I was also able to track how effective exercise is compared to diet and exercise combined. When I started my "healthier me" journey, I didn't want to change my diet. I honestly didn't feel like I was eating badly. I felt like I could fix myself more if I just started exercising.
At first my exercise wasn't that extreme. I just wanted to get over 10,000 steps per day. So, I started walking in parks and my treadmill. The only part of my diet that I changed was that I stopped drinking Cokes, which I was consuming at a rate of roughly 20 ounces per day. I changed over to all water with the occasional sweet tea or Coke.
Also, being from the south, most sodas are called "Coke" here as a generic term, but I'm literally referring to Coke as a brand. I don't like "diet" drinks because artificial sweeteners all affect me badly and I don't trust them. I preferred real cane sugar sodas but those are usually more expensive and I was almost to the point where I was physically addicted to Coke.
Even though I cut out soda and started walking regularly, I wasn't losing weight. I actually gained about five pounds over the course of three months doing this. Here's why I think this is the case. When you are overweight like I was (and still am), starting to exercise has the negative affect of adding to your hunger. Don't get me wrong, exercise is great for you no matter when you start doing it. However, if you start exercising before you change your diet, you will end up eating more. Your body burns more energy straight from your food, so you eat more.
It's as simple as that. If you want to seriously get benefits from exercise, you have to also change your diet. Making both of those changes at the same time seems way more beneficial to me. If nothing else, I would change my diet before I started exercise, if I was advising someone else about it. The dietary change can zap your energy at first, but it is a necessary change if you want to significantly change your health.
Furthermore, the diet change is important to get your body to burn the correct energy sources during exercise. I don't think that I've accomplished this yet, but with enough commitment in diet, I will be able to train my body to use stored body fat for energy. The positive thing I have going for me right now is that my food intake is way below my caloric usage. I'm burning close to 3800 calories per day on average. On days that I jog, I can get this number well over 4000. CICO works, but you have to really focus on CI in a way that doesn't feel like torture.
My biggest recommendation when it comes to "calories in" is to get carbs/sugar completely out of your diet for at least three weeks. Don't cheat. If you cheat just a little bit, you'll ruin the effect that you are trying to achieve. Don't try this if you are under a doctor's care or have known issues with your glucose levels. If you are taking medications for anything like this, don't listen to me. I'm talking about anyone who is traveling down the road toward type 2 diabetes.
Insulin resistance is real. I haven't went to the doctor and been diagnosed with it, but my Google MD chops show me that I've been insulin resistant for quite some time. My skin was developing dark patches around my neck. I kept gaining body fat. I felt hungry all the time. If you are in this situation, you should research insulin resistance and how to reverse it. It takes an extreme change in your diet to make it happen, but I'm confident that once I have that fixed, I'll have a lot less issues with my health.
I'm down nearly twenty pounds from when I started my journey. Today I'm going for a nine mile backcountry hike at dawn. I'm loading my day pack with about twenty pounds, including water and some emergency items. This means that I'll be carrying my start weight with me through the woods. I will probably burn 5000+ calories today and most of that will occur before noon. Then I'll come home and get at least eight hours of sedentary coding work done.
It's hard to fit a lot of activity like this into busy lifestyles. I will touch on this subject in future posts.
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