The other day I found myself in a business meeting. We were mostly a bunch of new faces to each other, so we took turns briefly introducing ourselves. Of course, to make things a bit friendlier, we followed up the brief summary of our respective professional backgrounds with one or two sentences about our personal interests. I told them that I am interested in politics. That was a bit of an overgeneralization, but it was nothing compared to what some token woman said. She claimed that she “loves working out.” You may now think that there is nothing odd with a woman claiming that she loves working out. Yet, the problem was that she did not look the part. She could easily lose 30 pounds. The idea that she is breaking a sweat at the gym is laughable.
As I demonstratively looked away from her, I thought of other occurrences where women tell you complete bullshit about their interests. For instance, if you do a bit of online dating, you have probably come across countless profiles of women who claim that they like hiking or “enjoy nature”. In my profile, I used to write that I like Kafka, referring to the author Franz Kafka who is indeed one of my favorite authors. Somehow, this made some women tell me that they “like reading.”
It is very easy to claim something. It is a lot more difficult to make a plausible claim. For giggles, you could probe a little bit when you come across implausible statements. You will find that a woman who writes that she enjoys swimming but who does not look like she is much of a swimmer is just telling you what she thinks you want to hear. They don’t seem to even factor in that they may have to put their money where their mouth is.
I just mentioned swimming. I used to swim religiously in my early to mid-twenties. I had easy access to an olympic-size pool and spent about an hour, three to four times a week, swimming back and forth. It is a wonderful meditative experience. I even made a few friends back then, such as a Japanese guest professor who taught me an energy-efficient freestyle stroke. It was a great hobby to have, but then I moved to Berlin where I no longer had easy access to a pool. Yet, one of the girls I (briefly) saw back then squealed, after I dropped that I used to swim somewhat seriously, that she also “loves swimming” and suggested that we go to a swimming pool together. I did not mind that, but it turned out that she had dramatically overestimated her proficiency. She did not even manage to cover the entire length of the pool one single time, which she found deeply embarrassing — and then she hissed that this was a “stupid idea” and that I should have taken her to a water park instead. Needless to say, I moved on quickly.
I think there is a pattern. Instead of telling you what they really like, i.e. gossiping, shopping and watching TV shows, women want to a) look more interesting in general and b) also look more interesting to particular guys. Thus, they have those generic hobbies that have a wide appeal like hiking and once they know what a particular guy wants, they suddenly discover entirely new interests as well, such as reading, politics, or philosophy. In general, you should do yourself the favor and not probe too deeply. By and large, it seems that the average woman only wants some kind of positive feedback that she identified one of your interest, nothing more. Of course, that realization may be quite a disappointment.
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Aaron you should have told them this your hobby, they would have been delighted
I have my doubts about that.
Interesting. Recently I kept overhearing this young and attractive chick exclaiming how she couldn’t wait to be off from work. All she wanted to do was shoot some guns and go fishing. Sounded pretty bullshit to me.
This was most certainly bullshit. I bet she said that to impress some guy in her vicinity. If you have a hobby you’ve been pursuing for a while, it’s not the case that you “can’t wait” for your workday to be over. Also, fishing and shooting guns in the same evening is quite a time commitment. I bet she was unaware that you can easily sink hours into this activity. Also, I don’t recall ever having seen young attractive chicks with a fishing rod. It’s normally older guys.
I actually worked with her again last night. I assume she meant to impress me actually since she excitedly pulled out her phone to show me clips consisting of interviews for this upcoming annual local fighting tournament. In short, it’s redneck as hell and we were just laughing at how dumb the contestants were. I’m pretty sure she wanted me to accompany her because she said she really wanted to go and never mentioned having anyone to go with, and apparently her ex-boyfriend was into this sort of stuff.
I didn’t take the bait. And guns, hunting, fishing and being a stupid redneck is far from my pool of hobbies. I’m guessing it’s just what she mistakingly expects all guys to be in to or something based on her past experiences.
As a regular “visitor of shooting ranges” I can assure you that this is an expensive undertaking.
Given the price of ammo alone, I doubt that any middle class chick with her typical chick-job can afford that “hobby”.
