Bought these few weeks ago, great invention! easy on shoulders and wrists worth weight in gold 
If you were to lift weights without any change at all in diet you’re going to weigh less, not more.
Fancy waffle irons? Nice.
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Thanks for the advice.
Well that made me an anomaly then. I went from 12.5 stone to nearly 13.5 - 14 stone through nothing but weight lifting.
What you mean is you did not consciously make any other changes. What actually happened was that you did and just didn’t notice them. Your body is remarkably powerful at making you do what it needs you to do and just as good at hiding these changes from you. You simply cannot create mass from thin air.
The exercise for weight loss has a fairly boring but also a fascinating side to it.
On the one hand, there is the reality that most people simply cannot burn anywhere near enough calories to move the needle. 30 minutes of a brisk walk burns only the amount of extra calories that you can undo from a calorie balance perspective with a couple of poorly chosen bites of dinner. If you can knock out an 18 minute 5k you might have the capacity to burn enough to help. That isn’t most people.
The other more interesting side is related to what I said to Noo above - the body has incredible control and feedback systems. These mechanisms have long been understood - increase physical activity and your body responds by fucking with hunger signals and reducing energy expenditure throughout the rest of the day. What has not really been apparent until far more recently is just how extensive the compensation is on the energy expenditure side of the equation alone. This idea is now termed the Constrained Model of Energy Expenditure. I dont know accessible it is to people without a science background, but im pretty sure the guy who mostly coined the term (Ponzer) has written some material for the general public on the topic.
Rescued a dog in January. Needs about 1.5-2 hrs walking a day.
Lost 2 stone since we got him. Was more but blew my knee out about 10 weeks ago and put a couple pounds back on.
But not just did it help lose quite a bit of wobble, mentally it made a huge difference. Getting out every morning for a walk before work means I start my day off in a refreshing way; and am so much more productive at work now.
Dogs a tosser at times mind
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Fat stores can be seen as natures defence mechanism. In times of famine / extreme stress the body pulls from these stores to sustain bodily function and life. The body defends these stores really really well - so the key to long term, effective weight loss is to find the key to unlock those stores.
Fat storage, simply put, is controlled by insulin. Every time you eat there is an insulin response. What you eat determines how strong that insulin response will be. A donut will produce a far greater insulin spike than a stem of broccoli. When there is too much sugar in the bloodstream, the body has only one place to store it - because it must be removed from the bloodstream - so it is deposited in the fat cells for use “at a later date”. In the Western world, that later date never arrives - so the sugar/energy remains stored, the cells of the body become insulin resistant and the weight gain continues.
This is why weight gain is an hormonal issue not a physics issue of calories in/calories out. Keep eating carbs and sugar and your insulin will just keep on pushing that sugar into your fat cells. The key is to safely have the lowest possible insulin spikes at the lowest possible frequency. Emerging research is now indicating that how often you eat may be almost as important as to what and how much you eat.
Cutting out carbs and sugar, exercising for optimum health, getting enough sleep (crucially important) and removing as much stress as possible should get you the results you desire.
I appreciate that it is very difficult for people to abandon the “conventional” theories of nutrition and weight loss. It must be quite a kick in the teeth that the advice and theories you have followed for years are not only wrong but have largely contributed to the greatest incidence of ill health and death ever seen in the human population. (3 million deaths per year caused by obesity WHO estimate)
Still not convinced? - Go down to your local high street and look around. The evidence is right in front of you. It was not like this pre 1980’s when the Government nutritional advice changed to eat a low fat / high carb diet. That is the overwhelmingly terrible advice that has caused this problem. Its not your fault.
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No, but some people have bodies that are rather stubborn about adding much mass as fat. When I was monitoring intake very carefully as an athlete, the summer ‘off’ periods of deliberate muscle mass accumulation did not have radically different amounts of nutritional intake. But workouts were much more focused on high weight/low repetition than in-season. I found it was basically impossible to gain weight at any meaningful scale during the playing season, but in the focused summers, I could add about 1kg a week.
Granted, that was in the 19-22 age bracket. Things are a little different now. The pandemic broke me out of the 100kg +/- I had maintained for about 20 years. I seem to have found a new saddlepoint just under 110 kg, though still well below my training peak.
Funny enough, I used to be one of those people (personal best of 16:15) but then struggled with injuries, quit running out of frustration for five years, and gained weight — way more than I should have. Started running again for mental health, went and lost 50 lbs. (~3.5 stone), and I’m running my first marathon the morning of the City home game. One interesting thing I found recently is that — while 1/2 hour of running is really when you start to make aerobic gains — in terms of marathon training, running 3+ hours in training actually just beats up your body; the aerobic gains really stop at 3 hours. I did 3:09 for my 20 miles last weekend, so I’m glad I decided against doing the full 26 like I had intended when I made my training plan in the spring.
