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I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little calories compared to the effort. I find it way easier to eat less: not doing something is easier to spe

I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little calories compared to the effort. I find it way easier to eat less: not doing something is easier to spend effort, and the effect multiplier is bigger. I should still exercise for other reasons, but not for losing weight.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
The calories burned during the exercise matter less than the higher metabolism resulting from having more muscle mass. Especially if we're talking about strength and hypertrophy exercise and not just cardio.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  How does this work? I have way more muscle than my wife, but she can eat way more than me without gaining weight. It can't be just muscle mass? How many calories does extra muscle mass burn daily?
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    It's definitely not just about muscle mass. But you should compare yourself to yourself only when it comes to self-improvement, since you can't borrow someone else's metabolism. Having more muscle mass is better than not having it for both health and appearance. When we're talking about slowly gaining weight over time as the OP did, even if muscle only burns a little more energy than fat that could be enough to tip the balance.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    There could be a lot of factors: your body size, muscle to fat ratio and body comp, total exercise in a day, the actual caloric amount of the food you are eating (you can eat a lot of low calorie food compared to a single high calorie item for instance), mitochondrial function in your muscles and your ability to clear lactate from your bloodstream. Controlling for all of the variables is actually very difficult. Most people that eat a lot and don't seem to gain weight are simply not eating that much calorically or exercising a lot. When a more sedentary lifestyle kicks in they generally begin to align more with the general population.
  - ayewo 4y ago
    Perhaps the difference comes down to body type (Ectomorph, Endomorph, or a Mesomorph)? https://www.gq.com/story/body-types-explained-ectomorph-endomorph-mesomorph https://www.gq.com/story/body-types-explained-ectomorph-endo...
lm28469 4y ago
> I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little calories compared to the effort. Exercise help in much broader ways than just the amount of calories burned on the spot. Take weight lifting for examples, it increases your lean mass, which means it increases your metabolic rate, which means you can eat more and not gain fat. You also spend more calories on your resting days to rebuild your muscles, &c. exercising also tend to curb appetite
voisin 4y ago
I suggest not focusing on what calories it appears the exercise is burning. My experience is that something else is occurring which helps to lose weight and keep it off - I suspect something to do with the microbiome and increasing basal metabolic rate to feed an exercise-trained microbiome (more active? Different makeup for sure). I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed to move the needle in a meaningful way. Over a few years that turned into running a few times a week, which turned into running daily. In the beginning I had already been counting calories and the calories I was burning walking whatever it took to get from my normal amount to 10k (varied each day) was not enough to justify the weight being lost when compared to calories consumed. It should have been much slower.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  > I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed to move the needle in a meaningful way. Part of this might also be about how exercise generally leaves you feeling pretty good, usually better than after a day that is spent entirely sedentary in my experience. A lot of people crave the instant satiating feeling of eating. Eating often feels good. The exercise might then help by replacing the "make me feel better" feeling that food might give you, leading to you swapping out "unnecessary" feeding and lowering your caloric intake in the process.
  - voisin 4y ago
    I would agree with this thought generally as it certainly happened when I started running, but in the days of just getting my steps in, my use of MyFitnessPal showed that I was eating the same diet with essentially no change to the average daily caloric intake. I did increase my water intake.
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  I've observed that moderate aerobic exercise often tends to temporarily suppress appetite for some people, myself included. Doesn't work for everyone, though. My partner swears their caloric cravings increase disproportionately after workouts and feels strongly that reducing food intake has helped them maintain weight far more than exercise. There are probably some genetic components to this (according to our 23andme data, we have very different genomes).
twawaaay 4y ago
Exercise is key. The problem is people expect exercise to directly burn your fat which is completely false and broken way to look at it. Then what happens when they don't see results is they proclaim it does not work and drop exercising altogether. What they did not do is stick long enough to actually see the results. Exercise is to keep your healthy and to improve your internal regulation. It is to keep you feel well so that you don't feel compulsion to eat more just to feel well.
j_mo 4y ago
I agree that moderate amounts of exercise are not helpful in losing weight at all. I fluctuate all year between 73kg and 80kg (with a brief stint at 84kg the other year while I wasn't doing any cardio for 6mo and eating way too much takeaway). In school I used to go to the gym every day for 45mins at lunch, and box 5/6hrs a week, from 14y/o. The last 3/4yrs I climbed 3/4x a week and the last 2 of those I also ran 3/4x a week up to ~40km/wk, albeit inconsistently around my 9-5 and part time uni course. Every time I cut out one of the sports I enjoy, I am drastically less hungry. Yes, a 5km run might burn ~300cals, but if I'm so hungry I eat a whole extra meal, I'm generally more likely to gain weight. Same for lifting weights, but even moreso - if I go and hit a 200kg deadlift PR I'm going to be hungry the next day, but that 1-2hr gym session maybe burned 100 calories at most. Exercise for weight loss is only useful if "calories in" stays the exact same, and even then it would be way less effort to reduce "calories in" and not exercise (if weight loss is the only goal). The point at which this stops applying is excessive cardio, ie running 40km+ in a week. That will pretty much always result in a caloric deficit for me, because at that point I'm forcing myself to eat enough food to recover (rather than having to force myself not to overeat). Most people exercising to lose weight (rather than for enjoyment, to push themselves/prove something, or to win a race) don't want to exercise. If you have to commit 6hrs a week to cardio to see any effect, 99% of people aren't interested, so I'd imagine they fit into the "not excessive" category where exercise might make them want to eat disproportionately more than they burned. Controlling "calories in" (which will guarantee weight loss, as far as the laws of physics are concerned) is always going to be the easiest path to weight loss.
- garganzol 4y ago
  Here is what's very helpful in loosing weight: ketogenic diet. Just try it for fun and see for yourself.
nonameiguess 4y ago
There are two only tangentially related issues here. One is, given you're already overweight or obese, can exercise help you change that? The answer seems to be yes, it definitely can, but it seems empirically that it very rarely works over any appreciable long-term, other than in people who find they enjoy it sufficiently to become at least recreationally serious endurance athletes or at least very active people for the rest of their lives. If your only motivation for exercising at all is to lose weight, it very likely isn't going to work over any meaningfully long span of time. But the other issue is, given you're a normal-sized, metabolically healthy 10 year-old, will developing a lifelong habit of regular exercise and a generally active lifestyle keep you from ever getting fat in the first place? I don't know that we have any kind of long-horizon, longitudinal research to demonstrate one way or another empirically, but mechanistically, it sure seems like that should be the case, and you can look at manual laborers in developing countries, the Amish, any serious lifelong athletes in sports where being maximally large is not advantageous on its own, as existence proofs that this should help. I think the comment you're responding to was really asking about the latter scenario. It's not, okay, you spent the last 20 years gaining 30kg, well how active are you now? The question is how active were you over the entire course of the last 20 years? Because it's likely that if you were sufficiently active, you wouldn't need to lose weight at all, and the question of exercising for losing weight would be irrelevant.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

