Comment on Anon figures out how dieting works
meowMix2525@lemm.ee 4 weeks agoI don’t think you realize how few calories are burned by exercise relative to the amount packed into our food, especially if you eat without thinking about it. I was dancing for a while, 8 hours straight of sometimes very intensive cardio, and only burning like 1000 extra calories (according to my fitbit) on those days just to feel like shit the next day from all that work, which would definitely have driven me to eat even more if I wasn’t paying attention to my diet or able to control my impulses (which tbh I think one or the other can be assumed for someone 100+ lbs overweight).
Even the most intensive bike ride or couple hours at the gym can be eaten away in as few as 7-10 oreos. Sure if you just need to trim a pound or two to get to your ideal weight, exercise alone can do that along with many other great benefits if you can commit to it daily, but you simply cannot expect to see results if you are habitually overeating highly caloric/low nutritional value foods and do not change those habits.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
“According to my Fitbit”
Starting on a high note I see
You burn 2200 a day doing nothing and eat 2200 a day, your weight stays the same
You start jogging 3 miles a day that’s 240 to 420 calories right there, don’t eat any more than you did and you’re at 240 to 420 calories in deficit.
Don’t jog and cut 240 to 420 calories a day and you have the same impact on your weight.
There’s no magic to it, it’s fucking maths! The difference is how hard it is for the results to last if you just do it through changing your eating habits, there’s a reason why about 90% of people who go on a diet just gain their weight back, they didn’t build a healthy habit, they make their life miserable for a while and then go back to eating the same as before.
meowMix2525@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
My maintenance as a woman was somewhere between 1700 and 2000 calories. With the meals that I was used to having, this was easily exceeded simply by eating more than one meal per day. So I switched to an OMAD diet and hit a plateau around 170lbs while I was dancing. I was happy with that weight so I loosened up, eventually stopped dancing, and now I use the time saved to eat healthier (or at least less processed) food instead of less food in general and maintain at that weight.
I tried biking and while I enjoyed it, it just wasn’t something I was going to keep up with consistently. The hassle alone of getting a bike down from my 3rd floor apartment was enough to end that, and the stationary bike just isn’t engaging enough. Again, any progress I make from that is gone from one bad eating choice, which is going to happen if you change your activity level without any consideration for nutrition. This isn’t a magical world of pure numbers, there is human psychology involved.
I do think the dancing boosted my metabolism a bit or maybe something changed in my lifestyle like returning to office instead of WFH and now I’m more consistently maintaining at just over 2000 calories. I really wouldn’t be able to even simply maintain without reading nutrition labels and limiting my snacking though.