> The entire experience made me feel like the fitness industry is bordering on fraud with the promises.
The fitness industry is very broad and is by no means just about weight loss. There's a large amount of people who are a normal weight, but not "fit" (ie. skinny fat).
It has been established for a long time that weight is generally diet based ("abs are made in the kitchen" etc), and every diet under the sun is some variation of CICO. Nobody is hiding it, nor is it a secret. It's just hard, and it takes work.
That said, exercise can boost weight loss. If you run 5 miles, you burn 500-ish extra calories which can be used to eat more or accelerate weight loss. I burn around 1500-2000 extra calories a day as a semi-professional athlete (3/4 hours per day).
Having lost a similar amount of weight (12kg) in a similar timeframe (2-3 months) last year, it's important to realise that a big portion of the initial weight loss upon a sudden diet change is water weight. You're probably eating less salt, which means your body isn't retaining as much water (which is very heavy in the body). It's important to keep doing something (like your resistance training) so your body doesn't burn off muscle mass as well, and it's important to ensure that the diet is sustainable, and as a side note, at some point weight loss will hit a slowdown or plateau somewhere above your target weight. Keep at it!
A lot of people lose a lot of weight, then go back to their former habits and put it all back on, plus extra. You have to be careful and make sure the changes you make are sustainable. Unless you're a very heavy weight, it's better to steadily lose weight than lose it very quickly, as this makes it more sustainable.
Exercise can make weight loss more sustainable because it can give you different goals that take your mind off of the number on the scales. For example, if you take up running and work up to 5k, 10k, half marathon, marathons, and improving your own time, you can stay slim without really thinking about it, and reap the benefits of better cardiovascular health and a stronger body.
I'm surprised your doctor/nutritionist expresses shock at the weight loss. If they have a rough idea of what you eat, they shouldn't be shocked. I'd advise finding another.
All that said, great job on the weight loss so far! What's your end goal if you don't mind me asking?
According to the WHO, there is no level of alcohol consumption that is good for the health.
OP sounds like he doesn't get anything out of drinking anymore, so I guess he doesn't even want to crack open a bottle for special occasions. He's realised he only lives once, so he kicked the booze.
As somebody who's never drunk, the only thing I think I've ever missed out on is the social lubrication element, but that just made me find people who are more like-minded.
I'm not sure how it's counted (whether it includes forcibly migrated), but according to Statista, Russia currently holds the majority of non-internal Ukrainian refugees.
The lifting heavy weights just ensures you retain muscle during weight loss, doesn't it?
While weight loss is mostly diet, if you did want to use exercise to burn additional calories, cardio would do more than weight training. I burn up to 1000 calories in an hour of very strenuous cycling (from normal weight), which I doubt I could ever do lifting dumbbells and barbells.
I've always used weight training during weight loss to try and tell my body to retain muscle and target fat primarily.
Where I live in Northern England, buses are (amongst other reasons) mostly hampered in their reliability by delays and cancellations caused by sharing roads congested with cars.
Here there's an almost palpable attitude of disgust towards using the bus. Almost a me versus the plebs attitude. The car represents the people's private island.
It would be slightly improved if people moved from tank-like SUVs to smaller cars, even better improved by embracing 1/2 seat cars (which will never happen because the design isn't conformist, see the Smart Car), and most improved by people putting their ego aside and taking the bus.
For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.
Instead it looks like self-driving cars will win out due to people's behaviour.
Privacy nuts are always going overboard about things that mean very little.
Genetic data sounds important but in the bigger scheme of things, it's probably the least manipulatable data about a person on the internet.
My genetic data is less weaponizable than if I uploaded hundreds of pictures of myself and my shared my social graph to Facebook, if I shared my political opinions on Twitter, if I commented/posted on Reddit boards of my interests and hobbies. It's also less weaponizable than the multitude of "invisible" data that I feed to Google, my incompetent local government, service providers, every shop that is shipping something to my home address.
I lose genetic data everywhere I go, every day.
50-100 hairs fall of my head, and I leave fingerprints on everything I touch. I "lose privacy" every day by walking into somebody else's photo/video/TikTok, and by mishandling of it by poor government/business entities.
> somebody choosing to smoke/chew/dip tobacco which may eventually cause them serious health conditions and death
In a crowded street, somebody's choice to smoke tobacco isn't just causing them serious health conditions.
I don't advocate banning smoking (Brits seem to love banning things they disagree with). I'm fine with people smoking so long as they do it in an isolated area where it's just harming them. It would be better if they didn't (especially to ease the burden on the healthcare system and spending), but that's their prerogative. I'm just as much an NHS burden if I break my leg doing sport.
I don't know where you're from, but in the UK, over £50 billion is spent on it each year.
If you've seen anybody who lives for Friday / Saturday night and a Sunday hangover, it fits the consumerist image pretty neatly. Many (obviously not all) are slaves to alcohol.
