Article on exercise and weight loss

Membrane

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2198879,00.html

I find it well argued, not the usual newspaper dross.

rp

Membrane wrote: »

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2198879,00.html

I find it well argued, not the usual newspaper dross.

I thought it was an exercise in self-justification: "The scientists can't agree that exercise helps weight-loss, so there's no point me doing any, where's me fags?".
Specifically, he didn't mention the role of increased exercise on metabolism and the Krebs cycle, or genetic anthropology - very important research areas in understanding how the human machine works.
My own experience with the weight/exercise equation tells me different, as well, but to the legions of over-weight regular cyclists out there: feel free to disagree.

sapper

It definitely seems to make sense to me...I haven't lost any signicificant weight after 1 year of cycling 18 miles a day and continuing to go to the gym at lunch three times a week.

The only time I have ever really lost weight was when I went travelling in Asia and when I tried Atkins - ie. when I ate a lot less carbs

Perhaps a poll of all boardsie readers is called for like, "have you lost any significant weight since taking up cycling?"

DITTKD

"In this gym we obey the laws of thermodynamics!":D

Yeah, it makes sense to me. Actually it seems ridiculously obvious.
Physiology is complicated.
A lot of people would benefit from reading articles like that, and trying to better understand how their bodies work instead of stressing out about a few pounds that are perfectly natural and, essentially, do not matter at all. Meanwhile they sweat and worry and throw money at a gym and miss the point altogether.

Incidently, I’ve gained weight since I started cycling. But it’s leg muscle, I’m a skinny guy. I’m skinny not because I exercise either, it’s physiological!!!

RtD

I haven't lost any signicificant weight after 1 year of cycling 18 miles a day and continuing to go to the gym at lunch three times a week.

Perhaps, and I'm only guessing as I don't know what sort of work you do in the gym, your metabolism was already raised to the level of an active person rather than that of a lazy person, therefore adding the cycling to the mix wouldn't have had as much of an effect.

Personally, echoing DITTKD somewhat, since starting to commute on bike for a bout an hour daily I have noticed that while indeed losing some pudge off the belly I have gained weight overall, predominantly in the form of leg muscle. A small bit of the weight might also be due to the fact that I now have a beard to deal with the cold mornings on the bike :rolleyes:

Also, the increased fitness means it now takes a pint or two less to get me tipsy, perhaps informing people that they can get drunk cheaper will get them off their ass

niceonetom

well i've lost about a stone over the last few months, and i've been cycling a lot (while still enjoying take-aways and pints too). this article would have me believe that either

a) it's just a correlation not causation, i didn't lose fat because i went cycling - i went cycling because the fat made me (see the activity impulse bit with l. armstrong).

b) i would have lost 2 stone if i'd sold the bike and just sat on the couch not eating instead (maybe).

This article actually really annoyed me. it seems to attack the very idea of causation itself and say that biology is so complicated that weak correlations are all we can hope for. which is post-modernist loser talk.

i'll stick to my system :
calories in > calories burned = fat boy
calories in < calories burned = skinny boy

either that or the old favourite:
"i'm not fat, it's glandular!"

Ghost Rider

I don't think he's questioning the notion of causality; he's just saying the situation is more complicated than the simple "calories in/calories out" equation would have you believe. Losing weight isn't simply a matter of biology, but psychology. And I think it's fair to say that whenever the latter -ology rears its head (no pun intended), things get very complicated very quickly.

niceonetom wrote: »

well i've lost about a stone over the last few months, and i've been cycling a lot (while still enjoying take-aways and pints too). this article would have me believe that either

a) it's just a correlation not causation, i didn't lose fat because i went cycling - i went cycling because the fat made me (see the activity impulse bit with l. armstrong).

b) i would have lost 2 stone if i'd sold the bike and just sat on the couch not eating instead (maybe).

