Went from 230 to ~155 without exercise by calorie restriction alone (600-1200cal/day). It IS possible, though likely unhealthy to accomplish without exercise (I never, ask they say, consulted a doctor prior to the self-imposed restriction).
Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing exercise at any time in their goal for weight loss, but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
> Exercise was uncomfortable until I had lost weight, now I can do 15+ mile hikes with a 60l backpack.
A simple walk on an incline (5km/hr @ 5% incline) can help you burn 400+kcals/hour. You can probably eat at 1500 kcals and start your day with a walk like that on the treadmill while watching some TV show :).
> .. but it is possible to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.
Indeed it is! :)
If you're obese or severely overweight, it's best to just do a PSMF to lose weight as quickly as possible. Btw, at 230lbs you can easily do strength training which will help you with body recomp (stimulating muscle growth while burning fat).
A good rule of thumb for a PSMF is 9.7x[protein intake]. For example: given 1.6g/kg*104kg = 166g of protein per day we get: 166g * 9.7 kcal/g = 1610 kcal. So your daily calories are at 1610 kcal max, and you need to eat at least 166g of protein (the rest of the calories can be filled with carbs/fat). I suggest min 50g of fat per day for men.
Walking is the most under rated weight loss activity. People don't understand how many calories walking on an incline on a treadmill will shred if you are obese. When I was 220 pounds, walking at 10% incline at 2.6mph was 770 calories an hour. It is actually hard to eat at a calorie surplus when you are burning that many calories a day.
If you want to lose weight you need to do one of the following
Be hungry,
Be in pain from exercise (running),
or sacrifice all your free time to low intensity exercise
I chose option 3 along with weight lifting and I don't regret it.
Walking also has this really cool effect of not increasing ghrelin unlike high intensity cardio
> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
I think this is a misleading cliche. I seem to have a lost a significant amount of weight just from eating less, without exercise. Which makes sense.
It's amazing how many miles you'd have to run to burn the calories you get from a Big Mac. Basically, our food is super dense in calories, and our bodies are extremely efficient machines (meaning, they don't burn as many calories as you'd think when exercising). So, it should be much easier to lose weight by eating less than by exercising more.
> Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.
Most people aren't motivated enough. But "willpower" is a misleading and thus destructive way to describe motivation.
You increase motivation by thinking about whether the positive thing you want is "worth" whatever you're doing to get it. In other words, staying focused on the value. You don't increase motivation by "exerting willpower." That whole concept for motivation is a recipe for failure.
> To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet. Plus if you are exercising a lot, you'll feel hungier and it'll be harder mentally to not eat more to compensate.
Exercise is tricky. If you do no exercise at all, you get really sluggish and tired all the time as your metabolism slows down, which then requires further caloric restriction. This works (especially, it seems, in a time/place that feels like winter, as the cold and darkness coupled with the lethargy seems like it maybe downregulates hunger), but it's really hard because now you have to barely eat at all.
If you exercise a bunch, you burn energy exercising and you also upregulate your metabolism significantly, giving you a higher calorie budget -- but you also really, really heavily upregulate hunger. If you exercise enough that the calories burn "matter", you're likely to feel the need to eat way way way too much.
Doing "just enough" exercise that you don't become sluggish and lethargic is probably the right place to be purely from a weight-loss perspective.
But in my experience, the hard part about losing weight isn't really anything other than "the amount I have to eat to not feel miserable all the time is too much"
Diets do work, in that if you want few enough calories, you will lose weight. They "don't work" because asking someone to spend months or years continually in escalating misery generally eventually results in noncompliance -- and if your body tells you that it wants 2500 calories per day and you go on an 1500 calorie diet to create a 500-calorie actual deficit to lose about 0.8-1.0lb/week, you're go to feel really really hungry 24 hours a day.
Some folks report that if they force themselves to eat less after a month or two, their sense of hunger downregulates and it gets easier. Other folks report that hunger remains a constant companion, never relenting until they broke.
I started intermittent fasting, basically eating nothing between dinner at 8PM and lunch the next day at 1PM. The most striking thing is that I eat much less for lunch than I usually do, I'm full very quickly. And the effect continues throughout the day (smaller dinners, less / no snacking)
Had to give up coffee in the mornings because of the milk I put in it and the fact I can't just have coffee on an empty stomach. I have 3-4 cups of tea and 1.5L of water before lunch. Makes me piss like a race horse and gives me an overall "clean" feeling with no real hunger feelings at all.
