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I'm on the same track as you, I've lost about 80lbs so far and I've done zero exercise. I've found that when I tell people this, they worry about my health eve

I'm on the same track as you, I've lost about 80lbs so far and I've done zero exercise. I've found that when I tell people this, they worry about my health even more than they did when I was 80lbs heavier. It's bizarre. Never mind the fact that my blood pressure is now a pristine 110 over 70, all my pre-diabetic symptoms have disappeared, my sleep apnea is cured, my gastroesophageal reflux disease is completely gone, my cholesterol and triglycerides are back to normal, etc. The fact is exercise has an almost negligible impact on weight loss. Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories. If you're overweight, compare that to the 120 calories you burn per hour spent sitting in your chair. That's an extra 230 calories you burned by exercising for an hour. That 230 calorie expenditure costs you: * 1.5 to 2 hours of disruption to your daily life * An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable * An ever-growing amount of generalized aches and joint pains as you put together consecutive days of doing this And at 230 calories per hour, doing an hour of exercise every single day nets you 1610 calories per week, which is less than 1 pound of fat loss every 2 weeks. You turn your whole life upside-down, make yourself miserable and in pain every single day, take significant time away from work and studying and family, and all you get is LESS THAN 1 additional pound lost every 2 weeks. I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals. As far as health impacts, I'm still not convinced on the cause-and-effect here. I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed, that's a result of me being less depressed because of all the weight I've been losing. All the studies I've seen on exercise and health draw the same sort of "playing basketball makes you taller"-conclusion.

