The other thing about exercise (and this is completely anecdotal) is that for me, light exercise reduces food cravings*. I started walking to work about a year ago, and I immediately started to find MacDonald’s completely repulsive. I went from “need to use willpower to limit myself to once a week” to “I walk through the MacDonald’s parking lot to get to the bus stop and have never once wanted to go in”.
I haven’t made any deliberate adjustments to my diet at all - I deny myself nothing - but light exercise seems to help appetite regulation for me.
So, just by deciding to walk to work, and I need to get there anyways, I’ve lost 50 pounds in the past year. Now, I was over 300, so it’s low-hanging fruit, but whatever works, right?
*Paradoxically, heavy exercise increases food cravings for me. Bodies are weird.
“Simple, but not easy” is a common mantra in 12-step meetings. I had a bit of a time internalizing this myself, until I created an analogy that made sense to me (analogies are how I process and explain many concepts).
The directions to climb Mt. Everest are simple- “Go up.” The execution- not so easy.
Saying there’s a genetic component to obesity bothers me, though. Of course blah blah blah small percentage of people blah blah blah polycystic ovary syndrome blah blah blah, I get it. But beyond that, I fully believe that you can blame your genes for slow metabolism and basically for making it hard for you to eat lots and not gain weight. If I don’t work out and watch what I eat, I will gain 20 pounds in short order, and hang out around 140 pounds, never gaining much beyond that. That’s the size my body would be happy to be but it’s not what I want so I work out and make sure I don’t eat more than my body needs. But anyway, that’s different than blaming an extra 100 pounds on slow metabolism. That’s extended periods of eating much more than your body requires, and not countering it with exercise. For me, gaining those twenty pounds happens pretty easily so I fight against it. Gaining the eighty after that? There’s a point where you can’t blame a slow metabolism anymore.
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That may be true for some people, but it’s probably a tiny minority. An average person would need to do full-out cardio for an hour to burn around 600 calories. Or they could spend three seconds not ordering the large fries from Mickey D’s.
People tend to vastly overestimate the energy they’re using while exercising, and vastly underestimate the calories they consume. Altering your diet and sticking to it every day will provide you with a much larger and more sustainable calorie deficit than an exercise routine that requires a huge investment of time and energy.
That’s not to say exercise is bad – quite the opposite – just that exercise alone as a weight-loss strategy is not realistic for most people.
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I agree with what you’re saying but Ill add that for me, exercising helps with the eating less. If I just spent an hour doing full-out cardio, sweating myself dry, then that large order of salty, greasy fries just makes me feel like I’ve wasted all that workout time. So I can burn the 600 calories, as well as not ordering the fries. I love cheese and bread like nobody’s business. But working out with the cheese and wheat bloat I feel like I’m carry around for a day or two afterwards sucks, so I avoid it.
For most people, exercise is important for your health and diet is important for your weight. But exercise can force you to change some bad diet habits too.
It drove me fucking crazy when I worked at a gym and people would, week after week, insist to me that this was the reason they weren’t losing weight. I’d set up a routine on the weight machines for them, I’d suggest cardio, starting slow and getting more difficult as time went on, using a variety of cardio equipment so as to not get too used to any one machine. But there they were, three days a week, never increasing the load on the weights, never exercising beyond a non-sweat-breaking twenty minutes on the elliptical, and I’d hear over and over “But I’m here all the time! I must be putting on muscle, that’s why I’m not losing weight!” Working out should not be painful. But it should be work. No amount of explanation can help people who feel it’s the fault of someone or something else that they are fat. It’s near fucking impossible to try to keep motivating people when you want to throttle them sometimes - it was usually week ten or eleven when I started to slip up a little, if the clients hadn’t given up by that point.
Anyone want to place bet on how many more posts until this is explained by viruses making people fat? She’s already said it’s because some people’s metabolisms being “messed up” and storing half the reasonable amount of calories they eat as fat so how did they get that way? Virus, I’m telling you.
Reading through some more of that thread, I really wish she’s stop crowing about how much she like facts and data when it’s obvious she ignores anything that she doesn’t like.
No only that, but she keeps acting like everyone else should just mind their own business and not disagree with her. So pursuing facts and truth and data (and arguing ferociously about it for pages and pages) is fine for her, but there will be hell to pay if anyone else is interested in finding their own facts and data.
I’ve read lots of Stoid threads. Tons. Her MO doesn’t change. She’s right (for whatever reason) and everyone else is wrong for no reason whatsoever, even people who agree with her.
Someone once in one of her threads said something like, “I picture you seated in front of your keyboard trying to explain yourself and wondering why everyone is yelling at you.” I thought that was apt at the time, but I’ve reconsidered.
Stoid likes people to come in and disagree with her because then she can lash out at them. When she lashes out, she loves it; it makes her feel smart to put these other people in their place - that’s why she does it so much. So now I picture her typing away and congratulating herself on how smart she is, and how amazingly witty and cutting her put-downs are, and how stupid everyone is in comparison. She convinces herself she’s right by doing so. She doesn’t listen to others because she’s too busy and invested in making herself feel smarter by humourously insulting them (humourous to her mind).
It’s a feedback loop and the reason all of her threads end up the same.
Her weight isn’t something I choose to mock. I hope she finds something that works and gets her to a weight she’s comfortable with. And I hope people who read that thread don’t come away thinking either that all overweight people are delusional or that low-carb claims to be some sort of magic bullet. Neither are true.
She does seem to love to remind us of how smart she is all the time. Talking about how difficult being fat was as a teenager*:
I don’t actually see much evidence of this extreme intellect. Don’t smart people generally know enough to trust other peoples expertise when they need it? To appreciate training and education? Between this and the interminable lawyer threads, I get the impression that she doesn’t think anyone in the world could possibly know more than her about anything.
*Translation: she was an awkward know-it-all who constantly disagreed with people.
I haven’t even read the thread. The title alone was enough to make me think “Really? Did you have a dramatic hand to your forehead while you typed that?”
I don’t understand that at all. You’d think that after a few times, one would think, “Everyone disagrees with me. Maybe it’s not them, it’s me?” And I don’t really see too many people in her corner either. With a lot of the more controversial posters, you’ll see at least some people saying, “Leave _____ alone, OK, just leave him alone! HE POSTS COOL STUFF!” But I don’t see that with Stoid. It’s like she just doesn’t get it.