Tried it. Didn’t work. Welcome to the unfair universe.
Good thing you don’t have that attitude about FAI.
Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn’t have anything to do with weight loss.
Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I’ve read an interesting book that says aerobics don’t actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you’re doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more… which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.
What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn’t dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
Anyway, I’m currently experimenting with one of his simpler “beginner” routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I’m only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I’ve not done it every day this week. I’ll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.
I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one’s results, and that “tried it, didn’t work” isn’t a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn’t overweight was the time where I didn’t have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.
What I’ve observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.
This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you’re not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you’re getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate… even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I’ve had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?
There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they’re all simultaneously satisfied, you’re not going to get a result.
Simply labeling yourself “metabolically challenged” is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?
Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
This strikes me as very unlikely, given that humans have lower sprinting speeds than most prey and predator animals, but better endurance capabilities, enabling us to catch them through persistence hunting. Humans have adaptations that make us quite good at steady long distance running, such as an energy-conserving bipedal gait and highly efficient cooling through sweat, but compared to other animals our size we’re quite bad at covering short distances quickly. The idea that our ancestral environment demanded a lot of sprinting relative to long distance running sounds downright implausible.
That sounds like the theory Christopher McDougall presents in Born To Run. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any credentials in the relevant fields (not that that has too much impact on whether the theory is likely or not) so maybe he is relying on previous work? If you don’t mind me asking, where have you gotten your information from?
Crisis of belief? Definitely maybe. I don’t know EY’s full situation, but I’m still having a hard time digesting the idea that he just can’t do it.
I believe you’re just describing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) above. When I started learning about diet and fitness, that was a big one.
I agree with the poster who said to ask the bodybuilders. I got into reading bodybuilding information sites and they really do have it down to a fine art. There are many subtleties beyond “good diet and exercise.” Screw up a few little things and you won’t lose weight.
Diet: low carb, and only unrefined, high good fats, high protein (“low carb” here just means not the 80% carbs people normally consume—it doesn’t have to be ridiculous like Atkins). Tons of vegetables and fruit (slightly more controversial). Lots of small meals. Eat less calories than you burn [Edit: though obviously this is wishy-washy. Still, count calories in general. Sometimes you have to eat more to boost your metabolism, etc]. There are degrees of strictness, and much more specific ratios and timing and cycles, but those are the basics.
Exercise: Do heavy weightlifting. Do full-body lifts like chin ups, push ups/bench press, squats, deadlifts, military press, etc. And do HIIT. And continuously switch your routine around in some way.
If this is exactly what you’ve done, then I underestimate the severity of a slow metabolism.
And of course, this doesn’t address the willpower issue at all.
I just have to say it anyway though, because if you’re eating well and exercising regularly and not losing weight, just missing a few things like:
-eating 5-6 meals a day, not 3
-pounding a spoonful of fish oil a day
-doing 15 min. HIIT 3-4 times a week and not slow cardio
-doing squats and deadlifts
can make the difference between losing a pound or two a week and actually gaining weight.
Yeah, in my case it’s omega 3s or 6s, deadlifts, HIIT, pull-ups, side presses, lots of minimally-processed or unprocessed foods, raw meats and eggs, and the occasional tomato/lemon puree for alkalinization. My achilles’ heel has been not being spectacularly regular about any of this, in that I’ll also eat out or eat junk when pressed for time or otherwise stressed. And sometimes my exercise will make me sore all over for days, causing me to skip some exercise.
When I have ALL of this stuff lined up just so, I lose weight and have more energy. Drop even one piece, and it’s flatline or gain.
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to “tweak” in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then… I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for results to become apparent. Or perhaps the timing is purely coincidental—I lose weight at random intervals or in response to stress at work or changes in my personal life and the latest downturn merely coincided with Tweak F. Or perhaps it’s an observer affect, such as the fact that I’m paying attention to my weight in order to evaluate which tweak is working, is what made me lose weight.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there’s a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there’s a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
Hell, some of them are probably useless or counterproductive for me! ;-)
Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you’re getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate… even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I’ve had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking? There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they’re all simultaneously satisfied, you’re not going to get a result.
I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you’re deluded about how much productive tweaking you’ve done. People are useless at figuring out what causes what when there’s a large time-lag between cause and observed effect, especially when there’s lots of noise too.
Basically this is something the body cannot do. The fat is stored with some glycerides that can be converted to glucose but the rest cannot.
So this theory sounds like broscience to me.
What you are actually doing may work though, 10 minutes of HIIT will not burn much glucose (this is good—if you burn glucose it has to be replaced—you want to burn fat) and will add a fair bit of fat-burning muscle.
Mr. Eby, I am doing some informal research on diet, weight loss, exercise etc. I am curious:
What was your highest weight; lowest weight in the last 10 years; and current weight? What do you do to maintain your weight? Are you happy with your current weight and level of physical fitness?
P.S. I am sorry to invade your privacy but it does seem like you have held yourself out to the world as something of a guru.
If you’re still reading, I’m definitely interested in your research. I’ve done some myself.