The calories burned during the exercise matter less than the higher metabolism resulting from having more muscle mass. Especially if we're talking about strength and hypertrophy exercise and not just cardio.

checkyoursudo 4y ago
How does this work? I have way more muscle than my wife, but she can eat way more than me without gaining weight. It can't be just muscle mass? How many calories does extra muscle mass burn daily?
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  It's definitely not just about muscle mass. But you should compare yourself to yourself only when it comes to self-improvement, since you can't borrow someone else's metabolism. Having more muscle mass is better than not having it for both health and appearance. When we're talking about slowly gaining weight over time as the OP did, even if muscle only burns a little more energy than fat that could be enough to tip the balance.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  There could be a lot of factors: your body size, muscle to fat ratio and body comp, total exercise in a day, the actual caloric amount of the food you are eating (you can eat a lot of low calorie food compared to a single high calorie item for instance), mitochondrial function in your muscles and your ability to clear lactate from your bloodstream. Controlling for all of the variables is actually very difficult. Most people that eat a lot and don't seem to gain weight are simply not eating that much calorically or exercising a lot. When a more sedentary lifestyle kicks in they generally begin to align more with the general population.
- ayewo 4y ago
  Perhaps the difference comes down to body type (Ectomorph, Endomorph, or a Mesomorph)? https://www.gq.com/story/body-types-explained-ectomorph-endomorph-mesomorph https://www.gq.com/story/body-types-explained-ectomorph-endo...

lm28469 4y ago

> I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little calories compared to the effort. Exercise help in much broader ways than just the amount of calories burned on the spot. Take weight lifting for examples, it increases your lean mass, which means it increases your metabolic rate, which means you can eat more and not gain fat. You also spend more calories on your resting days to rebuild your muscles, &c. exercising also tend to curb appetite

voisin 4y ago

I suggest not focusing on what calories it appears the exercise is burning. My experience is that something else is occurring which helps to lose weight and keep it off - I suspect something to do with the microbiome and increasing basal metabolic rate to feed an exercise-trained microbiome (more active? Different makeup for sure). I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed to move the needle in a meaningful way. Over a few years that turned into running a few times a week, which turned into running daily. In the beginning I had already been counting calories and the calories I was burning walking whatever it took to get from my normal amount to 10k (varied each day) was not enough to justify the weight being lost when compared to calories consumed. It should have been much slower.

