While weight training will burn calories as much as any other exercise, its key use during weight loss, the way I see it, is to preserve muscle mass while dieting. If you don’t incorporate resistance training, your body will snag excess calories from muscle and fat indiscriminately, which is not a good thing. Weight training helps to preserve muscle (hopefully), forcing your body to grab more from other sources (again, hopefully–the human body is rather perverse and indiscriminate in this, I’ve found).
When it comes down to it, I’ve found that diet is far more important than the exercise you do as far as weight loss goes. The exercise will help you lose weight faster (and in better ways), but if your diet isn’t dialed in you’ll have to do a lot of exercise to make up for it. In some cases, too much for a typical person to contemplate or keep up with.
I mean, if the average person eats 3000 calories a day or so, and requires 1800 calories per day to maintain their bodyweight, then that means they’d have to run 8 or 9 miles a day to lose significant weight…which is not gonna happen…
Of course, running has other benefits. It strengthens your legs something fierce, does wonders for your cardiovascular health and is a hell of a lot of fun. In my case, I have greatly increased energy levels these days and it’s very rare for me to run out of breath. I just don’t attribute most of my current leanness to it.
I dunno about that… thin, yes… small, yes… but they have tiny rolls of fat all over their bodies. It’s like their body wants fat and stores it wherever it can get away with keeping it. I would not want a marathoner’s body. I mean, I’d rather have a marathoner’s body than a professional bagel-eater’s body, but if I had the choice I’d want a sprinter’s body. Those guys build large compound muscle groups, which is the key. Muscle burns fat while you’re sleeping or watching TV.
You can’t just get out and start sprinting, your body isn’t tough enough. Jogging is good for strengthening your joints, ligaments, and tendons for greater things, and for keeping a minimum base metabolism going. But go beyond that, work some sprinting into the mix… run 200m, 400m, 800m, 1600m, for speed… and you will get better results.
If Joe wants to lose weight, Joe should reduce the calories he is consuming. For most people, while running burns calories, it doesn’t burn enough calories to cause significant weight loss on its own.
Just to use myself as an example: My basal metabolism burns approximately 1700 calories a day. My typical daily activities (walking to the bus stop, walking around in the course of the day, sitting on my but in frunt of the computer, doing some light housework, etc.) burn approximately (very approximately) 700 calories. So that’s roughly 2400 calories burned daily. My 45-50 minute run/walk combo burns around 250 additional calories. That’s trivial. It’s more or less in the noise of my daily activity. And I don’t do it every day—I’ve just started running, and I found that was too hard on my bod. So if I go out and run on a Saturday morning, for example, and spend the rest of the day watching tv, I’ve probably burned fewer calories than on an average non-running day.
I could train harder and run longer and burn a more significant amount of calories, but that just doesn’t fit into my lifestyle. I’m not interested in training for a marathon. I just want an inexpensive, uncomplicated way to exercise.
To lose weight, I’ve cut my calorie consumption down to 1500-2000 calories a day. That’s a 400-900 calorie deficit, every single day, which is more significant than the calories I burn running.
However, running is definitely good for improving your cardiovascular health. Cardiovascular exercise can also lower your cholesterol levels. Whether or not you are trying to lose weight, you should have a regular program of cardiovascular exercise. I can now run farther, at a higher speed than I could before. I don’t get winded walking up stairs or a hill the way I used to. I have more energy during the day. I sleep more soundly at night. My muscle tone is better. I could get most of these benefits from taking a daily brisk walk, but I’m not ashamed to say that running makes me feel like a stupendous bad-ass. But I don’t attribute much (if any) of my weight loss to running, aside from psychological effects.
When it comes down to it, I’ve found that diet is far more important than the exercise you do as far as weight loss goes. The exercise will help you lose weight faster (and in better ways), but if your diet isn’t dialed in you’ll have to do a lot of exercise to make up for it. In some cases, too much for a typical person to contemplate or keep up with.
