I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of a morning routine of 15 minutes of exercise at home, targeting the pelvic muscles. The only equipment required is a floor mat, if the floor is hard. I started gently and naturally progressed to a higher level, taking the attitude that there is no hurry, because I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life, so there is plenty of time to progress. My initial routine was just lying on my back trying to tighten my pelvic muscles without hurting. Three years later I'm up to front/back/left/right planks interleaved with stretching.
I don't mean to be smug, as back pain really is an individual thing. There's an element of searching for what works, and I was lucky in that I was pointed directly towards an effective treatment.
This result was science based, in that I was treated by a general practitioner who specialised in back pain and insisted on an evidence based approach. (This doctor also wrote the manual for NSW's worker's compensation scheme and lectures at a major university on the topic.)
Edit: My doctor's rule was "pain free exercise". Go as far as you can, but stop if hurts. A test of whether you've really overdone it is whether the new pain goes away overnight. He also reckoned that it would be difficult to do a further injury whilst doing exercises, as the pain would make me self limiting.
Further edit: My initial physio, and a cortisone injection, at the time of injury, weren't aimed at a long term fix, but at providing enough temporary pain relief to begin exercising.
> I don't mean to be smug, as back pain really is an individual thing. There's an element of searching for what works, and I was lucky in that I was pointed directly towards an effective treatment.
I think this is extremely important for everyone to remember. People tend to (correctly) scoff at anecdotal experience, but often that's all you can work with. When studying health problems, most studies will tend to find the "best" thing overall for a varied group of people, but basically forces the solution to be the lowest common denominator. You see this all the time with different diet studies, were people "prove" that some diets are better than others. Of course the true answer is that there is no solution that's best for everyone.
Really you need to experiment and just learn a lot about your body. For example, I've been able to rid myself of my back problems by running. If I stop running for a few weeks all my really painful back problems start to come back. Since I mentioned the diet example earlier, I should point out that for myself the most effective way to lose weight is basically just starvation. I exercise a lot and track calories and only consume between 1500 and 2000 a day (I probably need at least 2500 a day and maybe closer to 3000). It's always been much easier for me to just be constantly hungry for a couple months than to play different diet games and figure out which foods are most filling.
You need to learn to listen to your body.
> My doctor's rule was "pain free exercise". Go as far as you can, but stop if hurts.
1000 times this! If I'm running in form, I'll probably run 6 days a week, but I've learned to just quit if I feel acute pain or if my muscles are very tight and I can't get them to loosen. You gotta know when to fight your battles. An injury today means no exercise for a while and that's way worse than whatever gains you'll get by continuing.
"I should point out that for myself the most effective way to lose weight is basically just starvation. I exercise a lot and track calories and only consume between 1500 and 2000 a day (I probably need at least 2500 a day and maybe closer to 3000)"
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but this is the only effective way to lose weight. If your body needs 2500 calories a day and you eat 2000 you'll lose ~1lb a week.
Sorry my point was more that I'm okay going at a 1000 calorie daily deficit and that I just accept the inevitable hunger. This differs from many approaches which seem to chase the holy grail of finding food that's very filling, but also very low in calories and usually not going for that extreme a calorie deficit.
Put another way, mine is the stubborn bull-headed weightloss plan. Basically I just try to climb the mountain the fastest and most painful way and then be done with it.
Agree that weight/load is an issue. In my experience, a measurable side effect of a daily routine is some weight loss, which if nothing else provides motivation for continuing.
Weight loss isn't "known intractable". Physically it's very simple, if an overweight person is physically prevented from eating too much, they'll lose weight, just like physically it's very simple to quit addictive drugs.
And the drug analogy is a good one, because just like quitting drugs, you can't quit overeating (barring the aforementioned option of someone physically preventing you from doing so - which is literally what gastric sleeve surgery and the like are doing) until you actually choose to. When you wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and instead of "oh I'm so fat" or "it's not fair" or "I wish I could lose weight", you think "I choose to lose weight by controlling what I eat", then you lose weight. And it stays off for as long as your choice holds.
