BBC say weight loss is diet not exercise. It says, direct quote: “Physical activity has little role in tackling obesity”. Beyond that the article lacks facts or and specifics and just makes claims like “Doctors now say” or “Nutritionists now say”. It does say to avoid sugar and carbs.
I disagree wholeheartedly. In my experience exercise is key. If you stay on the couch, it doesn’t matter how little you eat, your body will find a way to turn it into fat. Get up and move.
I have to agree on this, though:
Also, I just noticed we’re not in IMHO. What is the question?
Hate to throw something unsupported into GQ … so maybe this is more of a piggyback question than an answer. But I have heard “people say” and I have “read somewhere” that unless you’re exercising like a competitive triathlete, you won’t bur enough calories to make a real difference in your weight without drastic diet adjustments. Upshot is “drastic diet adjusments + no more than ordinary walking around” might lose you 30 lbs over 6 months; while “drastic diet adjusments + 90 minutes of light cadio per day” might lose you 32 lbs over 6 months.
Something like that. No cite.
Agreed
Makes sense
I did the math for walking at a brisk pace for 1/4 mile at lunch 5 days a week. Weight loss from calories burned exercising? 11 ounces per month.
Walking or biking six miles a day plus better portion control (I didn’t cut out any particular food; I just ate less) let me lose 100 pounds between 2012 and 2014.
I’ve lost a significant amount of weight by changing what I eat, with little change to my exercise routine.
This isn’t really controversial, is it? Diet trumps exercise, always has and always will. It’s just so much easier to over eat than it is to exercise it off. Exercise can be a component of a weight loss plan, and appears effective as part of a maintenance program, and there are many additional benefits from exercise unrelated to weight loss.
Sitting on the couch isn’t going to make you overweight if you’re not eating enough. Your body doesn’t magically make fat from air and laziness. You may not be healthy, but you won’t be obese.
I think the point is more that you can’t eat crap and hope to remain healthy just because you exercise. There’s probably truth in that. Also, if you eat enough high-sugar, high-fat foods, you can’t possibly exercise enough to burn it all off. It’s also possible to exercise too much. Some former athletes have a lot of joint and connective tissue problems. There’s even a form of an eating disorder where people either eat poorly, or binge-eat, and over-exercise.
I’m sure that diets being equal, the person who exercises is going to be a lot more healthy than the person who doesn’t.
I can also attest that sitting around makes you gain weight. I developed a serious back problem after I was pregnant, and gained weight from a combination of being in pain a lot, plus lack of sleep from taking care of a baby.
After the baby was older (and weaned), I got physical therapy and pain medication, my back got a lot better, and the weight came off with no change in diet (albeit, since I wasn’t nursing, I may have been eating a little less without realizing it, but I was putting out fewer calories, because I wasn’t putting out any in the form of breastmilk, so I’m sure that evened out irrespective of how much I was moving around).
awesome :d:d:d
I realize I should have added to the above post that I was already eating a pretty healthy diet. I could have restricted calories if I’d wanted to lose weight faster, but I was really just interested in not being in pain, and I hadn’t gained that much weight-- about 20 pounds, and it came off pretty slowly once I was moving again. And when I wasn’t moving, I really wasn’t moving. There were days I didn’t leave the house and barely left the couch.
That’s supported by what I wrote, I think – if you want exercise to impact your weight, eat a lot less and work out hard/long. “Easy” workouts won’t do much (e.g., walking the dog around the block, splashing around in a pool).
I probably overstated it when I wrote “90 minutesof ligth cardio”. Maybe it’s morelike 30-60 minutes. Don’t know. But some believe (no cite) that there is a point one must surpass to achieve true weight-impactful execise … and a lot of people who exercise for weight loss don’t get past that point.
Hmmm … looking at it now, perhaps the idea isn’t all that controversial.
I say it’s both diet and exercise. I average about 1 hour of moderate aerobic exercise a day, but I still have about 20 extra pounds. I do like my beer, ice cream, and other foods. If I want to lose weight, I need to cut the calories. On the other hand, if the weather is crappy, like during winter, and I can’t get out and exercise, you can bet that I put on a few pounds pretty quick even if I cut calories. I also notice that my belt needs to go out a few notches.