Conversely, if all you do is diet without exercising, then your metabolism slows down to match your caloric intake and you eventually start to feel like crap and you go off your diet and since your metabolism is depressed and takes time to rebound you put back the weight you lost. Only part of what you lost was lean mass and all of what you put back is usually fat. This is how the whole yo-yo dieting thing happens. Not only is it self-defeating, it is dangerous to your health.
This is purely anecdotal, but whenever I start swimming, two things always happen: 1) I become totally ravenous, all the time, and 2) I put on about 5 pounds, which I’m guessing goes mostly into subcutaneous fat, because my body is saying “Holy crap, that’s cold!” and desperately packing on some insulation. A friend of mine told me that when he started swimming, he suddenly noticed that his abs were a lot less “cut”, and he guessed it was because he’d put on some fat over the muscle. After a few weeks, I lose the 5 pounds (and then some, depending on my diet) and put on muscle—or at least, I get more toned and stronger.
But the bottom line is that if you want to lose fat, you must consume fewer calories than you use, and for the vast majority of people, that means eating less. (Cavaet: I was told that for women, going under 1200 calories a day throws your body into starvation mode, which is a Bad Scene. There’s probably a corresponding figure for men, and it prolly depends on your weight and activity level. Bottom line: don’t cut your calorie consumption drastically.) Obsessing about what exercise is best for “burning fat” is futile, and, IMHO, pretty much missing the point.
What really matters is that you pick something you like doing, and keep doing it. If you diddle around researching the optimum fat-burning exercise, you’re worse off than if you just get out there and start walking or running or swimming or biking or doing what you like. And if you launch into some magic ultra-fat-burning workout, and it turns out you hate it, so you do it for two weeks and quit, then, again, you would have been better off if you just started swimming 30 minutes a day (assuming you like to swim and will keep doing it.)
What most people seem to end up doing is either getting their diet in order without worrying too much about exercise, or getting their exercise program in order without worrying too much about their diet. Naturally, whichever one they don’t have in order is the more important.
Swimming isn’t in and of itself ineffective, but exercising in cold water seems to increase your appetite.
I afraid I can’t find any cites, it just there in my memory. And, to clarify, by ‘people’ I meant ‘most people’, including military instructorss and various health brochures I pick up on clinic. And add in those sleazy teenage magazines as well. Maybe they are refering to the practise of ‘dieting’.
So some summarization of what I’ve learned so far:
It seems most exercise is generally similar. While the calories burned is not terribly significant in the actual act of exercising (I’m burning about 150-200 calories a session) the act of exercising keeps up the metabolism which would normally slow down when dieting. I can see now how the “binge” diet happens and how exercise can help a dieter achieve his goals.
After only about 10 days I have waaaay more energy than before. My mind feels ten times more focused than before. This is great!
Heres some more questions though…
Does muscle always burn calories while not exercising? And if so would more muscle mass = more calories burned? If so would weight training be more effective in terms of just losing weight (ex. Will sit ups kill my flabby stomach quicker than just running?)
What can I say…I hated gym in high school. Now I have to relearn everything
(bolding mine.) I agree with most of your post, but the message that a running regimen only burns off a trivial amount of calories isn’t a positive one. Earlier in my life when I was wildly overweight and inactive, I read up on how few calories running burns, thought about all the pain and effort it would take to have such a trivial result, and decided to avoid it. Huge mistake. When I finally started running, I barely managed a mile a day at a plodding pace and I still dropped 5 pounds the first month without changing my diet at all. That trend has continued as I’ve slowly added more distance.
I don’t know if it’s had an effect on my metabolism. I know that I have a lot more energy now, and instead of doing everything slowly, I now bound up the stairs and walk twice as fast in the hallway between meetings. I might only burn 360 calories during my daily three miles, but I’m burning a lot more calories than I used to the rest of the time just by being fundamentally more active. I also find I need less sleep and am more alert through the day.
There are other positive aspects, too. (And for the record, Cecil’s on the side of exercising more than dieting.) I’m now trying to help some of my friends lose weight, but they all refuse to try running or other exercise, because they’ve heard too many times that they’ll only burn a trivial amount of calories. This is not ever a message to send, it’s fundamentally incorrect. I agree if a running regimen is planned incorrectly (like the example of running on a Saturday morning and being to tired too move the rest of the day,) it can end up a net gain of calories instead of a loss. This is why it’s important to start slowly and work your way up.