Dumping a 30rd mag of not even match grade .223 (that’s about as high of a rifle caliber most chicks can handle) will cost you around $18. If you’re remotely serious about the challenge, you can double that price for match grade ammo or even triple it if you are into reloading, which has a setup cost of a few grand.
An hour of shooting will set you back at least $150 (range rent included) and given you do a hobby quite regularely, we are closer to $500 per month. Most people cannot afford that. We have not even touched on the guns alone. No, a $800 AR15 or $550 Chinese AK47 are NOT serious instruments.
That’s the financial side.
Dumping a mag and sorta aiming at pretty much nothing after the 2nd shot is one thing. Religiously loading 3rds only and in a meditative manner evaluating your breath, your posture, your thoughts and critically approaching the task – these do not sound like the typical chick-activities to me, given that the average garden variety girls prefer liking pics on insta.
So: 99% of the time chicks lie to you, when they brag about shooting. The few ones who actually outshoot you fall in the category of very manly looking chicks and the others are the diamonds of conservative nature, which you almost gotta try and marry asap.
I could easily lose 30 pounds and I do love working out.
My fitness trackers often say I’m more active then 98% of users for most weeks, and I only track my walking/jogging. That that doesn’t even account for the 2 hours of weightlifting that I do 3 times a week. Plus 6-10 hours of competitive training I do each week.
You can’t workout away your caloric intake. “Loving to work out” doesn’t magically make math eaten calories no longer count.
Again, those of you who are fortunate that working out automatically makes you leaner (since satiety hunger is a fixed constant for you)… I’m happy for you, but many don’t have that fortune. And projecting your fortune on others as the default is not well informed.
There is a clear difference between men and women in this regard. I used to know a big, chunky guy. He lived one floor below me before I moved out from that apartment complex. He is the hulky type. One day, I met him in the gym in our compound and he was dead-lifting ridiculous weights. It turned out that he is a powerlifter. Under his enormous body mass he hid big muscles. On the other hand, fat women tend to have a pear-shape. You can find fatties with relatively thin arms. Those women do not lift a lot, you can be sure of that. On the rare instance I see one of those women in my current gym, they do not break a sweat. They may walk for a bit on the treadmill. Women just don’t have enough testosterone in their body to develop sizeable muscles. Thus, the claim that they could very well work out like crazy seems hard to substantiate.
I have an acquintance… She’s a feminist, and I despise her as a person… really unlikable girl/young woman.
She runs marathons in different countries each week, and she spends hours a day training for it, and does seem to love working out. She could stand to lose 30 pounds as well.
@Alek
That’s anectdotal.
Most chicks don’t go to the gym for the effect it has on their body, but to feel good about what others think of them if they tell them that they work out.
Men mostly couldn’t give a damn what somebody thinks of them going to the gym.
Want some proof? Men dress like crap in the gym, while it is not uncommon to see women with make-up on the running tape.
TOUCHE!! That was my point. I can meet your anecdotes with my anecdotes.
Doesn’t change the point of my gripe… It is with the assumption that if someone has 30 pounds to lose, they must lie that they love working out. Which then changed to “well, if a woman does it, it means she’s lying”.
Fact is… you can’t make any definitive statements about how much a a person works by their bodyfat level.
The problem is that your one anecdote is exactly that. I contend that my observation that most fat chicks do not workout effectively counters it. Also, you did not address my main point, i.e. the difference in muscle mass between men and women. A fat guy could very well be a powerlifter, a fat woman not so much.
In before someone comes in with “yeah but alek, what about if someone is 2239320 pounds overweight”…
We’re talking most people you see here. Not the morbidly obese people you only see on shows about morbid obesity. Obviously those people can’t be working out.
I can give tons more anecdotes, plenty of them are all the tons of girls in the gym I go to, they work out as hard as I do (more than me, these girls go 5-6 days a week), and they’ve been working out for years… doesn’t change the point. That’s the point, anecdotes don’t matter and don’t mean shit.
There’s almost no evidence that working out makes people not-fat. It’s science. Look up the science, look up the research. It’s one big fat myth.