You're right that weight loss is largely a mental rather than a physical issue, but very, very wrong to suggest it's as simple as making a choice. Mental health issues can prevent someone from making good, rational decisions, and the notion that they're somehow failing to make an "easy" choice shows a contemptuous lack of understanding and compassion.
Constant application of great amounts of willpower against your most basic biological instincts is possible for some individuals, but generally you are really arguing against the dictionary definition [1].
[1] [trak-tuh-buh l] .. easily managed or controlled; docile; yielding:
It's not mere availability of food. Obesity rates vary quite widely across OECD countries; the US is at 35%, France/Italy/Spain are at about 5-10%, Korea is below 4%.
Overeating is a stress response for a lot of people, and overeating often occurs among people in high-stress situations. The US is a country that tolerates a very high level of poverty, inequality, and insecurity, and this results in high obesity rates in some sectors. Obesity isn't the same problem for people who shop at Whole Foods and spend hours at the gym on weekends; it's a more severe problem among people who have to work a horrible job 60-80 hours a week to avoid really desperate poverty, live in decrepit housing, spend hours on neglected bus lines, and are physically insecure.
Where are your numbers from? According to Wikipedia's summary of a 2014 WHO report the US is at 33.7%, France is at 24%, and the major Anglo nations in between. There is not nearly the disparity between the US and the rest of the world you claim.
Those are good points. Heavy marketing of highly processed food that's loaded with fat and sugars is also an issue. Maybe also because that crap is relatively inexpensive.
This feels only the level of suggesting a person can choose to not be depressed by thinking positive thoughts. Mental issues are 'just choices', yet we aren't sure that free will even exists or if choices can be made. Research on the brain shows it isn't nearly as simple as just choosing to be better. Brain does a great job of tricking us into thinking we have control.
It is not physically simple to quit addictive drugs. It depends on the drug. Even alcohol is not simple to quit, depending on the person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_tremens
A few people seem to be reading my comment as "dietary restriction is easy and so is quitting addictive drugs."
I meant the comparison with addictive drugs to illustrate how difficult it is to resist the urge to overeat. And I believe the two cases are essentially the same - you can't save an addict who doesn't want to be saved, and you can't convince a fat person to diet if they don't want to lose weight more than they want to eat food.
Claiming weight loss is "simple" is like claiming that climbing Mount Everest is simple because you simply put one foot in front of the other and repeat until you reach the top
Indeed, weight loss is "simple", as you said. The problem arises when you have managed to get to your target and you realize that, short of amphetamines or similarly dangerous drugs, there is no known way to keep your weight stable with an acceptable life quality.
Obese people are not stupid when they choose to keep eating; they've just learnt by experience that, unless you solve the hunger problem, loosing weight will not yield a better life.
By the way, surgery actually looks like an option.
> there is no known way to keep your weight stable with an acceptable life quality.
Firstly, why does your weight need to be stable? Personally I tend to go on yearly (maybe biennially) cycles with shifts between 170 and 195 pounds. Basically I force myself to get down in the weight (my weight-loss method is to restrict calories pretty dramatically). After that I will have eating habits that tend to keep me low for a while, but over time as I go back in my regular eating style (I am naturally a bit of glutton), I'll usually go back up in weight. After that the cycle starts again. I think that this is a much easier approach than trying to stick to a target weight. It also allows you to "live" (most people don't want to count calories forever).
Secondly, what is an "acceptable life quality"? Like I said, I lose weight by restricting calories greatly. This leaves me pretty much constantly hungry for a couple months, but I quickly am able to just push it into the background mentally and accept it. For me this is acceptable. But yes if basically any approach that _works_ is considered _unacceptable_ to you, you're basically screwed. (I don't want to sit on a high horse. You might have stress in life or obligations that make it basically impossible for you to be productive and hungry for a couple months, so I can totally understand my method as being unacceptable to many.) In the end, you do need to figure out how to take action somehow, or you'll never solve the problem.
> By the way, surgery actually looks like an option.
