[jedrek]

I think you're misreading the function of those slogans. First off, they're hardly "obvious" when you account for the overwhelming FUD around nutrition anybody who's tried to lose weight. And you get it from everybody: your Mom, magazines, movies, the news, pop sci articles, the government, etc.

But more importantly, those things are TRUE. Anybody with significant weight to lose will not be able to out-exercise a bad diet. What fat people hear a lot more often is, "oh, you gotta hit the gym". Hitting the gym is great if you're 15 lb overweight, but at 50 or 100 it's all but useless.

> exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session.

Yep. If you spin hard for 45 minutes you get an extra 170kcal through the rest of the day. That is... 2 fun sized Snicker bars, 19 grams of butter, or 17 Pringles chips.

Caloric intake is the absolute key to weight loss. Everything else is complementary. Telling people who are more than a few pounds overweight to hit the gym as the base of their weight loss strategy is complete un-based in science and almost always self defeating.

[watwut]

The worst thing you can do is to focus on calories only. That is the worst advice out there and you get it from everywhere.

YoYo effect guaranteed, cravings guaranteed, lesser ability to focus at work guaranteed and so on and so forth. And you will be miserable and won't keep it long term.

You don't just loose fat when you exercise, you build muscles, your cardio system is getting better etc etc. The way people here talk about it all sounds as if they would be putting on makeup - there is more to health and performance (including mental) then just how quick you lost few kilo.

[bitexploder]

Running at a moderate pace for 45 minutes is an easy 90-110kcal / mile depending on your weight.

Running is a double edged sword on appetite. It tends to shut down your gut for a while, making you less hungry for a period after the workout. But, people tend to misjudge how much they burn on shorter workouts or runs.

Often people only need 2 or 3 habit changes to create a long term deficit. Example: run a few times a week (30 mins, 3 miles each time, -900 kcal). Cut out sugar drinks (2 per day? -1400 kcal / day easy). One per day? (-700kcal) / week). Exercise is likely to simply make you feel better and in my experience causes me to at least think about healthy eating choices. Many people who don't exercise and drink sugary drinks can do just those two and end up with an easy 1600-2500 kcal deficit without thinking much about diet change etc. Even doing that is a huge change, and to sustain that over the course of years is a huge undertaking for anyone.

These are some simple things, yet even then most people will completely fail at a diet. A sobering statistics: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/1/222S.long -- only approximately 20% of individuals are successful at sustaining weight loss.

Personal anecdote time: I dropped about 45 lbs through calorie counting and a lot of running. Eventually the running allowed me to eat more food than I was eating before I started running. This greatly contributed to satiety and addressing the psychological and mental battles anyone faces undergoing an effort to cut fat. I have maintained the weight loss for 10+ years. It is very hard to separate where the exercise stopped and the nutritional plan started in terms of addressing all of the facets of sustained weight loss. One thing that is clear to me now is that my approach was extreme and probably only a very small fraction of people can or ever will be able to adopt such an approach. I ran at least 20 miles per week, typically 30-40, and at my weight that was for sure 2500-5000 calories per week burned from exercise alone. It put me in a position of actually having to eat more than was comfortable some days just to not push things to a relatively unhealthy range of calorie deficit. My take away is this: you can't out run a diet [^1]. I like to think of myself as "not exceptional"... I am not a fast runner and I have no real gift for it. I just like doing it. (side note: it turned out to have been very effective self medication for ADHD, so it was probably much more rewarding for me than the average person, who would probably not have the same elevated positive feelings surrounding their exercise activity as I probably get).

1: Unless you turn your body into a machine capable of obliterating calories at a rate that outstrips your ability to eat yourself fat.

Also, the whole "ups your metabolism for hours after the activity" that is factored into almost any calorie calculation and the actual burn from that is almost trivial. Its a few calories, but it is mostly your heart rate recovering down to a normal resting range. It doesn't change the basic calculations (100kcal / mile of running, etc.). You nailed that one, but people tout it as an exercise benefit when... it is just calories out and not many at all.

My point about all of this is that many slogans are correct or correct enough to be a reasonable model (calories in, calories out, can't outrun a bad diet, etc.). But the shocking lack of success in sustained weight loss is something you need to look down the barrel of the moment you decide "I will lose some weight" because if you want to keep that weight off what you are really saying is "I will lose some weight; I am going to need to make moderate to significant changes to my lifestyle... forever." It really is that meaty of a decision. Many people don't succeed their first attempt, but learn enough to succeed eventually. Most people never succeed to the degree they desire. It is because completely changing your lifestyle and mentality as an adult is very hard.

So we know all of these true things about weight loss, but I think it is a mistake to narrow it too much down to any one rule aphorism. It must be tackled on all fronts simultaneously (mental, exercise, diet). Most people will try just one and fail. Some people adopt two, but lose the habits because they weren't real change. The mental approach is the hardest to "prescribe" because each individual will have different issues and triggers for their eating. Mileage will vary, but these are some things I have observed.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Running at a moderate pace //

If you're obese you will knacker your knees. Swimming is better, but be careful to exercise complementary muscle groups too.

[bitexploder]

You can walk. If you are at 50 + lbs of weight and haven't run at all fast walking will put you in the same cardio zone as running for a lighter weight runner. The math of calorie loss as it goes with running is the simple equation of how much weight are you moving and what cardio zone is your body operating in to move that weight. If you can hit low aerobic fast walking (most non runners can do that easily), just do that.

Beyond that I am not sure about how running impacts the joints of heavily overweight people. I would advise a very slow and conservative ramp of up mileage. I think as long as the body is given time to adjust it can do so with minimal risk of serious injury (even if you are running). The problem with running is your aerobic capacity will likely outstrip the rest of your bodies ability to absorb punishment. This is why so many "I am going to run a Marthon, but have no prior running experience" people end up injured and then wander about telling people how bad running is for your joints, etc.

(https://www.runnersworld.com/general-interest/runners-have-m...). Could just be a self reporting bias, but it is interesting. Several studies over the years have looked at life long runners knees and they seem to be fine compared to a non runners.

I didn't even go into some of those "soft" benefits of regular exercise, such as the mental boost it gives (which seems like it would support weight loss), along with the obligatory lymph system circulation which is likely to improve immune health and help with waste cycling. As long as someone isn't overtraining, that is :)