Calorie restriction versus increased activity
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"Don't get me wrong, your topic is important. It's important that people know they have other options and dieting (in the sense of decreasing calorie intake) may not be necessary, but don't you think personal preferences and personalities make generalized solutions too mainstream and not practical for many?"
Yes, a thousand times yes, absolutely. I agree wholeheartedly on both counts and did not mean to imply that increasing activity level alone was the sole way to weightloss for everyone and I apologize if it came across that way.
My point was there are two sides to the caloric deficit equation and because I felt (notice I say that I felt, perhaps you feel differently) that the MFP forum for weight loss skewed pretty heavily to one side of that equation I would comment on that.0 -
Put another way.
I believe that they are likely people out there who feel from the culture that the only way to lose weight is to eat a substantially less amount of food and they struggle to do that. Those same people might actually quite enjoy focusing instead on biking to work instead of taking the bus or making a point to go on hikes during the weekend but just not realize you can actually eat close to what you have been eating, do that, and actually lose weight from that over time provided you do track your calories to ensure you don't start eating even more.
I hope that that point gets made more and more because I think it is helpful to talk about the benefits of increased activity towards weight loss and that weight loss can motivate one to be healthier and actually happier and it doesn't have to be painful.
Not saying that is the way for everyone, but it is certainly going to be true for a lot of people and some of those people might not even realize its an option based on the way our culture approaches "dieting". The very fact the word for weight loss is "dieting" shows that.1 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »Lets put it this way.
If you told me you want to lose weight and I told you sure, you can lose weight but you have to pick one of these two options.
Option 1: Never eat burgers again
Option 2: You can still eat burgers and on top of that you now have motivation to go for long walks around your town, explore it a bit, walk around your local park to meet your goal of weight loss.
How come 99% of people seem to go with option 1. That is the part that confuses me to no end.
If Garmin is to be believed, I can't really do option 2.
I'm a total believer in fuelling my exercise but extra steps just doesn't up it enough for me.
I still eat burgers, but it comes with balancing the rest of my foods and more activity than just taking some extra steps in a day.
I don't necessarily believe my fitbit but on the weekend I did a good amount of just walking and at the end of the day my Charge HR stated my TDEE to be 6,420 calories (it puts my BMR around 1800 so my burn from walking was about 4600. Do I believe that is accurate? Not really. But I doubt its off by 4-fold so we are still talking a thousand or more calories burned. I also enjoyed myself quite a bit and on that day ate a Dairy Queen Blizzard, a Jumbo Jack and a 4-entree Panda Express meal in addition to other things of course.
That's what you get. I don't get near that. My Garmin step activity is very conservative. Even on a 20,000 step day I'm not getting a DQ Blizzard unless a chunk of those steps were a run.
Never made the claim, never tried to make that claim. People keep reading into what I am saying. Where did I say "I burned X while walking therefore everyone can burn X while walking" I didn't say that. I posted that because the claim was made that one cannot burn enough just by walking and I was providing an example where that clearly was not the case based on my own experience.
I never said you said everyone should. You are missing my point.
Your post is about simply adding more exercise to lose weight. One example you gave was to add more steps, go for walk (and continue to eat burgers). MY point is that simply adding steps doesn't necessarily mean that.0 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »I have seen very few people seem to take the approach of eating the exact same as they have been but just increasing their activity level.
Above is a direct quote from the post that opened this thread. I'm not misinterpreting it or taking it out of context. You are asking why no one eats as they currently are, but just increases their activity level, to lose weight as opposed to the more common route of slashing daily caloric intake. Sometimes to unrealistic and unsustainable levels because they want the weight gone Now-Now-Now that leads to failure and abandonment of the attempt to lose weight many can see coming a mile away.
Probably because there are not enough hours in the day for the average person who needs to realistically achieve this. You do realize that the average person who is overweight/obese is eating 3, 4, 5+(+, +++) thousand calories a day, yeah? What people have lost, and need to relearn, is how many calories will maintain "x" weight regardless of activity level. Namely because caloric intake is a daily thing while activity expenditure above/beyond BMR is not.
