I’m sure begbert2 will handwave it away or attempt to rationalize his way out of it just like every other fact that inconveniently doesn’t fit his viewpoint, but aside from the host of health benefits that exercise provides, from a fat-loss viewpoint, you should exercise in order to offset the loss of muscle mass as well as fat that typically results from a reduced-calorie diet. Swing dieting exacerbates this problem because every low-calorie cycle leads to a loss of at least some muscle mass, which makes the lean vs. adipose body tissue ratio even more negative.
The first thing your body tries to protect is stored fat, and it will do this by preferentially cannibalizing muscle mass before it even touches the fat. Weight-bearing exercise like running or at least walking — not swimming, not biking, not rowing; those are not weight-bearing activities — will be of the most benefit to prevent this loss. Weight training also, obviously, helps to preserve muscle mass even when running a calorie deficit. You also should be eating sufficient protein in order to prevent the loss of lean body mass.
Even if you don’t care about the effect of exercise on insulin regulation and cholesterol, and hypertension, all of which are extremely relevant to a diabetic individual’s overall health, exercise does (PDF) help in losing fat, and more importantly, keeping it off. I posted general links to Google Scholar because it doesn’t matter what individual study you look at, aside from some possible outliers I’m pretty confident that practically any study you pick will have shown positive outcomes in those components of health due to exercise — independent, in most cases, from any changes in diet.
rhubarbarin, of course there’s a genetic component to body fat and body composition, but activity has a big effect on it. I personally eat more now that I’m fit than I did when I was over 15 kg heavier. And despite being in generally good shape for most of my life up to that point, I did get fat in my late 20s due mostly to being inactive.
I lost the weight through exercise. The only component of my diet that I consciously changed was food quality; eating more fresh foods and fewer processed, eating a bit more protein than before. Aside from sanity checks every couple of months to be sure I wasn’t eating ridiculous amounts without being aware of it — during which I deliberately did not reduce my food intake so I could see what I actually ate on a normal basis — I have not weighed or measured my food. During those checks, I put my portion on the plate and weighed the food afterward.
I’m now 73 kg, 176 cm, and eat about 300–500 calories more than I did when I was nearly 90 kg. I do weightlifting and some short-term, high-intensity aerobics on average about twice a week, 3 or 4 days if I can fit it into my schedule, which is not that often in the last 8 or 9 months. I’ve lost muscle, actually, due to less exercise; I used to be 75 kg before I started this job.
Unhealthy eating and excessive portions were not really what contributed to my weight gain, lack of activity was. Even before I lost much weight, the changes from exercise showed up on my next health exam, when my blood pressure and cholesterol levels had dropped dramatically from the previous check.
Contrary to what begbert2 said earlier, exercise is not a desperation measure to lose weight faster, it takes longer to show visible benefits for fat loss than dietary changes, but has profound effects on long-term body composition. If I had tried to lose weight through dieting, I’m absolutely certain I would have gained it back. I know this because that’s what happened when I got lazy again for a while and let life interfere with my exercise schedule to the point where I wasn’t doing it regularly at all. I gained back about half the weight I’d lost. With exercise, I’ve maintained the fat loss over a few years now, and I pay less attention to how much I eat than I did when I was fat and worried about getting fatter.
Oh yeah, I’m definitely the only one with a bias here. The exerciseophiles are totally not handwaving or rationalizing, no not at all. :rolleyes:
That said, here’s your handwave: I don’t give a crap about muscle mass. Possibly because I never had any to lose.
Oh, and I don’t recall ever saying that exercise didn’t have other benefits that I don’t care about. But this thread is about weight loss. Say it with me: weight loss. Say it slower: weiiiight, looossss. Say it in reverse: Sol tay’w. Say it in pig latin: ateway osslay…
Bolding mine. Do you seriously think that doesn’t make a difference? Seriously? You think that all foods are the same with regard to calories (or other nutritional values) per weight? Seriously?
Wanna know why I snack on raw vegetables? Because you can eat your weight in them and get the same calories as you get from smelling a sugar cube. Sheesh.
I never said exercise didn’t effect long term body composition. And it’s the exerciseophiles who have been selling it as a measure to lose weight faster on top of dieting; in fact I think you’re the first person who is asserting that dieting doesn’t work. Though it doesn’t sound like your approach to tracking your diet would be likely to give you useful data from which to draw such conclusions, which might explain your…unusual…position.