Yeah most don't realize how extremely successful gastric bypass is. It's way more successful on average than any popular weight-loss routine. Obese people should seriously consider the possibility. It can be life-changing.
I'd like to clarify: I think that big sacrifices are easily acceptable while you're losing weight. What can make life miserable is the perspective that sacrifices will always be necessary, just to maintain the status quo.
Your method is indeed interesting, as you basically found a way to concentrate "suffering" in few months per year, still it is another example of a cure that lacks an important bullet point: it never ends.
Solving the hunger problem would let obese people loose their excess weight, no matter the sacrifices involved, and then forget they ever were obese.
Yes I guess using your terminology, my method is basically to solve the hunger "problem", by redefining it as not being a problem (and obviously changing my mentality to allow this). So for me hunger isn't really a problem it just becomes a state of being for a while.
But yeah I think the most realistic way to solve the hunger problem en masse* is gastric bypass. It's surgery so it shouldn't be taken lightly, but not weight-loss method even appears to come close when compared to it.
*As I said in another thread in this post, I don't think it's a good idea to focus on finding the best weight-loss plan for everyone, since it's a very personal issue, but everyone has to recognize that if there is such a general solution, it certainly is gastric bypass.
I wish people would be less cavalier with throwing around gastric bypass as a general obesity fix. I know many people that have had gastric bypass, and have considered it for myself as an obese man.
You will absolutely lose weight with gastric bypass. Full stop. And usually a ton of weight. Which is good! And the surgical complications have fallen way down over time. Those are the good bits. The BAD bits that aren't emphasized in the literature (and that a poor doctor will gloss over):
1) A lack of focus. Universally the people I know that have had gastric bypass seem to have a greatly reduced ability to concentrate on complex tasks and recall. Its almost like 'pregnancy brain' but for men and women and seems to persist long after the surgery.
2) Gastric issues. Everyone knows that people that have gastric bypass spend a lot of time vomiting after their surgery while they adjust to what kinds, and volumes, of food that their greatly reduced stomach can handle. What isn't discussed is that often times your stomach is reduced to such a point where food gets into your intestinal track partially digested, leading to diarrhea and a host of other digestive issues. Also, depending on where the band is placed there might not be enough 'drop' in your stomach for food to easy make it further into the digestive tract. This can lead to further surgeries and even shortening of the intestine. I don't know about you, but going through the rest of my life fighting explosive diarrhea. I'd rather be obese then run the risk of vomiting and intestinal distress for the rest of my life.
3) A general listlessness. I don't know what the cause of this is but I've observed it in everyone that I know thats had it done but no one as much as my mom. She was quite overweight my entire life, but almost disgustingly energetic and just generally full of life. She rarely got sick, and could work a full day of manual labor with no complaint or sign of slowing. After her surgery she shrank way down lost all of her, for a lack of better word, vim. After the surgery she didn't seem to have the energy or interest in pursuing any of the pursuits that made her get the surgery in the first place.
4) Long term results. Long term results for gastric bypass are not great. Most people will shrink down over the course of a year or two to a low weight and then will start packing the weight back on. Slowly at first but usually more and more rapid as time goes on.
I'm not trying to say that gastric bypass isn't an option for a lot of people-but I wish people (obese and non-obese) would stop looking at it as a cure all. Its at best a staving off. Lack of willpower, deep seated problems with food, and self-esteem are almost always the demons at the bottom of the obese pyramid and until you exorcize them, surgery is going to just paper over your problems.
The only person I know who had Gastric bypass complains that she cannot eat more than one doughnut at a time anymore. Which is to say if you don't fix your eating it won't help. If you fix your eating you won't need it (though it might be easier to stop afterwards).
It is possible I know more than one person who has had gastric bypass, if the rest have not told me about it.
>They surely don't eat for the pleasure of adding some more fat to their body. //
We surely do, isn't that the problem, we're tailored to times of famine & plenty meaning eating is pleasurable even when we're physically sated to allow us to gain weight ready for the next famine?
I'm on the line of obesity, I eat most when I'm lethargic, depressed, bored. I eat less when I'm exercising, occupied mentally, distracted, physically tired.
