In a calorie deficit, scale isn't moving, Split
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Well, in that case, you may want to try to understand why some types of (dis)information lead some people to believe that calories are just physics and don't apply to human physiology:Rockmama1111 wrote: »Also, it's incredibly presumptuous to assume anyone has less information than you and is therefore making an arbitrary choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DboTyNu-FLk&t=507s
Jason Fung is generally regarded as a quack, even if he is a genuine nephrologist, but there is far more than him.
Here is Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hWntvp0_4
This is painful to watch, because a lot of what he says really is established science. He is just adding a sauce that some people may well like and wish to be true, but is not.
And here is Giles Yeo, a professor of molecular neuroendocrinology giving a lecture at the Royal Institution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQJ0Z0DRumg
This lecture is especially painful to me because this is really an excellent lecture. It is essentially only the title and a bit at the very end that is really objectionable. There is also a Q&A and that is equally excellent, arguably even better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5F0x1HZSBs
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And believe it or not, there are people who should know better that claim exercise doesn't count towards creating a calorie deficit. Not sure who that might be, but I've heard there are people who espouse that.7
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While on the phone last night I didn't have time to quote the utter nonsense above, so I just replied then with Chappelle's "I didn't put my feet on Charlie Murphy's couch", immediately followed by video of him doing that and saying that.BartBVanBockstaele wrote: »Note that I did NOT write that losing weight is dying. I wrote that losing weight is taking in less energy than you need to stay alive. Most people don't die from that: they use their energy stores to get that energy. Once those energy stores are depleted, their body starts to cannibalise itself and the person eventually dies, but –and that is something I usually don't mention because it doesn't change anything related to energy– it is *possible* though not certain, that the person will continue to live for some time but with death as a guaranteed outcome no matter the therapies that are tried to save her/him: if death is caused by lack of energy intake, the person will lose the ability to synthesise protein at some point and die, I assume rather painfully, but I have never seen a credible report on that.
In other words, you must be taking in less energy than you need to stay alive, or you will not lose weight
Ludicrous stuff. LOL.4 -
Impressive dfferences made by exercise:A meta-analysis of the past 25 years of weight loss research using diet, exercise or diet plus exercise intervention
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9347414/
An increase of a whopping 300 g attributable to exercise on a diet total of 10.7 kg or a difference of 2.8%. If that doesn't show that exercise is useless for weight loss, I don't know what is. The difference is so tiny that it doesn't even make plausible sense. Any statistician will be able to tell you that this difference is meaningless.
And yes, the difference made by exercise only is a bit bigger, but it is small nonetheless and it is at leat seemingly contradicted by the diet+exercise results.
And that difference isn't even included in the conclusion:
That said, this is an abstract, and abstracts are notoriously unreliable, which is why no one should rely on them.0 -
Same for this one:Diet, exercise or diet with exercise: comparing the effectiveness of treatment options for weight-loss and changes in fitness for adults (18-65 years old) who are overfat, or obese; systematic review and meta-analysis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25973403/
I can not repeat it enough: no one is rubbishing exercise for health, but as an intervention for weight loss it is useless, unless you take it to extremes most people will never be able to reach. Exceptions exist, the Biggest Loser is a prime example of that, but even they used a calorie-restricted diet in combination with the ridiculously high and intense amounts of exercise.0 -
No one claims there is no science. However, that science confirms exactly what medicine claims: that exercise is next to useless for weight loss, and that goes against what exercise proponents like to claim.
This is the only "positive" one of the three. It is an abstract. Abstracts are notoriously unreliable and no ethical scientist would take them at face value.Efficacy of Exercise Intervention for Weight Loss in Overweight and Obese Adolescents: Meta-Analysis and Implications
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27139723/
As a result, we have no idea what type of intervention was made and we cannot conclude anything, except for surmising that it is *possible* to lose weight with exercise. No one claims otherwise since exercise does use energy and we can therefore guarantee that no one will gain fat weight because of exercise, but we don't need a vague abstract to know that.
Reality is that established medicine teaches that exercise is largely a waste of time for weight loss. It is great for many other things, but not for weight loss.0 -
BartBVanBockstaele wrote: »
Impressive dfferences made by exercise:A meta-analysis of the past 25 years of weight loss research using diet, exercise or diet plus exercise intervention
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9347414/
An increase of a whopping 300 g attributable to exercise on a diet total of 10.7 kg or a difference of 2.8%. If that doesn't show that exercise is useless for weight loss, I don't know what is. The difference is so tiny that it doesn't even make plausible sense. Any statistician will be able to tell you that this difference is meaningless.
And yes, the difference made by exercise only is a bit bigger, but it is small nonetheless and it is at leat seemingly contradicted by the diet+exercise results.
And that difference isn't even included in the conclusion:
That said, this is an abstract, and abstracts are notoriously unreliable, which is why no one should rely on them.
Looks to me like exercise makes a pretty big difference.
If diet alone will get you a 10.7 kg loss and exercise alone will get you a 2.9 kg loss, exercise alone without making any changes in diet will achieve 27% of the weight loss as diet alone. That is far from insignificant. It's actually much larger than I would have thought. It is interesting you don't acknowledge that this is VERY significant. Not surprising because your thesis is that exercise is useless for weight loss. Once again, THE NUMBERS YOU PROVIDED show otherwise.
It's odd indeed that combining the two only shows a 3% greater weight reduction than diet alone.
