Comment on Oh lord yes
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I feel like the number of people blaming genes for their unsuccessful weight loss attempts is far greater than the number of people who really do have bad genes for weight loss.
Or it might just be my personal experience with knowing people who failed to lose weight. Maybe not reflective of anything. I’ve heard this opinion may times before, but quite often it felt disingenuous.
I think it’s more about people thinking exercise is a pretty good tool for weight loss. It really isn’t, though it’s a really good idea for health broadly, but weight loss is not that significant with activity, at least to get from the low end of obesity to healthy weight.
Managing what you eat and how much you eat is pretty unavoidable if you want to manage weight, but people keep thinking a few minutes on a treadmill should take care of it.
There actually is one excersize routine that one can do that will completely ignore/offset your diet. Competitive swimming. There is an issue. If you eat empty calories, you feel and perform like shit. Yeah, at my peak I was eating 20,000 Kcal a day, but there was no processed sugar, no bleached flour, no soda, no dyes, you basically had to make everything from scratch.
How does that work though? Is there some genetic situation where consuming fewer calories than you burn doesn’t lead to weight loss?
A lot of calorie expenditure is determined by hormones, and for a typical person, resting metabolism is a significant percentage of total calorie burn.
Some people respond poorly to dietary interventions because they end up with lower resting metabolic rate. Sometimes it shows up in the form of a person who is always feeling cold or exhausted.
Others have high stress hormones, which throw all sorts of metabolic loops out of wack.
And other hormones affect appetite or satiety after eating, so the biological disadvantage (whether genetic or environmental or both) sometimes comes in the form of greater difficulty with portion control or willpower compared to others. That’s not a direct effect on calories in versus calories out, but it does have an indirect effect on overall success with a weight loss program, and it’s grounded in an actual physical/physiological/biological difference between individuals.
Nope. It’s usually people, like in this thread, not understanding what “bad genes” means.
You’re a thermodynamic machine, not magic. If you eat less then you burn you’ll loose weight.
You are also an extremely complicated machine, with complex chemical processes that govern long and short term behaviors.
“You” are a little slice of protein and fat the size of an avocado glued to the front of a more complicated machine. “You” are responsible for solving problems. The rest of your brain and endocrine system is responsible for managing most desires as well as most other things.
Some people have genetics where they run a mile and their body says “oh shit, this would be easier if I turned the energy fountain up to full wouldn’t it?” And now they’re burning more energy when they’re asleep than they were before.
Other people have genetics that gives them a body that says “oh my God, you just ran nearly 2 blocks. Clearly you’re in danger, so I’m going to increase the hormones that tell you to eat a lot more food. Don’t worry, the pizza will be gone before you actually feel how much food that is”.
You can override the endocrine system, but it’s hard. The frontal cortex can change what you do, but the endocrine can change what you want.
Your body is a machine, just like a car. And different cars will start to ding and nag the driver for fuel or maintenance tasks at different points, with different levels of intensity. If your car is built for the Australian outback it might be way more aggressive about fuel warnings, and have a significantly larger tank.
All that’s why excercise is a terrible way to lose weight. You lose weight by getting your eating under control and convincing the medieval peasant in your endocrine system that you’re not in a famine. Excercise makes your body feel better, more capable, and healthier.
You can excercise all you want, but you can eat your way through any excercise routine in minutes.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is more than an hour of vigorous time on a rowing machine.
baronvonj@piefed.social 18 hours ago Our bodies each have an equilibrium of calories consumed/burned that it really wants to be maintained. If you start dieting to reduce calories consumed, then it automatically adjusts so that your body burns fewer calories just for existing, thereby reducing the deficit you created with your diet. So people see the diet not working and give up rather than taking the time to dial in a sustainable dietary calorie deficit that allows for weight loss without leaving you physically and mentally exhausted by your bodies compensatory reaction.
without leaving you physically and mentally exhausted by your bodies compensatory reaction.
Unfortunately, I get this feeling before even reaching maintenance numbers, let alone a deficit. Losing weight is absolutely brutal for me because there is no available option for “lose weight without complete and abject misery” for my body apparently.
Still doing it (with occasionally falls off the wagon, but get right back on), but fuck me does it suck.
Same here. The most weight I lost was in the 4 months after my then wife told me she didn’t want to be married anymore, while I figured out she had already been cheating on me for months, I was already in such misery not eating didn’t add any more… I lost 40 pounds in 4 months… Haven’t been able to continue…
It does seem to be a thing. Just not as common as some people want it to be.
Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
it’s almost always the amount of trash they eat.
breads, sugar ‘coffee’, sugar food, cereals… it’s all empty carbs. almost always… just watch people eating, you’ll notice a trent that a LOT of people eat nonstop trash