How often, how long, and more importantly, how intense a level of exercise do you think a sedentary 42 yo, 5'7", 205 lbs, 40% BF woman would need to engage in to raise her TDEE to match the bottom number just given, to 3K calories? To just maintain? She'd need to be exercising at the professional/Olympic athlete level according to available TDEE calculators. And if that same woman got back to a perfectly "normal" BMI weight and BF% of 142 lbs./22%? She'd *still* need to be engaging in that level of activity to have a TDEE of just 2.7K. The reality is the average person simply does not have 4-8 hours every day to devote to, or more importantly access to the equipment resources to, exercise at that level of energy expenditure. And that's without even addressing motivation.
When I stop counting and logging I can easily, without even thinking about it, without gorging/"binging"/whatever slip back into cooking and eating habits that result in the intake of 3.5-4K calories a day as that sedentary woman. Heck, I've done it since counting and logging. Multiple times.
If I boost my activity to the common increase of walking three times a week for two hours (an easy to moderate hike), it only increases my TDEE to something like 2.2K calories if average all available equations per SailRabbit. From my current of around 1.9K not doing so. If I didn't keep track of what I was eating, I'd still be overeating by nearly 1X (100% increase) over TDEE and I'd still be steadily gaining weight despite the "significant" (for me) increase in exercise (i.e., 0 hours/week to 6). I don't know about you, but this would frustrate me to the point of saying 'eff it'. In fact, I have done exactly that multiple times in the past.
So after a decade of gaining and losing the same 20, then 30, then 40, and now 60+ lbs, what have I learned? How much I exercise doesn't matter, though it does allow me to eat more if/when I do on a routine basis. What matters is how many calories I shove into my pie hole every day.5 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »"But an increased heart rate doesn't mean you burn more calories. "
Doesn't it though? Weight loss is largely through respiration and your heart-rate is a very good indication of your respiratory activity.
"If I go running at 40 degrees C my heart rate is much higher than when I go running at 15C, yet the calorie burn is about the same"
Are you sure about that?
"If I'm completely unfit and my heart rate goes up big time due to that from cycling a certain distance then the calorie burn is still pretty much the same if I'm at the same weight but fitter and cycle the same distance yet my heart rate doesn't go up so much. If I take my asthma meds I get an elevated heart rate, yet it doesn't burn more calories"
That isn't true at all. A person who is more fit will typically burn fewer calories than a person who is not fit carrying out a similar activity with all other things being equal. As you train and get fitter it actually becomes more difficult to burn calories with that activity. Your heart rate is harder to elevate, your muscle control and activation is better and more efficient.
An obese person walking a mile will burn a lot more calories than a thin person and a 200 pound male who walks 20 miles a day will likely burn less walking a mile than a 200 pound male who doesn't walk often walking a mile.
Heart-rate is very much tied to caloric usage and weight loss.
Yes. In that case, the calorie burn IS the same or similar. This is part of the issue with using HRMs to determine calories burned. Other factors, like heat, can skew the results.
The fit part is also incorrect depending on activity. For something like walking or running where we are already pretty efficient, two people who are the same weight doing the same work at the same intensity - ie running the same course at the same pace - will burn the same amount regardless of fitness level.
Something like swimming may be different because there is an element of effiency.
An obese person walking a mile will burn more than a thin person because they are moving more weight. The two 200 pound males will burn the same walking a mile unless one is significantly uphill.
HR is an indicator of effort/intensity but it is not directly tied to calorie burn. There is a relationship.0 -
3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »Lets put it this way.
If you told me you want to lose weight and I told you sure, you can lose weight but you have to pick one of these two options.
Option 1: Never eat burgers again
Option 2: You can still eat burgers and on top of that you now have motivation to go for long walks around your town, explore it a bit, walk around your local park to meet your goal of weight loss.
How come 99% of people seem to go with option 1. That is the part that confuses me to no end.
If Garmin is to be believed, I can't really do option 2.
I'm a total believer in fuelling my exercise but extra steps just doesn't up it enough for me.
I still eat burgers, but it comes with balancing the rest of my foods and more activity than just taking some extra steps in a day.
I don't necessarily believe my fitbit but on the weekend I did a good amount of just walking and at the end of the day my Charge HR stated my TDEE to be 6,420 calories (it puts my BMR around 1800 so my burn from walking was about 4600. Do I believe that is accurate? Not really. But I doubt its off by 4-fold so we are still talking a thousand or more calories burned. I also enjoyed myself quite a bit and on that day ate a Dairy Queen Blizzard, a Jumbo Jack and a 4-entree Panda Express meal in addition to other things of course.