In case there are obese people here who are looking for other options, I found an obscure one that has stabilized my weight 30lbs below where it had been previously. I found that by doing apnea training that freedivers do to increase their breath-hold times, I naturally dropped the weight and it hasn't come back. The exercise itself can be done in 15-20 min per day and is done in either sitting or lying down, so anyone without respiratory issues can do it.
As I understand it from a study [1] that someone here posted the last time I mentioned it, the training changes our body's way of dealing with oxygen. It basically does naturally what happens to athletes that take EPO, though without the dangers of that rightfully-banned substance. That raises the body's basal metabolic rate, which should help in losing weight and keeping it off.
Like most other things weight-loss-related, it's probably not a magic bullet, so YMMV, but my sample size of one resulted in my accidentally losing 20% of my body weight and keeping it off for about a year now.
Regarding the hunger problem - is increasing calorie consumption a viable option? A physically active male with significant muscle mass can fairly reasonably find himself needing about 3000 kcal a day without having to be a pro athlete. Would becoming much more active and gaining lean mass help, or would the amount of food needed to feel sated just increase?
I heard a radio program a few years ago about childhood obesity. They had an expert on who said something I'd never really thought of before: They said the conventional causality of sports curing obesity is the wrong way around. The reason you don't see fat marathon runners isn't because running makes you thin, it's because being thin makes it easier to run.
The guy's reasoning was: You exercise for an hour doing something like walking or golf, then reward yourself with a snack? Net intake of calories [1]. And it's easier to cut a snack from your diet than to find the time and motivation to do an hour's exercise.
To put it another way, when you're obese exercising is like a job that pays ten cents an hour.
Of course, once you've become thin and athletic, you gain access to more time-efficient types of exercise. But that snack might still need 15 minutes of vigorous cycling, or competitive soccer or basketball.
[1] e.g. an hour's dog-walking or golf are roughly equivalent to a 16 fl.oz can of Coca-Cola and a 2 oz packet of skittles, respectively.
It's viable, but only if you also adjust your diet. Burning 100kcal / day extra from being buff doesn't do much if you're also eating 100kcal / day extra.
Plus getting buff costs a lot of effort, it's easier to reduce intake.
But, besides weight loss, anyone should probably do both, especially if bound to a computer; back pain isn't primarily caused by obesity, but also due to under or overdevelopment of certain muscles, posture, movement or lack thereof, etc.
And being on a healthy weight whilst still being weak or low in energy is no fun.
You have to be pretty careful. It's actually quite common for people to _gain_ weight when training for a marathon because they often end up eating more than they burn during the runs. For me at about 185 pounds, I'll burn around 870 calories by running 10k:
I could gain those calories back and more in 15 minutes just eating a burger. A lot of people do exactly this and sabotage themselves a bit.
Personally if I bump up my running training and want to lose weight, I can never depend on it happening naturally. I always gain weight if I don't actively try to lose it. So I think no matter what you need to be careful. If you exercise more, you'll be able to eat more, but if you want to lose weight, you'll still need to eat less than your body wants. So I still think fundamentally losing the pounds starts in the kitchen.
I tried that theory for 20 years, and it didn't work for me. I've always been active, playing lots of sports and going to the gym regularly, hiking, biking, running, etc.. Unless I'm counting calories, I always compensate for exercise by eating more. I finally realized exercise alone wouldn't help me lose weight.
In general, you probably can't get rid of a little hunger. If you want to lose weight and be in a calorie deficit, you might be 500 calories short. If you add 1,000 calories of exercise, and 1,000 calories of food, you're still 500 calories short, and still likely to experience hunger.
I feel stupid for how long it took me to "see" my own evidence. Like many people, I have a mental aversion to paying extreme attention to what I eat, to eating less, and to counting calories. The very idea of doing that is off-putting, and I didn't notice how subconsciously strong that mental aversion is until recently. It wasn't easy, but I did the hard mental work before I started the diet. Once I got going and formed some new habits, I didn't have to think about it much. One of my mental tricks was to realize that a little hunger is exactly how I'm supposed to feel. Rather than focusing willpower on combating my hunger and reminding myself not to eat, I came to the realization that not being hungry at all is the bad state, that is the feeling I have when I've eaten too much. Being a little hungry is a good thing.
