> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference.
Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.
I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
Congratulations! I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is. And it's also depressing if I look at the graph that some 40 to 50 year olds seem to still have the metabolism of a toddler - I'm definitely not one of those! OTOH, you can feel superior by thinking these people would be in big trouble if there was a famine, but that's (fortunately) not the world we live in (although it's pretty fucked up if you consider that we are complaining about these first world problems while in other countries people are starving)...
My advise: (as someone who does a lot of working out and calorie control)
Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home.
Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is
(The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)
> Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
Not necessarily. It is important to remember that water weighs ~1lb/pt and there are a lot of things that affect how much water your body is carrying at any given moment. Depending on your body mass, it is not unrealistic to see 5lbs of fluctuation in a single day. On a calorie restricted diet your body will tend to retain water (because it does this for pretty much any stressor), so you may actually see a slight increase in body weight at first even though your TDEE is above your caloric intake.
A more reliable approach, in my opinion, is to do the TDEE calculation for your target weight and set that as your calorie limit.
That's why they are telling you (as is common) to compare the results on a weekly basis which reduces the variance. TDEE calculations from scratch are much much more unreliable than empirically finding out and mostly good for a starting point.
You can of course calculate the TDEE of your target weight but like you implied, unless you know your own, based on your own metabolism and intake, the data is never going to be accurate
For example I eat much less than my bodybuilder friends. When I went with the calories that they recommended to me I gained so much fat with a very active workout schedule and noone had a explanation why. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe medicine I take, maybe something else. I now eat much less than you’d expect from a person with my height and age, but I still gain weight, because my actual calculated TDEE is comparatively low
Having that data on hand as a reference is incredibly helpful to plan my weight progress
I'd love to count calories. I'm just too lazy to measure and research everything I eat, and the alternative is to have only processed foods that are labeled.
It's too bad that we can't just live on Soylent (the actual beverage, not the thing from the book)
With a 10 dollar scale and an App like Lose It, it is pretty easy. They have both things with UPC codes for easy look up and standard foods, for example brown rice or salmon. I keep track and probably spend less than 5 minutes a day getting everything down. Obviously it will be difficult at a restaurant unless you want to bring a scale with you or beg the wait staff but largely they won't mind and if you're order grilled chicken and veg most likely they won't mind measuring the chicken for you. Anyways, the stuff on labels are estimates so the whole process has some moderate error so as long as you estimate fairly you don't have to worry about being crazy accurate.
A few years back I lost 30 lbs over the course of a year using Lose It. I didn't make any major dietary changes other than reducing total caloric intake. I found that ballpark estimating calories for restaurant food was fairly easy and close enough. I never weighed my food. I even went over my caloric budget fairly often and would just make up for it the next day. Overall, it was surprisingly simple to lose the weight but I did find myself hungry more often than I would have liked. After regaining that weight over the last two years, I recently bought an exercise bike. I'm hoping that the regular exercise it provides will help suppress my appetite. I have been thinking about picking up Lose It again, and this thread has convinced me.
I dunno, me and the wife realised that certain foods are simply not worth the calorie count. Really nice curry vs Pizza? The curry wins on taste, nutrition and calories. Chocolate bar vs chocolate-chip brioche? If I'm honest, id prefer the brioche (warmed a little, with a cup of decent coffee). It also affected ingredient choices: if I'm gonna make an Indian dish like palak paneer, I find it impossible to get low-fat paneer. However I can get low-fat halloumi (lots of protein), and if it's cooked right, it works extremely well in place of paneer. Over 6 months using a calorie counting app we got to our "perfect weight" without having to go hungry. In fact, if anything, it just made me stop and think before having second helpings and overeating. So now we have "free meals" in the freezer, for when we want a lazy evening.
On the low fat halloumi vs paneer thing... We also found that low-fat soft cheese (like Philadelphia light) are amazing in soups. Simmer lentils and cubed potatoes with some spices and a can of chopped tomatoes, and just before you serve, add a large dollop of light Philadelphia and stir it all the way in. Boosts the protein content and makes for a really creamy soup. Also works great in other soups.
Absolutely. Preventing overeating was likely the biggest contributor to my weight loss. I stopped going back for seconds every time. The next biggest was probably eating higher quality foods, similar to your examples. My memory is fuzzy on this detail, but I believe the times I ended up hungry were largely the days on which I'd had an especially calorie dense meal, like pizza, earlier in the day, so my calorie allowance was smaller come dinner time. However, pizza being my favorite food, I'm unlikely to give it up. Rather, I try to make it the last meal of the day. I found that I was able to resist the late-night munchies easier than mid-day hunger pangs.
I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to make a healthy pizza. Adding gluten to the flour for extra protein, using low fat cheeses etc. If I crack the 500 calorie 12" pizza I'll let you know.
The Milton's brand cauliflower crust pizza (available at Costco among other places) is also pretty good. Not available outside the USA yet AFAIK, unfortunately.
Making the crust very thin is also an obvious way to reduce carbs, and using whole wheat crust also help, and using Khorasan wheat or similar whole grains.
For sweets, I adopted the snob diet: raise your standards so much the average supermarket chocolate bar just doesn't appeal any more, and you are less likely to snack casually :-)
Never had a decent cauliflower crust (yet). Unfortunately the Milton brand isn't available where I am. But checking out the nutritional value, they're replacing replacing wheat flour with "Rice Flour, Tapioca Starch", which smacks of gluten free rather than low carb. Having said that, it is lower in calories than my store bought pizza (690 vs 800 for the same weight). But is it as good? Like your snob chocolate diet: I would prefer to eat pizza less often and maybe walk an extra 5km on the days that I enjoy a real pizza.
I am going to experiment with low-flour dough with extra gluten and cauliflower to bulk it out. Might need xanthan gum and an egg.
If you eat a lot of similar stuff, after looking up things periodically over time you'll get to be able to ballpark calorie counts. Calories aren't really hidden that well.
I was very excited about Soylent years ago...until I tried it. I really disliked the flavor, so wouldn't have stuck with it regardless, but what really surprised me was how much I enjoy the act of sitting down and eating a meal. Soylent filled me up, but it never satiated me. Regardless of the time savings and predictability, I missed the act of eating, if that makes sense.
Makes total sense to me - we are creatures of habit and eating is one of our most sacred rituals. It's deeply rooted in our psychology so no surprise to me that one would miss the ritual even if satiated.
I tried it while on a trip to the states, and had the same experience as you. It was barely ok, and the taste was not great. Also, saved time from not eating a regular meal is not that much, cooking it is. As with many things, that can be fixed just by throwing more money at it.
MyFitnessPal does a pretty good job. You can scan barcodes and it'll (usually) have the calories and macros. Also just having a set of scales on hand makes it a lot more accurate!
When you cook for yourself it's pretty easy. After a month you remember kcal per 100g for each common ingredient and the weight is on the box or on the receipt anyway.
For me at least it's not that simple. My weight (healthy to low BMI) has been very stable over many years with vastly different amounts of exercising and quality of eating habits within that period. Fat to muscle ratio does move but total weight is stuck even with long runs of lots of junk food.
Hmm I have trouble believing that. If you eat less and put yourself into a caloric deficit, your body is going to start using up fat and to a certain degree muscle, that's just how it works and your body is no exception. If you work out during a deficit, your body will try to retain muscle and use more fat instead. Gaining muscle in a deficit is possible, but only in small amounts, if at all.
> quality of eating habits within that period
To me this sounds like you aren't actually changing the amount of calories that you eat, just the quality of them. Eating 2000 calories of McDonalds or 2000 calories of high quality food does not matter (or barely matters) for losing/gaining weight. If 2000 calories is under your TDEE, you can eat 2000 calories of cheesecake and would still lose weight (but very unhealthy).
What I see often is people claiming stuff like "I can't lose weight" or "I have a slow metabolism", but they never actually bother counting how much they eat, and because of that have no understanding of what high-calorie and low-calorie food is. (For example if I'd ask how much calories an average hamburger or a glass of cola has, you'd likely have no idea if you haven't counted calories before).
It was the same for me, once I started counting I realized that I was not eating according to the goals I had set at that time, and that the food I ate was actually much much less in calories than I thought it was.
You might try an other diet that‘s more filling and creates less cravings. So less carbs and more protein and fat. I don‘t think that willpower really works in this regard long term. It only creates frustrations.
The big trick is figuring out mentally how to eat less without requiring willpower. It is possible. Depending on willpower is setting up for likely failure, IMO.
> I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is.
Had the same problem. Then switched to intermittent fasting. First two months, nothing happened. Then within a month dropped 10 kg, which got me back to my pre-covid weight. I'm doing 8/16 IF by the way, and eating more than I did before, so I think the CICO theory is stupid :)
Isn’t 2.5kg / week weight loss extreme, and unhealthy or bordering impossible? It seems to be usually recommended to stay below 1kg per week, a healthy rate seems to be closer to 0.5kg/week. I’d assume that something might have been happening the first two months. Could be a measurement problem as well, that you were catching water-weight highs and then maybe changed the timing of your measurements? If you were actually losing closer to 0.8kg / week without knowing it for three months, that’d be about 10kg.
How much more are you eating exactly? Have you changed your exercise routine or physical habits? The problem with calling CICO stupid is that it’s two-thirds physics. The only way to gain mass is to eat it, and the only way to lose mass is to burn it off through RMR and exercise. There’s mountains of data demonstrating that humans gain weight when eating more than they burn, and lose it when burning more than they eat. The people who seem to lose/gain weight abnormally are just people who’s bodies burn calories in unusual ways. That’s rare and statistically unlikely, but even that still follows CICO.
