Excersize doesn't burn fat!?!?
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Exercise doesn't "burn fat". You expend calories when you exercise, which (along with your diet) can help create/sustain that deficit you need to lose weight. That deficit, sustained over time, is what will get rid of the excess weight and fat.
Right ... and it is a little pet peeve of mine when people talk about burning fat ... "fat blasting exercise" and all that rubbish.
Chances are, my bicycle ride burned the energy from piece of toast with cheese I had before the ride because that was what was readily available in my blood stream.
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Exercise doesn't "burn fat". You expend calories when you exercise, which (along with your diet) can help create/sustain that deficit you need to lose weight. That deficit, sustained over time, is what will get rid of the excess weight and fat.
Right ... and it is a little pet peeve of mine when people talk about burning fat ... "fat blasting exercise" and all that rubbish.
Chances are, my bicycle ride burned the energy from piece of toast with cheese I had before the ride because that was what was readily available in my blood stream.
Well if the bike ride wasn't that hard or that long ... however even for a lighter ride, there was some fat in your cheese. Muscles do burn fat when there is enough oxygen and fat available to do so. There isn't any doubt about that, but that doesn't mean a person can't store more new fat than the fat that was lost. That boils down to diet. (Unless your bike rides are 100+ km, then you have to burn a lot of fat!)
I think I'm basically in agreement with you, I think.0 -
miss_brown1989 wrote: »That's what I though they should of made the main point. That you can't just eat whatever you want and think working out will help lose weight.
That's a completely different message to "exercise doesn't burn fat (calories)".
It's also aimed at a completely demographic to calorie counters on MFP.
Exercise obviously does help the CO part of the energy balance but also can help adherence by allowing people to have a sensible deficit with a higher quantity of food.
I'm going to be cycling for about 3 - 4 hours today with a few big climbs. That's going to burn a load of calories.
It could make a very considerable difference to my calorie balance for the day or I could "eat whatever I want" and cancel out the calories burned. In reality I would have to really push my eating as hard as I will be pushing my pedals to cancel it out!
But that's a conscious choice I will make. Most people don't make those conscious choices.
I could very easily lose weight quickly purely by eating at my non-exercise maintenance calories and let my exercise create a deficit. It's actually what I do to a degree if I want to drop some weight before a big cycling event.1 -
Exercise doesn't "burn fat". You expend calories when you exercise, which (along with your diet) can help create/sustain that deficit you need to lose weight. That deficit, sustained over time, is what will get rid of the excess weight and fat.
Right ... and it is a little pet peeve of mine when people talk about burning fat ... "fat blasting exercise" and all that rubbish.
Chances are, my bicycle ride burned the energy from piece of toast with cheese I had before the ride because that was what was readily available in my blood stream.
Well if the bike ride wasn't that hard or that long ... however even for a lighter ride, there was some fat in your cheese. Muscles do burn fat when there is enough oxygen and fat available to do so. There isn't any doubt about that, but that doesn't mean a person can't store more new fat than the fat that was lost. That boils down to diet. (Unless your bike rides are 100+ km, then you have to burn a lot of fat!)
I think I'm basically in agreement with you, I think.
Even with the 100+ km rides, we try to eat approx half the calories we're burning to provide fuel so that we don't have to tap into the fat stores too early in the game.
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Exercise doesn't "burn fat". You expend calories when you exercise, which (along with your diet) can help create/sustain that deficit you need to lose weight. That deficit, sustained over time, is what will get rid of the excess weight and fat.
Right ... and it is a little pet peeve of mine when people talk about burning fat ... "fat blasting exercise" and all that rubbish.
Chances are, my bicycle ride burned the energy from piece of toast with cheese I had before the ride because that was what was readily available in my blood stream.
Well if the bike ride wasn't that hard or that long ... however even for a lighter ride, there was some fat in your cheese. Muscles do burn fat when there is enough oxygen and fat available to do so. There isn't any doubt about that, but that doesn't mean a person can't store more new fat than the fat that was lost. That boils down to diet. (Unless your bike rides are 100+ km, then you have to burn a lot of fat!)
I think I'm basically in agreement with you, I think.
Muscles do not directly burn fat. It is your metabolism that does. to burn calories from stored fat, this requires the presence of oxygen. Everyone needs a certain amount of oxygen needed to burn fat, this can be done if you can measure your own body's amount needed perhaps by keeping within your target heart rate.
