One at a time, and these will be my last posts on the topic. You're welcome to PM me if you need more information.
I want to agree with the premise that if you're overweight but exercise and are healthy, that's fine. The only thing that doesn't sit right with me on this is, if you're exercising enough to do good, you shouldn't be overweight unless you have some other underlying condition. If you get past the 20 minute warmup point with cardio exercise, that is when fat starts to burn off. You must get past the 20 minutes, though. If you are doing that three times a week, at least, then you have to burn off the extra pounds. If you say you are exercising but not losing weight, then what are you doing? Now if you're just bench pressing weights, okay. Muscle weighs more than fat and you're not doing a thing to burn off the fat by doing that. But if you are doing anything to work up a sweat for your cardiovascular system, you should be losing weight, too.
How's a carefully put together program by my personal trainer sound? Seriously, I do 50 minutes of cardio training 4 times a week, somestimes it's straight cardio to the right elevated heart rate (I know how the Krebs Cycle works, hehe), sometimes it's interval training. 3 times a week I do a weights routine that does raise the heart rate and break a sweat too, though not quite as much as cardio. I'm not a flimsy thing, the weights I do are closer to bodybuilding training than the "toning" most women go for. Building more muscle
will cause your body's energy requirements to rise, muscle's high-maintenance. Also, I don't have a car, so I do a LOT of walking. So, I must be eating too much, right? Well...no. I actually recently did write down everything I ate over two weeks, including everything such as a 1/4 cup of juice to wash down a pill, etc. Showed it to my doctor (who has a big interest in nutrition and is quite slim herself) and she couldn't find anything to criticise. We figured out together that I actually have a calorie deficit of around 140 calories a day on average. Now, in a person who's become fat simply through poor lifestyle, that would possibly result in a very slow gradual weight loss. In people like myself who have a medical history of starvation and yo-yo dieting...not so much. All that famine training I did taught my body well how to make the most of every calorie it gets. My doctor's recommendation is that I actually try to eat just a little more to make up that deficit, say, an extra snack, so that my body will get used to the idea that it doesn't need to have any extreme reactions any more.
Taking in less energy than you expend is the theory behind most weight loss plans. But the body's not quite so simple and it's also very tricksy. It works like this (and this is even the simplified version leaving out the factors to do with hormones and enzyme regulation):
C - N - S1- S2 - S3 - I - H - E - V = 0
C = calories eaten
N = non-absorbed calories excreted in bowels
S1 = calories stored as fat
S2 = calories stored as carbohydrate
S3 = calories stored as protein
I = calories used in involuntary movement
H = calories used for heat generation and other metabolic processes
V = calories used in voluntary movement
E = calories excreted in urine (Examples: fat converted to glucose in the liver, incompletely burned triglycerides and albumin)
You only have manual controls on C and V, and when you deliberately vary C and V it causes feedback to the other parts of the system, none are independent of the other, they adjust to keep equilibrium as much as possible. So you can't say that the amount of energy stored as S1 is "whatever is left over", because there is no such thing as "left over" in a feedback-controlled homeostasis. Increasing V and decreasing C in order to affect S1 is unpredictable, because you can't control what, say, I and H and V will do in order to maintain that equilibrium. If you keep trying increasingly varying changes in V and C, you can really screw up your regulatory mechanisms even more.
This isn't a wacky new idea, it's there in detail in your average human biochemistry textbook. And it's not to say, of course, that we shouldn't bother with exercise to burn calories, because the benefits of exercise are far greater than mere calories expended. I'm looking forward to seeing how much I can improve my cardio and weights with the stacks of extra energy I will have after starting CPAP. (Positive thinking! )
