The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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On Outrunning a Bad Diet
We've probably all heard the phrase, "you can't outrun a bad diet". There's certainly some wisdom embedded there, particularly for anyone that's just starting to get a handle on their weight and fitness - burning enough calories to significantly outstrip dietary intake isn't really an option for most people most of the time, and even if they do start burning quite a few calories, many people find it easy enough to outeat that burn rate anyway. Nonetheless, I find that the phrase irks me a bit, I think because people use it in a fashion that I think is stronger than what's consistent with either the general set of facts or my own personal experience. I've been thinking about this more lately for reasons I'll get to shortly.
As a bit of background, I'm a running enthusiast that picked the sport up in my late 20s when I had started to look at little doughy around the middle. After entering a couple races, I found that I really enjoyed the sport, wanted to be more competitive, and embarked on what's now a more than decade-long journey through the sport. Over that time, I've had ups and downs due to work schedule and injuries that resulted in my mileage fluctuating from a then-highpoint around 2200 miles back in 2015 down to about 1100 miles in 2020. Over the past couple years, I've been lucky enough to finally sort out both my work and injuries well enough to have set a new yearly mileage PR last year, knockout a great marathon training cycle to start 2024, culminating in a marathon PR to close the spring race season. During that time, I saw, "you can't outrun a bad diet" quite a few times on various message boards, and I'd quibble a bit with it on the basis that it sure seemed like controlling my weight had become a lot easier since I started my running life. Nonetheless, it was true that it fluctuated a few pounds and that I had to consider my calories a bit, so at least the weak form of the claim seemed true even for a consistent runner.
In the last couple months, that's changed. Now, I am outrunning a bad diet. After I bounced back from my marathon, I just started running every day with recovery days being slower and shorter rather than true rest. After finishing my morning run today, I'm at just a shade over 500 miles in 50 days, and the result is that I've lost a few pounds of fat. What's more, I'm seeing some additional muscular remodeling through both my torso and legs as I adapt to the consistently higher mileage. Going even a shade further, we got a dog and I'm walking more now too, with Garmin saying that my total movement per week is about 105 miles. I haven't made any conscious changes to my diet and haven't noticed any sharp increase in appetite, so without any dietary effort at all, I'm getting leaner.
To be clear, what do I mean by a "bad diet"? I think the first thing to note is that I kind of object to the term, I think most foods are fine in their proper time and place, and to the extent that food is "bad", it's contextual. Donuts are a terrible idea for diabetics, but there's nothing wrong with someone walking in from ten mile run and smashing a donut. At 140 pounds, I generally eat about 3000 kcal per day and I'm not at all particular about "eating clean". I drink too much beer (particularly big stouts and IPAs), I eat potato chips, I grill a lot of burgers, beef and onion fried rice is a huge go to, slow-cooker pork shoulder is great, cheese is definitely a go, fries or tater tots from the freezer are great, I'm happy to have pizza, and so on. It's not comically bad or anything, and I don't have a sweet tooth, but I just eat a lot of basically whatever I want.
So, is there any real point, any lesson to take away here, or am I just being a smug, pedantic asshole in saying that ackshually I outrun my diet? Well, admittedly there's more than a little of the latter. But really, I do want to note that I think people take the framing too far and undervalue exercise as part of maintaining a healthy weight. While it's true that a fat guy probably can't run enough to get skinny, the flip side is that a guy that isn't fat that takes up running or cycling really probably isn't ever going to get fat because of the way these sports change your relationship to food, giving you a real perspective on what you're eating and how much you need to eat for a given task. The metabolic impact is also crucial as easy aerobic work both burns fat directly and improves the capacity to use fat as a fuel for exercise. As with many other things, this isn't very helpful for digging out of a hole, but it's great for avoiding that hole in the first place.
I've been having similar thoughts for a bit, happy to be able to latch onto your post to discuss them. I think you are broadly correct, but that the common wisdom advice is the common wisdom advice for a few reasons:
Focusing on diet is good advice if you're in a hurry, or if you're already working out. At my age and size and weight and activity level, the basic calculators say I maintain weight at about 2,800 calories a day. That's pretty much my normal diet. I can cut 800-1000 calories a day with effort, but without suffering. I can cut 2000 calories a day while feeling it a little, but not dying or curtailing other activities. To burn 800 extra calories a day, I'd have to run something like eight miles (I'm going to use a simple 100 calories/mile number for simplicity). That will take a good runner an hour, it would take me at least an hour twenty or an hour thirty, and I'd be tired after. To burn an extra 2000 calories, well it's right in the username, it would take me close on five hours. A totally impractical quantity of time to spend in an otherwise full life.
