High-intensity exercise, some new news
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Go outside, work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal and get a good amount of sleep. It's not really rocket science. Don't pre-emptively optimize all your workouts based on some cutting edge science before even brute forcing it, building work ethic is far more important. As its commonly said in CS, premature optmiziation is the root of all evil. If doing the basics doesn't work, then sure consider delving deeper into more complex routines.
The psychology is way more important for the average person than an optimal training: do something you enjoy doing several times a week.
A 1 hour brisk walk is roughly 400 calories, which is roughly the same as a 5k run, not eating a Starbucks muffin, or not eating half a small pizza.
Exercise, even light walking is incredibly beneficial, but you won't lose any weight doing so. Weight is lost in the kitchen.
You can loose all your extra weight in the kitchen. Nevertheless, doing a sport help, a lot. I lost 15kg just by changing my eating habits (over 3 years). But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises. I'm a sailor, but i only get to windsurf/kayak/so catamaran during summer, where i loose ~5kg i immediatly gain over the autumn-winter period. Doing a new, indoor sport did help a lot. This year, even though i only started in February, i already have my weight of October (when i usually stop enjoying myself on the water)
Losing weight doesn't have to increase muscle, you might be trying to just actually lose weight. Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle (which unless you're doing an incredible amount of lifting you won't be doing), ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning.
> But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises
The last mile is the same as the previous mile. The difference is that many people realise that losing weight isn't the entire story, and the last mile is no longer about losing weight it's about gaining muscle, and _that_ requires exercise.
As I said, exercise is incredibly important, you'll look better you'll feel better, you'll sleep better, but you won't lose weight unless you're running 10k every day _and_ not eating any more to compensate for it.
If you’re middle-aged (-ish) and healthy, overweight, but not obese, what made you overweight likely is a gain of, ballpark, 3 grams a day (that’s about a kg a year, or 10kg/decade, 30kg between the age of 20 and 50)
There’s about 7,700 kilocalories in a kg of body fat, so preventing that slow but steady weight increase only takes eating about 25kCal less per day or burning 25kCal more.
It doesn’t take much exercise to get there.
Is it, though? Maybe from a biological perspective, but definitely not in terms of lifestyle.
The times I've needed to lose weight, the first few pounds came off easily, because I usually just need to clean up a few bad habits. But then I typically settle in to a set point that's still above a healthy weight. At that point, further reductions require more and more calorie micromanagement.
But then there are others, me included, who have a lifelong love hate (mostly hate) relationship with exercise. I’ve exercised moderately at least every alternate days for most of my adult years (for a few, I worked out quite religiously every day even), but not a single day did I find it rewarding.
If science can help me find the most effective way I could utilize the few times (and the short periods) I do muster the motivation to work out, I’m happy for it.
So in your analogy, it’s not premature optimization for many, especially the ones that need the most.
I'd suggest that whilst you may have suffered in doing the exercise for whatever reason, there was also a parallel and strong reward process embedding and sustaining that behaviour in you.
By far the hardest part of working out regularly is to have good mental setup, which just doesn't spawn on itself but one has to work through some mental resistance. Getting into the state of enjoying the suck, for all the benefits, for the feeling afterwards, whatever makes you tick and come back. I can't agree more.
Personally I'm riding my bike to work as well, but I go slow enough that I don't consider that exercising. Instead I do real exercise separately.
Because if just walking to the store is too much exercise that it makes you feel pain or really any kind of discomfort, this is not an individual quirk, this is a serious medical issue. Real talk, you gotta talk to a doctor, this is not normal or healthy.
Walking is the primary activity humans evolved to be able to do better than any other animal. Humans can outrun any other animal in races that last multiple days, by simply walking all day and resting at night and consistently covering more miles than any other animal, not even an elephant or horse or tiger can go as fast in the long run.
It sounds like you've internalized the local cultural concept in parts of the USA that "exercise is supposed to be unpleasant, no pain no gain" which is just disconnected from the reality that humans are meant to move.