And by the way, how much exercise do you think “exercise” means? The examples you give sound rather beyond what I’d expect your average 350 lb person to dive into (though of course there will be exceptions).
bebert2, you obviously haven’t read a single link I’ve provided in any post in this thread. If you had, you’d see study after study that reported better weight loss from exercise and diet than diet alone. I linked to a meta-study of over 50 separate studies that found better outcomes from the combination of exercise and diet than just diet. You’d also see that most important for health, visceral fat is more affected by exercise than by dieting, and that even without dieting exercise has health benefits.
I, personally, don’t bloody care if you exercise or not. You have your priorities and you’ve made your choices. That’s your right, and I’m not going to try to cajole you into a different course of action. But you have been factually wrong in practically every post you’ve made here, and repeatedly asserting that something is true does not make it so.
I absolutely do not think all foods are the same. That’s why I said food quality. It’s much harder to overeat if you cut out processed foods. 2000 calories of Coke and chips that you binge on in two “meals” a day is totally different from 3–5 small balanced meals made up of fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and nuts.
You also obviously don’t understand that the proportion of macronutrients is nearly as important as the raw calorie count, nor that simply cutting calories is unlikely to prove to be a good strategy for long-term weight loss and maintenance. There are people who eat very little and are still fat. Why? Because, as I pointed out — and provided citations for — they are starving themselves. They lose muscle, inhibit their metabolism, and make it virtually certain that they’ll binge at some point on high-calorie foods. Eating raw cauliflower probably isn’t going to help you lose weight forever, though it might work in the short run.
And no, “dieting,” doesn’t work. Long-term sustainable changes in diet and activity work. The way you eat today should be the way you plan to eat for the rest of your life. You can’t just go on a diet, lose the weight, and expect to maintain that loss. You have to change your lifestyle, or the weight will come back. If there’s anything the diet industry has demonstrated it’s that nearly anything will work to lose weight…for a while. Maintaining that body composition requires more than a temporary change in eating patterns.
Exercise for a 350 lb. person seriously can be as simple as walking — as I specifically said in my last post. (Again, you don’t appear to have actually read what I wrote.) As you lose weight and get fitter, you can progress to more strenuous exercise, but in the beginning most sedentary people who are that overweight can probably elevate their heart rates just by going for a decent walk.
By the way, I’m not an “exercisephile.” Even people who are fit and who can perform well don’t really like to exercise, they like the results. Getting under a heavy squat fucking hurts. Running is exhilarating and unpleasant in nearly equal measures. The reason I exercise is so I’m not fat and weak, and so my body works well. There’s a certain amount of pleasure in being more capable and fit, but the process of getting there isn’t exactly fun for anyone. You can minimize the unpleasantness, but if you want better results, you have to suck it up and deal.
It’s also an unfortunate truth that there’s a direct relationship between intensity of exercise and the time you need to spend doing that exercise for good results. If you want to minimize the time you spend exercising, you generally need to go harder, which is more painful even though you’re doing the activity for a shorter time.
If I’m going to do something, I want to do it well, so my workouts are way more strenuous than I’d recommend for most people. Without talking to you and figuring out your goals and — more importantly — your capabilities and current health, I wouldn’t make more than very general recommendations about a fitness program. Besides, I’m not a fitness expert, I don’t even play one on TV. I’m more willing to give advice with people who have some experience in exercising since they are presumably more capable of judging what they can and cannot do.
If you’re actually interested, I can tell you that right now, body weight exercises are probably more than enough for you. Pick multi-joint exercises over isolation ones. Body weight squats, scaled (aka: girl) pushups, shovelglove etc. Whatever you do, you’ll probably be sore for the first couple of weeks. That’s natural. Even advanced athletes get pretty sore if they take too long of a layoff from working out regularly, and for you your layoff has been most of your life. It gets better if you make it a habit. If you quit and start, and quit, and start it always — always — sucks about 10x more. Which is probably one of the reasons you hate exercising.
Walking at a brisk pace will probably be enough to get your heart rate up. You could do marching in place or something else that’s low-impact if you don’t want to go out. Whatever it is, it should be something you’re standing for. Like I said before, biking, rowing, etc. aren’t weight-bearing activities. They have other benefits, but for starting out, you’re going for bang-for-buck. For someone who’s probably still quite heavy, I’m not about to tell you that you should start jogging or jumping rope. That would be a good way to screw up some joints, especially combined with overall muscular atrophy.