This article actually really annoyed me. it seems to attack the very idea of causation itself and say that biology is so complicated that weak correlations are all we can hope for. which is post-modernist loser talk.

i'll stick to my system :
calories in > calories burned = fat boy
calories in < calories burned = skinny boy

either that or the old favourite:
"i'm not fat, it's glandular!"

niceonetom

Ghost Rider wrote: »

Losing weight isn't simply a matter of biology, but psychology. And I think it's fair to say that whenever the latter -ology rears its head (no pun intended), things get very complicated very quickly.

so... think yourself thin?

Ghost Rider

More like "Don't kid yourself fat".

niceonetom wrote: »

so... think yourself thin?

zorkmundsson

i think the problem here is that too many people confuse weight with health. it's a cliché, but a cliché because it's true, that arnold scwarzenegger in his prime was clinically obese.
as various posters have said, cycling tends to put on weight, at least it has done on me. however, i'm not nearly as flabby after cycling 10 miles a day 5 days a week, but i'm still heavier.
any sort of resistance exercise (like doing weights or cycling) is going to build muscle and, to add another cliché (why not?) muscle is heavier than fat. once people realise that it's fitness that matters, and not weight, the charlatans what peddle fad diets and whatnot will go out of busy-ness.

and that can only be a good thing.

rubadub

zorkmundsson wrote: »

i think the problem here is that too many people confuse weight with health. .

And far too many equate fat loss with weight loss, as this article seems to for the most part. I know of very few people whos desire is to lose muscle, which can happen when a lot of people lose "weight". Weight is simply gravitational pull on the earth, I can change my weight by 7lb in just over an hour- fat loss is a different story.

I was a constant ~12stone for over a year yet getting thinner all the time.

zorkmundsson mentioned a few cliches, but unfortunately I do not think they really are cliches- i.e. most people I know are ignorant of those facts/cliches. In the fitness forum one lean lifter said his own doctor pronounced him as obese- if medical health professionals are that disturbingly ignorant then it is safe to presume a lot of others are too.

John_C

I'm sure it varies from person to person but the article is certainly true for me. I've ran a few marathons but the only time in my adult life where I've lost any significant amount of fat was when I lived with a vegitarian for 6 weeks.

rp

John_C wrote: »

I'm sure it varies from person to person but the article is certainly true for me. I've ran a few marathons but the only time in my adult life where I've lost any significant amount of fat was when I lived with a vegitarian for 6 weeks.

So was it diet or exercise that did it?

John_C

rp wrote: »

So was it diet or exercise that did it?

Diet, no question.

I don't lose any weight when I'm training hard and lost a lot the time I stopped eating meat.

rubadub

John_C wrote: »

Diet, no question.

I don't lose any weight when I'm training hard and lost a lot the time I stopped eating meat.

But that seems to go against the article. At the bottom it was talking of restricting carbs leading to fat loss. And most veg diets have a higher ratio of carb to protein than a meat eaters diet.
Or were your overall calories reduced? I think this is could be the case, like the Atkins- I put some of these diets down to the fact that when your variety of food available is reduced then you eat less since you are bored of it.

John_C

rubadub wrote: »

But that seems to go against the article. At the bottom it was talking of restricting carbs leading to fat loss. And most veg diets have a higher ratio of carb to protein than a meat eaters diet.
Or were your overall calories reduced? I think this is could be the case, like the Atkins- I put some of these diets down to the fact that when your variety of food available is reduced then you eat less since you are bored of it.

I agree with you about the Atkins diet, I think people on it just eat less because it's hard to eat a big plate of meat.

I'll admit that I only read the first 2/3 of the article because he seemed to swap from opinion backed up with evidence to just opinion about there so I don't know if I'm contradicting him or not.
I can only say that my experience is that when my dinner swapped from meat&spuds to veg&pasta I lost a good bit of weight. This change in my lifestyle had a much bigger affect on my waist than going from jogging five miles a week over the winter to 30 or 40 miles a week training for the marathon. My conclusion from this is that (for me, at least) diet is more important than exercise.

Pete4779

sapper wrote: »

It definitely seems to make sense to me...I haven't lost any signicificant weight after 1 year of cycling 18 miles a day and continuing to go to the gym at lunch three times a week.

