"Losing weight" is nonsense. It's bad thinking that leads to frustration among industrial era humanity.Exhaustive cardio exercise and sensible diet is the about only way you'll lose weight aside from starvation, surgery or illness.
"Our bodies are not normal in the absence of exercise", but we've eliminated the need for most people to have to exert themselves at all for anything. The most walking the average American is required to do is a short jaunt across a parking lot a couple times each day. Nothing heavy ever need be lifted and a sweat need never be broken. With lifestyles like that, of course people end up skinny fat. These unmuscled flabby people then think in terms of "losing weight" when what they should be thinking is "getting stronger." When getting sweaty on the elliptical fails them, they become easy targets for muddled thinking... All weight gain becomes bad because they understand all weight gain as fat gain. They don't think in terms of gaining 40 lbs of muscle. "40 lbs heavier?! Why would I want to do THAT?!?"
Industrial era people just don't think in terms of physical work or strength. They only understand getting bigger as getting fatter, not getting more muscular and stronger. Add to this the past half century of "exercise equals aerobics" and you have the current mess of confused, frustrated people afraid of calories as they sweat it out on their treadmills.
regardless of age, the daily energy requirements (calories burned) per pound of fat-free mass was the same. So a 20 year old and a 65 year old will burn roughly the same amount of calories if they are of the same height, weight, and body fat percentage.posted by ludwig_van at 8:31 AM on April 19, 2010 [1 favorite]
As adults become less physically active, their muscles shrink due to not being used. The combination of less fat free mass and less activity leads to inevitable weight gain (unless they reduce their calorie intake over time). The only reason why older people on average tend to burn less calories than younger people of the same weight…is that the older people have less lean body mass.
Even in the 60- to 90-year-old range, training reduces the loss of muscle mass to less than 5% per decade. Several studies have shown that 80-year-olds who were inactive but began training with weights actually gained muscle mass and improved their strength, proprioception, and balance. This effect was directly related to the amount of leg work included in the program and the resulting improvements in leg strength. Leg strength was also responsible for improving the ability to walk faster in older people. In one study, twelve weeks of strength training was shown to increase walking endurance by 38%, something walking by itself fails to do.posted by ludwig_van at 1:39 PM on April 19, 2010 [2 favorites]
19–35% for dietary protein, 22–40% for carbohydrate, and 28–58% for fat. In the United States, the third National Health and Nutrition Survey showed that among adults aged 20 y, protein contributed 15.5%, carbohydrate 49.0%, fat 34.0%, and alcohol 3.1% of total energy intake.Also:
Consequently, the range of percentages of energy for carbohydrate and protein in the diets of most hunter-gatherer societies worldwide falls outside the average value found in Western diets and in recommended healthy diets [15% of energy from protein, 55% from carbohydrate, and 30% from fat].
Our macronutrient projections for worldwide hunter-gatherer diets indicate that these diets would be extremely high in protein (19–35% of energy) and low in carbohydrate (22–40% of energy) by normal Western standards, whereas the fat intake would be comparable or higher (28–58% of energy) than values currently consumed in modern, industrialized societies. However, the types and balance of fats in hunter-gatherer diets would likely have been considerably different from those found in typical Western diets.
Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45–65% of energy) of animal foodSo there it appears that there is hardly consensus on some of the assumptions held by obesity researchers.
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posted by cmoj at 8:41 PM on April 18, 2010 [1 favorite]