And I consider this also potentially terrible advice.
1 is all you need to lose weight.
2 is mostly irrelevant. It's not like if you accidentally eat too much you'll get hulk muscles if you were working out. It's mostly impossible to both gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.
3 cardio is always good for you, but does little for weight loss, compared to food intake
4 is probably good advice.
5 is awful advice because you'll get discouraged weighing everyday. Between swings in water weight and erm, waste product, weight can easily swing a few lbs. Weekly is better advice.
None of this is to say your advice is necessarily bad, but I feel you're treating heavy people as idiots that you are smarter than. And maybe you are. But I personally think there's much much more going on than fat people being too stupid to know better, and that's what we need to focus on.
Advice that might work for you may not work for me, and vice versa. Best to not to assume your advice universal except CICO does works.
Here's my advice:
1. Assume that cardio and strength training basically don't help you lose weight, no matter how much you train. Unless you're absolutely crazy. Constrained energy metabolism suggests that your basal metabolism adjusts to your physical effort or lack thereof.
2. Weighing yourself can work if you don't freak out over every little variation in weight changes.
3. Exercises should be done for health reason, not for weight loss. Only insane maniac can use exercise to lose weight. You should consider a well rounded program, and not just overly focus on one specific thing. Do steady cardio AND HIIT, stability and strength training. It's a lot. You probably should do more than the minimum requirement set by the CDC to get everything you need, but even if you can't, any exercise is better than none.
4. Weight loss is made in the kitchen(or rather what you ingest). There are ways to cut calories, some you may adhere to better, such as time restricted feeding, eliminating certain major food categories(cutting out deserts and sweets other than fruits), and calories counting. There's no real magic bullet here. Experiment and see what works best for you.
I'm gonna need a source. Because for some odd reason I've known more than one bodybuilder in my life who has explained to me this is the reason behind bulking and cutting. I have trouble believing they were wrong all along and could do it all at once.
To be clear, I'm absolutely not a lifter or bodybuilder, so I'm playing a secondary source at this point.
Bodybuilders are notoriously terrible at knowing why things work for them. They generally know one version of "what" works but the "why" is often rather made-up ex post facto.
That said, the "bodybuilding meta" regarding Bulking/Cutting has evolved in the past decade. Now it's widely accepted that bulking/cutting cycles are probably merely the most efficient way to grow big and only need to "look good" for shows 1-3 times per year. It's also becoming accepted that "recomposition" (losing fat and gaining muscle) is real, and a very useful practice for bodybuilders who need to look good year-round (fitness models, instagram models, social influencers). The year-round nature of daily/weekly direct engagement with fans has driven significant changes in the bodybuilding community.
These days, it's believed that recomposition is a valid strategy if you can afford the "slow and steady" pace. If you need to get as big as possible in a limited number of months, and only need to look perfect for a specific target time window, then "bulking and cutting" allows the fastest size growth in the available time (actors preparing for a specific upcoming role, bodybuilders who are competing in an upcoming show).
Note also that for most bodybuilders, the aggressive cutting phase requires a fairly large amount of steroids to minimize dramatic loss of muscle mass.
> It is significantly harder to do this if you're close to your frame's natural muscular limits, but most people aren't.
It is true that bulk/cut cycles are much more efficient at putting on mass and it's absolutely the path that anyone trying to min-max their gains should follow, but that's not the demographic we're talking about.
In general I would not assume that every body builder actually knows the science behind muscle growth, many are cargo culting a small number of serious people who do know the science and offer recommendations on the most effective ways to build muscle.
Regarding 5, those swings happen even with weekly weighing. If you lose the recommended one to two lbs a week, and your water weight(etc) swings up it will sometimes look like you are stalling even though you are not. It'll be deceptive though because it will not happen that often. Risk taking away the wrong lessons.
With daily weighings the noise will be obvious and in your face, forcing you to acknowledge it.
It's basically a matter of downsampling with/without antialiasing.
Makes no sense. A lb of pure fat is what, 3500 calories? You could eat nothing for 3 days and barely see the scale move. And if you get the runs and your body starts collecting water, it can swing the other way.
Daily weighing proves absolutely nothing, and at best, follows the same trends as weekly weigh ins.
Makes plenty of sense, if you’re tracking your weight of course you’ll see variation through the day, but over multiple days? No. You’re losing tenths of a pound at a time.
That’s the indicator.
If you’re on the wrong track you don’t want to find out 21,000 calories later.
If a person burns 2000k at rest, and eats a 1500k a day, we could expect this person to lose 1lb every 1 week, give or take.
It's completely possible this person would see swings as much as 2lb up and down over that week. This tells them absolutely nothing about whether they are eating enough to lose weight or not.
I'm not saying every day weighing is useless, as it still covers the necessary bases. Just that it doesn't tell you a ton in the short term, or not appreciably more than weekly weighing.
I've swung 4lbs in a single day. How can that possibly jive with daily weighing in a way that makes any sense?
If you're someone locked on your diet and just tracking, it's probably fine. If you're someone tuning your diet, you're gonna make a lot of really bad decisions based on daily data.
I read an article years ago about people who managed to keep the weight loss for more than 5 years, and what they had in common. Weighing themselves every day was one of the commonalities.
Yeah, I’m not sure where people get this idea that you can’t weight in daily or shouldn’t.
Weight loss happens daily, when the week begins your body doesn’t suddenly decide to lose weight then and check back in with you next week.
Hell, it happens hourly. You can figure out what your hourly caloric burn rate is and know that if you eat something, your body will have to burn though it for the next n hours.
1 is all you need to lose weight.
2 is mostly irrelevant. It's not like if you accidentally eat too much you'll get hulk muscles if you were working out. It's mostly impossible to both gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.
3 cardio is always good for you, but does little for weight loss, compared to food intake
4 is probably good advice.
5 is awful advice because you'll get discouraged weighing everyday. Between swings in water weight and erm, waste product, weight can easily swing a few lbs. Weekly is better advice.
None of this is to say your advice is necessarily bad, but I feel you're treating heavy people as idiots that you are smarter than. And maybe you are. But I personally think there's much much more going on than fat people being too stupid to know better, and that's what we need to focus on.