Stupid question about exercise and weight loss

Nope, really not looking for an argument.

Feels like we’re debating semantics here and things don’t come across very well on text. I think you’re stating fat loss is most efficiently performed by maintaining a low insulin level, using a low GI diet. I’m saying calorific deficit is the only way to weight loss, and incidentally fat loss because the fat reserves are what’s burnt when there’s no access to other energy sources due to the deficit.

The article I linked to made sense to me as a lay person. Calorific deficits have also worked in practice for me (and for millions of others). I think you may have greater knowledge about what you’re talking about, but I still can’t understand how calories in < calories out == weight loss doesn’t make sense. I’d be interested in seeing any studies disproving it.

Cheers for your time. Happy riding. 🙂

fat loss is most efficiently performed by…

I don’t think there’s any ‘best’ way – what works depends on a huge variety of factors.. and there’ll be more than one way.

I’m saying calorific deficit is the only way to weight loss

Not this again. Putting food in your mouth is only the start of what actually happens to it, and what your muscles end up using when you exercise. Much more complicated than a car engine. Just because you eat a calorie doesn’t mean it’s necessarily available for your muscles, or that it ends up under your skin as fat. A lot has to happen for fat to be laid down, and a lot of things affect the processes.

calories in < calories out == weight loss doesn’t make sense

I’ve always understood that:

some calories leave as heat, some get stored, some are used to make you (or your internal gubbins) move and do stuff.

less calories in doesn’t always result in calories being liberated from fat stores – the deficit might be made up in a different way

for fat loss, ultimately you have to do something that convinces your body to use more stored fat than it deposits; for *most* people a straightforward reduction in calories in will do that, for others its more of a struggle

How is the deficit made up then? I thought breaking down muscle and bone tissue for energy when fat stores were readily available was a very inefficient process.

It is most people I’m interested in. Not outliers like people with Marasmus, hormone imbalances, or undergoing a version of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

Most people will lose weight maintaining a calorific deficit. This weight loss will mostly be due to fat loss, and some of it will be the loss of retained water. If there’s a way where you can lose fat while eating at maintenance, or at a calorific surplus then please share it. I’ll even go as far as giving it a shot if you do.

If you find you’re not losing weight while at a deficit, then chances are you’re not sticking with it long enough to see the water weight drop. I’ve seen my own body retain up to 2kg in water weight over a week while eating at a deficit while increasing the volume of exercise.

If you exercise you can’t always tell what fuel you are using, so unless you are doing long slow riding really well you’ll be using up muscle glycogen. If you use up enough you’ll either drive your appetite up to the point where you’ll have to eat more; or if you can beat that with enough willpower you’ll go slower and slower on subsequent rides and you will end up using fewer calories and if you are anything like me you’ll feel absolutely shit and not be able to ride much at all . I hve a feeling that your metabolic rate slows down at this point too because I end up feeling really tired wanting to sleep a lot and unable to work.

In other words, your body does its best to reduce calories out and make you eat more. The less fat you have the harder it tries. That’s why it’s much easier to go fro 25% to 20% body fat than from 10% to 5%.

I think I’ve figured out the statement about CICO being false, depending on calorific composition. The argument is that calories from protein are not as efficiently stored as fat, as calories from carbs.

Ok, I can definitely buy that. I’ve also come across a study using diets with 3 groups. 2 had equal calorie counts, but one was low carb, high protein. The other ate at a deficit.

Counter to the CICO belief, the low carb, high protein group lost weight. I’ve learned something from this. So thanks to Solo etc for helping me get off my backside and look for it without putting blind faith in CICO, which I was.

Like someone stated in the thread, the problem with carbs is it’s easier to consume a ton of calories without feeling full for certain foods (ice cream, sweets etc). Given this knowledge, perhaps low carb, high protein is the way to go, while getting carbs mainly from vegetables, and to a lesser extent, fruits.

Still not sure on fasted training though!

Solo you are missing the point there

Obese people (without bariatric surgery) are essentially incurably obesse, their hormone levels will never return to normal
Without surgery some will loose weight but keeping it off is virtually impossible, over 95% will never loose the weight. Their daily intake has to be 300 calories Les than a non obesse person just to maintain the same weight.

Extrapolating the study on these patients to all people, including those with normal hormone levels is certainly not without caveats, but it seems to be very well controled and will probably have some relevance outside of the obesse patients too.

Questioning the integrity of the NIH is a bit silly too, unless you have specific knowledge of the researchers interests (all of which they have to devlare) you are poo pooing the work of the largest scientific finding body in the world.

