Explanation: male, 38, 130 pounds. Skinny, low muscle mass but have a beer keg belly.
My day is 7am wake up. Get kids to school. Work until 5. Get kids from school. Cook, shower and then I’m exhausted AF.
I’m semi fit? I’m a mechanic professionally and spring til summer I mountain bike regularly. So my calves are monsters.
But would like… basic at home sit ups. Push ups etc like on a Saturday, would that help at all?
Humans are horribly, miserably energy efficient.
Seriously we evolved as exhaustion predators: pick an animal and just keep walking after it until it drops, then eat it. That’s our whole schtick. We are the goddamn terminator.
Just being alive and breathing uses up about 1500-2000 calories a day.
An absolute bastard of a workout will use up maybe 100 on top of that, which makes up for like a spoonful of peanut butter.
As such, you can’t practically lose weight via exercise alone. You need to bring calories-in down to less than calories-out.
The tricky part is doing it in a controlled and sustainable manner so you don’t just say fuck it and scarf down two whole pizzas for lunch in a week’s time because you’re hangry and don’t care any more.
An hour run burns like 600
At my weight (175 pounds) going 10k over an hour puts me at about this amount of calories. That’s 6.2 miles. I am in no way fit enough to be able to go that kind of distance, forget about the pace, which is sad to admit.
At a 15 minute mile, I would burn 120 calories/mile.
That’s not to say that you can’t burn significant calories exercising, it’s just that your average couch potato won’t be able to out of the gate. It’s far easier for me to reduce my intake by 120 calories/day than it jog a mile a day on average. Ideally you would do a bit of both.