Diet Vs Exercise

hippiesaur wrote: »

I think for some people exercising can be enough if they gained their weight really slowly, so they barely ate above their maintenance prior to exercising. I was one of these people (I had to lose only about 20 lbs however I was overweight since I was a child, so I really ate close to my maintenance), and starting to exercise helped me lost most of my excess weight without making huge changes in my diet. This is why some people might think that it can be enough cause there are people who are successful at weightloss without eating 'diet food', and it's probably easier to think that doing 30 mins of cardio a day will lead to success. However when I got to those last 7-8 lbs, I couldn't succeed in weightloss barely through exercise, that was the point when I realized how important is the calorie deficit to lose weight.
So I say that diet is more important but it doesn't mean that exercising can't be enough. Those 200-300 calories are a lot when you are not far away from your goal weight and you should eat very few calories otherwise if you wanted to lose weight without exercising.
For obese people the dietary changes should be the first thing they do if they wanted to get to a normal BMI, however adding exercising is very important for health as well, so it's best to do both.

Along these lines, I'm at a good weight when I have an active job and active lifestyle, but struggle with a sedentary job and lifestyle. Since I don't see myself having any job other than a desk job for the conceivable future, I up the exercise outside work.

I used to be a long distance hiker. On the Appalachian Trail, I met several people who hiked the trail hoping to lose weight. Most did. When you are hiking 15-20 miles a day for 5-6 months, you burn a lot of calories. My husband lost 20 pounds in the first two weeks on the Continental Divide Trail, because heat and lack of water depressed his appetite so much and we were hiking 15 miles a day. He lost at least 50 on our first CDT hike. What most thruhikers didn't realize though was that as soon as they stopped backpacking, the weight would come right back. Worse was that the habits of the trail--eating whatever you want, as much as you want, and preferably the most fattening foods you can find--are very hard to lose afterwards.

I lost weight and regained weight many times with my hikes. After we stopped hiking, I lost weight and kept it off by a combination of watching what I eat and exercise. Since I'm a runner who likes to do marathons and half marathons, I exercise a lot. Part of the reason I do is so I can eat what I want, most of the time. Logging my food keeps my intake in check. If I just exercised without logging, I know I would eat too much. I don't run enough to justify ice cream and beer every day.

I've been able to lose weight by mostly diet and also by diet plus exercise.
Sometime back I couldn't exercise very much because of a strained hip and frozen shoulder. But I still lost several pounds. However, according to before-and-after DEXA scans, half of that loss was lean body mass. Now why would I want to lose THAT? I ain't getting any younger and can't afford to do that.
Back before I did running and weight lifting, I was of normal weight (121, 5'0") but had no shape and a plump face. After adding the running and weight lifting for a couple of years, I was only 6 pounds lighter but a lot leaner looking. I no longer looked like a fat baby.

Short answer for me is I focus on both.
Without a high level of exercise I have to try much harder to maintain or lose weight. My exercise boosts my daily allowance by probably 600 cals and that gives me a lot of dietary freedom and a satisfying volume of food.
As an averaged sized old bloke I'm eating well over 3000 cals on average to maintain because I'm very active compared to an increasingly sedentary population and I also exercise a lot.

General points:

• Be careful of comparing a general population of people who don't calorie count with those that either count or are simply calorie aware.
• Be careful of reading a general population tendency into being personally relevant. That many people can't exercise their way to weight loss is irrelevant to people like me who can.
• Hunger response to exercise is very personal, for some it blunts hunger, for some it increases hunger over their actual exercise burn. I'm a foot in both camps depending on exercise type and intensity.

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People try to turn it into a matter of black and white, especially outside MFP.

If someone is unwise enough to say that they want to lose weight, they get bombarded with stupid advice from all quarters, from "Have a teaspoonful of apple cider vinegar every morning" and so on. I include blanket pronouncements like "Exercise is the only way!" and "Diet, diet, diet! You can't outrun your fork, so don't bother with the exercise. It'll only make you hungry" in that.

The way to lose weight full stop is to calculate a (sensible) calorie deficit and keep to it for long enough. (However, the way you lose weight can affect what the new lighter you actually looks like at the end of all this.)

The way to keep to that calorie deficit is an individual decision, which should be made having taken your starting baseline and lifestyle into account.

If we simplify it a lot, the possible options are:
a) only reducing your intake (diet alone)
b) only increasing your output (exercise alone)
c) a combination of a+b

You should look at your starting point, and work out which is the better method for you.

In my n=1 experience, I was in the overweight category on the BMI chart, and getting closer to the obese category than the normal weight category.

So I decided to overhaul my life before I got to the obese category, following Option C in 2015. I took up a form of sport that I loved for itself, not just the weight-loss benefits, that I knew I could continue with, no matter what. Then I started logging my food. Over the next two years, I went from BMI 27.x to 24.x. Depending on what time in my cycle I weighed myself, I'd lost between 7% and 10% of my starting weight, and I was working on getting into BMI 23.x.

Then I had a close personal bereavement, and I just didn't have the headspace to bother with weighing my food, so I didn't. The scales went up a bit, and I thought "well, kitten it". After that, I ate whatever I liked for the following fifteen months. However, I kept going to my sports sessions. I do 5-6 hours a week of this sport, and according to MFP's various entries on the database, it burns between 572 and 657 calories per hour. Personally, I think that's a bit high, but you get the idea.

I kept on periodically weighing myself between then and now, and found I gradually gained 2kg, and then maintained it for a year, which put me into BMI 25.7. Not great, but not a huge disaster. To hear some people rubbish the concept of exercise, you'd think I should have put on 15kg.

Does option C work for everyone? Obviously not. But I can tell you now that option A, diet alone, does. not. work. for me. Option B of exercise alone didn't work that well either, at least not when paired with complete hedonism food-wise; so I'm going to log my food and cut the daily slices of cake, in conjunction with 5-6 hours of sport.