https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQbuzsY_34QSo here’s an old YouTube video from 2009 that I’d saved because it makes the point brilliantly. Ignore the slight sales pitch at the start. The video highlights an incredibly important and easy to understand point that some people on this thread have already mentioned. Your weight loss is a dietary issue, not an exercise issue.
In this video you’ll see a guy who starts running on the treadmill at roughly 55 seconds into the video. He runs at 10.5 miles per hour on a 0.5 incline. He keeps running until around 3 minutes and 20 seconds into the video. That’s a total of 145 seconds of running. In that time he burns roughly 42 calories according to the treadmill. That may or may not be totally accurate, but it’s accurate enough.
That’s 0.29 calories per second which would be somewhere in the region of 1040 calories at hour. That might sounds great, but running at 10.5 miles per hour for an entire hour without stopping is something 99% of the population will not be able to do. Ever. They don’t have the desire to put in the years of training to get there, and unless they are some kind of competitive athlete, they probably don’t have the time. I’m guessing you don’t have the time either.
On the other hand look at the guy eating the pizza and drinking the root beer. He’s no desperately trying to cram it down as fast as he can, but in the same 145 seconds, he eats 800 calories. Now it might actually only be 400 calories or it could be 1000. It doesn’t matter. You get the point. Consuming calories is quick and effortless. Burning them off afterward is incredibly strenuous and time consuming. If you’re continually overeating, even by just a little, you will be wasting time and effort thinking that you can just quickly burn off the excess within 20 minutes of light, borderline pointless exercise.
People will often say that they have friends who are in great shape and they exercise all the time, or they will point to Olympic athletes etc. and say how they train for hours a day and they are in great shape, so I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Imagine you could spend all day, every day with an Olympic athlete of your choice for an entire 7 day week. I don’t care if it’s a sprinter, a long distance runner, a rower, swimmer, diver, gymnast or weightlifter. What do you think the CONTENT of their diets would look like? I’m not talking about portion size. Some of them will eat relatively large portions in order to fuel lengthy workouts. I’m talking about CONTENT i.e. what they actually eat.
Do you think you’d see any of those athletes eating cookies, chips, fries, burgers, chocolate, pizza, cakes, ice cream or pastries? I doubt it. Would you see them drinking Coca-Cola, Wine, or Beer? I doubt it.
The analogy I like to use with food consumption is that it’s like filling your car up with gas.
Even if the gas tank on your car was completely empty, how long would it take you to fill it to the brim at the gas station? I’ve never timed it, but when I’m at the gas station, I would estimate that it takes me no more than about 2 minutes to fill my car up.
Now, how long do you think it takes me to burn that gas off? Hours. Lots of hours.
Either many consecutive hours on a single day of driving across the country on highways, or many weeks if I just make the occasional short journey around my local area where I live. Either way, the cumulative time spent driving will be HOURS.
Gas – Only minutes needed to put it into your car, but hours needed to burn it off.
Food – only minutes or seconds needed to put it into your body, but hours needed to burn it off.
The point I’m attempting to make is that if burning calories is your main reason for wanting to start exercising, don’t bother. You’re wasting your time. Concentrate instead on your diet i.e. putting fewer calories into your body in the first place.
If however you’re exercising because you enjoy it and it makes you feel good and you’re doing it for other health benefits associate with it, then by all means continue.
Before anyone says anything – the only reason any diet works is because it reduces your calorie intake. I don’t care if it’s Atkins, SouthBeach or some other low carb, low sugar fad. Whatever the current trend is, somewhere, somehow the diet will have a mechanism built into it that reduces your calorie intake. It may not say that explicitly, but if doesn’t reduce your calorie intake, then it can’t possibly work.
All this say no to sugar stuff makes me laugh. It’s as if people have spent years pouring bags of sugar into their mouths and are now being told to stop. Nonsense. They’ve been consuming sugar in the form of things like donuts, candy bars and crappy soft drinks.
