Gym, what's a gym? Oh, a gym.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-1,00.html
Interesting take on dieting. Essentially excersize doesn't help people lose weight. Excersize has 2 draw backs, first it turns out excersizing doesn't increase people's overall level of movement, because after excersizing people tend to sit around more balancing out with their earlier excersize. Likewise after excersizing people becoming hungrier, and eat more, which can more than balance out the calories you lost from working out. When they looked at a group of children, they found that children ate 100 calories more than burned off, just actually gaining weight instead of losing weight from their excersize. That isn't to say you shouldn't excersize, it's healthier anyway, but if you really want to use it as a weight lose device you have to make sure to keep your calories constant, and not reward yourself with extra food for excorsizing, or take the opportunity to reward yourself by lazing around instead of doing the gardening/housework/whatever you what have done.
Homer: Oh Marge, how could you let me let myself go like this?
Marge: Me? I'm not the one who puts butter in your coffee.
Interesting take on dieting. Essentially excersize doesn't help people lose weight. Excersize has 2 draw backs, first it turns out excersizing doesn't increase people's overall level of movement, because after excersizing people tend to sit around more balancing out with their earlier excersize. Likewise after excersizing people becoming hungrier, and eat more, which can more than balance out the calories you lost from working out. When they looked at a group of children, they found that children ate 100 calories more than burned off, just actually gaining weight instead of losing weight from their excersize. That isn't to say you shouldn't excersize, it's healthier anyway, but if you really want to use it as a weight lose device you have to make sure to keep your calories constant, and not reward yourself with extra food for excorsizing, or take the opportunity to reward yourself by lazing around instead of doing the gardening/housework/whatever you what have done.
Homer: Oh Marge, how could you let me let myself go like this?
Marge: Me? I'm not the one who puts butter in your coffee.
posted by Trashcan at 3/31/2011 01:18:00 AM
4 Comments:
Fascinating, especially the bit about the experiment on the English kids whose activity remains constant no matter how much they're force exercised.
The part about overweight people already expending far more calories without any exercise at all was not news to me. If I eat only 3,000 calories a day, I'm already losing weight, because I burn more than that without even moving a muscle.
I'll second the study, though my evidence is meager. When I started my current weight loss regiment, I lost about two pounds a week for six weeks. On the seventh week I added exercise to the dieting, and lost only half a pound. Booooooo.
I think the most valuable tool in losing weight is logging everything you eat, and your exercise. Like the article said, people exercise and feast, without realizing they're canceling out all their progress, or eating even more than they burned. I used to have the same mind set: if I exercised well, I'd eat whatever I want for the rest of the day. Until I started keeping track, and I realized the self-defeatingness of it myself.
I think the main problem is that people don't realize how many calories excersize burns. Unless you're a pro athlete or something, you aren't burning enough calories to reward yourself with extra food. I agree when i was dieting last fall/winter i was losing 3 pounds a week, basically by looking at calories and eating just 2,000 a day. I didn't really check on how much i was eating at dinner, it's hard to measure the calories from a slice of pork roast, or chicken, but i would eat like 600-700 calories during the day and tried not to eat to big a dinner hoping it was not more than 1300. Also cutting out juice/alcohol makes a big difference.
It is ten times easier to judge calories at dinner if you have a scale. I put my plate right on the scale and keep track of each food that goes on it.
Oh, and here's an interesting suggestion from my special lady on not lazing away the rest of your day/over eating: just exercise after dinner before you're going to bed anyway.
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