You can run a marathon a month or not drink a coke a day or eat one less slice of bread. Exercise is important for your health but it’s not how one loses weight.
You can run a marathon a month or not drink a coke a day or eat one less slice of bread. Exercise is important for your health but it’s not how one loses weight.
This ignores metabolism. If you are in a state of high caloric excess (i.e. you eat more than you need every day, like most modern humans) and then you reduce your calories a bit, you'll see some initial minor weight lots, but then your metabolism will simply compensate.
To see real weight loss over a period of months you need to push past the point of metabolic adaption and stay there. Dropping a slice of bread won't cut it. That's why weight loss is so hard.
That's why exercise is useful for weight loss even though it won't do much by itself. You'll need to use every tool at your disposal to burn those excess calories.
Your body mass doesn't materialize out of nothing. Food in, body mass out. Less food in, less body mass out. Simple as that. Everything else is optimization that's not really required, just eating less, patience and consistency.
His point was when you eat more calories than you need, then the body can afford to be sloppy (inefficient) about absorbing all those calories.
When you cut down a little on food but are still above or at your daily calorie requirement, the body can adapt by increasing its conversion absorption efficiency and in that case one wouldn't lose weight, because metabolically it's still absorbing the same amount of calories.
Interesting thought.
Do you have a source I can read through to understand more? I couldn't find anything supporting that idea.
Before dieting, I would expect most people to be in energy equilibrium, where their weight matches their calorie intake and calorie expenditure. Changing one side of that equation will change the equilibrium, every thing else equal.
If you eat more, you will gain weight. If you eat less... you will lose it. If you want to keep losing it, you have to keep eating less. Every target weight has an associated calorie intake / expenditure.
No doubt there are metabolic levers to pull to optimize the timeframe and that psychology and lifestyle play a big part of caloric intake, but, again, thinking about all that isn't really necessary.
Just eat less that you used to and be consistent about it. And if you're feeling spry, move more than you use to too. Keep tapering down until you're at your goal weight. This is the diet that is probably the best fit for 99% of people who are overweight. Dumb simple. No way to fail. Literally nothing to think about except the spoon, and maybe which route you're going to take walking around the block.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4803033/
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Constrained-Total-En...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_paradox
Those are mostly just arguing that exercise isn't a good way to lose weight. No disagreement about that, although to be super nitpicky, "not good" doesn't mean "doesn't work", they just suggest that there is a cap on how much exercise you can do before your body stops burning more calories, so there's an effective limit on that side of the energy equation.
Also, from the second one:
That's exactly what I'm arguing above.A marathon a month is less than a mile a day. Semi regular exercise is an excellent way to burn some extra calories. Especially when your weight is relatively stable and your diet isn’t completely awful (so it’s not trivial to make huge improvements for little effort).
This isn’t even getting into the many benefits of exercise in general, or the virtuous circle of "well I didn’t particularly enjoy that hour on a bike in shitty weather so I refuse to waste the benefit on a shitty donut purely out of spite".
Sure but run a mile a day or eat one less slice of bread is an easy choice for most people looking to lose weight.