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Don't Try to Lose Weight by Exercising

No, calories, though you did make me check. This morning I did 434 in 40 minutes -- I'm feeling very energetic at the moment -- it goes up and down quite significantly, though never below 500 in 40 minutes.

I’m still sceptical of that. Not that you’re reading it wrong but more than likely your bike isn’t giving you an accurate reading. However, as I said if your healthy and a decent weight forget the numbers and enjoy :)
 
Sorry I only read a few interviews there, he was just saying cutting out certain things might work for some but not others and generally fad diets are a waste of time.

My opinion on losing weight etc is people put far too much thought into it, making it overly complicated when it isn't.

1. Because they're obese and live in a world of denial as to why they're fat.

or

2. Because they're some personal trainer, dietician, nutritionist, fitness guru etc with a product to sell.
The big shift in weight loss is the muscle between your ears. People stop losing weight because they fail to sustain the requirement to eat less than they burn. It's hard work, and it's boring. It takes a bloody long time. I am doing it now, 7 weeks in, 10lb down. It works, but I have to carry on for another 2 months before I can back off to a "maintain" level. Fad diets are attractive because they claim to circumvent this. Spend a week on the Lychee Diet and lose a stone! Yeah right.

The psychology of weight loss is extremely complex. It's easy to be dismissive about "obese and live in a world of denial". OK, so let's say this person is your patient. What are you going to tell them, how are you going to sustain them through 6 months of weighing portions and only eating what it says on the card? How are you then going to stop them reverting to eating 4000 cals a day and not burning them?

Personal trainers help in this because they shift the psychology of the patient.
For reference, dietitians are generally based in hospitals and they work with people having a particular medical condition (other than obesity) that affects their nutritional needs. Nutritionists work with people with no particular conditions, ie the general population that have normal responses to normal foods and do not have any special requirements. The two are not to be confused. They even do different degrees.
 
All this micro biome stuff may have its place but to 99.9% people of the overweight population it has no bearing. If they stopped eating garbage and started eating healthy I’m sure they’d see a difference.
The studies are suggesting, though, that the bigger effect from eating better is the improvement in the balance of gut bacteria. Eat garbage, bugger up your gut flora and face the consequences, including obesity and, possible depression. There isn’t yet, AFAICT, a link between bad diet, unhealthy gut flora and voting Brexit, but I’d not be surprised ;)
 
Yes. But in the context of your gut microbiome, unless you arrange to change it for the better as part of your weight management, it's still (as the paper says) a matter of managing calories in minus calories out. And, as in the thread title, for most people it looks to me like calories consumed is a more important factor than calories expended by exercising.

Are you simply referring to the second line of the abstract? The review goes on to consider a range of metabolic and behavioral effects of the microbiome that can alter adiposity.

Take, as just one example:
"The microbiota of genetically obese mice is rich in enzymes involving the fermentation of dietary fiber including starch/sucrose metabolism, galactose metabolism and butanoate metabolism [11], and once this obese microbiome is transplanted into germ-free mice it induces adiposity in their new hosts."
It goes on to explain how fermentation of dietary fiber also has beneficial side-effects, so it is needed in balance. But it gets unbalanced, more fat is produced.
 
The studies are suggesting, though, that the bigger effect from eating better is the improvement in the balance of gut bacteria. Eat garbage, bugger up your gut flora and face the consequences, including obesity and, possible depression. There isn’t yet, AFAICT, a link between bad diet, unhealthy gut flora and voting Brexit, but I’d not be surprised ;)
I don't know. I've seen a few fat racists.
 
All this micro biome stuff may have its place but to 99.9% people of the overweight population it has no bearing. If they stopped eating garbage and started eating healthy I’m sure they’d see a difference.

Although I have been working hard to clarify the role of the microbiome here, I don't entirely disagree with this statement. I think that in most cases this is true.

However, it cannot go unacknowledged that thanks to antibiotics, changing dietary patterns with regards to processed foods, etc. there has been a trend towards unbalanced microbiomes, and the evidence is now overwhelming that this can induce predisposition to obesity (among other things). Also factor in other things like hormonal imbalances (the relatively common hypothyroidism carries an obesity risk), behavioral risks (the relationship between poor sleep patterns and obesity), etc. and the picture generally becomes more complex than simply accusing that one is eating too much.
 
Are you simply referring to the second line of the abstract? The review goes on to consider a range of metabolic and behavioral effects of the microbiome that can alter adiposity.

Take, as just one example:
"The microbiota of genetically obese mice is rich in enzymes involving the fermentation of dietary fiber including starch/sucrose metabolism, galactose metabolism and butanoate metabolism [11], and once this obese microbiome is transplanted into germ-free mice it induces adiposity in their new hosts."
It goes on to explain how fermentation of dietary fiber also has beneficial side-effects, so it is needed in balance. But it gets unbalanced, more fat is produced.
OK then, but I'm puzzled as to how to use that point for practical weight management, which was the point I made. Can your quote be applied in practice, and if so how? I'm managing my weight and would love to know what I am missing of doing wrong.
 
