This is such an important point. I know some people who have made great efforts such as exercising more or quitting alcohol, but for whatever reason they claim to not perceive the purported benefit of their effort.
I don't know how to help them, because for me, if I need more exercise, I perceive the "benefit" (mood improvement, etc.) usually almost immediately, like 5 minutes into it. When I cut out alcohol, I perceive improvements within 24 hours. It unsettles me to imagine if this was not the case.
Regarding exercise, I may be able to provide some insight as I've gone through this transition over the past few years. Most likely, they're looking for the wrong benefits:
As a society, we tend to center our advice to overweight people around "losing weight." It's a useful long-term diagnostic, but terrible as a day-to-day guide. The maximum safe rate of weight loss is 1-2 lbs/week, but your weight can easily fluctuate by 5 lbs through the course of the day -- even when doing everything right, you still have to go back a month to reliably find higher scale readings.
As people chase scale readings, they tend to pass straight through the enjoyable activity range without noticing and into the range that requires burning willpower to continue. The trick is to focus on activities that are inherently enjoyable, and work on improving them. Lots of people that kill themselves running on the treadmill would be better served by a leisurely stroll outside. Eventually, they'll add in some jogging just because they feel like it, and they've started on an improvement path that's long-term sustainable.
If people want to lose weight, the worse advice you can give them is to "exercise to lose weight". Exercise has little to no effect on losing weight. You have to exercise at such a level of intensity and duration to make any meaningful difference that most people can't or won't do it. Losing weight is almost entirely about what you eat.
As I said in another post, I was a part time fitness instructor for 12 years and I would exercise intensely between teaching and my own personal workouts 10 hours a week. But it didn't take "willpower" because it was harder to get out of exercising (I had to find a sub), it was part of my social life and I was getting paid to stay in shape. How many people could handle that level of effort?
Even now, to see any effects from exercise on losing weight and keeping what I would consider a fairly normal caloric intake, I exercise 2 hours/four days a week and trending toward 3 hours/four days a week. How many people can actually do that?
I also have a separate room in our house reserved for exercise equipment so I don't have to find time to go the gym - a treadmill, elliptical, and soon a magnetic rower and adjustable weights. When all is said and done, I'll have about $5000 worth of equipment in my house. I would never recommend most people spend money on exercise equipment at home unless they are already an avid exerciser.
There are a lot of good reasons to exercise that should be emphasized but so wouldn't even mention "weight loss" as one of them.
Agreed, but there's an exception in my personal experience. If you start commuting by riding a bicycle, you can easily get 5-10 hours a week at around 70% max heart rate (average).
Of course it's difficult to motivate yourself to start and to keep at it. If the distance is long, you probably can't completely change to riding in one go due to excess fatigue, and if it's short it won't be effective. And of course it will take months to lose any significant amount of weight, just like any other way.
When I started this on a 22km commute I didn't want to lose weight, but I literally ate as much as I could and still lost some.
I'm not arguing that it can't be done, just that someone who is over weight and deconditioned is not going to have the stamina to work out enough to make a significant difference in their weight.
How long did it take you to get in the kind of shape to do that?
Yes, you're absolutely correct, but stamina comes with practice. The biggest issue IMHO is motivation: if you don't have it, you're not going to keep exercising for long enough.
Riding 22km once was no problem, and shouldn't be for most healthy people given plenty of time and a working bicycle.
Riding it both ways on the same day took me a couple of weeks. This was coincidentally the point where I noticed weight loss.
Riding both ways three days a week took 2-3 months. (I did it before that, but then was too tired next week.) Note that this was about 7-8 hours a week of exercise, ie. a lot.
Now, about two years later I might be able to ride that kind of a commute five days a week. But my commute is only 15km now (which is a lot easier) so I haven't tried.
Although I am not very experienced in exercising, from time to time I start to jog or go to the gym for a couple of months and the only reason I do this is to get into shape; losing the weight was always a part of it. After all, there is a reason why thousands and thousands of people go to the gym only to lose weight. I'm not saying that exercising is only for this and of course it brings lots of health benefits, but I cannot neglect the fact that after 3-4 months of gym I get in a perfect shape and lose 8 lbs minimum.
> After all, there is a reason why thousands and thousands of people go to the gym only to lose weight.