An important thing to keep in mind is that a substantial amount of calories can be burned outside of formal exercise. Incorporating more walking into your day, general activities that involve movement rather than sitting at a desk, etc
I've struggled with this a lot over the past 10 years. I was 60lbs (27kg) over my weight from leaving university 25 years earlier, I sit a lot, and am late forties. The last few years have been harder, and I've been bouncing between a small range, and couldn't 'break out'.
Others have suggested 'writing it down' - not going to argue with that. I don't 'write down' every food I eat, but I do make mental notes every day. What's helped me more though...
2 years ago I bought a fitbit - basic model, nothing fancy, but got serious about tracking my movements. It helped create some easier external documentation about what I was doing. I then moved to an Apple Watch last May, and have been following the '3 circles'. It gave me a target 'move X calories per day' target, do X minutes of 'exercise' every day (exercise seemingly defined as 'get your heart rate above Xbpm').
I've hit those targets ALMOST every day (I missed one calorie target 1 day by 13!). I'm on day ... 206 of my movement streak.
For me, the visual reminders on my wrist help keep me motivated/focused. I 'compete' against a couple of friends with the watch now and then, but just being connected and getting a thumbs up from a friend now and then is motivating.
As others said, track weight daily - I track morning and night. I put it in my iphone. I look at the graphs. I see the downward trend. THIS HELPS A LOT when it bounces back up a bit now and then. I'm up ... around 1.5 lbs from earlier this week. JUST seeing that uptick used to demotivate me. But looking at the downward trend of the last 7 months, I can see the larger direction is down, and I don't stress as much about small upticks. I'm down 25lbs (11kg) from last June, and at this pace will probably be down another 15 or so by this year.
I used to go to a gym, but ... it's a 'process'. I now often just go outside and jog around. There's a run club once per week, and weather permitting, I'll do it, but... I hit those targets every day. Even if it's just running in place, or getting on an exercise bike, or jumping rope. I tell myself "every little bit helps", and tracking every one of those 'little bits' has been the motivating factor for me. May be different for others, but keep going till you find something that works for you.
Took me years to find some 'thing' that clicked for me, but I'm closing in on one year of losing weight based on 'more movement' and 'fewer snacks' and 'better eating'. But it took weeks before there was a trendline to see a downward line.
I'm a bit confused by this point in the article, because it also states:
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Given that "regular" people clearly do not burn 4650 calories per day, and it is possible to burn 4650 calories per day, there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure. I'm guessing it just doesn't happen for regular doses of exercise (including, evidently, walking 14km per day).
Perhaps the body down regulates calorie-consuming processes to a point where it's just the bare minimum, and calorie expenditure increases from there. Or perhaps we should take the opposite view and say that our bodies up regulate unwanted processes (like inflammation) to use the energy of an engine designed to keep running at a certain level?
Either way I find this incredibly interesting. And either way I'm probably also going to keep stuffing my face on a day I run 30km :).
Yeah, the article isn't very clear on this. ISTM the claim is not that exercise doesn't increase energy consumption at all, but just that it increases it by much less than the amount of energy expended in the exercise, because the body (partially) compensates elsewhere. Whether the degree of compensation varies based on amount of exercise I'm not sure, and I wish it had explained. I expect it probably would, as presumably there would only be so much 'low hanging fruit' for your body to use when compensating.
I can definitely see how that works. I'm a cyclist and often ride 60-100 miles on a weekend day, plus 3 days pf 20-30 miles during the week. That should be a lot of extra calories. But, after those long rides, I usually need a nap and don't do much else (maybe grocery shopping, but definitely not woodworking or other serious projects).
That said, at the peak of my training (12 hours/week), I can definitely consume more calories without putting on weight. Like, a giant bowl of ice cream most nights. But, if I continue that diet during recovery periods, I'll put on a few pounds. So, it's not that exercise has zero impact, but possibly quite a bit smaller an impact that one might assume.
Yeah, I thought this. There's clearly an amount of exercise that will cause you to lose weight. An interesting question is whether your body prevents you from achieving that.
Cycling was always interesting to me in this context because it seems easier to burn energy on a bike than other forms of exercise.
seems easier to burn energy on a bike than other forms of exercise
I'm not sure this is true. Cycling isn't weight-bearing (you're sitting down) and only engages the large leg muscles. Running and rowing likely provide more calorie burn for a given RPE (rate of perceived exertion) over a fixed time period. Running because it's weight-bearing; rowing because it engages more muscle groups. That said, you can probably cycle for more hours total, if you have nothing else to do.
Running doesn't burn as much as you think because your muscles store energy elastically on the eccentric phase of each step. This removes a lot of energy needed for the subsequent concentric part.
Contrast this with cycling which is pretty much all concentric contractions.
Evolution is great at optimizing! Running is so efficient for humans that some human tribes use it to hunt (persistence hunting). They literally run their prey to exhaustion then just walk up and kill them.
There's nothing special about cycling. You can deplete your glycogen stores and hit the wall with any aerobic activity. If you have a healthy metabolism and stay in heart rate zones 1-2 then you'll mostly burn fat stores and can cycle for many hours without hitting the wall. At higher zone 3+ efforts you'll need periodic carbohydrate supplements to keep going.
Indeed, but you can keep going just about. I've properly hit the wall once, and that was an unpleasant experience - nearly fainting and seriously in danger of falling off my bike, but I think that was largely a hard removal of all accessible glycogen, and it was years ago when I was relatively green. Now I just tend to eventually find it hard and unpleasant.
> there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure
Of course there is. The problem is that it's much easier to eat than it is to exercise. You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes, and you'd have to run or bike for hours to burn those calories off. A 30 minute jog on a treadmill won't do it.
Most people eat more calories than they need, and would have to exercise much more than they realize to burn them off. So losing weight over a reasonably short period of time almost always requires cutting calories. Few people have enough free time to do it with exercise alone.
The efficiency of our bodies (or the amount of calories in food) is astounding. Makes one think whether there is any acceptable use case for serving snacks and other high-calorie-density food.
Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy.
Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate, then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.
If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories per minute.
There are loads of videos on YouTube of what happens. You may or may not want to watch them. Spoiler alert: you vomit when you eat too much.
The vomit limit is probably higher than 4560 (which BTW has a suspicious number of significant digits), there might be a range between too many calories and vomiting where your body breaks down the food into waste without digesting any more nutrients/calories. Kinda like how if you eat too much vitamin C, you’ll just pee most of it out.
At some point your body will also fail to exert energy; there are also metabolic safeguards ahead of the point where your body can no longer manage the energy to keep basic functions going where the lower-priority functions (immune system, cognitive function, motion muscles) start to degrade.
You don't need to be at the limit of human energy intake to see what happens to people when their energy expenditure greatly exceeds the energy available from food over a sustained time period; there is quite a lot of medical literature on the effects of such... er... malnutrition.
Long term, yes. Short term you might be able to get some from fat stores. But the claim is that ~4650 is the most you can persistently get from food intake per day.
Sort of makes sense, the body is a machine and will get worn down/depleted at some point and not some infinite bag of holding. Surprised its as low at 4650 calories though, figured marathoners + swimmers and such could burn more.
The article says you can't keep unhealthy diet and get fit just by exercising. Which is true in my experience as well - I was eating over 3000 kcal a day before I started counting calories, and if I haven't reduced that - no reasonable amount of exercise would have helped.
What's tricky is that in early 20s I was eating about as much and it was fine.
There's a huge variation between individuals based on size, sex, and activity level. As a large, fairly active man I have to consume around 3100 kcal per day just to maintain body weight. But a small, sedentary woman might gain weight with even half that consumption.
All else being equal, resting metabolic rate doesn't tend to slow down much as we age. The notion that people in their 20s can eat as they want without gaining weight is mostly a myth. It's more likely that you don't accurately remember what you consumed and your activity level in your early 20s.
You’re reading that wrong. Of course you burn more calories through exercise. Michael Phelps couldn’t have eaten 12k cals a day if exercise didn’t burn calories.
Well that's what the article says. The Hazda who walk 8-12 km a day burn the less calories as an average American (or the same after adjusting for body weight).
Also that Phelps thing is highly questionable. He says he "probably" burns 8-10k, not 12k. Not the type of statement you want to rely on to dismiss all this work.
I just have a hard time believing it to be true that no amount of exercise will increase the overall caloric expenditure. For example, I've done a few multi-week bike tours, and we ate an enormous amount of mostly pasta every day, and managed to peel off a few pounds each by the end of it.
It's strange. Go out in freezing weather and stand still;you'll get cold. Move about and you get warm. I find it unlikely that you can heat up without energy?
The article mentions a study that tracked energy expenditure of runners over many weeks, and found that the energy expenditure was much lower at the tail end of the experiment, suggesting the body gets accustomed to the activity somehow and burns less energy.
The study must have tracked non-runners, given the conclusion. If they were already runners and the conclusion is that they get accustomed to the activity, they'd already be accustomed and there'd be no tail end difference.
So they most likely tested non-runners and had them start running. We get more efficient at physical exertion with practice. Better coordination of muscle groups. Finding a more efficient pace. Correcting form deficiencies. These all increase capability or reduce energy expenditure.
This assumes that there isn't a spectrum of running intensity. In this case they were running 10s of kilometres every day during the study, an absurd distance. So they were likely experienced runners already who were engaging in this extreme competition and took it up to an abnormal intensity that they weren't used to.
We saw a very large reduction in caloric expenditure in people who were already very fit runners. So body weight changes over the course of the experiment are unlikely to explain it.