….calories from protein are not as efficiently stored as fat, as calories from carbs

The thing is, your body doesn’t work with the “currency” of calories – the calorie is a chemists way of measuring the potential thermal energy content of a substance and is barely relevant when applied to the potential electrochemical energy avilaible.

Using science designed for steam engines to try and understand the body’s “fuelling system” is pretty much as futile as it gets, to really evaluate food soures and their energy potential you need to consider if their primary route of metabolism is aerobic/anaerobic, what metabolic cofactors may be required, the presence of inhibitors/competitors for the enzyme systems and the mitochondrial redox potential – and that’s just for starters!

But fundamentally, until you understand how energy is generated, stored, transported and utilised in biological systems you may as well stick to CICO &/or “what works best for me” because all this half assed pseudoscience is going to get you nowhere 😕

If you use up enough you’ll either drive your appetite up to the point where you’ll have to eat more; or if you can beat that with enough willpower you’ll go slower and slower on subsequent rides and you will end up using fewer calories and if you are anything like me you’ll feel absolutely shit and not be able to ride much at all .

Good post and yes if you continue in that fashion your endocrine system will down regulate cellular activity to a) get you to slow your ass down and rest, b) to conserve remaining reserves and allow time for replenishment to support repair and adaptation.

and
your metabolic rate slows down at this point too because I end up feeling really tired wanting to sleep a lot and unable to work.
Yes, this is your system reacting to expending significant quantities of energy and is another anecdotal example that it’s not as simple as counting cals in or out.

Kimbers. You’re so far wide of the mark, I don’t think I can help. Good luck

Pretty much it. The more I look into it, the more it seems like CICO, eat less, move more are simplistic ways to weight loss. But that’s what the general populace (your average overweight person) needs. They don’t need to understand or even care about the minutiae.

What gets me about the pseudoscience is when it’s used as an excuse to justify poor choices.

I agree the science behind loosing weight is complicated. The themes I see are that the old school CICO approach works for most people most of the time, but for it to work it has to not be temporary, it has to become the norm to eat healthy. Lots of apps and devices can now help people judge the in and the out. I quite like my fitbit.

One interesting article I read recently had an interesting reminder that we may all come from more/less the same gene pool but within our stomachs we all have different bacteria that have been shaped by our eating culture. Billions of organisms that have been encouraged or killed off by what we have eaten over our lifetimes. So if you go abroad and eat local you might get the runs whereas a local can stomach it. So, what our bodies does with the food, how it reacts, will be individual and this logically then extends into how much, of the different food types, gets stored or used as energy. Apparently Inuit’s in the arctic eat 70% meat – whale/seals etc, its what is readily available, not much vegetation up north. They clearly get their energy from this diet without issue. In reverse, some Amazonian tribes live on more veg than meat and similarly still have energy. It seems us ‘europeans’ have fed ourselves largely on refined food diets and to me, looking around the office here, we have made a mistake.

I’m rambling and will now shut up. Have a look at national geographic paleo diets if you want to read up on it.

Solo, please educate me…

within our stomachs we all have different bacteria that have been shaped by our eating culture.

Heh. Bacteria, culture etc. I like that sentence…

It’s lose, guys, not ****ing loose. Unless you mean set the fat loose, in which case, as you were.

Solo… 98% of obesses people unable to lose weight
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302773
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587%2815%2900009-1/fulltext
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24911618

I’m not sure exactly what you’ve taken issue with

….What gets me about the pseudoscience is when it’s used as an excuse to justify poor choices

and even worse, when the pseudoscioence is used to reinforce negative attitudes/habits on the basis that “my endocrine system isn’t letting me do this”

day to day it’s really a matter of ‘eat less move more’ with a big side serving of MTFU

and even worse, when the pseudoscioence is used to reinforce negative attitudes/habits on the basis that “my endocrine system isn’t letting me do this”

That’s probably well worth reinforcing.

To Solo and the weight-loss deniers, who seem adamant that it’s basically impossible to lose weight and thrive while exercising at a ‘deficit’, how do you explain the physique of pretty much any endurance athlete?

For example, most runners in regular training, especially in marathon training, will lose weight (and some muscle mass, depending on cross training), regardless of what they eat. Building an endurance body requires many thousands of extra calories, but there’s enough ‘deficit’ built in, especially in physical repair after first fuelling a run, that fat will be lost. Do you seriously think the ‘endocrine system’ is holding back runners doing 120 miles per week from losing weight? Do you think they lack the necessary energy to fuel their runs, even when they are in the process of getting lean for a target race?

