Does exercise really not help with weight loss?

Maybe exercise can’t totally out train a bad diet but if someone is doing cardio a few times a week, plus getting their steps in everyday and also being generally quite active, walking lots and running round after kids etc, then I would think their diet would have to be extremely bad to be putting weight on.

Ideally weight loss would be slow and steady and most importantly sustainable. So many people seem to lose loads on slimming world but a year or two later most has crept back on. A small calorie deficit, created using a combination of an exercise you enjoy, plus small changes to diet and ultimately sticking with it consistently will see you lose weight and hopefully keep it off.

Re bread & butter...

I don't know anyone sane who would only have one of those dinky butter pats. You can barely taste the butter if only 1 pat. If you want to taste the butter, you need 2 pats.

Apparently the avg UK person has 3 slices of bread/day.

It's funny how bread & butter went out of fashion. it was the default snack food when I was a kid, especially for hungry teenagers. I thought MN was teeming with low carb people would just have 500 kcal of butter, forget the bread.

ps: DH does not eat 7000 kcal every day. Or even most days. Only on the days he does things like cycle 200 miles. Because his calorie needs vary with activity levels.

Yeah I definitely don't agree with that. I can eat much more on days when I exercise hard without putting any weight on (one of the reasons I do!)

Out of interest I’ve had a quick look for H Pontzner’s academic papers:

This one seems to contradict the claims in his book:

Results: Tsimane have higher RMR and TEE than people in sedentary industrialized populations. Tsimane RMR is 18 to 47% (women) and 22 to 40% (men) higher than expected using six standard prediction equations. Tsimane mass-corrected TEE is similarly elevated compared to Westerners.

So resting metabolic rates are higher in this amazonian foraging population than sedentary westerners.

The thing with studies like that is measuring metabolism is ridiculously complicated. I’d like to know how they measured the calorie burn of these hunter gatherer tribes

Basic observation would say different. Professional athletes aren’t fat. Marathon runners aren’t fat. People who exercise are generally slimmer than people who sit on their arses.

www.today.com/health/exercise-weight-loss-why-diet-more-important-lose-weight-t212045

This research suggests that it doesn’t matter how much you exercise, you basically burn the same amount of calories. Your body just ends up burning less on other things. I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard the guy on the radio the other week and it really depressed me!

The NEAT bit is really interesting. I've tended to call it incidental / informal exercise. I'm fortunate to live near the core of community facilities and prior to March 2020, I'd walk up and down the road about 16 times per week between school and activities. At a typical 500m, it's not a lot in its own right, but added up to about 8k/ 5mi per week... actually roughly 500 calories. And with my rubbish time keeping, those frequent bursts are brisk!

With the various restrictions this year, I'm down to it being 5k/ 3mi, 300 cals. When school has been off and that burst of movement lost, I've gained weight, partly in itself, partly more time sitting on my arse refaining from bashing my head into the table from the frustration of home learning and spending hours in the same room as the food cupboards with ravenous reluctant learners
That 5 miles lost is a fairly significant burst of exercise. Most people shuffle up the scales year after year on those small calorie surpluses, and frequent exercise/ bursts of movement are good for managing that without resorting to some form of dietary abstainence. I have generally kept up the running in this time, but without cross-training classes or full access to the osteopath, it's far harder to replace that lost NEAT with formal exercise.

It's tricky to use exercise to create enough deficit to out-run diet as our appetites adjust. While my appetite is dented on the day I do a long, hard run, my body is keen to eat much of the energy back the next day.

For dramatic, motivating weight loss, it is about diet. Exercise can interfere with complictions such as water retention as muscles recover. The density of muscles compared to fat make it more condusive to seeing results by the tape measure rathee than scales. But diet alone can reduce muscle density and cause a lower TDEE long term at the maintainence stage and making it harder to avoid regaining the loss. Toned bodies are stronger and attractive and have a higher metabolic rate.
While substantial weight loss needs to come from diet, it is always better long term to build exercise into a healthy lifestyle.

I used to joke that running allowed me to eat the nice stuff (as a shortie, my sedentary TDEE looks depressingly like a permanent low calorie diet of 1400 per day) but the last year has proved that to be true.