Those of you lurking this thread looking to pick up tips on weight loss (like I was,) there is no substitute for getting up, getting out and moving around. Even if you don’t lose weight, you’ll still feel better, and that will help give you the energy to do something to improve yourself.
For those of you in the Seattle area… see you in November at the Half Marathon.
Er, sorry that’s not “positive” enough for you, but it’s mathematically correct, isn’t it? Under the supervision of a physical trainer, I’ve been doing running/walking intervals since December, trying to work my way up to a continual run. Despite the fact that my workout was much more intense than the elliptical trainer workout I was doing before, and we’ve increased the intensity of the intervals steadily, I didn’t lose any weight until I started restricting my calorie intake in mid-May.
I feel great, my leg muscles are more developed, my endurance is much improved, and all in all, it has been really awesome for me. But running did not, by itself, cause me to lose weight.
Buh? Where did I say anything about being too tired to move? I’m just talking about running in the morning, the same distance and speed that I do on a weekday, and then spending a leisurely day at home, as opposed to a typical day when I go into work and am up and around. I’m just trying to point out that while running burns calories, it’s not going to double your calories burned per day, or something.
I’m glad you had good results with running, but starting a running program does not automatically mean significant weight loss for every person. I don’t think you should assume that you’re training right and anyone else who’s running and not losing weight is doing it wrong. Different people react in different ways to different types of exercise.
Running turned out to be the right exercise for me right now. If I’d tried it a while ago, my fitness level might not have been sufficient for me to succeed. I’m pretty sure that without my trainer’s help in designing an interval workout to get me started, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Or even if I’d started running in December thinking that I was going to lose weight, and that was my primary motivation for doing it, I would not have gotten the results I was hoping for, and I probably would have quit.
Exercise has many benefits, such as improved endurance and muscle tone, which pretty much everyone experiences. I think that’s the better way to motivate people to exercise, rather than promises of weight loss that may or may not work out. And everyone should exercise! Screw losing weight, it makes you feel great and it’s important for the health of your heart! Get out there and do something fun!
BTW, the column is from 1986. I wouldn’t rely to heavily on it, since the Perfect Master does have to rely on the science of the day, has been a lot of study in the field since then. You should check out some of the other links in this thread—I certainly found them informative.
I’ve lost about 40 pounds since re-starting my diet. In the past month, I’ve lost 9 pounds. I eat whatever I want, and I eat whenever I’m hungry. This week, I’ve had pizza, movie theater popcorn, a couple of beers, and cheeseburgers with cheese flavored potato chips. I lost 2 pounds.
I attribute this 100% to the fact that I’ve been running 5-6 miles per day 4-5 times per week, with 1 longer (8-10 mile) run on the weekends. I also lift weights twice a week. I’ve never worked out this hard before, and it makes me so stomach-turning hungry I HAVE to consume, consume, consume and I’m still dropping the pounds. Running is definitely beneficial to your health, your weight management, and if you happen to be overweight, it’ll help you lose it.
The first 30 pounds I dropped were way worse. I completely changed my diet to do it… a small lunch, Lean Cuisine dinner, and jogging 2 miles. I was miserable and tired all the time. The weight came off no faster or slower than my current technique, but this is a much better option for me. Sure, I exercise for an hour or more a night. That sucks… I wish I had that time to watch TV or do laundry. The good parts outweight the bad in huge ways.
I have more energy during the day. I sleep better at night. I feel better, healthier, more confident. I feel more in touch with my body, in that I can tell what kinds of food I need to eat at a given time, and I can feel my body reacting to my work out.
Jogging and running is a fun and beautiful thing that has tons of benefits. It helped me go from a lazy and fat 255 pound guy to a only-slightly-overweight 190 pound guy. I’ve got about 10-15 pounds left until my goal weight, and running is making these last pounds come off very easily. Good luck… it sucks at first, but when you hit your stride, you’ll love it.