It’s not that people are all that different in their fuelling needs, it just depends on the level of training and the resultant level of adaptation to that training. The body will naturally learn to burn more fats and spare carbohydrate/glycogen the more you train your body through the repeated bout effect; that’s just one adaptation to increasing exercise levels.

Spend most of your day on your feet/walking, and throw in some exercise, eat pretty much what you like, but aim for a largely Mediterranean type diet, avoid excess sugars from drink, and, unless you’ve got a metabolic disorder, you will likely continuously lose fat.

day to day it’s really a matter of ‘eat less move more’ with a big side serving of MTFU

Eat less? How do you suggest someone does that? Fewer calories, perhaps? …. oh, wait a minute……
😆

The suggestion to MTFU being made by someone trapped in a flawed and out dated paradigm is amusing.
Much more amusing than the patronising remarks about how Joe Public is too thick to understand what you know.

ELMM has an impressive history of totally failing to achieve its purpose.
But it allows those afflicted with a misplaced sense of superiority to admomish the “weak” and get a kick while doing so.

Alternatively, an intelligent person might question the wisdom of giving advice with such an ineffective history.
😉

That’s likely all the STW fun I can handle today.
😀

…That’s likely all the STW fun I can handle today

back under your bridge then matey 😆

…Joe Public is too thick to understand what you know.

ably demonstrated by just about any thread here on losing weight or eating healthy 😛

…Eat less? How do you suggest someone does that?

ummmmm, maybe eat a smaller portion, just off the top of my head like 🙄

Eating less and maintaining weight seems a contradiction to me unless there is a significant reduction in physical exertion. I must admit I’m sceptical.

There has got to be other factors which are not being measured. Little treats, snack etc.

I can see that various glandular problems etc could slow down weight loss, but effectively if less energy is going in that being expended, it’s got to be impossible to gain weight without sundering several laws of physics – unless our method of measuring the energy capacity of some common foodstuffs is flawed.

Or could there be any truth in that Indian guy who claims to live on air? 🙂 (Breatharian?)

One of the biggest issues I have with these threads is the amounts of backward reinforcement that goes on.

Molgrips is pretty much spot on here, what works for you might not work for him, I can live pretty much carb free (and I do) I see from his posts that would make his life intolerable, so while I’m happy enough, telling him (or worse dragging up any number of scientific papers on the subject) to reinforce my belief about what works to loose weight is a best unhelpful, and at worst counter productive.

ELMM might work for you, or calorie deficit, understand though that there as many ways to sustainable weight loss as there are ridiculous diet plans. Any new way of eating has to bring rewards and be maintainable, if you find one, great. But trying to tell others that their ideas are all wrong, and unscientific is pretty much pointless.

EDIT: I’d add that, I’m not saying that “your” lack of weight loss success isn’t your fault…It generally is, but what I’d suggest is learn to look at ALL the information that coming out about weight loss strategies these days, and learn to adapt your thinking and ideas.

It’s not that people are all that different in their fuelling needs, it just depends on the level of training and the resultant level of adaptation to that training. The body will naturally learn to burn more fats and spare carbohydrate/glycogen the more you train your body through the repeated bout effect; that’s just one adaptation to increasing exercise levels

From my own experience I don’t agree with that. There is a significant adaptation to diet changes as well. Training is one half of the coin, diet is the other.

I was doing a fair amount of training – running 2-3 times a week, big ride on a sunday. mountain bike 2/3 times a week and circuit training. I never really looked at my diet but was always around the 75kg mark.

I decided to have a fitness test done because I wanted to have a go at racing and to see where i could improve

despite all that training my fat utilization was appalling. Right at the bottom of zone 2 (127bpm) I was only using 43% of my cals from fat

I then changed my diet (effectively followed the idave/four hour body diet) where ate a lot more eggs, no cereal and no high carbs. I re did the test after 5 months and that figure went from 43% to 84%. The trainer told me my body had become fat adapted ( I also dropped down to 68kg where i’ve stayed for the past 4 years)

As above. Do you test tyre puncture resistance using a tyre that already has a puncture or a standard, correctly inflated tyre?

Conducting a which is best test on subjects who’s bodies already suffer a distortion of normal function is a trick someone is trying to slide by the reader.

