Is there a way to lose bodyfat with just EXERCISE (including cardio, strength training etc) alone?
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amusedmonkey wrote: »Everyone keeps saying you can't out-train a bad diet as if it's automatically assumed the diet will be bad. One can out-train a good diet that has no calorie counting. If he is aware of how much he usually eats and makes effort not to eat more than he does he will eventually lose weight if he includes some good burns into his routine.
Calorie counting has been fantastic for me. I do not find logging annoying, but we have to accept that some people do. As long as he burns more than he consumes, it does not matter which method he uses to get there.
Thank you for that :-)
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amusedmonkey wrote: »Everyone keeps saying you can't out-train a bad diet as if it's automatically assumed the diet will be bad. One can out-train a good diet that has no calorie counting. If he is aware of how much he usually eats and makes effort not to eat more than he does he will eventually lose weight if he includes some good burns into his routine.
Calorie counting has been fantastic for me. I do not find logging annoying, but we have to accept that some people do. As long as he burns more than he consumes, it does not matter which method he uses to get there.
Thank you for that :-)
You are welcome, but you have to understand that as you lose weight you body burns less and less both during exercise and rest. If you are going this route you will have to gradually decrease your food intake and/or increase your exercise every time your weight loss slows down to a crawl or halts.
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Using TDEE that was calculated once is also inaccurate. Since this number can vary if you did more or less, there could be an overshoot of how many calories that should be subtracted to lose the weight. Use the most conservative activity data to (no exercise that day) to calculate this number then subtracting off 300 or so and then you may see the 1 lb loss. Otherwise, you may be discouraged that you didn't lose the pound.
P.S. Are you also drinking enough water? If you are hungry, drink water first to see if it is thirst or true hunger and it doesn't even count towards calories so you can drink as much of that as you want!
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I'm not considering eating non-stop junk food. How about those people that eat whatever they want never diet but never put on weight? There are people like this. The fact is a lot of them just move more. They've always been athletes, or worked out with weights since high school or whatever. In fact half of the success stories in fitness and bodybuilding are from people who were always fit in some way, and just let themselves go, but then they're able to get back in shape easier than I do.
It's metabolism and genetics.
You see professional atheletes at the highest level that move around plenty but tell us that they had to hire a chef and nutritionist to drop 20 pounds. Why? Because it's about nutrition. They can run around all day but if they neglect their diet, they're just negating all the hard work they do burning calories. We've all watched althetes gain weight during the season they are competing. It's because they aren't eating right. It's not just about junk food. It's just an excess of calories.
As a woman, I have quite a few girl friends that are stick thin but are fairly sedentary. You can take two people that live the exact same life, but one may be bigger than the other. The smaller one just is naturally smaller and it has nothing to do with him/her moving more than the bigger one.0 -
So first of all I think what you're really asking is whether or not it's possible to lose weight without tracking calories.
It certainly is for some people but it may not be possible without some other form of restriction somewhere, and/or without taking the time to develop habits around food that facilitate weight loss.
I do think that short term tracking is highly beneficial to help this process along as it can help you become aware of proper portion sizes.
I also think there are going to be preferential aspects of dieting that will differ from person to person so it can become difficult to recommend a framework that is going to apply to everyone. That being said, I've been experimenting with this both for myself and for a couple of clients. I've blogged about it here and you can feel free to take a look at it just in case you get anything of value from it. I don't claim this advice to be universally applicable to everyone -- this is just a general set of ideas that has been helpful for me and a few others, and I'm sure I'll add to or modify this as I get more experience doing this myself and coaching others:
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/SideSteel/view/methods-without-logging-697613
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At some point in the calorie counting you will KNOW what is a proper portion for you to make meals. And what is nothing but empty calories. My food may be a bit repetitive but I know I can have a fried egg sandwich and some fruit for breakfast, my premade chicken, green beans and brown rice for lunch, prepackaged 3.5 oz greek yogurts and more fruit for snacks, and if I'm careful with dinner I can even have a few beers.