*There are groups of people who get leaner from working out, those who don’t, and those who get fatter. The main point is it depends on your starting point. If you start off real fat, even if you’re in the high-responder group it’s not gonna make you not fat, jut less fat. So you can work-out like crazy and still be fat.
tl’dr people who say they’re working out like crazy are not automatically lying if they aren’t a certain bodyfat level. They might be lying, or they might not be.
This is actually an argument for the opposite 🙂
– The fact that women can’t develop as much muscle as men doesn’t men they can’t “work out like crazy”, it means they can’t develop as much muscle (have as much to show for the effort)
– If men get more muscle out of resistance training that means men are more likely to get leaner from working out than women (gaining muscle lowers bodyfat if all else equal)
– So women can actually work out more than men, and have less to show for it. That’s the exact opposite of being an argument to justify the first claim “person looked like she doesn’t work out (visually), so they must be lying about working out a lot”
In a nutshell, your claim is that overweight women could work-out like crazy and not lose any of that fat because they lack testosterone? I just don’t see this happening. There may be an extreme outlier, i.e. a woman with excess overweight, who works out like crazy but eats even crazier amounts of food. However, this does not mean that the a priori assumption that a fat woman who claims that she loves working out is full of shit is wrong.
I’m extremely lean and probably always will be. I managed to eat so much about a year that for the first time I develepoed what looked like an ethopian belly. Literally most of the fat got stored there. All it took to lose it was a week or two of intermittent fasting. I’m super lean like that. However, with muscle building I have to take things really slow because it seems like my body will over produce cortisol or something, or I just recover very slowly.
The problem is that I’ll start having trouble sleeing and the soreness and stress will interfere with my other responsibilities. Also, I start getting really tight muscles and muscle knots that become very painful and I have to whip out the lube (for non-masturbatory reasons) and the foam roller. So my ideal weight lifting scenario is going hard for about an hour every week or two.
“Mein Hobby ist Shoppen!”
Mein letztes Date ^^
@Neutralrandomthoughts
Most chicks go to the gym to have their asses checked out by attractive men. They like the attention by attractive men and female competitors. That’s why they wear those tight yoga pants.
working out the female way:
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/3/imgsrc.ru_63421703aIm.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/4/imgsrc.ru_63421704gEk.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/6/imgsrc.ru_63421696SwM.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/8/imgsrc.ru_63421698SlC.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/0/imgsrc.ru_63421700qMn.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/1/imgsrc.ru_63421701BbY.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/2/imgsrc.ru_63421702iZt.jpg
https://b7.eu.icdn.ru/c/charlie88/2/imgsrc.ru_63421912uIy.jpg
Because you need to wear super tight semi-transparent yogapants while doing sports :=D (+ mandatory thongs)
Well, why bother working out in the comfort of your own home when you could instead do a few half-assed yoga poses in a public park instead? Women are so incredibly transparent. Unfortunately, inexperienced men believe the bullshit justifications women tell them, i.e. that tight yoga pants are “comfortable”. It would be quite something if women bluntly stated that they dress up like harlots in the gym because they want to meet a rich guy with a big dick, but that won’t ever happen.
I always have to laugh when “they” tell me that they wear thongs due to comfort reasons. Like yeah, putting a string between your butt cheeks, because you seek comfort! Absolutely plausible motivation and reasoning… *lol*
Also it’s mere coincidence that they start wearing thongs when they hit puberty. Because you only start to care about comfort when you hit puberty…^^ Women’s bullshit amazes me every time.
Another “hobby” of women, especially the > 40yo cat ladies:
http://www.skeptiker-blog.ch/2012/03/ist-esoterik-ein-frauenproblem.html
http://scienceblogs.de/bloodnacid/2012/11/29/warum-befallt-esoterik-vor-allem-frauen/
Seems like menopause is devastating to womens’s minds.
I have noticed that as well. Sadly, as women infiltrate government and business, thanks to diversity hiring, the madness spreads. A few months ago there was a case — I couldn’t find the reference in a quick search online — where some German state agency paid 100,000 euros to a woman to “consult faeries” regarding a planned bridge or street. You could probably add the excessive spending on management consultants in government and business as those people tend to peddle bullshit. Yet, if you’re burning taxpayer money, a few million euros for some fancy PowerPoint slides are probably a steal in the minds of those people.
