This is simply not true, and I wish people would stop repeating this falsehood. Your body is not a bomb calorimeter, and it treats different types of foods indramatically different fashion which is evident with even a cursory knowledge of nutrition and biochemistry.
Stranger
Most of the calories expended during activity are not reversable work but instead are lost as friction and drag. Calorie estimators are notoriosly unreliable, and at any rate people with different levels of fitness and skill will burn calories at different rates. The goal should not be to maximize the amount of calories a calculator claims that you are consuming during exercise; rater, it should be to elevate your fitness and increase lean muscle composition so as to maintain a higher basal metabolic rate and reduce conversion of sugars into body fat. To that end, focusing on body weight, duration of exercise, and specific caloric intake are distractions from the actual functional goals, which should be to improve nutrional quality, increase exercise intensity, and build lean mass. You are better off planning out a reasonable diet which minimizes intake of low nutrient and high glycemic index foods and maintain a schedule of regular intense exercise (with appropriate recovery intervals) than to count every calorie and check the scale twice a day.
Stranger
Re-emphasizing what has mostly already been said: exercise is not a very good weight loss tool.
It is a great tool for improving health and a decent tool for decreasing fat percentage. Weight change or no weight change exercise substantially lowers your risk of heart disease, of type 2 diabetes, of many cancers, of osteoporosis later in life … it increase the odds you will live longer and live better … so on.
Some people psychologically feel justified eating more because they exercised and even if that more is all healthy stuff eating more calories than the body needs will get stored as more fat. Not saying that is you but it does often happen.
Meanwhile here is the bottom line:
Your goal was what again? Oh yes …
The scale is not the best measure of being in better shape. It is a crude proxy at best. You are hitting your goal.
In my own experience, calorie counting is how you lose weight: exercise is how you keep it off. If you aren’t tracking your eating, you will tend to eat more in response to increased hunger, and you don’t have to start shoveling back milkshakes for this to happen–it’s just a matter of a slightly more generous scoop of potatoes, an extra shake of a cereal box, a bigger glass of milk. A “normal” looking serving is based on how hungry you are, not how big it was yesterday.
However, once you are at goal, exercising regularly seems to be absolutely vital for most people trying to maintain. If you don’t exercise, your maintenance allowance is just pathetic. It’s real suffering to stay on it. However, regular exercise–even if it’s just a matter of 300-500 calories a day–gives you enough wiggle room to have some pleasure and flexibility in your life.
Don’t confuse what takes weight off with what keeps it off. They are really different animals.
Weight loss happens in the kitchen. Fitness happens in the gym.
This is true, and can have an impact in long term weight loss and healthy maintenance. But as a basic view of weight loss the “calories in = calories out” model is still a pretty accurate representation. Yes, there is a difference between calories from protein and from fat, fiber is important for feeling full, but if you want to lose weight counting calories is a good starting point.
I ride about what you ride, cept I ride for minutes, heart and rate, not for distance.
In the beginning I did not lose much at all, actually did you like you, gained some muscle but all in the legs. I incorporated an upper body workout in combination and worked by diet around to fit my fitness needs. Weight pretty much dropped off without much effort after that.
This.
And this.
And I’ve never understood the “Diet or Exercise” debate. The two concepts work synergistically together very well. When you diet, you need some motivation and encouragement to continue doing what you’re doing to reach your goals. Exercise serves to fill this role quite well. When you exercise and diet, you begin to see changes and results, which further motivates you to continue to stay the course and remain committed. Diet is always the main driver of weight loss but exercise is definitely an invaluable additive ingredient in the plan.
You are probably substantially overestimating your calorie burn via exercise and are underestimating your intake. Your body is going to work VERY hard to keep you at a weight set point. If you are hovering just below maintenance levels you will not have the gradual loss you are anticipating, your body will throttle back your metabolism and increase your muscular burn efficiency to compensate.
If you are going to get serious about losing weight you are going to have to cut your intake substantially, and more specifically your carbohydrate intake. You need to go heavy on the protein and green veggies and light on the refined carbs, and especially reduce alcohol which is virtually junk carbs. Your multiple alcoholic drinks have got to go. You might as well be ladling spoonfuls of sugar into your mouth.
You need to put enough space between your burn rate and your intake that you body cannot compensate with metabolism changes and other adjustments and needs to start burning fat for energy. Right now you are too close to maintenance and nothing is happening weight wise.
Except that the calorie counting approach has led people to embrace low calorie “diet food” which is neither nutritious or actually promotes permanent weight loss, and has come to regard dietary fats as the cause of obesity rather than a necessary component of a healthy diet which should be consumed in the appropriate proportion. An effective diet requires changing eating habits in a sustainable fashion, not counting calories and munching on starch-rich “diet” foods. A well balanced diet that minimizes highly processed and easily broken down carbohydrates in favor of foods that are more readily regulated by the body, combined with vigorous strength-building exercise and regular aerobic activity will naturally moderate body weight and composition without the need to “count calories” and other abstractions.