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No, I agree but I would say that my diet at the time gave a decent foundation to bulk up. My main point however is that under certain training regimes, weight training can cause you to gain weight and not really lose any fat.
This is essentially what body builders do to an extreme during the bulking phase of their season. They bulk, then they cut.
For us on this thread their cutting phase is the most interesting / relevant. During this time they do not really add any muscle mass. They train to minimise any losses they make under extreme dieting.
On a personal level, I’d like to look more at what cyclists, climbers etc. manage. My gut says a lot of this genetics at the top level but I’m fascinated by the idea of people with really high power to weight ratios.
This thread is totally screwing me up.
On one hand we’ve Paul Walsh coming in at over 6’ tall and over 16 stone. The other we have Peter Griffin running 20 miles in a tad over 3 hours.
Your activity both in type and amount was not constant so you shouldn’t expect the same effect from constant nutritional intake between those periods. The other reality is that you dont typically need “radical” changes to provide the additional fuel your body needs to recover and adapt. It is an amount well within the limits of what you can take in without feeling like anything in your diet has changed if you weren’t paying close attention.
BTW, good to see you post again.
Weight training can help direct how weight gain is in the context of caloric surplus is directed. Without caloric surplus (which doesnt have to mean an increase in calories from baseline if other changes are made to accommodate the weight training) there will be no weight gain.
What I would say that changed was a reduction in cardio and a conscious effort to train heavy.
Yeah I run marathons regularly - and now ultramarathons - but I don’t ever do more than 20 miles for a training run. If I have a longer race planned then I up my weekly mileage instead.
I also fell out of love with it for a while. After I ran my first marathon in 4.30 I was really disappointed (wanted to be <4) and stopped running for about a year. Eventually got back into it and decided not to think about time at all so started running with no watch or phone etc. It really helped me find my love for it again. The downside is I had no idea what pace I was running in any meaningful way so race days were just listening to my body and sometimes getting carried away with racing people around me.
Now that I’m joining the Air Force I am training to be ready for basic (it’s pretty easy standards to be honest but I want to max out every category) and so have got myself a simple digital watch. Ran 12 miles this morning in 1:35.05 which is a fair bit quicker than I expected!
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That is absolutely correct.
About a third of people are genetically predisposed to not gain weight - an evolutionary weakness thousands of years ago but today most would term you as lucky…
Another third are predisposed to gaining weight very easily - we have all seen the family genetics at play of “large” families
The other third seem to easily gain and easily lose weight as a matter of choice.
As I mentioned before your size is driven by genetics and hormonal reactions to food. Nothing much anyone can do about their genetics but the hormonal response is somewhat able to be naturally manipulated.
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Carried over from the Covid thread…
You are saying this to someone who has spent 20 years of his career conducting research into the neuroendocrine control of energy regulation. Things that you raise as new ideas are things on which I was published 15 years ago. You will be very unlikely to ever meet someone in your real life who has spent more time thinking about and advocating for an appreciation of the complexity of changes in body weight.
If you take issue with people who say weight loss is just a case of moving more and/or eating less - a supposed application of energy in vs energy out (EIEO) - then you have an ally. As attractive an idea as it is, no just because you burned 300 kcal on the treadmill does not mean you can have that piece of cake. It just doesn’t balance out like that. But that is not evidence of the falsification of EIEO. It is simply an illustration of the dynamic, non-linear characteristic of it.
If from a practical perspective you would advocate people to ignore EIEO and make specific changes in their diet (e.g. eliminate sugar) then I’d say there are many ways to skin this cat and so do whatever you have success with. Where I’d have a problem is in inventing magic theories about why such workaround strategies work. Any strategy you employ that produces weight loss works because it creates a caloric deficit. To this point, not all strategies are equal. This is clear. Some foods have different effects on satiety than others and so certain choices can help set someone up to succeed in creating and maintaining a caloric deficit than others in a Real World setting. But the data is pretty unequivocal - regardless of the diet composition in terms of macronutrients or other aspects of diet quality, it is the presence of a caloric deficit that drives the weight loss. It is actually crazy that we need these really difficult to do clinical studies to demonstrate this given how fundamental thermodynamics are, but that we need them to convince people is an example of how attractive magical thinking is in this area.
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Question that may or may not be related to the above
Does the body use fat stores as a defense mechanism such that if the body is taking in substances which it does not like these are stored within the bodies fat reserves? In some cases can this drive the development of fat reserves. I’m thinking diets high in sugar for example.