Losing weight

When I was class 1 obese, I became very active. I trained 6 days most weeks, working intensely. I competed in races, sometimes winning medals in my age group category. I stayed obese.

How? Why?

Training hard burned only a few hundred extra calories a day. If I ate freely, I just ate up those calories, because I was hungrier. Despite regular, quite intense workouts, all it took to eat back those workout calories was maybe a Kind bar (200-some calories) and perhaps a slice of hearty bread with a couple of tablespoons of peanut butter (maybe 250-300 calories). (Notice how all of those are (sort of) "healthy foods"?)

There are a few people who can lose weight, just by adding exercise, if (and only if) they don't increase eating at all, even subtly. Those are people who've maybe been gaining a few pounds a year, year after year. (Eating just 100 excess calories daily, on average, every day, adds about 10 pounds a year.) If they add exercise, but don't increase eating - hard to do if not calorie counting - they might lose weight slowly.

The rest of us, we need to monitor and manage our eating. For lots of us, that's not terribly difficult or punitive, as long as we're willing to lose weight at at sensibly moderate rate, rather than trying to lose all the excess super-quickly. Lose a pound a week, even half a pound: It adds up, impressively, over the weeks and months.

So, I used to be class 1 obese, and a competitive athlete. I'm still an athlete, age 66, and at BMI around 21 (5'5', around 125 pounds +/-). I've been at a healthy weight now for 6+ years, after 30 years previously of overweight/obesity.

Managing the calories on the eating side is really powerful. It's simple (a simple process), too, though it may not be easy (psychologically, for example) every single minute. It's a thing that you can do, if you really want to. Exercise can be part of the health picture, but at the very least, you'll need to keep the calories commensurate. Trust me, from experience, it's really easy to eat up exercise calories without even noticing a difference, unless tracking carefully.

Don't get me wrong: Getting fitter and reaching/maintaining a healthy weight are both major quality of life improvements. I'm not sorry I got fit while staying fat . . . if I was going to stay fat.

One or the other of healthy weight or more fit is better than neither. Both is the jackpot. Go for the jackpot.