That's what you get. I don't get near that. My Garmin step activity is very conservative. Even on a 20,000 step day I'm not getting a DQ Blizzard unless a chunk of those steps were a run.
Never made the claim, never tried to make that claim. People keep reading into what I am saying. Where did I say "I burned X while walking therefore everyone can burn X while walking" I didn't say that. I posted that because the claim was made that one cannot burn enough just by walking and I was providing an example where that clearly was not the case based on my own experience.
I never said you said everyone should. You are missing my point.
Your post is about simply adding more exercise to lose weight. One example you gave was to add more steps, go for walk (and continue to eat burgers). MY point is that simply adding steps doesn't necessarily mean that.
Well okay yes, it takes calorie counting to ensure that by eating that burger you aren't over and if you are over your goal it takes a certain number of steps to account for that burger and that number of steps will be different for different people and some people might not have time in their day to do that number of steps.
I don't get the sense we don't actually fundamentally disagree here.
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Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »Lets put it this way.
If you told me you want to lose weight and I told you sure, you can lose weight but you have to pick one of these two options.
Option 1: Never eat burgers again
Option 2: You can still eat burgers and on top of that you now have motivation to go for long walks around your town, explore it a bit, walk around your local park to meet your goal of weight loss.
How come 99% of people seem to go with option 1. That is the part that confuses me to no end.
If Garmin is to be believed, I can't really do option 2.
I'm a total believer in fuelling my exercise but extra steps just doesn't up it enough for me.
I still eat burgers, but it comes with balancing the rest of my foods and more activity than just taking some extra steps in a day.
I don't necessarily believe my fitbit but on the weekend I did a good amount of just walking and at the end of the day my Charge HR stated my TDEE to be 6,420 calories (it puts my BMR around 1800 so my burn from walking was about 4600. Do I believe that is accurate? Not really. But I doubt its off by 4-fold so we are still talking a thousand or more calories burned. I also enjoyed myself quite a bit and on that day ate a Dairy Queen Blizzard, a Jumbo Jack and a 4-entree Panda Express meal in addition to other things of course.
That's what you get. I don't get near that. My Garmin step activity is very conservative. Even on a 20,000 step day I'm not getting a DQ Blizzard unless a chunk of those steps were a run.
Never made the claim, never tried to make that claim. People keep reading into what I am saying. Where did I say "I burned X while walking therefore everyone can burn X while walking" I didn't say that. I posted that because the claim was made that one cannot burn enough just by walking and I was providing an example where that clearly was not the case based on my own experience.
I never said you said everyone should. You are missing my point.
Your post is about simply adding more exercise to lose weight. One example you gave was to add more steps, go for walk (and continue to eat burgers). MY point is that simply adding steps doesn't necessarily mean that.
Well okay yes, it takes calorie counting to ensure that by eating that burger you aren't over and if you are over your goal it takes a certain number of steps to account for that burger and that number of steps will be different for different people and some people might not have time in their day to do that number of steps.
I don't get the sense we don't actually fundamentally disagree here.
No we really don;t disagree overall.
Exercise is good. Do more. Don't go to extremes.1 -
grinning_chick wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »I have seen very few people seem to take the approach of eating the exact same as they have been but just increasing their activity level.
Above is a direct quote from the post that opened this thread. I'm not misinterpreting it or taking it out of context. You are asking why no one eats as they currently are, but just increases their activity level, to lose weight as opposed to the more common route of slashing daily caloric intake. Sometimes to unrealistic and unsustainable levels because they want the weight gone Now-Now-Now that leads to failure and abandonment of the attempt to lose weight many can see coming a mile away.
Probably because there are not enough hours in the day for the average person who needs to realistically achieve this. You do realize that the average person who is overweight/obese is eating 3, 4, 5+(+, +++) thousand calories a day, yeah? What people have lost, and need to relearn, is how many calories will maintain "x" weight regardless of activity level. Namely because caloric intake is a daily thing while activity expenditure above/beyond BMR is not.
