To explain that exercise does not affect your weight, or impact on obesity rates

[allmyown]

I see this misconception all over MN every day.

Exercise is fantastic for your physical and mental health in many ways, but it is not a weight loss tool.

Posters are forever quoting energy in -minus energy out = energy stored, etc, as if we are petrol engines or something! we are not - this is not how our body works.

It is more like energy available / energy required to maintain weight= energy body decides to use.

Your body burns off excess energy if you are taking in more than your homeostatic systems think you need. Your body slows down and uses far less energy if you have taken in less than your homeostatic system thinks you need.

And so if you lose weight, and go below what your body wants you to be, then your metabolism will just slow down massively to make the weight go back on. And if you exercise a lot, your metabolism will just adjust to accommodate that.

The key to weight loss is making sure your homeostatic systems decide you should be a healthy weight. You can lower the weight your homeostatic systems is attempting to maintain, with healthy eating, cut out sugar, HPF, vegetable oil, margarine, and cut down on wheat.

Eat plenty of fresh food and greens, nothing long dated.

Unless you are running 10K every single day, you are not exercising enough to change your weight, and even if you are, it won't stay changed.

The obesity epidemic is related to sugar, highly processed food, vegetable oil, margarine, etc, and poor diet in general, not too little exercise.

But don't get me wrong, there are other health problems caused by too little exercise, I am not saying exercise is bad, just that an obese child is not necessarily a child getting inadequate exercise, as so many people seem to think.

Read "Why we eat too much" by Andrew Jenkinson, he explains the up to date science in so much more detail.

How do you know you actually burn 400 cals? A Fitbit? Everybody’s body is different.

Which is why you spend time plugging in your overall weight, body fat %, height etc into the fitness app so the output data is more tailored to you. Throw in a chest strap heart rate monitor for more accurate data and you are well on your way to obtaining reasonably good data sets.

It’s of course only an estimate but for me it has worked very well both for weight loss and maintaining.

I first used a cheap Chinese fitness watch and now I have a Polar. Both worked for the purpose although I have always taken these estimates with a grain of salt and never eaten to the point of implosion just because my Polar told me I burned some calories.

It's tailored for age and weight, heart rate and cardio fitness so it's a pretty good estimate.

I have used watches with actual heart rate straps in the past and the stats are similar.

Also interesting to see how my cardio fitness has improved.

If the woman was older and post menopausal then she would have to be only a few hundred calories to see any difference

As a post menopausal 17 stone woman I had to reduce my calories to be sub 500 calories to lose weight (according to my basal calorie intake) if I didn’t exercise

Diagnosed with ADHD and lost 5 stone by only eating under 500 calories per day

Got a job at the start of the year where I regularly walk 40,000 steps per day every single day and the weight has gone even lower. Despite now eating pretty much what I want and sometimes more when I know I can’t stop for a break for a few hours

Of course exercise helps you lose weight

I think the biggest thing people don’t seem to understand about weight is the difference between men and women and hormones

Men can reduce their calories by 500 calories per day and lose weight steadily

A woman of the same age could do the same and depending on the time of the month her weight loss wouldn’t be so linear

Post Menopausal and you have to do something drastic to lose weight. It’s like a light switch where one day you are eating your usual breakfast lunch and dinner and being the same weight and then almost over night your weight goes up and suddenly you have a belly and are a stone or 2 more and other factors come into play such as insomnia and hot flashes and short of a drastic lifestyle change it becomes harder and harder to lose the weight or feel like losing weight

Out of interest, I wore my daughter's Fitbit today along with my Samsung watch. If calories burned during exercise and activity are just made up then surely the two would make up entirely different numbers?

They both measure my heart rate, walking speed, and distance and my Samsung watch also measures my body composition and temp.

Samsung says I have burned an extra 1200 calories from being active, 800 of which are from exercise (it auto logs some walks as exercise and not others, I assume it's something to do with my heart rate or walking speed or distance only 149 calories came from an actual workout I told it to log as exercise).

Fitbit says I have burned 1109 calories from walking (it doesn't log exercise calories separately, I don't think. I don't have the app.)

They're both close enough to convince me there is some actual science behind the numbers and I am, in fact, burning calories from moving.

Also, this dude has never met anyone over 40 just in case you were wondering...

