You’re absolutely right - my memory failed me. Nobody brought a 2500/day exercise program into this discussion. This was what I was remembering.
Still, my question is valid - what IS enough exercise?
(And on further review, if 5 miles a day every day only burns 3500 calories a week, why the hell bother?)
There’s lots of information available as to what constitutes enough exercise. Since it’s not exactly difficult to find I’m not going to look it up for you.
As to the benefits of burning 3500 calories a week, that would mean in excess of an additional pound of fat loss per week, plus muscle gain, plus cardiovascular health benefits, plus the aforementioned cognitive and mood benefits.
Seriously. I’m actually not convinced that begbert isn’t having a little fun with us. I mean, really? Burning 3500 calories per week = “why the hell bother?”
3500 calories is about a pound. So if you’re burning 3500 calories per week, that’s a full pound right there, and that doesn’t even take into account your basal metabolic calorie burn, or dietary caloric restriction. 1-2 pounds per week is considered an appropriate rate of weight loss. (Reality programs such as “The Biggest Loser” notwithstanding.)
Well, one of my main points is that the practice can help a person conquer their compulsions/hangups or what have you. People have talked about the irresistibility of various biological drives, comparing a compulsion to eat to the drive to breathe. One point is that if it can take a person’s discipline to the point that they are competing with Marine Corps champions in deep sea diving, it’d be enough to teach a person to conquer their compulsion to overeat.
Another is that I thought the argument would be more convincing if I were demonstrating that point (and verifying for myself that I’m not full of shit). Fact is, this is very embarrassing for me to talk about. It evokes new-age hippie images, not to mention that where I come from, getting involved with something like this would be tantamount to coming out as gay (a Very Bad Thing back there, and I’m not, not that there is anything wrong with that etc :rolleyes:).
So. Looks like I’ve overcome one of my little hangups. Not that you can verify it, but it was interesting for me to test. Obviously losing 100 lbs is another kettle of fish…
And- diabetes can get pretty rotten. I don’t think people deserve the worst consequences if they can avoid it.
I guess I’m just about done, unless you’ve got some more questions. I’m not fed up, I think I’m running out of things to say about it.
It is just about control, not going mindless. Your own account made it sound like kanicbird’s or my theories on ‘how people get so fat’ might be too complicated. Sounds like you did it absentmindedly is all.
But speaking of this, I asked another yoga instructor about the mechanism that causes this state. You might like this actually. She looked kind of surprised and asked, “That’s it?”, like she expected some tough question. Yeah that’s it.
The answer was it isn’t the yoga at all. :smack: It is only the sustained focus (on the breath in this case) that does it. A person could throw away the yoga and just do this and get exactly the same effect (though obviously no exercise benefits). Because it isn’t sorta kinda like meditation- this aspect of it literally is formal meditation. Hmpf. No one ever mentioned that (you just do it), and having never tried meditation I didn’t recognize it as such. Not in all this time. Can you fuckin’ believe it??? I always thought there was something more to it. Yoga de-mystified.
The mechanism is that the mind is not good at multitasking, and so sustained focus one one thing drives out all the little monkeys. Once you get there it coasts along for awhile, and you get better at it with practice. No religion to it.
And. You could take the breath away too and do it some other way (though she thinks this is the easiest method). Concentrating on a candle flame for instance. Or various other things (I’ll go out on a limb and say TV doesn’t count), I’ll go into it if you really want. I’m sure there is a cheap book or tape around on the subject, probably something that would even avoid awkward concepts from foreign cultures.
So it looks like you could get your wish. You actually could get this mental benefit while simply sitting there.
If this hasn’t done any other good, I have to thank you for being so skeptical, begbert, or I might not have sorted this one out any time soon.
If your diet stalls, now you’ve got another thing in the toolbox you could try. No one would even have to know!
I’d like to discuss a slight hi-jack although relevant topic to the discussion. Fast food.
We all know it’s a major cause of people becoming fatter yet it is still ate by millions of americans everyday. Personally, I don’t think they’re as popular as they are because it’s that good, because it’s not that good, but for the sole reason of efficiency. No other meal must come cheaper and faster.
My question is simply when do you think society will produce quality food that matches the price and efficiency of fast food?