The only time I have ever really lost weight was when I went travelling in Asia and when I tried Atkins - ie. when I ate a lot less carbs

Perhaps a poll of all boardsie readers is called for like, "have you lost any significant weight since taking up cycling?"

After 6 months of 1 hr a day cycling, I dropped almost 20kg. Unfortunately, the opportunity to cycle that much every day stopped and I gained it all back because I didn't change eating habits. I don't even think it was six months - it was from mid September to January.

I'm back cycling now and going down in weight again.

Of the "healthy slim" Lance Armstrong types I've known, the action is that eating unhealthy food (e.g., chips) is an exception to the norm day to day of healthy. And likewise, they use excercise as part of the normal day and not an exception that is added to the norm of watching TV in the evening.

So any changes IMHO have to be made permanent, it has to be part of your day - I think I learned the hard way

niceonetom

Pete4779 wrote: »

After 6 months of 1 hr a day cycling, I dropped almost 20kg. Unfortunately, the opportunity to cycle that much every day stopped and I gained it all back because I didn't change eating habits. I don't even think it was six months - it was from mid September to January.

I'm back cycling now and going down in weight again.

Of the "healthy slim" Lance Armstrong types I've known, the action is that eating unhealthy food (e.g., chips) is an exception to the norm day to day of healthy. And likewise, they use excercise as part of the normal day and not an exception that is added to the norm of watching TV in the evening.

So any changes IMHO have to be made permanent, it has to be part of your day - I think I learned the hard way

My weight is totally seasonal. I'm at my lightest at about this time of year (11 stone dead) and i'll expect to be as much as a stone heavier by next march, then i'll lose it again. i'd say a lot of cyclists are the same though right?

rubadub

The problem, as he and his contemporaries saw it, is that light exercise burns an insignificant number of calories - amounts that are undone by comparatively effortless changes in diet. In 1942, Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan calculated that a 17st man expends only three calories climbing a flight of stairs - the equivalent of depriving himself of a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar or 100th of an ounce of butter. 'He will have to climb 20 flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread,' Newburgh observed. So why not skip the stairs, skip the bread, and call it a day?

Nothing surprising there, this is like the crap you hear like "coke has 52 teaspoons of sugar in it", trying to use figures to shock people, well skim milk has over 50% of the sugar as coke too, yet nobody gives a damn about that.

3kcal per flight of stairs. If I did 4 flights in a minute that is 3x4x60=720kcal per hour. Nothing remarkable there.

Why not skip the bread? I like bread and like the endorphin rush of exercise and the cardiovascular fitness it gives me. Louis probably was the 17 stone man in question trying to convince himself he is a fat mess for some other reason, and want to justify his choice to be a couch potato.

My weight is totally seasonal. I'm at my lightest at about this time of year (11 stone dead) and i'll expect to be as much as a stone heavier by next march, then i'll lose it again. i'd say a lot of cyclists are the same though right?

not just cyclists. I am out more in the summer exercising, and eat less. In the winter I stay in more, I eat more since I am at home more, but I conciously eat more to keep up immunity against the cold. And over christmas I will eat and drink like a horse. Seasonal weight changes make perfect sense to me.

blorg

As niceonetom says, it really is as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I've charted this when trying to lose weight myself and weight loss was pretty much exactly as predicted in the spreadsheet. The article points out, correctly, that if you exercise a lot you will feel hungrier, so it's important to track and control that if you are trying to use exercise to lose weight.

The problem, as he and his contemporaries saw it, is that light exercise burns an insignificant number of calories - amounts that are undone by comparatively effortless changes in diet.

This is also entirely true. It's a hell of a lot easier to wolf down 1,000 calories than to burn it back off again, and overall I would have to say diet is easier than excercise (exercise does however have other benefits, and you may enjoy it for it's own sake in a way you won't with a diet.)

niceonetom

blorg wrote: »

As niceonetom says, it really is as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I've charted this when trying to lose weight myself and weight loss was pretty much exactly as predicted in the spreadsheet. The article points out, correctly, that if you exercise a lot you will feel hungrier, so it's important to track and control that if you are trying to use exercise to lose weight.

