Comment on Cutting sucks
ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI’ll tell you that for most people it’s less about food intake and more about physical exertion.
I’m not saying eat cake for every meal but as long as you’re burning more calories than you’re taking in that’s all that matters unless you have underlying health conditions. Keep being you but just exert yourself more. Work until failure.
I say this with love as a person who has struggled with dysmorphia and has taken several steps to overcome it.
Actively exercising only burns slightly more calories than just sitting around existing does.
CICO works to an extent, but human bodies are shockingly efficient machines. What you eat is important, why and how you eat are important. Losing weight and keeping it off can be hard.
Adding exercise is great for a lot of reasons. If you aren’t getting regular exercise you really should. But one of those reasons is certainly not weight loss. You might even gain weight.
Anivia@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
This is absolutely terrible advice. It takes an insane amount of physical activity to burn the calories of a meal, and being in a deficit will make you feel hungry regardless.
The majority of people need to worry about putting down their fork, not doing more physical activities
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Like 10% of our calories that we burn come from exercise - the rest is just keeping the lights on, so if you want to be in a deficit, you need to eat less.
BitchPeas@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Abs are made in the kitchen.
ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s… exactly what I said? You need to burn more calories than you consume. But that means putting in the work to do so.
AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think the person you’re replying to is arguing that whilst exercise can have myriad health benefits, that when it comes to weight loss, it’s more practical to focus on one’s diet. I also hold that view, and it seems to be the consensus amongst weight loss specialists. You can’t outrun a bad diet when the difficulty of burning calories is so much higher than the ease of consuming calories. If someone who wanted to lose weight was going to focus on either changing their diet, or increasing their activity level, then diet is the sensible choice.
Of course, framing it like that is a bit of a false dichotomy, because the health benefits associated with exercise are so significant that I’ve seen some research that suggests it may be healthier to be fat and fit than to be at a healthy weight and unfit/sedentary. Personally, I struggled with disordered eating for many years, but I was finally able to lose weight in a healthy way after I started powerlifting. The impact was mostly one of morale: whilst the increased muscle mass and activity level increased the number of maintenance calories I needed, it wasn’t too huge of an impact when compared to how much I was eating before. What actually changed was how I felt about my body, and how I thought about food, as well as my overall energy levels.