The article says pretty explicitly that, while you do burn more calories while exercising, your body finds other ways to compensate and generally keeps about the same total energy expenditure in a day.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to extreme cases like modern athletes, who explicitly push their bodies in many ways that normal fit people don't, and who have teams of doctors and coaches that can force them to keep up with exercise and diet even when their bodies are telling them to stop.
Is it certain that we absorb all of the calories we consume? I went on a backpacking trip with my friends recently and despite similar activity levels everybody was surprised when they noticed that I eat twice as much as anybody else in the group.
Maybe I should bring it up with a doctor, but I feel fine, I just also spend more on food than most.
No, there's lots of calories in stool, but it depends on the type of food. For example, eating lots of fats and oils tends to "go through". On the other hand, rate of metabolism varies between people too.
Yes, this. These conversations about weight loss are so rife with spherical cows and people come to ridiculous generalizations because of it. Bodies are complicated and varied. "Michael Phelps eats 12kcal a day and yet he's not fat" is just a correlation, it doesn't mean anything. He's an extreme outlier of a person in many ways.
I was eating similarly in my 20s and 30s and in 20s I kept about 80kg but in 30s I got to 130kg :/
BTW there are diseases that reduce calories absorbed, you might want to get checked for colitis ulcerosa and crohn's disease. They have nasty side effects so better to know earlier even if you don't have the worst symptoms.
The body absorbs refined carbs very quickly. The glucose rush will increase insulin levels to very high levels and make you feel hungry again soon leading to the consumption of even more calories.
Anecdotally, this has been my experience as well. I tend to think of my base metabolic rate as the integral over my physical activity over the last N years (it used to be N=5, but even that window is way too small I think now). Point being, you can be inactive for a long time without a meaningful change in body fat/weight, but eventually your body adjusts. Or rather, the first gain in body fat is offset by the loss of muscle weight. Once you're at a slower metabolic rate and less muscle, exercise becomes more difficult and it takes years of consistent activity to raise your metabolic rate again.
I'm not sure how base metabolic rate relates to incidental energy expenditure. My gut feeling is that every body has its own limits on energy expenditure, and max TDEE doesn't need to correlate directly with base metabolic rate. That's why I mentioned the integral above. I tend to think of $TDEE_{max} \simeq MBR_{base} + E_{available}$ but $MBR_{base} \simeq \int_{t=-5}^0 TEE(t)$ -- and in my experience, weight loss correlates more with base metabolic rate than with caloric intake ($E_{available}$).
I used to eat a lot of candy, but I never considered eating more than a handful of anything a "snack".
That said, what do you call it when you eat something that isn't a meal? I don't think most people have any word other than "snack" without resorting to things that sound like insults, like "pig out". And it's really hard for most people to insult themselves.
I’m not a big fan of sugar so I wouldn’t be able to eat a whole cinnamon roll, let alone two. But if I’m doing a big hike I’ll have no problem demolishing a whole tub of rillettes, which must be at least 1000kcal
roughly 3/4 of your energy consumption is maintenance (fe keeping body temperature). So you walking/biking might even be irrelevant. If the outdoor temperature was low, this would probably be number 1.
it's simple thermodynamics: your body needs to keep its temperature around 37C.
It needs energy for this.
Heat flows from high temperature (your body) to low temperature (surroundings)
via the contact surface (naked skin) or via via (clothing,...)
The energy that you lose via heat transfer needs to be compensated.
You burn food, fat, tissue,.... (I'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you in what order this happens)
Just try to lower the heating in your house in the winter and run around in a t-shirt iso a pullover.
In the context of nutrition the word calories always means dietary calories, so the kilo- prefix is redundant unless discussing physics, or commenting on HN...Ooooh, ok.
The practice of indicating kcals as "Calories" always seemed to be an American thing to me. I don't know how widespread this is outside the US but there are plenty of countries that use "kcal" in nutritional tables and such. People will still colloquially confuse calories and kilocalories a lot but that's largely due to bad translations (similar to mistranslating short billions).
People everywhere mix those 2 regularly and nobody is confused. You don't say you go out for a run to burn some kilo calories and so on. Sometimes places like HN are needlessly pedantic
Can you show me a representative sample of places where English speakers refer to [unit of energy] burned by exercise and mean anything else other than kilocalories while saying anything else other than calories?
No, you can't, you're showing hypercorrection and lack of fluency.
Actually, I noticed it because the OP wrote kcal in one place and calories in another and since they were using large units I had to read the sentence twice to make sure they meant the same thing. I don't have a problem with the fact that we have a unit that means something in one context and 1000xsomething in another as long we're consistent in naming (only calories or only kcal in the context of diet). And of course I didn't mean to be mean (no pun intended) to the OP - being consistent is good but this is such a minor thing that we could safely ignore and it won't affect our lives at all - now I even feel sorry I paid attention to that.
I think a big part of the issue is that popular fitness and weight loss advice has perpetuated the wrong way to exercise to loose weight. When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat, and a high calorie burn number. While the short term results may seem great based on the immediate calories burned, it's actually a terrible strategy for several reasons.
1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate.
2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate.
4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate.
A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate.
Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.
> 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.
I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.
I know this isn't rigorous but it definitely matches up with my personal experience -- I'll be hungrier, often ravenously so, after strenuous activity.
I have no apetite at all after biking for two hours. However, if I drink any diet soda or piece of candy with sweetener, I will be ravenously hungry in 10 minutes. Has always been like this so I stay away from that stuff.
My exercise is a game called Turf. Mostly played in Sweden where there are a lot of zones close by. I bike quite relaxed for 1-4 minuts and stand still for 20 seconds in the zone, then repeat until next zone. It's a bit harder during winter with all the snow though. I have done nothing to my diet and lost about 20 kilo the last year. The GPS says I traveled about 3500 km the last year at my slow pace.
100% this for me. I do intermittent fasting and my first meal is around 2pm. I do brazilian jiu jitsu around 6-9 and skip dinner. When I come home Im not hungry at all for at least an hour. Ill get a little hungry and if I eat or drink anything, the floodgates open and I cant stop eating. It is better to go to sleep a little hungry.
I try to have a 500 calorie deficit. If I have more than about 500 (say 1000) Im fine that day, but the next day Im ravenous and tend to overeat.
Oof this was me yesterday. Ate one large meal and snack between 2pm and 5pm because I had a work event in the evening. Got home around 9:30pm and really wanted to eat something and I almost did.
Drank a few cans of seltzer and wound up staying up doing emails and chores until 2am. Woke up at 9am today and I'm feeling a bit hungry at 11:20am, but even if I eat something now, it will be a net negative compared to what I would have eaten last night.
After a long bike ride, apart from being much hungrier than usual, food tastes better. Mediocre food becomes good, good food becomes the best thing you've ever eaten.
The activity makes a big difference for me though. Running for example tends to not have a major impact on appetite.. sometimes I feel like it actually lowers my desire to eat. That's based on relatively short runs though (45-90 mins of activity). I don't know how I'd feel after a marathon.
If I ride a bike for 3 hours, I feel like I could eat a horse.
This matches my experience. Swimming or biking makes me hungry. Running a reasonably long distance (say, 7+ miles) makes me a slightly nauseous and not hungry at all. Maybe it's because running causes more jostling and/or beats up non-muscle parts of the body more?
I also have that gut feeling, mind the pun. It stands to reason to me that since metabolism is incredibly complex, any slight variation in any of the parameters can lead to significant differences observed at an overall operational level. It's also very obvious people are reporting a wide range of experiences for the same activity
I know, anecdata, but on my off dates (I go swimming in the early morning three days a week) I have to fight not eating breakfast early and then needing lunch and dinner in the evening.
On my swim-days I have no problem with a late breakfast leading me to be able to skip lunch and enjoy my dinner.
It has a lot of backing when you look at people changing jobs without gaining or losing weight. We think of exercise in terms of X minutes on a treadmill, but people working long days of physical labor can more than double their daily caloric needs and will eat accordingly without prompting.
There where plenty of old jokes about lumberjack breakfasts and people eating skills tall stacks of pancakes. These guys weren’t trying to gain or lose weight just keep going for another day of hard labor, but when you start talking 6-8,000 calories per day it’s an insane amount of food.
Also, some of the feedback mechanisms involved are quiet slow and can take weeks to kick in. Your body doesn’t need to balance things every day as gaining or losing significant weight takes time.
Also anecdotal, but I’m not an athlete (like, the inverse of an athlete, I’m overweight and don’t move enough) and moderate exercising does, in my case, suppress some appetite. I eat les after exercising.
My 2 cents theory is that it suppress the "stress induced" appetite.
If you are low on sugar (therefore hungry) for a while, your body will start burning fat (lipolysis) to restore sugar levels. This will suppress apetite.
It's easy to experience, although it can take longer for lipolysis to start if you're not used to. Of course, eating sugar during or before exercise delays it.
I think it depends heavily on what you do. When you run, you tend to eat less, me definitely. When you weight lift, do body weight exercises, do anything that builds muscle, you need to eat. Personally I get more hungry about HIIT too.
And that additional eating is not a bad thing either. It is body needing supply to build muscles. For most beginners, that is a good thing.
Yeah, this is me. I naturally eat a lot less when I am exercising than when I am not. I'll often exercise in the morning and then have no desire to eat until dinner time.
If you fall into a routine CICO isn't that difficult in practice. First, while sleep/stress definitely impact the equation unless you are at an unusual life crisis, the ups and downs mostly balance out over time. Second, I don't recommend counting calories, at least not in the traditional way.
Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.
NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.
Based on your description, I will venture a guess that you are not obese / grossly overweight. There is good evidence from various studies that obese/overweight people are not typically able to achieve this - usually their craving for food is far too powerful to just control simply by falling into a routine; or, the body sometimes finds other ways to adjust (the lipostat model).
This is really the problem with CICO - it is definitely correct in an abstract sense (weight doesn't come from thin air, and neither does food you eat magically disappear), but the factors controlling calories in and calories out are far more complex. Human behavior is far from being entirely rationally determined. Our choices (particularly in regards to food, exercise, and other basic needs) are to a great extent controlled by our metabolism, even though it often doesn't seem that way.
This probably explains why people rarely lose weight on the long term - you can allow yourself to be forced to eat less than your body thinks it needs for a while, and obviously you'll lose weight; but you will go right back up to your "normal" weight as soon as the forcing stops (program ends, willpower exhausted etc).
the type of food definitely matters. Carbs somehow 1) dont fill you up 2) spike your appetite. When I do low carb I feel so much less hungry on lower calories.
The deficit cant be too large, for me 500 is ok, but 1000 has me ravenous the next day.
Lots of obese people easily lose 2 pounds/week but as you get closer to a healthy weight it gets harder.
CICO was the first time I was able to actively lose weight in my entire life.
The general observation from most long-term clinical studies of obesity, as far as I understand, is that many types of diets work to reduce weight in the short term, but the weight almost invariably comes back after the intervention period ends (usually within 1 year or so after the initial weight loss). Conversely, people who are normal weight and are forced on a hyper-caloric diet for a limited time (say, a few weeks) will gain weight as expected, but will naturally lose it back over the next period without explicit effort.
This has generally been treated as a lifestyle issue, but another possibility gaining traction is that "obesity" is a disease in itself, one that tricks your organism is seeking to maintain excessive weight, by impacting your appetite, BMR, exercise habits etc; this will of course usually make people suffering from "obesity" (for lack of a better name) over-weight, but the weight can be controlled without curing the disease. Basically losing weight doesn't cure your "obesity", just like when you suffer of diabetes, controlling your diet keeps you healthy without curing your diabetes.
The possible causes of this "obesity" disease could well be diet related, and definitely refined sugars seem to be at least a major culprit.
Correct, temporary diets don't work. You have to change your lifestyle/diet permanently. This means after weight loss, you need to adhere to your new caloric intake baseline, which will be _lower_ than when you started. The more you lost, the lower it will be. This is hard, but not impossible to do. I can't speak for the obese because I was never there, but I was solidly overweight and proceeded to dump 40 lbs a decade ago, and never gained it back. Had I gone back to my pre loss diet it would have all come back.
NOTE: Before someone points it out, this is NOT incompatible with my parent comment. Going on a 500 cal/day cut and losing say 8 lbs will not lower your caloric baseline all that much, so temporary more or less works fine. If you use the same method to dump 40 lbs, you will need to readjust your baseline when done or you absolutely will gain it back as your caloric intake needs have been meaningfully reduced.
I have also done almost exactly this process, and it worked for years to regulate my weight. But then I hit a plateau (a high plateau, not a low one) where I was unable to drop weight no matter how low I cut my calories. I started at a range that I knew had worked in the past, and lowered it over the course of weeks, well past the point where I was miserable. I even tried more complicated things, like varying my intake, doing on weeks and off weeks, etc. Nothing worked.
I wasn't sure what was causing it, so I hypothesized that I was low on muscle mass, and took up weight training. Then I gained ten pounds.
I'm not sure what the upshot is here, but my guess is that this approach indiscriminately consumes lean muscle mass if you don't pair it with muscle-building exercises.
> But then I hit a plateau (a high plateau, not a low one) where I was unable to drop weight no matter how low I cut my calories.
Fat cells "remember" their metabolic environment when they were created--ie. they "remember" your weight and fight you when you try to reduce it. It's one of the problems with dieting to large weight losses.
It is somewhere around 3 years for a fat cell to die off and be replaced. You probably need to "hang out" at the plateau weight for a bit until the fat cells that remember you being heavier die off.
It's been a while. IIRC, it was from an article discussing the fact that radioactive fallout allows critical measurements of cellular lifetimes and that in about 25 years the fallout levels will be too low to do the experiments. I'll see if I can cough it up.
> The carbon-14 fat-cell study also revealed that fat cells don’t last forever. Fat or thin, your body replaces roughly 10% of your fat cells every year. If you have more fat cells to begin with, you’ll have more fat cells to replace.
I can't seem to find the study talking about how fat cells remember the chemical environment when they are created.
What I know from personal experience and learned a bit through knowledge osmosis (my better half studied ecotrophology/nutrition) is that many people underestimate how the body adapts to a "new normal" of caloric intake when this is well below basal metabolic rate/consumption.
On the other hand, the body also likes to get essential amino acids, if it does not get them from food, from the body's own muscle mass. This leads to a reduction of the own muscles and to a low basal metabolic rate.
I cannot judge whether one of the reasons is true, that would be the job of a good (!) nutritionist. Unfortunately, at least in Germany, the term is not protected and anyone, regardless of education, knowledge or experience may call himself so. Here there are really (especially on social networks) really many false claims.
The most likely possibility is that you were simply underestimating your calorie consumption. A lot of people forget to count the creamer in their coffee, the candies from the office break room, the little tastes while cooking dinner. Unless you have a severe metabolic disorder your body will only burn lean muscle mass as a last resort when you have exhausted glycogen stores and can't sustain the energy demand from fat alone. Some weight training is always a good idea, though.
I explicitly overshot the goal by more than 500 calories. Yes, there are always mistakes in estimation, but that isn't what was happening. Remember, I've done this before successfully.
A catabolic state induced by caloric deficit will absolutely consume lean muscle mass regardless of the availability of fat reserves. Muscle stimulus (via weight training, for example) and sufficient dietary protein can prevent this. But if you're just dieting without specifically controlling this, you will lose muscle along with the fat.
I've only used this to go up/down +-10 lbs seasonally (although I did permanently drop 40lbs on a one time calorie restriction diet about a decade ago, but not exactly this method). One thing to keep in mind (you probably thought of this already) is your calorie burn goes down as you lose weight. So a 160lbs person takes in less calories to maintain even weight than a 200lbs person, thus you may need to reassess baseline for longer cuts. Beyond that, no idea, and yes, everyone is individual.
I will say the whole time I have used this I have trained with weights extensively (5 days/week standard 3x sets per exercise body building routine). I do not know how much or little this plays into it, but definitely helps with the fat/muscle ratio (obviously).
I don’t see how the weight change is relevant in this. Muscle weighs more than fat, so your strength training caused you to build up some muscle, making you heavier. The valuable metric to track would be what % of your body is fat mass vs. muscle mass
For how long were you in a deficit before plateuing? There are some adaptations the body will make with regards to the thyroid that'll drastically lower your BMR
> Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat
I appreciate you are trying to be helpful. But most of what you said assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have. People working long hour jobs, or double jobs, or balancing kids/parent responsibilities. Often fast food is the only obvious option, and people aren't buying it until well into the throws of a low blood sugar event.
This coupled with metabolic/genetic differences can really muck up any given diet. What works of you doesn't just not work for everyone, it isn't even possible for everyone to follow.
That said, I know you are being helpful - my words or more to help those that might read them and be saying: "I did all that and it didn't work!"
> assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have
Unless you're talking about extremes (e.g. non first-world country, homeless, or disabled people etc) I'm going to call BS on this.
Everyone eats, and everyone has 24 hours in a day.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Australia you can buy a 800g can of tomatoes for $1.50, a 185g can of tuna for $1.60 and 1kg of rice for $1.40.
You could cook that up on a stove (with just a couple portions of rice) in about 30min, giving you two nutritious meals for (I'm going to be generous) let's say about $4. That's $2 per meal. 3 meals a day gives you a total of $42 for food per week.
So are you telling me that fast food costs less than $50 per week, that 23 hours isn't enough time left in the day to do everything else, or am I missing something here?
We once, out of pure interest calculated based on nutritional value, the cost of eating on different diets. We took the average discount market shopping cart, a conscious version, the same for a regular (so more pricy) supermarket and did a comparison with ecological as well as regional food sourcing.
Based on nutritional value (taking into account to fulfill the base needs as well as potentially overshooting on salt, fat, sugar and other things like Vitamin A just to name an example) we found that industrial food is always the more expensive solution.
Yes you can feed people on a very cheap industrial diet but they will miss essential nutrients as well as overshoot on salt, sugar, and others to detrimental health effects.
If you want a balanced diet mostly locally and seasonally produce (with added stuff like olive oil and such) cooked by yourself was way more cost efficient per nutritional value.
The problem is, that it takes time to learn this, especially to learn this from experience. Also time to relearn how food really tastes without added aroma and stuff. Time to learn how to cook efficiently and with variation. And so on. We don't learn this anymore. Not from our parents, nor otherwise. But the advertising tells us how easy it is to just open a fully ready meal, pop it in the microwave and be done in 3 minutes.
Instead of enjoying the quality of preparing food together as a family/couple. Spending time, experiencing the smell of fresh cut food, herbs and so on. We nowadays equivalent cooking to a chore.
I meant resource in the form of time/money/education/motivation.
If it were as simple as you say, then why (in Australia) is your minimum wage so high? So 2 hours of work on minimum wage can cover a week of food? And you are calling BS on what I said? Okay.