Ask your doctor how you think going from doing nothing at all (typical american sedentaryism) to walking 3-4 miles (just one hour) a day every day will impact someone's health! Even just walking one mile a day (about 20min) will put you in much better health than doing nothing.
I am not advocating walking as the obsessive only exercise, but it's a perfect starter exercise for people like yourself and OP who think it's not exercise unless you hate it!
Why do you keep doing it? Suppose you burn 500 calories in a workout session, I would think its easier to eat 500 calories less than it is to slog through something you hate.
You don't need cutting edge research to fix your motivation issues, since plenty of proven exercises are out there that help so much for personal health. You probably just need a therapist. Once you get over that inertia of regularly working out, you will constantly want to work out. You will feel sore on the weeks you let your yoga regimine slide, and you will feel 10 years younger or more when you do consistantly do your yoga and other excercises. You won't get as injured in your age the more flexibile you are, and you won't get nearly as frail the more muscle mass you can keep on you through adulthood. Exercise sucks but this is the investment you make today to have a quality life decades down the road. Money alone cannot relieve issues that are brought on by a lifetime of inactivity.
I do too. That's why I insisted my apartment have a dishwasher—they're surprisingly uncommon in entry-level New York studios. I dump everything in there, it's great. No pre-rinsing, I just throw stuff inside and it comes out clean 90 minutes later.
I don't like vacuuming either, so I got a Roomba. Also highly recommended. It goes out, cleans the whole floor, and then comes back to charge itself. I just have to empty the bin. Sometimes one or the other speakers gets unplugged, which is a tad annoying. Much less annoying than vacuuming.
I firmly believe that some day, humanity will discover an exercise pill. Sign me up. There's nothing inherent about using muscles which makes them stronger. Using muscles tells the body that it needs to make its muscles stronger, but we could just skip to the second part.
None of this really contradicts your point. As of today, we don't have an exercise pill, so you've got to exercise. But I also believe in constantly looking for ways to make life as engaging as possible.
(And I also found the dishwashing example triggering. Too many of my acquaintances don't have dishwashers. They're like $300 y'all, you spent five times that on a marginally faster iPhone but scrubbing plates is as slow as ever...)
Tangentially, I used to be a "whatever, I just wash dishes by hand" person and got converted to dishwashers because I actually, for the first time, ended up using one that actually worked well and got everything very clean reliably and repeatedly. I had only ever used the "landlord special" machines you are all too familiar with as well. It really is such a time saver and makes me eat at home and do more involved cooking more often.
If cooking more is a goal of yours and you're like I used to be, dismissive of dishwashers, think again.
Cuts out the moving to/from cupboards part. Also frees up said cupboard. Probably sufficient for people who don't cook much but YMMV, haven't tried it myself yet.
But, it also takes me less than 60 seconds to empty the dishwasher, it doesn't really feel like work.
There doesn't need to some mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study, because... well, the proof is in the pudding if you look at athletes.
Most people are not doing the basics, but by doing some form of exercise often and consistently. Eat a nutritious meal, don't binge on junk food and sleep well. People love to complicate and over engineer the situation by diving into everything 100% when they have a 'I'm going to lose weight' mindset. Weight loss takes a while and you might need to be a little hungry at times to lose weight.
Just don't expect exercise to be the one reason you will lose weight, the largest reason will be your diet. As the old saying goes, you can't outrun a poor diet.
I'd say obesity is the greater eating disorder, not athletes being at the top of the game working themselves into the ground.
But a good thing you point out there, is that it is easy to say exercise consistently and eat a good diet. But the trouble is the discipline/self control to do so.
Many of us lead stressful busy lives which don't always leave us the room to be the healthy people we want to be. You just need to make time for it in a way that you can and enjoy, if you truly do want to prioritise it.
It is so much easier to exercise consistently and eat a good diet if one is being paid for it.