I don’t think anyone did, but is possible for someone to burn that many calories a day without preparing for a decathalon, though. At my weight five hours of shoveling snow by hand would burn more than 2,100 calories, and I’m sure it’d be easy enough to rack up another 400 doing nothing much the rest of the day. And with the winters we’ve had over the past two years, I’ve done this more than once. Hell, I’ve done that shoveling off the damn roof more than once.
There are probably other activities on this list one could realistically sustain for quite a long time and also burn up a lot of calories.
For heaven’s sake, burning 3500 calories in exercise does not mean you lose one pound. It’s not simple math. Just as you can eat 3500 calories more one week and not necessarily gain one pound (those were the good old days), or eat 3500 calories less in a week and not lose a pound. Two years ago I began walking and swimming a total of 6 miles a day, 3 times a week, for 9 months, did not increase my eating (I actually was monitoring it), and didn’t lose an ounce. I’m sure there were other benefits, but weight loss wasn’t one of them. Either were the two stress fractures in my foot.
Something’s not adding up here. You were doing 2 hours of exercise a day, probably 600 calories, without changing your eating and didn’t lose weight. The energy to do the exercise has to come from somewhere. What sort of food logs were you keeping? Did you monitor your eating before you started exercising?
What he said. The only possible way that this situation makes sense is if even though you were burning significantly more calories you were still eating more calories than you were burning. I.e. (I am making these numbers up just as an example) if you were eating 4000 calories per day before you started your fitness routine, and with your exercise you were burning 600 calories per day, you would still have a net intake of 3400 calories per day, which is probably too much for anyone who is looking to lose weight.
If you say that you were consuming an appropriate amount of calories for weight loss, then something was wrong with your tracking methods.
PS (Missed the edit window), I am certainly not saying that weight loss is a simple math problem. I think anyone who has lost a significant amount of weight knows that even if you are eating properly and exercising and all, there are some weeks that you lose more, some weeks you lose less, and some weeks you don’t lose anything at all. Maybe even some weeks where you gain a bit. But the overall trend is downward. If your calories burned are greater than your calories consumed, then over time, you will lose weight. It’s not a simple math problem, but it is a pretty simple physics problem.
Pheh, lots of the information doesn’t agree with each other - and to date they don’t suggest getting much exercise at all. Cited above is a source suggesting 60-160 minutes of walking a week (rather a large spread), which my my extraordinarly coarse calculation could be as low as 500 calories burned. A week. Yay?
I have serious doubts that most of the exerciseophiles in this thread would consider that exercise at all.
3500 calories a week is 500 calories a day. That’s like two, maybe three more cookies. A couple handfuls of chips. It’s a few minutes work to eat this - or not eat it. So, to get the same benefit from a caloric(/weight loss?) standpoint as walking five miles, you could…put down the damn cookie.
Given that, “why bother” seems like a perfectly appropritate response, just the same way I’d ask someone why they’re bothering to start a fire by rubbing sticks together when they have a lighter right there. Now of course, they may tell me that they’re rubbing the sticks together for some other reason than because they’re in a hurry to start a fire. (For the ‘experience’ of it, or whatever, perhaps.) And a person who walks five miles a day could tell me the same thing - it’s not about losing weight, it’s about getting a nice six-pack or build muscle or reduce their cholesterol (or increase their cholesterol?), or whatever. If they have another goal that is well-served by walking, running, yoga, wheight lifting, or whichever, then that’s a different matter.
But. This thread is about “How do people get so fat”. It’s about the heavies. It’s about the losing weight. Specifically.
Fair enough! It’s been good chatting with you. 
Seriously, I think that’s the normal way to do it. There presumably are people who get fat for freaky reasons, obsessive attractions to their food or whatnot, but I seriously think that for most overweight people it just sneaks up op them.
Now, obviously at some point they notice it happening, and the reasons they don’t do something about it could branch into more interesting territory, particularly if you’re looking for something to criticise them for. Laziness, resignation, fatalism, apathy, denial? I’m sure they’re all represented. Probably increasingly so once you get out of “overweight” and “obese” territory into “good lord they can’t move under their own power” territory. But such people are still the exception, not the norm.
Okey-dokey, this makes sense, and is a reasonable mechanism for what’s going on. Yoga simply combines exercise with meditation. So, if you take the exercise out, you’re left with meditation.
