Exercise expenditure may have an upper limit

suefitnessaccount wrote: »

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-myth-burn-calories

Well this is just depressing!

Not when you understand how everything actually works. You don't need to do all kinds of crazy exercise to lose weight. Exercise is for fitness and is good for your overall general well-being...it has the added bonus of burning some extra calories and increasing your energy expenditure...but it all comes down to diet...if exercise was for weight loss then why would all of these lean, healthy, and fit people like myself who don't need to lose weight be doing it?

Weight loss simply comes down to consuming less than you expend. You expend more merely existing and breathing air every day than you typically would exercising...on top of that you expend energy (calories) just doing your day to day stuff...you also expend energy processing and digesting the food you eat. Exercise expenditure is generally pretty small compared to these other things.

ETA: one of the worst things I ever did when I was losing weight was to start training for a triathlon. I thought of course that this intense training would help me shed the pounds...but in reality, this intense training left me intensely hungry which made it difficult to restrict my calories...when I ignored my body's cry for more energy (calories) and restricted, I had issues with recovery which in turn made my next workout a little crappier and made me more lethargic in general outside of my training.

I had the most success while maintaining a reasonable calorie restriction in my diet and doing light to moderate exercise for 30-45 minutes 5 days per week vs. all kinds of crazy training.

suefitnessaccount wrote: »

True, but I like exercise; it's fun and I have the energy to sustain it for quite a while.

I also like food, but being short, female and old and having spent most of my adult life dieting I am hating the realisation that I just can't eat much of it. It doesn't help that I'm cooking for three preteen/teenage boys who are stick thin and just can't seem to fit enough food in

I guess I want my 'hard work' to give me something back.

It does...your health and well being are pretty important I would think....

And this isn't saying you aren't going to expend calories...you are going to expend more calories with regular exercise than you otherwise would. It's just not the massive burns people think they are.

Short course tri shouldn't make you *SO* hungry you need to overeat to refuel. Unless you are training to win, in which case the intensity is pretty high. The amount of training you do for short course is right around that "reasonable" level of exercise.

I hear about people gaining weight training for full Ironman races and I don't get it. I can't eat enough. I stopped tracking long ago and just shovel food into my mouth pretty much constantly. I have lost 5lbs I didn't need to lose over the past 10 weeks or so.

i read that article the other day and found it pretty silly. while it's premise is true (the old saw of not being able to exercise a bad diet) it's 10 reasons were actually pretty much one reason stated 9 different ways. "you can only exercise so much, and you can always out eat it" was repeated over and over and over again as if each bullet point and reordering of the words made it fresh and new and proved it's point all over again.

but there's really no reason to be depressed because nothing has changed. 1) you can eat the things you like within your personal limits, 2) a reasonable amount of physical activity will safely increase those limits, 3) purposeful exercise will have a positive effect on your overall health.