How often, how long, and more importantly, how intense a level of exercise do you think a sedentary 42 yo, 5'7", 205 lbs, 40% BF woman would need to engage in to raise her TDEE to match the bottom number just given, to 3K calories? To just maintain? She'd need to be exercising at the professional/Olympic athlete level according to available TDEE calculators. And if that same woman got back to a perfectly "normal" BMI weight and BF% of 142 lbs./22%? She'd *still* need to be engaging in that level of activity to have a TDEE of just 2.7K. The reality is the average person simply does not have 4-8 hours every day to devote to, or more importantly access to the equipment resources to, exercise at that level of energy expenditure. And that's without even addressing motivation.
When I stop counting and logging I can easily, without even thinking about it, without gorging/"binging"/whatever slip back into cooking and eating habits that result in the intake of 3.5-4K calories a day as that sedentary woman. Heck, I've done it since counting and logging. Multiple times.
If I boost my activity to the common increase of walking three times a week for two hours (an easy to moderate hike), it only increases my TDEE to something like 2.2K calories if average all available equations per SailRabbit. From my current of around 1.9K not doing so. If I didn't keep track of what I was eating, I'd still be overeating by nearly 1X (100% increase) over TDEE and I'd still be steadily gaining weight despite the "significant" (for me) increase in exercise (i.e., 0 hours/week to 6). I don't know about you, but this would frustrate me to the point of saying 'eff it'. In fact, I have done exactly that multiple times in the past.
So after a decade of gaining and losing the same 20, then 30, then 40, and now 60+ lbs, what have I learned? How much I exercise doesn't matter, though it does allow me to eat more if/when I do on a routine basis. What matters is how many calories I shove into my pie hole every day.
Okay, I retract that statement and modify it by substituting "the amount they need to eat to maintain their weight and establish a deficit through exercise rather than decreased eating" Yes if you are overeating by 2500 calories a day you are not feasibly going to make that up through increased activity, it would be more practical to decrease your intake in that case.
But I'm not trying to say that this is true of everyone, yes there are cases where its better to focus on caloric restriction.
That said I do think the majority of people who are overweight got there by eating an extra 200 calories over their maintenance over the period of many years and that someone eating 2000 calories above their TDEE daily is a pretty extreme case.0 -
3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »Lets put it this way.
If you told me you want to lose weight and I told you sure, you can lose weight but you have to pick one of these two options.
Option 1: Never eat burgers again
Option 2: You can still eat burgers and on top of that you now have motivation to go for long walks around your town, explore it a bit, walk around your local park to meet your goal of weight loss.
How come 99% of people seem to go with option 1. That is the part that confuses me to no end.
If Garmin is to be believed, I can't really do option 2.
I'm a total believer in fuelling my exercise but extra steps just doesn't up it enough for me.
I still eat burgers, but it comes with balancing the rest of my foods and more activity than just taking some extra steps in a day.
I don't necessarily believe my fitbit but on the weekend I did a good amount of just walking and at the end of the day my Charge HR stated my TDEE to be 6,420 calories (it puts my BMR around 1800 so my burn from walking was about 4600. Do I believe that is accurate? Not really. But I doubt its off by 4-fold so we are still talking a thousand or more calories burned. I also enjoyed myself quite a bit and on that day ate a Dairy Queen Blizzard, a Jumbo Jack and a 4-entree Panda Express meal in addition to other things of course.
That's what you get. I don't get near that. My Garmin step activity is very conservative. Even on a 20,000 step day I'm not getting a DQ Blizzard unless a chunk of those steps were a run.
Never made the claim, never tried to make that claim. People keep reading into what I am saying. Where did I say "I burned X while walking therefore everyone can burn X while walking" I didn't say that. I posted that because the claim was made that one cannot burn enough just by walking and I was providing an example where that clearly was not the case based on my own experience.
I never said you said everyone should. You are missing my point.
Your post is about simply adding more exercise to lose weight. One example you gave was to add more steps, go for walk (and continue to eat burgers). MY point is that simply adding steps doesn't necessarily mean that.
Well okay yes, it takes calorie counting to ensure that by eating that burger you aren't over and if you are over your goal it takes a certain number of steps to account for that burger and that number of steps will be different for different people and some people might not have time in their day to do that number of steps.
I don't get the sense we don't actually fundamentally disagree here.
No we really don;t disagree overall.
Exercise is good. Do more. Don't go to extremes.