That’s a hella absurd claim to make, why would I make it 🙂
– Working-out produces a limited amount of weight-loss, it’s not infinite
– People with more testosterone lose SLIGHTLY more* bodyfat
– People with less testosterone lose SLIGHTLY less* bodyfat
with the exact same style of working out
The term “less” doesn’t mean at all. And besides, this whole topic is a diversion that you introduced and I merely responded in order to point out that it doesn’t make a difference the way you were intending.
Original claim:Person has extra weight, they must be lying about working out
Me: Actually, it’s a scientific/mathematic/objective fact you can work out like crazy and still have some extra weight
Aaron: But women have less testosterone
Me: Points out the fact that this doesn’t change anything…
It doesn’t matter how much testosterone you have… you can work out like crazy and still have extra weight… because working out only lowers your weight down from your starting point. People with more T get SLIGHTLY more benefits, people with less T get SLIGHTLY less benefits.
Doesn’t change the point!!! Working out doesn’t automagically make “a person lean”. That’s a myth. It’s bullshit. Unconnected to reality and doesn’t work mathematically. You have to know their starting point, their diet, their post-workout satiety response etc.
Basic math with a super-simple example
– If I eat 20,000 calories in excess each week, I will be very fat.
(Excess: means more than the caloric intake at which you would be a healthy weight)
– If I work-out like crazy and spend an additional 10,000 calories from working out, I AM STILL 10,000 calories in excess each week
(20,000 minus 10,000 is 10,000 it’s NOT ZERO) Basic math
– So I’m going to be LESS FAT, but still fat. Then some naturally thin person comes to me and says, well you have fat on you, so you must be a lazy slob/lier who can’t possibly work out
Look up the research. Working out isn’t very good at making fat people not-fat. There are very few who see this magic pill benefit.
Alek, aren’t you leaving out basal metabolism, that should increase over time, as you work out? Because, one work out doesn’t burn so much extra calories, from what I understand. One muffin can pretty much kill half an hour on the treadmill, no?
Combined with a control of the caloric intake, increasing the basal metabolism is where the magic is. Unless of course, one is fooling around in the gym and not really increasing one’s base consumption… Which, I think, is to some degree Aaron’s argument as well. Women mostly just fool around in the gym and then on top of that even eat more because “they’re working out 3 times per week”.
(Neutral 1)
What do you mean leave out? You want me to mention all of the 767 biological factors and pathways through which increased weekly caloric expenditure works when you work out more?
All of them are INCLUDED in the phrase “calories spent”. I don’t care whether it’s from the immediate spend or the additional bmr spend. That’s why I used a weekly example. IT INCLUDES everything.
There is an increase in BMR through working out (in some people). Contra-intuitively in MANY people BMR DROPS when they increase exercise because their NEAT (non-exercise activity threshold) drops.
(Neutral2)
Point is, IT DOESN’T MATTER. YOU ONLY SPEND X AMOUNT OF ADDITIONAL CALORIES a week BY WORKING OUT. It is NOT INFINITE. YOU CAN NOT SPEND AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF CALORIES BY WORKING OUT (“serious exercise” or “fucking around exercise” is irrelevant, there’s no magic math where the number becomes infinite or auto-calibrating to fit exactly the number that is your eaten excess).
It’s a SPECIFIC FINITE number. It doesn’t AUTOMAGICALLY align with the number of excess calories you ATE.
THERE IS NO FUCKING MAGIC. MAGIC PILLS ARE NOT REAL.
Magic “fat burning” “metabolism boosting” exercises don’t break basic math.
If you eat an excess of 20,000 calories a week and you’re lazy and sedentary you’ll be SUPER FAT…. But then you start spending 10,000 more than than usual through exercise for a while (whether you got 10,000 direct from the exercise or exercises + “increased bmr while you sleep” it doesn’t matter for the math!!!!)… and then you get down to being “less fat”. BUT STILL FAT.
