Some excerpts of a Times article are here. Basically says that you can't lose weight working out alone. More changes need to be made. Isn't it interesting that we are in a period of time where we have BOTH of these trends going on simultaneously:
- We are the fattest we've ever been
- We have the most gyms and weight loss programs we have ever had
Seems like if #2 goes up, #1 should go down, right? No. Somewhere along the lines we got convinced into thinking that if we exercise we'll lose weight and we don't have to worry about anything else. Ever see guys who are buff and fat? It's because they eat like shit. If you want to lose weight, eat less. At the least, even if you eat shitty food, but not a lot of it, you will lose weight over time (minus when your body going into starvation mode, but eating less will work for most people.). Ideally you would eat nutrition-rich food with everything in moderation. Exercise alone will not change your body fat composition that much.
I've gone through the different combinations of eating and exercising:
- 2nd half of 2006: gave up (actually weaned off of) land animals; nothing else changed including physical activity and high prevalence of ice cream and cookies: lost 10 lbs in 6 months, went from 132-122 lbs; gained some of it back in early 2007 when I found a wider variety of vegetarian food
- mid 2007: I signed up for a gym, exercised and ate a lot. no weight change or fat loss.
- end of 2007: weight loss competition: ate healthy and ran 3x a week. Lost 8 lbs in 3 months, from 128 - 120
- Aug 2008: I went to China where EVERYTHING I ate went right through me. Also walked a lot. Lost 2 lbs in 2 wks. Gained it back plus a few pounds more.
- 2009 weight loss competition: I was back to going to the gym regularly and eating better. was counting calories and keeping calories to around 1200 calories a day. no change. I only did this for about a month or so which isn't enough time to see results. Was too discouraged to stick with it. counting calories was a good experience, but made me super hesitant about going up in calories. made the change to not count calories (although I don't regret it at all; it's really good experience to measure your intake) and just eat healthy instead
- sept 2009: got hit by a car while walking and hit the lowest point in my life emotionally. Lost the drive to eat healthy. The only thing I had an appetite for was sweets. Ate only chocolate and Yogurtland; lost 2 lbs in a month (which actually made me angry because I can do all sorts of things and not lose 2 lbs in a month!!!). but you can only eat so much chocolate and Yogurtland (and this is coming from ME!!!) so I wasn't eating much, but was probably malnourished. This goes in the "even eating small amounts of nutrient-lacking food made me lose weight" bucket.
- 2010: stayed in the low-120s and eating healthy was a habit. Was running and swimming sometimes (Thanks Mike!) -- proved to be very effective in maintaining my figure.
- 2011: Insanity and currently doing P90X, eating healthy, although not my best. Best shape of my life. Probably the lowest body fat percentage since college.
In conclusion the best way to lose fat is to eat healthy and exercise. End of story. I don't know why people follow weight-loss gimmicks more than this tried-and-true (and cheaper) method. If you eat healthy, you don't even have to watch your intake that much. It's the intake of other things that are categorized in the "eat only in moderation" foods that you have to watch. I don't think you can eat too much of fruits and vegetables, but you
can eat too much of starches, fat, sugars, and meat (the last is subjective to me of course as I am a staunch believer in vegetarianism). Okay, before anyone goes off on me, you can probably eat too much fruits and veggies, but I don't think any one of us is in danger of that, including me and I love vegetables. Variety matters. If you wanna be able to eat more, then yes, work out. But think about it this way:
- Running 1 mile burns roughly 100 calories.
- A Krispy Kreme donut contains about 500 calories. And that's the regular one, not the one with added chocolate or sprinkles on it.
- If you say you will eat something "healthier," such as a banana walnut muffin or any other empty-starchy-non-filling food, it's almost the same deal.
You're better off NOT eating the donut and NOT running. In a sense, if you run and feel "entitled" to that donut all the time, you will get fat.
And for those of you who still say, "I work out so I can eat whatever I want," I know that line is usually followed by, "...to a certain extent." That is NOT "whatever you want." And if this isn't you, then you're blessed with the lack of desire to eat more calories than you expend.
An excerpt following a study done on 4 groups of obese women who were told to exercise in different amounts, with the control group being no exercise:
The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months — did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.
What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home.
The difference between having muscle and fat in your body, even in the same amount (respective of weight). Also, as a side note, muscle holds more water than fat does, so if you have more muscles, you'll be more hydrated than someone of equal weight with equal water intake with a higher body fat percentage. And since water makes up 2/3 of our bodies and, well, the earth, we all know how important water is.
According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.
Here's something we all ask: Why is it so hard to eat healthy and exercise?? And the potential pitfalls of being a gym rat: You'll move less later, neutralizing your work at the gym because you could have just moved more throughout the day and skipped the gym.
Self-Control Is like a Muscle
Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll be more likely to opt for pizza.
...
Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control "muscle" as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.
I dated a guy who told me he'd rather take the escalator and not the stairs because he pushed himself hard during his cardio routine earlier that day. I believe him when he says he pushed himself hard, but I didn't think that was a good excuse to NOT take the stairs. But what do I know? He has a 6-pack.
Thoughts? What works for you?
Original article here:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.html