1. All workout types leads to being more in shape 2. HIITs lead to weight loss faster than other types of training.
It is valuable information, if it is confirmed to be true.
Your maximum heart rate isn't likely to increase unless you train and push the upper end of your HR. Sprint cyclists don't train to be fast by riding slowly, they do high intensity sprint efforts.
Your body adapts to the stimulus you provide it, if you want to increase your maximum HR you need to train at your near it.
Is the problem. So many studies lead no where because the body is insanely complex, so what works for this person should not be generalized.
If it turns out that a certain kind of exercise makes it a little easier for people to reach their health/fitness goals, and it isn't commensurately more likely to injure them, then let us leave no gains on the table.
You didn't give definitions for any of those terms, nor good values they take from their domains.
There has to be one and only one definition of each. We have to know exactly what macro and micro nutrients the human body needs, and how many calories per person, per lifestyle.
Science has no answers to this, bar the consumerist publications of the cancer-curing properties of grilled avocados or somerhing.
What I understood from your post is I can sleep for 6 hours, briskly walk to the supermarket, and cook 3 XL eggs with a handful of bacon, as a pre-lunch.
An analogy to what you are saying would be this: Studying in MIT vs. any random university should be the same. "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science."
Your other points are valid.
Is that wrong?
E.g. On this account, "stay hydrated" is bad advice, since if you drink 60L of water in a day you will die
Regular exercise AND healthy eating AND good sleep? Too much of the population struggles with way too many things to be able to get all 3.
I'll give you an example that has happened to me several times, I have friends who work out 3 times a week and don't understand why they don't lose their pear shape. The answer is: Do HIT and weights too!
Each type of exercise develops one of the various perspectives our physical nature has in the same way that each type of mental exercise develops one of the various mental capacities we have. You can't be in good mental shape if, for example, you only do chess. Of course it is a great and beautiful exercise, but someone should remind you that your brain has other needs that must be satisfied.
I've been going to the gym for 2 years now with a personal trainer - mostly a wholesome approach and even when doing HIIT intervals, I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike.
His experience seems anecdotal at best and an extreme case of cherry picking alongside that. I do feel some nausea after a decent workout usually and it does suppress my appetite for a few hours, but I know of people that are just ravenous after working out.
Are you sure that you are climbing fast enough? Gym training isn't necessarily the best way to prepare for cycling.
Also, I'm not sure if you understood correctly - I've hit my 194 when I was out of shape and stepped on my bike and tried to climb the tiny hill (after doing about 20km or so). After about 200m of distance with about a 6% gradient, my HR was 194 and I had to step off the bike, my lungs felt like they were extending from my groin all the way to my upper arms on boths sides :D.
After going to the gym for two years I've never seen more than 187 during the HIIT sessions that we had (usually it's something along the lines 20 calories max effort rowing with 15-30 seconds rest, anywhere from 6-10 series) so my experience directly contradicts what has happened to him.
A different change in routine can make a big difference. Also, people have a different body composition which is important to know.
Based on your reaction, i guess you're not a Endomorph :)
And the second half is about the author training for cycling up mountains and it basically looks like a reasonably normal thing that someone serious at training for something might write. The point of tracking the numbers is to notice trends which someone who is serious about training would likely care about.
As someone who wanted but struggled to motivate myself to take up regular physical activities, the short duration of HIIT was what sold it to me. Sure it's "intense", but I found it way easier to just push myself for ~10min (20min door-to-door) rather than finding time for a 1-2h regular exercise - which I personally don't enjoy much more anyway.
Weight loss has never been my consideration. However, what I've found over the years (and is also supported by research afaik) is that a practice of regular short HIITs greatly contributes to endurance too. Anecdotally, by doing HIITs almost exclusively I am able to keep up pretty well with my triathlon friend during longer runs.
