I trained quite heavily until about 30 years of age and discovered after being unrestrained, that I now longer, with the new medicines, get the kick from endorphins. That is needed to make running and other such exercises possible. I just stopped doing these things that was a part of my life. 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, when pain and age started to kick in. I also gained weight and was a bit depressed. As we get older, we burn less and the body need to learn to reduce the intake. When I was young I sneered about those people that seem to be fat and avoid exercises but I am now wiser. I think that it is obvious that people are different and some people does not get the kick out of exercising and some people burn more and some people burn less. Why must it be so that our body system has to work perfectly and it is only up to you that you are obese, that common assumptions seem very wrong.

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 long 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, seem to loose the appetite to compensate and experience problems of under-nourish.

We know that burning fat by exercising is troublesome without a focus on maintaining a proper diet. This is a reasonable well established truth and in principle underlines that 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!

It seems that it's common for people to get fatter when they get over 40. That is a well established it seem and attributed to people's underlying burn rate being lowered with age, but also less interests to exercise and various health problems that creep into life as well as we get older. From this one could ask oneself; If we could experience a change with time, wouldn't it be logical that there also is a variation across the population, 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 regulator may be tuned a bit differently in different people. Being good add collecting energy at the waist is not really a bad feature, in case you experience famines. At least historically those people have an advantage as they can use the stored energy. And of course if you are obese, you also tend to have problems in normal life where there is plenty of calories. In total two opposite environmental forces that typically results in a variation between individuals as there is no strong obvious optimal point. Hence due to some general knowledge of biology (genetics) you would expect that there should be a variation in the population. All those people who maintain that there is just energy in and energy out must in my mind must quantify the variability in the population in order to have a correct argument. Not knowing this means that one need to be more open minded about it.

Another fact is that may of us have problems with big excursion in blood sugar values, and 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 to reducing the intake for many of us.

Finally, if you exercise a lot you will use all your reserves and the body may, (this is my assumption), 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.

What I am doing now is exercising a lot, the equivalent of running 10km a day, day in and day out. I take it in small steps with exercising for 10 minutes at a break from my ordinary life, where I run a stationary bike. I can't do a lot of varying exercises due to body constraints like an akin hip and overweight. If I work from home, I can work out in this way. I find the 10 minutes to be a good balance and choice of time frame as I can plan ahead when it comes to work, get inspiration for new things to do etc. Therefore I tend to be more organized.

I can burn around 80kCal for each run and make keep 10 runs a day. That means in a day I get around 800kcal which is what an 80kg person will burn if he runs 10km if I understand sources I found correctly. Now notice that this means that I spread out the exercise for all day and hence simulate a higher mean burning rate, that should, as I suspect, also be something the body regulator is bad at compensating for. Hence imply that I burn something like 0.5kg a week without changing eating habits. I've done this a week now (That's kind of fascinating; how many people can start exercising and run 10km a day after a week). I notice I have zero feelings to eat an extra sandwich. I drink a lot as I'm thirsty and I drink mainly water. I eat only 3 times a day and tend to get less and less hungry, with smaller portions. I cook a lot still as I like to cook, so the food is really really tasty. This means that I do not need to compensate with extra food. The interesting thing is to see if my body adapts and I start getting hungry again. According to the arguments above I will not be able to compensate, we'll see.

The whole idea with this post is to propose that we view exercise totally wrong in many cases. I'm not an expert so I can certainly be wrong, but still it is exactly this kind of posts that I like to make as it goes against what I learned and it teases my mind, realizing that I've been wrong and I like that - to challenge my own assumptions. So why not go wild at work and put a stationary bike in the smack middle in the office so that the people are teased to work out a little.