Even just not using your car to do journeys of less than a couple of miles.

I don't exercise at all, really. I just walk everywhere, to do my shopping, and for fun. I don't run or jog or lift weights. I cook food from fresh as much as I can, avoid too much meat, and I don't have a car. I have a healthy weight and a small (usually) waistline.

Like a lot of us I do occasionally still have back problems from too much sitting (as I enter middle age) but literally just a couple of weekends of daily, hilly walks will put things back in order for some time.

It's also an effective mild antidepressant and sleep regulator.

If you want a life choice that will help you lose weight: move somewhere you can function as much as possible without a car.

Most people don't have the freedom to make this choice, but the fact that the people who do genuinely have the freedom and who can see their whole family is overweight never even consider it, often surprises me.

(We should be developing societies that can function this way at a larger scale, not just developing on-demand delivery services.)

Britain (England in particular) is half and half, really. Lots of people live in towns and can walk to everything.

But a very large number of people make the choice to live in the kind of "out of town" developments that would be familiar to Americans: a car-journey from everything and served by large supermarkets to which you can't so easily walk, rather than in the kind of smaller more traditional communities that are a walk from everything. And nowhere is cycle-friendly yet, really.

Covid will exacerbate this -- people looking to live in houses with gardens will choose to live further away from towns.

I have lived mostly in towns and I prefer that, but where I am living at the moment, the corner shop is not a corner shop, it's a small supermarket, and it is a hilly half mile away. This is right on the cusp of impracticality for a lot of people who don't have the freedom to work from home during the day and who are shopping for more than just themselves.

I live by myself and I don't have a car, but I work from home, so I choose to do that journey on foot, rather than get deliveries, but I am unusual in this; most people get deliveries or will take the car (and then go to the bigger supermarket further away).

Rising obesity in kids is observed but no link is made.

All the while I have seen my country 'Americanizing' in the last 20 years : more McDs etc, now the food delivery guys and McDs now delivers to your home too ( unfanthomable! )

It is not the US style what sells it : it is convenience. Convenience sells.

At least in the US. Maybe it's different in Europe.

$4+ per diner delivery markup (increased base food price, delivery fee, tip) will keep it from being a widespread problem. This is like worrying that meal ingredient delivery services will make lots of people more sedentary because they won't walk to the grocery store—no, it won't, because not many people can afford those services.

After all, the USA was once a country of broad, healthy outdoorsy types, and that health pattern carried on well into metropolitan living, well into the late seventies.

And then the "TV dinner" approach was all dinners, and along came higher and higher calorie snacks. Americans became substantially less healthy in less than two decades. Through convenience shopping.

The same thing happened to the British at only a slightly smaller scale, and slightly later.

Like you I had back problems at regular intervals. Then I read about building muscle using moderate weight exercises and have been free from back pain ever since. Whenever I stop doing my exercises for 1-2 weeks because of holidays or whatever, I feel the oh so familiar back pain creeping in again...

You kind of gloss over this, but 8k steps is around 3 miles of walking for the average person. You might be able to get that "naturally" if you live in an urban area and go out on foot every day to get coffee, groceries, etc., but if you're a typical WFH software engineer living in the suburbs, you're probably going to have to spend 45 min to an hour every day walking for exercise to achieve that number. I'm certainly not claiming that this is excessive or impossible or anything, but spending more than an hour a day (when combined with the weight lifting) on exercise and fitness is a MAJOR lifestyle change for most people. I think it's extremely important to be honest about the effort and commitment required. Getting healthy and staying healthy is _hard_, especially if you're starting out seriously overweight or obese.

I gave up automobiles about twenty years ago, and attribute my health and slenderness (relative to the rest of my family) mostly due to walking-lifestyle. I spent last month visiting family, and definitely put on weight from thirty days of being sedentary in the suburbs. Awful way to live.

I haven't been able to consistently operate on it for deeper work/code or meetings, but I don't know if I really need to.

Now, obviously this isn't for everyone, but my partner and I adopted a dog and she needs to be walked once or twice a day for about 45 minutes. It's been a great way to get us out of the house every day.