Me personal experience checks out with the author's anectdata. Following a broken leg I gained about 20 pounds over 2 years, and burned it off quickly (5 weeks) once I started with HIIT.
People are going to keep telling me that "calories in = calories out", or that "weight loss happens in the kitchen", and I'll keep not believing them. HIIT is the most effective level I have for raising my metabolism without a corresponding increase to my appetite.
Warm up in a sustainable way then limited sprints at an unsustainable speed.
The only way to legitimately say "weight loss happens in the kitchen" if the discussion is over what, and how often... any discussion that is about CICO throws something like 20 years of science under the bus.
HIIT helps override early metabolic syndrome symptoms, but so does eating a diet devoid of refined sugars, refined grains, and seed oils; combining this with a high fat diet (to purposefully keep insulin levels low) multiplies the effect of both HIIT and diets that follow the Paleo way of thinking; then, on top of those, One Meal A Day (OMAD) further multiplies the effect.
If you eat your TDEE in calories every day (ergo, neither excess nor deficit of calories), you will lose weight with HIIT, but also lose weight with Paleo, more weight adding Keto to Paleo, and then even more weight with Ketoized Paleo OMAD, and all four together would still be a weight loss powerhouse even with eating TDEE.
This means absolutely nothing
This is the kind of empty advice that gets in the way more than helps, and I can't even start saying how "sweat for an hour" is just checkout-lane fitness magazine non-advice
In fact I'd say that that most people fail at fitness because they try to go for meaningless advice like "sweating for an hour"
HIIT is great and it is the way to optimize time and progression
Not sure much for a beginner, but even for advanced beginners yes.
The heart is very hard to optimize machine. More it gets efficient, the harder it is to make it more efficient. Hence every last bit of detail counts.
You will be surprised how hard it is to proceed to make the heart efficient by a linear scale.
https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/this-is-what-michael-p...
Phelps would be the same. Swimming is hard work.
It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well. Generally I try and do this, I just do my baseline steps + cycling and try not to miss days and I can pretty much eat what I like. But when I'm loosing weight, I usually wake up really hungry and that's when I can tell the scale has tipped the other way into a calorie deficit.
That's the first I'm hearing this opinion. I'd expect the opposite. It's definitely the opposite for me, because eating healthy is pleasurable, tasty. I'm a hedonist, so I love eating healthy. I do exercise everyday, with an odd missed day here and there, but much of the exercise is a battle of my will to keep pushing, soaked in sweat. Additionally, for exercise you need to find extra time in a day, whereas with food one way or another you're going to need to do that anyway.
Even with heavy exercise, I have a strong suspicion your doctor wouldn't recommend you a diet like that. Just because by some miracle it works for one guy (and who knows what the consequences are going to be in a couple decades), doesn't mean it's good advice for the general populace.
It's the balance between calories consumed versus calories burned.
Swimming famously burns an immense amount of calories both due to being an endurance sport as well just maintaining body temperature in a body of cool water.
For the average individual who are looking to improve their health, it mostly likely false, because the average individual is not in perfect health, especially once they pass the age of 20. A good demonstration of this can be found in older medical science, much which was done on military recruits. More often then not they do not represent the average individual in modern society in term of health.
If we look at the average person, we found things like metabolic disorder. It obviously effects how food metabolize, but it also effects how easy it is to exercise, and it effects sleep in terms of falling asleep, staying asleep, and how long people need to sleep. It is estimated that about 1/3 of the US population suffer from a metabolic disorder, and is only one category of many different diseases that might effects people in a negative way.
All that said it’s great that different options are out there for people who are motivated in different ways.
I know you're trying to help HN readers but your comments I extracted above give the wrong impression of the article's actual text.
He's not micro-optimizing and he didn't pre-emptively optimize. Summary bullet points:
- He wrote that he was already doing high-intensity bike riding in the mountains for the past 12 years.
- Each of the previous seasons, he noticed he always lost the weight he gained during the winter. This was his baseline.
