How does one lose inches?

michaelwrightkindle wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

michaelwrightkindle wrote: »

Just don't get too caught up on tracking exercise calories or using them as an excuse for guilty eating.

If someone is exercising without paying attention to how many calories one needs or using extra activity as an "excuse" for eating, that has the potential to create major stress for the body. If it's true that this impacts fat stores, wouldn't we want to minimize that?

I feel like you could just as easily argue that dieting leads to anorexia or other eating disorders.

I mean, any glance at any public forum dedicated to weight loss or dieting or exercise shows you that there are a tremendous number of people trying to use a Fitbit as an oracle. It's counterproductive and "rule of thumb" generalizations like "eat back half" are pretty arbitrary and meaningless without context. You're not going to fall out if you go from sedentary to doing a daily aerobics class or walk without compensating with a protein shake or an energy bar. But it would be trivially easy to undermine your weight-loss efforts if you equate working out more to eating more, especially when diet is the major factor. Maybe I'm wrong for assuming someone adhering to the kind of training regimen an elite athlete might use would present differently, though, and the average person on a dieting forum is genuinely at risk of doing themselves harm by overexertion? Nah.

Here, you are in a semi-public forum where the predominant mode of weight management is calorie counting. It's bog-standard to advocate that people strive to count the little buggers as accurately as practical, avoiding obsessive levels of compulsion, including tracking exercise.

It's also common here to recommend that people start by setting their MFP profile for moderate (not crazy-fast) weight loss, and eat back a fair fraction (like half) of their best estimate of exercise calories (or believe their fitness tracker, because tracker estimates are reasonably close - i.e., errors smaller than the calorie deficit - for a majority of people). Then, we usually suggest that they monitor their actual weight loss for 4-6 weeks, while logging carefully, then adjust their calorie intake based on actual weight loss experience.

That's the context you're commenting in, and the context that most of the (experienced, successful at weight management) people above are commenting about.

They've already made it clear that MFP uses a NEAT (before intentional exercise) calorie goal, rather than an TDEE (every bit of activity) calorie goal. They've also made it clear that we regularly see people who are actual exercise beginners (or near-beginners) undertake what will be, at their current fitness level, truly punitive and exhausting exercise schedules.

For a (near-) beginner, even an objectively quite moderate exercise program, way less than "elite athlete" territory, can create physical stress that, when added to a substantial calorie deficit, will result in cumulative fatigue/exhaustion that can easily (1) bleed activity and the calories it burns out of daily life (rest/sleep more; soft-pedal activity in home chores, job, and non-exercise hobbies) to the point of impairing weight loss on the calories-out side of the equation, or (2) cause compensatory overeating ("binges") that limits weight loss progress, or even results in the person completely giving up.

You've done some research, and it sounds like found some things that work for you (or which you're deploying in the expectation that they will). You may even have lengthy experience with what you're suggesting: I have no way of knowing. But one thing I do know, is that the people you're arguing with have also done research, and do have practical experience (even success), so are worth listening to.