You are absolutely right that adding an hour a day of exercise is a major lifestyle change, but so are a lot of things in life.

I mean if youre willing to walk around with an oxygen mask allday and aren't bothered about possible health consequences, there is also plastic surgery.

Disagree completely. Exercise does not lose weight. The amount of exercise one needs to lose the calorie gained from a burger is not possible to achieve on daily basis. Weight does not just come from air. It's all about what you eat. That's the science.

Exercise helps to build muscle and good health, not reduce body fat. Period. So eat less calorie and not junk/packaged/sugary food. So yeah "just eat well and exercise".

I exercise daily and it has only increased my appetite, I eat more than when I did not move much. The desire to eat is related to habit too. When I eat more it increase the craving and when I stay away from junk food for a long time, the cravings goes away.

The correct exercise is critical for many people to lose weight. Why?

Weight lifting and some HIIT exercises help you build lean body mass, which will raise your metabolic rate. Many people have "poor metabolisms" because they have less lean body mass than expected. Weight lifting in particular will also help you protect your muscle mass as you lose weight.

If you do not lift weights when you lose weight, you will lose a lot of muscle, which will tank your metabolic rate. When people talk about losing weight, they really mean losing fat. If your goal is to lose fat, you need to weight lift.

Beyond that, exercise can help with leptin. Many overweight people have leptin issues, which causes them to overeat, which makes them even heavier, which makes their leptin ever worse. It could either be too little leptin or a lack of sensitivity to leptin. Regardless, leptin is the hormone that signals satiety, and if this hormone is out of whack, you will overeat.

Either way, this is not a good situation.

Recent research says that exercising 300 minutes a week can help people reverse this leptin issue. I have been doing this myself, and it has been a key way that I have been able to get my hunger levels under control and help me lose more than 50 lbs.

Here is a write up about the study: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/well/move/to-lose-weight-...

You should not exercise with the mindset of burning calories. You should exercise with the mindset of building lean tissue, with increasing your cardiovascular fitness, with increasing your mobility, and with helping to get your hormones into a good place.

But please exercise. If you do the right exercises with the right mindset, it can help you lose weight and keep it off.

Yes, you can't outrun a bad diet. But you also will struggle to beat poor leptin levels too.

That said, it's definitely not an either/or situation.

Its simple to lose weight. Eat less. Lots of "people" advertise their programs but at the end its simple as that. Eat. less.

You need to stop thinking about exercise as burning calories. Exercise can be critical in getting hormones, particularly leptin, back to a normal function. Exercise, particularly weightlifting, can help build muscle and prevent muscle loss from losing weight.

Eating less is not the secret. That's to reductionist.

The secret is altering your energy balance.

You can alter your energy balance from a combination of diet and exercise, and the way you handle both will further impact your energy balance. Your hormones will also play a critical role in your ability to maintain this as well.

Getting good sleep will also be critical for altering this energy balance and setting yourself up for weight loss. People who don't get 7-9 hours of sleep a night aren't going to be producing enough human growth hormone at night, and they won't be able to recover from exercise or build lean tissue.

I would never, ever recommend someone try to lose any significant amount of weight without weightlifting. It's a fool's errand.

Yes, you'll lose the weight by eating less, and in the process you may end up having half of that weight loss be muscle mass. Now your metabolic rate is in the gutter, and you have set yourself up perfectly for a rebound in weight.

If you want longterm weight loss, exercise and eat well. Try to get at least 10,000 steps a day and then aim for 4-6 days a week of strenuous exercise.

I’m always wary of essays like this one. People figure out how to manage their own bodies and somehow extrapolate their lessons to all humans.

I've also met plenty of people who yo-yoed just by "eating less", which is what the grandparent comment was claiming. No change of -what- they ate, no inclusion of exercise, just tried to calorie restrict. They'd lose weight, possibly a lot (depends on the person)...and invariably plateau, get frustrated, and put it back on.