Stranger
You won’t get any argument from me, everything you wrote is correct. But if you apply a few simple rules (such as more fruits and veggies, don’t drink your calories, get more fiber) a calorie counting approach works fine. I managed to lose and keep off 60 lbs doing that. Counting calories doesn’t mean eating starch-rich foods, etc.
However, in my experience, if a person was to eat a poor but low calorie diet they’d still lose weight. They might not be as healthy as they could be, but if you intake fewer calories you’ll still end up losing weight.
You will have gained muscle and it’s way denser than fat so even a little on your glutes adds up.
On the other hand, we can eat a little more through the week thinking we’ve done great exercise and deserve it.
Just stay away from processed shit, and cook/eat ‘fresh’.
You’re probably burning a lot less than you think you are with the mountain biking, and like others have said, exercise alone sucks as a weight loss method.
The magic happens when you restrict your caloric intake, and rev up your metabolism through a combination of building muscle mass and raising the base metabolic rate of your muscles through exercise. Basically, what you’re doing is raising the idle RPM and making the engine a little bigger- you don’t burn so much going from point A to B, but rather during the other 23 hours you’re not exercising. Muscle burns a lot more calories at rest than anything else save maybe your brain.
(not coincidentally, this is part of the reason, I think, why women have a harder time than men losing weight- they don’t have the muscle mass to begin with and nor do they build it as rapidly)
Thanks all, interesting read!
This.
We have been over this before. To recap… it is very difficult for the average person to burn enough calories via exercise to cause a significant reduction in weight. The math just doesn’t add up. Secondly, exercising can make you hungrier, thus causing you to consume more calories. The extra calories you consume will likely cancel any calories burned during exercise. And if the extra calories exceeds the number of calories burned during exercise – which is also likely – you will gain weight.
Someone here once said, “It is easier to *not *eat a donut than to run three miles.” So true.
The goal of exercise should *not *be to lose weight. The goal of exercise is to be healthier and fitter.
Weight reduction is primarily achieved by modifying your style of eating, not exercise.
I don’t disagree, but keeping a food diary/calorie counting at least gives you an idea of what a “normal” portion size is, how energy dense foods are, etc., and gives you a much better idea of just how many calories you are throwing down your gullet each day, and how much a snack here and a beer there can add up. You don’t have to do it forever, but enough so you can better figure out what at least a maintenance food intake for you should look like each day.
My own approach was to slightly cut carbs to about 50% of calories, then about 30% protein and 20% fat. That worked well for me. Sustainability is important. I could never do a true “low carb” diet and, for myself, it wasn’t necessary. YMMV. But it was important for me to keep a diary for a couple of weeks just to get an idea of how much food I was taking in, and how to keep my diet at around 1800-2000 calories per day. You can actually eat quite a lot of food and keep in that range if you make good choices.
I can tell you, I ran for a while, off and on, and it never lost me any weight. Then I went on Weight Watchers for my wedding, still running, lost 30 pounds. Went off the diet after the wedding, haven’t really paid attention to what I eat, but I haven’t gained it back at all (maybe five pounds) and I can almost assure you that’s because I’ve still been running. Running has absolutely kept it off for me. (And I’m still running despite a lot of problems like sinus infections and now I have this thing with my toe because I have a running buddy who shows up at my house at 5:30 AM.)
I missed this when I first responded and I’ve seen several people comment on it, but I think some perspective here will help with this. To a certain extend, people who exercise regularly can eat what they want, but it’s not quite what it looks like.
Let’s use myself and a friend as an example, we’re both roughly the same height and weight (6’ 225 lbs) but our lean body mass is significantly different (I’m around 8% he’s probably ~20%). Even though we’re the same heigh and weight, and neither of our diets are particularly great, his weight fluctuates a lot more. He often goes through phases of working out more and dieting. The difference there is that the resting metabolic rate for muscle is higher than it is for fat. Thus, I can eat a few hundred calories more than he can and not gain weight. In fact, I often run a calorie deficit and even have to find a way to get more calories into my diet than I would normally want to eat.
Another thing that I’ve found, at least for me, is an affect I’ve described as “you don’t need to water dead grass”. When I was exercising with less regularity, I had a greater desire to eat junk food. When I got more serious about it, I found that I craved junk less and I started to crave healthier foods. As I exercised more, my body had a greater need for protein and other nutrients and my tastes changed.
So, with that all in mind, yeah, I pretty much eat what I want and I stay in shape, but what I crave and actually eat still tends to be better than what someone who doesn’t exercise regularly tends to. Really, besides gaining more lean mass to increase your RMR, I think there’s this other underappreciated aspect of exercise that attributes to getting healthier, that it makes it easier to eat healthy, which just helps start a positively reinforcing cycle of then eating better and then wanting to exercise more.
This isn’t a “cite” but my experience when I lost weight a couple of years ago was that, despite drastic changes in my diet and exercise levels, for a month nothing happened with my weight. Then the next 6 weeks, I lost 13 lbs (which brought me to my goal weight, and I’ve not gained it back).
Keep in mind that muscle mass weighs more than fat. It’s quite possible that as your health improves, you’re replacing fat with muscle.
Suggestion: cut the booze out of your diet completely. That will cut down on your calorie intake greatly.