The survey I recommend reading both the livejournal and the dreamwidth comments. They don’t trend in the same direction.
My conclusions Short version: people can hurt themselves badly by trying to lose weight. “Roll your own” moderate low carb and exercise regimes work safely for some people.
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes also claims aerobics doesn’t work to lose weight and refers to a bunch of studies to that effect. Though he doesn’t go so far as to deny there are cardiovascular benefits.
Incorrect, at least from my experience. I lost ~30 pounds, a little more, when I was 16 and doing aerobics one summer. The only diet element I had was eating slightly less. Mind, it was an hour, sometimes an hour and half of intense great aerobics with no breather pause and I was sweating a great deal by the end of each session.
I did gain that weight back in less than a month, so fast that my classmates didn’t even notice I had lost a lot of weight in the first place, so the end effect was that it didn’t work, but the idea of aerobics not leading to weight loss at all is not true.
You cannot counterbalance the evidence behind a claim that “refers to a bunch of studies” by citing anecdotal evidence.
You can most certainly give people a cause to actually look at the “referred to studies” to see what they actually say rather than third hand impressions given in a one sentence comment about a book. ie. To see whether the actual studies are incompatible with the prediction “If someone does intense cardio for one and a half hours (every day) AND actually ate less rather than more energy from food while maintaining this schedule they will probably lose weight”.
As far as I know the “doesn’t work” means something far more specific, practical and psychological that isn’t particularly incompatible with the highly unnatural circumstances mentioned in Kiraly’s experience. It is also something rather closely relevant to the “I did gain that weight back in less than a month” observation.
I took off about fifteen pounds in seven weeks with nothing but cardio, and dropped another twenty after that in a few more months, still with more cardio (it probably would have taken less if I hadn’t had to recover from getting hit by a car in the middle of it,) and I was still losing weight at the time that I seriously altered my workout regimen, because I’d lost too much weight. I put weight back on afterwards, but it was almost all muscle, so that people actually commented that I was looking leaner after I put twenty back on than before I gained the weight (some people even thought I was losing weight while I was gaining it.) I still weigh less today than when I started working out, and have more muscle as well.
On the other hand, I have a predisposition to eating disorders (suffered anorexia as a kid,) and my approach to exercise for someone who was not a competitive athlete at the time could fairly be described as fanatical, so it’s reasonable to expect that most people who start working out with the intention of taking weight off would not achieve similar results.
Good thing you don’t have that attitude about FAI.
Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I’ve read an interesting book that says aerobics don’t actually improve your fitness or burn fat.
Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you’re doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more… which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.
What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn’t dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.
His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)
Anyway, I’m currently experimenting with one of his simpler “beginner” routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I’m only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I’ve not done it every day this week. I’ll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.
I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one’s results, and that “tried it, didn’t work” isn’t a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn’t overweight was the time where I didn’t have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.
What I’ve observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.
This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you’re not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you’re getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate… even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I’ve had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?
There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they’re all simultaneously satisfied, you’re not going to get a result.
Simply labeling yourself “metabolically challenged” is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?
Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.
This strikes me as very unlikely, given that humans have lower sprinting speeds than most prey and predator animals, but better endurance capabilities, enabling us to catch them through persistence hunting. Humans have adaptations that make us quite good at steady long distance running, such as an energy-conserving bipedal gait and highly efficient cooling through sweat, but compared to other animals our size we’re quite bad at covering short distances quickly. The idea that our ancestral environment demanded a lot of sprinting relative to long distance running sounds downright implausible.
That sounds like the theory Christopher McDougall presents in Born To Run. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any credentials in the relevant fields (not that that has too much impact on whether the theory is likely or not) so maybe he is relying on previous work? If you don’t mind me asking, where have you gotten your information from?
EDIT: Nevermind, I followed your link to persistence hunting and from there to Endurance Running Hypothesis.
Crisis of belief? Definitely maybe. I don’t know EY’s full situation, but I’m still having a hard time digesting the idea that he just can’t do it.
I believe you’re just describing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) above. When I started learning about diet and fitness, that was a big one.
I agree with the poster who said to ask the bodybuilders. I got into reading bodybuilding information sites and they really do have it down to a fine art. There are many subtleties beyond “good diet and exercise.” Screw up a few little things and you won’t lose weight.
Diet: low carb, and only unrefined, high good fats, high protein (“low carb” here just means not the 80% carbs people normally consume—it doesn’t have to be ridiculous like Atkins). Tons of vegetables and fruit (slightly more controversial). Lots of small meals. Eat less calories than you burn [Edit: though obviously this is wishy-washy. Still, count calories in general. Sometimes you have to eat more to boost your metabolism, etc]. There are degrees of strictness, and much more specific ratios and timing and cycles, but those are the basics.
Exercise: Do heavy weightlifting. Do full-body lifts like chin ups, push ups/bench press, squats, deadlifts, military press, etc. And do HIIT. And continuously switch your routine around in some way.
If this is exactly what you’ve done, then I underestimate the severity of a slow metabolism.
And of course, this doesn’t address the willpower issue at all.