It's only been 2-3 weeks so too early to say if the diet's any good, but at least there's no hunger / misery / counting calories. Overall pretty easy.
During lockdown, I ended up adopting roughly that eating schedule unintentionally -- just because my routine didn't have a "breakfast" gap.
It did not work for me at all, I gained SO MUCH weight, because by lunchtime I was ravenous and couldn't stop myself from eating way, way, way more than I would have if I split between breakfast and lunch. I mean, it was also a stressful time, so it's hard to compare, but I put on 20 pounds in a few months, after having been stable weight for 5-6 years.
I started forcing myself to get up earlier and have a breakfast of around 350ish calories (basically a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something with milk), and that allowed me to immediately stop the weight gain, because I removed probably 750+ calories of "excess" lunch in exchange. Still struggling to lose what I gained, but I've been stable for 18+ months since I made space for breakfast.
It's really interesting how individual some of this stuff ends up seeming. For example, I have learned that I can not be a stable weight (at any weight, it seems) if I drink sugared drinks with food. It seems that if I have a sugary drink with my food, I actually feel the urge to eat more food in addition to the calories in the drink, leading to a massive downward (well, upward in weight) spiral. I almost completely cut out sugary drinks from my life when I figured this out. (I now have maybe two or three sweet drinks per month on average. I haven't lost any weight this way, but I have regained stability).
I am a firm believer that the real solutions to the obesity epidemic are all going to be around helping people control their hunger sensation (be that with dietary changes, coaching and counselling, routine changes, chemistry or other medical intervention). Learning how much you should eat to be the weight you want to be isn't that hard. Spending about a third of your concentration power at all times to avoid the overpowering urge to raid the pantry, on the other hand, is really hard.
I'm glad you found something that works for you. I'm still working on finding it for myself, though I did manage to stop the bleeding at least.
If you're already overweight then exercise is important for reducing insulin resistance. Any resistance keeps ones insulin levels high, which is bad for many reasons, but also increases the feelings of hunger.
I lost 60lbs in about a year almost exclusively based around a large amount of exercise.
My diet was bad and I was eating far above 2000kcal on many days. I just exercised a lot. 1h of fairly intense cardio at least 6 days a week, though I would always round up to the next 10 min mark and do more like 70 or 80 min per day.
Some days I would order pizza or something and some dessert in the evening when I knew this would push me into the 3000kcal range and in return did 2h or 3h exercise routines fairly regularly, often times while eating the pizza.
Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories. Last night I showed my wife a hand with 5 Brazil nuts. That’s equivalent to a one mile run at my weight.
Obviously different things work for different people, but no amount of cardio is going to offset a terrible diet for most people. Caloric deficit and intermittent fasting combined with exercise is the easiest and fastest way (imho) to get your body to start metabolizing fat stores.
> Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories.
That's a massive number of calories! Might not look like much compared to how much is in, say, a bagel, but use a calculator to figure out what your basal metabolic rate is (what your body consumes just you doing nothing, sort of) and you'll find that extra 500 gives you a ton of headroom in whatever your diet is. A week and a half of that would be a solid pound on it's own (yes yes a pound is less calories than 500x10.5, but weight loss is not 1:1 like that for many reasons).
Are you at all worried that your eating habits/patterns haven't changed and you are compensating with lots of exercise? It seems to work great for weight loss but at some point you will plateau and maintanance seems difficult that way?
>Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet.
For me, exercise leads to me feeling pretty crappy if I eat badly/too much and drink alcohol. So the exercise leads to me not wanting to feel like that, which leads to improvement in diet.
> It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.
I found the same when I started counting calories. An extra slice of wholegrain bread is how much?!
Even just a thin spread of butter or margarine on the bread would blow my daily budget by a lot, so I had to find alternatives for that (like mustard).
Given my own preferences for having a "proper meal", I ended up only eating twice a day. I focused on making it high-protein and high-fiber to make me feel full longer, cutting down on regular carbs as needed.
> It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.
In the immortal words of Jasper Carrott:
"This hole", points to mouth. "Is bigger than that hole", points to bottom.
> they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight
My problem isn't meals and their potions, it is absent-minded snacking between. I'm finding it a lot harder to drop the few Kg I put on over 2019/2022/2021 (largely in 2020, when I like many had a bit of a mentally unstable few months and comfort eat a lot) than I found it to drop a few tens of Kg in 2015/2016.
Even if there was a device that could scan all food before eating it, they would still exempt some meals with the "do not count" argument.
Rule of thumb, that if a meal is easy and fast to prepare, then it is probably not suited for a diet.
To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.
Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.