I do make my frozen lunches in advance because of my long work schedules and proximately to too many fast food restaurants. Yes it may take a couple of hours, but at the end of it I have 22 frozen meals to take to work, at a cost of $2 each. Money and calorie saving.
When I want to splurge on my eating, I workout more. I don't know if you call it losing weight with exercise alone. It sounds like what you want is to know your maintenance level and then exercise to lose, whereas MFP is set up to automatically put your food level at a deficit so that you can lose without exercise.
I guess its what in works for you. I don't have a great deal of time/energy to workout hours on end, so I fit some workouts in with eating at a deficit.
But nothing will help you more than portion control, which is really what calorie counting is.0 -
I've lost approx. 10 percent body fat in the last year while staying the same weight. Blah blah blah about whether the measurement system was 100% accurate...I don't care. My pants are a smaller size, my veins are popping, and my pictures look totally different. I have also gained a lot of muscle. I followed a program called Eat to Perform (google it). Basically I eat starchy carbs around my workouts and try to eat 1 gram of protein per lb of body mass per day.
I Crossfit 3-4x per week, powerlift 3-4x per week, take an olympic lifting class, do yoga 2x per week and run or hike 1x per week. So, I work out a lot. But, I eat at maintenance, which for me is about 2600-3000 calories per day. I tracked my macros for several months. Now I pretty much eat intuitively. I had been calorie counting for many years, so there are no surprises for me in terms of calorie counting. If I wait til end of day and then log to check, I am always very close to where I thought I was.
As an aside, during this time, my bench went up 60#, my squat went up 100 pounds, and my deadlift went up 115 pounds. I PR'd a trail race that I do every year as well and hit some new PR's on my Crossfit baseline test, 500 m row time, etc.
If you like to exercise a lot, this might work for you.0 -
CLA produces very minimal results at best and appetite suppressants don't teach anyone how to control eating habits. That's why they're not advocated here.The only way I can think of that that MIGHT work would be with a combination of CLA and appetite suppressants, but MFP doesn't advocate supplements....
A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
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Using TDEE that was calculated once is also inaccurate. Since this number can vary if you did more or less, there could be an overshoot of how many calories that should be subtracted to lose the weight. Use the most conservative activity data to (no exercise that day) to calculate this number then subtracting off 300 or so and then you may see the 1 lb loss. Otherwise, you may be discouraged that you didn't lose the pound.
P.S. Are you also drinking enough water? If you are hungry, drink water first to see if it is thirst or true hunger and it doesn't even count towards calories so you can drink as much of that as you want!
The best guestimate is my tdee is about 2200 -- subtract 500 from that and you get 1700 kcal - but I'm going to try to increase my exercise, so hopefully this will go up.
Probably not drinking as much water as I should, but am drinking some every day in addition to anything else I drink.0 -
A purposeful diet provides the opportunity to maximize fat loss. Not just the calorie counting dimension but the macronutrient percentages and sugar intake. I'm learning that hormonal levels (e.g. insulin, cortisol, etc.) play a big role in what your body is consuming. Through a couple of Resting and Active Metabolic Assessments, I found out that I was a pretty efficient fat burner during activity but at rest I was a 70/30 Carb/Fat burner. I also ate a ton of fruit - great for antioxidants etc. but was playing with blood sugar levels/insulin secretion. Not an issue in terms of diabetes but in terms of what I ended up burning. I also ate a lot of nuts - healthy fats but it drove my fat intake to 40+%. I'm only about 2 weeks into this new journey my <new> nutritionist put me on and I'm eating around the same number of calories (maybe a couple hundred less/day), but eating a 30/40/30 Carb/Protein/Fat diet, replaced my healthy fruit-based smoothies with green-based smoothies and limiting my daily sugars to 25g (effectively I've taken fruit out of my diet for now). Exercising about the same and I've dropped 6 pounds in these two weeks and lowered my BMI over 1%. Still very early into this new protocol but it's made me a believer that if you want to reduce body fat, leading with the right diet is the optimal way to get results.0
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I know my lowest weight was when I was walking 40 minutes to and 40 minutes from work everyday. I wouldn't say I was consciously counting cals at the time, but I was also doing some exercise in the evenings and had a job that kept me on my feet all day. Even then, it was one eye on the scale. Have a pizza if I wanted it, have whatever I wanted to eat whenever, and when my weight inevitably crept up a bit it was back to being 'good' for a couple of weeks. I had obviously found MY balance, but this will be different for everyone. One thing I will say is that after a long time counting calories you start to get a good feel for the calories in foods, what you can eat in a day etc, and it does become less of a chore.0
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amusedmonkey wrote: »Everyone keeps saying you can't out-train a bad diet as if it's automatically assumed the diet will be bad.