It’s still called “additional calories spent over the week”. In this basic 2nd-grade math example it ACCOUNTS FOR any fancy magic pill marketers use to sell products. It doesn’t matter what or how or why you’re spending an additional 10,000 calories. What matters is what’s your STARTING POINT. If you’re starting point is a 20k excess, 10k additional burned over a week will-not-make-you unfat. BASIC MATH.
tl;dr
= You can’t tell by looking at a person how much (and how hard) they exercise unless:
a) you know their starting point
b) how many calories they eat
Otherwise you’re just making things up.
“If you’re starting point is a 20k excess, 10k additional burned over a week will-not-make-you unfat. ”
Yup fully agree. And you are right I wasn’t specific enough. And yes, I was assuming that people who want to lose weight do excercise as a complemt to a caloric deficit. And that’s where I am wrong.
Yes thank you. That was my key point.
— And yes, they should (because exercise should be a compliment to decreasing food intake, not instead of).
The main reason people aren’t focusing on reducing caloric intake? Because there’s a whole fucking industry brainwashing people day in and day out that exercise has a magic effect to where you don’t have to eat less… “just burn the fat away”.
It’s really good for profits of both weightloss marketers and the food industry (don’t eat less of our foods, just burn them away).
@Alek
I know this isn’t the topic,but interestingly enough,Scooby Werkstatt has cited a study that said Obese(not just overweight,OBESE. surprising)people who did lots of cardio were overall healthier than lean people who were sedentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMXJuw79NCc
(3:00 mark)
I wonder how much truth there is behind this. Although,just doing weights and losing the fat(especially if you’re obese)already yields health benefits. Maybe only a minimal set of cardio is necessary(if at all)for overall acceptable health for the average person.
@maou
We’ve known this for decades now I believe. A fat person working out is healthier than a sedentary non-fat person.
As much as I love this blog, some people really think that multiple anecdotes = data. I agree with Alek on all points. Assuming women really do try,the widespread belief that exercise will make you slim is hurting those (gullible) women chances of losung weight.
Sadly FatLogic subreddit was removed.
When you hear statements like “exercise allows you to lose weight”, I take it to mean that if you do not increase your calorie intake, you will lose weight.
That’s the big IF right there. Research shows a huge portion (in some studies MOST people) just end up eating more food when they do more exercise, so it cancel itself out. And no, they’re not aware they eat more. They just wonder why the scale isn’t moving.
Why? Most people just eat until they’re full. It’s just that if they work out, they need to eat 10% more to get full… (or whatever amount cancels out the working out).
But nobody tells people:
– track every single bite to the gram for a month
– then workout and track every bit to the gram for a month to make sure it’s exactly the same as the month before you started working out to ensure the working out creates fat loss
Irony If people were able to track and limit their intake down to the calorie, they wouldn’t be fat in the first place to begin with.
tl;dr: Working out only* produces weightloss if you have a conscious control of the caloric intake (the ability to stay in a negative).
— This is the ability to make sure you’re in a deficit, at a minus over the weekly expenditure, whether that expenditure includes exercise or not is irrelevant, math is still math, and you need to be in the negative, and that IS A SKILL.
HOWEVER: IF you had that ability/skill, YOU WOULD ALREADY be losing weight in the first place.
Put in another way: In order to lose weight with exercise, you need to be the kind of person who can lose weight without it. But why would you be fat if you had that ability in the first place?
For most people… exercise can at best speed up weight-loss, not create it out of thin air. And that’s best case. In some people it increases the difficulty in staying negative so much, that it backfires and makes it harder to stick to a negative (slowing down weight loss).
Even more simplified: People should be mastering caloric intake for weight loss. Exercise is for health.
“Even more simplified: People should be mastering caloric intake for weight loss. Exercise is for health.”
Health and building muscle, which is arguably for health, but also for aesthetics.
I see it more as women being a vessel of water that is filled and adapts to the man. If she’s into you (for whatever reason), she’ll start liking whatever you like, regardless if she’s competent in it or physically capable). Heck, I even got my girls to like New Country music…
btw – just found your site. Great stuff!