People who claim their bodies "don't lose weight like everyone else":

The first law of thermodynamics is one of the universe's fundamental principles. it states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. Calories are units of energy. Your body requires energy to perform work. This is why we eat food.

On average human bodies burn around 2000 calories each day. Therefore, we eat 2000 calories to maintain normal functioning. If we eat 2500 calories, 2000 will be converted to energy to perform work, and 500 will be converted to fat and stored for use at a later date. When we eat 1500, all of this is burned, and our body metabolises 500 calories of stored fat to make up the deficit.

There are of course individual differences in how our bodies work. For example, when we eat too much sugar over a long period of time, not only do we put weight on but our bodies stop using the sugar as efficiently (reduced insulin receptivity). Therefore, not only does weight increase, but our bodies crave more sugar and it is even harder to lose weight. This can explain why some people put weight on more easily than others, but in reality the vast majority of reason why people put on weight is they eat more than they need.

Therefore, people who claim their bodies don't work like everyone else's, then their are two possibilities. Either their bodies must exist outside the fundamental laws of the universe, or they are eating too much/not exercising enough.

The 2000 cal average is misleading to some as they don’t know what average means. If you’re 5ft 5 and under you need more like 1500.

Wait till you get to menopause.

i think calories in v calories out is fine if you are male but being female and hormones do play a huge part in weight loss or non weight loss

If they didn’t then women who eat and exercise exactly the same as when they were 20 wouldn’t put on weight at menopause

How many 60 year old women can lose weight like a 20 year old man

To be fair, I've always taken pause at people who claim they cannot eat more then X amount of calories or they gain weight.

Hormones play a part, I agree but not to the extent that you can only eat 500 calories a day. Hormones mostly cause "weight gain" via increases to appetite and water retention. They do not magically allow your body to function on fresh air.

Your brain, heart, and lungs use more than 500 calories a day to function normally. If you're eating 500 calories a day and not losing weight then you're either in a coma and have not realised or you're not measuring your calories/food properly and are actually eating a lot more than that.

It is biologically impossible for your body to function normally without energy and calories are just units of energy. If you take in less energy than you expend you will lose weight. Men lose quicker because their body composition is different and they generally require more energy to function normally.

I don't think calories change how they work once you hit menopause. I think the energy requirements of a menopausal woman are different to those of a 20 year old man because their bodies are different (fat stores, metabolism, insulin resistance).

FWIW, I am menopausal. I have never needed to lose weight so maybe I am not best placed to comment, but I haven't noticed a change. I exercise a lot, I eat pretty well and I weigh the same as I have done (give or take) all my adult life.
Sure, my skin has aged and I've had two children so my shape has changed a bit. I am doing more strength training to improve my bone health and I've struggled with some injuries so I've had to modify my exercise patterns, but that's ageing.

If they didn’t then women who eat and exercise exactly the same as when they were 20 wouldn’t put on weight at menopause

Because of changes to body composition and activity levels. Muscle uses more energy per kilo than fat and as we age we naturally lose muscle mass which changes our BMR, although not by anything as drastic as 1500 calories a day. Our activity levels also naturally decrease. We're not out with friends as much walking about, we move up the chain in our careers meaning we spend more time behind a desk and less time physically moving around the workplace, our children grow and leave home so we have less housework to keep us moving, etc. Activity is about a lot more than just traditional exercise. Day-to-day living uses more energy than going to the gym. Like I said up the thread I used 1200 calories just moving about as part of my normal daily routine yesterday. Only 149 of those calories came from exercise.

You can mitigate these changes by staying active and incorporating strength training into your routine to minimise muscle loss.

Our activity levels also naturally decrease

Mine are increasing! I'm a lone parent but now buggerlugs is old enough to leave alone I'm able to go out A LOT more. So I do.
Moving up professionally goes along side the flexibility to manage my own time.

I would say my least active time was when each of my children were very young and I was working full time. I was also probably at my thinnest and most unhealthy (tired, emotionally drained).

