Yes I know the whole calories in vs. calories out paradigm, but I was doing some calculations and I’m sure I can find many threads where Dopers hold to that ideal. In fact, 2 I started about type of diet and effect of diet drinks both led to 90+% about how it was all about calories. I think I may get a lot of of the same responses but on the chance that we get into talks about hormones or BMR or glucose vs fat burning instead of (cal in - cal out)/3600, here’s my question.
According to calories burned charts, I would have to walk 20-25 miles to lose a pound. Assuming I walk 5 times a week, we are looking at a 4-5 mile walk just to lose an extra pound a week. That doesn’t sound right. I know that if I walked 4.5 miles @ 3-4 mph 5 times a week I would lose more than a pound per week. So how does exercise tie into weight lose beyond number of calories burned?
Are you sure you’d lose more than a pound a week with that walking regimen, assuming you keep everything else exactly the same?
People tend to vastly overestimate the amount of calories burned by exercise, and underestimate the amount they consume. That’s why controlling your diet is much more important for weight loss than exercise. (But exercise does help, of course.)
An indirect benefit of exercise is that increasing your muscle mass will also increase your basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of calories you burn just sitting around. Again, the effect is small but it can be significant over the long term.
Exercise doesn’t help all that much. I recall watching an aerobics class and this was very high intensity where you’re jumping around for an hour. And you only burn 300 calories an hour. A candy bar is like 200 calories or more.
You can lose some weight by exercising, but you’d be hard pressed to lose more than 10 pounds that way.
Also don’t forget you are burning calories anyway, just to live.
So lets say you burn those 300 calories in aerobics. You may burn 100 calories an hour just to live. Well that is not 300 EXTRA calories. That’s 300 total. So you would’ve burned 100 just sitting anyway, the net result is your burning only 200 extra calories
One reason that the mile count is so high is that walking is not particularly strenuous exercise. If you ran those miles, or swam them, you wouldn’t have to go nearly as far.
The other main reason, as friedo mentioned, is that building muscle helps you burn more calories even during the times that you’re not actively exercising.
There’s a lot more involved in exercise than just the calories you burn while working out. Any muscle mass you gain from exercise raises your resting metabolism rate. Also, particularly from cardio, you raise your heartrate and metabolism for some period after you’re finished working out. IIRC, those calores from increased resting metabolism and increased heart rate contribute more.
So, in short, you’re not taking into account any of the additional calories that you burn as a result of the exercise but not directly from the exercise itself.
Increases heartrate and metabolism for hour or more after event,
Increases flexibility and strength, which can lead to more vigorous movement during daily activities, which also burns more,
During dieting, fights the body’s attempt to balance fewer calories by lowering rest metabolism and curtailing movement during daily activities,
In my case, vigorous exercise decreases my appetite.
At least it used to. I’m not as able to make with the vigor as I used to be. But if I walked 4.5 miles @ 3-4 mph 5 times a week I would lose more than a pound per week because I’d be doing more things because I felt more energetic. I’d also feel all virtuous and proud of myself, which would make it easier for me to stick to a meal plan.
I disagree 100% with people who are saying diet is WAY more important than exercise, in my own personal experience.
If I try to just diet, it’s hard. Grumpy, hungry, etc. If I eat ‘normally’ and exercise, I lose weight. If I eat lean and exercise, I lose weight even faster.
But it has to do with the amount of exercise you’re willing to put in. I regularly burn 900+ calories a day on the elliptical. I realize most people probably believe that a 15 minute walk or jog is all they need to stay in shape and still eat the crap they usually do. Of course, that isn’t true.
But exercise has a much more positive impact than just calories. It promotes good heart health. It promotes better ratio of good/bad cholesterol. Even if you aren’t losing weight when exercising regularly, you are STILL becoming healthier (most of the time, anyway). Exercise also makes you feel better, whereas dieting just makes you feel grumpier and hungrier.
So, the more exercise you’re willing to mix in your daily life, the healthier and happier you are going to be, regardless of your weight. That’s how I see it anyway.
Exercise is more about maintaining a long healthy lifestyle, and there’s no better time to start that when you are trying to lose weight.
Exercise is what you need to do after you lose the weight to help keep it off. So many people see the crap on TV and think I need to exercise to lose the inches in my waist and get those perfect abs. No, exercise is what you need to do to keep your heart and other vital organs properly working and so that your muscular/skeletal system keeps you moving around well into your 80’s and 90’s.
This is it. The key is increased muscle mass. When you starve, the first thing your body does is shed muscle, because it takes a lot of calories to support that muscle; which is why starvation as a diet plan is remarkably ineffective. Plus, if you hear about people on crash starvation diets losing a lot of weight, they often have heart problems afterwards. Your body sheds whatever muscle it can, including heart muscle.
And of course, sedentary people have a lot less muscle and less calories needed to keep their body running.
Plus, when your body goes into starvation mode, your metabolism goes way down so that you burn much less calories at rest; after a few days continuous starvation, it stops being as effective as it was before. On exercise/nutrition book mentioned that people who work themselves down to a 1200-calories-a-day may still not lose weight because the body adapts to this.
Wow. Let me just say, that’s not typical. When I was losing 2 pounds a week (from 205 lbs down to 170 pounds), I went down to 1800 calories per day, and running @ 5-6 miles per day, five days a week (and usually a long 10-15 mile run in there, too). Everybody is different, but that’s an impressive jump in metabolism if you are really losing that sort of body fat weight at that clip. I wish I could do that. My results are pretty close to what is expected from the math. That said, I could lose up to 7 pounds of water weight from before and after a ten-mile run, so when you weigh yourself is pretty important, too.
