Comment by NoboruWataya
3 years ago
It's definitely true that eating less/healthier is the most important part of weight loss. However, perhaps because exercise played a big role in my own weight loss journey, I do feel like people go too far in dismissing it as a weight loss aid.
First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.
There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.
Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
My own anecdote: I've been a cyclist and/or a runner pretty consistently for the last 20 years. This year I moved to a place where cycling wasn't an option (without driving a long way), and at the same time I injured my knee by overtraining on hills. So I was benched from my typical cardio.
The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.
Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
The article seems to indicate that, counterintuitively, your Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) wouldn't have changed much after you stopped the regular cycling (see the section about how hunter gatherers walking 8-14 km a day had the same TEE as average US), so your weight gain may have been from second-order effects of coming back to your diet.
Do you remember whether your diet changed at this time as well?
Some other anecdotes shared here seem to share a similar theme, that exercise helps in losing weight on a more meta-level by shifting yourself into a generally healthier mindset which, in turn, seems to help you eat "healthier" foods, which is probably a proxy for "low-calorie foods" like fruit and vegetables. Maybe when you're sedentary it's easier to reach for the bag of potato chips?
I'm starting to think that these kind of scientific studies, that focus on a single factor and rule every other variable aside, are not the best way to analyze weight loss.
Because following that logic, exercise supposedly does not work if you want to lose weight. But if every study around aerobic exercise arrives at that conclusion, why aren't the majority of athletes overweight? Where are the fat runners?
Is this a survivor bias? (Fat people even with great aerobic capacity end up hurting their joints so they stop running)
Is it because the addition of exercise generates other kind of changes in the body, like less insulin resistance, and overall more signals in the body to burn fat rather than store it?
Do runners spontaneously change their diets once they get used to their new lifestyle? Maybe the food they used to eat, both in amount and in composition, makes them uncomfortable so they start making lasting changes?
Yes, it does look like running a static amount every time has diminishing results. But, overall, people who run tend to be less overweight. And a lot of overweight people who start doing exercise and stick to it, tend to lose the weight, or at least they lose fat and gain muscle.
I am pretty sure my diet stayed pretty tight, as I monitor my caloric intake using my smartphone and it remained pretty consistent. Obviously this could be skewed for other reasons so it's not gospel.
The "much" is carrying a lot of weight, so to speak, in your comment. As a reference I went from running ~25 miles a week to just walking a fraction of that as I've recovered. I did keep up my other non-cardio calisthenics throughout, though.
Some napkin math suggests I was over my calorie target by just shy of 300 calories per day over the course of this time period.
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There’s an idea in the fitness industry called “skinny fat”. Thin people who “look” and eat healthy but when you actually look at their body composition have no muscle and relatively high fat percentage.
I’m my experience people severely underestimate the effects of having more muscles mass and the changes it can cause when you lose some from lack of training.
It also bleeds into peoples thinking. People view exercise as a way to lose weight. And eating less is, rightly, a more efficient way of losing weight. But body composition really matters not just for losing weight, but just life in general.
My own anecdote - when I started cycling about 6 miles to work each, I was ravenous by lunchtime and had much larger lunches than previously - put on a lot of weight.
I get the impression that cardio affects some people differently. I'm taking some time off from my 30+ miles a week running habit to let my foot heal up. I'm now at about 10 miles + cycling and nordic skiing when I can but overall probably 1/2 to 2/3 the cardio than I've been used to for the past 4 or 5 years.
But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.
I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
Those "calories burned" calculators are also not very good, so you may just be in the margin of error.
It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to propel a given weight 5 miles. It's hard to tell how many calories a person burns to produce that energy. Your ratios of aerobic to anaerobic respiration are going to impact that wildly, which will depend on how much oxygen your body can absorb and how quickly you're burning through oxygen. There's a huge gap in the amount of energy cells get from each. Aerobic respiration produces up to 38 ATP per glucose, while anaerobic produces only 2 ATP per glucose.
Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
>> Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
Yep, my form is atrocious and inefficient due to bunions and Morton's toe which has evolved into hammer toe.
I'd argue that I burn calories more efficiently, however :)