jasonwelk 9y ago
> An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable In the beginning, this is often true. But exercise is addictive! When your body gets used to it, you really want it and it is not uncomfortable. That "runners high" is also not a myth.
- randallsquared 9y ago
  I'm willing to grant that this must be true for some people. However, I don't think it's true for everyone, or maybe even most people. In the early 90s I was in the US Army for a couple years, and exercise never got better: it was always a struggle: boring, painful, and stressful. I suppose one good thing about it was that it was very rare that anything worse happened to me later in the day... :) Looking around at the PT groups I was in during that time, I do not think most of them were looking forward to it.
  - jasonwelk 9y ago
    Just guessing, but maybe a difference between recreational exercise by choice vs duty or imposed regimen. Or perhaps just having choice over the kind of exercise makes a difference.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    I've never been able to reach a point where weight training is anything but boring and painful. The trouble is it requires mental focus, and I cannot think about other things while lifting. I try to mitigate the boredom by watching a movie while doing it.
    - pnutjam 9y ago
      I listen to headphones, music, podcasts, ebooks. I find it a very stimulating time and I feel better about it at a gym, even though I don't socialize much. Just seeing the same people every day makes me feel like a community member and helps me stay motivated and connected.
  - prestonbriggs 9y ago
    Yeah, well, the Army can make anything boring, painful, and stressful.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  I've been jogging for a long time. For the first year, I had to force myself to do it. After that, I was surprised to find I started enjoying it, looking forward it, and missing it if I didn't do it. I don't try very hard at it, I'm not running against time, I just jog and don't worry about it. As for boredom, the opposite happens to me. I find I think better while jogging. I work on programming bugs while jogging, and often find solutions that eluded me while sitting at my desk. I write articles and compose presentations while jogging. It's often my most intellectually productive time of the day.
dyarosla 9y ago
Just wanted to point out- 350 cal/hour is inaccurately low for even light exercise, and exceptionally low if you are overweight. Properly doing exercise and keeping at it won't result in joint pains or aches, and may also uplift your mood due to endorphins+more. IMO your reasoning for avoiding exercise should be revisited.
- throwaway0255 9y ago
  It's not inaccurately low at all. You're basing your estimate on perfect/ideal scenarios, I'm basing it on the kind of thing the average overweight person trying to lose weight does when they spend an hour in a gym. They walk on a treadmill or they do more intense things with a lot of breaks in between. Also, there is no proper form of exercise for an obese person that won't cause pains or aches, it doesn't exist. We might just be coming from different backgrounds and talking about different body types here.
  - naasking 9y ago
    > Also, there is no proper form of exercise for an obese person that won't cause pains or aches Swimming. Doing laps is a great calorie burner too.
- DanBC 9y ago
  > and may also uplift your mood due to endorphins+more. there's very little evidence for this, other than a very short lasting boost.
sonthonax 9y ago
An hour of intense exercise will burn roughly a thousand calories.
- throwaway0255 9y ago
  > People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning
  - szemet 9y ago
    https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+80+kg+1+hour+running https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+80+kg+1+hour+runn... = 1050 calories
    - throwaway0255 9y ago
      15 years of being very overweight and trying to lose weight through exercise = 1050 calories/hour only if I exercise at a level of intensity that risks injury and causes me to be practically bedridden for a week even without injury. Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight. People who have a lot of weight to lose aren't capable of running for an hour.
      - szemet 9y ago
        Ok, but if you plan to do something(not just excercise) regularly, maybe it is better not to calculate with the initial costs/benefits but with the long term averages... There are plenty of activities in life that initially only have costs and zero benfits - excercise at least consumes calories from day 1...
      - Fnoord 9y ago
        > Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight. If you are 1m80, quite possibly. Don't forget it isn't just about BMI but also waist circumference. Obese men and alcoholics likely have high waist circumference.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hellofunk 9y ago
> I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed How do you know? I think you are being unfair to yourself to so easily dismiss what exercise can do for your moods. When I'm feeling down, getting my heart rate up for 45 minutes totally turns around the day. I don't know the exact reason, maybe all the rapid blood flow or found energy, whatever it is, it is not a reaction I get from anything else. An article was shared here recently how so many great artists and scientists in the past were slaves to a ritual of long stretches of physical activity every day. It really changes how your brain works.
- DanBC 9y ago
  > How do you know? Because researchers keep failing to find evidence of effectiveness.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    Mayo Clinic is a respected place, and they seem to think there is a link: http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495 http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-... Even if there was no evidence, surely the testimonies of many others right here on this page would at least be worth the possibility that it could be effective.
    - DanBC 9y ago
      Here's a well run meta analysis. http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depression http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depre... > Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression. [...] > The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive. [...] > The evidence about whether exercise for depression improves quality of life is inconclusive. Since depression is a potentially fatal illness it's important to stick to evidence based treatments.
      - 9y ago
Boothroid 9y ago
Lifting weights is different - the muscle consumes calories just being there. Also call me a masochist, but I love lifting weights - its a physical rush, a challenge, allows me to work off frustrations, and like Arnie I enjoy feeling pumped. I can get in and out of the gym within an hour having hammered my muscles plenty. Do that 3 or 4 times a week and you'll keep yourself strong and young into old age. You should only get aches and pains if you are doing something wrong or have an underlying health issue - and even if you do, doctors still almost always recommend weight bearing exercise.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Exercise increases your metabolic rate so you burn much more calories throughout the day, its not just the number on your treadmill. I still agree with your main point though, that weight loss is mostly about diet. Just saying questions about fitness and nutrition are incredibly nuanced because the body is a complex system.
jpfr 9y ago
Sure, eating better has a huge impact. But you miss the main argument why physical training helps in weight loss: Physical training increaes your resting metabolic rate by ~10%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11283427 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11283427 Since you are not doing sports 95% of the time, this has a lot of leverage. And you can build muscle with 30min of training per day easily. Also, you please check whether you mean kilocalories when you say calories.
Fnoord 9y ago
> That 230 calorie expenditure costs you: > * 1.5 to 2 hours of disruption to your daily life Or a replacement of meditation. Or, as another user suggested, listen to e-books, podcast, music, conduct a phone call, or record whatever interesting thoughts come up. > * An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable Boredom is a matter of adaptation. See above for some suggestions. Comfort? Do you mean because you're overweight and at the gym? Seriously, get over yourself and fuck what other people think about you in that regard. You'll be laughing the longest on the long term. If its such a big barrier consider to see a psychologist to aid you. > * An ever-growing amount of generalized aches and joint pains as you put together consecutive days of doing this Start with light exercises and go to a gym where there's qualified physicians with low amount of overbooking. Those gyms cost a bit more. You can also do like me (I follow a TV program with varied daily exercises, 15 min a day). Take a day rest in between heavy exercise. If you get muscle pain the day after it was heavy exercise according to _your_ standard. That said, changing your eating habits is going to have more meaningful impact: eat less calories, eat less sugar, eat less salt, eat less saturated fat, and have a critical look if you get all your nutrients (consider blood analysis). Guaranteed you'll lose weight just from #1 and the rest is going to aid your health. Finally, don't drink or smoke are an obvious no-brainer.
- throwaway0255 9y ago
  Uncomfortable meaning physically uncomfortable. Even when it's not painful (like walking for an hour on a treadmill), it is uncomfortable and it feels bad and it's boring. Yes podcasts and ebooks are great, but they're even better when you're not exercising. People who enjoy exercise are by far the exception, otherwise we'd see a lot more people doing it. We would see every elliptical at the gym occupied on January 1st, and they'd stay occupied indefinitely. But that's not what we see. The ellipticals are all taken on January 1st, and they're all empty by February. People need motivation and willpower to do it. That should tell you all you need to know about how enjoyable it is. You don't need motivation or willpower to eat a steak or watch a movie, because those things are fun. You need motivation and willpower to exercise, because it's boring and it sucks. Sorry but every time this subject comes up there's this contingent of people trying to insist to everyone how fun exercise is, and none of you seem to realize that you're outliers and this is your hobby and not everyone likes your hobby. Most people don't like it and can't be convinced to like it and will never like it, and that's normal. But the tone is always that there's something deficient with people who don't exercise, and if they don't like it that's a sign of their deficiency or something, and you think we all need pep-talks to better ourselves. I don't agree with this. I don't think exercise matters anywhere near as much as you think it does. I've waited my whole life for proof, and all I've ever gotten is correlations found in studies funded by vested interests (if exercise works the food industry can shift blame onto the consumer).
phaus 9y ago
>Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories. This isn't being generous at all. Once you get past the initial few weeks of not being physically able to put that much effort into exercise, 350 calories for an entire hour would be on the low end of what I expect most people to burn. >I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals. Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. It is an objective fact that if you burn more calories in a day because you exercise, that you will get away with eating more food. How much more depends on how many calories you burn when exercising. The concept of weight loss is very simple. Burn more calories than you eat. People need to start somewhere by making an estimate of how many calories that they burn on a daily basis and then adjust it slowly if they don't lose weight. Its silly to act like the concepts of physical fitness and weight loss are so complicated that people are being manipulated and/or confused into gaining weight. The only thing difficult about losing weight is the consistent execution of an incredibly simple process.
- throwaway0255 9y ago
  > Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. Something must be wrong with exercise then, because that’s not true of dieting at all. Just dieting will do just fine.
  - phaus 9y ago
    There are more reasons to exercise than just weight loss and there's more to being healthy than just maintaining a specific weight.
    - throwaway0255 9y ago
nradov 9y ago
Why are you so adverse to a little pain and discomfort? There's more to life than being comfortable.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jasonwelk 9y ago