There are multiple reasons for that, but none of them are because it's the best way to lose weight. I used to think it was, and I've been going to the gym religiously for a couple of decades. I was always fit, but never lost the weight I wanted until recently when I discovered that eating less is the best way to lose weight. When I would go to the gym, I would compensate by eating more, which is why I never lost weight.
The high level bit, the primary action is exercise makes you stronger. Not exercising makes you weaker. Eating adds mass, not eating removes mass. It's so simple and symmetric, it just astounds me how long I believed that the primary way to get skinnier was to exercise.
I was afraid to eat less, and extremely resistant to counting calories (and I believe many many people are in the same boat). How many diets advertise being able to eat as much as you want of certain kinds of food and still lose weight? How many gym commericials advertise gyms for weight loss? Most gym ads sell gyms as a way to lose weight, most of society talks about gyms as a way to lose weight, it's no surprise that people think of the gym as a weight loss tool and as a way to avoid counting calories, or worse: being hungry.
The replacement technique in the article is exactly what I had to use to get over the fear of hunger. I had to figure out a way to mentally realize that my hunger meter was mis-calibrated, and that if I didn't feel a little bit hungry, then I was eating too much. I had to re-adjust to realize that not being hungry was a bad thing. This is opposite of feeling like I need willpower to overcome hunger.
> I cannot neglect the fact that after 3-4 months of gym I get in a perfect shape and lose 8 lbs minimum.
You're lucky; your eating is under control and you don't over-compensate when you work out. But many people do if they're not careful, which is why advising gym use for weight loss is usually ineffective (and can even damage some people's will and/or self image). Advising gym for getting stronger is great.
I very much agree with many points you've mentioned. I've never said it is the best way to lose weight and I'm sorry if I misled you.
My response was to the comment above; I will just quote the last part of it :"There are a lot of good reasons to exercise that should be emphasized but so wouldn't even mention "weight loss" as one of them." My point was to say, that exercising can help you lose weight. I'm not saying a lot, or easily, nothing is easy when it comes losing the weight, I struggle all the time, but sports is one of the ways to do this if you do it reasonably, trying not to overeat, etc.
I'm not saying it can't work. I was in a position as a part time fitness instructor and a very occasional personal trainer, that people would ask me for advice. The safest most general advice that would work for "90% of the people 90% of the time", would be to focus on their diet (not "a" diet) for weight loss and to recommend a dietician for help in eating a well balance meal.
My goal was to help them get stronger and in better cardiovascular shape - not to help them lose weight. I would actively discourage them from thinking of exercise as a weight loss tool. Anyone who was active enough and already in shape enough to work out to the point where they were losing weight wasn't coming to me for advice.
Getting in shape is an excellent reason to go to the gym, but it has surprisingly little to do with losing weight. The two are correlated, and weight is easy to measure, but your fitness can improve much faster than your weight can come down.
In my case, I was better off paying attention to how my tennis game was progressing than anything else — winning a point I wouldn’t have been able to touch a month ago is much more motivating than the 1% weight change over the same period.
I understand and respect your attitude towards fitness, I think that's even better, because this way you are not concentrated on and irritated by the fact that it takes so long to get in shape. Everyone have their own goals when they start doing sports. For some it is improving the performance for others to lose the weight.
Doing hundreds of different diets can be much more challenging then breaking into sweat and for some (imho: very reasonable) people, it's better to lose 2-4 lbs a month than 10 in a week. Most of people are generally aware, that it takes time to lose weight by doing sports, but it is the fact that you do lose it eventually.
To lose 4 pounds a month just by exercising and if you keep your calorie intake the same, you would have to burn an extra 500 calories a day through exercise. That's about a 3 mile run. Assuming most people won't me able to run and will be doing a brisk walk, they can expect to burn about 280 calories an hour - almost 2 hours, 7 days a week.
How many people exercise and don't eat at least a little bit more?
Between walking at decent pace, at a 12% incline, I can burn 500 calories in an hour. I add on another hour on an elliptical at the highest resistance and that is another 900 calories (yes I know they are usually off by up to 15% either way). But how many people just getting into shape can do either with good form? Let alone both 4 days a week?
Well, isn't it individual for every person? Firstly, someone who weighs 141 lbs does not lose weight with the same intensity as someone with 220 lbs. Secondly, if one wants to lose weight by doing sports, he should be reasonable about this and not eat a bar of a chocolate after a 50 min run.