Moreover, adding more than about two moderate miles a day to a full workout schedule is nearly guaranteed to interfere with squats, or kettlebell snatches, or whatever else I'm trying to do. For a sedentary person, anything bigger than a two mile walk (probably the equivalent 100 calories) is going to require effort and recovery. You've frequently discussed injuries in the WW threads, that shows right off how difficult it would be for you to add activity to burn additional calories.
So, in my mind, it's easy to cut 500-800 calories a day, on average. That's a pound a week. While it's easy to burn 100-200 extra calories a day. That's a pound a month.
Burning an extra 100-200 calories is going to get you a pound a month, give or take. Keep it up for a year, you're dropping ten pounds a year.
That's a lot in the grand scheme of things! If I was ten pounds heavier every year for the past five, I'd be fucking fat by now. And that's the case for a lot of people! If they took a two miles walk every day, 45 minutes of time, they'd be a lot lighter today.
But that's also mind-numbingly, unnoticeably slow. If I tried to do something today, in hopes of being lighter five years from now, that's tough for me. It sure ain't gonna help you get ready for that beach weekend. Where cutting calories, whether daily or in an IF format as I prefer, can get you ten pounds in two months, no sweat.
So in my mind, if someone is sedentary and fat and wishes to lose weight, the right move is to start by getting active, and then to move to diet. If one is already active, focus on diet.
The inverse is also undeniably accurate, that it's always possible to out-eat any workout plan, it is always possible to create a diet bad enough that it can't be outrun. I outweigh you by 50 pounds, I'd imagine that might be a difference between us: it's not difficult for me to imagine a dietary choice so brutal that no activity would save me. There's an all you can eat Sushi place on the drive back from the downtown courthouse, I could swing in there and with a few beers or sodas eat a marathon's worth of calories. I could sit down and house a half bag of oreos watching the Phillies, and not even think about it. I can power through half a pie when my wife makes one. Any Dairy Queen will happily sell me a thousand calorie Blizzard. Some degree of not-terrible choices must be made to even begin to keep a decent weight.
I also think that the viral memetic quality of "You can't outrun a bad diet" is in part a puritan strain in American culture that can't quite be exorcised. You can't be enjoying yourself, having fun, and getting good results. You must be suffering. Suffering is the only way to succeed. So don't think you can enjoy that donut and then pop in a podcast and take a pleasant jog or go climbing and burn it off. You can't do that! You must suffer!
In my experience, the main draw to addressing diet is either A: Culling excessive calorie intake and running a big enough deficit is a way to lose weight quickly, and it's easier to stay motivated when I see fast results. or B: My diet has become so bereft of nutrition that my lack of energy is interfering with my daily life (My job is fairly physical.).
I've bounced between "average overweight American" and "really fast weight loss" (My personal record is 25lbs in six weeks, starting at a BMI of 28.) more times than I can count, invariably prompted by something setting off my anxiety such that I totally lose my appetite (I suppose that being in a permanently agitated state might burn more calories than being calm, but surely not that many.). It's horribly unhealthy to have the majority or entirety of my calories come from Mountain Dew Voltage (If they made a sugar-free version I'd switch, but that's not what the Circle K is selling at 79 cents for a 44 ounce.) and alcoholic beverages (Oh, and you'll drink less and get more bang for your buck because the perpetually empty stomach and weight loss will wreck your alcohol tolerance. This can be dangerous when trying to have a fun night out.), but from the perspective of the scale it's almost amusing effective.
I'm actually kind of annoyed tonight because I went through the effort of acquiring a dinner that I was looking forward to/ meal prepping for the next few days and then barely ate any of it before getting too full to continue. I don't know if the stomach really shrinks after a few months of food restriction, being excessively tense tightens something around the stomach, or what, but when I get like this I have to force myself to eat at all or I'll go days without eating (By day three I'll hit a wall, run out of energy, and get really cold.). Oh well, I ate enough that the fat soluble vitamins should take, can refrigerate the leftovers, and I can always freeze the stuff I prepped.
My favorite bit of American puritanism (while not raised a churchgoer, I grew up in a churchy enough place that the values rubbed off on me) is that I refuse to take OTC anything to medicate a hangover. Hangovers are to be endured as penance for excess. With that, there is the very real thing that if you have anything like an excessive drinking habit you probably shouldn't touch Tylenol because combining liver killers is a bad idea.
Could be dyspepsia? Buildup of gas in the stomach, sometimes due to the output pipes getting clogged.
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