No, we say because it's truism about weight loss. If you eat a bad diet, you can't out train it. Don't read more into it than that.One can out-train a good diet that has no calorie counting.
By definition, you don't need to out train a good diet.If he is aware of how much he usually eats and makes effort not to eat more than he does he will eventually lose weight if he includes some good burns into his routine.
That really only works if you eat the same things every day. The problem with monotonous diets is that people don't tend to stick them. Real life gets in the way. Sure you eat chicken breast and asparagus on Sunday and you're doing fine but come Monday you forgot to do your grocery shopping the day before so you impulse buy a turkey and cheddar panini at the supermarket deli. On Tuesday, you decide to try something new like making your own pizza. You try all kinds of cheese and meats on it. You eat 1/3 of it. On Wed, it's your niece's birthday and you have a piece of spice cake with cream frosting and a scoop of ice cream. Thursday you work late and grab a Chipotle salad on the way home. It's just a salad so you adding sour cream and guacamole is OK, right? Friday your co-workers talk you into going out for Mongolian BBQ. Next week every agrees to sushi and you'll be eating eel for the first time! Saturday is a cookout with burgers, hot dogs and corn on the cob and one or maybe two or perhaps three beers. Now, how many calories did you eat that week? Did you go over or not? Can you honestly hope to guestimate and expect to be in the right ball park?
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So first of all I think what you're really asking is whether or not it's possible to lose weight without tracking calories.
It certainly is for some people but it may not be possible without some other form of restriction somewhere, and/or without taking the time to develop habits around food that facilitate weight loss.
I do think that short term tracking is highly beneficial to help this process along as it can help you become aware of proper portion sizes.
I also think there are going to be preferential aspects of dieting that will differ from person to person so it can become difficult to recommend a framework that is going to apply to everyone. That being said, I've been experimenting with this both for myself and for a couple of clients. I've blogged about it here and you can feel free to take a look at it just in case you get anything of value from it. I don't claim this advice to be universally applicable to everyone -- this is just a general set of ideas that has been helpful for me and a few others, and I'm sure I'll add to or modify this as I get more experience doing this myself and coaching others:
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/SideSteel/view/methods-without-logging-697613
Logical thought out response that bares repeating.
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You don't have to count calories. You could just do the portion control method with a meat, carb, fat at every meal and fill half your plate with veggies and have two fruits a day for a snack. Don't snack at night (my worst downfall). Making some changes instead of counting every calorie works (fruit instead of chips, one piece of meatloaf and a scoop of potatoes or a big steak and no carb - either of those meals with a huge salad and no second helpings, etc.) and can go a long way to help see results. Adding exercise will help increase your efforts. Exercise played a HUGE role in my weight loss, continuing efforts, and overall mental wellbeing. It did some pretty nice things for my shape as well (better posture, looking better in clothes). The problem with only exercise is that as it tends to (usually) make you hungrier, and if you are not consciously controlling your diet in some way, you probably won't lose much weight. I like to bike, run, and lift weights. I change it up with kickboxing and Zumba as well. Personally I think lifting weights makes me hungrier (sure it increases your metabolism, but that's what makes you hungry - the catch 22 here), so I make sure I eat a fruit/protein mix RIGHT after I workout. That helps ALOT. Usually Greek yogurt and strawberries with Stevia or a banana and a hard boiled egg, or a smoothie. Yes you have to put SOME effort into your diet, but there is a happy medium.0
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peter56765 wrote: »amusedmonkey wrote: »Everyone keeps saying you can't out-train a bad diet as if it's automatically assumed the diet will be bad.