Yup. But if that is all I said would their be discussion? :-)0 -
When I was younger I had lost weight by not counting calories, and increasing activity (almost every day for 20-30 minutes a day I had done some kind of exercise tape). I know now that I did have a caloric deficit because I was eating so little. Jump about 10 years later to now, I had thought if I had jogged/ran every other day and ate nearly the same things/same portions I would lose weight because I was running around so much. My heart health increased for sure, my stamina was getting better but I hardly saw the scale budge. I started counting calories again and with the same amount of activity or sometimes even less, I began losing weight again. It would be great if I could get to a point where by just increasing activity (not just by jogging but through other things during the week) I could consistently lose weight, but at the moment I don't get the results that I wanted.
Turns out, my idea of portions were all topsyturvey. And I'm the type of person who would wait until starving to eat one big meal and then call it a day (so not even sure I was eating enough to maintain proper cell function/get my body into the notion that weight loss would be ok without dying).
Thankfully my intake doesn't have to be at 1200 to lose weight. I eat about 1800+-.
But yes, I do agree that most of the posts talk about how to decrease calories as opposed to increasing activity, but I feel like once people get to a comfortable place with the caloric deficit they'll be more inclined to start moving more, may it be walking, taking the stairs more. Just being overall more conscious of the little things that can be done to continue towards a healthier way of life.0 -
Younger me ramped up the exercise whenever I wanted to lose weight, but older me keeps getting injured whenever I try to increase intensity or duration too quickly.3
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3dogsrunning wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »"But an increased heart rate doesn't mean you burn more calories. "
Doesn't it though? Weight loss is largely through respiration and your heart-rate is a very good indication of your respiratory activity.
"If I go running at 40 degrees C my heart rate is much higher than when I go running at 15C, yet the calorie burn is about the same"
Are you sure about that?
"If I'm completely unfit and my heart rate goes up big time due to that from cycling a certain distance then the calorie burn is still pretty much the same if I'm at the same weight but fitter and cycle the same distance yet my heart rate doesn't go up so much. If I take my asthma meds I get an elevated heart rate, yet it doesn't burn more calories"
That isn't true at all. A person who is more fit will typically burn fewer calories than a person who is not fit carrying out a similar activity with all other things being equal. As you train and get fitter it actually becomes more difficult to burn calories with that activity. Your heart rate is harder to elevate, your muscle control and activation is better and more efficient.
An obese person walking a mile will burn a lot more calories than a thin person and a 200 pound male who walks 20 miles a day will likely burn less walking a mile than a 200 pound male who doesn't walk often walking a mile.
Heart-rate is very much tied to caloric usage and weight loss.
Yes. In that case, the calorie burn IS the same or similar. This is part of the issue with using HRMs to determine calories burned. Other factors, like heat, can skew the results.
The fit part is also incorrect depending on activity. For something like walking or running where we are already pretty efficient, two people who are the same weight doing the same work at the same intensity - ie running the same course at the same pace - will burn the same amount regardless of fitness level.
Something like swimming may be different because there is an element of effiency.
An obese person walking a mile will burn more than a thin person because they are moving more weight. The two 200 pound males will burn the same walking a mile unless one is significantly uphill.
HR is an indicator of effort/intensity but it is not directly tied to calorie burn. There is a relationship.
Hmm, yeah you maybe right. So generally with increased heart rate comes increased respiration. Weight loss is basically the expelling of C02 from the inhalation of 02 (you lose the carbon). So I'm picturing heart pounding, breathing heavy, more respiration, more C02 exchange. Are you saying that the amount of C02 produced is actually the same in the two cases and the person who is less fit and breathing heavily has less CO2 expelled per breath than the fit person?
I might be weird but I tend to think of weight loss in heterotrophs as being pretty heavily tied to respiration.0 -
I started out simply increasing my activity as part of a health initiative at my workplace. I started out with 1 15 minute walk on my afternoon break, then increased to 2 (adding one on my lunch break), then three (my first fifteen minute break which I am entitled to but hadn't been taking). Now I'm taking four, sometimes five 15 to 20 minute walks a day. I did lose weight by increasing my activity. I lost a few pounds simply by doing this.
When the workplace initiative had a month where they challenged us to cut our serving size by half for just 1 meal, I noticed a difference (who knew that I didn't need to eat half a pizza at dinner, eh?). Then the next month we were to track out calories and my sister joined this site (My Fitness Pal) to help her do so. I tracked on paper. Watching what I ate, really watching and noting how many calories I was eating compared to how much I actually needed, was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I was eating way too much. Cutting back to human portions helped me lose more weight.