> An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable In the beginning, this is often true. But exercise is addictive! When your body gets used to it, you really want it and it is not uncomfortable. That "runners high" is also not a myth.

randallsquared 9y ago
I'm willing to grant that this must be true for some people. However, I don't think it's true for everyone, or maybe even most people. In the early 90s I was in the US Army for a couple years, and exercise never got better: it was always a struggle: boring, painful, and stressful. I suppose one good thing about it was that it was very rare that anything worse happened to me later in the day... :) Looking around at the PT groups I was in during that time, I do not think most of them were looking forward to it.
- jasonwelk 9y ago
  Just guessing, but maybe a difference between recreational exercise by choice vs duty or imposed regimen. Or perhaps just having choice over the kind of exercise makes a difference.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  I've never been able to reach a point where weight training is anything but boring and painful. The trouble is it requires mental focus, and I cannot think about other things while lifting. I try to mitigate the boredom by watching a movie while doing it.
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    I listen to headphones, music, podcasts, ebooks. I find it a very stimulating time and I feel better about it at a gym, even though I don't socialize much. Just seeing the same people every day makes me feel like a community member and helps me stay motivated and connected.
- prestonbriggs 9y ago
  Yeah, well, the Army can make anything boring, painful, and stressful.
WalterBright 9y ago
I've been jogging for a long time. For the first year, I had to force myself to do it. After that, I was surprised to find I started enjoying it, looking forward it, and missing it if I didn't do it. I don't try very hard at it, I'm not running against time, I just jog and don't worry about it. As for boredom, the opposite happens to me. I find I think better while jogging. I work on programming bugs while jogging, and often find solutions that eluded me while sitting at my desk. I write articles and compose presentations while jogging. It's often my most intellectually productive time of the day.

