You burn 2200 a day doing nothing and eat 2200 a day, your weight stays the same
You start jogging 3 miles a day that’s 240 to 420 calories right there, don’t eat any more than you did and you’re at 240 to 420 calories in deficit.
Don’t jog and cut 240 to 420 calories a day and you have the same impact on your weight.
There’s no magic to it, it’s fucking maths! The difference is how hard it is for the results to last if you just do it through changing your eating habits, there’s a reason why about 90% of people who go on a diet just gain their weight back, they didn’t build a healthy habit, they make their life miserable for a while and then go back to eating the same as before.
My maintenance intake as a woman was somewhere on the low end between 1700 and 2000 calories. With the meals that I was used to having, this was easily exceeded just by eating more than one meal per day. So I switched to an OMAD diet and hit a plateau around 170lbs while I was dancing. I was happy with that weight so I loosened up, eventually stopped dancing, and now I use the time saved to eat healthier (or at least less processed) food instead of less food in general and maintain at that weight.
As for exercise; I tried biking and while I enjoyed it, it just wasn’t something I was going to keep up with consistently. The hassle alone of getting a bike down from my 3rd floor apartment (and across a major intersection) was enough to end that, plus I can’t do it in all seasons, and the stationary bike just isn’t engaging enough. Again, any progress I make from that is gone with just one bad eating choice, which is going to happen if you change your activity level without any consideration for nutrition. This isn’t a magical frictionless world of simple numbers, the psychology and physiology involved here is not negligible.
I do think the dancing boosted my metabolism a bit, or maybe something changed in my lifestyle like returning to office instead of WFH. I’m more consistently maintaining if not slightly losing at just over 2000 calories now. I really wouldn’t be able to maintain if I didn’t read nutrition labels and limit my snacking though.
“According to my Fitbit”
Starting on a high note I see
You burn 2200 a day doing nothing and eat 2200 a day, your weight stays the same
You start jogging 3 miles a day that’s 240 to 420 calories right there, don’t eat any more than you did and you’re at 240 to 420 calories in deficit.
Don’t jog and cut 240 to 420 calories a day and you have the same impact on your weight.
There’s no magic to it, it’s fucking maths! The difference is how hard it is for the results to last if you just do it through changing your eating habits, there’s a reason why about 90% of people who go on a diet just gain their weight back, they didn’t build a healthy habit, they make their life miserable for a while and then go back to eating the same as before.
My maintenance intake as a woman was somewhere on the low end between 1700 and 2000 calories. With the meals that I was used to having, this was easily exceeded just by eating more than one meal per day. So I switched to an OMAD diet and hit a plateau around 170lbs while I was dancing. I was happy with that weight so I loosened up, eventually stopped dancing, and now I use the time saved to eat healthier (or at least less processed) food instead of less food in general and maintain at that weight.
As for exercise; I tried biking and while I enjoyed it, it just wasn’t something I was going to keep up with consistently. The hassle alone of getting a bike down from my 3rd floor apartment (and across a major intersection) was enough to end that, plus I can’t do it in all seasons, and the stationary bike just isn’t engaging enough. Again, any progress I make from that is gone with just one bad eating choice, which is going to happen if you change your activity level without any consideration for nutrition. This isn’t a magical frictionless world of simple numbers, the psychology and physiology involved here is not negligible.
I do think the dancing boosted my metabolism a bit, or maybe something changed in my lifestyle like returning to office instead of WFH. I’m more consistently maintaining if not slightly losing at just over 2000 calories now. I really wouldn’t be able to maintain if I didn’t read nutrition labels and limit my snacking though.
edited for clarity