The thing is when I look up activities on the old Google it says you can burn XXXX. When I do it I burn less than half. Think adverts exaggerate the burn by basing it on a 16stone rugby playing male.

I don't think anyone is trying to say that it's not basically calories in v. calories out. Just that it's perfectly possible to reduce your calories through exercise rather than diet.

Well I do an hours turbo every morning and my gadget tells me I burn about 500 calories. That coupled with intermittent fasting I’ve lost 2 stone and kept it off

The easiest way to reduce calorie intake is by eating less.

But the easiest way to burn calories is exercise. Some of the forms of exercise I'd happily do all day. And have to remind myself to eat something as I genuinely don't get hungry.
In general I've tried to get out of the habit of eating high calorie low value snacks - crisps, doughnuts etc - so that when I am hungry I'm not undoing all the good work in 5 seconds. Bread and butter is the last bastion to defeat!

It definitely is calories in vs calories out but in practice that's surprisingly hard to work out.

You need to count very accurately as it's easy to underestimate and that is so boring and time consuming measuring and weighing everything that lots of people just won't be able to stick to it. Hence the popularity of IF which means you reduce calories without the faff of counting. Most diets are basically a way of tricking you into eating less calories overall and the one that works best for you is the one you can stick to.

Your body has all kinds of mechanisms to keep the status quo and will subtly try to stop you losing weight because through most of human history losing weight was a bad thing. Hence the NEAT reduction when dieting.

If it was so easy to do then more people would succeed.

Exercise definitely helps to control weight. You are literally burning off calories. I enjoy my food, wine & beer and I try to eat healthily most of the time, but I only have so much self-discipline so if I didn’t do plenty of exercise I would find it impossible to maintain a healthy weight. In my experience, the same is true of most people over 30.

I love how we're all eating bread and butter though. For me it's because it's the only snack left in the house (apart from dark chocolate which is obviously medicinal) 🤔

It helps weight loss in combination with a healthy diet, but most of the consistently slim people I know are active on a daily basis, even if it’s just walking lots.

And of course exercise is very good for almost every aspect of your health: reduces cancer risk, improves cardiovascular health, reduces risk of high blood pressure and diabetes, great for mental health.

My bread is 117 per slice.
Butter is 9 cals per gram and I have 10g per slice which is quite thick. I have been known to have more but I do try to keep it down.
So that's 207 per slice.
I try very hard not to add honey too!

Exercise is great for physical health and mental health. For weight loss the benefits are usually overestimated.

Exercise will certainly burn calories. But many people overestimate the amount of calories burned. There’s also the double-hit of exercise making you hungry.

Sadly, although many won’t accept it, weight loss is a simple calories in/calories burned calculation for most people. The easiest way to reduce calorie intake is by eating less.

I believe it's over simplified to count exact calories from exercise, but the secondary benefits to metabolism, wellbeing, stress etc must help the overall effort, especially for people who don't already exercise.

2 x 40g bread is 200
40g butter is about 280

My bread is 160 for 2 slices.

The spread I use is 700/100g, so 10g is 70 cals. I leave it out of the fridge and use a thin spread.

40g is a load of butter. When you look at the 25g markings on a butter block it’s a big chunk- a 6th of a pack.

No way would I use a 250g pack of butter in six days just on two slices of toast every day.

AyyMacarena It obviously did help. But, I honestly don't think I'd have lost weight if I hadn't have got into running. I'm 41 with an underactive thyroid, so 5:2 wouldn't really have given me a huge calorie deficit without exercise, especially as I didn't count calories at all on the non fasting days.

Ok I do like quite a lot on when having bread and butter. But I honestly reckon that most people would be nearer 20g per slice than 10g per slice (Unless as part of a sandwich)

@TheHoundsofLove you started with 5:2, that's a big calorie deficit which will have been the reason for your weight loss. It honestly helps more than everyone things.

@Zig4zag

Ok I know someone will come back saying 40g is loads but it's not as much as you think. Weigh bread, spread normally, reweigh.

I’m going to be that someone I do that weighing/reweighing thing - and I use about 9g of butter per slice of bread. 40g is loads.