Fair point, and and definitely some truth to that. I almost added "This works for me, your mileage may vary" disclaimer.
I will say that what I said above is _relative_, so if you go out for fast food "more than you should" than that becomes your baseline. Anything can be a baseline, even if not a healthy one.
I also know at least one person who has tried it and swears up and down it just doesn't work for them.
Ironically fast food often has some of the most easily available calories and macronutrient ratio. Working out the calories and macro for a home-made meal can be much more time-consuming
> measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7
Is even that sufficient? Like, would you be able to tell the difference between "oxidation done by the body to generate energy for human cells" and "oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"? Maybe you could tell by the mixture of other gases, but I suspect CO2 itself wouldn't suffice.
Yeah, that's a very good point. This is kinda getting off into the weeds from the original point, but interesting weeds nonetheless :).
This study[0] says that measuring CO2 is not enough, and that indirect calorimetry is the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure (EE).
"Calculated EE based on CO2 measurement was not sufficiently accurate to consider the results as an alternative to measured EE by indirect calorimetry. Therefore, EE measured by indirect calorimetry remains as the gold standard to guide nutrition therapy."
Google says "Indirect calorimetry is the method by which measurements of respiratory gas exchange (oxygen consumption, V O 2 and carbon dioxide production, V CO 2 ) are used to estimate the type and amount of substrate oxidized and the amount of energy produced by biological oxidation."
So getting back to your point, if bacteria are feasting on part of the calories and producing CO2, it seems that it would throw off the results even using indirect calorimetry. At that point though are we kinda arguing semantics? While our microbiome isn't composed of human cells, you can still argue it's a part of our functioning organism. It seems it would be nearly impossible to measure human digested calories vs bacteria digested calories, so maybe the results are close enough. Also, many beneficial bacteria release calories that we can consume, like butyric acid, which further complicates things.
Let's consider a specific example: Lactose intolerance. The Wiki page for it is pretty good. So, despite the name, lactose intolerance refers to lacking the enzyme lactase, which is used to break down lactose. If you have lactase, then your human cells can use the calories from lactose; if you don't, then the bacteria get the lactose. Wiki says "Symptoms may include abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, gas, and nausea", which sounds like the bacteria do indeed eat it; if the bacteria couldn't extract calories from it either, then I assume it would just pass through and there would be no symptoms.
Thus, if Bob and Joe eat the exact same diet that has some milk products, and Bob is lactose intolerant while Joe isn't, then Bob's cells get fewer calories from that diet than Joe's. If Bob and Joe's bodies are otherwise identical and follow identical exercise routines, then I would assume that, like, if the diet is exactly enough to maintain Joe's weight, then Bob would lose weight; and if it's exactly enough to maintain Bob's weight, then Joe would gain weight. (Right? For sake of illustration, we could imagine that most of the diet's calories are from milk, and assume Bob can tolerate the nausea.) Yet "calories in" (measured as food entering stomach) are identical, and "calories out" (measured as CO2) might also be identical.
Lactose is a specific, well-understood example of some people absorbing nutrients much better than others. I think there are other examples, and I expect there's a lot of variation in absorption efficiency that's less known. When you hear about people who eat lots of food and remain thin, I suspect this is part of the explanation. And whether their bacteria get the calories instead, or whether it passes through untouched, might show up in CO2 measurements but I don't think it would be related to body fat accumulation.
In a conservation-of-energy sense, "calories in" certainly gives you an upper bound on how many observed "calories out" you can produce without losing weight. But I don't think there's a lower bound on how inefficient someone's digestive system can be (except "zero"), or a practical upper bound on how much their cells might burn energy without us noticing (without close observation). I think, if you wanted a complete accounting of calories-out that would actually match the input, you'd need to add up (a) the heat a person puts out (via contact with air and surfaces, also infrared emissions), (b) the work they do in a physics sense (e.g. lifting heavy objects), and (c) the amount of un-burned calories in their stool (or any other excreted substances).
> Lactose is a specific, well-understood example of some people absorbing nutrients much better than others. I think there are other examples, and I expect there's a lot of variation in absorption efficiency that's less known. When you hear about people who eat lots of food and remain thin, I suspect this is part of the explanation. And whether their bacteria get the calories instead, or whether it passes through untouched, might show up in CO2 measurements but I don't think it would be related to body fat accumulation.
Yeah, the blind assertions I have seen that people basically always absorb pretty much 100% of the calories of the food is weird. We already know that some forms of calories like fiber have very low absorption rate. The Atwater indirect system of calculating calories takes that into account, but is still just an estimation, since it uses average calorie values for protein, carbs, and fat.
And so I've just noted that calories on packaging is just an approximation. An individual food may actually have more above average proteins than below average, etc, which can skew the real calorie count. For example, nuts are known to have less calories than indicated on the label, with whole almonds having 20% fewer. (https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/138.9.1741S) This is also ignoring the fact that many foods, especially those prepared by people are not always super consistent in sizing. A subway sandwich prepared correctly should on average have the calories subway claims, but we all know that some locations will follow the correct procdure more closely than others. Etc.
The other issue with just blindly going with calorie counting (which is really on tracking calories in) is that the differences in the calories one takes in will cause changes in the calories one expends. Eating fairly substancially less than your body is used to will almost certainly cause one to feel bad, and avoid doing as much, meaning fewer calories out, at least partially offsetting the the calorie reduction. But people are generally not measuring the calories expended very closely, if they bother doing it at all.
> At that point though are we kinda arguing semantics? While our microbiome isn't composed of human cells, you can still argue it's a part of our functioning organism.
It's not semantics, because when more calories are used up by bacteria they only sustain the amount of bacteria inside you, which then die and leave your body on a relatively quick timescale.
It's like if your fat cells could only store fat for a month before it gets discarded.
So it's important to know how much is each, if they can both vary.
> When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat
This is a major education/communication issue. When I switched to weightlifting, I started seeing rapid and significant results. And I don't even really sweat from it (except on leg day)
> You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism
This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.
Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so
Strength training to get strong.
The change in metabolic rate is a homeostatic adaptation of the body due to increased energy expenditure due to exercise. You can measure it in a metabolic chamber, and 200-300 calories per day during rest time is not unusual for male athletes.
I don't know if I can accept that offhand because high levels of muscle atrophy is a human adapted trait specifically to save calories for the brain. If muscle maintenance costs were so insignificant why would we have adapted a trait to make us physically weaker?
This is anecdotal but the difference between what I can eat working on a farm with having lots of muscle mass and sitting around on a computer with that same muscle mass was not really significant. But the difference between sitting at a desk with a lot of muscle mass and sitting at a desk with noticeably less muscle mass is night and day in how much I have to eat. With small and inconsistent amounts of strength exercise to maintain a bit more muscle mass again, my caloric expenditure went back up, far beyond what is lost from the exercise itself.
Some very bold claims, would love some citations to give them more credibility.
HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.
Meh idk. Look at any long distance runners. They are skinny. Based on my own ancedotal evidence when I am running often I tend to be 20lbs less than when I don't.
You have a few correct points but are mostly spreading misinformation. Repeated exercise will only improve efficiency by a few percent at most, and then only for certain activities. For cycling, efficiency hardly improves at all. The calories shown on gym equipment are often nonsense but the latest generation of fitness trackers are reasonably accurate and can be worn 24/7.
You have to get into really long cardio sessions with no carbohydrate supplements before that has any significant catabolic effect. This is not a concern for casual athletes.
Strength training is great, but it should be combined with some form of cardio in a comprehensive fitness program.
> latest generation of fitness trackers are reasonably accurate and can be worn 24/7.
I've heard claims of 30% inaccuracy. Not sure if that applies to the absolute latest generation but I'd be happy to know if my understanding is outdated
It's definitely true that eating less/healthier is the most important part of weight loss. However, perhaps because exercise played a big role in my own weight loss journey, I do feel like people go too far in dismissing it as a weight loss aid.
First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.
There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.
Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
My own anecdote: I've been a cyclist and/or a runner pretty consistently for the last 20 years. This year I moved to a place where cycling wasn't an option (without driving a long way), and at the same time I injured my knee by overtraining on hills. So I was benched from my typical cardio.
The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.
Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
The article seems to indicate that, counterintuitively, your Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) wouldn't have changed much after you stopped the regular cycling (see the section about how hunter gatherers walking 8-14 km a day had the same TEE as average US), so your weight gain may have been from second-order effects of coming back to your diet.
Do you remember whether your diet changed at this time as well?
Some other anecdotes shared here seem to share a similar theme, that exercise helps in losing weight on a more meta-level by shifting yourself into a generally healthier mindset which, in turn, seems to help you eat "healthier" foods, which is probably a proxy for "low-calorie foods" like fruit and vegetables. Maybe when you're sedentary it's easier to reach for the bag of potato chips?
I'm starting to think that these kind of scientific studies, that focus on a single factor and rule every other variable aside, are not the best way to analyze weight loss.
Because following that logic, exercise supposedly does not work if you want to lose weight.
But if every study around aerobic exercise arrives at that conclusion, why aren't the majority of athletes overweight? Where are the fat runners?
Is this a survivor bias? (Fat people even with great aerobic capacity end up hurting their joints so they stop running)
Is it because the addition of exercise generates other kind of changes in the body, like less insulin resistance, and overall more signals in the body to burn fat rather than store it?
Do runners spontaneously change their diets once they get used to their new lifestyle? Maybe the food they used to eat, both in amount and in composition, makes them uncomfortable so they start making lasting changes?