Obviously this is not a random sampling, but there's definitely a pattern that emerges if you look at how people who have lost weight took it off and kept it off. And there's also definitely a pattern if you look at the people who have lost weight and regained it. "Eat less" is not helpful advice (which is what the parent post was responding to). It's not entirely wrong (exercising, as per the parent, helped them eat less at meal time. Restricting carbs also helps people eat fewer overall calories too), but it's not particular actionable as formulated, and it reduces weight loss to a "willpower" problem, which study after study has shown is doomed to fail, and also leads to all sorts of negative feelings along the way.

Any dieting strategy which doesn't involve eliminating sugar in liquid or edible form and replacing it satiating foods isn't going to work long term.

No loss in about 60 days, with zero cheating. I also started doing a lot of cardio at the same time (bike riding, running). No help there, either.

Gained a ton of fat fast when I stopped and went back to eating normally (for me).

Yeah, I'll stick to weight lifting. Dieting (past a certain point, anyway) fucks up my metabolism.

So.. are you 5'2" female or a 6'3" male? 1400 is (potentially) appropriate for one and brutally low for another. Gained fat FAST after eating more? Well sure if you went from 1400 to 2800 and your BMR is 1400 that's gonna make anyone gain weight. Faster than your normally would because your metabolism changed based on your previous input? That doesn't track with conventional knowledge.

I did the diet to try to make the ol' abs pop even more, the idea was that I'd get down to where I wanted to be fast then ease up a little and hold there (diet's the main thing that matters, everyone says, after all). It backfired badly. Two months of constantly feeling hungry, to no benefit. I'm sure my metabolism was on the way down anyway (early 20s at the time), but that diet killed it dead in just a couple months.

Weight lifting continues to be more effective for me than it "should" be according to common wisdom, even if I'm not doing enough to pack on more muscle. Whatevs.

[EDIT] Incidentally, I wish dieting worked as well for me as all those online calculators say, because I find it a lot easier than working out. Takes negative time, for one thing, and costs negative money. It's great.

* Eat * Lift * Sleep

The combination of LIFT-WEIGHT with RUN-CALORIE-DEFICIT it how you lose weight whilst gaining muscle. It's extremely effective and you feel awesome from it. Sleep is absolutely vital - without having enough sleep you can't recover and it gets very hard to keep the calorie intake limited.

At some point - once you get to about 18-20% body fat it will start to stall - then you need to start adding some cardio to the mix.

Covid + having three kids - the youngest was 6 months old at the start of the pandemic - have absolutely ruined my fitness. I really want to get back in to shape but having proper sleep (and not having any time!) is killing my chances. After the summer he should be old enough to make it possible again though..

Even with the exercise (have "closed all three rings" since COVID) I hit a wall below which I am not losing weight. From experience though I know I need to cut the portion size of my meals.

Years ago when I was preparing to undergo surgery, I would look at the meal I was about to eat and lay out what I thought was a "reasonable" portion. I would eat that and no more. Habitually, I would have gone for "seconds" in the past, but with surgery looming I restrained myself.

I was surprised to find that I was not hungry even though I ate perhaps 2/3? my usual food intake. Tough though to pass on seconds when the meal is a tasty one.

In the end lost another 20+ pounds and was at my lowest weight since I had been recording it.

I'm afraid I celebrated the success of the surgery though by returning to my eating habits and returned to my previous weight.

I just want to reach through the screen and shake you while screaming. This is what I'm talking about, with every mention of exercise being dismissively pivoted back to diet hacks!

Exercise is not a substitute for eating better, it is a tool for helping you eat better. Of course you should cut out sugary soft drinks and eat smaller portions! It's just that a minimum amount of exercise helps that happen naturally, rather than requiring herculean amounts of focus and discipline and constantly feeling miserable while trying.

In my 20's I was completely sedentary, weighed nearly 200 pounds / 91kg at 5'9" / 175cm, and had basically no muscle mass. I could barely press an empty 45#/20kg barbell overhead. 8-9 months of high intensity workouts, without any dietary changes, and I was down 50# with a lot of strength gains. I absolutely could have lost the weight faster, and gotten stronger faster, if I stopped eating fast food multiple times a week, but at the end of the day if you're physically able to do the work it's not a necessity.

Your comment seemed (to me) to be too dismissive of diet.