Of course, the meditation alone isn’t a weight loss strategy. (Excepting to the degree it occupies time that might otherwise be spent snacking, which I freely concede could have an effect if you’re not already controlling your snacking by some other method.) And my focus is on the weight loss. So, while it’s interesting to have ascertained the separate mechanism for achieving this altered mental state, it doesn’t have the appeal to me that it might otherwise have.
(Actually I’m a little leery about things that alter the mental state, just in general. My mind is me, after all. So the mental stuff doesn’t read like a benefit to me; it reads like a risk. But that’s just me; other people can, and do, have different opinions on the subject.)
The Dope is awesome for this. Seriously, it’s like the Unexpected Learning Experience message board. Makes it totally worth the time to come here.
Well, that and the arguments. 
Er, if the diet stalls (which it kind of has, but I know why. Damn cookies! Damn me who eats them!), I’m going to be looking for another tool that makes me lose weight. Meditation may have other benefits, but that’s probably not one of them. And as exercise in general is a poor way to lose weight…better get back to the diet. Back, you cookies, back! Get away!
You are undoubtedly correct that fast food is a factor. (Though, um, not for me - unless you’re including prefab food on store shelves in the category, which you might as well, since it’s functionally equivalent.)
And unfortunately quality food will never match the price and efficiency of fast food - unless it already does. You can buy salads at most fast food restraunts. But if you’re talking about serving meats that haven’t been frozen to death and grease-fried to get some flavor back into them, those will never be as cheap and easy as doing it the cheap and easy way, for obvious reasons.
Maybe he was gaining muscle mass. Or maybe he was just excreting more. Or maybe his metabolism altered in a way that conserved his food energy.
I’m not really up on my human biology, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a simple “insert X food calories - get back Y energy calories”. There’s chemicals and stuff involved. Any number of things could be happening.
I actually fully agree with this. If someone is thinking, “Well, I need to lose weight, and I’m either going to fix my diet or get some exercise, but not both,” I’d tell them to fix the diet in a heartbeat. As you correctly point out, burning mondo calories with exercise doesn’t help you much when you then consume half of a birthday cake or whatever.
My only beef in this thread is that you’ve made a lot of very silly statements about exercise, e.g. that you have to sweat buckets for it to do any good, it’s insanely difficult, it takes a huge amount of time, etc. And FTR, I absolutely would characterize 60 minutes per walking a week as exercise. What the hell else would you call it?
But yes, if you are going to lose weight, you absolutely have to address your caloric intake before anything else, IMO.
(Btw, I had a gleeful little giggle at being referred to as an “exerciseophile,” as someone who, prior to June of this year, primarily got exercise by walking to the refrigerator and back. So, thanks for that. )
Yay! Concensus!
I would call 60 minutes of walking a week “not a way to lose weight”. (My version of that, 60 minutes of stationary biking a day, which I have sustained with reasonable consistency for periods longer than a year at a time, also had no discernible weight loss effect.)
My position is that exercise is at best small change in the game of weight loss - a position that still seems completely supported by evidence. This being the case, if you want to pretend that it’s going to be having any effect on the weight loss front, you’re going to have to do rather a lot of it. Which will take a lot of time. (Heck, my hour of biking a day was a huge time cost. Good thing I was also watching TV at the time, which I’ve been criticized for in this thread.)
The sweat thing was exclusive to the yoga discussion, of course (and I didn’t come up with it), and the insane difficulty/agony have tended to go along with the marathoner discussions, an exercise I feel justified in believing would be quite painful for me, long before it exceeded the caloric burn of nightly biking (which has no weight loss effect). Both these things are issues that don’t apply to minor, generic exercise, which merely has the problem of being extremely ineffective as a weight loss method.
We aim to please! (Though I was referring collectively to the others who avocate more strenuous exercise programs too, as well as those who affectionately overestimate the weight-loss benefits of such activity.)
Just chiming in to say that I don’t think it’s a mystery. I’m 5’2" and very food/body conscious, but I can put on 10 pounds at the drop of a hat! It’s a constant struggle. People looking at me cannot imagine the struggle. Oh, it must be easy for her. So, if it’s hard for me to maintain the weight I want, it’s not hard at all to see how easy it would be just to quit being so vigilant and say screw it! I was kind of amazed to read the OP; it seems fairly obvious to me. It’s HARD and it takes WORK NOT to be fat, as far as I’m concerned.
