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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As a lot of people already said :
You cannot out train a bad diet .
Working out is to improve your physical capabilities and feel better in your body not to loose weight.
If you bike 5 miles the objective should be to be able to do a 10mile climb by 6 months for example not to loose x amount of weight
>lose 200 or so calories. Is that not a good exercise?
It is good exercise. You just burned about 40g of fat. Do this every day for a month, and you’ve lost a kilo.
It’s much easier to lose weight by eating less, but exercise is good in other ways — it helps get your cardiovascular system in shape, and the muscles you will build burn some calories just to stay alive.
It might not sound like a lot, but it adds up.
Imagine someone who weighs 170 lbs when they’re 20, and then when they’re 50 they weigh 250 lbs. You might think that something took a turn at some point during those 30 years, but that weight difference is actually just an extra 25 kcal per day, consistently for years.
So at least mathematically speaking, that short bike ride postponed your “inevitable weight gain” by like a week.
Exercise to get become stronger/faster, but if you need to lose weight pretty much the only thing you should think about is eating less.
I’ll go further than that: don’t even really worry about “eating better”. Most diet fads and diet foods are ways to trick your body into fewer calories whilst still eating a lot, and they often fail. Literally just eat a lot less.
Eat one sandwich for lunch. Like just the sandwich, not a sandwich and a snickers and a pack of crisps and a slice of cake for an office birthday later. One sandwich and you’re done.
It sucks and it’s hard but when I internalised that I lost the weight.
Short version: It works exactly like you said. Loosing weight is way easier by eating less, than exercising more.
Other version: The less you eat, the more your body gets accustomed to less calories and will try to save as much as possible, reducing your weight loss., which sucks The more you exercise and more fit you get, the more calories the body will need to sustain the fitness, which is great. The more you exercise, the more you will crave calories, which sucks.
Its best to not get too hung over on trying to burn calories with exercise, but instead finding an exercise you love and keeping fit. On the other hand it is crucial to understand how many calories you ingest and try to keep it in the range you want and it is really vital, not to try to reduce too much too fast, because your body will adapt and you will suffer while not loosing a lot of weight.
Most people don’t realize how energy dense a chocolate bar is….
A snickers bar has more energy in them than a stick of same sized dynamite…. Snickers just used up more slowly.
Snack are really really energy dense, chaloric bombs (badumts)
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Nobody would ever need to eat snacks, if you want to lose weight, lose the snacks… Keep up your increased chaloric output and lover your input… both just a little, so you don’t shock your body.
That 200 cal extra is about 10% increase from the baseline, which is good. Lose the snacks or do what i do, if you get a chockolate or a packet… Halve it, put the other half away for tomorrow
Losing weight without change in excercise or diet is impossible, you need to give up something, or excercise more or both
Eating less is the best way, but you need months for your body to adjust, but a diet is never over, if you don’t change your daily excercise output, you are gonna get the weight back if you “stop” the diet
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I’m a programmer and since I started to work from home 4 years ago, i picked up about 40 kg of weight, just because I ate the same, but i don’t need to commute, stand on the bus or walk long distances to work…. It matters(I’m a big dude, about 190cm so it levels out but with that 130 kg, i have a belly now)
Now that i Have reintroduced 30-60 minutes of excercise each day walk or cycle, or just by going to the store everyday and I use a smaller bowl for eating things… i lost 10 kg in 3 months
(It took about 2 months to the constant hunger to stop, that was hard)
Cycling though better than sitting on a couch is not a very intense activity as bikes are very efficent machines. If you were to run 5 miles you will easily burn 600+ calories. If you can I urge you to try running.
Lifting weights also unless you are insanely intense at it doesn’t burn that many calories.
That said, no amount of exercise will get you to lose weight if you don’t cut down on your intake. You can always eat more than you burn so discipline is key.
But don’t get disheartened, excercise has many benefits beyond losing weight and is a good thing on its own.
Humans are extremely efficient at walking and running. Bikes makes us even more efficient. If you want to really BURN energy, do something we are not efficient at such as: gymnastics, swimming; weights; just about any exercise that doesn’t involve being upright with two feet.
Ok so… You won’t lose much actually biking around – for the reason mentioned above – but what you do end up doing is increasing your passive energy consumption; since you will develop more muscle mass.
Muscles are incredibly energy hungry just by existing. Our body doesn’t like to keep anything too demanding around, so it removes them. How do you gain muscles then? Well funnily enough by damaging them; when you stress your body with physical exercise you damage your muscles, which then proceed to fix themselves by having the cells replicate and then you have more muscle. However there is a certain point of mitigating returns, if you get enough muscle mass you can’t keep it since you can’t stress is effectively, which is why professional body builders do very specific almost muscle exclusive exercises with high intensity. Since the type of body they have is not *natural* as in they are pushing it to the limits and beyond of what it can be by manipulating these natural mechanism with unnatural means. Which is where the art and sport of the sport lies, doing something extreme that our bodies normally shouldn’t do by manipulating how they work.
So you will lose weight as long as your diet stay stable. This is because just you staying alive consumes the most calories you could possibly consume. Only way to consume more by existing is to stay be somewhere where it is really cold, because this triggers metabolic changes in our bodies.