Just to clarify, this was a clinical trial, clinical in this instance meaning ‘relating to the observation and treatment of actual patients’. It used people with a high BMI because obesity is one of the most far reaching and damaging health problems that we currently face, so it is important to help people like that to acheive a low BMI. It was not a sneaky trick to try and get one past the reader.
I think the confusion might lie with the fact that much of this thread has been concerned with people who are already reasonably or very fit and also reasonably slim endeavouring to get more fit and more slim, which is a great thing of course, and there is a lot of work that is being done in the sport science world that is entirely focussed on that which is also, obviously, great. But I feel that it seems a little rash to close our minds off to any studies that are carried out in the health science world, because it seems to me that there are times when the two very much overlap, with weight loss being a very good example.
I also feel that talking about tyres, punctured or otherwise, is a little misleading (although completely relevant to a bike forum, obvs 😉 ). There might well be a sound, physiological reason why someone with a high BMI will react to a specific diet differently to someone with either a low or a recommended BMI, so it might be more helpful to talk about that instead.

Well said shermer

trickydisco – Member

From my own experience I don’t agree with that. There is a significant adaptation to diet changes as well. Training is one half of the coin, diet is the other.

I don’t dispute your experience, but frankly my assertion about fat burning and glycogen sparing is not really in question. This is what happens with training. It is also why a beginner runner can’t go for a 5k run without then getting home and raiding the biscuits and bread (if they lack willpower), while a trained runner can go for a 10 mile tempo run on water alone.

It’s quite possible you substituted foods that are significantly healthier and less calorific than others and therefore lost some weight. It’s possible your training (type, intensity, duration) changed when you hired a personal trainer.

But these are not to dispute the physiological changes that occur with increasing your endurance training loads. All running, cycling and other endurance sports, contrary to popular belief, heart rate ‘zones’ etc., burn a combination of fats and carbs. Intensity alters the fuel source, but the after-effects usually balance out the resource output. E.g. HIIT will use carbs as fuel during, but, afterwards, raise the metabolic rate for hours to use more fats to restore equilibrium.

And whatever anyone asserts, personal trainer or otherwise, heart rate training cannot accurately and definitively predict your fat utilisation. But that’s a different matter.

Further, I think we’re on different wavelengths about bodily adaptation to fat input/output. You can, as you may have done, train your body through diet to use more fats than carbs (through adaptation to ketogenesis). But how a heart rate would predict this is entirely unclear.

hilldodger – Member
But fundamentally, until you understand how energy is generated, stored, transported and utilised in biological systems you may as well stick to CICO /or “what works best for me” because all this half assed pseudoscience is going to get you nowhere
I your particular case, and in light of TrickyDisco’s post. I agree 😉

A precis for Hilldodger:
despite all that training my fat utilization was appalling.

I then changed my diet (effectively followed the idave/four hour body diet) where ate a lot more eggs, no cereal and no high carbs. 

.
The trainer told me my body had become fat adapted 

It is what you eat, over how much. Type of cals over counting cals.
8)

During a six-day race from Sydney to Melbourne, Yiannis Kouros was said to have managed to take in 15,000 calories the first day, 12,000 the next, and 7,000 the third day. During the Phidippides run that traced the Athenian messenger’s route from Athens to Sparta (and back) for a total of 300 miles, Kouros consumed half of his calories as Greek sweets, eating every 20 minutes, and enjoying baklava, fresh creamy custard, and honey cookies. He says he doesn’t eat too much fat, using mostly carbohydrates and only loses weight in races if he wants to, even gaining weight in some. “But food is not the secret. While you have to avoid making mistakes with food, the Australian runners documented what I ate one year in an ultra-distance race and copied it the next year and I still won by 28 hours.”

http://www.runnersworld.com/trail-runner-profiles/on-the-trail-with-yiannis-kouros

This guy’s taking in more than Tour de France riders to keep him fuelled. This shows how difficult it is to maintain caloric equilibrium when doing extreme endurance sports. Also, he’s doing this on a strict vegetarian diet. Notice how he says he only gains weight if he wants to.

…Type of cals over counting cals

you don’t get calories from food unless you burn them in an oxygen rich environment to total ash and measure how many degrees celsius you have raised a given mass of water by.
Your (and many others) fundamental failure of interpretation and lack of understanding of what a calorie is, and how innapropriate it is to use as an energy unit in a discussion on metabolic energy, reduces everything else you say to just background noise really 😆

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/stop-counting-calories-and-start-a-highfat-mediterraneanstyle-diet-health-experts-urge-10473085.html

When I lived in Oz, it was the norm to not feed our dogs 1 day in the week (obviously a rest day). This was to keep them fit and trim and their coats in good condition.

It seemed to work.

Now I wonder how good that would be for a human

… and whether my hair would regrow. 🙂