The benefits of exercise for me were better, more restful sleep, more energy, improved emotional well-being, time afforded for setting my priorities for the day, etc. But weight loss was not one of the benefits, nor did I see a significant change in my dietary habits.

It's much easier to eat better than it is to try to burn those cookies off through exercise.

I say this as someone that knows how much easier it is to cut calories than to burn them- but I know if I was a bit more active, it would be easier to cut the calories

I don't understand how most replies to multiple of parent's posts keep completely missing their point. It's like the replies didn't even read the post they're replying to

Other people are just the "ACTUALLLLLLY..." types, who have to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian no matter what.

Either way, I knew with 100% certainty when posting the original comment that I would see a handful of "can't outrun a bad diet!" replies, from people who completely missed the point.

"4000 calories" ? With "real food" ? In one meal -- how ? I eat 3 full meals and a weight gain smoothie and barely pass 2700 calories for the day. Is there something you would recommend adding to my diet so I can increase my calories a bit as I would like to gain some weight. But seriously unless your meal is 100% deep fried, I can't even picture a 4000 calorie meal.

There isn't one particular ingredient, it's just large amounts of high-fat meat with large amounts of high-fat, high-carb side dishes. Say, skin-on chicken thighs with mashed potato that't full of butter and caramelized onion that's full of oil. It might be hard to "picture" because you're trying to picture a plate of food, but in the volumes I used to eat, the amount of food wouldn't fit on a single plate, even piled high on a large one.

I wouldn't recommend anyone eat this way.

Edit: I have the same problem. I ate a whole frozen pizza a few days ago and felt like crap for a day afterward. Not just a little personal one either. A full Screamin' Sicilian pepperoni...

Its the other side of "someone on the internet is wrong!". Now I know better and am happier for it.

I would not recommend anyone to follow this advice for some exercises without practicing a good form to avoid injuries.

In terms of hardware, what I have is really basic:

* 2x Dumbbell bars

* 1x Barbell bar

* 1x Easy (W) barbell bar (I don't often use it anymore)

* Plates in total weight of 130 KG (286 pounds). I'd start with only as many plate as needed to accommodate for your 1-rep max of either squat or dead-lift (you don't really need to have as much weight as you'll need for your 1RM but it provides a good buffer so that you don't need to acquire extra plates every week for quite some time)

* 2x home made makeshifts stands for squat (this part can be risky and I'd not advise it whoeheartedly. It is also why I avoid anything more than 250 lbs squats and opt for 8-10 reps instead of 4-6)

* CCF pad + foam roller (I use the roller instead of a bench-press bench)

If you have the budget and mostly the room for that, I'd get a real bench and a squat rack/cage, but the reason I made those choices is mostly to save on space. All of the above can easily be deployed and removed from sight.

I've always lifted weights + cardio for exercise. Fitbit allows me to see that cardio >> weight lifting for calorie burn. Even the idea that "muscle burns more calories that fat" is a red herring because muscle burns about 4 calories per day per pound than fat. How much muscle fiber can someone build in a year? The most Arnold Schwarzenegger ever built was 25 pounds. That's full time professional with all the additives. Most 25 year old men can build maybe 8-10 pounds. Congratulations, you're burning half an Oreo cookie more per day.

Another thing that surprised me is how much more effective low-to-medium intensity exercise is that high intensity- for burning calories. Yes, even including the "afterburn." Now to be clear, the per minute burn of high intensity is more while doing it, but you can't maintain it (by definition of "high intensity"). So if you can do some light aerobics for 40 minutes you will burn more calories than a 20 minute High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout. At least according to fitbit.

Also, at nearly 60 years old, by basal metabolic burn rate (according to online calculators, so YMMV) is only about 225 calories per day. At my weight that is like a 30-40 walk. That result surprised the crap out of me.

So: You make your most percentage gains simply by getting off the couch and walking. For me I go from about 1.25 kCal/min to 5 kCal/minute. Add some light intensity you can add 40% or more (calculated from the new burn rate; for me, 7 kCal/min). Increase the intensity and I can get to something approaching double that (12-13 kCal/min for me). The HIIT workout averages lower for me because I usually do 30 sec on and 30 sec off, and my recovery is decent.

