People generally want to lose weight along with getting fitter. What they really want is to change their shape.
In my experience, they often gain a bit of weight as they build muscle mass. And they generally hang on to some of their stubborn belly fat. My advice is that they need to alter what they eat, mainly cutting way back on sweets and processed foods. That’s what works.
Here’re some highlights from a recent NYT article covering recent research indicating that exercise is less effective than diet if you just want to loss weight.
Unfortunately, exercising seems to excite us much more than eating less does.
… exercise improves outcomes in many domains. But that huge upside doesn’t seem to necessarily apply to weight loss… the added weight-loss benefit from activity was small.
Far too many people complain that there’s just no time to cook or prepare a healthful, home-cooked meal. If they’d spend just half the time they do exercising trying to make a difference in the kitchen, they’d most likely see much better results.
I also don’t mean to make it seem that weight loss with diet is easy and exercise is hard. They’re both hard. The challenge of a slowing metabolism, and the desire to eat more, occurs in both exercise and diet change, although dietary change still works better than exercise.
So if you’re keen to lose weight focus more on how you eat more than what you do for exercise.