For weight, yeah. It’s still unhealthy for many reasons but if you only care about weight that’the thing that matters
It’s far better for your health to be a healthy weight and unfit than to be overweight and unfit.
OTOH, if you eat a lot of shitty food, it can very well be the case, that you just get enough essential nutrients by the sheer amount of food you’re eating. That would mean that by cutting the amount without changing what you eat, you’d get into malnutrition.
Yes, you can eat the same shit. Only way less, though.
Yeah, it is not easy.
We seem to have primarily high calorie foods. The reason people change diets to get some low calorie ones that keep them feeling full.
Another thing, but perhaps not as much related to losing weight is that food doesn’t exactly work like most people think i.e. it isn’t that we consume something then we get energy from it and then we excrement it. In reality our body absorbes the food and uses it for other functions. So unhealthy food still affects us negatively.
Most people don’t realize we loose weight by breathing, not excrements. You breath in O2, you breath out CO2. Same volume (since gases have more or less the same volume per molecule), but 37.5 % heavier. That’s how you loose weight.
Or the same quantity and start being active, much more likely to keep up with it long term as well.
The problem about being active, is that the moment you stop you’ll put the weight right back on. Most people don’t take up going to the gym for decades, it’ll last a few months, maybe a few years. Long term weight management needs to be about food intake.
Physical activity make you generate hormones that push you to continue doing it, weight management through food intake does the contrary, weight management through increased activity has much better long term results than going on a diet.
Physical activity make you generate hormones that push you to continue doing it
I don’t experience this at all. I don’t enjoy working out at all even after years of doing it consistently. I still have to force myself every time.
You can’t outrun your fork. If OOP had 150lbs to lose, it’s unlikely he could’ve continued eating the same amount and burnt that weight off.
If you’re at maintenance at 2500 and start doing more physical activities you’re burning more calories.
“You can’t outrun your fork” doesn’t mean you can’t increase how much you’re burning without increasing how much you’re eating, the result is the same, in that case you’re not depriving yourself and for this reason the results tend to stick.
Source: GF is a dietitian
I get it, but if homie was 150 lbs overweight then he was probably eating wayyyy more than maintenance and would’ve continued to gain if he didn’t change his eating habits.
If someone is 150lbs overweight and sticking to that weight long term then the same logic applies (they’re not staying at that weight by eating the average maintenance for their sex), increasing the calories they burn while eating the same number of calories as before will induce weight loss because they’ll be at a deficit. They’ll reach equilibrium at some point and they could continue increasing their activity level to continue losing weight, the same thing happens with adjusting your food intake, if you eat 3500 calories to keep your weight at 300lbs and you cut down to 3000 calories your weight will go down, but you’ll never end up weighting 120lbs by sticking to 3000 calories.
I don’t think you realize how few calories are burned by exercise relative to the amount packed into our food, especially if you eat without thinking about it. I was dancing for a while, 8 hours straight of sometimes very intensive cardio, and only burning like 1000 extra calories (according to my fitbit) on those days just to feel like shit the next day from all that work, which would definitely have driven me to eat even more if I wasn’t paying attention to my diet or able to control my impulses (which tbh I think one or the other can be assumed for someone 100+ lbs overweight).
Even the most intensive bike ride or couple hours at the gym can be eaten away in as few as 7-10 oreos or a large fountain drink. Sure, if you just need to trim a pound or two to get to your ideal weight, exercise alone can do that along with many other great benefits if you can commit to it daily, but you simply cannot expect to see results if you are habitually overeating highly caloric/low nutritional value foods and do not change those habits.
“According to my Fitbit”
Starting on a high note I see
You burn 2200 a day doing nothing and eat 2200 a day, your weight stays the same
You start jogging 3 miles a day that’s 240 to 420 calories right there, don’t eat any more than you did and you’re at 240 to 420 calories in deficit.
Don’t jog and cut 240 to 420 calories a day and you have the same impact on your weight.
There’s no magic to it, it’s fucking maths! The difference is how hard it is for the results to last if you just do it through changing your eating habits, there’s a reason why about 90% of people who go on a diet just gain their weight back, they didn’t build a healthy habit, they make their life miserable for a while and then go back to eating the same as before.
Someone I look up to more convincingly said the same thing. I scoffed but he knows what he’s talking about.
I lost so much weight so fast—during the beginning of the pandemic no less—by only staying beneath the magical number everyday.
How do you calculate the calorie maintenance number¿?
2200 is about expected maintenance level for a man that does normal daily activities (going on walks, cleaning around the house and so on).
If you currently maintain your weight with whatever you’re eating and drinking then calculate how much calories there is in what you’re currently eating and drinking (average for the week) and cut that by 500 a day to lose 1 pound a week.
If you’re increasing your physical activity as well then take that into consideration, it’s much more healthy and effective in the long run (in most situations) to just continue eating the same but to start being active, this way you’re not taking anything away, you’re adding something to your life.
I almost literally lost forty pounds eating nothing but buffalo wings
And then I turned into a vegetarian
Sorry chickens, ty for your lean protein (before they Buffalo’d it), I put it to good use
What do you like to cook?
I figured out I was less interested in the meat than I was in what made the meat actually taste good, your buffalo sauces, barbeque, etc, and just did the same thing I was doing but with tofu and broccoli.
When I first started I was all about these weirdo “secret tricks” to get tofu to “taste like meat” but I quickly figured out it just wasn’t worth the effort for my tastes and stuck to pan frying or raw tofu afterwards.
Yeah, fake meat tastes meh, I’d rather just do my own thing for sure.