- But COVID disrupted his normal bike training and when he restarted the high-intensity exercise, he noticed he wasn't losing the weight like before. To fix this, he made sure he got his max heart rate back up to 180. This seems to match some of the recent research out there.
The above timeline over a decade is the opposite of premature optimization. It's taking 12 years of baseline data and noticing something about his body changed in the 13th year and then taking steps to isolate and fix it.
Unfortunately, his wall of text about his personal anecdote makes it hard for readers to skim for his main ideas:
(1) many science articles say exercise doesn't help you lose weight but his personal experience contradicts this. He believes the explanation is low-intensity exercise vs high-intensity.
(2) even high-intensity exercise will not stop weight gain unless you actually hit max heart rate. Almost reaching max heart rate (e.g. 172 bpm) was not enough; he has to reach 180 bpm.
1) daily HIIT, preferably multiple times
2) not eating for 7-35 days at all (just water/electrolytes/vitamins/potassium)
Eating just a little while doing just a bit of sport just made me tired, and didn't lead to any weight loss.
Consistency is #1 for exercise. I do agree that many people seem to overthink it too early on. But, some people draw motivation from the overthinking as long as they don't consider the thinking part a silver bullet or mistake it for actually doing the exercise.
if i spend hours on the bike to get better at biking, yes, thank you, this is actually valuable and important information! no, it's not going to change how i ride on relaxing group rides with my friends or my feel-good rides for getting my head aired out; i do those too, but they're a completely different thing.
HEY LINUX KERNEL PROGRAMMERS! why do you always care about buffer overflows so much? just write some fun code! get a few features done! stop worrying about security holes all the time. accumulating LoC is far more important.
Notably, he's arguing against the apparent evidence supported consensus that excercise doesn't help you lose weight, so you possibly could get a nobel if you proved it did.
Sure, while doing something is better than doing nothing, whether you push the muscles to exhaustion or not, or whether you push the cardio to max throughput or not makes a vastly outsized difference vs mere total time or effort expended.
The details of how &how much you get to that intensity are admittedly details ,but to dismiss the whole concept as unnecessary is, well, unnecessary ignorance.
Source: fmr international level amateur &pro competitor & trainer. Happy to provide more details of training if interested .
Dr. Mike Israetel had a video on this exact topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0ejGgLRQZI
Still better than nothing and you only need up to 20 min to complete training.
Of course sprinting all-out for 5 minutes is better than walking for 5 minutes. If all you have is 5 minutes, and you're trying to get the most out of that session without any other consideration, you should sprint.
But for most people, 5 minutes of all-out sprinting is very, very hard, and has a very fatiguing effect - you won't want to (or be able to) exercise again for a while. As opposed to walking, which most people can realistically do for a long time.
The concept here is the amount of fatigue you're accumulating. As a fat-loss tool, a low-fatigue exercise that you can do for a long time will mean much more total calories burned, as opposed to a high-fatigue exercise you'll only realistically do for a very short duration.
So let's say you do the ladder routine. I don't have any idea how fast people typically sprint, but let's take 2 minutes per sprint - we have 100 twice, 200 twice, 300 twice, and 400, for a total of 7 sprints - so we'll say 14 minutes (and I think I'm exaggerating up?) In terms of calories burned, this is the "same" as a 45 minute walk.
I assume, by the way you describe it (people can't walk up stairs for a few days, people puking) that this is very hard on people. They're probably not doing this every day.
As opposed to walking 45 minutes, which is incredibly easy and won't make anyone feel bad, and you can definitely do every day.
Of course, I'm only talking calories burned here - for health and for improving conditioning, of course you need something more strenuous!
In both cases, your metabolism adjusts - it feeds more muscles, its set into high-energy mode with 'fast' digestion.
I wouldn't recommend it to most though - if done properly its very taxing. I mean being in anaerobic state and pushing through is a hard sell to people who barely muster enough motivation to do occasional jog or spinning. One needs to be in top shape overall for it, no hidden heart issues etc.
