I completely and utterly disagree. If your premise is true, every single overweight person who wants desperately to lose weight but cannot, is “immature”. And the reason we have an obesity epidemic is entirely due to people suddenly becoming far more immature than when obesity was rare.
Also? Your initial premise, that all positive change to the human body involves suffering, is demonstrably false. Changing an unhealthy habit for a healthy one can be easy, can be a struggle, or can be just about impossible, depending on a wide and complex array of variables including your cultural and economic status, where you live, work, your individual physiology and many many other things.
My dad gave up smoking when his first granddaughter, a baby, coughed when he breathed smoke on her. He never smoked again.
My friend who died of AIDS gave up every recreational drug he was using when he was diagnosed, but he couldn’t give up smoking. He was smoking on his deathbed.
Why? Because my friend was immature and my dad wasn’t? Or maybe it was a complexity of factors you and I know nothing about.
Was your old calorie amount 2500 calories, or more than 2500 calories?
If it was 2500 calories, then what makes you think that eating 2500 calories on a long term basis won’t just bring you back to that weight?
If it was more than 2500 calories, why not just start eating 2500 calories and keep going like that, since that’s your ongoing plan?
Do you understand that ten different people all the same height and the same exercise level all eating 2500 calories for a year will all end up at different weights, and the numbers you get out of books and off websites are averages?
Really hating the demonization of dieting. Dieting works as well as any other major lifestyle change. If you don’t stick with it and keep yourself disciplined, you’ll fail. Your semantics are like saying, “Don’t call it ‘quitting smoking’ - call it ‘breathing healthier’.” :rolleyes: It really should go without saying that dieting in a healthy way means avoiding crap like the Cabbage Soup diet and whatnot. I really do hate how misinformation is now considered the ‘diet industry’. I think more education is needed to help combat the obesity epidemic, and then you wouldn’t see as many people yo-yo dieting (which isn’t really MORE dangerous than keeping the weight on all the time - none of that makes any sense).
Yes, stay healthy as you lose weight. Don’t resort to anorexia or making yourself vomit up meals. This isn’t a novel idea.
The energy stored as fat will get used up, resulting in an (ideally) slow but steady weight loss. As you lose lbs, the excess skin will grow lose and hang, proof that you can’t just delete the existence of matter. Not sure why you put thermodynamics in quotations - it’s a pretty well-established fact…
According to a personal trainer I once had, it is exhaled. She gave me a whole complicated chemical answer but basically, you breathe it out.
BTW if you can afford it, personal trainers can be great for keeping your motivation up and providing little tips. I “won” six weeks of personal training by having my business card drawn out of a fishbowl at my gym and it was amazing.
ETA: Answering Zyada’s “where does the weight go?”
Not exactly. It’s entirely true you can’t ever go back to your previous way of eating. If I’m eating 3000 calories I day and suddenly switch to 1500 or 1700 (assuming I’m a 5’4 woman with an office job and little exercise), I will lose weight until I reach the point that 1500/1700 is sufficiently enough to support me.
If that number is too low, I will begin showing signs of malnutrition, such as being underweight. If it’s too high, I will not lose the weight I want. Maintaining 1700 calories, IF that is enough calories to support your body healthily (and that depends on your height, activity level, sex, etc), you’ll be fine. Your body doesn’t WANT more calories - your body is a thing. It doesn’t WANT Milano cookies or a protein shake. There’s only what it NEEDS, which can easily be determined with the use of a TDEE calculator.
According to this quick BMR calculator i found on the first hit on Google. I’ve dieted once for real. I went from 520 pounds to 280 pounds over three years with 80 pounds dropping in 6 months when I went from 400 to 320. I kept the weight off for almost a decade until 3 moved in 2 years broke my eating and diet habits. Now I’m somewhere north of 400 and I just started my second major attempt at weight loss yesterday. My goal is to get back to 320 by my October elk hunt. Longer term I’d like to get to 260 so I can be half the man I used to be and have under 5% body fat.
The reason not to eat 2500 calories is it takes years longer to lose the weight. I’ll lose roughly 2 pounds more per week at 1500 calories which means I can lose 50 more pounds before my hunt. Why wouldn’t you want to get thin faster. I probably ate 3000 calories per day on average.
Most of it goes into the toilet. Some is lost through your breath and some is lost through sweat. That one reason you hear about weird people weighing their poop. You can do a mass transfer on your body if you really wanted to.
Do you mean that you pee it away? How does it get into your pee? If you think it goes into your poop, how does it get there?
FWIW, I know the answer, but it took me a few years to figure out how it happens… I want to see the people who are saying “You can’t make mass just go away” explain this.