We've all heard the wine'o'clock jokes from middle aged women in the office, people struggling to complete "Dry January" and similar challenges, colleagues talking about how excited they are to get a drink when they get home.
These people are held under the thumb of a handful or two alcohol companies. In many cases, it's simply a wasted weekend and quite a sum of wasted money, especially when you can't remember any of it.
This is usually labelled quite literally as a "whole foods diet", meaning that the foods you eat are "whole" in themselves and not composed of other refined food. To me, it's the only diet that makes any real sense.
We live in a crazy ultra-processed food world. Even just standard processed food can be pretty bad for you (bread, rice) in certain quantities and a lot of people see that stuff as being baseline, the way you'd view whole foods.
Not to one-up you, but Sheffield in South Yorkshire has even more trees. I visited recently and was taken aback by how much coverage there was for a city center, coming from Leeds, which seems to hate trees.
If I remember correctly, London has around 8.5 million trees (for a population of almost 9 million, 1:1 tree:person) and Sheffield has around 4.5 million (for a much smaller population of less than 600,000, 7.5:1 tree:person). Sheffield has more trees per person than any other city in Europe.
Sheffield council tried to cut down thousands of trees a few years ago and it caused massive backlash, protests and arrests.
A few years ago, primary age students going into high school from my home village were going to be split between two secondary (or high) schools, as not every student could be accounted for in the closer school.
The closer school was a decent high school in an affluent town across from my village. Decent teachers, grades, no drama.
The other was a poorer high school in a rough and downtrodden town. The town has higher crime, including crime which reaches students (anti-social/troubled kids, more bullying, even cases of knives being brought into school).
This is a classic pattern in the UK. Well off/decent towns within spitting distance of formerly well-off towns which used to be industrially important and are now in stagnation, with poor job prospects, crime, anti-social behaviour, poor maintenance, nothing to do, and nothing to help.
Worse average grades, worse teachers (due to high turnover from teachers being pushed out by bullying), more potential to get in trouble, and worse life potential.
Not sure how this should be worded to not be construed in a funny way, but the kids from my village would have been the only white kids in the school in the rougher town, so you can imagine how that may amplify the effect the school would have on them.
Unsurprisingly, parents protested and many sold up and moved in order to avoid the "bad school" in question and get into a better school catchment area.
If you know West Yorkshire, you probably know exactly which towns I'm talking about. Such is the reputation of both towns and their respective schools.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for stating this.
To add to what you said, environmentally it's awful. Where I live it, most of the food deliveries were bicycle based a few years ago. Now it's all cars, mopeds and e-bikes (the best of a bad bunch) as anything less makes the delivery driver less competitive against the others.
The bikes/e-bikes ignore traffic lights and flow, causing close-calls and collisions in pedestrian areas (where they pick up the food).
None of the economic, environmental and moral (laziness) waste can possibly be justified for the sort of rubbish that is being sold on a takeaway app. It's always just junk like burgers, chips, and cakes.
The fitness industry is very broad and is by no means just about weight loss. There's a large amount of people who are a normal weight, but not "fit" (ie. skinny fat).
It has been established for a long time that weight is generally diet based ("abs are made in the kitchen" etc), and every diet under the sun is some variation of CICO. Nobody is hiding it, nor is it a secret. It's just hard, and it takes work.
That said, exercise can boost weight loss. If you run 5 miles, you burn 500-ish extra calories which can be used to eat more or accelerate weight loss. I burn around 1500-2000 extra calories a day as a semi-professional athlete (3/4 hours per day).
Having lost a similar amount of weight (12kg) in a similar timeframe (2-3 months) last year, it's important to realise that a big portion of the initial weight loss upon a sudden diet change is water weight. You're probably eating less salt, which means your body isn't retaining as much water (which is very heavy in the body). It's important to keep doing something (like your resistance training) so your body doesn't burn off muscle mass as well, and it's important to ensure that the diet is sustainable, and as a side note, at some point weight loss will hit a slowdown or plateau somewhere above your target weight. Keep at it!
A lot of people lose a lot of weight, then go back to their former habits and put it all back on, plus extra. You have to be careful and make sure the changes you make are sustainable. Unless you're a very heavy weight, it's better to steadily lose weight than lose it very quickly, as this makes it more sustainable.
Exercise can make weight loss more sustainable because it can give you different goals that take your mind off of the number on the scales. For example, if you take up running and work up to 5k, 10k, half marathon, marathons, and improving your own time, you can stay slim without really thinking about it, and reap the benefits of better cardiovascular health and a stronger body.
I'm surprised your doctor/nutritionist expresses shock at the weight loss. If they have a rough idea of what you eat, they shouldn't be shocked. I'd advise finding another.
All that said, great job on the weight loss so far! What's your end goal if you don't mind me asking?