Exercise all you want, but for most people, if you eat garbage food in large quantities, you will be overweight.
I am exactly the same, btw. Most of my family was overweight when I was growing up. I was a fat kid, all the way through high school. Since then, I have been exercising consistently for 40+ years. Lifting weights, bicycling, walking every day, etc. But I still need to not just eat everything I want or I will gain weight. I try to avoid junk food, fast food, eating out, MOST days. Personally, I do one “cheat day” per week (see Tim Ferris’ Slow Carb diet for roughly the idea, although I’m not militant about the foods he says are ok, etc.).
I’m around 20% bodyfat at 5’10” in my early 60s, so I could use to drop 5-10 pounds of fat. What boggles my mind is that everyone says I’m crazy to think I need to lose ANY weight. I’ve got clearly visible fat around my middle and other areas, even if I’m not “technically obese”. I don’t look great in most clothes. But compared to the typical person (my age or not), people think I’m in great shape.
I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
I completely agree.
> I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
I think the difficulty varies from person to person a lot more than people realize. We all end up making decisions between what we want to eat and what we think we should eat, but the level of deprivation people feel when they forego the tasty option for the healthy option seems to vary.
I think we eat similarly, and it's not incredibly hard for me, but I think it's much harder for some people.
Up until around age 60, your body adjusts your muscle mass based on usage. Somewhere around 60, you start losing muscle mass. If you have just enough muscle for day to day activities in a sedentary life at that point, then over time daily tasks like carrying groceries or standing up out of a chair are going to become prohibitively difficult. You need to do something that encourages your body to grow more muscle than you need for day to day life so that you can afford to lose some of it.
I know several people who lift weights three times a week, run for at least thirty minutes three times a week, and were still consistently 20-40 pounds overweight before Ozempic and similar drugs.
Is anyone else seeing this in their orgs? I'm not...