[phaus]

>Let's be very generous and say an hour of typical exercise burns 350 calories.

This isn't being generous at all. Once you get past the initial few weeks of not being physically able to put that much effort into exercise, 350 calories for an entire hour would be on the low end of what I expect most people to burn.

>I honestly think the net impact of promoting exercise as a weight loss option is people getting and staying fatter. People have a tendency to dramatically overestimate the calories they're burning, people want to use exercise as a way to avoid having to eat less, and people use exercise as an excuse to eat more. It also causes an amount of disruption and discomfort in people's lives that's probably the number one cause of people giving up on their weight loss goals.

Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. It is an objective fact that if you burn more calories in a day because you exercise, that you will get away with eating more food. How much more depends on how many calories you burn when exercising.

The concept of weight loss is very simple. Burn more calories than you eat. People need to start somewhere by making an estimate of how many calories that they burn on a daily basis and then adjust it slowly if they don't lose weight.

Its silly to act like the concepts of physical fitness and weight loss are so complicated that people are being manipulated and/or confused into gaining weight. The only thing difficult about losing weight is the consistent execution of an incredibly simple process.

[throwaway0255]

> Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet.

Something must be wrong with exercise then, because that’s not true of dieting at all. Just dieting will do just fine.

[phaus]

There are more reasons to exercise than just weight loss and there's more to being healthy than just maintaining a specific weight.

[throwaway0255]

> There are more reasons to exercise than just weight loss and there's more to being healthy than just maintaining a specific weight.

This is the worst advice you could ever give to someone who's very overweight.

For overweight people exercise is a complete waste of time, and their bodyweight actually is what matters above all else as far as their health goes.

Telling an obese person that they should do some jumping jacks so their heart will be nice and healthy is just absurd. I see parents doing this all the time (and had it done to me), they get their obese kid running around and encourage them to engage in all these ultra-boring uncomfortable painful "fitness activities" that will never in a million years form into a habit for them. Then they take them home and give them some chicken nuggets for a job well done.

These people are more concerned with the theater of weight loss than they are with actual weight loss, because the theater of it gives them the highest ratio of guilt relief to effort expended.

For those kids, for the rest of their lives, every time they consider trying to lose weight, they'll see visions of running toward a brick wall for an hour without ever getting closer to it, and taking an hour out of their day to go somewhere and move things with their arms until they're sore. "Yeah fuck that", they'll say, never fully realizing that weight loss is really just about passively managing their food intake. Or maybe they'll try, it'll make them completely miserable (like it does for most people), and they'll perceive that as a personal failing and give up both dieting and exercise, once again not realizing that 99% of their goal can be achieved with just the dieting part.

The reality is that as long as you're overweight, your primary health objective should be to lose weight, and the only way to do that is to change what you eat and how much of it you eat over the long term. If adding exercise to that equation adds a 0.1% chance of you giving up, then it's not worth it.

Until you're at a normal weight, exercise is a premature optimization.

[Fnoord]

> If adding exercise to that equation adds a 0.1% chance of you giving up

That's because you put on a (too) high standard, and if you don't make it, instead of lowering your goal you end up with a defeatist attitude and give up. If you do that in your professional life as well that's a recipe for a burnout.

Example: say you want to go to the gym but you can't make it this week. Is that a huge issue? Does that mean you shouldn't go anymore at all? That everything's lost? No! Just try next time again, and do your best. Say your training scheme tells you that you should run 5 km in 30 min, you're on 20 min and only at 2,5 km. Does that mean you should give up? No. It means you should follow your pace as far as you can push it. Overcoming such might even strengthen you if the adversary is burnout.

If you're under the guidance of a quality physician or training scheme (basically same, as physician makes that for/with you) that shouldn't happen.

I replied to a previous post of you where you were saying you were running for an hour (!) at the gym. An hour! That's not how you start with getting fit. That's way too hardcore already. For one, its too long. Second, its the same stuff all the time, while you clearly don't seem to enjoy running. If you enjoy running, sure, but you don't.

Why don't you try different exercises and accept that there's some you like and some you dislike? Example: if you're only rowling for 10 minutes while you enjoy planking more which is next, you got something to look forward to. Plus, perhaps you'll start to like rowling eventually. My (anecdotal) experience is that eventually, once I get good at it, I start enjoying it more.

When I do daily exercises as broadcasted on TV (using rebroadcasted IPTV) there's all kind of exercises I enjoy and some I dislike. Especially the stuff I'm relatively bad at (basically anything involving hamstring like multiple, deep squats) is rough. But after I did them I feel the difference. And if I can't do it exactly as the example shows, I can at least try to mimmic it as good as I can. Eventually, I'll get better.