You do not need to go for an hour. The most benefits-for-time are accrued in 20 minutes of aerobic activity, assuming you’re doing it hard enough. Frankly, if you’re not pushing yourself enough to get at least a little bit out of breath, you’re not doing it hard enough to matter much. It’s better than sitting on the couch, but not really the best use of your time. The calorie counter on your bike, treadmill, whatever, is mostly useless. Not only does it not reflect the actual work you’re doing, it really has no relation to what adaptations your body is making to the stimulus.
Best advice: find a good physical therapist or other specialist in exercise therapy. I do NOT recommend going to your nearest Globo-Gym and talking to some “trainer” there. The vast majority of gym trainers have no professional qualifications, and honestly have probably injured or turned off more people from exercise than they’ve ever helped. They’re particularly harmful to people who have no fitness background, which is painfully ironic since those are the people who most need good advice.
I’m skinny, real skinny. I eat anything and everything. I’m a walking garbage disposal. I eat starch, fat, grease, preservatives, red dye number 2, nitrate enriched hot dogs, sugar, bacon bits in bacon wrapped in bacon, all sorts of probably bad stuff. if it don’t run faster than me it’s food.
So as someone with no dog in the fight, I have to wonder, why has this board lately seen so much “hatin’ on da fatties”?
What is it with certain people having to tell other people that they are fat/lazy/sick/disgusting/evil/nofuckinggood etc? Is it some sort of superiority thing? Is it a matter of getting some jollies at someone else’s expense?
Ok, you’re dubious. Let’s see that quote again so I don’t lose the studio audience:
All right, this guy learned this lesson, but you remain dubious. So your POV ought to be that the only possible treatment goal is just the control of hyperglycemia and minimization of the risk of complications. That’d include losing some weight, sooner rather than later. Exercise, with an eye toward fitness rather than weight loss, is probably your best all-around bet. Combined of course with a sensible diet.
I would call you an ‘exercisephile’ based on this statement! I stay moderately active, but nothing I do ‘fucking hurts’ or is what I would call unpleasant. The whole POINT of staying active is to have fun doing it (and secondarily, to be able to have more fun when I’m older because I never became totally sedentary). I’m a grown-up now, I don’t waste my precious free time doing activities that I find unpleasant or painful.
Because I’m me (got really damn lucky in the body-type lottery), and also because of what I eat (I wasn’t this muscular before I started eating high-fat and high-protein) I’m thin, muscular enough to be described as ‘cut’, strong for my small size, with a heart rate in the ‘athletic’ range, even though I hardly exercise at all right now.
Athletically I perform better than most people I know - and most of them ‘work out’ a lot more. I have friends that have been running (and hating it, but assuming it keeps them thin) for years and can’t get their mile under 8 minutes - three years ago when I tried to run a mile for the first time after many years of being almost completely sedentary it was 8 minutes without terrible effort.
The way I look and my general athletic performance is genetic, with nutrition coming in second, and exercise hardly factoring in at all. This of course is not true for everyone (if you work your body like hell of course you could improve performance, and probably the look of it), but it’s true for plenty of people, especially those who don’t do a high degree of working out. Like I said before my sisters and are very similar shapes and sizes. I have always been the thinnest overall, and right now I appear to be the most muscular (I also do the most load bearing activity). My sister who does dance and runs track has put on a lot of muscle weight since she started, but doesn’t have my muscle tone, probably because of her diet and because she does mostly aerobics. My sedentary sister doesn’t have a higher BMI but has a higher body fat percentage so looks quite a bit curvier than us. Our bodies still look more alike than anyone else I have ever met despite our vastly different diets and athletic activity/performance, and we are all very close in BMI (17 and 18).
This thread isn’t about health, it’s about fat and weight loss. Keep up, will you?
And, emphasis mine. Is diet control effective or not? If it really weren’t, we would see comparisons of exercise combined with a diet of twinkies and hohos with exerciseless sensible diets. But we don’t because, despite your position on diet, it’s clearly the foundation and framing of any effective weight loss effort.
As I’ve said, strenuous exercise can add a small extra boost to the weight loss. But who cares? Exercise levels sufficent to do squat to your rate of weight loss are a pain in the ass, as you admit, and the suggestion that it is necessary to do strenuous exercise to lose weight will obviously deter heavy people from attempting to lose weight. Does that mean that some people won’t hold their nose and do it? No, some people will do the total lifestyle change thing, and some of them will even keep it up long enough for their change in diet to make a difference in their weight.
