There is, btw, a real entity of “exercise addiction.” It is not however defined by hours but by mindset. The screening questionare is 6 questions that are ranked 1 to 5 strongly disagree to strongly agree:
If walking isn’t exercise, explain how I lost 15 pounds my first semester of college? I didn’t change my habits a bit (and still ate like crap, back then). I didn’t “work out”, didn’t go to the gym, didn’t play a sport. But my dorm was located at the opposite end of campus from the class buildings, and I had to walk 10-15 minutes to and from several times a day.
I didn’t do anything else, and lost 15 pounds in three months, without making any particular effort to achieve this.
Regardless. That’s not what I saw, but this point isn’t the hill I want to die on.
Which would be what mentality? That weight loss is a bad idea unless you do it for just the right reasons?
Weight Watchers sells weight loss, period. They don’t sell sex or promise six-pack abs and a rock-hard ass. They sell weight loss and promise that, if you do their program, you will lose weight. Their major selling point is that their program is easier to follow and therefore stick with.
It would be nice if you could please enlighten us with what that point is. Until then, I’m through arguing with you.
I shed 25 lbs over the course of several months once I took up walking.
I wonder if Modern Master’s misconception is widespread. If I believed that exercise has to be strenuous and uncomfortable for it to “count”, maybe I wouldn’t bother with it. And I’d almost certainly be overweight.
Walking is probably the safest and most natural form of exercise one can do, and it’s perfect for beginners/the very overweight who want to avoid injury. I would hate for anyone to be discouraged from taking up a walking routine out of the belief that it wasn’t really exercise.
Maybe it’s not what you saw, but it looks to me like you owe me an apology. Would you mind looking at the video at 0:21 and quoting exactly what appears on the screen?
See Item number 1 in Post #97.
They also promote a mentality which is counter-productive. From the capitalist point of view, it’s a reasonable thing to do. Let’s suppose they showed commercials where a 5’4" girl went from 200 pounds to 180 pounds and maintained her weight for 10 years, thus avoiding the need to get a butt wand and a mobility scooter. If they did that, their service wouldn’t sell as well. But that doesn’t change the fact that the mentality they promote is counter-productive.
Lol, it would be nice if you actually read my posts with a modicum of attention before responding to them.
This is mostly irrelevant except for the Weight Watchers’ reference, but it’s sort of humorous. Or just weird. An acquaintance of mine has been with WW for about four years. Every week she posts, “Down 2 pounds at weigh-in this week!” on Facebook. Or 1.2 pounds or 1.5 or whatever. Every single week. The thing is, she was only about 30 pounds overweight to begin with, so by my calculations she should currently weigh about 20 pounds. She doesn’t, she’s just slightly lighter than when she started with WW.
Social involvement is a very important part of maintaining weight loss, that’s why the WW meetings were so successful back when they started. You had to be accountable to people besides yourself, you had a social network of support and encouragement. Posting her results on FB are a way to get positive reinforcement for the behavior which leads to continuation of the behavior. I do the same thing with my running.
I understand that, but my point is that she claims to have lost at least a pound a week for over four years. That’s roughly 192 pounds, for someone who was about 170 when she started and looks like she now must be around 155 or 160. Why the lying?
Every thread here that ever discusses anything having to do with diet, exercise or fat always includes these 3 points:
Someone pops in and says they lost tons of weight by just walking, starting with short distances. (see post 20)
People in cities (especially in Europe) are thinner/people in the old days were thinner because they walk everywhere and don’t drive big gas-guzzling SUVs. (see post 73, hinting at it)
People could lose tons of weight if they just got up and walked around their house (see post 121)
“Walking is exercise” is definitely a prevailing opinion around here, and I don’t disagree with it. In fact I’d go so far to say it’s a fact, not an opinion.
Just noticed Monstro already pointed out the obvious here. I’ll leave my response to clarify, and to remind me to read all posts before jumping in with a response.
Which is the whole point in burning the calories through exercise. Maybe there is some misunderstanding.
First, I am not obese. I am within 10-15% of my recommended bodyweight.
Second, by indulge I do not mean gorge. I mean indulge. A serving of chocolate ice cream once or twice a week. Not a bowl full every evening.
