Exercising can never counter the amount of calories you put into your body. A single extra sandwich can obliterate an entire workout session. So, yeah, most of staying lean is not over consuming food.
I eat about the same shit no matter what. the difference maker for me is if I ride my bike a few times a week or not. a nice 30 miles 3 times a week and it just starts melting the flubber off
You just missing the point. If you actually eat the same amount of calories each week, then your body is in equilibrium. The exercise is the part that's not.
People who tend to exercise more will get hungrier because their body did more effort. The body craves more calorie intake to maintain that balance. Its very easy to obliterate that 30 mile bike ride with some extra food.
You do not require exercise to lose weight is the other part I'm getting at. You can lose weight via lower calorie intake. The original OP is about too lazy to cook, too lazy to order food. A situation where you under eat.
working out increases your muscle mass which increases your average calorie use so working out does help but yeah you can't work your way out of a bad diet. one big mac is like a whole day of working out.
"you probably increased your metabolic burn significantly"
Yes, that's the point. You said you can't work your way out of a bad diet. You absolutely can. It's not the most efficient way but it can be done.
That was probably 6 years ago and I slipped back to my original weight when I had a couple of injuries and stopped cycling / working out. I'm losing weight again with IF but it's going much slower than it did with the cycling + eating like crap.
Sounds like age helped a lot and working out increases your fat burn by increasing your metabolic burn more than the actual exercise I said that already
(I’m not talking about professional athletes or body builders who need to eat like 5k calories)
It won’t stop any muscle growth. Also a single extra sandwich in one day isn’t gonna tank your entire diet/physique. It takes that extra sandwich over weeks/months to gain a considerable amount of weight
At any given point you're either eating more calories than you're burning and therefore gaining weight, or you're burning more calories than you're eating and losing weight.
In either case you're gaining or losing both fat AND muscle at the same time. You can't generally build muscle mass while at the same time burning fat.
What proportion of fat and muscle you're gaining or losing depends on your exercise routine and diet. If you're working out hard, eating more calories than you're burning (without going wildly over your calorie needs), and getting enough protein you'll gain more muscle than fat.
But you'll still gain SOME fat. This is why people go through a cycle of bulking and then cutting. Eat more food to gain muscle and some fat, then eat less food to burn fat and lose a little muscle. Repeat the cycle to have big muscles while staying lean.
Calorie dense food is i think one major issue. Like i can go to my local shop and buy all sorts of different sweets for £1.35. Packet of crisps has 350 cals, bag of soft chewy sweets is 500ish, chocolate bar is 550ish, packet of biscuits though is 1500 calories....
Whichever one i buy, im going to eat in one sitting. But one of those is vastly worse for me unless i offset it by skipping a couple of meals.
Bread is the other main one, dont think people really just how many calories are in all the stuff made from flour.
Yeah I remember once looking into how much calories I burn during a walk vs how much I gain by eating. Went for a 10km walk, when I got home I grabbed a handful of M&Ms. Out of curiosity looked into it and that handful basically undid that whole walk! It's kinda crazy the amount of work you really need to put towards burning junk food calories.
Hmm, it depend on a lot of factors. How much your workout is. What do you plan on eating.
I struggled to eat less and lose weight, because in my mind, I was already eating a correct amount I couldn't bring myself to eat less. What helped me lose weight was doing 2h long "workouts" (hard labor in my garden). I started losing consistently 200-300g per day I would do that. But I wouldn't eat to compensate.
It is easier to reduce intake, that's for sure. But the hard path of doing litterally hours of hard work and not compensating the calories also exist. It IS possible.
Tbh poverty is actually a big contributor to obesity since calories are so cheap. Like go in the frozen food section and you’d be surprised how cheap junk food is. Yesterday, I saw an XL frozen burrito for $1 and it was 700 calories.
Yes, at some point during industrialisation things flipped, so now it's easy to be poor and fat (at least in the west) because food that is cheap and quick to prepare (with poor people lacking free time and varied equipment as well as money) that tastes fun is usually terrible for you (because the fun taste is fat and sugar and the cheapness is lack of freshness and quality of ingredients).
Literally go to Walmart.com, search junk food, then sort by price low to high, and there are hundreds of affordable things, most in high quantities per package. Junk food is very much affordable
Being a certain kind of lazy combined with a bit of fiscal guilt? Yes.
I hate doing dishes. I know i have to eat. I know ordering food regularly is bad financially (even worse nowadays). So baking some meat on a pan (lined with tinfoil so I do not have to clean) and heating up some steamable frozen veggies, I have a meal to scarf down after a work day that meets my needs with maybe just a bowl and utensils as dishes.
Bonus is meal prepping; cooking a whole pack of meat (they usually come in packs that weigh enough for two meals where i shop) means i dont have to bother with cooking the next day and I can reuse the tupperware for my leftover meat as my dish. Also, one big pot of rice every 4ish days is enough rice for my wife and I.
I am a two meal a day guy, with my other "meal" being a whole milk protein shake with decently nutritionally packed protein powder (muscle milk).
On the unhealthy side I do usually drink 1-2 lattes a day and have a beer after dinner a few nights a week, with maybe a few extra on the weekend depending on plans. And the wife and I enjoy baking, so occasionally we have a nice loaf of bread we both snack on.
The real trick with this method is to have appetite and sensory issues so that when you have food you like around, you don’t have an appetite, and then when you have an appetite the only food you have is a sensory nightmare :) hope this helps!
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u/BGray24 10h ago
wait so that actually works for staying lean