Is this view just an opinion or do you have a cite for it? In the gym where i work out, there are quite a few people who have lost considerable weight, using a balanced plan of exercise and proper food intake. It’s called a lifestyle change for a reason. Every trainer I talk with echoes the sentiments expressed in other threads here; you need to expend more calories than you take in.
It’s a balance of the two that work well together. The problem is, a lot of people will think that a 30 minutes of exercise a few times a week is enough to have a significant impact, and for someone who has been a couch potato, it’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not going to have the impact that most think. As others said, a lot of people overestimate just how many calories they burn from exercise and underestimate how many calories they eat. Afterall, that’s probably a big part of how they got fat in the first place.
The problem is, I’ve seen plenty of people who go to the gym, even doing a decent workout, but have horrible diets and lament about not seeing any results. I’ve also seen the opposite where someone half-asses it at the gym while eating an awesome diet and sees no results.
I think the problem is that while the math is relatively simple, people don’t understand how diet and exercise interact with metabolism and end up with a lot of bad ideas. For instance, understanding that exercise raises resting metabolism, that muscle has a higher resting rate than fat and all of that makes the simple “calories out > calories in” a bit more complex than some might think. It’s also unfortunate that people judge health by a single number of weight, which misses a lot of important information. So, sure, if you can’t lose weight, it is as simple as exercising more and/or eating less, but there’s less naive ways to approach it to get better results.
Perhaps this is one situation where literally YMMV.
Seriously, don’t believe the calorie burned charts, or the machine calculations. They’re rough estimations at best.
Exercise really does not result in much weight loss directly. Some gain weight when they exercise because psychologically they excuse the 400 kCal muffin or 500 kCal Starbucks Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino with the maybe 300 kCal they burned jogging for half an hour. Train for a marathon running many hours a week, cycle a hundred miles a week, and the calories burned become significant (if not replaced).
Still exercise burns beyond the period of exercise. The energy burned after exercise is represent by “Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption” (EPOC). Different sorts of exercise have different EPOC values. Higher intensity exercise has greater and longer lasting EPOC values. This results in greater fat loss even though less calories are expended during the exercise itself. Thus if your past walking was somehow intermittently very intense for you it may have burned more calories in the after exercise period than the numbers suggest. The most effective form of high intensity exercise is high intensity interval training (HIIT). This article (pdf) refers to it as high intensity interval exercise (HIIE) but same thing. The classic example of HIIT is the Tabata interval - warm up a few minutes, then 20 seconds all out, 10 lower intensity recovery, repeat 8 times, then cool down. As intense as you can go and keep the intensity as even as possible for all 8 cycles. There is nothing magical about Tabata intervals however; they are just the intervals arbitrarily chosen by that researcher doing the first study in trained cyclists. HIIT is currently very hot and I must admit I that it seems a bit oversold to me. But the idea that higher intensity burns more after the fact, and that resistance exercise adds or at least maintains lean body mass during weight loss is very well established.
Exercise also increases insulin sensitivity. According to that article HIIT does a great job with that as well.
Bottom line it is part of the mix. A pound a week more that otherwise might be expected is nothing to sneeze at. Maintaining or increasing lean body mass while losing fat mass is a great thing. Increasing insulin sensitivity - golden.
I walk between 25-30 miles a week. I eat 1500-1600 calories a day. I am slight in size, but I have reached equilibrium.
Now when I first started walking, I did lose weight. But maybe more like 0.5 lbs/week, if that. Changes in diet came, but phased in gradually. I’d say after about three months of being Miss Walkathon, I was probably down 8-10 lbs? Enough for me to notice clothes fitting differently, but not noticeable for anyone else. I had to go another two months before I had to start looking for better fitting clothes.
So you can lose weight by incorporating that level of exercise, but you will not see fast results. One pound a week may happen initially, as you shed water, but it’s not something you can count on for very long. Not without stepping up your game and putting the kibosh on snacking. And maybe it’s because my perception is all out of wack now, but 5 miles a week is doodly-squat for weight loss. If I was walking 25 miles a week and only losing half a pound, I’m not thinking you’re gonna notice any loss doing just a fifth of that.
(I think one overlooked reason exercise promotes weight loss is that it changes how you allocate time for eating. If you do an hour of exercise, that’s an hour that you’re not snacking. If you’re like me, you need another forty-five minutes to an hour after that to even develop an appetite. So that’s two hours of not eating. If snacking is a problem for you, this isn’t trivial.)
I agree with everything you said, but I wanted to point this one out specifically. It is a TERRIBLE shame that our society has become so weight-conscious and not health-conscious.
It is perfectly possible to be overweight and be very healthy. In fact, a study last year showed that life expectancy for people who were barely overweight on the BMI scale was actually better than “normal” and FAR better than very overweight or obese.
I’ve been accused on this board as hating fat people, not caring, not being sympathetic, etc. But I really only have no tolerance for the people who don’t even want to make the effort to live a healthy life. If you are exercising, and eating well, and not losing weight, then for all that is good in this world DON’T feel like you are failing! You are NEVER failing if you don’t see your weight change, but you are working out regularly and eating well. Weight is one little indicator, and it does not have perfect correlation with overall health.
If people could just appreciate the intrinsic value of regular exercise and a balanced diet, and not erroneously believe there is a perfect correlation between doing those things and maintaining an “ideal” weight, then we’d be a lot better off. People should be happy with themselves and their bodies. They should NOT be happy with themselves if they are continually making unhealthy choices.
