Losing weight

The BEST way to lose weight is to eat less food than your body needs.

Visit this site and read this entire article, it is very helpful.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/diet.htm


I'll say it again, the BEST way to lose weight (and really, the ONLY way) is to eat less food than your body needs.

Working out really doesn't even have that much of an impact on your waistline (it does have other healthy benefits). You can walk for an 30min and only burn 250 calories, OR you can only eat 3 slices of pizza instead of 4. Which sounds easier to you?

walk
its simple and effective.

I disagree with that maporsche, I've been working out and successfully losing weight without changing my diet (which was always reasonable, I just need to stay very active or I gain weight).

That said, I agree that the best way to lose weight is to eat less food than your body needs -- but exercising is a good way to get your body to need more food.

You need to expend more calories than you take in.

I'm reading that article... it has a lot of useful info but this isn't quite right:



The benefits of being fit extend beyond just the calories that are burned when you are actually running -- it also affects how you metabolize calories at all times.

I agree Soz, and I'm not trying to say that exercise doesn't matter. The after effect of exercise is difficult to measure, and people often overestimate calories burned.

I find it much easier to focus on the calories you eat and the calories you burn while doing the exercise. Eveything else is gravy.

But I do stand by the belief that it is easier to lose weight by controlling your calorie intake (your diet) than it is by controlling your calorie expenditure (exercise). From a time stanpoi t alne this makes sense. It takes no additional time to eat less food, but takes a lot more time to burn more calories.

Agreed. But I'd rather run more than eat less.

. . . but most people wouldn't . . .

Yep, dieting is essentially more effective than exercise in terms of bang for buck (er, btw, overweight people are lazy? Where's that one coming from -- see initial post).

Exercise is good because (a) you're doing something other than eating, or thinking about eating; (b) you're firming things up, once the fat is stripped away it's going to be muscle that shows; (c) it does metabolize more efficiently/effectively than when you don't have developed muscles; (d) more working out means more endurance to work out more, as there is a difference in calorie expenditure for one hour of exercise versus 15 minutes, but you have to get accustomed to 15 before you can stand 60 minutes, plus you want to do it gradually so that you don't injure yourself and (e) it is a source of pleasure, and it is helpful to get non-food pleasure sources into your life. That helps to quell the emotional component of overeating.

Yeah, that's kind of my point too.

Sometimes people just plain eat too much and they need to cut down.

But once you're eating reasonably, it's sometimes more arduous to count calories et al than to eat more normally and get out there and exercise.

I much prefer to eat normally and exercise, since I enjoy exercising and it offers a lot of other benefits. And for me, calorie-counting becomes counter-productive -- if I don't think about food much, my diet is fine to excellent, but if I am dieting or thinking about it a lot, that's when I start craving the verboten stuff.

Depends on what works best for the individual, within the general framework of burning more calories than you take in.