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If you are looking for a miracle fix, or some hidden secret that allows people to lose weight without diet or exercise, I believe the snake oil people are currently selling essential oils, or NTFs or something. I’m talking about a real-world plan to lose weight tailored to me. Not tailored to my genes or my apple shape, or whatever they have out there. I’m talking about being realistic and making a push for better health without using any of the “maps to the stars” type of diet plans out there.
If we listen to doctors and dieticians (is there a more useless job?) there is a specific set of ways to lose weight by dieting. However, even these official diet strategies are all lies. Once they finish telling you how to eat, then they tell you that you also have to exercise. It seems there is no such thing as a diet without exercise. But, what about the opposite?
At first blush, losing weight without dieting looks like a fool’s errand. A single Oreo cookie has 77 calories. You would probably have to run forever to burn that off, right? Actually, no. And here is where we begin.
According to this calorie burn calculator from Rochester University, a 260 lb. man will burn 864 calories on an elliptical trainer. Obviously, there is a lot of variation there including what kind of trainer, how hard he trains, and so on.
But, if that number is even ballpark, one could theoretically eat 10 Oreos, and still come out ahead after an hour on an elliptical trainer.
We’ll deal with the flaw in this line of thinking a little later.
Now, assuming our 260 lb man is not ripped in some fashion, chances are his muscles exist somewhere in the minimal area. Whatever amount of calories he is burning today just by existing is pretty low compared to the possibilities.
Let’s use me as an example. I’m 260 lbs. (I’m lying to myself here a bit, but let’s go with it.). The amount of exercise I get on a normal day is nothing more than going to the store, doing some laundry, some light housework. Now, I have the capability to do more than that, so that isn’t necessarily the peak of my usable fitness, but it gives us an idea of what my “sit on my ass” rate of calorie usage is. According to my Apple Watch, that number is between 2,500 and 2,600. Let’s call it 2,500 just to be safe.
So, theoretically, assuming the human body worked via robotic exactness, I could eat 2,000 calories each day and lose weight based on a 500 calorie per day deficit.
But, remember that hour on the elliptical machine and those 864 calories? If did that on a certain day, I could eat 2,864 calories and still be 500 calories short and lose weight. That’s Why that new mom powers that stroller around the Denver Zoo, I can guarantee you that.
Here is where it gets better. If my sit-around-no-muscle-body burns 2,500 calories per day, then it stands to reason that every bit of muscle I add increases the amount burned. Now, keep in mind that resting muscle doesn’t use a lot of calories. That is by design. While your caveman ancestors were waiting around to take a shot at a whooly mamoth or something, you didn’t want to be starving to death just by sitting there.
But, when you have the muscle, and you use that muscle, you will burn significantly more and every time you use any muscle strenuously enough, it takes many calories to repair, and if you keep going strenuously enough, your body will eventually decide that that muscle just needs to be bigger, and even more calories get used.
Sucker! If you keep using it and it keeps getting bigger eventually, you have done a lot of exercise and built a lot of muscle and by extension likely lost a fair amount of weight.
What gets left off all your weight loss plans and strength training programs is joy. That’s right, joy.
Right now, when I go to the gym it sucks. It sucks because I have to be on a stupid Precor or treadmill or something for half and hour. It sucks because I have to go around these weight machines and I want to be doing something else.
But….
The more in shape you are, the less it sucks.
Doing 30 minutes on level 10 is way easier and less sucky for that 200 lb guy with mostly muscle. Heck, he probably enjoys listening to a podcast, or whatever, while he’s doing it. The lady that jogs down the path in front of my house faster than I can run at full speed probably likes running. She probably thinks its a great way to start her day and to get some sunshine while enjoying the outdoors.
To me it just sucks. To them it’s joy. Guess which one is easier to keep going?
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. All you have to do is kick it off and keep going long enough to win. To do that, you have to stop worry about what you eat and think of your exercise as permission to eat what you want. And, what does that give you?
Joy.
So how you gonna do it?
I’m gonna trade this life for fortune and fame
I’d even cut my hair and change my name.
I just recently found out that the song Rockstar is by Nickleback, so you can all just ease up on that now.
In the face of overwhelming resistance I’m going to have to science the shit of this. — Mark Watney, The Martian — — sort of
Actually, we’re going to math the shit out of this.
First, I’m only going to eat when it is worth it.
Seriously, how many calories do you waste each day on a bowl of Frosted Flakes, or a can of Spaghetti-Os with Meatballs? Those are calories you could be using on a plate of nachos and few beers with friends.
To keep from feeling hungry and having some sort of starvation reflex kick in, I’m going to use protein shakes to fill in the “non-awesome” meals each day. I’ll throw a quality multivitamin down my throat each day (maybe twice a day) along with fish oil, and that is basically everything a body needs to survive. Everything else that is missing, my body can go withdraw from the fat stores.
Second, it’s exercise time.
It’s been 2+ years since cancer kept me in bed for the whole day. It takes a while to build back up from that, but it could have been a lot faster, and I know it. Starting now, we make it faster.
My home office is four feet away from our treadmill, and next to it is a weight bench and some dumbbells. Not a lot of dumbbells, but I’m not Gym Guy right now either. When you are at this level of non-fitness literally anything is going to increase your muscle and cardio.
Third?
Yeah… let’s make sure first and second happen first. No point in figuring out what the proper grip is for a Marine-style pull up when you can’t even do one pullup.
If you read all the way down to here, I apologize for the rambling rant, but I’m a writer and things rattle around in my brain until I get them out by writing them. Check out my other stuff for things that are worthwhile.
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