I’ve never quite understood how one goes about cutting calories. Is the best strategy just to fill up on low calorie foods (veggies, etc.) so I don’t have any appetite for the high-cal stuff? Or does this mean I just need to stop eating when I still feel hungry? If it’s the latter, wouldn’t I just be hungry all the time? (Which sounds like absolute hell.) Or would my body eventually adjust to the lower calorie intake in such a way that I’d feel satisfied with smaller meals?
I think the important factor here is that you had a training regimen in place before, on the elliptical thingy. Moving from that to running, your overall results have been trivial, no? I went from being almost entirely sedentary to jogging a mile a dayand I saw a big difference.
I’m not looking to pick a fight, I’m instead looking to encourage folks who are sedentary, like I was, to get out and move around. They will also see a big difference, in some way shape or form.
It was an inference I made, apparently incorrectly. Apologies. :smack:
Running is not-that-good overall for you, you certainly do lose weight but you lose muscle as well as fat. Additionally it is an impact exercise, something that overweight people often have problems with. Ideally you would want to increase muscle if you could. The best exercise would be one that allows you to do a cardio-workout, with intervals of heavy-weight resistance.
Swimming is supposed to be bad for weight loss as well, unless you are swimming in very-warm water. The reason is that it is only a cardio-workout, and that in cold water the body uses fat to regulate its temperature, and you become very resistant to losing fat.
~
I didn’t go on the Atkins diet, because it sounds crazy to me, but I did decide to drop high carb foods (like bread, pasta and rice) in favor of higher protein foods (like chicken or soybeans.) I found this reduced my appetite a lot, and made it easier for me to cut down the total amount of food I was eating. I also replaced the Doritos with chopped cauliflower and broccoli (also low carb foods, and good sources of fiber.) Eventually my body got used to eating less and it doesn’t bother me anymore.
I also replaced watching TV with a focused activity, like playing guitar or taking a walk. Watching TV is a real killer - you don’t get exercise, but you do get the munchies. If you want to cut calories, plan non-TV related activities.
You’ve just encapsulated the reason people are fat. If you eat fewer calories than you use, you get hungry. Eating more calories than you need doesn’t cause any discomfort at all—until your jeans don’t fit any more, but that’s a separate issue.
You aren’t necessarily hungry all the time when you diet, but there are plenty of times when you want to eat, and you just have to tell your bod no! Filling up on low-calorie foods is one important strategy—and fruits and vegetables are a good idea because they contain lots of fiber, which makes you full, plus lots of nutrients, which are good because you have to make sure you’re still getting all your vitamins and minerals even though you’re eating less. Whole grains and lowfat dairy products are also good choices. It’s important to plan sensibly sized meals around low-calorie, high-nutrient foods, so you can fill yourself up on good stuff. But that only goes so far. If you always eat when you’re hungry, and eat until you’re full, you can still pack in a lot of calories even when eating healthy food. You have to restrict yourself to reasonable portions and avoid snacking.
Sometimes you do want to snack, and sometimes you finish your sensible portion and you want more. Sometimes you can fight off the urge, and sometimes you can satisfy yourself by eating something healthy and sometimes . . . not. It’s hard and it sucks. If it wasn’t hard and didn’t suck, everybody would be fit and trim. And there I go again with the negativity, but, seriously, people are fat for a reason. I’m fatter than I want to be for a reason. Any diet plan is windowdressing. Whether or not you lose weight boils down to having the willpower to change your life. I don’t know excactly where I found the willpower to do it this time (after many failed diets over the years), and I certainly can’t tell anyone else how to do it. And this is why I will never be a rich diet guru.
IMHO, the best way to understand calories and what they mean to you is to simply start paying attention to them. All packaged foods have nutrition information and places like http://www.nutritiondata.com/ can fill in any blanks for you.
Here’s the way I started. I simply wrote down everything that I ate. I did my best to estimate quantities, but I didn’t obsess about it. Keep it simple in the beginning. After one week, add up the total calories you consumed and divide by seven to get your average daily caloric intake. I waited until the end of the week to add up the numbers because I didn’t want to be influenced by them. I just wanted to find out how many calories my normal eating patterns were producing.
