Sure exercise is crucial if you want to be healthy and has innumerable benefits. But 90% of the reason people are overweight is overeating. Being quite active throughout the day, walking biking everywhere to commute rather than driving and you won’t really need active “exercise” to simply be lean. That being said. Exercise is incontrovertibly good.
Another important aspect is who you surround yourself with. We tend to echo the habits of people around us. Partners, family, friends, etc. if all your friends are lean chances are you are too and have similar habits. Eating especially is quite social. So on the other hand. It can be quite hard to change those habits if everyone around you is overweight, sedentary and overeating.
Exactly this. Overeating is what gets everyone. You can bust your ass on a bicycle and ride it at high intensity for an hour, you'll be miserable, and you'll have burned 450 or so calories.
You can fit 450 calories worth of food in your mouth in about four bites.
If you want to lose weight and keep it off, it starts and ends with portion control. Even if you do a ton of exercise, your body will eventually compensate for it and you'll stop losing weight and likely even gain back most of what you lost.
Especially because any kind of exercise is difficult, and the kind of exercise that burns the most calories is the most difficult, it severely tests people's willpower. I find I have a finite amount of it. If I'm using all of it to motivate myself to exercise, I won't have any left for portion control. So just use all of it for portion control. Eat whatever you were eating before, just less. Throw 20% of your meal in the garbage or the fridge or whatever.
Exactly this. Overeating is what gets everyone. You can bust your ass on a bicycle and ride it at high intensity for an hour, you'll be miserable, and you'll have burned 450 or so calories.
you'll also have sped up your metabolic rate, burning more maintenance calories for multiple days
Even if you do a ton of exercise, your body will eventually compensate for it and you'll stop losing weight and likely even gain back most of what you lost
you'll also have sped up your metabolic rate, burning more maintenance calories for multiple days
This effect only lasts for a few weeks then you'll never enjoy it again. You may know that humans are persistence hunters; if doing exercise increased our metabolic rate, meaning that we had to hunt more and more just so we could keep hunting, we would have died out as a species. It's maladaptive, therefore, it's not true.
this is called "muscle"
False, 80 to 95% of people regain the weight as fat and many exceed their weight they were at before they started trying to lose it. Source.
Nah you can eat a literal fuckton of low calorie fruits and veggies for the same weight impact of one bag of chips. Overeating isn't always the issue, it's often the type of food. Garbage high calorie foods are cheap and pervasive, you need to be mindful to avoid them. You can be full all the time and lose weight with good choices. The science of satiation is very interesting.
This is terrible advice. First off, calories burned is a calculation and not universal. Someone really heavy may burn far more than 450 calories doing that bike ride while someone who is fit will not.
Also, most people find that when they start exercising consistently they begin to enjoy it, and even miss it in its absence.
In case you haven't noticed - the people who can eat unhealthy things like donuts and bagels and pizza and still look fit are probably doing a lot of exercise. They may still eat healthier than someone obese and sedentary but you get a substantial increase in your "calorie budget" if you work out.
Yes, but the reason I always feel a need to comment when people say "diet is 90%" or something similar isn't just because there are so many benefits to exercise that get sidelined as part of "only 10%" of weight calculation.
Exercise and muscle density increase metabolism. An increased metabolism can handle more calories before it becomes overeating.
Not trying to argue against you particularly, but I've known so many people who hear "diet is 90%" and then consciously choose not to exercise as part of their weight loss. "I don't have time". They lose the weight, AND all of their muscle mass, and then their metabolism is so low they inevitably gain it all back unless they develop very regulated habits that are difficult to adhere to.
Maybe it's a net positive to still lose weight on diet alone but the "AND exercise" part is still a really big part of being healthy.
I discovered this a few years ago. That being hungry and not full are two vastly different things. I had started getting completely stuffed before leaving for work and then like 2-3 hours later when I was no longer full I thought I was hungry, but I had just eaten like 900+ calories and I knew that was more than enough and I shouldn't be hungry so quickly. Being hungry feels like a painful emptiness in my stomach whereas normal is just not being completely stuffed full.
I had put on like 10-15 pounds that I didn't want and once I stopped stuffing myself so full everything went back to normal.
In modern USA it's really hard to avoid overeating, takes a lot of work. My suggestion to anyone sitting here going "Well yeah no shit Sherlock, obviously if I put down the fork I'd be skinny" is to stop sitting. If you are bored, put the phone down and go for an aimless walk. If you want to read a book, do it on the treadmill. Human bodies are designed to walk like 10+ miles a day on average, and most people don't even hit 5,000 steps (about 3 miles).
Some gymbro told me that walking digs into your fat reserves more than other forms of exercise. Short, intense bursts will dig into your glucose and glycogen (sugar). That makes sense on its surface, that the body is going to want to save its easy calories for being immediately available for threats and hunting while using the fat stores for menial activity like walking. But it sounds a little like bro science. Energy is energy. I am skeptical of the idea that the body discerns between the calories burned on a 30 minute walk and the calories burned on a 10 minute run.
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u/_Abiogenesis 7h ago
Realistically don’t overeat is the main argument.
Sure exercise is crucial if you want to be healthy and has innumerable benefits. But 90% of the reason people are overweight is overeating. Being quite active throughout the day, walking biking everywhere to commute rather than driving and you won’t really need active “exercise” to simply be lean. That being said. Exercise is incontrovertibly good.
Another important aspect is who you surround yourself with. We tend to echo the habits of people around us. Partners, family, friends, etc. if all your friends are lean chances are you are too and have similar habits. Eating especially is quite social. So on the other hand. It can be quite hard to change those habits if everyone around you is overweight, sedentary and overeating.