I'd rather be overweight than perpetually hungry.
EDIT: I wrote my comment in hurry, so I will now take some time to clarify my point.
Feeling hungry comes from the fact that eating foods rich in sugar and fat puts your insulin levels at a roller coaster, going up and down like crazy. With balanced diet, after initial few days of adjustment your insulin level stabilize making hunger go away.
Also, whole foods, vegetables, grains contain a lot of fiber, which stacks up in your bowels making you even likely to feel hungry.
No you can't. You can say that eating fewer calories doesn't mean feeling hungry for you. Apparently you're not in the fraction I was talking about. Good for you.
I also note that you're talking about changing your diet, while the post I was replying to specifically said you didn't have to do that.
I read that post as saying that losing weight does require a change in diet. Reducing calories is a significant change to make.
I think one of the easiest ways to reduce calories is to change the composition of the diet, there are a lot of calorie dense foods that provide little nutrition and not much satiety. Eliminating (or simply reducing) them can be an easier way to shift calorie consumption in the right direction.
I agree with you that changing your diet seems like generally a much better idea.
at the end of the day, losing weight is work. there's no way around it. work is generally slightly uncomfortable, and if you're not at least a little bit willing to endure that, you aren't going to see results. i treat gym time and kitchen time like office time. it's just work i have to do. it's not a big deal. after i get this work done, i can relax and chill out and do something mindless.
and really, in the end it's an individual decision. you have to decide, do i give a shit about this? you don't have to give a shit about it. if you don't, that's fine. if you do, then get to work.
maybe in 20 years things will be different, but that's how it is now.
After being on intermittent fasting 16/8 for half a year the notion of being "hungry" amuses me. Now being hungry means not eating for 24h or more. Sadly some think that if their stomach is a bit empthy, they have to eat. Or they need to eat because the device on the wall/hand/in the pocket displays a certain number which indicates food time, then wonder why they're fat.
But you're right, most of the 16 hour fast happens while you sleep.
Estimation is good enough as long as you monitor your progress and tweak it if it's not getting you results.
Another issue I think is extremely pervasive is moral licensing: apparently, doing something that helps to strengthen our positive self-image also makes us less worried about the consequences of bad behavior, and therefore more likely to make bad choices. This can translate to internal conversations like, "I did good by exercising today, I guess I'll order dessert." I think this error in thinking causes serious problems for a lot of people. There are no "good" or "bad" actions - only actions that add or detract from whatever the goal is.
I'll also add that you can't undo a bad diet over x years in much less time.
Obese people are shocked that changing the course and loosing fat takes time. Of course, they didn't also get obese in a year.
When you're getting fatter and fatter you don't even register couple extra kilograms, compared to if you have a healthy habit of measuring weight/lean body mass/body fat weekly (this is crucial, because measuring JUST weight is just half-assing yourself) and staying in shape. One who's doing that will notice the weight change even without measuring, your more attune to your body and you "know". It's ironic that more better you're in shape, easier it is to stay in good shape, but hey that's how law of fittest works.
You can certainly lose massive amounts of weight in a relatively (compared to how long it took to put on) short period of time.
I counted my calories with MyFitnessPal last spring and dropped 25 pounds. Consistent, long-term caloric deficit is the answer, except no substitutes.
It isn't just varying the food that makes the difference: there is variation by individual as to how certain foods affect the body. There is evidence that it can vary somewhat not just by age and gender, but the results are noisy enough within tightly controlled test groups that it varies per individual. Where there isn't an obvious cause for this such as diabetes, differences in gut microbiome are suspected to be key.
Everything you said is still correct of course. This variation just adds wrinkle to it, but a small enough one that "calories in" against "calories out" is accurate enough for the vast majority of the population (i.e. those without significant medical issues).