As you mention, HIIT is also very hard for many people do even if they are healthy and want to do it. The body naturally fights going all out.
I've pitched training BJJ on HN (well to anyone really), and HIIT is yet another reason. People who train end up doing HIIT without even realizing. The body is in defense mode which breaks down some of the natural steady guardrails.
Can anyone? Almost by definition, your top sprinting speed, e.g. what you would use for 100m race, is going to be different than your speed running a mile, even if you are an olympic athlete.
Exact numbers escape me, but exercise somewhere between 65-80 percent of your heart rate leads to optimal consumption of carbs and fats. Too low stress and you aren’t using up much stored energy; too high and the body needs sugars to keep going.
Better yet, it’s prolonged intensity that matters, as it takes the body a few minutes to activate all the pathways required to start burning fats and carbs. So for example long distance running will burn more fats than sprinting.
The likely fact that exercise does not result in significant weight loss does not mean exercise won't keep you from gaining weight, keep you from regaining weight, or help you lose weight that you specifically put on from stopping exercise.
We have good evidence if you're fat you probably won't get skinny from exercise.
But we also have good evidence that if you lose a bunch of weight exercise is really important for keeping it off.
Basically the human body is very complicated so you can't make many assumptions.
I bulked for lifting in the winter. Got to a body fat percent where I wasn't happy with how I looked. I then needed to decide to cut or continue gaining strength. This decision actually caused a lot of strife when before I realized I couldn't do both effectively.
I looked at my calories and what I wanted to reduce. It didn't work well, I had a hard time tracking calories and making the correct cuts despite a simple diet.
Now it is summer, it is hot, I'm not using AC. My body wants less food, I cut out rice, mostly on meat and dairy. Consistently losing weight now. I attribute it largely to the heat.
My take away is that it is eating less, but eating less is hard.
It's not a meaningful factor in any sort of weight change unless taking substances with dangerous side effects.
Would you say this drug helped you lose weight?
Or on the other end if you have a drug that decreases caloric expenditure by 5 calories but decreases hunger by 500 calories would you say this drug helps people gain or lose weight?
We can look at these interventions through the very narrow lens of thermodynamics and say the first one will help with weight loss and the second will help with weight gain. Or we can just give people the drug and see what happens to their weight. It seems very clear to me the second approach is a better one.
I row and cycle casually. Most of the ostensibly-evidence-based, in-vogue advice that I hear is to do a large volume of work (1-2 hours per day) at between 65% and 80% of maximum heart rate -- not very high intensity. This same advice recommends a very limited amount of work (1-2 hours per week at most, or even none at all!) at any intensities above that.
You see this all over /r/rowing ("steady state"), and on the Science of Ultra podcast (discontinued but has lots of pragmatic advice distilled from research). [0] The low-intensity, high-volume approach was actually pioneered in 1970s East Germany. [1]
That advice is mostly intended to help already-healthy people get fitter, but I'd be surprised if the science would lead people who have excess fat to work at a harder intensity than people who don't, especially when accounting for the increased injury risk and wear on joints.
[0] https://www.scienceofultra.com/podcasts/139
[1] http://footnotes-catalan.blogspot.com/2011/05/rowing-machine...
The research shows that lots of exercise volume at low intensity, a bit of excersise volume at high intensity, and zero volume at mid intensities is (counterintuitively) the most effective way to build performance at all intensities for endurance sports. This applies both for trained professional athletes and regular people who are untrained.
