What kind of exercise have you done ?

KimberlyRuffalo

hello new to this site. Looking for ways to keep the weight decreasing. Thank you, Kim

AnnPT77

Honestly, for weight loss, exercise is a lower return on invested time and energy than managing the eating side of the equation, for most people.

For the typical person doing typical amounts of exercise, the exercise burns around 5% of their total calorie expenditure, according to research. It might range up to 15% of calories among very active regular people, but that's quite a lot to maintain while having good overall life balance - enough time and energy for job, family, social life, home chores, non-exercise hobbies, etc.

I'm not saying it never helps, but I am saying it's fairly common for people to over-estimate the weight loss impact of exercise. (That's without even considering that there's a common phenomenon called "energy compensation" or "calorie compensation" in which people who exercise a lot can tend to burn fewer calories doing daily life stuff, so the net calories from exercise are lower than one might expect.)

If you want to know what kinds of exercise other people do, one option would be to take a look at threads like this one and others, where MFP people talk about the exercise they do:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10705619/what-was-your-work-out-today

Even though it's not a major contributor to weight loss for most of us, exercise is worth doing for health, appearance, and fun. It does burn a few more calories, so we can eat a little more (and potentially get more nutrition) while losing weight at the same sensible rate.

Your title asks what we have done. As context, I'm in year 9+ of maintaining a healthy weight, after having lost from class 1 obese to a healthy weight right before that. The exercise type and volume is about the same now as the exercise I did for a dozen years while overweight/obese. During weight loss, I was a bit more consistent with strength training than I usually am, in order to increase chances of holding on to as much existing muscle as possible while losing fat. (To my detriment, I don't usually do enough strength training.)

These days, I mostly row and cycle. In Winter, it's machine rowing and stationary biking, because it gets cold, snowy and icy here. In better weather, it's on-water rowing and cycling on the local paved trail system, though I haven't done much cycling this summer because of a medical situation. I'm active for around an hour 4-6 days most weeks, including some fairly intense work.

In the past and occasionally more recently, I've done canoeing, martial arts, yoga, various styles of aerobics, clogging, weight lifting, core exercise routines, weight machine circuits, cross-country skiing, spin classes, swimming, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.

Find something fun, and do that - ideally something that raises your heart rate a bit, and that challenges your current strength. Don't overdo for current fitness level, because overdoing is counter-productive either for weight loss (because fatigue makes us drag through the day) or for fitness improvement (because recovery, the time between workouts, is where the magic happens - the body rebuilding better than before).

An exercise you enjoy so do regularly is 100% more beneficial for weight loss or fitness than some theoretically perfect exercise that feels miserable so gets procrastinated at the slightest excuse and probably eventually is given up altogether. At minimum, if fun is out of the question, it should at minimum be tolerable and practical.

Best wishes!