So wait, you’ve needed the anti-sugar/low carb diet movement to come along and tell you that eating too many donuts and candy bars will make you fat?
That’s not a sugar or carb issue, that’s a calorie issue. You don’t need to get overly complex and vilify certain ingredients or macro nutrients.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/a-science-teacher-lost-37-pounds-from-an-experiment-where-heAlso – Remember the craze for workouts like Insanity, Beachbody and P90X that were fronted by people like Shaun T? They had you jumping around like an idiot doing things like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLK28BHJDd8Well, it’s never talked about in the infomercials but these workouts also come with a diet plan. If you look at the diet plan it has people eating things like fruit, vegetables, lean protein and brown rice in small quantities and drinking nothing but water. If you don’t follow these corresponding diet plans, you won’t achieve the fat loss they promote in the infomercials. But why don’t they talk about the diet plans in the infomercials? Because they aren’t good marketing. You can’t sell basic common sense eating like your grandmother would have done. But what does sell, is rock hard abs, glistening with sweat in the sun after the most awesomely intense fat burning workout that you’ll ever experience etc etc. What a load of shit. The diet plan alone would get you 90% of the results.
Modern scientific studies have now shown that the daily energy expenditure of African tribesmen to be the same as Western office workers. The difference is energy intake.
In 2019 you can walk into a convenience store, slap $2 on the counter (which is nothing, even if you’re on minimum wage) and you can purchase about 1000 calories of utter shit.
In 1919, you’d have been lucky to have enough calories to get through the day without feeling at least somewhat hungry most of the time and $2 would have a been a big deal to anyone. Back then, the majority of the foods and restaurants we have today didn’t exist. Pizza, donuts, candy bars, ice cream, McDonalds, Subway, Dominos, KFC etc. It’s not inactivity that makes you fat, it’s too many calories.
The best form of exercise is weight training/resistance training/strength training. Call it what you like. Why? Because inactivity, whilst it doesn’t make you fat, does make you lose muscle, strength and bone density. Spend time reading about what sarcopenia is and what it does to you as you age. Realise that every human on the planet is affected by this. Then realise that cardio/aerobics don’t address those issues and may actually exacerbate them.
Weight training works like saving for retirement. Start at age 60, you might be too late. Start at 20, 30 or 45 and never stop (30 minutes 2 or 3 times a week is all you need) and you could reach the age of 70 with more muscle, strength, vitality and physical capability than an untrained 50 year old.
Think of anyone you know who is obviously old and frail. That’s sarcopenia and its cousins, osteopenia and osteoporosis in action right there. What they are suffering from isn’t lack of running, lack of walking, lack of swimming, cycling or boxercise. They don’t have the physical strength to even consider doing any of those things. What the lack is strength. Muscles are what allow us to move. They allow us to exert force to move things or resist forces placed upon us. Many elderly people don’t have the physical strength to get out of a chair unaided, walk up a flight of stairs or do things like get dressed or stand up for more than a few minutes at a time.
Society sees this as “What happens when you get old.” But it’s not. It’s what happens when you do no deliberate resistance training for you entire life. I’ve been involved in online communities where people who do a couple of short workouts a week over the long term (think of the parallels with saving a high % of what you earn and investing it) end up looking and feeling half their age.
I’m not talking about CrossFit, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting or bodybuilding. I’m just talking about sensible and safe, basic weight training. Yes, it involves many of the same exercises and equipment that the aforementioned may use, but the execution doesn’t have to be anything like them. Also, you don’t have to take large doses or steroids. The image of incredibly muscular, borderline manly physiques on female CrossFit competitors is the kind of thing that turns many uninformed women away from weight training and that is tragic. They believe that they will automatically begin to look like that if they even lift weights for a week. Ladies, let me tell you, you couldn’t get like that if you tried. Not without steroids.
If you’re over 40, particularly if you’re a woman, you owe it to yourself to begin weight training because it will stop you from wasting away.
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I think I’m done.