alt Hacker NewsI gained about 50 pounds the past decade and the past year I’ve been trying to lose it.
I weighed myself at the beginning: 205 lbs
I started running 30 minutes per day (heartrate training targeting about 140-150), every day, for 10 months. I kept my diet the same as before (though with a protein bar after the run). Weighed myself every week or two, always within a couple pounds of 205.
In March I ramped up my runs to 45 minutes per day with better interval planning. Still 205. I injured my ankle in May: 205. I’ve been busy and haven’t gotten back into running yet, just weighed myself, and after months of no activity: 205
Weight loss is hard. It is possible to put in a pretty strenuous amount of effort and willpower and see exactly zero results.
Replies
Its a pretty well known fact that exercise alone (unless you are doing extreme athlete training) is not going to change your weight without a change in diet.
You can get healthier with exercise, but not smaller. That is almost entirely based on diet.
Just think about it; your thirty minutes of running probably burned between 300-500 calories. That one protein bar probably has about 300 calories by itself.
Running for 30 minutes is maybe 200-400 calories. If you trigger your body to eat more because of that or you are more lazy throughout the day because you’re tired after running, it’s a wash. Exercise is not the route to weight loss. It’s like 80-90% diet.
What do you eat? I bet $10 either it's calorie-counted standard high carb diet or something that is low in protein and fats.
The physiology of dieting, and avoiding hunger, is pretty well understood at this point. Just don't ask your GP or they'll just tell you to stop eating red meat and eat more cereals as the "solution".
Just doing more exercise doesn't actually help much with losing weight, as it turns out. The human body will optimize around even intense exercise to reduce calorie burn to a homeostatically stable level. The exercise will still make you healthier (and have some marginal extra calorie burn from e.g. extra muscle mass), but you'll only lose serious weight if you also reduce what you eat.
There are a bunch of articles out there about it, but Kurzgesagt has a decent pop-science summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSSkDos2hzo
You need to reduce your calorie intake. The exercise isn't enough to have a significant impact.
There are a couple things missing from routine. That protein bar is sabotaging your run. Those things are filled with sugar. You need to do 2 things. Change what your eating and do intermittent fasting to jump start your metabolism.
Exercising won't work, weight loss happens in the kitchen.. You can do some moderate exercise of course but you should count calories and eat less (don't forget to recalculate your requirements as you lose weight!).
Thanks for sharing. It must be discouraging to see no results after pretty rigorously following the mantra of "just try harder".
Exercise by itself doesn't increase calorie burn all that much, it just strengthens your body in other ways. It's still very important, but to have a healthy weight you need to eat healthy (for most people this just translates to eating less) and diverse foods with good macro coverage.
You not changing your diet is the problem in this case, and that protein bar has so much sugar that by itself it's counteracting whatever effort the exercise had in the first place.
Also in my experience most people who say this kinda stuff (I train and eat healthy but can't lose weight!) actually don't eat healthy at all, because they simply don't know what that actually looks like.