Yes, because everybody has as much physical activity as the Amish people. That totally disproves the idea that for a normal heavy to obese American trying to lose weight, that diet is they key factor in that weight loss, not exercise. Sure, exercise is more important if you workout 10 hours a day, or run a farm without modern equipment. I guess you just blew my argument out of the water, mr Rumor_Watkins. Congratulations!
Now, for the other people with heads in normal positions, diet is more important than exercise.
Because achieving a sufficient deficit through exercise alone would require several hours of exercise per day, something that most people don’t have available in their schedule. To lose two pounds per week (a reasonable rate for an obese person) requires a deficit of 7000 calories per week. A 200 pound person can burn about 700 calories running 5mph for an hour straight, without stopping. If you have ten hours every week to devote to the treadmill, that’s great, but most people don’t.
On the other hand, reducing one’s energy intake by substituting lower-energy foods can reduce total calories consumed without a huge amount of effort. 700 calories is a large McDonald’s fries. Eat some carrot sticks instead and you’re set, and it doesn’t take two hours.
I disagree, I think eating high-calorie foods until one becomes morbidly obese is unnatural. Human civilization did not have an obesity epidemic until modern technology and business made food universally available for cheap. People get used to eating more than they should, until they feel that that’s how much they need. They can also get used to eating a more proper amount. I did, and I’ve lost almost 40 pounds so far.
I also exercise, but not that often nowadays, as my new job keeps me very busy.
Per the OP’s question, one study demonstrating weight gain in patients who consumed diet soda was performed at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. cite and cite.
In another study performed at the University of Minnesota, drinking diet soda was more strongly associated with metabolic syndrome than either fried foods or red meat. cite. The same article also references a study done at Purdue in which rats were fed yogurt sweetened with high-calorie glucose or with the low-cal artificial sweetener saccharine, among other foods. Note that the study was limited rats, not people, and tested saccharine, not other artificial sweeteners. For the OP, you should be able to find the original research papers for each of these studies by searching on PubMed (although there may be a fee for the full text articles).
A recent study indicates that diet drinks may not fool the brain cite - the body detects the calories in food via mechanisms that don’t just involve taste.
I drink diet drinks - if I can skip out on the calories in a full-fat coke, I will. But I don’t drink heaps, I drink plenty more water. I lost weight (25kg over 18 months) by a combination of diet (cutting out easy carbohydrate calories) and exercise (3500-4000 calories a week, over 10 hours a week exercise). The trouble with exercise as a weight loss method is that maintaining a high level of exercise increases the appetite and requires available fuel, so getting the calorie balance right is really hard.
I think all of this is nothing but an illustration of the difference between cause and correlation. There’s no defined or proven cause. Heck, everything points in the other direction: if you stop drinking sugary drinks and drink diet drinks you’ll lose weight.
Obese people arent stupid. They’ll drink a diet drink instead because it almost tastes the same, but they also eat pretty badly. There’s no “deep friend chicken carving” gene thats activated by sweetners. Its just people with bad habits who would love to blame the companies that make splenda for their troubles and conspiracy theorists and other naturalists who have nothing to do but make false accusations that appeal to their identity politics.
Yes. I understand better studies are in progress, but the original, widely-reported study that “diet drinks make you gain weight” said (of course) nothing of the sort. An equally valid way to phrase the result would be “people with weight problems are more likely to drink diet soda,” which I suspect would come as a surprise to no one–but doesn’t make for as good a headline.
Isn’t one of the problems with all the speculation and studies about what soda does that there’s no accounting for the difference in dietary habits between people who tend to drink soda vs people who tend do drink water? I would imagine that people who drink water rather than soda are simply more inclined towards eating more healthy food regardless.
Just to be on the safe side I have given up diet sodas and switched over to unsweetened ice tea or water, in hopes that it helps me with my battle against weight gain.
I have also started eating better and exercising regularly (5 times a week) and my treadmill says I am burning about 800 calories in two hours of power walking.
So far my weight has stabilized, but at least it’s not going up (and I feel a lot better in general).
(offtopic slightly) To the argument about exercise and diet:
It seems like you guys are all so intent on proving your point that you are intentionally ignoring what the other side is saying in order to make your side of the argument seem much better of an approach.
This is NOT a mutually exclusive club here. Nobody should ever choose one over the other, to do so would be a silly (dare I say lazy) way to approach losing weight.
If you need 2000 calories a day to mantain your current weight, but you eat 3000, you will gain weight.
If you go on a diet which reduces your calorie intake to 2400, you will still gain weight, but after a year you will be quite a lot lighter than you WOULD have been. This is technically the same as losing weight.
If you exercise regularly and bring your daily required caloric intake to 2500, you will also “lose weight” at nearly the same speed as you would with diet alone, but the two compounded now have an actual measurable effect on your weight decreasing.
So basically my opinion is if you actually have to consider which is more worthwhile to you between diet and exercise, you are already fighting a losing battle. While you sit there thinking you’re smart for dieting instead of exercising or vice-versa, you will be heavier in the future than you could be no matter what.
A lot of studies seem to assume that the alternative to Diet Soda is water, while in my experience, people usually drink diet sodas as an alternative to regular soda.
Certainly true in my case anyways, I was drinking several cans of coke a day, and then switched to diet coke as an alternative. I quickly shed something like 10% of my then body weight without any other changes to my diet, which makes sense, several cans of coke is ~500 calories-a-day.
Of course I could’ve had the same effect if I switched to water, but I was pretty hooked on coke, so that would’ve been a much tougher transition. So at least for people in my situation (which I don’t think is terribly unusual), diet sodas are a good diet aid.
It seems to me that if my body produced extra insulin in response to artificial sweeteners, that this insulin response would be detectable in the form of a change in blood sugar levels. However, I can drink a very large quantity of diet soda pop with absolutely no change in my blood sugar level, as measured by my home meter. I’ve heard the same anecdotal evidence from a lot of people on diabetes forums.
I may be beating a dead horse at this point, but this is clearly wrong. If you eat little enough, you’re going to lose weight, no matter what you do. Your body burns some energy even when you’re just sitting around. If you aren’t eating enough food to provide that energy, then your body can only get it from burning the mass you already have. It’s just a matter of physics.
just gave it a shot, tested glucose, swilled 4 oz of diet brown bubbly water, tested immediately and 1 hour post swillage, normal small drop since I didnt actually consume anything to digest. tested, drank 4 oz hfcs laden bubbly brown swill, major spike immediately after, 1 hour later, still too high for my personal preference. ’
You do realize my endo is going to ream me for that little spike o’fun when they read out my meter … and tell them i was playing with soda to see what happens
All the arguments about artificial sweeteners aside, there’s the matter of the stomach.
Sodas fill the stomach. On the plus side this reduces cravings. On the negative side, it stretches your stomach / keeps it from shrinking. Put another way, filling up with water reduces symptoms of withdrawal while prolonging the addiction. A reasonable strategy is to start off substituting water for food, but eventually cutting that down too.
