I think my co-worker must have one. The other day she told me she eats about 3500 calories a day. I nearly died. The woman is skinny as a rail. She does exercise, but how could she possibly exercise enough to burn 1500 calories over the recommended 2000 calories you’re supposed to eat? I just don’t get it.
It’s the magic of basal metabolic rate. Some people burn 130 calories/hour just typing or reading or sleeping, while others burn 60. Over the course of a day, that really adds up.
Well, I hate her. (Nah, not really. I actually quite like her.) I do hate that she walks by my office eating cookies and Triscuits like 75 times a day.
Tapeworms?
Of course, the moment you do buy your Magic Metabolism, they’ll come out with Magic Metabolism 2000, which is 30% better in every way, but completely incompatible with Magic Metabolism 1.0. And then your Magic Metabolism breaks as soon as it’s out of warranty.
The funny thing about this commercial is that if you read the fine print (my friend has TiVo, so we did just to read it) it says that this pill is not a substitute for exercise and good diet and is not guaranteed to work if you don’t ALSO exercise and diet you probably won’t lose weight.
When I was in high school I had a horrible diet of mostly snack foods and fast food. But I exercised every day and drank a lot of water (mostly to balance out my Coca Cola addiction) and I went from a size 18 down to a size 12. And when I got out of high school and ROTC, I stopped excersizing, and guess what? I’m at a size 20 now. Exercise is the key. Good diet is definitely a helper, but even if you eat crap like I did, you can still work it off. The key here is WORK - it’s hard work to exercise enough to make up the difference, and you have too do it several times a week (note, like I said, that I worked out EVERY DAY, seven days a week, for at least an hour; health experts advocate a twenty minute workout three times a week). And you can’t use the “I can’t afford a gym membership” line on me, because I did it without a gym. Pushups, situps, jumping jacks, hello dolly’s, flutter kicks, and crunches got me there - you know, the stuff the military does. If it’s good enough for them, I’m sure you can pull it off.
~Tasha
Singing show tunes constitutes excersize? Excellent! I’ll have to pull out my old VHS tapes…
While I agree with the rest of your OP, I have to take exception to this bit. For one thing, many obese people feel terrible guilt about their situation, and feel like it is a personal moral failing. Society doesn’t help with this. And most dieticians are very clear that if you really want to lose weight, you need to start with a positive attitude about yourself. Of course, diet and exercise are key ingredients as well. But being ashamed of your body, paradoxically, is setting yourself up for failure.
Not true. In high school, my diet was utter crap, too (we’re talking giant Snickers bar and Coke for lunch every day), and I didn’t do any exercise. I weighed 110 pounds. I started exercising in college (6 hours a week) when I started to put on a little weight, and my weight ballooned up to almost 200, because my diet was still crap and despite the exercise, my metabolism had slowed down with age. It took dieting before I actually lost weight (same thing happened with my husband). I still exercise, of course, and both are really necessary, but to say that all someone has to do to lose weight is to exercise is wrong.
People should exercise because it’s good for them, and it will *help *them lose weight, but I’ve known a lot of overweight people who get plenty of exercise.
I’m sort of the opposite. I have a trip coming up that I have to be in shape for. I’ve been exercising like a madman, but still eat just about anything. I’m down about 5 pounds so far.
Yes, please. I’d love one.
How the monkeyfucking Christ do you sanitize a tapeworm?
Very true.
The key to permanent weight loss is *not * exercise. While exercise is certainly good for you, and while it can *help * a person lose weight, it is *not * the most important factor. The most important factor is eating less & eating better.
I have to agree with **DeadlyAccurate **and Crafter_Man and say that’s not really true, at least in my case. I went down eight to nine sizes (the highest I ever *wore *was a fifty) and 180 pounds in only eighteen months and have maintained that size over the last three through diet alone. It’s a lot easier to just not eat the Snickers than run the two and a half miles afterwards to burn it off.
One thing I probably should have pointed out is that I ate crap; but I didn’t eat a LOT of crap. I never had much of an appetite. Breakfast was usually a donut. Lunch, a McDonalds burger or corn dog. Dinner, some cereal or something. Usually I’d have a candy bar or small bag of chips in there somewhere. And a lot of soda. But not a lot of actual food, just mostly crap.
And Hello dolly’s are a military-style exercise where you lay on your back, put your hands flat under your rear end to support your back, and extend your feet out to the side at the same time, and then bring them back to the center. Because your feet are up about six inches in the air, your stomach gets a hell of a workout this way. Flutter kicks are the same thing, only up and down instead of side to side. Seriously, twenty of each of these every night will help shed pounds SO MUCH. They give your tummy muscles a serious workout. You WILL feel the burn.
~Tasha
I know it’s been a long time since Ethilrist posted this, but I’ve been thinking about it for long enough to make a reply. Hey, Ethilrist, I keep my weight off by walking. I have found that I gain weight at under 30 miles a week, stabilize between 30 and 45, lose weight at over 50. Yes I have walked 60-mile weeks.
The thing is, because of arthritis in my foot, I cannot walk those miles fast. I am a three-mile-an-hour person. So you are talking a minimum investment of 10 hours of walking a week. That’s a hell of a lot more than 15 minutes three times a week with a backpack.
I made significant life changes to be able to do this: I found a house a mile and a quarter away from work, leave early some days so I can walk longer, don’t bring a car to work, walk on my lunch hour, etc. etc. I think it’s more than most people can do. And I had to work my way up to it; despite the ease of walking as an exercise , I had to spend a couple of years at three miles a day, only twenty-one miles a week, before I could gradually move up to 35-40. It was 10 years before I could walk 70 miles in a week.
We did something like that in karate–my instructor called them “Archie Moores” and we pair up when doing them. Your partner would push your feet in random directions, hard. You had to bring them back up without your heels hitting the floor. Brutally effective if you do them for several minutes at a time.
Not to mention you’re typically not eating when doing those long-ass walks.
Pretty impressive, in all. Wish I did that much walking.
What are you eating that you can walk 29 miles a week and gain weight? I’m not the greatest eater in the world - I’m somewhat conscious about what I eat but I cheat and convince myself certain things are ok on the weekends, etc - and I pretty much stabilize with no excersize. Any little bit of excersize and I’ll lose weight, or any stuffing myself beyond satisfaction and I’ll gain weight.
I was in the hiking club in HS (or whatever you call it, we’d walk up mountains). I went to the club’s summer camp in 11th grade. It was 15 days, in tents; every other day we’d walk/climb up a mountain (including things like “Acherito from the North” which leave those-sissy-climbers-with-the-ropes open mouthed) and come back down. On rest days, we’d just get up around 5am, have breakfast, walk to the river pool over in the next valley (7km), spend some time swimming in the river, come back, spend some time hauling stones trying to convince our own river to make a bit of a pool, have lunch (if your 'taters had a fly, your benchmates would complain that you’d gotten extra protein), spend some more time in our river (you only have to wait two hours if you haven’t jumped in before digestion begins, was our theory), go back to the other pool, swim, come back, play some volley or whatever.
I gained 5kg and lost 2 jeans sizes.