Counting calories worked for me relatively quickly, and it worked regardless of whether I was exercising (as long as I tracked my exercise calories too.) It took less time than exercising, and it helped me see the differences more clearly between losing weight and getting strong. Those are two mostly different things. There's some cross-talk between them, but the main way to target each of them is different. Gyms all advertise weight loss, but now I see gyms as a place to get strong, and eating less as the way to lose weight.
I should have been a bit more explicit - I meant life after weight loss. The problem was apparently that maintaining a healthy weight requires being perpetually hungry. I was wondering if being able to afford 3 solid meals and some snacks without gaining weight would help with that appetite issue.
I understand. FWIW, in my mind what I said applies to life after weight loss. I still speculate that exercising more to eat more doesn't solve the appetite issue. At least for me anyway. Here's why. The comment you replied to made the hunger out to be an issue so large that it affects quality of life drastically and negatively, and so significant that the alternatives - not losing weight and the problems that come with that choice - are preferable to the extreme hunger. I have no doubt some people legitimately feel this way.
My experience counting calories and adjusting to the hunger are all about being just a little more hungry. I'm not starving or ravenous at any point, I stay only a sliver shy of satisfied. I don't let the hunger get uncontrollable, and if I'm ever crazy starving, I eat. I never get crazy starving when I'm counting calories, though, because if I exercise a lot I eat a lot, and if I don't work out then I don't get as hungry.
Before I mentioned adjusting mentally to seeing a little hunger as good rather than bad. That helps. Quality of life is a relative and subjective idea, and within reasonable limits, people can and do adjust to being equally happy with less. If weight loss is a goal, then I'm suggesting that seeing a little hunger as a good thing is a way to re-calibrate your quality of life detector, not a way to compromise. If you want to lose weight, then the feeling of being sated, and the weight gain that comes with it, isn't a higher quality of life. It's more than you need and includes potentially negative side effects.
Another mental change I made that I didn't mention before is that when I had success counting calories, I set my calorie limit to what it "should" be forever, based on standard age / height / goal weight charts. I never had a life after weight loss, I didn't temporarily reduce it further than that like most people who diet try to do. I just set it to what it should be for the long term. I knew this would make it take longer to lose weight, but I wanted to form a habit and feel like I was always eating a normal amount, rather than suffering a temporary sacrifice. I wanted to set it and forget it, rather than have to adjust again later. I was still eating 3 solid meals a day, and having snacks. Just a little less than before, controlled and accounted for so I knew when I was about to go over.
I also like to go a little light during the day so I have a calorie budget for a dessert treat after dinner. This way I usually feel like I'm splurging just a little rather than suffering through hunger. Instead of feeling like I need to summon more willpower, I feel like I'm always cheating just a tiny bit.
From my own experience, I didn't find that counting calories and being a little bit hungrier on average than I was before affected my quality of life negatively. Not at all. My appetite changed when I changed my diet. I became more comfortable with being just a little hunger, and perhaps surprisingly, I think I have more energy.
Anyway, it depends, I don't judge anyone's choices, and I think this is a lot more complicated and difficult than having willpower or overcoming hunger. But I also think an adjustment is an adjustment - the steady state of living with weight loss should be expected to feel different than before.
There are foods that help with feeling hungry. High fiber and low calorie foods can be eaten in larger volumes than high fat foods.
I switched to one full meal a day and fruits / salads / soup for the other times. This takes care of hunger issues and helps with losing weight. Change of habit is required and it is not easy. Bariatric surgery can help, but it has it's own annoying side effects and long term (>7 years) reports aren't available widely.
Sure, obesity is clearly (also) a problem of bad habits. The question that still needs an answer is: when will the new habit become natural for me?