As I already said, I'm not a professional and I do speak from my personal experience. I don't have exact statistics either, I'd like to try and search for it though and post it here. I've found an interesting series of articles which I read just now, if you have interest or time you might want to skim through it, too:
Statistically speaking, no. Most people's physical response to food and exercise is almost exactly the same given the same inputs. There may be minor variations from person to person, but the variations aren't large enough to change the general advice. There are extreme exceptions, but those are natually extremely rare, and shouldn't be used to muddy the water.
> Secondly, if one wants to lose weight by doing sports, he should be reasonable about this and not eat a bar of chocolate after a 50 min run.
While that's exactly the point, the way you said it is too dismissive, IMO. This is exactly what happens to almost everyone. You don't need to exaggerate with chocolate bars. Unless you're counting your calories or consciously going hungrier, most people will naturally just eat a bit more at meal time because they're hungrier, because they worked harder. If that's not being reasonable, then you need to understand that millions and millions of people are not reasonable.
If one only wants to lose weight, he could reasonably skip his normal 2nd morning bagel, and just skip the run too. Save $5, save an hour, it costs less to eat less, in every way. One way to look at this is there's no such thing as losing weight by doing sports. There's only gaining weight by eating too much, and losing weight by eating less than you burn. Whether you exercise is perhaps irrelevant to your weight. (That's exaggerating, but is more true than the other way around.)
> I've found an interesting series of articles
These articles are from a sports magazine and are selling sports as the solution. In the (second) article, he admits that you have to keep diet under control, but he is dramatically over-emphasizing the importance of exercise on weight loss, and he's painting a picture of calorie counting being too difficult and too inaccurate to be effective. Speaking from personal experience, this is quite misleading bullshit. You don't need accuracy for it to work, and you don't have to account for secondary effects of exercise either, which the author claims at length. Compare these articles to the Vox article @scarface74 posted, you will see some striking differences.
I love going to the gym, I advocate exercise 100%. I think exercise keeps me happier and healthier. But the gym isn't a weight loss tool. If anything at all, I now use the gym so that I can eat more than I would be able to otherwise. I can burn 500 calories working out, and then feel okay adding an extra 400 calorie treat during my day.
I didn't exaggerate with a bar of chocolate, I've done that, not proud, but a huge fan of chocolate.
I understand what you mean and most people might do exactly as you say, I don't argue with that. My argument is that it is possible to lose weight if you do sports, even if you lose a very small amount of weight, it is still losing the weight. I'm not trying to stubbornly prove my point here, I just feel that I've been misunderstood. I don't advice anybody to leave doing what they are doing and start doing some sports because it is the only way to lose the weight, no it isn't. There are lots of other options and maybe more effective even. I just don't understand why we should deny the fact that sports also is one of the options, if, and I have to agree here, combined with a good diet (and by diet I don't mean starving yourself, but eating consciously).
I appreciate your answer, there is more for me to read and learn about the subject indeed.
I hear you, and I understand your point. And you're right too. Exercise is a way to burn calories faster, there's no denying that. I've been coming down extra hard to emphasize my point. ;)
But just to be clear, because I'm not sure I've been completely understood either, and to answer your question "why we should deny the fact that sports also is one of the options"... I never lost weight at the gym in 20 years of going to the gym until I realized that sports is not a weight loss option for me personally. The reason is that our physiology compensates for excess calorie burn by making us hungrier, which is true for almost all humans & animals. If I don't track what I eat, then I will accidentally eat too much after I work out, just like I accidentally eat too much when I don't work out. I know that many, many people have the same problem. Once you see this, you realize that for many people, going the gym actually has nothing to do with the weight loss, even if they think is does. It's either a way to continue to eat 2k+ calories, or a way to get stronger, but only the intake control is what leads to weight loss. Without the intake control, the gym just leads to more intake and no weight for me, and for a lot of people.
When I was teaching and training for runs regularly, I would often purposefully eat more on my heavy work out days before a two or three hour work out session just so I could make it through the session. But I was in weight maintenance mode. I wanted my weight to stay in a certain range. If I were over a certain weight, I wouldn't look as toned and under a certain weight, I just felt "little".
I was in weight maintenance mode. But like you said, whT about all of those people who weren't purposefully trying to maintain and were compensating by eating more? I know people who actually gained weight by over compensating.