dyarosla 9y ago

Just wanted to point out- 350 cal/hour is inaccurately low for even light exercise, and exceptionally low if you are overweight. Properly doing exercise and keeping at it won't result in joint pains or aches, and may also uplift your mood due to endorphins+more. IMO your reasoning for avoiding exercise should be revisited.

throwaway0255 9y ago
It's not inaccurately low at all. You're basing your estimate on perfect/ideal scenarios, I'm basing it on the kind of thing the average overweight person trying to lose weight does when they spend an hour in a gym. They walk on a treadmill or they do more intense things with a lot of breaks in between. Also, there is no proper form of exercise for an obese person that won't cause pains or aches, it doesn't exist. We might just be coming from different backgrounds and talking about different body types here.
- naasking 9y ago
  > Also, there is no proper form of exercise for an obese person that won't cause pains or aches Swimming. Doing laps is a great calorie burner too.
DanBC 9y ago
> and may also uplift your mood due to endorphins+more. there's very little evidence for this, other than a very short lasting boost.

sonthonax 9y ago

An hour of intense exercise will burn roughly a thousand calories.

throwaway0255 9y ago
> People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning
- szemet 9y ago
  https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+80+kg+1+hour+running https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+80+kg+1+hour+runn... = 1050 calories
  - throwaway0255 9y ago
    15 years of being very overweight and trying to lose weight through exercise = 1050 calories/hour only if I exercise at a level of intensity that risks injury and causes me to be practically bedridden for a week even without injury. Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight. People who have a lot of weight to lose aren't capable of running for an hour.
    - szemet 9y ago
      Ok, but if you plan to do something(not just excercise) regularly, maybe it is better not to calculate with the initial costs/benefits but with the long term averages... There are plenty of activities in life that initially only have costs and zero benfits - excercise at least consumes calories from day 1...
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      > Your calculation is for a person who weighs 80kg, which is someone who doesn't need to lose any weight. If you are 1m80, quite possibly. Don't forget it isn't just about BMI but also waist circumference. Obese men and alcoholics likely have high waist circumference.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hellofunk 9y ago

> I want to start doing some physical activities soon, but that's not going to cause me to be less depressed How do you know? I think you are being unfair to yourself to so easily dismiss what exercise can do for your moods. When I'm feeling down, getting my heart rate up for 45 minutes totally turns around the day. I don't know the exact reason, maybe all the rapid blood flow or found energy, whatever it is, it is not a reaction I get from anything else. An article was shared here recently how so many great artists and scientists in the past were slaves to a ritual of long stretches of physical activity every day. It really changes how your brain works.

DanBC 9y ago
> How do you know? Because researchers keep failing to find evidence of effectiveness.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  Mayo Clinic is a respected place, and they seem to think there is a link: http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495 http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in-... Even if there was no evidence, surely the testimonies of many others right here on this page would at least be worth the possibility that it could be effective.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Here's a well run meta analysis. http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depression http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depre... > Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression. [...] > The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive. [...] > The evidence about whether exercise for depression improves quality of life is inconclusive. Since depression is a potentially fatal illness it's important to stick to evidence based treatments.
    - 9y ago

Boothroid 9y ago

Lifting weights is different - the muscle consumes calories just being there. Also call me a masochist, but I love lifting weights - its a physical rush, a challenge, allows me to work off frustrations, and like Arnie I enjoy feeling pumped. I can get in and out of the gym within an hour having hammered my muscles plenty. Do that 3 or 4 times a week and you'll keep yourself strong and young into old age. You should only get aches and pains if you are doing something wrong or have an underlying health issue - and even if you do, doctors still almost always recommend weight bearing exercise.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

Exercise increases your metabolic rate so you burn much more calories throughout the day, its not just the number on your treadmill. I still agree with your main point though, that weight loss is mostly about diet. Just saying questions about fitness and nutrition are incredibly nuanced because the body is a complex system.

jpfr 9y ago

Sure, eating better has a huge impact. But you miss the main argument why physical training helps in weight loss: Physical training increaes your resting metabolic rate by ~10%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11283427 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11283427 Since you are not doing sports 95% of the time, this has a lot of leverage. And you can build muscle with 30min of training per day easily. Also, you please check whether you mean kilocalories when you say calories.

