I mentioned the nutrition because that used to be my problem in the past.
I had low level of iron, so the answer “just exercise and burn some calories” was quite useless to me—I was barely able to wake up in the morning. Repeatedly I tried to exercise regularly for a few weeks, but the outcome was always pathetic: after a few moves I was exhausted, and there was no visible long-term progress. Of course, after doing a difficult thing with zero benefits, after a few weeks my motivation was gone.
Meta problem was that “checking my levels of iron” wasn’t even on the list of things I was thinking about, when I was thinking about how to get rid of some fat. (People around me assumed the opposite causal model: I have a problem with energy, because I am not doing any sport or exercise, duh!) It happened quite randomly; a friend of mine was reading somewhere on internet a list of symptoms of iron deficiency and mentioned it to me, and I was like “huh, sometimes I have similar symptoms, too”. Yet it took a few years until once I asked a doctor to measure my iron level. Turned out, it was at the lowest end of the “healthy” interval… so, according to the doctor, not worth mentioning unless I ask explicitly, because I am still technically healthy. I guess being technically healthy is important from the official medicine point of view, but I would rather get closer towards the optimal health, so… I bought some iron supplements, and...
With the level of iron fixed, it was a completely different game. I suddenly felt full of energy, which was something I only remembered happening decades ago. Suddenly, exercising hard became possible. (At the risk of making a pseudoscientific explanation, I suppose that iron plays an important role in the process of converting “calories in” into energy available for exercising.)
Then, after a few months of exercising hard I lost some fat, gained some muscles; people who haven’t seen me for a longer time say I have visibly changed. (I don’t even check my calories, but I started eating more fresh vegetables, so maybe it happened as a side effect.)
So my experience is that exercising more, and eating less calories (not by eating less in general, but by eating different food) worked for me, but I had to “unlock” this option by doing something else first. In other words, when “calories in, calories out” finally started working for me, the problem was already halfway solved.
I mentioned the nutrition because that used to be my problem in the past.
I had low level of iron, so the answer “just exercise and burn some calories” was quite useless to me—I was barely able to wake up in the morning. Repeatedly I tried to exercise regularly for a few weeks, but the outcome was always pathetic: after a few moves I was exhausted, and there was no visible long-term progress. Of course, after doing a difficult thing with zero benefits, after a few weeks my motivation was gone.
Meta problem was that “checking my levels of iron” wasn’t even on the list of things I was thinking about, when I was thinking about how to get rid of some fat. (People around me assumed the opposite causal model: I have a problem with energy, because I am not doing any sport or exercise, duh!) It happened quite randomly; a friend of mine was reading somewhere on internet a list of symptoms of iron deficiency and mentioned it to me, and I was like “huh, sometimes I have similar symptoms, too”. Yet it took a few years until once I asked a doctor to measure my iron level. Turned out, it was at the lowest end of the “healthy” interval… so, according to the doctor, not worth mentioning unless I ask explicitly, because I am still technically healthy. I guess being technically healthy is important from the official medicine point of view, but I would rather get closer towards the optimal health, so… I bought some iron supplements, and...
With the level of iron fixed, it was a completely different game. I suddenly felt full of energy, which was something I only remembered happening decades ago. Suddenly, exercising hard became possible. (At the risk of making a pseudoscientific explanation, I suppose that iron plays an important role in the process of converting “calories in” into energy available for exercising.)
Then, after a few months of exercising hard I lost some fat, gained some muscles; people who haven’t seen me for a longer time say I have visibly changed. (I don’t even check my calories, but I started eating more fresh vegetables, so maybe it happened as a side effect.)
So my experience is that exercising more, and eating less calories (not by eating less in general, but by eating different food) worked for me, but I had to “unlock” this option by doing something else first. In other words, when “calories in, calories out” finally started working for me, the problem was already halfway solved.