Hunger is not like exercising: while a couple years of training can make a marathon feel natural for the body of a former sedentary person, no amount of training (AFAIK) can either ease the feeling of satiety with the correct amount of calories or set your stomach/brain system to "hunger is normal" state.
Satiety is apparently a complex mix including mental aspects but also chewing. Have you tried chewing more? Either "over chewing" (just keep each mouthful of food in your mouth longer and chew it to a complete pulp) or lower calorie foods that you physically have to work on more to actually eat (carrots, celery, ...)?
Water before eating may help you slow down too, which means your body can realise you're sated at an earlier point through the meal.
Just suggestions, YMMV, IANADietician and haven't fully researched these ideas scientifically (though they are based on research I've heard about in passing).
The main challenge is that a lot of people try and change too many habits at once - when new year comes around, lots of people go on a diet, go to the gym, etc.
But changing too much at once will only cause people to revert to old behaviours. Change one thing at a time. I started by weaning myself off of sugar in coffee, one step at a time. Stopping candy was easy, I never had a problem with that, the stuff makes my teeth hurt. And stopping friday/saturday/sunday snacking was relatively easy too once I was no longer living with my parents and it was just put on the table.
Current / most recent change is having a big salad for lunch at work, now that I've got a new assignment that has a big salad bar. Making it big is important; there's pretty much no nutritional value in the green stuff, and it helps me get through the afternoon without feeling hungry.
This might sound glib but it's not meant to be; habit and discipline take over after desire fails.
Meaning you need to establish a new normal for yourself. Maybe that means no more soda (not even the sugar free crap) and no ketchup on your fries. After a while weight comes off and stays off without you missing the extra calories.
This is something I've realized as well, AFTER losing weight. It's very difficult to convey the differences between "real hunger" (when you need energy) and "fake hunger" (you want to eat crap because you haven't for a bit) to someone who hasn't gone through that. I think this is an issue everyone needs to learn themselves.
At this point I actually like the feeling of lingering hunger, I focus better, probably a hunting instinct. I've attached it as a pavlovian response to ambition I think. At first knowing I was losing weight, but now detached from that and more general.
I think there are more types of hunger than just "real" and "fake". The body has needs and you can attune yourself to them. "Cravings" seem to be real psychological signals for certain sorts of nutrition. I've been trying to pay closer attention to them ever since losing a significant amount of weight on keto a few years ago and starting to exercise more seriously.
For example, after a strength workout, I experience a different kind of hunger than "morning hunger" (protein craving, the urge very consistently appears about a half hour after my workout, vs something small to start the day), which is in itself distinct from hunger around lunchtime (habit-formed hunger, you ate at this time yesterday). Also, thirst sometimes seems to manifest itself as another sort of hunger, or else a craving for salt/electrolytes (especially after a sweaty cardio workout).
Listening to your body is a curious exercise to do while you're sick. Your body really tells you what you need, if you're willing to listen. But too often it's like, well, you have this lunch meeting, and you're not hungry but you can't miss it/don't want to miss the social interaction. And suddenly you're ignoring your body again and eating because it's convenient...
There is difference between 'Hunger' and 'Appetite'... A simple solution prescribed by my physician was 'just sip warm water (not too hot)' and if your stomach feels good, it was your appetite which got satiated at that time DON'T EAT anything.
After 1/2 sips if there is still feeling of emptiness, it means your body really needs something.
Indeed all animals' life is a constant battle against hunger. No brain evolved to accept hunger, but to recognize it and fight it as the no. 1 priority.
No, you're describing the intense hunger associated with starvation, not the mild hunger associated with gradual weight loss. If you're doing other stuff then mild hunger is easy to ignore. It's an alert, not a command.
Yes of course I've experienced it. Being a little hungry is just like being a little too cold or feeling minor pain. Put it aside and get on with life.
You come off sounding like all of the whiners on various Reddit fitness subs complaining about how they can't lose weight, or their lift numbers aren't going up just looking for someone to tell them that's it ok to quit or ease-up. To steal from fitit, have you tried trying.
If my house were not a constant 73F, it would seriously impact my quality of life - at least for a while - because it's my long-standing definition of normal. That is what people do: seek comfort, then take it for granted.
