You can't outrun a fork!

Jon4189

You can't outrun a fork!

I know it is simple, but it is true, your exercise is great for moving, making yourself heart healthy, but no amount of exercise will make up for your FORK!

For weight management it's all about the Fork what you eat. I have separated what I do and what I eat into two goals, distinct from each other because, the amount of exercise required to make up for one bad meal, is more than most of us do in a week.

I have ridden over 1000 mile on my bicycles this year, and I am still overweight, I have lost 27 lbs this year. But all of the weight loss was due to forking less! I exercise for enjoyment and making my body feel better. I eat to gain or to lose weight.

This is some sage advice I got years ago that I still forget "YOU CAN'T OUTRUN A FORK!"

About myself:

I'm 57 years old, 6'2" as of August 22, 2025, I'm at 192.5 lbs—down from around 217 when I started on April 11, 2025. This is my third time using MFP (it worked each time), and I am going to not stop using it when I hit my end goal of ~178 lbs.

Nutbugs2

II couldn't agree more. I started at 3:33 in December and am now at 279. And the only reason I'm not more is because of the fork. I exercise daily and have for years. My goodness I used to hike 6 Mi a day 5 days a week at 333 lb and stayed that way. I don't care what all the fancy diets say it really is about calories in.

spiriteagle99

You can, but it's not easy.

I know several people who have lost 50+ pounds while thruhiking the Appalachian or other long trail. Most gained it back as soon as they stopped walking 12-20 miles a day. So you can lose weight with a lot of exercise, but is it sustainable?

For me, it's a combination of calories in and calories out. I walk 3 miles a day and run 30 miles a week. That allows me a lot of freedom in what I eat. I log and pay attention to how much I eat, so I can maintain my 50 pound weight loss, but thanks to a lot of exercise I can have ice cream or cookies for dessert and drink the occasional beer. I have the time and energy to devote to exercise on a daily basis. Many don't.

AnnPT77

Usually, yeah.

But it depends on how much of an overachiever a person's fork has been.

Looking back, we've had a few folks here who had a very slow creeping on of body weight when their lifestyle changed - going from a semi-active job to a full-on desk job, or moving from a big house/garden with lots of chores to a one storey condo. Sometimes people like that can creep their weight back down again by intentionally yet moderately increasing activity - formal exercise or daily life stuff, or both - then stay at a healthy weight that way.

Is that the most common story? By far, not. Would a seriously overweight person need to throw their life totally out of sane balance to reach a healthy weight in a reasonable timespan while changing only the exercise side of the equation? Sure.

Heck, I'm a poster child for that. I went from a sedentary couch lump before cancer treatment to a very active person after treatment, after a gradual build-up training hard six days most weeks and even competing (not always unsuccessfully) . . . but stayed class 1 obese for a dozen years doing that, more or less weight stable.

I can not-eat a peanut butter sandwich in zero minutes. A pretty hard hour-ish workout would be necessary for a person my size to burn peanut-butter-sandwich-equivalent calories. One of those things is quicker and easier than the other, absolutely.

But calorie balance is the key thing. Outrunning forks, or out-forking runs, that's just slogans. Underfueling is just as silly as overdoing either of exercise or food intake. Balance FTW.

Since we're doing demographics: I'm 69F, 5'5", 130-point-something pounds this morning, been somewhere in the vicinity of that weight for 9+ years now, after about a year of loss from class 1 obese to a healthy weight, and around 30 previous years of overweight/obesity. I'm menopausal and severely hypothyroid (medicated), and have been both for around 25 years.

Not going to lie: Getting routinely athletically active in my late 40s/early 50s was a huuuuge quality of life improvement, and a big health improvement even though I stayed overfat for another dozen years. I did gain muscle mass at that close-to-constant weight in those years, though - got a couple sizes smaller.

Getting the eating side under control and losing the weight was another huge improvement to quality of life and health. The combination of reasonable fitness and healthy weight is truly gangbusters, at least for me. I won't deprecate either one.

I'd say I've been successful with MFP only once. I hope to keep that count at one from here on out. 🤞

IMO, that's about finding personally sustainable, practical, ideally enjoyable but at minimum tolerable/practical routine habits for BOTH eating and activity . . . habits that can run almost on autopilot when other parts of life get challenging, because eventually they will.

LiveOnceBeHappy

I bicycle and play pickleball every day. There are plenty of extremely overweight people who do both and plenty of thin people too! I track my exercise for biking and pickleball and close my exercise rings daily. The overweight people must be consuming a lot of calories because both activities burn a lot!

rsccore

It depends on what you mean. If you mean when you are trying to lose weight, then yes, you have to restrict your body's desire to eat, whether you are burning additional calories or not, or you will often simply eat back the calories burned. But if you mean to maintain a healthy weight and not gain, then it is generally the opposite, you can't restrict enough (long term) to counteract a lack of activity. Think of it as your body simply needing a minimum number of calories per day on average, regardless of level of activity. You have to lose the weight and find that level of activity that allows you to eat normally to satiety thereafter, or you eventually regain the weight. Find your own balance, but it will be a balance.

It is a fairly simple model. Eat less and exerecise more to maintain a deficit, lose weight, and get (back) into shape. Then exercise normally and eat normally thereafter. It's cliche, but find actvities you enjoy and can discipline yourself to do regularly.

That being said, in the past, we didn't have to exercise to maintain a reasonable weight. And by "exercise" I mean intentionally move for some period of time. We mostly got sufficient activity in day-to-day life, some more than others, but obesity was much less common. And this is an issue because it seems to indicate that exercise is not in (most of) our nature (duh). You have to either overcome that, or find a lifestyle that is more naturally active. Usually, it is a combination of both.

Womona

I’ve always heard that weight loss starts in the kitchen, but “you can’t outrun a fork” is so much more fun!!