Trying to lose weight and putting it in numbers is demoralizing. I’ve started riding a stationary bike for 5 miles and then doing minor weight lifting after and I maaaaybe lose 200 or so calories. Is that not a good exercise? I’ve been doing this almost everyday starting 2 weeks ago. But it’s starting to feel useless if it’s such a minor amount of calories burnt. Is this a good trend to continue? What am I missing?
Edit: everyone here has been incredibly helpful, and surprisingly consistent with one another. I feel much more confident about what I’m doing and what I need to do. Seriously, thank you all.
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Mass has an incredible amount of energy. For example: Just 1 gallon of gasoline will move a car 20 – 30 miles. Your body is better at turning food into energy than a car is at turning gasoline into energy.
But calories don’t really matter as much as what your body does with them. Active people who eat good food tend to simply burn off extra calories while sedentary people who eat shit food tend to store extra calories.
5 miles is a great start. I can tell you from experience that if you ride like 100 miles a week you can shovel massive amounts of garbage food down your throat and lose weight.
Don’t consider exercise a strict calories in/out thing. Exercise because it’s good for you and will be one of the factors that helps you live a long, healthy, mobile life.
1) To lose weight you have to start with your diet first. Really easy things to do: 1. Cut out soda, beer, wine, chocolate, chips, and snack foods. Moderately easy things to do: 2. Increase your intake of vegetables (not corn, not potato, not the good veggies), I’m talking spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, choy, cucumber, tomato, bell peppers, zucchini. 3. Difficult things to do that will have a huge impact: cut dumb carbs. If it comes in a packet, bread, etc. cut it. You’ll need carbs to feel satisfied but you can find a lot of good subs like sweet potatoes, vermicelli, etc.
2) Exercise in ways you LIKE. Take a break at lunch and go for a long walk. Swim. Ride a bike. Just get your body moving. Now there are going to be two issues with this: 1) building muscles adds weight, but it’s good weight. Your enemy is body fat, not just a number on the scale. If you drop five pounds but its because you lost 10 of fat and gained five of muscle then you’re laughing. The key with exercise though is that you stick with it.
3) Target a 300 calorie a day deficit. Never run more than a 500 calorie deficit. Your body can only metabilize so much fat (500 calories a day) and after that you’re burning lean mass that you want to keep.
4) Start snacking healthy. An apple is a great snack, oranges are great snacks, carrot sticks are great snacks. If you just can’t hold back from eating then eat healthy at least. Find snacks you like, personally I’ve become an apple snob, it’s all about the Ambrosia’s baby. But a bowl of apples on the coffee table is going to save you from bags of chips and over-eating in other areas.
5) Develop healthy habits. A quarter cup of mixed nuts a day is a great snack, it’s also in the 250 calorie range so it needs to be a planned snack, but you’ll live longer because of it and its satisfying as hell. Flossing every day is going to do wonders for you overall. vitamin D supplements are going to do great things for you if you don’t get much sun.
6) Buckle up for the long term. You need to keep weight off for a full year in order for your body to adjust to the change and accept the new you as normal. You have to think of this as a long term thing. Exercise has to be fun. Your diet can’t be crushing and you have to FIND those veggies you enjoy eating. You have to understand that your old lifestyle got you into trouble and if you go back to it you’ll just end up in the same boat.
7) There will be some surprises. You’ll find over 3-6 months your tastes start to shift a bit. Fruits and veggies will become more satisfying and tastier. Garbage food will start to loose some of its appeal. I think it has to do with your gut biome shifting as your diet does.
So a calorie is actually a scientific unit, it’s meant to represent the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gram of water up by 1 degree Celsius. The crazy thing is the Calories we know are actually 1000 calories (little c) and that’s why some labels in foreign countries say kcal instead of Calories.
Several people here have detailed out the simple answer to “losing weight”, which is have an energy deficit, which will make your body burn it’s stored energy (fat). Here’s the thing though, all weight is is the effect that gravity has on your mass….that’s it. It’s a number, an arbitrary measurement that says very little about your overall health.
The routine you have going is a great start. And if you’re enjoying it, you should definitely keep it up. But you may need to adjust your goal from “I want to lose weight” to something more along the lines of “I want to be healthier”, “I want to be able to walk up stairs without being winded”, “I want to fit into my jeans from college” etc…real actionable goals that don’t rely on that arbitrary number.
I say this because as you get fitter, you’ll build up lean muscle, which contrary to myth, doesn’t “weigh more than fat”…it is denser though. So 1 lb of muscle takes up less room than 1lb of fat. This is why a body builder or pro athlete can be 6 ft and 200 lbs and look ripped, but a couch potato with the same stats looks “chunky”. Fat simply takes up more room.
So long term, you need to figure out what you really are after, and then make some of the changes the other users are suggesting. The real key is finding a routine that you actually enjoy and can stick with long term. The extreme diets and exercise routines tend to fail because no one can keep that up long term, and they don’t teach you habits that will keep you healthy and maintain at the size you want to be.