I just have to say it anyway though, because if you’re eating well and exercising regularly and not losing weight, just missing a few things like:
-eating 5-6 meals a day, not 3
-pounding a spoonful of fish oil a day
-doing 15 min. HIIT 3-4 times a week and not slow cardio
-doing squats and deadlifts
can make the difference between losing a pound or two a week and actually gaining weight.
Yeah, in my case it’s omega 3s or 6s, deadlifts, HIIT, pull-ups, side presses, lots of minimally-processed or unprocessed foods, raw meats and eggs, and the occasional tomato/lemon puree for alkalinization. My achilles’ heel has been not being spectacularly regular about any of this, in that I’ll also eat out or eat junk when pressed for time or otherwise stressed. And sometimes my exercise will make me sore all over for days, causing me to skip some exercise.
When I have ALL of this stuff lined up just so, I lose weight and have more energy. Drop even one piece, and it’s flatline or gain.
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to “tweak” in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then… I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for results to become apparent. Or perhaps the timing is purely coincidental—I lose weight at random intervals or in response to stress at work or changes in my personal life and the latest downturn merely coincided with Tweak F. Or perhaps it’s an observer affect, such as the fact that I’m paying attention to my weight in order to evaluate which tweak is working, is what made me lose weight.
In short, if there are really tons of variables that all have to be simultaneously satisfied for weight loss to work, there’s a decent chance than any conclusion you draw from your personal observations will be useless or counterproductive for anyone else.
Hell, some of them are probably useless or counterproductive for me! ;-)
(Hence the admonition to try different things.)
I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you’re deluded about how much productive tweaking you’ve done. People are useless at figuring out what causes what when there’s a large time-lag between cause and observed effect, especially when there’s lots of noise too.
Basically this is something the body cannot do. The fat is stored with some glycerides that can be converted to glucose but the rest cannot.
So this theory sounds like broscience to me.
What you are actually doing may work though, 10 minutes of HIIT will not burn much glucose (this is good—if you burn glucose it has to be replaced—you want to burn fat) and will add a fair bit of fat-burning muscle.
Mr. Eby, I am doing some informal research on diet, weight loss, exercise etc. I am curious:
What was your highest weight; lowest weight in the last 10 years; and current weight? What do you do to maintain your weight? Are you happy with your current weight and level of physical fitness?
P.S. I am sorry to invade your privacy but it does seem like you have held yourself out to the world as something of a guru.
If you’re still reading, I’m definitely interested in your research. I’ve done some myself.
The survey I recommend reading both the livejournal and the dreamwidth comments. They don’t trend in the same direction.
My conclusions Short version: people can hurt themselves badly by trying to lose weight. “Roll your own” moderate low carb and exercise regimes work safely for some people.
One more thought
Title?
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes also claims aerobics doesn’t work to lose weight and refers to a bunch of studies to that effect. Though he doesn’t go so far as to deny there are cardiovascular benefits.
Incorrect, at least from my experience. I lost ~30 pounds, a little more, when I was 16 and doing aerobics one summer. The only diet element I had was eating slightly less. Mind, it was an hour, sometimes an hour and half of intense great aerobics with no breather pause and I was sweating a great deal by the end of each session.
I did gain that weight back in less than a month, so fast that my classmates didn’t even notice I had lost a lot of weight in the first place, so the end effect was that it didn’t work, but the idea of aerobics not leading to weight loss at all is not true.
You cannot counterbalance the evidence behind a claim that “refers to a bunch of studies” by citing anecdotal evidence.
You can most certainly give people a cause to actually look at the “referred to studies” to see what they actually say rather than third hand impressions given in a one sentence comment about a book. ie. To see whether the actual studies are incompatible with the prediction “If someone does intense cardio for one and a half hours (every day) AND actually ate less rather than more energy from food while maintaining this schedule they will probably lose weight”.
As far as I know the “doesn’t work” means something far more specific, practical and psychological that isn’t particularly incompatible with the highly unnatural circumstances mentioned in Kiraly’s experience. It is also something rather closely relevant to the “I did gain that weight back in less than a month” observation.
This is exactly what pjeby’s description of the book you’re calling “incorrect” suggested would happen.
I took off about fifteen pounds in seven weeks with nothing but cardio, and dropped another twenty after that in a few more months, still with more cardio (it probably would have taken less if I hadn’t had to recover from getting hit by a car in the middle of it,) and I was still losing weight at the time that I seriously altered my workout regimen, because I’d lost too much weight. I put weight back on afterwards, but it was almost all muscle, so that people actually commented that I was looking leaner after I put twenty back on than before I gained the weight (some people even thought I was losing weight while I was gaining it.) I still weigh less today than when I started working out, and have more muscle as well.
On the other hand, I have a predisposition to eating disorders (suffered anorexia as a kid,) and my approach to exercise for someone who was not a competitive athlete at the time could fairly be described as fanatical, so it’s reasonable to expect that most people who start working out with the intention of taking weight off would not achieve similar results.
PACE: Rediscover Your Native Fitness, by Al Sears, MD.
Thanks.