Of course, I’ve already said that, and if you didn’t notice you shouldn’t be criticizing me for reading comprehension.
Funny how you completely dismissed the effects of diet on your weight loss, then, in preference of your fantasy that exercise is the be-all and end-all of weight loss.
You are certainly not qualified to speak about what I understand.
And I wouldn’t describe a person who binges “at some point” on high-calorie foods often enough to stay fat a person who eats very little. But then, I’m not trying to distory reality to pretend that diet management can’t induce weight loss, probably because I’m not trying to clear the way for a fantasy that strenuous exercise is the only way to achieve a true nirvana.
I’m just going to assume that you haven’t bothered to read any of my contributions in this thread if you think I’m saying that after you get down to your goal weight you can go back to porking on ding-dongs and ho-hos and stay thin. Cause if you have some clue of what my position is, this is just a gratuitous strawman you’re doing 'cause you can’t think of any actual objection to fill this space with.
Your last post said lots of different things, as it moved goalposts around to try to pretend it was a coherent position. For example, you said that walking was exercise, and that exercise a great deal more strenuous than walking might help you lose weight. I wonder if anybody else noticed the bait-and-switch?
“As you lose weight and get fitter”. How much weight we supposed to lose first? 'Cause if your “exercise is the way to lose weight” argument only works on people who weigh 250lbs or less, as it really looks like it does, then you have wandered into the wrong thread. Seriously, a lack of rigid musclarity is not the problem under discussion here. And sure, your assertions might be sage advice for a football player who’s gone a little to seed and wants to drop thirty pounds and get that six-pack back (heck, it probably is good advice to such folks), but that ain’t the kind of ‘heavy’ we’re talking about here.
You like it well enough to deny the effectiveness of a good diet on weight in order to sell exercise better. 'Nuff said.
I get “no pain, no gain”. The question is, what are you gaining? Weight loss, or ripped muscles?
If you like ripped muscles, then good for you, you have chosen the most effective (heck, only) way to pursue your goal. Though, it’s a good thing you’re not fat. Fat covers the muscles, hides them, see?
My goals are not to have ripped muscles. They’re to lose weight. Lots of it. And my physical capabilities are so weak it’s beyond your capability to imagine - and they were equally low when I was thin!
I hate exercising because morons think that anybody can do a hundred pushups. Seriously, you have no clue who your audience is here. You belong in a “I’m only 80% ripped, please help” thread.
Given that I want bang-for-buck, I focus on the diet. And hammering my knees aganst the floor in a march is not on my list of things to do. My knees were born screwed up; the only part of me that’s weight-bearing is my ass.
Oh, it wouldn’t surprise me if my exercise bike was lying to me, technology being what it is. (Though I do wonder where you think it gets the number, if not from the work you’re doing.) Fortunately I don’t bike to lose weight, so it doesn’t much matter if it lies to me a little - it’s a good enough source to cough up numbers for this thread, I think.
And the best use of my time varies on my mood, but it’s never exercising. There’s this new computer game I got, for instance…
Dude. I don’t want to get fit. I want to get thin. (Well, less fat.) There’s a difference.
You’re telling me what my POV is? :dubious:
Not exercising to the extraordinary levels suggested by Sleel is my best bet, because I’m not in that big a hurry. I’m not on some TV-show where it’s a race, you know.
Sensible diet is indeed the alpha and omega of weight loss. Regardless of anything specific to diabetes.
Re the numbers on exercise bikes, etc: They are basically just ballpark figures, based on the average caloric burn for someone going that speed. Some of the fancier ones will account for your weight, but it’s still just an estimate. Still, a decent estimate is better than nothing. I have heard that those heart rate monitors that you strap to your arm provide a much more accurate reading, but I am not hard-core enough to get one of those… yet.
Dude, you are talking to someone whose last exercise bike was a yard sale find where you had to adjust the resistance by tugging on a fabric strap attached to the front wheel. (I finally ditched it and ponied up for a community center gym membership, though. They also have the fancy exercise bikes with the pulse readout, but I usually throw a towel over the readout because it’s depressing how much work you have to do to burn like 10 calories. Which is your point, I think.)
It’s a good chunk of my point - though at the moment (to my amazement) I find myself having to argue that diet control has any value regarding weight loss.
