I trained quite heavily until about 30 years of age and discovered after over working and hitting the wall, that I now longer, with the new medicines, get the kick from endorphins or what it is that makes running and other exercises so enjoyable. Just stopped. I could run for 5 min and the nah. So I stopped running 10km 3-4 days a week. I stilled went to work and day care center with the bike, still did gymnastics and the body was fit until the age of 40, where pain and life started to kick in. Also I gained weight and was a bit depressed. As we get older, we burn less and less energy during normal day and the body need to learn to reduce the intake. When I was young I sneered about those people that seam to be fat and avoid exercises but that has changed now. I realize that as people are different, some people does not get the kick out of exercising and some people burn more and some people burn less and why must it be so that our body system has to work perfectly and it is only up to you that you are obese.

If you ask around people who exercise they will basically tell you that it's just calories in and calories out. They say that you must burn fat and exercise for a log time in order to loose weight and I start wonder about the truth of this. There are a few facts that goes against this. First of all people who exercise a good fraction of the time e.g. the elite, seam to loose appetite and experience problems due to not getting the right amount of energy in the food. Now they still have long passes but it's interesting.

The second fact are that we know that burning fat by exercising a long time does not work. This is a reasonable well established truth and in principle yes energy in minus energy out is what counts, but notice the last fact about the elite sportsmen, they didn't have the appetite to compensate for the exercise. Simply put if you train 2 hours a few times a week, the body will compensate because you get hungry!

The third fact are that essentially people get fat when they get over 40. That is a well known fact and attributed to people's underlying burn rate is lowered. OK so, people are different, wouldn't this burn rate be different between individuals as well and explaining that some people stay thin whatever they eat and some does not. To me it's obvious that all people have a regulator when it comes to energy intake and that may be tune a bit differently. Also being good add collecting energy at the waist is not really a bad feature, in case you experience bad times you may at least historically have an advantage if you can use your stored energy. And of cause if you are obese, you also tend to have problems in normal life where there is plenty of calories. So by just these facts and some general knowledge of biology (genetics) you would expect that there is a variation in the population and to all those people who say that there is just energy in and energy out I would like to ask them to quantify the variability in the population. Not knowing this means that one need to be more open minded about it.

The fourth fact is that we do not like big excursion in blood sugar values. A more balanced diet with fat and longer carbon will mean a smother sugar curve. Fat has pros and cons but avoiding extreme conditions are most likely helpful in reducing the intake.

Finally, if you exercise a lot you will use all your reserves and the body may, this is my theory, be tuned so that it can handle exercises for a longer time by simply make sure there is a surplus when you do not exercise. In a sense the body is constructed to adapt well to huge variation in exercise and availability of food.

So, what I am doing now is exercising a lot, the equivalent of running 10km a day, day in and day out. That's a lot. But I take it in small steps of 10min break where I run a treadmill for 10min. I can do this at work as well as when I'm home so it's doable for me. I find 10min quite OK as I have things to think about, especially when I work and now tend to be more organized as well. I get around 80kcal each run and make it 10 runs, that means in a day I get around 800kcal which is what an 80kg person will burn if he runs 10km. Now notice that this means that I spread out the exercise for all day and hence simulate a higher mean burning rate, that should in theory also be something the body regulator is bad at compensating for and hence mean that I burn something like 0.5kg a week without changing eating habits. So I've done this a week now (That's insane, how many people can start exercising and run 10km a day after a week) and I notice I have zero feelings to eat an extra sandwich. I drink a lot as I'm thirsty and I drink in principle mainly water. I eat only 3 times a day and tend to get less and less hungry, with smaller portions. No beer, Almost no alcohol, a few candies that I get like 2,3 of them on each Saturday as my son shares a few with me. Maybe a hand of chips (agin from my son) and that's about it. I cook a lot still as I like to cook, so the food is really really tasty as always and I was stable in weight so I do not need to compensate extra foodwise. So the interesting thing now is to see if the body adapts and I start getting hungry. According to the facts above I will not be able to compensate so we will see. But the whole idea with this post is to propose that we view exercise totally wrong, I'm not an expert so it all can be bogus, but still it is exactly these kind of posts that I like to make as it goes against what I learned, goes against my education and this is so cool, realizing that you've been wrong all the time.