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
> I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed to move the needle in a meaningful way. Part of this might also be about how exercise generally leaves you feeling pretty good, usually better than after a day that is spent entirely sedentary in my experience. A lot of people crave the instant satiating feeling of eating. Eating often feels good. The exercise might then help by replacing the "make me feel better" feeling that food might give you, leading to you swapping out "unnecessary" feeding and lowering your caloric intake in the process.
- voisin 4y ago
  I would agree with this thought generally as it certainly happened when I started running, but in the days of just getting my steps in, my use of MyFitnessPal showed that I was eating the same diet with essentially no change to the average daily caloric intake. I did increase my water intake.
slfnflctd 4y ago
I've observed that moderate aerobic exercise often tends to temporarily suppress appetite for some people, myself included. Doesn't work for everyone, though. My partner swears their caloric cravings increase disproportionately after workouts and feels strongly that reducing food intake has helped them maintain weight far more than exercise. There are probably some genetic components to this (according to our 23andme data, we have very different genomes).

twawaaay 4y ago

Exercise is key. The problem is people expect exercise to directly burn your fat which is completely false and broken way to look at it. Then what happens when they don't see results is they proclaim it does not work and drop exercising altogether. What they did not do is stick long enough to actually see the results. Exercise is to keep your healthy and to improve your internal regulation. It is to keep you feel well so that you don't feel compulsion to eat more just to feel well.

j_mo 4y ago

I agree that moderate amounts of exercise are not helpful in losing weight at all. I fluctuate all year between 73kg and 80kg (with a brief stint at 84kg the other year while I wasn't doing any cardio for 6mo and eating way too much takeaway). In school I used to go to the gym every day for 45mins at lunch, and box 5/6hrs a week, from 14y/o. The last 3/4yrs I climbed 3/4x a week and the last 2 of those I also ran 3/4x a week up to ~40km/wk, albeit inconsistently around my 9-5 and part time uni course. Every time I cut out one of the sports I enjoy, I am drastically less hungry. Yes, a 5km run might burn ~300cals, but if I'm so hungry I eat a whole extra meal, I'm generally more likely to gain weight. Same for lifting weights, but even moreso - if I go and hit a 200kg deadlift PR I'm going to be hungry the next day, but that 1-2hr gym session maybe burned 100 calories at most. Exercise for weight loss is only useful if "calories in" stays the exact same, and even then it would be way less effort to reduce "calories in" and not exercise (if weight loss is the only goal). The point at which this stops applying is excessive cardio, ie running 40km+ in a week. That will pretty much always result in a caloric deficit for me, because at that point I'm forcing myself to eat enough food to recover (rather than having to force myself not to overeat). Most people exercising to lose weight (rather than for enjoyment, to push themselves/prove something, or to win a race) don't want to exercise. If you have to commit 6hrs a week to cardio to see any effect, 99% of people aren't interested, so I'd imagine they fit into the "not excessive" category where exercise might make them want to eat disproportionately more than they burned. Controlling "calories in" (which will guarantee weight loss, as far as the laws of physics are concerned) is always going to be the easiest path to weight loss.

garganzol 4y ago
Here is what's very helpful in loosing weight: ketogenic diet. Just try it for fun and see for yourself.

nonameiguess 4y ago

There are two only tangentially related issues here. One is, given you're already overweight or obese, can exercise help you change that? The answer seems to be yes, it definitely can, but it seems empirically that it very rarely works over any appreciable long-term, other than in people who find they enjoy it sufficiently to become at least recreationally serious endurance athletes or at least very active people for the rest of their lives. If your only motivation for exercising at all is to lose weight, it very likely isn't going to work over any meaningfully long span of time. But the other issue is, given you're a normal-sized, metabolically healthy 10 year-old, will developing a lifelong habit of regular exercise and a generally active lifestyle keep you from ever getting fat in the first place? I don't know that we have any kind of long-horizon, longitudinal research to demonstrate one way or another empirically, but mechanistically, it sure seems like that should be the case, and you can look at manual laborers in developing countries, the Amish, any serious lifelong athletes in sports where being maximally large is not advantageous on its own, as existence proofs that this should help. I think the comment you're responding to was really asking about the latter scenario. It's not, okay, you spent the last 20 years gaining 30kg, well how active are you now? The question is how active were you over the entire course of the last 20 years? Because it's likely that if you were sufficiently active, you wouldn't need to lose weight at all, and the question of exercising for losing weight would be irrelevant.