The reason something’s not adding up here is because it’s not simple math. The caloric value of food is, simply, the heat energy value of food in a lab. What your body does with that energy is something else althogether. The same number of calories of fat, protein, or carbs will not be treated the same way by your body, dependent on hormones present, metabolic rates, etc. Eating 500 calories of protein is not equivalent to eating 500 calories of carbohydrates or 500 calories of fats. Gaining and losing weight has to do with whether your body is burning carbs or stored fat, and how much of each it decides to burn or store. Expending 3500 calories DOES NOT mean you will lose one pound of fat. I’m not saying that exercise will not cause you to lose weight; of course it will, at some level of activity. If I had been doing something far more strenuous, such as running hard instead of briskly walking, or walked a great deal farther than I did, then at some point I, personally, would have lost weight. But light-to-moderate exercise does not cause me to lose weight in anything approaching a 3500 calories = 1 pound proportion. And there’s no reason why it should. Just as eating less will cause weight loss at some point, but again, not necessarily in the 3500 calories = 1 pound proportion.
Here is a more simple example, less fraught with “are they really monitoring every piece of food they’re eating?” A person with Type 1 diabetes (no insulin available) will not typically gain weight without insulin shots, even after eating vast amounts of food. Unexplained weight loss is one of the early symptoms. The more intensive the insulin therapy, the more weight they gain. 3500 calories = 1 pound has no meaning if the insulin isn’t there.
This “3500 calories = 1 pound of weight” notion is popular because it is easy to visualize, just like the notions that drinking water will flush out your system, or that sitting in a steam room will clear out your pores, or that drinking fruit juice will flush out toxins from your system, or that if we don’t drink 8 glasses of clear liquid a day we will dehydrate. But they’re not at all accurate representations of how physiology works.
Note: I’m not griping about not losing weight; I don’t really have a significant weight problem, though family members do. I’m giving a real-life example as to the over-simplification of the “simple math” of 3500 calories = 1 pound.
Thank god someone else in this thread understands that it’s not ‘just that easy’ and all down to the ‘law of thermodynamics’.
Listen, people, if we had the mechanics of the human body figured out- the amount of fat people in America would not be climbing. To to say nothing of the epidemic of fat children, which do more than anything I think to prove that it’s more complicated than most think. The amount of overweight kids has tripled in the past 30 years. How exactly does someone who is still growing ‘eat too many calories’?
…by eating more calories than they are burning? Just because you are growing does not mean that your body is burning an infinite number of calories.
Look, there are two things going on here. One is the idea that weight loss is, at root, just a matter of consuming less than you burn. This is true. The other is the idea that because the basic idea is pretty simple, that means that weight loss must necessarily be simple. This is not true. Weight loss is hard. There are a lot of things in the world that are theoretically pretty simple, but very difficult in practice, and for most people, losing weight and keeping it off is one of those things.
What I take exception to is people who say that weight loss is literally impossible, or that they know someone who has been eating 1200 calories and exercising like a madman for two years and hasn’t lost a pound. I find these stories dubious.
I don’t. Eating that little and exercising that much will leave very little calories for running regular body functions. The metabolism will grind to a standstill, as the body attempts to withstand the famine it believes it is in. The person will probably lose weight until the body slows down like this, but will plateau as soon as the body adjusts. Any time they aren’t 100% perfect with their minuscule diet, the body will cling to the extra calories as hard as possible.
Eating too little while dieting is just as bad as eating too much, and probably more common.
(1200 is actually a decent number for a small, sedentary person who wants to lose weight, but it starts to become too little if that person exercises, or is more than ~130 pounds)
That is a good point, although I was really just pulling a number out of thin air. The exact number of calories needed is obviously going to be different per individual, but I was referring generally to people who say that there are some people that literally cannot lose weight, and say that these people can exercise and eat the proper amount of calories and never lose a pound. That is what I find dubious. What is not dubious is that there are people who think they are eating the proper amount of calories, but are not, and this is not a value judgment of any sort; I know from personal experience how easy it is to under or overestimate your caloric intake. Or to find out just what an appropriate amount is in the first place.