Yes, going back to your previous eating is known as “going off your diet”, and if you do that, you will gain all your weight back. So you can’t go off your diet and maintain your weight loss. We are all agreed on that, right?
The controversial bit, and the bit that’s supported by science, is that if you start at 3000 calories a day, weighing X, spend a few months eating 1700 calories and then go back to eating 3000 calories, you will often/usually end up with your maintenance weight being some number BIGGER than X. This is why spending a few months eating 1700 calories is generally a bad idea. It **may **be that you are one of the lucky ones who won’t experience this, but you won’t actually know this until you’ve taken the chance on buggering your metabolism by trying it - and if you do bugger your metabolism, it will be permanent.
About TDEE calculators … I went to the first TDEE calculator I could find, and discovered that it predicts that if you’re a 160 cm woman doing light exercise and eating 2000 calories a day, you could end up with a maintenance weight of anywhere between 72 and 102 kg. Which is a Big Honking Problem for “calories in calories out” - even TDEE calculators admit that people have different metabolisms. Once you’ve admitted that, why not also admit that metabolisms can change - this doesn’t seem like a big stretch, and it’s one that’s supported by science.
There was some guy, discussed here I think, who went into a hospital and, under medical supervision, did not eat anything for a really long time. Like, a year. He did lose weight, lots of it. He did not poop that much. Like, once a month. So…if you are eating a lot you will poop a lot, and you will be somewhat lighter afterwards, but that’s not the main way the weight is lost.
The reason not to spend time eating 1500 calories is simply and solely because the experience of having been a person who ate 1500 calories for some months MIGHT turn you from a person who needs 2500 calories to maintain 260 pounds, into a person who needs 2200 calories to maintain 260 pounds.
If you believe that this won’t happen to you (which it might not - it’s a risk, not a certainty), or your personal experience is that eating 2200 calories doesn’t make your life significantly suckier than eating 2500 calories, then you probably don’t need to worry. But having dodged the risk once doesn’t absolutely guarantee that you’ll dodge it each time you do it.
Who cares if you need 2200 or 2500 to maintain a weight. That’s a small enough difference you can make it up at the gym its like 3 miles. Seriously, most people don’t check their weight that close. You jump on the scale at the end of the week or month and go “uups, my weight is up 3 pounds. I better eat a little cleaner next month”. Even if it destroyed your metabolism and you needed 2000 instead of 2500 that’s like 5 pounds a month. That is a nothing worry.
People who have set amounts of time that they can devote to exercise care. Three miles a day is 21 miles a week, that’s a big chunk of your free time gone if your free time is limited. (Also, holy crap it sounds awful … but I loathe running with a passion, so there’s that)
People who experience significant suckage from eating less also care. If your experience is that eating less than your body tells you to causes you to want to gnaw your own arm off with hunger all the time, then ‘oh I just need to eat a bit cleaner’ won’t be a thing in your life, it will be a big horrible deal, and it’s worth spending time strategising on how to avoid that.
That’s 30 min a day it really doesn’t it matter if you’re riding a bike, rowing or running. Seriously, you should be doing that anyhow. 60 minutes per day 6 days per week is a normal level of working out. And even if that is too much for you we’re talking 10% of your daily calories eat a big salad for dinner to give you the satiation and eat only half your cheeseburger.
I know there are people who maintain their health without working out or watching what they eat but they are the exception. For everyone else working out 30 min a day or skipping your venti mocha so you don’t get fatter is life.
Triglyceride metabolism produces carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Water goes out through urine and sweat but like 84% of the fat turns into carbon dioxide which leaves the body when you exhale. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7257
Don’t expect to lose much weight through feces, aside from maybe a very minor one-time drop if you go from a heavy diet to a light diet.
If your base metabolism is 2200 maintenance rather than 2500, then you have to add in 30 EXTRA minutes every day - three and a half hours a week - on top of whatever you would have had to do if your base metabolism was 2500. Or else you have to count calories obsessively every day, or else you have to live with gaining 2 kilos every month - that’s enough to take many people from underweight to overweight within a year.
Those may be shrug-off things to you, but any one of them would be a huge freaking deal in my life, and in many people’s lives, and I personally would do quite a lot to avoid having to be in a position where I had to choose between them
That why i always calculate my bmr assuming I’m completely sedentary. Then doing the bare minimum is gravy. Seriously, if eating 10% less will ruin your life then that’s why probably failed at eating 1500 calories. Lets say your right i wreck my body eating 1500 calories a day and for the rest of my life i gain weight eating 2000 calories per day that’s still 30 percent more then I was eating on the diet and a huge amount more.