In some of the videos you'll find, he provides definitions for these zones and makes suggestions about the ideal volume of exercise, as well as the structure of high intensity workouts (how many intervals? how long? etc -- there is research about exactly what intervals are best)
If you are interested in improving cycling performance, https://intervals.icu/ is a fantastic dashboard that can be used to track training, performance and has many charts directly relating to polarised training and Dr Seiler's research (I'm thinking specifically of charts for time-in-zone, cardiac decoupling and heart rate reserve)
There are many cycling training Youtubers but Dylan Johnson is one who comes to mind who looks takes a very evidence-based approach and breaks down the latest research in videos for beginners who want to improve cycling performance
In my early 40s, I did a lot of higher altitude mountain biking (single track, usually involving a good mix of climbs and descents). I wore a heart rate strap, which should be pretty accurate at measuring HR.
According to my Garmin data uploaded to Strava, one of my long rides (4 hours moving) had an average hr of 161 bpm and a max of 192. It also shows that 15% of my time was > 174 bpm. According to heart.org, my max should have been 175.
Since that's more than half an hour operating above the supposed max HR, I don't believe those max limits.
Even so, I think pushing oneself to the limit for periods of time is great as long as it doesn't kill you. And now for those of us who have been sedentary for some extended time (blame COVID), HIIT can mean going up and down the stairs a few times! Perhaps I should wear my heart strap around the house; I feel like my current max HR is probably significantly below what it should be.
On an unrelated note, a couple of years ago I went from not exercising to trying to learn to run. For one month, several days a week, I did a run/walk of a mere 6km. I did push myself to decrease the total time spent, and there was some progress. Before that month, my resting HR was around 65 bpm. After that month, my resting HR was in the low 50s, occasionally dipping into the high 40s. This was a bit scary to read, since online info about low resting hr supposedly means something bad; but I didn't feel bad. And after I stopped exercising, my resting rate went back to the usual mid 60s.
I always thought of MHR as "you'll have a hard time getting your heart rate faster than this," not "your heart will explode if you work hard enough exceed this."
I took part in two eight week healthy eating research studies just over a year ago.
One was the mediterranean diet (think olive oil in your porridge, a glass of wine with meals, olives, fish).
The other was the Australian government recommended healthy eating guideline (Balanced meals, lots of veg, lower carb, some cheese, some dairy, no alcohol).
I did the gov recommended diet first, and then the mediterranean.
My fat content reduced on the gov recommended diet, and increased slightly after on the mediterranean.
I usually hover around 72kg - 76kg, and on these diets I slimmed down, and got below 70kg for the first time in I don't know how long...
My exercise regime didn't change at all (I was doing a medium amount of exercise at the time).
If all you did was go to the gym regularly and eat the gov recommended diet, in my experience you'll definitely slim down. Say goodbye to that chocolate cake however - for that you might need to add some HIT / HIIT (high intensity interval training).
We also were given sample meal recipes.
Wut?
Being lazy, sitting on the couch etc seems to have the opposite effect... I also wonder about what our brain consumes visually. If you're watching other people eating and drinking, it kinda makes you want to do the same.
I guess it will depend on protein vs sugar and fat content in the diet.
Exercise because exercise is good for you. Try to eat fewer calories if overweight because that's good for you. It's best to treat these as separate problems: don't expect exercise to help you lose your weight.
If at all possible, find an exercise activity you enjoy, and do it because you enjoy it.
This is the vicious cycle: People expect more kcal to lose from exercising while underestimate the amount of kcal, eating and drinking can cause, especially alcohol.
Also the amount of muscle people build. Human beings are extremely energy efficient. And excess muscles only drain human bodies from energy. Does not make sense.
My pro tip: count your kcal for one month. Everything that goes into your mouth - except water - needs to be tracked and especially weighted. You gonna be surprised. Everything, no exception.
I count kcals and exercising for years now. My simple best advise: eating is 80-90% of the deal. Disciplined eating beats sports every time. More sports leads to more energy demand. And many overweight people cannot do sports.
I give you another example. If I manage to get a negative kcal of more than 500kcal a day, this is very tough to take. Your body revolts. It takes a lot of discipline to go with -500kcal for a couple of days in a row.
Another tip: go plant based. Added sugar etc. does not help.