CICO is an equation, you have to look at both sides. A calorie deficit can result from one side, the other or even both sides. I didn't drastically cut my calorie intake after I figured out who much I should be eating. I cut back on the excess and then added more activity to make up the difference (and to keep fit because I keep hearing about losing muscle if you simply cut back on calories). That's my take on the whole thing, for what it's worth.1 -
When I was younger I had lost weight by not counting calories, and increasing activity (almost every day for 20-30 minutes a day I had done some kind of exercise tape). I know now that I did have a caloric deficit because I was eating so little. Jump about 10 years later to now, I had thought if I had jogged/ran every other day and ate nearly the same things/same portions I would lose weight because I was running around so much. My heart health increased for sure, my stamina was getting better but I hardly saw the scale budge. I started counting calories again and with the same amount of activity or sometimes even less, I began losing weight again. It would be great if I could get to a point where by just increasing activity (not just by jogging but through other things during the week) I could consistently lose weight, but at the moment I don't get the results that I wanted.
Turns out, my idea of portions were all topsyturvey. And I'm the type of person who would wait until starving to eat one big meal and then call it a day (so not even sure I was eating enough to maintain proper cell function/get my body into the notion that weight loss would be ok without dying).
Thankfully my intake doesn't have to be at 1200 to lose weight. I eat about 1800+-.
But yes, I do agree that most of the posts talk about how to decrease calories as opposed to increasing activity, but I feel like once people get to a comfortable place with the caloric deficit they'll be more inclined to start moving more, may it be walking, taking the stairs more. Just being overall more conscious of the little things that can be done to continue towards a healthier way of life.
I didn't mean to imply activity increase without tracking calories was viable, I think if you don't track calories you are liable to just unknowingly eat more and balance it out. You have to track to keep at your prior maintenance level then increase your TDEE through activity to establish the deficit.
I'm just saying all other things being equal I think establishing a deficit via that method rather than just calorie cutting has the added benefit of improving your health and fitness level, not just decreasing your scale weight.1 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »That said I do think the majority of people who are overweight got there by eating an extra 200 calories over their maintenance over the period of many years and that someone eating 2000 calories above their TDEE daily is a pretty extreme case.
I'd think that many people who claim they don't eat much and thus cannot gain weight naturally, blaming their broken metabolism, age, or gender or anything else possibly do. Calorie creep is very real: just a drop of oil more for cooking, a slightly bigger chicken breast, a spoon of sugar not to the edge but just a big more for coffee over months or year.. it all adds up.
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I think the problem with trying to lose weight by exercising more is difficult if one expects the calorie burn will be very high. It often isn't. People start out with working out will most likely not be able to do much. As you lose weight the calorie burn for the same exercise goes down. Plus many people are not aware of the difference between gross and net burn, and most trackers track gross calories. Hey, now at my normal weight I'd need to walk about 10 miles to burn 360 net kcal. You'd need quite a lot of time to do that on a daily base. And even much more time if you play pokemon go while walking
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IMO, it's a matter of efficiency. It can be rather difficult to exercise to a level which would result in a meaningful energy deficiency day in and day out for months and sometimes even years. Injuries happen,...life happens and you're not always going to make it to the gym or whatever day in and day out...but it's pretty easy to cut out a few snacks or whatever to knock off 500 calories per day in your diet. It's efficient.
I'd also say that I see numerous people killing it in the gym...but nothing ever changes because they don't really watch their diets.
I'd also say that if I wanted to drop a few pounds, it would be difficult to up my activity...I'm already pretty active and spend a fair amount of my time training...pretty sure my wife would kill me if I did more.
Personally, I think most people who are successful in losing weight and keeping it off do a combination of both.3 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »When I was younger I had lost weight by not counting calories, and increasing activity (almost every day for 20-30 minutes a day I had done some kind of exercise tape). I know now that I did have a caloric deficit because I was eating so little. Jump about 10 years later to now, I had thought if I had jogged/ran every other day and ate nearly the same things/same portions I would lose weight because I was running around so much. My heart health increased for sure, my stamina was getting better but I hardly saw the scale budge. I started counting calories again and with the same amount of activity or sometimes even less, I began losing weight again. It would be great if I could get to a point where by just increasing activity (not just by jogging but through other things during the week) I could consistently lose weight, but at the moment I don't get the results that I wanted.