Yes, it does look like running a static amount every time has diminishing results. But, overall, people who run tend to be less overweight. And a lot of overweight people who start doing exercise and stick to it, tend to lose the weight, or at least they lose fat and gain muscle.
I am pretty sure my diet stayed pretty tight, as I monitor my caloric intake using my smartphone and it remained pretty consistent. Obviously this could be skewed for other reasons so it's not gospel.
The "much" is carrying a lot of weight, so to speak, in your comment. As a reference I went from running ~25 miles a week to just walking a fraction of that as I've recovered. I did keep up my other non-cardio calisthenics throughout, though.
Some napkin math suggests I was over my calorie target by just shy of 300 calories per day over the course of this time period.
Also the article did say specifically that the hunter-gatherers were within 10% TEE of the average US person. That's order-of-magnitude in line with the 300 calories/day, given that the NHS recommended calories/day for men is 2500 and 10% of that is 250 calories.
There’s an idea in the fitness industry called “skinny fat”. Thin people who “look” and eat healthy but when you actually look at their body composition have no muscle and relatively high fat percentage.
I’m my experience people severely underestimate the effects of having more muscles mass and the changes it can cause when you lose some from lack of training.
It also bleeds into peoples thinking. People view exercise as a way to lose weight. And eating less is, rightly, a more efficient way of losing weight. But body composition really matters not just for losing weight, but just life in general.
My own anecdote - when I started cycling about 6 miles to work each, I was ravenous by lunchtime and had much larger lunches than previously - put on a lot of weight.
I get the impression that cardio affects some people differently. I'm taking some time off from my 30+ miles a week running habit to let my foot heal up. I'm now at about 10 miles + cycling and nordic skiing when I can but overall probably 1/2 to 2/3 the cardio than I've been used to for the past 4 or 5 years.
But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.
I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
Those "calories burned" calculators are also not very good, so you may just be in the margin of error.
It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to propel a given weight 5 miles. It's hard to tell how many calories a person burns to produce that energy. Your ratios of aerobic to anaerobic respiration are going to impact that wildly, which will depend on how much oxygen your body can absorb and how quickly you're burning through oxygen. There's a huge gap in the amount of energy cells get from each. Aerobic respiration produces up to 38 ATP per glucose, while anaerobic produces only 2 ATP per glucose.
Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
>> Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
Yep, my form is atrocious and inefficient due to bunions and Morton's toe which has evolved into hammer toe.
I'd argue that I burn calories more efficiently, however :)
This is purely anecdotal, with a sample size of one even if it is right, but it seems to me, personally, that exercise suppresses my appetite to some extent. I can't say that this is even real, but if it is, my best guess as to why this might be is that the exercise subtly stimulates/irritates my gut such that I am de-motivated to eat, either by feeling full or subliminally 'sick to my stomach'. After running a marathon without proper training, it was a couple of days before I felt like eating anything.
I am not intending to dispute the fact that you ate more to compensate - you say you did, and I don't doubt it. Nor am I doubting that weight gain is a function of net caloric intake; it is just a suggestion of another way exercise may affect this.
FWIW most of my exercise is running, hiking or kayaking. I am not sure (or perhaps that should be 'even more doubtful') that kayaking has the same effect.
You’re so lucky! I wish exercise made me less hungry. I’ve only felt that when going on very long multi-day hikes… being in severe calorie deficit and having almost nothing sound good to eat. Chocolate was one of the only things that I could stomach. Oh and once I went running about an hour after eating tomato soup, and halfway through starting heaving uncontrollably. But normally, running, gym time, weight lifting and biking all make me hungry. :P
There’s no doubt that appetite and everything around dieting and weight loss has a huge range of variation in behavior and what works. In addition to learning to separate exercise from food, the other thing that took me too long to learn is that weight loss is more mental exercise than physical. Figuring out how to trick myself into calorie tracking and habit forming isn’t easy, and my tricks on myself clearly don’t work for everyone.
For me I lose my appetite for about a half hour, I was taught it's simply blood from your stomach being used elsewhere. After a short recovery period I'm definitely extra hungry.
I used this however to cut one meal per day. I'd eat breakfast late, a bit before regular lunch time, and then get hungry leaving work. Riding the bike home made the hunger go away, and it stayed away for about half an hour, enough time to cook dinner.
The result was that I wasn't superhungry when I started eating. I also tried to eat high protein, high fiber meals so I'd stay full for longer.
Intermittent fasting can help repair a lot of things in your body, make you live longer, etc.
Vegans live on average 10 year longer!
The hunger you feel the first day btw is not "real" hunger, it's just your stomach growling and you being used to eat. After you ignore hunger for 3 days, your body stops wanting food. That's if you want to do a cleanse. (I've never done one though)
Short fasting has been shown to have positive health effects when done right. Even short fasting can be dangerous and should absolutely not be done without prior consultation of a medical professional.
That being said 'clesnding' has been disproven scientifically so many times, I think there must be a Necromancer for bad nutritional myths out there. I just can't understand why this myth (together with others) always comes back from the grave.
Regarding vegans. Yes a primarily plant-based diet has been shown in studies to be beneficial to health. Depending on the environment of the test subjects. For practical purposes in western/northern societies that holds true.
The important word is plant based. Because without either taking extreme care of the (especially) micro nutrients as a vegan you either need to substitute or be extra cautious. And of omnivores with a primarily plant based diet also look at their nutritional balance, caloric intake and such, the difference between diets in the studied groups vanished.
So one could say if eating primarily plant based and being mindful of our diet and nutritional needs, there is no difference scientifically.
The only remaining difference is one of personal values and believes. The question of how (or if) do we want to have animals treated to firm our diet. Personally I would add to look at how do we want the humans in the food production chain treated as well and how do we want our diets to have an ecological impact.
But as said - these are existential because deeply personal value questions that can't be scientifically discussed.
Is it known if the meat causes people to die sooner, or is it just that people who are vegan are correlated with people who care about their health so they do other things that cause the 10 year effect?
I feel like a non-lethal poison like a flea killer or something would cause a 10 year lifespan drop, so it would be surprising if meat were as deadly as flea killer poison.
I'd guess the lack of processed foods is a big part of it. Until recently if you were vegan you pretty much had to make everything from scratch. I'd also guess that the average vegan is more health conscious than the average meat eater.
I hear this is a very dangerous game if taken to an extreme. You have to be very disciplined once you take it beyond 3 days. David Blaine did it for 44 days and I believe he has liver damage now? He talks about it on Joe Rogan.
Professional athletes cut for several days quite often. It’s well researched area.
But better way for regular people is just do OMAD. You get used to it after first three days, which are brutal. So, strong motivation is required, but still easier than real cut for bodybuilders or fighters.
This is my experience as well. I also had a trainer confirm this.
I used to eat before and after a workout because I bought into the idea of the body needing fuel to power the workout and fuel to recover. I ended up eating when I wasn’t hungry and feeling heavy or sluggish.
She said the appetite suppression after a workout could last 30-120min and to only eat when I felt hungry. I felt much better after adjusting my eating habits.
From what I've seen and experienced the act of exercising suppresses my appetite. I can't eat a big meal and immediately work out. If I'm a little hungry a few minutes into working out I'm not. But hours later or the next day I'm famished and will eat more. It's like a different kind of hungry--more of a craving.
I think moderate exercise can help with getting used to not over-eating. More strenuous exercise seems to make the body crave larger meals often negating any calories burned.
For me exercise does suppress the urge to eat sugary things. I don't know if it's subconscious or just how my body reacts but on days when I have good exercise, especially long runs I feel less urge to have sugars and more urge to eat chicken, cheese etc.
It doesn't really suppress the urge to eat though. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I must count my calories, I have been counting them for 15+ years now and it has become part of my life.
some would argue that running a marathon isn't exercise and shouldn't be considered as such.
Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.
To be clear: I only mentioned that marathon because it was a particularly clear case of the effect exercise seems to have on my appetite, and I am not recommending it as an exercise regimen.
And while it is not for most people (and definitely not me), there are people I know who thrive on running marathons and the training for it, while otherwise living perfectly normal lives. There is a hypothesis that cursorial / persistence / endurance hunting was a a stage in our ancestors' evolution, and that we have inherited some of the traits of that lifestyle.
That's a POV, and you could marshall evidence to defend it.
But it's mostly a hand-wavy assertion too, and there's other evidence against it. There are cultures around the world (low populations, to be sure) where repeatedly traversing 26.2 miles a day would not be considered particularly abnormal.
There is no culture in a world that would consider it normal to run 26.2 miles with no breaks. Walking it in a span of a day is massively different. Anyone who does hiking can do it. The same people however can not run that distance.
Even marathon runners run marathons only on competitions. The chance of injury or sickness after is too high in order to make it worthy. And after, you are supposed to rest for multiple days even if not injured. Again, 26.2 miles is 8 hours of hiking and you are pretty much guaranteed to be ok after it.
>A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths
It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook.
Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.
If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories
If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner (which is typically bigger than lunch)
So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
> if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.
A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
When I used to do heavy training (long distance running, weight training) I would eat close to 8k calories a day and I was in fantastic shape. Eating more was necessary to survive, given how much energy I was expending.
> A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
That assumes a “normal person” will not compensate for the effort with a snack.
A “reward” pint of ice cream will re-add more calories than the hour of cycling. A “standard serving” will nearly match your half hour.
And that’s an hour at 20mph, which really isn’t in any way the norm.
Most people can't manage to burn 1000 kcal in a 60 minute workout. I am a large man in fairly good shape and have to put in a pretty hard effort to hit those numbers. People who are smaller or not well trained are going to be significantly lower.