Fun story. 12 years ago I lost 80 lbs with keto. 4 years ago I quit keto for convenience because grad school. Gain 10 lb/yr since.
January this year I started keto, didn’t lose an ounce in 2 weeks. Eat less via IF and portion control but still keto, start losing. Eat a carb meal but still IF and portion control, still losing. Now I am on a standard ish diet (more emphasis on protein, more restriction on simple carbs) with portion control and gradually losing weight.
I tried dieting like this in 2010 but it “didn’t work”. In 2012 keto worked great but in hindsight it was likely the forced restriction and eventually calorie counting. Now that I’m good at calorie counting, CICO works great.
That’s the thing with keto though. Being in ketosis doesn’t make you lose weight on it’s own. It just makes it way easier to eat less because you don’t spend all day feeling hungry.
I dunno man. My neighbor is a big ass boi and his wife is a smoke show.
Maybe try getting a personality
Alternatively, having a lot of money also works.
I envy the people who can diet by just eating less. That for me is a path to intolerable hunger
Only limiting carbohydrates has worked for me, and I had to increase my meat intake just to ensure I have enough nutrition, with the little you want to eat on low carb
I could never sustain a restriction like this without modifying what I ate. It would have a profound effect of how soon and how much I was compelled to eat next. Once this was very clear to me after dozens of attempts at weight loss, I began to cook and eat for satiety. A low-glycemic, minimally processed diet free of added sugar is what worked best for me long-term. I lost 115 lbs, resolved diabetes, hypertension and non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Also vastly improved some other chronic problems. I’ve remained at a healthy weight now for 23 years with little variation. A lot of effort really and likely not possible for everyone -especially now. I can say it was worthwhile for me.
The steely resolve of CICO will only take a person so far. In my view that’s why it’s so unsustainable for most.
Why do you think it is especially difficult to follow this diet now? I keep trying to implement it myself but find the high effort required difficult to sustain, given other demands on my attention and will power.
Do you mean a general calorie restriction to lose weight or compositional change in diet to maximize satiety? Either is difficult without a strong impetus. For me the latter is far easier than the former. It seems to me that both are made a lot more difficult now than 24 years ago by the level of distraction and focus disrupting technologies we have to use on the daily. Not to mention economic material conditions are broadly worse for most people than they were two decades ago. Folks seem more harried and stressed with less discretionary time. Additionally, to my eye, food culture is getting worse. What is regarded as staple food is junkier and seemingly designed to circumvent the “fixed stomach problem”.
I hit a wall with my health and felt I could either break my problem into manageable pieces I could maybe find a way to live with and possibly enjoy sustainably, or else suffer a declining quality of life that was already unacceptable. At that point it was worth it for me to do all kinds of trial and error about what worked personally. And it still is. I have no super willpower. Just an understanding of what is at stake. And a willingness to sorta game my drives.
Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I agree that so much is at stake with diet. It all changed for me when I hit 40. I’m going to have to think about the manageable pieces of diet you mentioned. That appeals to me as practical.
Low carb diets have been consistently shown to only cause short-term weight loss, followed by even greater weight gain if the person even bothers to adhere to the diet long term in the first place. This is in addition to the fact that low carb diets lead to a lower lifespan.
Calories per 1 gram of macros- Carbs: 4 Protein: 4 Fat: 9
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/the-carbohydrate-advantage
Also, what does it matter that there’s more energy per gram of fat versus carrots? Your body knows when it has enough energy* and you stop being hungry. Consider 19th century explorers eating pemmican (made of 50/50 fat and dried meat - they avoided the versions with berries and sugar) they would eat tiny amounts - less than the meat in a McDonald’s cheeseburger as a days food, despite the fact it hardly filled their stomachs
*Though on high carb your body will say it wants
moreall of it, since carbs are only available briefly in summer in history so you want to eat as much as you can. As a bonus, carbs from plants are half fructose and the fructose is turned to fat directly. You want to save some summer energy for winterI don’t even know where to begin unraveling this bad take. You should at least start by reading an intro to nutrition book or something, sounds like you’ve been drinking a lot of unscientific koolaid.
I wish I could just eat a pill once a day marked with desired bmi and forget about eating and focus on real stuff instead. I can barely hit 17.7 bmi even with some huel powder in a cup that is a hassle to wash. I want like 20 bmi to not look like a stick but it is hard to remember to eat that much
The part of this that sucks is that one day this shit just stops. Went from skinny stick figure constantly being told to eat more and put on weight while eating SO much, then I hit 35 and all of a sudden I’m 15kg overweight and sporting a nice double chin.
Sorry if this comes off as a aggressive, but ive yet to see any of the “changes in an instant” things people say actually happen. For example, before you know it 10 years has gone by! Or yours, suddenly your belly just pops out!
When I gained 80 weight like that, it was very easy to point to the steps along the way. Its also important to realize how long it took to gain weight, as it can affect how quick you think you can lose it.
I’m almost positive its just people not paying attention. If its important to you then pay attention to it. If it was so unimportant that it seemed sudden, was it really that important to begin with?
Is it just people suddenly caring about something that they didnt for their whole lives and having to deal with all of it at once?
I’m going to look good forever
- a 33 year old
Keep fit, watch your diet and look after your skin and teeth and you’ll get it right. I’m a bit chubby now but I’m feeling better now that I’m doing these things.
Thank you I was making fun of myself mostly.
I’m legitimately not worried, I make a point to chase after my niblings and climb up things I shouldn’t for exercise.
But should I still be worried?