Some ridiculous generalisations here!
Most women in their late 40s and 50s are more active because they have more time to go out walking and out with friends etc because the kids have got older and less reliant on their parents. The age where most women notice it becoming more difficult to lose weight is around 45 - 50. I’m not sure where you’re working where people who still have 20 years until retirement are slowing down and moving less at work! 😂

There has been recent research that “menopause metabolism” doesn’t have much of an impact.

i know for myself menopause has nothing to do with it, it’s simply I’m less active. Sedentary job, online shopping, car. Even if I go to the gym everyday it doesn’t counter the loss of NEAT.

in my 20’s with no kids I had to walk/cycle everywhere. Work was a lot less sedentary as I had to physically get up and get stuff/speak to people. None of this teams and online delivery of materials. Work was in a town so out for lunch, coffee runs etc. now I’m on an industrial estate and eat at my desk.

my eating habits are better than ever. But the reason I find it harder to lose weight in my 40’s is because I don’t move as much.

i also think that women get more sedentary with kids. Then when they do get the chance to pick up activity again they don’t have the fitness they did in their 20’s and it’s hard. I used to think nothing of cycling to the gym, circuit class, cycling to work, cycling home, walking to the shops etc.

now I haven’t done that for so long I’ll need to practically get in training to maintain that level of activity. And it’s mentally hard to force yourself.

I have read some interesting things on this thread that I didn’t know, such as the capacity of the immune system to be less active and save calories. So, thanks for those, it is always nice to learn something new!

But, fundamentally, calories are a measure of energy and they either have to be burned (mostly thermogenesis and movement) or used to form chemical bonds (fat storage).

Ultimately, it is (subject to small energy economies) calories in and calories out. That is Physics and Chemistry (the fat bit), without having to resort to biological mechanisms.

I read somewhere that 3,000 calories was equal to a pound of fat so, to lose weight, you need to do a decent amount of exercise, but if you think of a workout as 300 calories (that is a fairly light workout) and do it 3 times a week, it will make a difference in the margin (900 calories equals 0.3lbs/week, which is a stone a year roughly).

If you do something like train for a half marathon, you will be making a huge difference!

Of course, if you then add 1,000 extra calories, which is tempting to do, that takes away the weight benefit, although not any of the other important benefits of exercise.

It doesn't play a "huge part". Sure as we age our metabolism slows, and therefore, holding calories constant, we have a tendency to gain weight as we age.

However, there is a simple solution to this - eat a bit less, or exercise a bit more.

Likewise, our body requires energy to create estrogen (steroid hormones are synthesised from fat), and therefore when we no longer produce this hormone, our body used less energy. However, I'd doubt if this process requires more than a teaspoon of sugar a day. Sure, this translates to a kilo of fat over a year, but if you find your weight creeping up, just eat less it's not rocket science.

I’m repeatedly hearing about the weight gain during perimenopause and after menopause.
From what I’ve read it’s the fat distribution that changes, the extra weight is not appearing out of the blue, it still needs to come from excess food. Oestrogen makes us store fat on hips, once it’s lacking we are more likely to grow belly fat. I noticed this, between 40 and 45 I gained about 6 kilograms and for the first time in my life the extra weight ended up in front of me.

I have, however, managed to get rid of it despite definitely being perimenopausal. Found out by accident during diagnostic hysteroscopy so I have a paper to prove it 😁.

Yes I agree with that. I’ve been a pear all my life and even after 2 chn I had a pretty flat abdominal area. I’m 53 , post menopause and now notice that if I put a few pounds on, it’s not on my hips but my lower abdomen.

Sorry, but not quite true. Some people have endocrine disorders. Their bodies do not work the same as the average person.
For example, I once had a severe thyroid disorder which caused me to lose 25 pounds in three months while eating more than I normally did.
Otoh, with low thyroid, the opposite happens. You put on weight without changing your diet or activity. Then there is PCOS, which also causes weight gain with no change in diet or activity. Adrenal gland disorders can also effect weight.
While the majority of people aren't overweight because they have those problems, they are more common than most people realize.

Yeah, it's probably a
ballpark figure for a man of average height. It's not applicable to most women.

no you are not, this is all nonsense. You need to be tested in a lab to get any idea of you metabolic rate, this is just throwing numbers into a formula that calculates a vague average. There are huge differences in individuals. You need to have the carbon dioxide entering and exiting your body measures, over 12 hours or so, to get an accurate idea.

You are completely misunderstanding the difference between a machine and a living body. There are literally thousands of variables in a living body. Your metabolism adjusts. For example, if you take in fewer calories, your body spends fewer calories on the immune system, or maintains a temperature 0.25 degrees lower, or similar. And if you take in more, then the body uses more, whether you exercise or not