The 10,000 steps!

KetoneKaren wrote: »

@wisdomfromyou Can you say what kind of work you do & how many days a week you work? I re-read your posts and I realized that the main problem is that you don't like exercise, and in fact prefer a sedentary lifestyle. Your only motivation is fear, which is a powerful short-term motivator, but not a very good long-term motivator. I wish you could find something fun, like belly dancing or bicycle riding with your children, or boxing, or yoga or ballroom dancing. It would be easier to commit to the time if the exercise was fun, or you were doing it with your children or husband.

I think this says it all.

I manage with a desk job to get in on average 12.5k steps a day. 6k are an early morning walk (early morning as of this summer) because I have other stuff to do...

I am not frantic, I am busy, I am my priority not my job.

MaiLinna wrote: »

WinoGelato wrote: »

He says it's because my body has adjusted to this amount of exercise over time, since I'm no longer overweight, and that it is impossible to continue losing weight now because my body is too efficient.

Losing weight means you have a lower BMR than you did when you were overweight - you're supporting less body mass at rest. You also burn less during daily activity and exercise because you're smaller and moving less weight around. But you still burn calories, and the more you move the more you'll burn. Of course you can continue to lose weight - you just need a calorie deficit, and you can create that through exercise.

It sounds like your friend is misinterpreting a study (I think it was done on Biggest Loser contestants a while back) that people who are obese and diet down to a normal weight burn fewer calories than a person who always was that normal weight. The argument is that their bodies become more "efficient" since they've had to move more mass for so long, but that's a small part of the bigger picture. If you make efforts to retain muscle mass while losing weight, your BMR won't deviate much from average. Losing with an extreme deficit seems to result in more metabolic adaptation than losing slowly with a moderate deficit. You certainly don't stop burning calories altogether.