Fnoord 9y ago

> That 230 calorie expenditure costs you: > * 1.5 to 2 hours of disruption to your daily life Or a replacement of meditation. Or, as another user suggested, listen to e-books, podcast, music, conduct a phone call, or record whatever interesting thoughts come up. > * An hour spent being extremely bored and uncomfortable Boredom is a matter of adaptation. See above for some suggestions. Comfort? Do you mean because you're overweight and at the gym? Seriously, get over yourself and fuck what other people think about you in that regard. You'll be laughing the longest on the long term. If its such a big barrier consider to see a psychologist to aid you. > * An ever-growing amount of generalized aches and joint pains as you put together consecutive days of doing this Start with light exercises and go to a gym where there's qualified physicians with low amount of overbooking. Those gyms cost a bit more. You can also do like me (I follow a TV program with varied daily exercises, 15 min a day). Take a day rest in between heavy exercise. If you get muscle pain the day after it was heavy exercise according to _your_ standard. That said, changing your eating habits is going to have more meaningful impact: eat less calories, eat less sugar, eat less salt, eat less saturated fat, and have a critical look if you get all your nutrients (consider blood analysis). Guaranteed you'll lose weight just from #1 and the rest is going to aid your health. Finally, don't drink or smoke are an obvious no-brainer.

throwaway0255 9y ago
Uncomfortable meaning physically uncomfortable. Even when it's not painful (like walking for an hour on a treadmill), it is uncomfortable and it feels bad and it's boring. Yes podcasts and ebooks are great, but they're even better when you're not exercising. People who enjoy exercise are by far the exception, otherwise we'd see a lot more people doing it. We would see every elliptical at the gym occupied on January 1st, and they'd stay occupied indefinitely. But that's not what we see. The ellipticals are all taken on January 1st, and they're all empty by February. People need motivation and willpower to do it. That should tell you all you need to know about how enjoyable it is. You don't need motivation or willpower to eat a steak or watch a movie, because those things are fun. You need motivation and willpower to exercise, because it's boring and it sucks. Sorry but every time this subject comes up there's this contingent of people trying to insist to everyone how fun exercise is, and none of you seem to realize that you're outliers and this is your hobby and not everyone likes your hobby. Most people don't like it and can't be convinced to like it and will never like it, and that's normal. But the tone is always that there's something deficient with people who don't exercise, and if they don't like it that's a sign of their deficiency or something, and you think we all need pep-talks to better ourselves. I don't agree with this. I don't think exercise matters anywhere near as much as you think it does. I've waited my whole life for proof, and all I've ever gotten is correlations found in studies funded by vested interests (if exercise works the food industry can shift blame onto the consumer).

phaus 9y ago

>Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories. This isn't being generous at all. Once you get past the initial few weeks of not being physically able to put that much effort into exercise, 350 calories for an entire hour would be on the low end of what I expect most people to burn. >I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals. Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. It is an objective fact that if you burn more calories in a day because you exercise, that you will get away with eating more food. How much more depends on how many calories you burn when exercising. The concept of weight loss is very simple. Burn more calories than you eat. People need to start somewhere by making an estimate of how many calories that they burn on a daily basis and then adjust it slowly if they don't lose weight. Its silly to act like the concepts of physical fitness and weight loss are so complicated that people are being manipulated and/or confused into gaining weight. The only thing difficult about losing weight is the consistent execution of an incredibly simple process.

throwaway0255 9y ago
> Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. Something must be wrong with exercise then, because that’s not true of dieting at all. Just dieting will do just fine.
- phaus 9y ago
  There are more reasons to exercise than just weight loss and there's more to being healthy than just maintaining a specific weight.
  - throwaway0255 9y ago

nradov 9y ago

Why are you so adverse to a little pain and discomfort? There's more to life than being comfortable.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]