This is also entirely true. It's a hell of a lot easier to wolf down 1,000 calories than to burn it back off again, and overall I would have to say diet is easier than excercise (exercise does however have other benefits, and you may enjoy it for it's own sake in a way you won't with a diet.)

thank you blorg. i bloody love being agreed with. here's the quote from the original article that so annoyed me:
"Humans, rats and all living organisms are ruled by biology, not thermodynamics."
eh, no. everything is ruled by thermodynamics. everything.

i know it's complicated, and our bodies will fight very hard to hold on to valuable reserves of calories (flab) and that we have evolved a mind-boggling array of physiological sympathetic feedback loops ill suited to the bounteous and sedentary times we live in. but marathon runners are not marathon runners because they are thin. they are thin because they are marathon runners.

i guess it's a matter of preference. if you don't want to be fat then you can eat a low-cal diet and sit OR eat like a pig and run/cycle/whatever like a bastard. i prefer the latter, but both work as strategies i suppose. either way the equation IN/OUT has to balance.

Ghost Rider

I thought the point was that causality is not just a one-way street. In other words, marathon runners are not simply thin because they run (which is true), but that their being thin also makes them WANT to run (which is also true). This isn't really a question about biology versus thermodynamics; it's a philosophical question about the nature of the will.

niceonetom wrote: »

but marathon runners are not marathon runners because they are thin. they are thin because they are marathon runners.

niceonetom

Ghost Rider wrote: »

I thought the point was that causality is not just a one-way street. In other words, marathon runners are not simply thin because they run (which is true), but that their being thin also makes them WANT to run (which is also true). This isn't really a question about biology versus thermodynamics; it's a philosophical question about the nature of the will.

this is getting a bit deep, in'it? well if you want to get philosophical about it...
I'm pretty sure that causality IS a one way street, that street being time itself. we can't cause anything retroactively. but the notion of 'cause and effect' has been seen by some as redundant as far back as Hume, and Bertrand Russell fairly demolished it in light of the temporal symmetry of all physical processes (except, of course, entropy). a positron can be accurately described as an electron travelling backwards through time, don'cha know. no, correlation is what we're left with.

and now to the nature of will: Nietzsche's arguements in favour of the "Der Wille zur Macht" (will to power) seem relevant to... o fucuk it's too early for this shizzle.... i'm going for a cycle before my shift starts. i had chinese and beer last night and i need to burn it off.

rp

blorg wrote: »

As niceonetom says, it really is as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I've charted this when trying to lose weight myself and weight loss was pretty much exactly as predicted in the spreadsheet.

Me too - but it's easy enough to monitor the calories burnt, but spreadsheeting your intake is hard (need an 'eat watch'), so I only did it for a few weeks, but the correlation was spookily accurate.

This is also entirely true. It's a hell of a lot easier to wolf down 1,000 calories than to burn it back off again, and overall I would have to say diet is easier than excercise (exercise does however have other benefits, and you may enjoy it for it's own sake in a way you won't with a diet.)

More than that: without exercise, diet lowers your metabolism so that even at rest you are burning less, so you have to diet more. The only effective diet is to hibernate.

Ghost Rider

I'm no physicist but, yes, I suppose I do want to want to get a bit philosophical about it (though hopefully without dragging too many others into my grubby little world).

When I implied causality was a two-way street, I wasn't thinking of it in the temporal sense. Nor was I trying to distinguish between deductive and inductive reasoning, as I think your references to Hume and Russell suggest.

I was thinking that cause and effect in this context might be better understood as being in a relationship a bit like a Hegelian dialectic. (You asked for this, dude.) This is probably just another way of saying the situation vis-a-vis the whole exercise-appetite-self-perception complex, with its intricate "feedback loops", is massively complicated. But I think it's to take it a step further to suggest that it may not be best understood (and perhaps not possible to understand) as underpinned by a simple, mechanistic, one-to-one notion of cause and effect.

In other words, a person doesn't just feel overweight and, of their own free will (i.e. cause) , make themselves exercise (i.e. effect). The exercise they subsequently do can itself subsequently become a cause by affecting how overweight they feel (sometimes without reference to the physical reality), thereby modifying the impules to exercise, perhaps even eliminating it!