"Holds" implies something a lot more passive than it is. Losing weight is a full-time job, harder than anything else I've done. I've succeeded over the last couple of years but only because I'm in the privileged position of literally everything else in my life going well enough that I can focus all my willpower on it.
you do not even need that. just set appetite = 80 in the human source code so you start eating 80÷ of your daily caloric use. the pounds will melt off. when you have a goal weight set appetite = 100÷ and you will simply stay at that weight.
it is very simple physically.
as for where to set it, I have nothing to say about it just as you have nothing to say about how to make a choice.
/s
The fact is, a choice fat people can make is "I will get gastric sleeve surgery" and this "commit" is statistically enough.
the "commit" that parent suggests is the same as my suggestion at the top. I give no practical advice at the top of this comment and neither does parent comment.
if there were a variable that would set someone's appetite and saciety then it would work. if there were a variable for commitment then parent's advice would work.
parent ignores the hard work of finding and setting that variable, and parent ignores statistics that most fat people have spent a few dozen hours looking for how to set that variable and have failed to do so.
your advice is as bad as when people defend some totally useless setup on the grounds that it's turing complete. yes, you can make a social media app with a custom backend written in C++. No that does not work statistically and most people who set out to do so fail.
>Weight loss isn't "known intractable". Physically it's very simple, if an overweight person is physically prevented from eating too much, they'll lose weight, just like physically it's very simple to quit addictive drugs.
Locking people up away from food is even more intractable!
I have a spinal condition (syringomyelia), I lost a similar amount of weight (250 -> 185).
Started exercising gently and worked up to a fairly intensive callisthenics (starting with basic stuff and using a pull-up bar, pressups handles). Takes me 40mins every other day to do a full 'routine' (quoted routine because it varies every time).
The end result was that I only take my medication on a night to sleep now, during the day I'm drug free which is fantastic because the medication wrecked my ability to focus.
The funny part is I didn't lose the weight because of my back but because I was having other health issue (and had metabolic syndrome, a big warning sign for diabetes), at my last checkup all my results where slap bang center of normal for my age.
My doctor told me pretty much the same thing when I asked him about exercise "listen to your body, if it increases the pain the next day back off that exercise".
For the first time in 3 years my health is level enough to live a completely normal life, I will never put the weight back on (kept it off for nearly 2 years now by calorie counting and using an accurate scale tied to my phone, I get weight every morning and night at the same time and it shows me a nice graph).
I'm a healthy athletic 20 year old and I was having back pain for a while, and when I finally went to the doctor they suggested it may just be an imbalance in the strength of different muscles in my back that I didn't properly train for the sports I participate in.
Gave me some exercises, and a month later back pain was all gone and my back felt stronger, with better posture. Crazy what can be done when you just have go for it
Got any links to similar exercises? I'm also early 20s, spend most of my day sitting at a desk, have dealt with backpain for a few years. Pullups (especially wide-grip) have helped but I'd like to know some stretches, too.
I'm in my 30s, but get most of my exercise from cycling, which doesn't exercise the back much. My back pain problems have been increasing over recent years, but I've had good success in the last few months with 15-20 minutes a night of yoga. I'm doing regular plank, bridge, locust, and downward dog poses for back strength, and cat/cow, sphinx, and forward fold poses for back stretches. I like a lot of the leg and hip stretches, too.
Start in a crawling position. The purpose of this is to give you more control of the pelvic position with independence from the chest.
Quote from the PDF:
Start in a crawling position.
Without moving your head and shoulders, roll your hips so that you arch your lower back. Do not push into pain. Only go as far as you feel comfortable with, then relax. Try not to move your upper body & chest. If this is difficult, rest your shoulders, chest and ribs on the couch or bed, keeping your tummy clear. This will help to restrict the movement higher up and help you to localize the movement to the pelvis.
The other thing my physio did was sat with me and showed me what my posture _should_ be like, and made me sit like that for an hour or so. It was then up to me to keep sitting/standing like that outside the office. The first day, I was exhausted after about 2 hours. Now, it's painful to sit slouched.