Measuring stationary bike workouts in terms of mph is kind of meaningless. What actually matters is the measured power output based on the resistance setting.
I'm a 40 year old guy who's been sitting behind a desk writing software for two decades. I was in good shape in my 20s but haven't exercised significantly in a very long time.
It took me about three months to get up to that speed, cycling every other day. I started out doing 10 miles, at 10mph.
Three months isn't all that long for an exercise program.
Color me skeptical. In order to burn 1000 kcal in 60 minutes a cyclist would have to sustain a power output of about 280 W. Do you have a calibrated power meter, or are you going by the "vanity" calories displayed by most stationary bikes?
There are certainly plenty of trained cyclists who can maintain that power output, but I've never seen anyone reach that level after only 3 months. If you really did that then you're an extreme genetic outlier with an unusually fast training response.
High aerobic fitness evaporates pretty quickly. The training you did a decade ago will not carry over to today. However, there are a few genetic outliers who can quickly build up a high level of fitness with just a short training program. You could be one of them, but it's more likely you're just getting bad data.
Absolute heart rate doesn't tell us much about calorie consumption because there's a huge variation between individuals. If we know the athlete's size, sex, and threshold heart rate then we can start to make some kind of estimate. But to get an accurate number it really takes a properly calibrated power meter (or more complex lab tests involving exhaled gas measurement).
It's doubtful that your measurements are even close to accurate. If you're on a stationary bike then the distance displayed is completely meaningless. The equipment manufacturers just show those numbers to make their customers feel good. In terms of calories they are in no way comparable to real outdoor cycling. You can get a great workout on a stationary bike but you need to be realistic about the true power output.
What is the actual power output in watts? Has it been properly calibrated? If not then you're just fooling yourself.
"Completely meaningless" and "in no way comparable?"
These statements are rather extreme and seem impossible to support. Energy output per mile with real world cycling has enormous variance as well. Why so much concern for precision regarding one and not the other?
I don't think there's much point in continuing here.
I'll continue with one last comment just for the sake of others who might be reading. The "distance" displayed on most stationary bikes is calculated by counting flywheel revolutions and multiplying by some arbitrary factor. It has no real correlation with the actual distance you would cover by pedaling a real bike with the same effort. It's a totally pointless number that tells you nothing useful about caloric expenditure, but some customers want to see it so the manufacturers put it on the display.
You can get an accurate calculation of real world cycling calories with a power meter. Everyone's cycling efficiency in terms of power output per calorie burned falls within a fairly narrow range so converting from time and watts to calories is simple. A good power meter accurate to within a couple percent can be added to any bike for about $700.
Smart trainers like a Tacx Neo or Wahoo Kickr also have accurate power meters built in. Those are substantially different from typical stationary bikes.
fwiw, I checked and the bike does have a power meter, I think it's an RS3 Lifecycle (or some similar model). I do a sustained 220-250w for an hour.
I understand the translation between power and mph is somewhat approximated, but I think you could be more generous. It's not unreasonable to make this kind of approximation and the numbers aren't meaningless.
Not that it matters, but reporting mph for a stationary bike (indoor trainer I assume) is meaningless in this context. This could mean that you're cycling anywhere between 0 and 2000 Watts.
I cycle on and off for ~8 years (35yo) and going at 20mph in the real world for an hour or more became possible only after a few years for me.
That is unlikely. How are you measuring calorie burn? You're probably overestimating.
As a point of comparison, an average size man would have to run at a speed of at least 11 mph (18 km/h) in order to burn that many calories in 30 minutes. Not impossible, but well beyond what most of us can manage.
An hour will replace a third of a healthy persons diet.
Fats are the secret to obesity, hands down. I have a remarkably small appetite and I can easily down 1000 calories of ice cream in a single sitting (a single pint of Ben and Jerry's. You can row like crazy for 30 minutes, but if you have two extra candy bars, it's meaningless.
Avoiding calorie dense foods is big, yeah. But exercise is exercise and at higher levels (1+ hour/day) the caloric burn is very significant compared to baseline metabolic rates.
Yes, our bodies are built to take in more calories than we can burn (thankfully!), but if you keep your eating habits constant the exercise will make a huge difference.
The thing is, the 300 calories from rowing shouldn't be compared to the absolute calorific requirement (say 2500 calories) but the surplus. So Maybe I'm overweight because I need 2500 and I eat 3000. Thats 500 too much, but take out 300 and that's 60% of what I need to at least reach equilibrium. It makes a huge difference to how much I need to sacrifice out of my diet.
A few hours on my bike can be 2,000-3,000 additional calories over base metabolic rate. That's not based on made-up calories but actual work from a power meter on the bike.
"You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories.
It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever.
> So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise.
One of the cruel aspects of endurance sports is that they suppress your appetite. You can go out and burn 6000 calories in one race, spend the whole time thinking about all the delicious food you're going to reward yourself with, and then you get there and have zero desire to eat. You sometimes can't even start refeeding until the next day.
Feels to me like pushing your body to extremes is akin to a metabolic shock and your system rebooting in another operating mode. Probably needs another reboot to go into regular mode, so your apetite will also vary in the meantime
I always feel there are some methodology issues in sports science studies like small sample sizes or strange metrics.
While I do agree with you that sustained, high level activity requires and burns more calories, I think that the advice coming out of there, exercise is less efficient than diet for weight loss, is going to absolutely be true for the majority of gym goers who quite frankly are phoning it in whenever they work out.
Like, for example, an olympic swimmer may eat 5000-10,000 calories in a day, but they are spending around 4-6 hours a day in a cold pool training at a world class level (body needs to keep warm somehow regardless of effort.) But a normal person may only swim for 20 minutes at a much gentler pace. This person should still be eating in line with calorie guidelines and macros for age/sex.
The reality is that diet needs to be flexible based on results. Not losing weight? Eat fewer carbs or calories. Feeling tired and worn out? Eat more or exercise less based on your physique and goals.
I spent years failing to lose weight through diet. I took up endurance cycling and in one day (13 or 20 hours) I burn off a kilo or more, even with the increased eating. Afterwards I'll put that back on in about two months, but as long as I keep doing one or two of these events every month I come out ahead.
I don't know how things are for anyone else, but it worked for me, shrug.
I had very similar experience. I lost weight with no much additional effort when I started to do a lot sport. I did not focused on food much, I was doing sport for weight loss unrelated reasons. And it dropped.
Attempts to loose weight by diet only all failed. To make it worst, there is also aspect of most common diet advice being plain wrong. It focuses on calories too much. It completely ignores what your body needs, so you end up in nutritional deficiency - this kind or that kind. And that will affect a lot and eventually you will stop diet and start to feel so much better and healthier after stopping it.
For the majority of regular people feeling tired and worn out is more likely to be caused by lack of sleep and too much booze than by lack of food or excessive exercise.
I meant more from training hard for long term. Most people are not at this level or pushing that hard. Normal people would definitely benefit from lifestyle changes outside of the gym if they are tired and worn out.
> I always feel there are some methodology issues in sports science studies like small sample sizes or strange metrics.
The calorie stuff is from both oxygen and deuterated water studies. You burn the same amount of calories and your system just shunts them around. The science on this is one of the few things in nutrition that is quite solid.
This has the effect, for example, that if you exercise a lot, this actually suppresses your immune system making you more likely to get sick.
A couple of years ago I took swimming lessons from the Swiss butterfly swimming champion and he said he trained about 20 hours a week and that to get to Olympic levels, he'd have to train even more. For swimming it's possible to train much more than in other sports, because it doesn't do as much joint damage, because you're in water.
> A few hours on my bike can be 2,000-3,000 additional calories over base metabolic rate.
Are you sure? 2000 kcal in 3 hours is 770 watts of power output.
Edit: Wikipedia [0] says "During a bicycle race, an elite cyclist can produce close to 400 watts of mechanical power over an hour and in short bursts over double that - 1000 to 1100 watts; modern racing bicycles have greater than 95% mechanical efficiency. An adult of good fitness is more likely to average between 50 and 150 watts for an hour of vigorous exercise."
You are forgetting that the human body is nowhere near 100% efficient at burning fuel to put power into a pedal. To produce 400 watts of mechanical power, the body consumes about 4 times that amount of fuel (25% efficiency). Consuming 2000 kcal over 3 hours is thus closer to the more realistic 200W of power to the pedals, and even the higher ranges make sense if he's a good athlete. See this article: https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-convert...
After a 2000 kcal high intensity cycling workout I'm so tired that I don't even feel like eating. I have to force myself to eat something because I know I need it for recovery.
It is a very valid point that dieting / food intake converts to calories way more drastically than exercise.
The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.
The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.
In your example, if you exercise, you can have the pizza as well as the sandwich. This can be significant, because suppose you have those 300 surplus calories 3x/week minus the exercise (not unreasonable, a small snack here and there, right?). 300 calories is about 3 bananas, so it might not even be unhealthy food.
Rough math: 3 * 300 * 4 = 3600 calories surplus/month. A pound of adipose tissue has ~3500 calories IIRC. So you're now gaining a pound of fat a month, and you're not even indulging yourself, really.
In reality, physical activity and diet aren't so steady, so some months you maintain weight, some you lose, and some you gain a lot. But over time it averages out, and you've put on 12lbs in a year.
People often conflate body weight with how they want to look, and when they say they want to lose 20 pounds, what they really want is for their body to look different in some specific ways. Exercise is a very effective way to alter the appearance of our bodies, and far more versatile than diet alone.
Yeah... I don't know that it is that simple. In the summer when I bike twenty miles a day, I am eating far more, and still losing weight.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.