Then check for your BMI at a place like http://www.nutritiondata.com/ so you can get an idea of where you are with your calorie consumption compared to that. The numbers shouldn’t be taken as gospel, they are just to give you an idea of where you are in the ballpark. You also have to ask yourself what your normal food consumption is doing to your body. Are you gaining rapidly? Are you gaining slowly? Are you maintaining? All of this should help you to get a picture of where you are at right now with calories and what they mean to you.
The rest of it is pretty much just common sense (but some education wouldn’t hurt either). Let’s say you are a 25-year-old male, 6 feet tall, 250 lbs, you live a sedentary lifestyle and you do not exercise. Your BMI would be around 3000 calories a day. Ok so you decide to go into a 1000 calorie a day deficit and consume 2000 calories a day. Depending on which foods you consume, that could be a lot of food! A 2 oz Snickers bar is 266 calories so you could eat seven and a half of them and still stay slightly under your goal of 2000 calories. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that an all Snickers diet isn’t a healthy diet no matter how few calories you consume.
I like to think of it as a calorie budget. If I have 2000 calories in my budget, how should I spend them? Try it for a few weeks and you will soon decide that calorie dense foods are not the best deal.
I can make a tuna sandwich with whole-wheat low carb bread (50 cals a slice) half a can of tuna (90 cals) a tablespoon of fat free mayonnaise (15 cals) half a stalk of celery (3 cals) and a teaspoon of dill pickle relish (19 cals) and come in at 227 calories. Compare that to our Snickers bar. There is no question which one is more nutritious but just as importantly, the Snickers bar is going to spike your blood sugar and your insulin levels will rapidly go up to compensate. Then because of the lag effect (insulin starts being produced after your blood sugar is high and doesn’t start to go down until after your blood sugar is down) your blood sugar drops due to over production of insulin and you start to feel hungry again. The tuna sandwich, on the other hand, is protein and complex carbohydrates and it won’t spike your blood sugar and you won’t still feel hungry after eating it. Like I said, it isn’t rocket science to figure out that a tuna sandwich is better for you than a Snickers bar, but it sometimes helps to understand exactly why.
As far as I am concerned, the only diet that makes any sense is a balanced diet. Once I had done the calorie counting deal for a couple of months, I no longer bothered with writing things down as I had a very good feel for which foods I wanted to spend my calories on and how much of them I could eat and stay within my budget.
So everyone is going to McDonalds for lunch and you really feel like skipping your bag lunch and going with them. Do it! Just be smart. Have a burger, skip the frys, eat slowly, drink iced tea or water instead of soda and enjoy the company of your friends instead of focusing on the food for satisfaction. It really isn’t hard to eat smart if you just put a minimal amount of effort into it.
The hardest thing about exercising is getting started, but once you get past that, then it’s all good. When I used to spend all day “resting” I had zero energy. Now that I exercise every day, I have energy to spare and even if I drop down to 1500 cals a day to get ripped (and my BMI is well over 4000 cals a day), I don’t feel deprived or hungry. In fact, I have to force myself to eat post-workout.
It is a cliché, but it is a cliché because it is true. Don’t ever go on a diet. Change your lifestyle.
Then you more or less are following the principles of Atkins, and most other low/reduced/controlled-carb diets, such as South Beach
Probably what you’re doing is most similar to South Beach. It’s bascially “good fats, good carbs” - so whole grains, olive oil and other vegetable oils, low-fat dairy, lots of lean meat and fish, masses of vegetables, and pretty much zero refined or processed carbs (the evil “whites” I suppose we might term them - bread, pasta, rice, sugar).
I’ve done both Atkins and South Beach, and they both work extremely well and left me healthy, skin glowing, heaps of energy, but on balance I prefer the lower fat content of South Beach. Atkins actually made me sick of some foods, such as eggs.
South Beach is also a bit more liberal about vegetables in the earlier stages, though both diets allow and encourage huge amounts of vegetable consumption, far more than the vast majority of people ever eat. So you actually end up eating “more”, and it doesn’t feel like a “diet”.