Exactly this. A climb up the local hill with my MTB taxes me for 1000kcal. Skipping three beers after amounts for the same amount of energy, and is way easier to achieve
And -500kcal per day is only 1 pound of weight lost per week.
Gaining weight is easy. Losing weight is very rough.
As someone who went from 105kg to 75kg, I wouldn't describe the process as "rough". It took a series of small, sustainable changes to activity levels and diet over an extended period of time.
At no point did I feel like I was forcing myself to do stuff I didn't want to or was depriving myself of anything.
Couldn't be happier with the results (with how I feel, with the various active pursuits that are now part of my life etc).
So 500kcal per day is only 1 pound gained per week? Sounds like gaining weight is a lot of work! Basically you have to eat 5 large meals for just a single pound? At that rate it will take years of work to go from healthy to obese!
For many, this is not true. My normal activity levels and eating tendencies make gaining weight quite hard for me.
Too much fat, particularly fat above the bodies carrying capacity - leads to steep declines in athletic performance. If you suddenly need to shed heat for regular high intensity aerobic work, or pull yourself up a mountain - then its in your bodies best interest to lose the excess weight (up to a point). Our bodies seem to be extremely good at maintaining homeostasis in different conditions, why would body fat percentage be any different?
Bingo. When I was much younger I was super skinny. I was weight lifting, but simply not gaining weight. I thought I ate a lot, and decided to start tracking. I barely ate anything. Even as a kid I hated to stop doing whatever it was I was doing and taking time to eat. That spilled over into adult life. But, once I saw numbers it became clear and I was finally able to adjust.
Humans are generally terrible at estimations like this. I suggest tracking anything that you think may be a negative in your life.
That's a lot of givens, given you're talking about a complex system that's evolved over the last million years to keep you from starving.
But actual answer is exercise causes most people's metabolism to slow down slightly, to engage in less movements both conscious and unconscious, and their hunger to increase.
Basically if your body realizes you're expending a bunch of energy it starts to conserve energy in all the other ways.
Exercise CAN lead to weight loss (I used to weigh ~115kg/250lb/18st, now weigh 74kg/160lb/11.5st ...mostly lost over 2 years), but as the old saying goes "You can't out-run a bad diet". It's much easier to eat 500 (k)calories than it is to burn 500 cal.
As for exercise-induced hunger, yes some people don't feel hungry 'after' exercise...but e.g. if you exercise mid-day, do you add more to the following meals (e.g. evening, or more snacking?), adding more calories overall?
Note: I found weight loss 'simple', as I find it very easy to follow a repetitive diet, so while calorie counting has flaws with the inaccuracy of estimates, calorie counting works IF YOU USE IT RIGHT. I at least knew if I eat roughly the same breakfasts and lunches, it's much easier to identify dietary habit changes or volume reductions if I wasn't achieving weight loss.
My heart pounded out of my chest every single time. But I lost weight with a very fast pace and didn't adjust my food too much ( i actually ate more, but healthier alternatives).
Muscle made me gain weight less fast on low motivational periods.
I now restarted sports and doing inline skating + fitness. Going up a bridge first to get my heart pounding again after 5 years inactivity. It feels great.
I'll try to change habits every month for muscle confusion. Since the human body optimizes for what you do ( and when) a lot. Inefficiency is key.
In terms of muscle protein synthesis and growth.
Edit: To make my (I believe) correct but not very useful comment more useful - this is a good article about training volume: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/the-new-approach-to-traini...
I burned it off using HIIT and it took a little more than a month. I noticed results right away, and kept going until I was done. I ate according to my appetite.
I don't get these kinds of results doing either regular endurance or strength training.
What’s more, five of the participants taking L-carnitine experienced nausea or diarrhea (24).
Another human study monitored L-carnitine’s effect on fat burning during a 90-minute stationary bicycle workout. Four weeks of taking supplements did not increase fat burning (28).