I am being asked to believe in? Yep. He wrote two books on the topic yet cites none of his own work in the topic, only the NIH study which is unquestionably flawed. But from that he founded the Nutrition Science Initiative where he serves as Director. Funny thing about that is that even though they say they're a registered 501c3 non-profit, you can't find their filings with the IRS or a rating on Morningstar.
I'm sorry that I didn't point out explicitly that Mark Sisson has a variety of businesses that sell supplements and certifications in his nutritional philosophy. I personally do not benefit one whit if someone buys something from him. But does profiting from their work preclude us from bringing up their work? I understand that it's a good rule of thumb, when determining trustworthiness, to consider profit-motive. But the supplement industry is huge: people argue whether it's $12 billion or $37 billion, and I don't begrudge a nutrition and health advocate to try to make money this way. Especially considering how dubious most supplements are, Mark seems pretty transparent about which supplements he recommends and sells. But you're contention, as I understand it, is that the author is not to be trusted. What is the author asking you to believe in? As I understand Mark Sisson's work, it is to eat nutritious food, get most of your calories from fat, protein, and carbs, in descending order, to minimize carbs to something like 100 grams a day or less, to eat when hungry, to not overeat, to exercise with low-level aerobic activity and occasional heavy lifting. That I got from the podcast episode linked above.
My contention is that the author is not to be trusted implicitly. He is not a nutritional scientist, nor has he done peer-reviewed research in the field. He could certainly earn my trust, and is not prevented in doing so by selling something. However, what he does sell is based upon a controversial nutritional concept which is not vetted by rigorous scientific research and directly conflicts with scientifically researched medical understanding of the human body. I don't trust him immediately because he sells something based upon this, though I don't begrudge him the right to sell products he believes in. I just don't have to buy them or ascribe to his philosophy. As for his nutritional philosophy it is based on low-carb intake to reduce fatty tissue build up in the body. When I see a controlled well-designed study, I will be more apt to believe it. Until then, what I'm doing now is working just fine and I don't have to buy anything from someone who asks me to believe something that doesn't make sense outright to me and violates a lot of media literacy principles. The publisher has an explicit bias, it confirms something that you want to be true (that you can lose weight simply by changing the proportions of what you eat), and is literally just a re-hash of a fad diet from 15 years ago (the Atkins diet). As well, do you really think that the optimal number of carbs for all people of varying shapes and sizes and genders just happens to be a round number like 100? How did this number happen? Eating when you're hungry and not over-eating is standard advice so I agree with the premise, though here it's not really defined what either of those mean. What does hungry mean here? That my stomach growls, or that I thought of food and it was appetizing. Hungry is an adjective, not a metric. Overeating similarly has no explicit limit, so it as well seems designed to make the whole idea very palatable and easy to manage, while simultaneously not providing any gauge for success. On the other hand, let's look at my simple, not selling you anything advice. If you are simply trying to lose weight, you just have to eat less than you burn. You burn calories at a given amount just by going through your daily activities. This is called your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). You do not have to exercise to lose weight, as long as you are eating less than your BMR. The rate at which you lose weight is directly related to how much less you eat than your BMR. You can safely eat 1000 calories less than your daily BMR, as this will lead to a 2 lb. per week weight loss which is considered healthy by nutritional scientists, but a 500 calories deficit is easier to manage in longer durations so you may lose less in the long run. When you are cutting it is a good idea to take a multivitamin to make sure that the vitamins and minerals from the food you usually eat are still being maintained at healthy levels. Eating foods which are high in insoluble fiber will make you feel fuller and make caloric restriction easier. Insoluble fiber is found in the skins of fruits and vegetables, nuts, whole grains, prunes, asparagus, corn and bran. When you are at the weight you would like to maintain, simply eat at your BMR (which gets smaller as you lose weight because a lighter body has less mass to maintain and feed). This got really long but it's important.
I appreciate your thoroughness. It's been motivating me to hold Sisson et al. to a higher standard, which is utterly a good thing, by spending some time doing further research. Specifically on this relatively new meme that's appeared: that the insulin response is a major root of excess fat storage. Predictably, it's not that simple, and there are in fact numerous scientists and bloggers who would say that the insulin response has next-to-zero blame. So in my original point -- where I claimed you weren't going far enough in your advice -- my follow-up wasn't far enough as well. I guess the rabbit hole never ends, and you can stop additional postulating where you see fit. The position I still hold is that running a net caloric deficit is the ultimate principle in weight-loss, but to facilitate a sustainable diet and body composition which requires manageable and not impossible levels of discipline and motivation, the quality of calories matters a lot: it affects your satiety, your mood, your energy level, and your health. And you gotta throw some weight lifting in there, too.
I didn't say the nutrition industry helps with these problems, the nutrition industry is very good at it's primary goal which is making money. I linked the article because I agree with the quote. Telling overweight people to just eat less isn't helpful. Telling them how to do it in a sustainable, enjoyable way is.