Burning only calories from carbs will allow a person the burn off “water weight” this actually will decrease metabolism if I understand this correctly. If you burn off all carbs, muscles do not get enough energy to actually increase metabolism which indirectly burns fat.
the mention of fat in cheese has nothing to do with the metabolic process, and muscles do not burn anything, it is the metabolism that does.0 -
Over the past 6 weeks, iveveen walking ten miles every 2 days and swimming 2000m in between I've been loosing 2lb or so per week
Last week I was lazy and stayed on the sofa and lost 3lb
But you know what? I'd rather loose 2lb a week and get myself fit than 3lb a week and not be fit X2 -
It's all true, @miss_brown1989 . This has been my experience as well. Typically when I undertake a rigorous exercise routine I temporarily gain weight as my body adapts to new demands.
I've lost count of the times a frustrated dieter complains that even after vigorous exercise every single freaking day, they actually gained!
No wonder they feel like throwing in the towel, if so much effort is needed to drop a few pounds.
But in fact less effort and greater patience reaps the reward. Control the calories and the pounds will shift.
That being said, I prefer exercise over dieting because exercise makes me stronger.1 -
Here's the thing....
Exercise is good for your health, heart, strength, balance, agility, and more. You can exercise all day long, and if you aren't eating LESS than you're burning... guess what? You won't lose a damn thing.
In general, i NEVER recommend someone tries to create their calorie deficit off of calories burned during exercise. it's too difficult to calculate accurately, and it's done inconsistently. In addition, you have to be eaten JUST at maintenance for the calories burned to cause weight loss.
Calories in < Calories Out
The problem with the above is most people aren't tracking their intake in any manner. they think by working out that they are somehow going to lose weight. doesn't work that way.4 -
It's all true, @miss_brown1989 . This has been my experience as well. Typically when I undertake a rigorous exercise routine I temporarily gain weight as my body adapts to new demands.
I've lost count of the times a frustrated dieter complains that even after vigorous exercise every single freaking day, they actually gained!
That's water retention. Seems like some people are too impatient to wait 3 days for it to go away.
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It's great of you to do some research. I can confirm that exercising one's butt off, I played racquetball for an hour in the morning, lifted heavy for an hour at noon, and danced aerobics for an hour in the evening, does nothing for weight loss IF you eat so much from the hunger caused by all that exercise as to replenish all the energy you needed to do all that exercise. I weight about 320 during that episode and it lasted months with no weight loss. It was then, it is now, it has been always, a mathematical relationship we call CICO; calories in, calories out. If your calories in are equal to your calories out, you maintain your weight. If your calories in are greater than your calories out, you gain weight. If your calories in are less than your calories out, you lose weight. No one is exempt from the biochemistry of it. There are some factors, such as your muscle and fat ratio, your gender, your size, your age, your activity level, which cause you to slightly differ from the population average, but you will not ever lose weight if your personal calories in are never lower than your personal calories out.6
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A sustained calorie deficit (taking in less than you burn) is what causes weight/fat loss. That deficit can be created by diet, exercise, or a combination thereof.
The problem is that exercise doesn't burn nearly as many calories as most people think, and most people don't understand energy balance in the first place - they just figure that they can eat anything they want, go walk on the treadmill for a half hour and they'll magically lose weight. That's not how it works. Walking on the treadmill for a half hour may burn somewhere in the vicinity of 150-200 calories - so when you go "reward" yourself with an ice cream bar after your workout, you've just cancelled out those 150-200 calories and then some.
Look at it this way - you can "save" yourself 500-600 calories by eating a chicken breast and a big serving of broccoli for dinner instead of a cheeseburger and french fries. To get the equivalent 500-600 calorie deficit from exercise, you'd have to go run 5 or 6 miles, or bicycle maybe double that, or do a couple hours worth of your favorite cardio workout video. Which of those two options is easier and more realistic for most people?
Exercise doesn't "burn fat". You expend calories when you exercise, which (along with your diet) can help create/sustain that deficit you need to lose weight. That deficit, sustained over time, is what will get rid of the excess weight and fat.
There are a lot of excellent reasons to exercise - but trying to create a calorie deficit sufficient for weight/fat loss entirely from exercise is unrealistic for most people. Hence the sayings "You can't out-exercise a bad diet", or "You can't outrun your fork".