If you are aware of this there is nothing wrong with exercising more so you can eat more, just be careful not to bias your diet by making the extra all "bad food" or you risk being the right weight but unhealthy in a number of other ways. These days I run for three reasons (roughly in order):
* Cardiovascular fitness. It is nice to feel healthier than old me ever did.
* Stress. A 30 minutes jogging with good music or a podcast and/or around some nice scenery is a great way to break away from hassle long enough to relax so you can deal with it better when you get back (burning 250 calories while you are doing it is almost a "freebie"). Don't speed run while stressed though, you'll not concentrate and damage yourself via putting your feet in the wrong places, bad posture, or literally running into things.
* Helping to get rid of the extra I've put on if I had a bit of a food bender last week (over the festive week for example) a little faster then I otherwise would.
Supposedly, some people lose weight on low-fat diets, and some on low-carb diets. A few can lose weight on either. And most people need high-intensity exercise to lose weight, while a few only need low-intensity.
(I have both forms of genetic privilege, and have never had to worry about my weight.)
I'm also bullish on microbiome transplant for weight loss.
If you don't want to mock people, consider not comparing them to barnyard animals.
That's not really true. When I ran 150km/week, I didn't have to worry much about what I ate. A couple of years after having some surgery, I'm only managing about 50km/week, and I have to be much more careful.
What the grandparent's post is highlighting is the physics of this system is that the difference in weight is proportional to calories in - calories out. It's important for people to reduce calories in by modifying their diet. No one is disagreeing with this. However individuals committed to reducing weight can put in some time to increasing calories out (often by cardio activities such as jogging/running/cycling/swimming).
It just doesnt follow to say "you cannot outrun a bad diet" followed by "the base metabolic rate is the primary means of weight loss". There is tons of evidence that exercise is exactly what increases your base metabolic rate! Here is just one study:
"Resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the largest component of the daily energy budget in most human societies and, therefore, any increases in RMR in response to exercise interventions are potentially of great importance" [0]
If RMR is the most important thing to reducing weight, exercise is the most straightforward way to improve RMR and reducing weight. But I wont make this reductionist claim; clearly diet is also important.
Exercise can be very helpful in reducing weight; it's simple physics of increasing calories out. My most successful friend losing weight changed both his diet and increased exercising to about an hour a day. He not only shredded 30-40 pounds, but gained from the additional benefits of higher resting metabolic rate, increased cardio health benefits, reduced stress, and felt like he had more energy with fewer coffees. The quick weight loss he felt meant he didn't have to have a yearlong slog waiting to see results, making the process all the more rewarding which significantly helps for some people's psychology. Sure it sucked in the beginning, but his life was unbalanced and he committed to making big changes.
It's almost cheating to exercise with improved diets; imagine if you were keto eating salads and still able to remove "chocolate bar debt" from the past by 30 minutes to an hour of activity a day followed by increased RMR for the next 24 hours.
Bad diets are bad. Complemented with exercise you can improve your metabolic rate which will give you long term weight loss and health benefits.
At an average walking speed of 2.8mph, that's 4.6 hours of walking. The average American adult walks around 2.5 miles per day, mostly indoors trips between rooms. The American knowledge-worker or automobile-dependent suburbanite will tend to have a lower average.
Jogging / long-distance-running tends to be about twice that fast, or 2.3 hours of activity. Per day. Ten percent of their lives, running. Most people don't come anywhere close.
One key thing to remember is: You cannot outrun a bad diet.
Meaning it isn't realistic to achieve substantial weight loss through exercise. Thirty minutes of jogging could be undone by one extra chocolate bar, a Big Mac, or a soda. If you already have control over your diet exercise can HELP with weight loss goals (e.g. extra pound of body weight a week) but a lot of people assume they can run off 20-30-40 pounds of excess body weight which is just totally unrealistic.
Base metabolic rate is the primary means of weight loss. As simplistic as this sounds, the goal remains to consume less than you burn through BMR, and the latest research on calorie's inherent inadequacies haven't yet changed that.