So you shouldn’t think you are taking a bike ride to burn energy, but you are taking a bike ride so your body starts to burn more energy. Because the thing is that you can lose weight by just laying in your bed all day. Many people who are bedridden do lose weight quickly and a lot, this is because they usually can’t get enough to or can’t eat enough. This is actually a quicker way to lose weight than adding exercise to your normal life assuming your diet is stable.
I don’t know what your goal really is, but if it is to lose weight then don’t actually focus on losing weight. Instead focus on not gaining more of it. Also don’t use a scale or count calories, use a measure of tactical spots (Belly, Waist, Hips), because your weight can go up and down +-5 kilos depending on stress, hydration, are you sick or healthy, what you been eating; but you tactical measurements do not. Always have a goal that you aren’t becoming bigger, and suddenly you’ll realise you are becoming smaller.
Weight loss is 90% a function of diet. Exercise is great for other things (mental health, healthy immune system, higher levels of energy, better sleep) but if u wanna lose weight you gotta just eat fewer calories. The best way of doing that is taking care in what you eat – eat really yummy, good quality food, just don’t eat big portions. The better the food, generally, the fuller it makes you feel.
Welcome to an understanding of energy and quite how much the human body does all day long. (I’m going to use the terms force, energy, power, etc. interchangeably, so physicists now recoil in horror… plus I’m gonna mix and interchange units like nobody’s business!).
You’re using energy all the time, all day, every waking – and sleeping – moment of your life. Just existing is “burning calories”. Whatever your exercise it has a certain amount of mass (weight) moving a certain distance, and that in very simple physics gives you a certain usage of energy. Whether that’s you pushing weights, walking, running, cycling, or whatever, it’s really quite simple to work out what you’re going to use up on an activity.
And, yes, it doesn’t *seem* very much at all. Because it’s not. Your food is incredibly rich source of chemical energy and your body incredibly efficient at processing it and is carrying around 70kg of person all the time so even moving your leg is moving maybe 10kg of you around.
And so when you’re exercising, instead of the “just existing” energy usage, you’re using your exercise energy usage instead. It’s not that the exercise is magically 200 calories over and above everything, it’s 200 calories compared to – approximately – 80 calories per hour that you’re expending ALL THE TIME anyway, just sitting there breathing.
Have a look:
[https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html](https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html)
But the fact is… you were burning those 80 calories per hour in your sleep, before you ever did exercise, etc. etc. Your body heat, your brain operation, just moving around, speaking, talking, breathing. The body takes in an incredible amount of energy and just moving your lungs and pumping your blood and heating your body and running your brain take enormous amounts of energy, let alone when you then transport 70kg for miles around your daily life just getting to work.
80kcal – an hour of sedentary activity – is 334,720J or 93Wh. About enough to light an energy-saving bulb for a day. But also the same energy as picking up a small tomato to 1m high 330,000 times (or over 3 times a second for an entire day). It would take a single hard boiled egg to give your body that amount of energy. The body is incredible, and food is very rich!
So when you do your exercise, your food is INCREDIBLY rich in energy, your body is burning an awful lot of energy just to exist anyway, and your exercise difference of doing thousands of repetitions ON TOP of that background consumption is actually not very much in total energy terms.
Rather than get bogged down in the numbers, though, there’s a very simple truth here. Whatever you base metabolic rate, whatever your diet, whatever your exercise – if you are trying to lose weight and are eating 2000 calories a day and exercising 200 calories a day… and you’re still putting on weight or not losing it fast enough? You have to reduce your eating and/or increase your activity. That’s all there is to it. Try 1900 calories of food and 250 calories of exercise for a week. If you’re still not losing? Adjust again. And once you get a slow, gradual loss… you need to stick with that for a long time (going “more” is probably unhealthy and subjecting you to exhaustion and malnutrition). You need to do more and eat less on a week-by-week basis until you discover the point at which you start to lose weight, and then maintain that for a long time – a year or more. Then, when you’re done, you need to eat and exercise to the break-even point, on average. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a burger, it means you have to maintain the average over a period of months.
A thing that many people don’t realise about exercising – your “weight loss” is generally through your breath. (“If you lose 10 pounds of fat, precisely 8.4 pounds comes out through your lungs and the remaining 1.6 pounds turns into water.”) You eat and excrete the same as ever, the energy is used in motion and heat but the actual loss *weight* loss is done mostly through your lungs. You’re losing weight out through your breath. It’s not quick or easy to do that – convert solid fat to liquid gas and then exhale it all. That’s why losing weight is really difficult.
“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”
2 weeks is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sorry, you won’t see much change at all on that kind of scale. And the exercise is comparatively little, yes. That’s true of all exercise. That exercise isn’t even 10% of your DAILY intake of energy.
Calories are strange things in that food has LOTS of calories, and those calories give LOTS of energy, meaning that to work off even an egg is comparatively a ton of exercise. That’s why much of losing weight is not putting that food into the body in the first place.
But if you want to lose weight, you have to look at months and years, not days, weeks and individual meals / exercises.
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