EDIT: Even though this is a thread about the industry being a scam, I'd still recommend seeing a professional (even just your GP). As other people here have alluded to, you'll probably get some drugs to get you to be able to exercise pain free, but it could also rule out other issues (kidney problems being a good example), and ensure that there's nothing more serious going on.
yes! this. the problem is, there are a lot of people that are told to lose weight to cure back pain, they lose enough weight for it to alter their posture, and they experience new back pain. of course it's temporary, and if their doctor had told them about it ahead of time and offered appropriate physical therapy when it happened they'd work right through it, but that doesn't seem to happen. all they know is the doctor told them to lose weight for their back pain but losing weight made it worse, so they stopped.
I've had back pain on and off over the years. Usually due to muscle cramping from poor posture. I had to make a conscious effort not to slouch at my desk.
What I've found helps with back pain, sciatica, knee pain, are stretches, and free weights. Then again, I've been lifting for about 41 years, so its not a surprise to me that changing my regimen provides positive outcomes.
Specifically, for me, dead lifts for lower back, squats and leg presses for legs and knees.
Speak to your physician first about whether you can do this. Speak to a PT person about what stretches/weights you should do, and what you should avoid.
I struggled for ages with trying to keep "good posture", trying to position each part of my body correctly (shoulders back, etc). Once the importance of core muscles was pointed out to me, I saw that all I need to do was "turn on" my pelvic muscles and the other bits of my body fell into place without thinking about them individually. As the strength of these muscles improved due to a regular exercise routine, I found that I didn't have to consciously "turn on" pelvic muscles and they were strong enough to keep things in position by themselves.
Laying on a hard floor with my arms above my head has been my near-term way of coping with back pain. But a little isometric back strength exercises like a nightly plank have helped with prevention over the past few weeks.
I tried a solid wooden bed platform with about 2 inches of foam mattress topper. If nothing else, it makes you really good at camping - sleeping on the hard ground is so much more comfortable when you're used to it.
Piggybacking on this - basic mobility exercises can free up a lot of your muscles from regular pain. You end up doing this a lot when you go see a physical therapist.
This was part of the reason we bootstrapped our app - MoveWellApp.com - to give people easy-to-understand routines to stay mobile and pain free at home.
No comment to its quality, but it's pretty ballsy to piggy-back on a thread talking about a $100B/yr industry being "mostly a scam" to promote your app :)
On a more serious note, I think an app that motivates people to be more active isn't a bad thing or scam per se, though I can't speak to the quality of this particular one.
I don't know why this is being downvoted -- it's the first sensible thing that I've seen here. For example, from the article:
> Spinal fusion surgery, for instance ... costing a total of $40 billion per year ... ... with a price tag averaging $80,000, [and] has a success rate of about 35%.
That's not a success rate of 0%. If you look around, you'll find tons of people (175k/year if my math is right with the numbers above) who have had success with spinal fusion surgery -- one such person actually posted below!
At least this particular approach (light mat exercises) can't be properly called a scam, since it doesn't really try to trick you out of money. The fact of the matter is that the back is tremendously complex, and this approach, when analyzed across a large sample of back pain sufferers, might have an even worse success rate, especially considering the symptomatic divergence of people reporting back pain.
I don't mean to be smug, as back pain really is an individual thing. There's an element of searching for what works, and I was lucky in that I was pointed directly towards an effective treatment.
This result was science based, in that I was treated by a general practitioner who specialised in back pain and insisted on an evidence based approach. (This doctor also wrote the manual for NSW's worker's compensation scheme and lectures at a major university on the topic.)
Edit: My doctor's rule was "pain free exercise". Go as far as you can, but stop if hurts. A test of whether you've really overdone it is whether the new pain goes away overnight. He also reckoned that it would be difficult to do a further injury whilst doing exercises, as the pain would make me self limiting.
Further edit: My initial physio, and a cortisone injection, at the time of injury, weren't aimed at a long term fix, but at providing enough temporary pain relief to begin exercising.