Calorie deficit is only 1 part of weight loss.
Physical activity is another part of weight loss.
You can lose weight by doing nothing but create a calorie deficit. -200 a day. Every 20-25 days or so, 1 lb of fat dropped. That would amount to around 15lbs a year, just by not having that 1 donut, each day, everything else being the same.
Through exercise, you are causing your body to burn more calories, but this has a *cumulative* effect if you keep exercising. When you go for your run or what ever, once you are done, your body doesn’t immediately go back to normal calorie burning rates. It will continue to stay elevated for some time afterwards, so though you burned 200 on the bike, you are going to burn more like 250-300 once your body finally comes back baseline, but that’s the cumulative effect, the baseline begins to increase. Through exercise, you will increase muscle mass which increases your baseline metabolism. Maybe right now your base line is 1500. After a month, your baseline could push up another 50 calories, and so on. It will slow down when your body adapts to your routine so you got to keep increasing distance, resistance, arms weights, etc, to keep the body challenged and keep this cumulative effect going.
You can never out-train a bad diet. It’s way easier to eat 500 less calories a day than it is to burn it off with exercise. Just start with the basic 2000 cal/day diet. Do that for a week and see if you lose weight/fat. If you aren’t losing, drop it down to 1800; do that for another week. Keep going until you find a calorie range that you lose weight at and just stick to it.
A calorie is a unit of energy. Food has calories; your body breaks up food and uses oxygen to “burn” it to get chemical energy that runs your body. You use about 1200 calories per day to “keep the lights on”, that is to power you heart, lungs, and brain to keep you alive. You use up that much just by being alive. The rest you burn through doing stuff — exercise, sure, but also walking around, doing puzzles, even eating requires some energy.
If you take in more calories than you can use, then the body tries to store some for later. First, we store calories in our liver as something called glycogen. If the liver is full up, we store most of the extra as fat (much harder to burn).
Sugar, starch, and protein has about 4 calories per gram of food, and fat has 9 calories per gram. However, only calories that come from sugar and starch are easily stored, and eating too much sugar can mess up the way the body manages sugar levels and energy storage in the body, so we tell people to lay off the sugar and starch (carbohydrates) especially.
It can be hard to control your calories, and exercise can be a difficult way to burn calories, but exercise has other health benefits and does burn calories, so it’s still a good idea. If you can reduce the amount of carbohydrate you consume and get regular exercise, you should have positive results. It simply doesn’t happen over-night, though, which discourages people.
Keep up the good work.
Don’t worry or look at numbers. Keep doing what you are doing for 3 months and then see the results. You are burning stored up fat.
read about your “Basal Metabolic Rate”. everyone burns >1000 calories a day his by being alive.
if you’re active calories + bmr are significantly greater (+10-20% or more) than the calories you take in, it’s essentially impossible to gain weight. you have to be careful though that your intake deficit isn’t nutritionally poor. for example if all you did was eat empty carbs but burn it all off and then some (again, active+bmr) you can become mal-nourished very quickly and in fact won’t have the energy to keep up the exercise.
I’m my opinion, most diets are BS. if you’re exercising regularly, you want your macronutrient fractions to be 30% carbs, 40-50% protein, and the rest as fat (ideally 100% of the fat being unsaturated). make sure your active + bmr calories burned is equal to or greater than your total intake, and you’ll get and stay fit.
something else to keep in mind: allow yourself the cheat days. don’t go crazy because you’ll get sick, but know that one day of excess doesn’t cause instant weight gain or cardiovascular harm. most of what you eat isn’t actually digested, especially insoluble fiber.
Don’t get too caught up in the calories because it can lead to a pretty bad mindset, especially if you don’t have good discipline in sticking to regimes or restrictions. The fitter you get and more muscle you build you’ll actually burn more calories than if you are in worse shape, and over time you will be better at executing your workout via form, intensity or variety, which will lead to more progress. Really though it is about making realistic goals and taking proper measures to change eating habits that will be the main component to losing weight and keeping it off. Logging food helps, slowly reducing portions and replacing bad food choices with good food choices gradually will benefit you in the long run. Don’t try to change everything all of a sudden all at once, it may lead to ping Ponging and bad habits.
As exercise becomes more habitual, you may come to really enjoy it. Perhaps you’ll want to train seriously, but still at an amateur level, for a race, or something like that. If so, your daily calorie burns from exercise will grow quite large, and the muscle mass you build will increase your basal metabolic rate. While the other posters are entirely correct that diet changes are more likely to lead to weight loss for the average person, exercise can lead to pretty dramatic burns once you build up your fitness.
I’m an amateur triathlete and today was a fairly light day: speed focused swim workout, followed by a recovery run. My calorie burn was 950. Long bike rides burn around 1500-2500 calories, depending on how long I go for.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go to that effort unless you want to. Your current workout plan sounds very sensible, and if you stay consistent and pair it with a healthy diet, you will lose weight, probably faster than you expect.
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