Third, I am practicing a weight maintenance, not a weight reduction program.
There is a lot of “no pain, no gain” mentality associated with dieting as well as the gym. Which is a misconception in its own right. It should be
“if you really want to go the extra bit above and beyond, you are going to have to push yourself into uncomfortable territory”
But most take it as
“if I want to change, I must suffer”
I probably set Modern Master off on the “exercise” scrutiny. Like Monstro I frequently participate in activities that are active and good calorie burners, but strictly speaking some would not typically describe as exercise. Some but not all things that fit that category for me:
I paddle my kayak around the lake weekly.
I mountain bike several times a week in a fairly intense fashion with friends of similar ability.
I play ice hockey between one and three times a week in league will getting up there in age is stilled comprised mainly by former D-1 and D-3 players.
I walk 15-20 miles a week.
To me this is “play time” not exercise. But the result is the same as if I had jogged on the treadmill for an equivalent calorie burn. Just a lot more enjoyable. And easier to keep going back to.
To understand how walking can contribute to weight loss, it’s important to understand how your body uses fuel at different levels of exertion.
At low levels of exertion, your body burns available carbohydrates. It will burn fat only if the supply of available carbohydrates is not sufficient.
At high levels of exertion, your body burns available carbohydrates in the bloodstream along with body fat. It burns fat because it needs a high level of energy, not because there isn’t enough carbohydrates.
Low level exertion’s effect on weight loss is more like dieting where you reduce the available calories to force your body to switch to fat stores. High level exertion forces your body to burn fat because it needs to create energy faster than it can from just carbohydrates alone.
At the end of a 200 calorie walk, you will have less carbohydrates in your blood but the same amount of body fat. At the end of a 200 calorie run, you will have less carbohydrates and less body fat.
So this means walking is like enhancing your dieting. If you need to reduce your calories by 500, you can do that with any combination of food reduction and increased walking. But like dieting, the reduced calories may make you feel hungry.
At high levels of exertion, the fat is literally burning out of your body. If you burn 100 calories of fat, it’s not like you feel 100 calories of hunger. So from a craving point of view, it may be easier to burn 500 calories through high exertion exercise than by using diet and walking.
But one of the great things about walking is that it can burn those excess calories that would otherwise be turned into fat. If you have an extra 200 calories floating around your body, much better to walk them off than have them turned into fat stores.
Everything I have read says that fat burning occurs at low intensity and carbohydrate at high intensity, and that it doesn’t really matter anyways for weight loss.
I never said walking wasn’t good. I think it’s great that people are active.
I’m not sure why people are assuming that I don’t think walking a lot is a good thing. I just wouldn’t consider it exercise. Yes, it does burn calories, but I still wouldn’t classify it as exercise. That’s just me though.
For example, if I were to walk to the store, I wouldn’t tell someone that was exercise.
If I walked back from the bar after a night out on the town, I wouldn’t tell someone that was exercise.
If I walked to work and back, I wouldn’t tell someone that was exercise.
If my girlfriend and I went for a romantic walk, I wouldn’t tell someone that was exercise.
It’s cool to have your own definitions of common words, MM, but it makes it difficult for others to communicate with you.
For the sake of everyone knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, what is the Modern Master definition of “exercise?” Just so we know what criteria you require for an action to fall under your term there.
Which all goes back to what I’ve been saying regarding: 1> needing to build physical activity into your daily lifestyle, and 2> in order to succeed at that for the rest of your life, you need to find an activity (or a few) that you really enjoy.
I don’t exercise at the gym. Gyms are boring, they cost money, it adds an extra hour to my work-out time to accommodate travel to and from. I run, outdoors, because I can literally just walk out the door and start my workout, it’s meditative, and good gosh, the scenery changes while I move. I’m not staring at the timer on a treadmill agonizing over when it’ll be over. I bike in warm weather. I take an aerial circus class instead of pushing things around on weight machines, because it’s a hell of a lot more fun (and challenging, especially mentally).
I had a double-scoop ice cream cone last week. Oddly, I didn’t gain weight from that indulgence. It might have something to do with my physical activity level.