Turns out, my idea of portions were all topsyturvey. And I'm the type of person who would wait until starving to eat one big meal and then call it a day (so not even sure I was eating enough to maintain proper cell function/get my body into the notion that weight loss would be ok without dying).
Thankfully my intake doesn't have to be at 1200 to lose weight. I eat about 1800+-.
But yes, I do agree that most of the posts talk about how to decrease calories as opposed to increasing activity, but I feel like once people get to a comfortable place with the caloric deficit they'll be more inclined to start moving more, may it be walking, taking the stairs more. Just being overall more conscious of the little things that can be done to continue towards a healthier way of life.
I didn't mean to imply activity increase without tracking calories was viable, I think if you don't track calories you are liable to just unknowingly eat more and balance it out. You have to track to keep at your prior maintenance level then increase your TDEE through activity to establish the deficit.
I'm just saying all other things being equal I think establishing a deficit via that method rather than just calorie cutting has the added benefit of improving your health and fitness level, not just decreasing your scale weight.
I think I agree with you on that activity is a great tool for weight loss. I've always been active, that part is easy for me the eating part is the hard part. I enjoy the active part but I have to track food and be careful with my eating or I can easily blow my TDEE every day. I went through my life yo-yoing - when I watch what I eat, I lose, when I don't I gain. (So I'm basically always going to have to watch if I want to keep it off this time.) So you recognize that regardless, you have to watch what you eat, so I'm not sure what the argument is here. When ever I read a thread with someone eating really low calories, like 1200, I always see people suggesting they could probably eat more and still lose.2 -
sky_northern wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »When I was younger I had lost weight by not counting calories, and increasing activity (almost every day for 20-30 minutes a day I had done some kind of exercise tape). I know now that I did have a caloric deficit because I was eating so little. Jump about 10 years later to now, I had thought if I had jogged/ran every other day and ate nearly the same things/same portions I would lose weight because I was running around so much. My heart health increased for sure, my stamina was getting better but I hardly saw the scale budge. I started counting calories again and with the same amount of activity or sometimes even less, I began losing weight again. It would be great if I could get to a point where by just increasing activity (not just by jogging but through other things during the week) I could consistently lose weight, but at the moment I don't get the results that I wanted.
Turns out, my idea of portions were all topsyturvey. And I'm the type of person who would wait until starving to eat one big meal and then call it a day (so not even sure I was eating enough to maintain proper cell function/get my body into the notion that weight loss would be ok without dying).
Thankfully my intake doesn't have to be at 1200 to lose weight. I eat about 1800+-.
But yes, I do agree that most of the posts talk about how to decrease calories as opposed to increasing activity, but I feel like once people get to a comfortable place with the caloric deficit they'll be more inclined to start moving more, may it be walking, taking the stairs more. Just being overall more conscious of the little things that can be done to continue towards a healthier way of life.
I didn't mean to imply activity increase without tracking calories was viable, I think if you don't track calories you are liable to just unknowingly eat more and balance it out. You have to track to keep at your prior maintenance level then increase your TDEE through activity to establish the deficit.
I'm just saying all other things being equal I think establishing a deficit via that method rather than just calorie cutting has the added benefit of improving your health and fitness level, not just decreasing your scale weight.
I think I agree with you on that activity is a great tool for weight loss. I've always been active, that part is easy for me the eating part is the hard part. I enjoy the active part but I have to track food and be careful with my eating or I can easily blow my TDEE every day. I went through my life yo-yoing - when I watch what I eat, I lose, when I don't I gain. (So I'm basically always going to have to watch if I want to keep it off this time.) So you recognize that regardless, you have to watch what you eat, so I'm not sure what the argument is here. When ever I read a thread with someone eating really low calories, like 1200, I always see people suggesting they could probably eat more and still lose.
I agree with this. It seemed to me that the OP said that too many people here are told to restrict calories and go hungry to lose weight, when they should be advised to exercise more. But I don't agree that happens! I see posts all the time where people are struggling to lose and to stay under a super-low calorie goal, and are advised to eat more and to try to increase their activity when they can. And I see exercise and fitness posts often as well. I guess like you I don't really understand what the problem is
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