I don’t think this controversial, is it? Nobody is saying exercise isn’t good for you, but if you want to get the weight down you need to be eating better, be that portion control or better food choices.
You have to be aware that you “burn” surprisingly few calories doing X minutes of cardio exercise (treadmill, jogging, walking, swimming, cycling etc.). Eating less calories contributes much more to weight loss (and weight gain). So basically, the BBC is right.
That being said, regular cardio exercise is essential for your overall health and it will contribute to maintaining your bodyweight in the long run. It’s just not the single magic bullet for weight loss.
One very important factor is strength training: strength training will maintain or even increase your muscle mass while you are in the process of loosing weight. More muscle mass means having a “bigger engine” and consequently burning more calories (even when you are asleep).
But the first and most important step above all is indeed diet.
I remember once reading that making different choices during the day can influence your weight more than going to the gym and working out. If you take the stairs every time you can, instead of using the elevator, walk or bike to work, instead of driving, or even take the bus so it incorporates a little walking to the bus stops, park once when you shop, and walk from store to store, instead of moving your car each time, having a manual garage door instead of an electric garage door opener, and so forth.
When I used to go to a gym regularly because I was interested in using the weights, and I was taking a Judo class, I biked unless it was raining, and the parking lot was always jammed full. It was amusing. I know some people had disabilities and others were rehabbing injuries at the gym, and still others were bringing children to use the pool, but I’ll bet a lot of people parked there could have gotten a better workout if they’d walked to the gym, not gone in, and just turned around and walked home.
Anyway, deliberate exercise is hard, and I think people overestimate what it should be doing for them, because it’s hard. They run a mile, and think it must burn hundreds of calories, when it really doesn’t add that much to what they would burn if they read books all day (it’s still good for you in other ways, though), so they may decide they can eat some kind of crap that actually has four times the number of calories as the number they burned running, and is bad for them in other ways besides just calories, because it may be high in cholesterol, or something.
The accounting number I use is that running a mile (on flat, even terrain) burns 100 calories. Or conversely, a donut requires about 3.5 miles to burn off. Most people’s estimate of the diet-to-exercise calorie conversion factor severely underestimates this. Clearly it is easier to cut out a daily donut than it is to add 3.5 daily miles.
I don’t think you can look at it as a simple physics problem and accurately predict calories in and out. You can’t say “if I burn this hamburger it releases 500 kilocalories, therefore if you eat this burger your body will absorb all 500 calories” and you can’t say “if I lift X lbs Y feet I’ve done 100 kilojoules worth of work, so therefore I’ve burned 418 calories”. Our bodies just aren’t that simple, and naive math like this gives us the article in the OP.
I believe our bodies are control systems, with both positive and negative feedback. And exercise (hard exercise, not just an easy jog that burns calories but a large enough stimulus that requires your body to adapt by getting stronger or faster) is the main tool we have to change the set point on the controller.
If you sit on the couch and restrict your diet, you may with great willpower lose weight. But your body’s set point didn’t change, and that weight will come soaring back as soon as you let your guard down. But if you train for strength or high intensity cardio that set point changes, multiplying the effect of your behavioral and dietary changes.
A cheeseburger has about 300 calories. Think about how fast you can munch away a single, measly cheeseburger. And now consider this [1]:
(Emphasis mine)
[1] Calories Burned by Running: What You Need to Know
Yep. Same here. I did make a concerted effort to get more exercise when I hit about 220. I fairly rapidly got down to 185-190, and about doubled the distances I did hiking on weekends. I SHOULD be about 160-170, and I ain’t going to exercise those last pounds off. I can do some strenuous activity - I usually do about 10-12 miles for a morning dayhike, 2000-3000 feet gain. But apparently not starving myself and eating what I like makes me, well, if not “fit but fat”, “fit, but a bit chubby”. At some point, exercising just allows you to haul the extra pounds around.
It doesn’t help that I was one of those extremely skinny guys when I was young. I gave my weight as 150 - I was lying. It was more like 140, 145. I could eat like a pig, and not exercise, and it stayed that way. I didn’t really start gaining weight until I hit about 45, either. I know that that ingrained some utterly terrible dietary habits.