From my experience, no amount of exercise will help you lose weight if you are eating crap. The only way I lost 25 lbs was to eat clean and exercise at least 3 times a week.
Given the choice between the following two snacks:
1. A single 0.6 oz Reese's peanut butter cup.
2. A large apple
By your logic, choosing the healthy apple will help you lose weight because it is not "crap", unlike the candy. However a large apple has 110 calories whereas a single Reese's peanut butter cup has only 88.
For the purposes of losing weight the Reese's peanut butter cup is the better choice. Arguably the apple has a better nutritional value, but that's not what we're talking about.
Yes, I would choose the apple if I had the choice between the two. The Reese's cup is less caloric, but high in sugar and fat. The apple also has a considerable amount of sugar as well, but has health benefits. Also, the apple will keep you full much longer than the Reese's. Let's face it, who only eats just one Reese's? The key is balancing eating good foods with less calories.
Also, I think it is important to not to focus on "losing weight", but living a healthier lifestyle.
Losing weight is something you can quantify and measure. Living a healthier lifestyle is fuzzy and open to interpretation -- allowing you rationalize almost any behavior you choose. For certain kinds of people the certainty of calories in vs. calories out is comforting, especially in the world of weight loss where feel good reasoning and pseudo science are everywhere.
No. Stop rationalizing that all there is to a Reese's cup is just calories. A healthy lifestyle has quantifiable metrics in regards to the levels of cholesterol, processed sugars, vitamins and aminoacids you should consume daily.
The food you consume also interacts in complex ways that go beyond what has been formally quantified, but a casual observation of people who eat leaner foods and vegetables instead of processed sugars and dairy products is pretty good circumstantial evidence. There's a reason why dissociative diets can produce different effects on your body even though by the end of the week you may have eaten the same in terms of the amounts of calories and nutrients as other people.
I have two personal observations in favor of that: I have psoriasis, and the level and redness of the rashes is directly correlated to my daily intake of fruits and abstinence of coffee. I also know several people who are healthy vegetarians who have been keeping insanely good dieting regimes for several years, and it's remarkable how good their skin looks in comparison to other people of their own age, less wrinkled and more elastic (not being a scientific observation, my sample size is still large enough to be adequately convinced personally).
You realize of course that choosing that weight lose is the most important metric is just another form of rationalization. If you take a step back to first principles and start with a reasonable goal such as "I want to feel better and live longer" then zeroing in on losing weight is not necessarily the most effective path. For obese people it might be, but for normal people getting regular exercise and eating right (which varies by individual) will have a much more positive effect than obsessing over weight.
Furthermore, telling people to count calories and not worry about the quality of what they eat is just opening the door for that same destructive human behavior of eating whatever crap they want, just in limited quantities. This is not the road to health. No amount of engineering mentality will get around the fuzziness of health or the stubbornness of human nature. Fortunately people are capable of being honest with themselves to varying degrees, and it is possible to improve one's health by a commitment to exercise and healthy eating.
Maybe that doesn't tell you anything but 100 gr olive oil has more calories that 300gr of sugar.
Eating apples is natural for human beings,like many other fruits, eating peanut butter is not(apple has a lot of water with their sugar what makes it easy to process, and converting its sugars to fat would take energy).
They are other reasons for storing fat, e.g cold protection and cell and arteries protection from acids(produced by sugars burning).
>Eating apples is natural for human beings,like many other fruits
With a small correction that eating apples that were not bred for sweetness and did not contain as much fructose as today's apples is natural. Therefore, there is such thing as too many apples (and fructose is probably not better than glucose or sucrose in any way).
You compare nutrition of apples with peanuts, then say it's natural for humans to eat apples. It's natural for us to eat peanuts too - compare the nutrition of apples with peanut butter if you want to make that argument.
Well that's your experience, obviously you weren't exercising more than you was consuming.
I easily lost over 20lbs whilst regularly eating McDonald's (by regular I mean I managed two big mac & fries & large soda, sometimes multiple times a week). Plus at the time I was consuming tons of empty calories in the form of beer and alcohol.
I didn't exercise either, I simply did my job. 8 hours of hard menial work, and frequently carrying exceptionally heavy weights up and down stairs. It's estimated that for an athletic person, 9 stairs = 1 calorie. Basically you burn 1 calorie every 5 1/4 feet if you're a ~120lb person. At the time I was ~240lb and I was carrying ~70lb of materials and ~20lb of tools up a 15ft staircase.
Basically I burnt 9 calories every trip upstairs and I likely made over a hundred of them in a day, every day 7 days a week. I lost that 20lbs in two weeks.
So from my experience, you can literally eat the most disgusting greasy food and load up on hundreds of empty calories because if you actually work you will find a way to burn off those calories. Assuming 1 hour of mild exercise means you can eat anything you want is absurd. I 'exercised' over 8 hours a day (frequently it ran to 10 hours) and it made me a shit load of cash . . . suck that gym membership!
What you don't see is that the amount of "energy in" is not regulated by typing a number into a computer, but how hungry you feel. And clean food makes you a lot less hungry for the same amount of "energy in", which makes you less likely to overeat the prescribed amount of "energy in".
You're falsifying the argument. We're not talking about "what you can eat that will make you feel less hungry and so will help you stick to your diet", we're talking about the simple equation of energy out - energy in.
In my experience, you can eat crap, drink beer, etc, and still lose a large amount of weight. You just have to know how much crap you're eating and keep the quantity down.
No. You are not understanding the difference between humans and computers. The equation simply makes no sense for humans, it is an ideological statement that only makes sense for machines (and humans living like they're a computer).
What matters for most human beings are how hungry they feel, because that is what controls how much energy that they take in.
Oh, and you forget that the "miles per gallon" for a human body is not constant. When the body gets less energy, it can improve the milage.
> What matters for most human beings are how hungry
> they feel, because that is what controls how much
> energy that they take in.
No, what matters most is how much energy they take in, and how much they burn. You're simply claiming that if people are hungry they will eat more. That's just saying they'll take in more. You're also saying that the body will "get better mileage". That's just burning less.
The long and the short is that if you absorb less energy than you burn, you'll lose weight. There are a shed-load of "strategies" to try to stop you from feeling hungry while you do this, but the truth is that if you want to lose weight you have to starve yourself. If you accept that, then you can make whatever trade-offs you like.
Of course the body is a complex thing, but the physics is easy, and understanding the physics makes the mental side easier too.
> Of course the body is a complex thing, but the physics is easy, and understanding the physics makes the mental side easier too.
I think this is actually quite profound. So many people don't understand the (relatively simple) physics of it, they try out things left and right — for a week — because they read it in a magazine.
There's also the case of short term versus long term energy spikes causing hunger and plenty of other psychological factors. On paper, yes, if you eat 100 calories of sugar a day versus ten apples, you'll lose more weight. But humans are not a transparent in vs out system. Plus there's also the fact that if you eat too little, your body reacts differently, making it nothing like the straight-line effect (eat 100 cal less, lose X; eat 1000 cal less, lose 10X) that a simplistic view would expect.
