<story><title>When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?</title><url>http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t help but groan at some of the &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Calories in, calories out!&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t outrun a bad diet!&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Weight is lost in the kitchen!&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Sure, things ultimately boil down to intake-vs-expenditure.  However, it IS more complicated than that &lt;i&gt;in practice&lt;/i&gt;.  As software developers, we complain when management makes decisions based on inadequate or poor metrics.  But likewise there so many more benefits to physical exercise that aren&amp;#x27;t captured by a diet and exercise tracking app.&lt;p&gt;During times when I&amp;#x27;ve been 100% sedentary for long periods, I experience &lt;i&gt;overwhelming&lt;/i&gt; cravings for sugar and crappy foods.  When I force myself to take up any consistent exercise, even just a 30 min walk in the morning or lunchtime... then the cravings subside and regular meals are sufficient.  This is fairly common.&lt;p&gt;Exercise has so many physical and mental health benefits.  But even just looking at weight management alone, exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session.  Something that doesn&amp;#x27;t get captured by your tracker app or wearable gadget.&lt;p&gt;So often, when I hear somebody smugly minimizing the importance of exercise to health and weight management, it&amp;#x27;s a person who is too-clever-by-half.  They&amp;#x27;re constantly dabbling with soylent shakes or paleo&amp;#x2F;keto fad diets... because the truth is they&amp;#x27;re just lazy and don&amp;#x27;t want to get off their ass, and look to rationalize that.&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  At least half of these replies are completely missing my point altogether.  I&amp;#x27;m not saying that there is a binary choice to be made between &amp;quot;good diet&amp;quot; OR &amp;quot;exercise&amp;quot;, and that you should make the latter choice rather than the former.  I&amp;#x27;m saying that &lt;i&gt;treating this as a binary choice in the first place&lt;/i&gt; is ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;Exercise &lt;i&gt;correlates&lt;/i&gt; with proper eating, it&amp;#x27;s not incidental or ancillary.  It&amp;#x27;s ineffective to tell someone to &amp;quot;go the gym&amp;quot; without changing their eating habits?  Well sure, but telling them to &amp;quot;go keto&amp;quot; without worrying about physical activity will be no more successful a year out.  It&amp;#x27;s the pretense that most people can consistently stick with one of these things, and not both together, that is absurd.</text></item><item><author>Zanta</author><text>From the paper &amp;quot;Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an additional 39 g of carbon from the body, raising the total by about 20% to 240 g. For comparison, a single 100 g muffin represents about 20% of an average person’s total daily energy requirement. Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily foiled by relatively small quantities of excess food.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>JoeAltmaier</author><text>Exercise makes more sense! Breathing hard == losing weight!</text></item><item><author>mikeash</author><text>For anyone coming straight to the comments looking for an answer to the question: it turns into CO2 (and a bit of water) and you breathe it out.&lt;p&gt;When you realize that you have to breathe out all the weight you lose, I think it gives you a bigger appreciation for how  difficult weight loss can be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedrek</author><text>I think you&amp;#x27;re misreading the function of those slogans. First off, they&amp;#x27;re hardly &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; when you account for the overwhelming FUD around nutrition anybody who&amp;#x27;s tried to lose weight. And you get it from everybody: your Mom, magazines, movies, the news, pop sci articles, the government, etc.&lt;p&gt;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, &amp;quot;oh, you gotta hit the gym&amp;quot;. Hitting the gym is great if you&amp;#x27;re 15 lb overweight, but at 50 or 100 it&amp;#x27;s all but useless.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?</title><url>http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t help but groan at some of the &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Calories in, calories out!&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t outrun a bad diet!&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Weight is lost in the kitchen!&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Sure, things ultimately boil down to intake-vs-expenditure.  However, it IS more complicated than that &lt;i&gt;in practice&lt;/i&gt;.  As software developers, we complain when management makes decisions based on inadequate or poor metrics.  But likewise there so many more benefits to physical exercise that aren&amp;#x27;t captured by a diet and exercise tracking app.&lt;p&gt;During times when I&amp;#x27;ve been 100% sedentary for long periods, I experience &lt;i&gt;overwhelming&lt;/i&gt; cravings for sugar and crappy foods.  When I force myself to take up any consistent exercise, even just a 30 min walk in the morning or lunchtime... then the cravings subside and regular meals are sufficient.  This is fairly common.&lt;p&gt;Exercise has so many physical and mental health benefits.  But even just looking at weight management alone, exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session.  Something that doesn&amp;#x27;t get captured by your tracker app or wearable gadget.&lt;p&gt;So often, when I hear somebody smugly minimizing the importance of exercise to health and weight management, it&amp;#x27;s a person who is too-clever-by-half.  They&amp;#x27;re constantly dabbling with soylent shakes or paleo&amp;#x2F;keto fad diets... because the truth is they&amp;#x27;re just lazy and don&amp;#x27;t want to get off their ass, and look to rationalize that.&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  At least half of these replies are completely missing my point altogether.  I&amp;#x27;m not saying that there is a binary choice to be made between &amp;quot;good diet&amp;quot; OR &amp;quot;exercise&amp;quot;, and that you should make the latter choice rather than the former.  I&amp;#x27;m saying that &lt;i&gt;treating this as a binary choice in the first place&lt;/i&gt; is ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;Exercise &lt;i&gt;correlates&lt;/i&gt; with proper eating, it&amp;#x27;s not incidental or ancillary.  It&amp;#x27;s ineffective to tell someone to &amp;quot;go the gym&amp;quot; without changing their eating habits?  Well sure, but telling them to &amp;quot;go keto&amp;quot; without worrying about physical activity will be no more successful a year out.  It&amp;#x27;s the pretense that most people can consistently stick with one of these things, and not both together, that is absurd.</text></item><item><author>Zanta</author><text>From the paper &amp;quot;Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an additional 39 g of carbon from the body, raising the total by about 20% to 240 g. For comparison, a single 100 g muffin represents about 20% of an average person’s total daily energy requirement. Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily foiled by relatively small quantities of excess food.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>JoeAltmaier</author><text>Exercise makes more sense! Breathing hard == losing weight!</text></item><item><author>mikeash</author><text>For anyone coming straight to the comments looking for an answer to the question: it turns into CO2 (and a bit of water) and you breathe it out.&lt;p&gt;When you realize that you have to breathe out all the weight you lose, I think it gives you a bigger appreciation for how  difficult weight loss can be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deadmetheny</author><text>For someone who is very badly overweight, cutting calories is still a very good step. My first 100 lbs lost were from doing exactly that. After you get down to merely overweight from terribly obese is when you really need to start caring more about being active and attempting to work exercise into the routine as well. At least from my experience, cutting calories is something that beginners can fairly easily wrap their heads around that actually shows results (provided they are actually counting properly).&lt;p&gt;A couple years after deciding that it&amp;#x27;s time to get serious about taking care of my body and I&amp;#x27;m very close to reaching a healthy weight, and additionally have become reasonably strong due to a weight training regimen. But I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be here if I hadn&amp;#x27;t seen the results of calorie counting and taken the next step after the benefits of that started slowing down.</text></comment>