Food v exercise: What makes the biggest difference in weight loss?

How long does it take to drive to and from work each day?
How long would it take to do the same trip on a bike?
Many people could get two ~30 minute aerobic exercise sessions by investing ~10 minutes at each end of the day. Or less.
Cycling for transport a lifestyle change that can be maintained. If you get into the habit of go_to_work = sit_on_bike rather than go_to_work = sit_in_car, it just becomes... habit. A simple change I made was to separate my work (including bike lock) keys and car keys onto separate keyrings. On the odd occasion when I need to drive to work, I have to go out of my way to find my car keys. My work shoes live under my desk at work, so if I don't ride I need to find some other shoes to wear to work (clip-in pedals and shoes are an indulgence I enjoy, although I ride in business shirt and trousers).
I've made it mildly inconvenient to do anything other than ride to work, and thus made exercise an unavoidable part of my daily routine rather than something I have to find time and motivation for. Very few people can sustain motivation to do exercise as something extra. If I go to work, I get exercise by default.
10kg has stayed off for 4 years so far... and I've never been fitter or more healthy. My car has moss growing on it.

Hi Tim

Here I am: a 52-year-old male; 6' 3" tall; 110kgs; BMI 32; stomach measurement 118cm; however - resting heart rate 65bpm; fasting glucose regularly 3-4mmol; healthy cholesterol.

So, over the recent years I've been to gyms - lasted 3 months, on average. Tried the CSIRO diet on at least 2 occasions - lasted 3 weeks at most. Completed one or two fun-runs, 5 to 10kms. I completed a 210km Round The Bay In A Day ride, followed a week later with a half marathon. Crazy.

You're getting the picture, aren't you?

It took one of the lovely GPs at the practice I've been going to for 15 years to look me in the eye, and say: "you need to exercise every day, occasional frenetic bursts of activity can be quite harmful." Well, she would say that wouldn't she?

Moving on from the contemplative and preparative stages of behaviour change, I'm in the action phase of staying alive for the long-term, and not just staying alive, actually thriving.

This is my daily action plan:
Increase in unprocessed food (including more fruit and vegetables) - check.
Increase in daily exercise - check.
Decrease in daily alcohol (to once a week) - check.
No more chocolate - juicy fresh fruit (high in sucrose + fibre) - check.
Smaller portions + more daily fibre - check.
Decrease in overall quantity of food - check.

A Swedish fitball (big boy size) for my birthday, and a set of hand-weights from Aldi.

But the clincher was staring me in the face.

Like Tim P, I got on my bike. Every day, I ride. I itch if I don't ride my bike. I drove to work this morning with my partner, and I actually feel a bit tense.

This is what salvation from a bike entails for me: http://bit.ly/daily_transport

So I'm in this for the long-term, for my sake and for the sake of my kids - who, being children, funnily enough look to me as some sort of role model.

Crazy, huh.

All the best

Richard

Has anyone mentioned bicycles yet? They are hardly ever mentioned on this site.

Thanks for this series of articles. Ever since I gave up smoking cigarettes and ice I've been developing more and more of a weight problem.

I recently heard of using BMR (basal metabolic rate) calculations for weight loss. It works by working out your sedentary basal metabolic rate for your weight. Basically how many calories are required to sustain your current weight. You then work out the BMR for your target weight and you eat that amount of calories and the weight drops away. No dieting and minimal exercise and the fat melts away. You can easily sustain half a kilo to a kilo a week loss.
For example, using ball park figures, I wanted to drop from 120 kg (BMR 2800 calories) to 100 kg (BMR 2400 calories - if you exercise you can eat more calories).
A drop of 400 calories a day is barely noticeable - toast with butter is 300 calories for example. Show me one diet where you can eat 2400 calories a day? I have cut out day time snacks - biscuits and chocolates - though. Not all, just most. I still eat the occasional snack. Mealtimes are exactly the same as before. You eat like the person you want to be. No going hungry. No diets. And no real hardship. And it seems to be sustainable. I've dropped about 8 kgs in the last 10 or 11 weeks with out trying.
BTW, I found out about this approach to "dieting" from http://www.fat2fitradio.com

Most people think they can just starve themselves to lose weight but you can't do that because your body will go into something called starvation mode. What happens is your body will slowly eat itself. If you want to know why you can't starve yourself to lose weight, this article gives a great explanation on it.

http://explainlikeakid.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-you-cant-starve-yourself-to-lose.html

Question for Tim: I am a complete amateur in your field, but I gather from other sources -- http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/1969924.htm -- that regular exercise changes the body's tolerance to insulin. This seems to be an extra benefit for exercising that doesn't get mentioned much. Is this a significant factor in the diet/exercise spectrum for weight loss?

Great to hear that from an automotive engineer TimP! That's an interesting observation you make about separating your car and bike keys. I've done that ever since I first owned a car (at age 29), but my motivation was just to keep the bundle of keys at a reasonable size.
Cycling to school/uni/work has always been my habit and at 39 I still only drive to work if I need to carry something big, go to the blood bank or something similar.
Cycling is a great way to integrate exercise into your day, almost every day. There was a good article on this site about getting larger organisations to get their employees to work at the branch closest to their home. With our low density suburban sprawl cities this would make a very useful contribution to waistlines, traffic jams, and transport CO2 emissions.
Question for Tim Crowe: How much of the caloric energy of my food intake might I 'normally' excrete as solid waste? Does this change much with caloric inputs or more with volumetric inputs or perhaps is more a genetic factor, or perhaps even related to exercise levels?

I just want to point out that eating 100g of chocolate in under a minute probably isn't that easy, nor typical of an average person's consumption- we're talking the equivalent of 2 Mars Bars or a whole regular-sized block of Lindt here. Energy-wise it's a good figure to keep in mind (just about anyone is capable of consuming that amount of chocolate over the course of one meal), but I don't think the time taken to consume it, as portrayed here, is realistic. Apart from this small point, good article.

Luke if I could suggest an answer as it frames some of the comments that I wanted to make about the article.
The central problem with Tim's article and Rosemary's before that, as well researched as they both are, is they are population based, and cannot account for the myriad of physiological and phenotypical variations that affect us as individuals.

Insulin may well be a good example. In a healthy normal weight conditioned athlete, Insulin levels may drop as exercise intensity increases. The obese individual on the other hand may not achieve the exercise intensity for this to occur, and are likely to be insulin resistant in the first place. Both groups may also be affected by their pre-exercise feeding, physiological stress etc. So I suspect the answer to your question is yes/no/maybe, tick as applicable.

On the broader thrust of the article and if an understanding of Energy Balance is needed to support an individuals weight loss or weight gain needs, then we need to be able to accurately access, not only an individuals energy requirement, but also the fuels and ratios they use to generate this energy. We can accurately determine the calorific load of the chocolate bar, we can accurately determine the energy requirements of a given activity (exercise etc), but we fail to accurately determine an individuals resting energy requirement (accounting for 60-80% of energy needs and likely more in the obese). The predictive equations currently in use - have limited if any value in individualising energy requirements and therefore undermine both the practitioner and the lay attempts to build successful programmes.

Most research protocols use Indirect Calorimetry, or similar to assess energy requirements, and yet this rarely happens in primary practise.

The popular idiom "you can't manage what you can't measure" may well be particularly relevant here.

I declare an interest here as we have developed and are currently validating here in Perth an Indirect Calorimeter designed for primary and non-specialist use.

I am curious about the item:

↓ overall quantity of food

in the section on successful maintenance of body mass.

What is the measure of quality, or is the down arrow a typo?