This!
In addition we as people have various energy pathways. Fat burning isn't the most efficient, combined with the fact that there's essentially a "cap" on how much can be used in a day for energy.
A lot of times people get "skinny fat" when they go overboard on the exercise, because they pull to much energy from existing LBM.1 -
I certainly couldn't have lost 80 pounds without exercise. It was the only way to achieve CICO for me. I find it much easier (FOR ME!) to burn an extra 500 calories than to eat 500 calories less. But we are all different. My point is don't believe anyone who says exercise isn't beneficial to weight loss.1
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JustMissTracy wrote: »I certainly couldn't have lost 80 pounds without exercise. It was the only way to achieve CICO for me. I find it much easier (FOR ME!) to burn an extra 500 calories than to eat 500 calories less. But we are all different. My point is don't believe anyone who says exercise isn't beneficial to weight loss.
I agree!
I like to eat, but fortunately, I love to exercise. 1 -
I can usually only burn 300 calories in one hour of exercise, which is only about 14% of my total calorie burn in a day. So you see that my exercise has only a very small relative impact on the weight loss equation.
In addition to this, exercise tends to depress my activity level during the rest of the day as well as cause excessive hunger especially sweet cravings. I can mostly overcome these negative effects, but it makes adherence to my calorie goal much more of a "white knuckle" experience.
The result is that exercise for me is almost entirely for heart and bone health and very little for weight loss.3 -
Seems I like to eat roughly the same amount of calories whether I have an active or sedentary job, so when I have a desk job, I need to exercise to make up the difference.
Exercise puts me on a positive cycle - I feel better, sleep better, and make better food choices.4 -
I saw a research study (article accompanied by presentation of an actual researcher, not a BuzzFeed article) which essentially said that it actually depends on your gender somewhat. Regular exercise doesn't seem to do much for guys, but a combination of cardio and strength training improved and accelerated weight loss (when accompanied by a healthy diet, naturally) in women.
The others are all right, though - over and over, the research says that it comes down to your calories in/calories out - people tend to severely overestimate the calories burned by exercise and eat back all of them plus some, which is probably why exercise alone doesn't do the trick. Diet alone isn't healthy either though, if any of you have heard of the term "skinny fat" (e.g., having fatty livers, high cholesterol, and other detrimental health outcomes associated with obesity despite healthy weight due to a sedentary lifestyle).
Diet plus exercise FTW!!1 -
miss_brown1989 wrote: »Okay so I found a random article that claims excersize doesn't help you lose weight at all. And only cutting calories does. This bugged me a lot so I researched it and found about 40 articles claiming the same thing. Here's one of the links:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/22/obesity-owes-more-to-bad-diet-than-lack-of-exercise-say-doctors
What do you guys say I'm so confused. They say that you get lots of benefits but no weight loss.
I didn't think it was possible that sweating your butt off working out for an hour a day does nothing for weight loss??
Technically exercise could help you lose weight......if everything else stayed the same. But the reality is, everything else doesn't stay the same. Many people think all exercise burns a boatload of calories. I'm sweating so I'm burning calories (sauna?....nope). You think I exercised so why not take seconds, or have that cookie. Then you are right back where you started. Chances are excellent that unless you are actively measuring & logging portions....you are eating more to compensate for the calories burned.3 -
You can't out exercise a bad diet (or too many calories).1
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It's all true, @miss_brown1989 . This has been my experience as well. Typically when I undertake a rigorous exercise routine I temporarily gain weight as my body adapts to new demands.
I've lost count of the times a frustrated dieter complains that even after vigorous exercise every single freaking day, they actually gained!
That's water retention. Seems like some people are too impatient to wait 3 days for it to go away.
I never weigh myself the morning after a workout. I work out every other day. So the morning *of* the day I will work out (which I do in the evening) then I weigh myself. That way I'm not going to have my results obfuscated by water and glucose retained in my muscles.2 -
I have been losing weight just fine without exercising. Fact is it slowed down a little since I started doing treadmill at the gym the middle of August. However I am now losing inches pretty steadily and I attribute that to the exercise. My plan always was to start with the food, then add cardio and eventually weights. I think you probably can lose weight with diet alone but need both to be fit.2
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