(I put in that exclamation mark to introduce an entirely false sense of levity. It's only half ten and I just got out of a two hour meeting. My brain feels like a stale croissant.)

niceonetom wrote: »

this is getting a bit deep, in'it? well if you want to get philosophical about it...
I'm pretty sure that causality IS a one way street, that street being time itself. we can't cause anything retroactively. but the notion of 'cause and effect' has been seen by some as redundant as far back as Hume, and Bertrand Russell fairly demolished it in light of the temporal symmetry of all physical processes (except, of course, entropy). a positron can be accurately described as an electron travelling backwards through time, don'cha know. no, correlation is what we're left with.

and now to the nature of will: Nietzsche's arguements in favour of the "Der Wille zur Macht" (will to power) seem relevant to... o fucuk it's too early for this shizzle.... i'm going for a cycle before my shift starts. i had chinese and beer last night and i need to burn it off.

blorg

rp wrote: »

Me too - but it's easy enough to monitor the calories burnt, but spreadsheeting your intake is hard (need an 'eat watch'), so I only did it for a few weeks, but the correlation was spookily accurate.

I used www.calorie-count.com and a scales to help with that; it has nutritional values for just about anything and you can log everything. It includes a very handy recipe analyser that just lets you enter the ingredients to your dinner and it calculates and logs the nutrition. It quickly becomes apparent that some stuff really has next to no calories in it whatsoever while other stuff is loaded.

Ghost Rider

By the way, I agree with you on the latter strategy: not no-cal and no-effort, but high-cal and high-effort.

Sometimes, though, I end up eating AND cycling like a pig...

niceonetom wrote: »

i guess it's a matter of preference. if you don't want to be fat then you can eat a low-cal diet and sit OR eat like a pig and run/cycle/whatever like a bastard. i prefer the latter, but both work as strategies i suppose. either way the equation IN/OUT has to balance.

blorg

Ghost Rider wrote: »

... exercise-appetite-self-perception complex, with its intricate "feedback loops", is massively complicated. ... may not be best understood (and perhaps not possible to understand) as underpinned by a simple, mechanistic, one-to-one notion of cause and effect.

It is precisely _because_ of these intricate feedback loops that it is essential to monitor in/out objectively if you are aiming to lose weight. Because at the end of the day reducing calorie surplus will result in weight loss. Thing is, with the feedback, uncounted binging at weekends, unrecorded small but high-calorie snacks, etc. it is very easy to get into a situation where you think you are cutting massively but actually are not.

Ghost Rider

Exceptional vigilance is definitely required.

To my mind, the single greatest thing a person can do to lose weight is to ensure their exercise routine is psychologically sustainable. Whether you do that by ensuring the exercise is enjoyable or join a club that exerts a certain social pressure on you to keep it up - I'm sure there are lots of methods. But whatever you can do to stop that little demon idea creeping into your head and whispering "Look: you've done enough. Now sit back, forget about weight loss for a while and get stuffing yourself" is essential.

A similarly confounding process happens to people who try to quit smoking, although it's far more insidious. You stop smoking for a few days and then, just as you've proved to yourself that not smoking is achievable, the urge to quit seems to retreat and you quit quitting i.e. you go straight back on the smokes.

blorg wrote: »

It is precisely _because_ of these intricate feedback loops that it is essential to monitor in/out objectively if you are aiming to lose weight. Because at the end of the day reducing calorie surplus will result in weight loss. Thing is, with the feedback, uncounted binging at weekends, unrecorded small but high-calorie snacks, etc. it is very easy to get into a situation where you think you are cutting massively but actually are not.

blorg

High-cal high-effort is fine for maintaining weight but is difficult for weight loss. One of the main problems with this strategy is that if you drop your effort (torrential rain for a month, whatever) it is very likely that you will not make a corresponding drop in your intake- with predictable results.