No, we say because it's truism about weight loss. If you eat a bad diet, you can't out train it. Don't read more into it than that.One can out-train a good diet that has no calorie counting.
By definition, you don't need to out train a good diet.If he is aware of how much he usually eats and makes effort not to eat more than he does he will eventually lose weight if he includes some good burns into his routine.
That really only works if you eat the same things every day. The problem with monotonous diets is that people don't tend to stick them. Real life gets in the way. Sure you eat chicken breast and asparagus on Sunday and you're doing fine but come Monday you forgot to do your grocery shopping the day before so you impulse buy a turkey and cheddar panini at the supermarket deli. On Tuesday, you decide to try something new like making your own pizza. You try all kinds of cheese and meats on it. You eat 1/3 of it. On Wed, it's your niece's birthday and you have a piece of spice cake with cream frosting and a scoop of ice cream. Thursday you work late and grab a Chipotle salad on the way home. It's just a salad so you adding sour cream and guacamole is OK, right? Friday your co-workers talk you into going out for Mongolian BBQ. Next week every agrees to sushi and you'll be eating eel for the first time! Saturday is a cookout with burgers, hot dogs and corn on the cob and one or maybe two or perhaps three beers. Now, how many calories did you eat that week? Did you go over or not? Can you honestly hope to guestimate and expect to be in the right ball park?
I just see this statement thrown around whenever a person prefers not to count and spend extra effort on exercise, who already said he will not be stuffing his face with high calorie food all day.
And yes, you need to "out-train" any old diet to lose weight. Using the term loosely to mean burn more than you consume through your diet.
All the situations you mentioned can be controlled without counting calories. Isn't that what people who are naturally thin do? For someone who is not naturally thin there will be a learning curve, but it's doable. Impulse buy panini? Have as soup and a big bowl of green salad 10 minutes before you sit down for the panini and you're full enough not to overeat it. Want to make pizza? Have something low calorie but satiating for breakfast. A cookout or a party? Eat light for a few days and train extra, then indulge at the party within reason.
Did you go over your calories that week? The scale will tell you and you will gradually learn how to cope and adjust. You have a mental picture of the size of your portions and your eyeballing skills get better the more you use them.
Being aware, and not mindlessly putting things in your mouth + having the ability to devise strategies to fit your personal preferences and circumstances is all it takes. It may mean slower progress, some weeks of not losing, other weeks of losing too fast, or maintaining. It will be less predictable, but as long as one takes more steps forward than he does backward it all works out.
I maintained for about 5 months before resuming my weight loss and it was without counting a single calories. Why do I count now you say? Because I enjoy numbers and like the predictability.
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The problem with your approach is, in my opinion, that if you exercise a lot you get super hungry, and then, if you aren't watching what you eat the calories WILL creep up. They just naturally will.0
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Strength training will help build lean muscle mass, which will increase your metabolism and help your body become a fat burning machine.
High intense cardiovascular things, such as spin class, biking, tennis (esp. cardio tennis), running classes - things that would cause your exertion to go anaerobic, then recover is a good way to torch calories.
I realize it is a pain to track everything you eat - we are creatures of habit and tend to eat the same foods for the majority of the time, try tracking a few days here and in combination with activity to get a good idea of calories in/calories out. Plus, as you increase your activity, you will be hungrier, so you want to make sure you are getting enough calories to support your activity, otherwise you will binge.
