body fat loss confusion

[mom418]

well, i've been asking lots of people what i should change to reduce body fat. i don't understand why almost everyone puts so much emphasis on low fat diet, instead of the exercise. yes i need to be eating low fat and healthy. lots of whole foods, but most of my weight was lost because of my exercise. i read these articles telling me not to do cardio at all, or very little. that doesn't sound effective at all, for me. they are talking about resistance training being majority of training.
'rest' days. rest days tell my brain to eat more food. i consistently eat less when i have had a good cardio or wt w/o. i don't do this everyday, i'm not over training. days i don't w/o at all i eat more food. i just want to munch. the recamendations wouldn't work well.

side note, this isn't at all directed at kathryn. thank you so much for answering my questions. i worked on eating low fat and have lost more weight. and making the wt w/o total body is very smart. i try to remember to do the suggestions you had.

 

[MadnNatsmom]

Unless you are exercisig for HOURS at a time - like athletes - exercise doesn't burn a whole lot of calores. An "average" sized woman would burn less than 600 calories running at 6.0 mph in 60 minutes. You can easily eat 600 calories in a few minutes, in one meal.

People overestimate how many calories they burn during exercise and grossly under-estimate how many calories they actually consume. It is easier to cut out 500 calories from your daily intake than to burn 500 calories with exercise.

Ideally, you should burn off 250-300 calories and reduce your calories by 250-300 calories to lose about a lb of fat in a week.

But, different routines work (or fail) for different people because the psychology of fatloss undeniably exists.

 

[nightowl81]

I guess for some people cardio and exercise is more important. It also gets confusing because you often hear you need to eat more to lose weight. If people tend to overestimate their calories then the advice of eating more is thrown around too freely.

If the average women burns 600 calories with an hour of running or other intense cardio, then 600x6 days a week = 3600 calories burned for a week which could be a 1 pound loss. Sounds good to me.

 

[RapidBreath]

I did not find that low fat worked for me, rather high healthy fats seemed to turn on my internal fat burning. Thats either olive oil or coconut oil.

Btw, everybody gets confused about fat loss because its never the exact same thing twice. I used to loose easily on calorie cycles, now my body is wise to it, so I'm doing the bmr calorie intake. But, that only works if you are counting calories.

The diet is more important than the fat loss because there are foods that put on adipose no matter how much exercise you have done. That varies from person to person. For me its anything commercial, especially commercial meats/chicken (I guess its the antibiotics.) and wheat flour. You just have to experiment to find out what is working for you. I know thats a crummy and not very helpful answer.

 

[mom418]

i think i figured out why i find this so annoying, and it even makes me angry sometimes. cardio is so important, i really feel like i 'should' be doing it everyday. 30-60 min a day depending on intensity. as traditionally recamended. not bc it's some rule. it just makes me feel like i had a real workout. later on i added weights to the workouts. increasing it as needed.

what i 'realized' today was simple. when people are saying cardio isn't important to this goal of fat loss. or literally saying forget cardio just do weight training with shorter rest periods between sets etc. what's really most important is cleaning up the diet. what i really hear/read is exercise isn't important. all that cardio and sweating my butt off was for nothing. completely irrational.

of course exercise is important. they were simply talking about a different way of training.

when i say that i lost most of the weight bc of exercise, what i mean is: i already had a healthy diet. i had to reduce my portions, eat less cheese, oil, etc. But i was already eating lots of fruits and veggies, whole grains. actually i was eating too many of them. so i really didn't have to make major changes in my diet. but i wasn't exercising regularly. when i did, it was for short periods for a few days at a time. i made major changes in that area. increasing consistency and duration of the workouts. and my self confidence. sorry, that must look like a bunch of run on sentences.

 

[mom418]

rapidbreath,

no that's ok. i really appreciate the thoughtful response. i recently started trying to eat less fat than before, only leaving almonds or other nuts, and it's already in some of the other foods. that week i was eating close to 20% of cal. from fat. most of that was the healthy kind.

 

[MidgetDogg]

My experience

All I can tell you is what works for me.... cardio, weight training and a clean diet. I make sure I include protein in every one of my 5 meals, eat the simple and starchy carbs in the first three meals of the day, then only the complex carbs in the last 2. No processed foods at all!

I just finished STS and run about 28 - 30 miles a week and I can't keep the weight on. Yeah, I know I'm doing a lot of cardio, but it has become a sport to me, and not just something to keep me in shape, so I'll have to adjust. I dropped 12% body fat in 3 months. Do what works for you, but I've always had good luck when combining all 3: cardio, weights and good eating habits.