And my bike wasn’t yard sale fodder, but it was still pretty cheap on the scale of these things; the most notable side effect of that being that it supposedly has a max weight of 250lbs :smack:. It still seems to work well enough though, aside from my having ruined the weight supporting ability of the flimsy chair back by leaning too hard on it and bending/weakening the metal…
Actually, I don’t think this is true. I’m blessed with a tiny body/high metabolism so I started exercising to keep that way. But now I do it not because I need to lose weight or be toned (I’m a bit more toned but not by a huge amount) but because it feels really good to do so. Even though it makes no difference in what I weigh (I really, REALLY don’'t need to lose weight), it feels good. I think a lot of people assume it’s going to be scary, but if you start little by little, gradually it gets easier. And this is from a former couch potato who thought the idea of running a mile without stopping was incomprehensible.
Okay, I started reading this thread with the noble intention of getting through all of it, but it’s sixteen pages!!! So, I tried. I can’t guarantee that my point has never been brought up before, though.
Yes, the points about diet and exercise are important, and that’s clearly where the thread is going right now, but I’d like to get back (just for the moment) to the larger issue of why some people are very overweight. I am a psychiatric social worker, and I have usually worked with people who have severe and persistent mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The newer generation atypical antipsychotics are now being prescribed for these illnesses. They can be amazingly effective, but they cause weight gain that is absolutely, positively, 100% inevitable in virtually every single case. There are only a few, rare, individual exceptions (usually people who just happened to also have ADHD and to be taking Ritalin or Adderall.) Anyone-- and I do mean anyone– who takes Zyprexa (the worst offender), Seroquel, Risperdal, et al, is simply guaranteed to gain weight, and I do mean a lot of weight. It is completely normal and expected for people to gain one hundred pounds on these drugs (especially Zyprexa.) I have rarely seen a weight gain of less than fifty pounds. It doesn’t matter what people do or hard they try, how much they exercise, how much they attempt to control their eating, etc. Extreme weight gain and a greatly increased risk of Type II diabetes are the prices they pay to control severe mental illness. (In fact, even those few people who don’t gain weight on these drugs have an increased diabetes risk, and nobody knows why.)
For the people who truly need these medications, the price is worth paying, because they finally may have a shot at normal lives. But they do not have a choice about gaining weight, and they are not to blame. Would you rather have them dead, on the back ward of a psychiatric hospital, or in jail? It’s easy to point the finger, but the truth is that we don’t always know why people are very overweight, and this is a fact that needs to be remembered.
How can someone gain 50 pounds if they are truly controlling what they eat? That doesn’t compute. You weigh yourself every few days, and if you start to gain, you eat less until you are no longer gaining. I would have thought that works 100% of the time - if you can do it and be rigourous. You simply can’t manufacture 50 pounds of extra body weight if you don’t eat more calories than you burn. It is physically impossible.
From doing some quick Googling, it appears that the problem is that these medications overstimulate the appetite. It’s hard to stick to a diet when your body is screaming at you to “Eat, eat, eat! Eat now! You’re starving!” Most people who successfully lose weight come up with a strategy that involves never, or rarely, feeling extremely hungry. If you’re feeling extremely hungry all the time, even when you’ve eaten an appropriate amount of food, that’s going to make it extremely tough to lose weight. Especially when you take into consideration that the types of people likely to be using these medications were not mentally healthy in the first place and often suffer from severe depression, etc., which is also not conducive to being able to stick to a healthy diet, even if your appetite is not hyperstimulated all day long.
I have no problem with that explaination. It just struck me as bizzare in the extreme to claim that one cannot lose weight, even if one does control one’s food intake. OTOH, it is perfectly reasonable to state that a side-effect of the drug is to make such control a lot more difficult.
Well, technically, Anise said that it doesn’t matter how much the person attempts to control their eating. Not that they were controlling their eating but still gaining weight.
They are on a medication that changes the chemistry of the body. The same weight gains of 50-100 lbs occur in institutionalized near-catatonic people who are fed a strictly monitored diet. They have no option to overeat, yet still they gain.
It’s not all about calories in, calories out in this case. Or in others.
etc. Whatever you do, you’ll probably be sore for the first couple of weeks. That’s natural. Even advanced athletes get pretty sore if they take too long of a layoff from working out regularly, and for you your layoff has been most of your life. It gets better if you make it a habit. If you quit and start, and quit, and start it always — always — sucks about 10x more. Which is probably one of the reasons you hate exercising.