Heck if I hadn't known about the density difference in fat versus muscle, I would have felt really bad seeing my weight go down by only 15 pounds a long time ago after working out hard, with cardio and weights - even though my body fat percentage went down 12% and I lost 4-6 inches in my waist.
For most people, weight loss is simply the wrong goal. Increasing activity levels and functional ability provides a much better return in quality of life and long-term health than weight loss.
As activity levels rise, weight loss starts to change from an extrinsic to an intrinsic goal, as it now directly impacts performance. It still requires diet change, but each incremental reduction produces more tangible effects than just a number on a dial.
I'd really like to read some unbiased statistics, which wouldn't be some sports propaganda or anything I've unknowingly posted above. Could you advice me any sources that I could read up on?
I've looked through the article that scarface74 posted, but I'd like to have some more read.
Unless you're losing mostly lean mass, that 10 lbs/week represents a 5000 kcal energy deficit every day. With base energy needs around 2500 kcal/day for most people, no diet will get you there.
I don't know if your comment is in response to my post. But I'm 43. When I was teaching fitness and working out 10 hours a week, I was between 25 and 35. These days, between problems with my ankles (not related to working out too much) and exercise induced asthma, I can't do high impact cardio, but I do still have my strength - hence high resistance low impact exercises.
I have no doubt that the issue you describe happens, but people have also had the experience that there simply isn't any "enjoyable activity range" to begin with. This could be some abnormality in interoception, which researchers are finding is much more common than previously thought (it was previously regarded primarily as an ASD symptom, but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed).
I should probably start bookmarking this stuff. To be clear, the connection to exercise resistance/intolerance is my own speculation. Most of the actual research so far is focused on the relationship between abnormal interoception and aspects of mental illness. A lot of this is also pretty preliminary; as far as I can tell, there's not yet much consensus on even a rigorous definition of which sensory functions qualify as "interoceptive", let alone validation of methods to measure it. That being said, interesting articles include:
Alexithymia, not autism, is associated with impaired interoception [1]
“Lacking warmth”: Alexithymia trait is related to warm-specific thermal somatosensory processing [2]
Alexithymia: a general deficit of interoception [3]
Alexithymia Is Associated With a Multidomain, Multidimensional Failure of Interoception: Evidence From Novel Tests [4]
Good point. It's an important factor. If I may add one pinch of advice though: it's also important not to run for pleasure only, that's the reason people are overweight in the first place; eating on a couch is 100% pleasure. Some times you have to overcome a pain barrier. And very often in life it is so. Not to turn people into masochists but it's important to know.
Well, yes and no. With me, as I started to get more active, I voluntarily pushed into those pain barriers because they weren't that bad, and made me feel amazing the next morning. Similarly, my eating habits improved primarily because eating junk makes me feel sluggish for a while, robbing later activity of its enjoyment. I sometimes still make that choice, but I usually pick activity instead.
Most importantly, through the whole process, I never had to force myself to do something I didn't want to. Instead, I put myself in positions where I want to do things that have a long-term benefit, for short-term reasons.
I had moments of deep mental resistance, anything is a damn burden. I believe lots of people feel the same and have a few very high psychological barriers.
True; I was lucky enough to be able to find a path through the maze that goes around most of my mental barriers. There’s no guarantee such a path will exist, and even if it does, it’ll be different for everyone.
IMO that's another thing you learn with time. There's no sure path.. you oughta crack through. Which is a bit paradoxical since you actually lack willpower but it's the only way.
It's like todolists.. I have thousands of them. Nothing happens. At times I just roll up my sleeves, in a very thin anger, and just go through chores and duties.
Now that I internalized that notion I'm much more willing to do things rather than procrastinate and day dream about how I would/should/could.
I'm not 100% proactive, far from that, but I know I'll be much happier if I do be (sic).
This is why culture/education is important. You can rediscover this on your own but it may mean hitting bottom to actually try other strategies. Or you can rely on experience of others. Or at least a system that let you fall a bit and then give you incentives to go the other way.
I don't know how to help them, because for me, if I need more exercise, I perceive the "benefit" (mood improvement, etc.) usually almost immediately, like 5 minutes into it. When I cut out alcohol, I perceive improvements within 24 hours. It unsettles me to imagine if this was not the case.