Hope this helps and find things that you enjoy doing, because it should be fun!0 -
heavy lifting and exlax might work ….0
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Wait - so the 3 minutes it takes in a day to count calories is more effort than the 2-3 hours a day it will take to exercise off your bad diet?
I'm in no way advocating a bad diet.
There are some forms of exercise I enjoy doing, or at least that don't seem like work.
To say it only take 3 minutes a day to count calories isn't the whole picture. For one thing you don't do it once, although I suppose if I could remember what I ate that day at the end, it would work. (Shouldn't be too hard, but sometimes you over look some snacks, as well as having to remember exactly the portions you ate, and specifically what you added, did I have half a tablespoon of mayo and a teaspoon of ketchup or was it just one full tablespoon of mayo.) For another thing you're going okay, so what do I have left to eat, 1200 calories, okay that's two 600 calorie meals (lunch and dinner), but wait I'm having that 800 calorie dinner, so that leaves 400 for lunch, okay, so lunch comes around but you forgot to add in that soda (no comments about cutting out soda), so now you can't eat that 800 calorie dinner, you have to make it a 600 calorie dinner again.
It's most likely I'm doing it all wrong, yeah say what you want about pre-planning and pre-making your meals but now you've turned a 3 minute chore into 30 minutes, and then you spent a whole half a day at the beginning of the week pre-cooking some of your meals.
So you may be condescending if you want, I'll continue to look for the exercises that burn more so I don't have to restrict myself to just all-you-can-eat brocolli and a 4 oz steak (4 ounces of steak, HAH!)
I pre-log all my meals and it takes me five minutes max…hell, I have my diary filled out through wednesday and I did that sitting here watching football …took about eight minutes total …
OP - no offense, but you just sound lazy. Until you are reedy to make the necessary changes and commit to a meal and exercise plan that 220 pounds is not going to go anywhere….
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Wait - so the 3 minutes it takes in a day to count calories is more effort than the 2-3 hours a day it will take to exercise off your bad diet?
I'm in no way advocating a bad diet.
There are some forms of exercise I enjoy doing, or at least that don't seem like work.
To say it only take 3 minutes a day to count calories isn't the whole picture. For one thing you don't do it once, although I suppose if I could remember what I ate that day at the end, it would work. (Shouldn't be too hard, but sometimes you over look some snacks, as well as having to remember exactly the portions you ate, and specifically what you added, did I have half a tablespoon of mayo and a teaspoon of ketchup or was it just one full tablespoon of mayo.) For another thing you're going okay, so what do I have left to eat, 1200 calories, okay that's two 600 calorie meals (lunch and dinner), but wait I'm having that 800 calorie dinner, so that leaves 400 for lunch, okay, so lunch comes around but you forgot to add in that soda (no comments about cutting out soda), so now you can't eat that 800 calorie dinner, you have to make it a 600 calorie dinner again.
It's most likely I'm doing it all wrong, yeah say what you want about pre-planning and pre-making your meals but now you've turned a 3 minute chore into 30 minutes, and then you spent a whole half a day at the beginning of the week pre-cooking some of your meals.
So you may be condescending if you want, I'll continue to look for the exercises that burn more so I don't have to restrict myself to just all-you-can-eat brocolli and a 4 oz steak (4 ounces of steak, HAH!)
I pre-log all my meals and it takes me five minutes max…hell, I have my diary filled out through wednesday and I did that sitting here watching football …took about eight minutes total …
OP - no offense, but you just sound lazy. Until you are reedy to make the necessary changes and commit to a meal and exercise plan that 220 pounds is not going to go anywhere….
I have a feeling that it took quite a while before you got all your meals put together and written down. So sure it takes you a few minutes every thing is done (of course you did do it yourself, but it's not like someone like me who doesn't have much experience with this sort of thing is going to be sitting down and taking less than 10 minutes figuring out my meals for the next few weeks, months, or years)
Okay so excuse me for essentially being a beginner.0 -
It's fine to be a beginner. Don't be lazy bro.0
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