Also, at nearly 60 years old, by basal metabolic burn rate (according to online calculators, so YMMV) is only about 225 calories per day. At my weight that is like a 30-40 walk.

That should read,

Also, at nearly 60 years old, my basal metabolic burn rate (according to online calculators, so YMMV) is only about 225 calories lower __than my basal metabolic rate of 25-year-old-me (that is, at my current weight)__ per day. At my weight that is like a 30-40 walk. That result surprised the crap out of me.

This seems a bit of a straw-man.

Almost nobody who's telling you to be more healthy will tell you to eat better without also telling you to exercise more.

Also, it's not "hack your body" it's actually "hack your brain" or, more specifically, hack hunger. That's also why there's so many different diets - everyone's different, and what works for one person won't work for another person. But there are some principles that seems to work for large subgroups of the population, e.g. intermittent fasting / skipping breakfast, eating low-carb, eating more protein, etc.

People need to stop referring to such a goal as weight loss, as what they are really talking about is fat loss.

Pro tip; if you want to lose weight most rapidly then don't eat! That works for 100% of people, as we are highly adapted to survive short periods of famine. What we are not adapted for is to have a limitless supply of calorie rich food which requires no effort to obtain; hence the obesity crisis!

Google[1] finds a link that says that it takes 80 minutes to walk 8K steps at an average pace. Overweight people probably walk slower as a rule, but let's assume it takes an hour of just walking a day, if we take away whatever walking people are doing from the bedroom to the office to the kitchen to the couch. Even leaving aside the gym trip (and who among us doesn't have multiple uncancellable gym memberships? Oh, just me? :/ ), that's quite a time investment.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myth... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+does+it+take+to+wal...

> A 30 minute workout, two or three times a week is sufficient (i.e. hit 6 or 7 machines, for 3 sets each)

...which was separate from the hour+ walk every day.

I'm trying to lose a little weight, so after ten years as a huge gym rat, Im currently going once a week just to keep my body functional. It now feels almost trivially easy to eat few, healthy, small meals. Combined with fasting every few days, the lbs are just melting away.

I've read them too, I've not experienced the two categories you describe. The keto comments almost always suggest some form of exercise too, and there are "eat well" comments that often go into detail. Are you sure you aren't just recalling the most frustrating comments?

I have that effect from running and cardio - it makes me not want to eat. After HIIT cardio, I do get hungry, but a little protein usually do the trick. The strength training makes me much more hungry then normally.

> * Telling you to "just eat well and exercise". Which is about as useful as telling drug addicts to "just stop using drugs",

I like to liken it to telling poor people that overcoming debt and becoming wealthy is a matter of spending less money than you earn. True and useless!

> 1. Exercise helps you eat well

I've noticed this as well.

Also: I'd like to be proven wrong on this, but I believe the point of exercise that builds muscle is that it increases your energy costs at rest. Muscles are expensive, or we wouldn't lose them. They're pretty useful otherwise! I can't see this fact anywhere though. Is that stupid? So obvious to everyone that nobody even mentions it?

So yeah, do you even lift?

What kind of sources are you looking for? It's pretty common bro science, and often repeated on HN and reddit.

Exercise, particularly when you adapt a training mindset, shifts your relationship with food to one when you eat to fuel and recover from your training.

Powerlifting, strenuous cycling, etc. all require one to eat purposely to really seen gains.

Getting overweight people to start viewing their relationship with food as one to fuel their life's activities is a power mindset shift that can help lead to lasting weight loss.

Don't think of exercise as a way to burn calories. Think of food as a way to power your exercise.

Now get out there every day and get after it.

This is so goddamn true, there is a magical threshold of enough exercise where you suddenly just start craving healthier food and lose interest in junk.

I have been across this threshold multiple times in my adult life and it’s always really fascinating.

Regular exercise is a mild antidepressant, and many people who do not realise they are a bit depressed and comfort-eating may no longer find the need.

This is a little crazy if you work in an office though.

It's like over 1 hour of walking per day. Where do people find the time?

Or cumulatively. When the officemates take a smoke break, I take a 15 minute walk (when the weather is better).