This is also a year later, right? So people who did diet plus exercise may have given up at some point in all that time. Who knows? Not me. Could be problems with the research. Also, to discount a 3% increase in loss rate as unimportant is disingenuous in my opinion.
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BartBVanBockstaele wrote: »
Impressive dfferences made by exercise:A meta-analysis of the past years of weight loss research using diet, exercise or diet plus exercise intervention
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9347414/
An increase of a whopping 300 g attributable to exercise on a diet total of 10.7 kg or a difference of 2.8%. If that doesn't show that exercise is useless for weight loss, I don't know what is. The difference is so tiny that it doesn't even make plausible sense. Any statistician will be able to tell you that this difference is meaningless.
And yes, the difference made by exercise only is a bit bigger, but it is small nonetheless and it is at leat seemingly contradicted by the diet+exercise results.
And that difference isn't even included in the conclusion:
That said, this is an abstract, and abstracts are notoriously unreliable, which is why no one should rely on them.
Once again, what people generally are saying here is to account for your exercise calories in plotting your path to weight loss. I haven't seen anyone here in this thread say "rely on only exercise for your weight loss". (I've seen a tiny number of people in other threads say that's what they actually did, FWIW.)
Let's say it really is 2.8% of calories (which I know is not the same as weight loss), but it's a nice low percent. Would we suggest that someone ignore 2.8% of their food calories? No. We'd tell them to log that food, account for it, as accurately as practical, without obsessing. (There is actual research about how to do estimates for exercise. Perfect and precise? No. But it's not that hard to reach the "within 20%" kind of accuracy that's claimed for food labels, for many types of exercise.)
Do we tell a bricklayer's apprentice who's remodeling their house in off-hours to use the same activity level setting as a reference library who sits at a desk all day then knits while watching TV in the evening? No. We tell people to account for that difference as they plan their path to weight loss.
That's the message for exercise, too. Some people exercise more. Some people exercise less. They should account for that as part of the overall calorie balance picture. That's it.
You don't have to exercise. But don't tell other people who do exercise to ignore exercise calories when they're calorie counting, any more than you'd tell them to ignore calories from healthy foods because nutritious foods are mostly for health, and there's evidence that people lose weight about the same way on equal calories of Twinkies or McDonald's meals. (<= intentional exaggeration).
Exercise calories are part of calorie balance. Log exercise separately, get an even more approximate estimate by considering exercise load in TDEE, either can work. Ignoring exercise calorie expenditure is a bad plan, unless exercise level is trivial.
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I love the irony that I started reading this thread on the sofa then decided if I read it whilst easy riding on the bike it would help me to make calorie deficit for the day, knowing I have indulgent meals planned for later in the day.
It took me around 45-50mins to read all the pages during which I burned 382 calories
winning!
Exercise is critical for me personally to achieve calorie deficit without feeling like I’m ‘starving’ myself. But then I enjoy exercise, clearly Bart did not. It’s important to remember we’re all different. Some of us thrive on the endorphins from a good workout and don’t see it as a ‘chore’ or ‘torture’ or even indeed unpleasant at all.3 -
sarabushby wrote: »I love the irony that I started reading this thread on the sofa then decided if I read it whilst easy riding on the bike it would help me to make calorie deficit for the day, knowing I have indulgent meals planned for later in the day.
It took me around 45-50mins to read all the pages during which I burned 382 calories winning!
Exercise is critical for me personally to achieve calorie deficit without feeling like I’m ‘starving’ myself. But then I enjoy exercise, clearly Bart did not. It’s important to remember we’re all different. Some of us thrive on the endorphins from a good workout and don’t see it as a ‘chore’ or ‘torture’ or even indeed unpleasant at all.
It's a pity that this thread is in Health and Weight Loss, rather than Debate Club.
If it were in Debate Club, I'd observe that cognitive biases (such as rationalization) are anyone's right at n=1, even if the end result may be objectively dysfunctional. Idiosyncrasies are part of what make other people interesting, if you ask me.
So if someone doesn't want to eat their veggies, or do exercise, or any specific thing that others may see as beneficial and even enjoyable, that's fine with me.
But when they want (need?) to believe that their approach is not just right for them, but objectively The Right Universal Answer - that veggies are icky, unhelpful, unnecessary for all, or unhealthful; that exercise is unproductive, whatever - then then they try to convince others to follow their idiosyncratic, maybe non-mainstream science, personally-appropriate course . . . well, that's kinda toxic, IMO, or at least psychologically odd (insecure, or something?).
If I want to do some unusual thing - "one weird trick", maybe?
- well, why not? If I must convince others that it's universal, that I'm an insightful iconoclastic Warrior for Truth because I want to do some offbeat thing . . . I dunno. Good odds it's wrong, IMO.
It's fine for me to be me. Trying to convince others to be me . . . in the face of even modestly adequate countervailing evidence . . . that's wrong, IMO.
Even more judge-y comment: People should have more actual self-confidence.1 -
sarabushby wrote: »I love the irony that I started reading this thread on the sofa then decided if I read it whilst easy riding on the bike it would help me to make calorie deficit for the day, knowing I have indulgent meals planned for later in the day.
It took me around 45-50mins to read all the pages during which I burned 382 calories winning!
I got 4K steps in just reading this split. That’s an extra Easter egg for me tonight. 😏
Loved the debate and the amount of energy some people put in.
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