Ghost Rider

Good point. Our climate generally suits the approach, though.

blorg wrote: »

High-cal high-effort is fine for maintaining weight but is difficult for weight loss. One of the main problems with this strategy is that if you drop your effort (torrential rain for a month, whatever) it is very likely that you will not make a corresponding drop in your intake- with predictable results.

rubadub

The thermodynamics/calories thing is sort of right to a degree (but it is a good estimate so should be used IMO). I have studied physics in college and have calculated calories of substances. The definition of calories refers to its energy per gram. To calculate this you burn a fixed mass of a substance, this in turn heats a fixed mass of water. The energy required to raise a volume of water by a certain temperature is known so energy can be calculated from this.

So if you get 100g of chocolate and burn it and it heats 100ml of water from 20C to 60C, then it has raised by 40C. If you burn 100g of chicken and the temp goes from 20C to 40C then it is raised 20C. Therefore the chicken has 1/2 the calorific value of chocolate.

Calorific values are better applied to fuels, used in calculation for efficiencies of engines. e.g. 100ml of petrol should in theory raise say 100ml of water by 50C, but may be put in an inefficient burner and only raise it 25C, so its efficiency is only 50%.

Problem is your body is not burning/combusting fuel. Therefore the calorific values of food are only a rough guide. And since no better energy valuation system has been developed people use it. The weightwatcher point system is a different way of trying to estimate the energy humans get from food (I dont like it, figures too rounded and needs calculation). So a food with 2 points, might have more or less than 1/2 the calories of one with 4 points.

The calories system for humans does work fairly well, I use it, and other posters report good results. Some foods might give more energy, others less, but overall it seems to even out. If you went on some bizarre one food diet it might show up more. Alcohol for instance has been shown in studies not to put on the same fat per calorific value as sugar drinks. i.e. they had 2 test groups, both on the same food diets, one drinking maybe 500kcal alcohol, the other 500kcal sugar drinks. The alcohol group put on less weight.

I have noticed this empirically myself, I used to drink like a fish, and if I did the math of 3500kcal = 1lb fat, I should have been massive. I have seen this with many people I know. I know people who were 8pints a day consistently for months at a time, who ate well too, that is 3.2lb per week from booze alone. 2 guys I know were underweight while doing this.

If I drank 3500kcal of petrol or ate 3500kcal worth of fire lighters I would not expect to put on 1lb of fat!

In other threads people were saying this could be due to insulin spikes in the sugar drinkers etc. But that is just agreeing with the point, calories from different sources can have different effects on the body.

6 small meals a day is said to boost the metabolism. If I eat 6x500kcal meals rather than 2x1500kcal meals- the food being the exact same- then I will probably put on less fat doing it in 6 meals.

Calories are still the best way IMO. Other methods would require intensive research, e.g. feeding a lad 3000kcal of chocolate per day and measuring fat increase. But interaction between foods will also have effects, and timing of eating and portion size etc.

As mentioned it is easier to eat 1000kcal than burn it off. If I wanted a 1000kcal deficit I would find it far easier to eat 500kcal less, and exercise 500kcal more. This is probably better for your system too.

The article doesn’t mention the effect of muscle growth either, if I do 1 hour per week of weight training in the gym or cardio I can work off 500kcal. But with weights my body is growing new muscle, this uses calories on the off days, and increases my basal metabolism in the long run, since the new muscle requires energy just to be maintained. That is why I would highly recommend weight training for fat loss, and probably why I see most people on forums who successfully lost weight AND kept it off are doing lots of resistance training, some doing little or no cardio at all.

Pete4779

rubadub wrote: »

That is why I would highly recommend weight training for fat loss, and probably why I see most people on forums who successfully lost weight AND kept it off are doing lots of resistance training, some doing little or no cardio at all.

That's true, but the inherent unhealthy state of your heart and lungs with being overweight improves more with cardio than weights - so a combination of proper diet, cardio and weights all in the magic balance is probably the best combo.

For me, I always found that cycling like a mother****er was the best way to get weight off, but I think that it does develop some leg muscle through that anyway and also involves a lot of isometric (i think that's the correct type but not sure) muscle contraction with your arms.