alt Hacker NewsI am constantly arguing with all of my friends and family who believe primary way to loose weight is to exercise more.
Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.
So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.
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I mean, these things are multimodal. For most people it's easier to cut enough calories to lose weight than it is to exercise enough to lose weight (though both are physically possible). But, of course, if you are losing weight you should be exercising! It's the best way to retain muscle mass, which is vital for health.
I am sure that when I've lost weight it's more the portion control than the exercise - but the exercise is a critical component. When you go from being sedentary to doing even casual exercise you feel better and get more energy - which you can then use to be more active. Without some kind of virtuous lifestyle-change cycle you are likely not going to shift your body mass, kind of no matter what ultimately puts you over the edge.
The problem, as it is for a shitload of women, is that the delta between "Minimum amount of calories needed to not be somewhat malnourished" and "calories you eat now without losing weight" is sometimes zero. Short women working desk jobs are fucked
I was with a girl that barely ate, and couldn't get her weight down for about a decade because of that. Eventually she got really excited about a local dance studio and suddenly her weight dropped like a rock. She had to exercise more, but that was miserable until she found exercise that was effective and actually clicked, then it was trivial
Meanwhile it was trivial for me to eat less, because my budget should be around 1800 calories a day, and I was eating 3000. It's easy to cut out an entire bag of doritos. It is less easy to literally starve yourself.
People seem to forget as well that when you cut calories, your body will scream bloody murder until it re-adjusts. My body was convinced I was starving while I was 50 pounds overweight and eating 2000 calories because I had previously eaten more. Your body did not evolve in an environment where that was ever the wrong thing to feel! "Please eat more or we die" is one of the most powerful biological signals.
That these medications cut that signal is entirely why they work! If people just "couldn't stop eating" then not having hunger or appetite signals wouldn't have worked either.
It’s just physics, really.
A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.