The op headine ime is correct for me

a year ago, i think, i really cut down on food and increased exercise by a lot (somewhere on pfm - health thread 1)
consequently i lost some blubber, but weight the same. i had increased my muscle weight. i cannot remember what this
outcome is called, anyway people on here and the GP told me i must eat more, this i did with less exercise and the weight finally began to go

our diet has always been mainly home cooked, tis the vino that keeps the blubber on these days. the most bizarre thing is about one pint of beer is difficult for me to gulp now, get full up so stomach has contracted i presume.
 
OK then, but I'm puzzled as to how to use that point for practical weight management, which was the point I made. Can your quote be applied in practice, and if so how? I'm managing my weight and would love to know what I am missing of doing wrong.

Sorry, we went off the rails a bit talking about microbiome transplants (my link to that article was in that side-thread of the conversation), so it was mostly about that. However, there may be ways to target your microbiome through diet, no transplant required.

In theory (n.b. I am not a medical doctor) aiming to either a) rebalance your microbiome or b) construct your diet to match your microbiome could reduce its negative effects. The former could be done via things like probiotics, however I think the scientific jury is still very much out on that one, and who knows about the quality of commercial probiotic products which aren't, I think, regulated by governmental health bodies. The latter would require having your microbiome analysed in the lab.

In general though the advice would look something like this (n.b. again I am not actually giving this advice. Talk to your doctor): don't use antibiotics if you don't absolutely have to (not a problem in the UK where they require a prescription) and try to eat a good mix of healthy, unprocessed foods. It also doesn't hurt to eat foods generally viewed as probiotic, like yogurt, as long as you're not eating the hyper-sweetened varieties...just good old-fashioned plain yogurt.
 
For me exercise is very directly linked to weight loss. If I don’t cycle, as I haven’t for the past four months or so thanks to the weather, I get fat. I’ll lose it again if we have a nice summer. It takes a 30 mile cycle through the far from flat local area at least three times a week and the weight starts to come off.
 
Relative, unusual, inactivity, encourages grazing in most people. Grazing, not the lack of exercise, is where extra weight comes from.
 
When I was running seriously, and training for marathons, running 90 miles plus a week, I couldn't keep weight on no matter what I ate, & I ended up a walking skeleton. I might have been fit to run long distances, but most of the time I felt like shit.

I suffer from Haemochromatosis which, due to the fact it wasn't diagnosed until almost too late has severely damaged my joints and liver. The consultant referred me to a dietician and a self-help group, and as a result, I've been on a keto-type diet for the last three years. I lost three stone, and feel a damn sight better for it. I no longer get the energy highs and lows from eating carbs, and I can, within reason, eat fatty dairy, meat & stuff. Before going on this diet (well, it's a permanent change in eating habits) I attended a fascinating lecture run by a special interest group in liver disease. The lady who gave the talk proceeded to demolish most of our strongly-held beliefs around what we considered healthy and safe to eat. So I don't consume carbs in the form of bread, pasta, rice, cereals etc., nothing sweet, sugar being the big enemy. Obviously no alcohol. Eggs are good, as is fish, green vegetables but not root veg. Berry fruits but not bananas, oranges, etc. Cheese, full-fat milk, cream, all fine in moderation, given they're high in calories.

it's a bit inconvenient of course, but I do stick pretty rigidly to it. I did indulge in a small slice of Christmas pudding on Christmas day, but it tasted horribly sweet & I couldn't eat it all.
 
The laws of thermodynamics are very simple. However the way they apply to real world biological systems are not as simple as we would like to think, or as simple as the classroom models would suggest, because some basic assumptions may be untrue.

Ah, the fog of science!

I’m increasingly coming to the view that gut flora are fundamentally important in many ways, weight control being just one of them.

I read somewhere a while back a theory that the (modern) lack of gut worms is causal in the increasing occurence of food intolerances. There was thought to be some synergy between worms and the breakdown of the things to which people are intolerant, many of which revolve around flour/wheat.

It is utter bullshit.
Want to lose weight?
Eat less calories than you consume.
There were no overweight allied prisoners of war.
And you are mis reading your bike info.

I have read that the fat ones lasted the shortest length of time.

When the factory was closing and I was made redundant in Devon, I was re-employed on the shop-floor. I worked 12 hour shifts, 4 days on two off. The job was loading batches of compnents into ovens, and then unloading an hour later. I was reasonably busy for the whole shift and shifted, around half a tonne into and half a tonne out of ovens, onto and off a washing machine conveyor, each shift.

I convinced myself that I'd lost weight (I have always almost never used scales, and still seldom use them). The shift sparkies chuckled when I mentioned it. I checked and I was the same weight as ever. I ate no more.

Muscle is heavier than fat.
 
Not to mention that the physiological distance between "calories in" and "calories out" is huge and complex. Oh, we're fine with standard cellular metabolism, and obviously the primary-school basics of digestion, muscle energy expenditure, insulin metabolism, etc. but once you start to look at the system as a whole, it might as well still be a black box mechanism. We can certainly see ways that the black box's output varies with different inputs, and we can zoom in on specific effects, but we don't understand it well enough to deduce exactly how those inputs over here cause different outputs over there at the level of the entire system.
 


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