Comments | digitaltaska: Dieting and Weight Loss Study

digitaltaska

Dieting and Weight Loss Study

Apr 11, 2007 12:16

Robin mentioned reading about a meta-study about weightloss programs, and I found an article about it in the scotsman. Basically, it says that diets are useless, and the only useful weight loss comes through more exercise. The article asks, why do we diet, when we just gain the wait back again?

I'll tell you why we do it. The hint comes down in ( Read more... )

Comments 4

loic April 11 2007, 17:01:07 UTC

I did the South Beach diet and was managing to lose about 1lb a day while I was sticking to it. That lasted for about two weeks and I've managed to keep most of that off. Recently I've slipped back to bad eating and gained about 4 or 5 pounds back, but the diet worked well for me. One of the things it did was train me to think about each thing I ate. Now I might decide to eat something "bad" but I'm making that decision, not just letting my whims and appetite control my eating.

Dieting vs. Exercise digitaltaska April 11 2007, 18:16:18 UTC

You hit the nail on the head. At least in the short term, we can see results several orders of magnitude higher from dieting than we can see from exercise ( ... )

Re: Dieting vs. Exercise loic April 11 2007, 18:58:27 UTC

And I think you hit the nail on the head too - a change in lifestyle is critical to a change in weight. A balance between a change in diet (though not necessarily a "diet") and an increase in activity seems to be the best approach to weight loss.

I entered this game with the opinion that I could make a significant impact by adding a reasonable amount of exercise, but I quickly found that everything I read told me the opposite. Half an hour on the elliptical is about equivalent to a can of coke. On the other hand exercise increases your resting metabolism and toned muscle burns energy faster than flab so it's part of the approach.

I found the Hacker's Diet to be quite enlightening. He points out that yes, you do have to literally starve yourself - eat less energy than you require - if you're going to lose weight. That simple math made all the difference to me. Of course I've been slipping. I've got to get back into the mindset, back to the gym, etc.

Re: Dieting vs. Exercise digitaltaska April 18 2007, 07:15:25 UTC

This is all made even more complicated because the amount of calories that we actually absorb, and how hungry we feel, are both influenced by many factors (some of them hormonal ( ... )