Yeah, for a few years in my 20s I was bike commuting 24 miles/day and running 6-10 miles/day on top of that, with longer runs or hikes on the weekends.
I was in the best shape of my life, felt great and ate whatever I wanted without thinking about it. BUT I was spending 4 hours per day exercising.
Now I have a 6 week old baby and WFH... I manage a 30 minute Peloton a few times a week. Maybe. Even though I try to pay attention the pounds have crept on because there's so little margin for error on 1500 calories/day.
Calorie counting is no way to live, IMO. I miss the days of a long run and guilt-free cheese and beer after :)
I picked up biking in my 20s, and was slimmer than I was in my teens. That's with no intentional change to diet. No one will ever be able to convince me that you can't lose weight with exercise. When I was doing ~90 minutes of cardio a day, it was impossible not to notice.
its possible to work out enough that compensative eating is not possible, but very few people work out that much, and some people have amazing eating powers, such that even riding a bike 50 miles a day isn’t enough to stop them being fat unless they also count calories.
Riding a bicycle? It's roughly 5x more efficient than running or walking. If you want to lose weight from cycling, you're going to have ride significantly further than 50 miles a day.
Paul, if I am doing 50 miles at 300 watts that isn’t any different than running for two hours. You can set whatever level of intensity you want for the duration. 50 miles a day all out will wear out even olympic athletes. Source: I work with olympic athletes and time trial champions
Sure, 50 miles a day @ 300W is not much different than running for 2 hours at a sub-7min/mile pace.
But most people cycling 50 miles are not generating 300W continuously, and most people running for 2 hours are not doing a sub-7min pace for the duration.
ps. I have run for 2 hours at a sub-7 min pace, and cycled 50 miles at about 280W.
I successfully lost weight at only twenty miles a day. Now... For a time, that also included Queen Anne Hill, in Seattle. So a decent amount of climbing. Still, I could lose weight easily while biking.
Also have lost a bunch of weight (or at least replaced fat with muscle) from just doing 10-15 minutes of PT exercises (strength training, stretching, and yoga) plus walking an extra mile or two per day.
I ride 20-25 miles a day on a stationary bike, at about 20-25mph steady rate. It burns a bit over 1000 calories during the hour. It's more than enough to make a significant change, especially when paired with a half hour of weights.
Depends. I can do 15 miles at a leisurely pace on a social ride and not burn very many calories. I can do those same 15 miles at a fast pace and burn 2-3x as many calories. And then you can throw in some hills too.
I lost 80 pounds over the last couple years with riding average of 12 miles a day.
Are you sure about those numbers?
Running is about 1kcal/km/kg of body weight. For cycling to be 5x as efficient you would only need 14kcal/km for 70kg man. I don't think it's realistic. The numbers I've seen are closer to 25kcal/km.
"much faster" is ambiguous here. Ride 150 miles a day every day for a week, don't over-eat, and you will lose much more weight than you ever could from HIIT. On the other hand, that's a lot of hours, and HIIT will easily win in terms of weight-loss per unit time.
The ambiguity is what unit of time you care about. With HIIT you lose more weight per minute of exercise you do. With a lot of LISS you can lose more weight per week than you could with HIIT.
Understood, but the parent I responded to was talking about efficiency so I thought that was the context.
In my experience I'm not so sure about that either. I can't repeat centuries day after day when I am out of shape and need to lose weight. If one can, it's very unlikely he/she needs to lose weight.
I know such a person which is why I mentioned it. That vast range of human physiology is fascinatingly wide. He also is very aerobically gifted, possibly related things. (efficient engine, but not confirmed with testing, maybe just a big engine and loves food)
I agree, maybe you got me a little wrong. I’m more or less talking about the good ol’ adage calories in, calories out. It’s never that simple, amen, but measuring and matching output with intake is a pretty good proxy and works in practice. When calories out is higher, calories in can be higher too (and should be for big exercises). My problem was unregulated calories in, and a tendency to overcompensate a bit.
The details might differ some but the overall advice is the same.
If you want to lose weight, eat less.
If you want to be in better shape, exercise.
If you want to improve your health, change your diet (and probably exercise).
A big issue is that people conflate those three objectives.
Being skinny doesn't mean you're healthy and exercising doesn't mean you'll lose weight.
I exercise quite a bit and have always had an extra 10-15 lbs up until semi-recently when I put those three things together and quit eating so much. I still eat plenty of junk food and I've lost about 20 lbs and kept it off.
If you're unhappy with your weight, eat less. If that doesn't work, eat less. Some people might have an easier or harder time with that because we're all different but the advice is the same.
Certainly agreed that compensation for exercise is a dangerous and likely way to gain weight. Is why, in the winter, I have a tendency to gain weight... :)
> It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less.
Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article:
But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.
Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
> People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place
People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.
I think we have fitness wrong in this side of the world. I grew up seeing 60 year olds that were as fit as youths in the west.
They didn’t have a treadmill or did keto diets.
My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle and to avoid lots of western food (sugar, processed, empty calories, I drink only water, etc).
I don’t count calories and can eat twice in the morning. If I counted, both morning meals are less than 600 calories.
I don’t go to a gym, but have maintained a <10% body fat (and 86kg at 190cm height) over the years (without feeling hungry all the time because I eat well). I just do body weight training and make my entire day active (even tho I’m a programmer).
For me, being in shape doesn’t need to be complicated.
There's only one way this actually happens for a majority of the population: exercise being built into daily habits, in a way that's so natural that it almost seems unavoidable.
The Netherlands seems to have the right of it: their urban design strongly supports walking and biking, and indeed, their rates of 'active transportation' are very high.
As a bonus, walk and bike infrastructure is quite cheap to build and maintain compared to car infrastructure.
"Traditionally" the people of Osaka, Sicily and various Greek islands are actually best at maintaining such healthy lifestyles, from what I recall from studies on longevity. Good diets, lots of mild exercise from long walks (on hilly terrain) and strong socal ties. I say traditionally because of course these studies can only really look at the lifestyles of past generations.
With that in mind the flat landscape of the Netherlands might be giving us a slight disadvantage ;)
I find that I need time to think and time do code.
When I’m coding I’m obviously sitting at my desk. At some point I get tired of that or hit a wall, then stop, and have to think about that to do next.
Instead of sitting at my desk thinking I’ll go for a walk, go outside and work on a project around the house, go for a swim, hike somewhere. During that time I’m mulling in the problem in my head coming up with solutions.
Once I finish with that activity, I’ll set back down and try a few if the ideas I came up with while doing those activities.
According to my Apple Watch, I get between 25-55 min of activity on a given day.
I think a good way is to take any chance to move around.
Ido Portal, for all his eccentric weirdness, knows things:
> The body will become better at whatever you do, or don’t do. If you don’t move, your body will make you better at not moving. If you move, your body will allow more movement.
I’m personally thinking in terms of micro-habits that eventually form a lifestyle, and it’s all about total lifetime reps, if you will.
For example, I have a height adjustable desk, and have replaced the chair with a pilates ball. I still stand, or sit on my knees, more than sitting down on it.
I believe there’s a problem with some of the ergonomic setups we use - if you keep moving, and shift around you shouldn’t need it. If you do, you’re already “losing it” and should probably be changing things up more frequently during the days. Now this is easy to say, and for some people, probably not true.
I’m basically continuously fighting the path of least resistance. I’m in war with the comfy a* brain!
No need to smear Europe with their high fructose corn syrup. There are plenty of empty calories on the table in Europe, but they are typically made in a kitchen and not in a factory.
Just a simple scan of some foods and some exercise calorie amounts and times should show it.
Reasonably tiring exercise on a bike could burn 10 Cal per minute, so maybe 600 an hour. But swallowing a few packs of crisps or a few chocolate bars could fill that right back up in a couple of minutes. If you were speed eating you could swallow it in under a minute.
Think about if your weight is steady, how long you spend eating and how long you spend using energy. It can easily be the case that you spent all your calories in 23.5 hours and were eating for just half an hour.
The time ratio is so lopsided it's hard to come up with a plan where exercise carries most of the weight loss vs just eating less.
If you think of your energy use as base rate plus exercise rate, because your base rate is sustained for the whole day you'd have to exercise like crazy for a long time to make up any difference to what you eat.
That’s the part that’s at least slightly exaggerated, or giving a misleading impression. Exercise absolutely burns more than 0 calories, and I definitely was burning some. Calorie burn from exercise is straightforward to approximately measure, and many people walking around with iWatches and FitBits and heart monitors are doing so. What’s well known to many people is that exercise burns far fewer calories than you wish it did, and less than it feels like. ;) The article points out that aerobic exercise adjusts your RMR and it becomes more efficient over time. However, it does not become 100% efficient, even though the article seems to suggest it and doesn’t bother with any fine print. It doesn’t bother to differentiate between running and weight lifting either, and we adjust to those differently.
I would really like to see raw data because it feels like the story being told can’t possibly be complete.
This in particular feels really hand wavy: “After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.”
What does “barely” mean? 40km/week isn’t that much in terms of calorie burn. The 100 calories/mile rule of thumb says this would imply ~350 calories/day. And this article says a woman would have a daily calorie expenditure of 2400 already (seems high, though). So this is only 15%. But anyway, this drops after adaptation seemingly, so does “barely more” mean 50 calories/day? Or does it mean 300? Because those are very different. And to where is the difference attributable? Because someone going from sedentary to trained runner is going to get a lot more efficient at running. “Less energy on inflammation” is really hard to swallow as the primary source of adaptation, especially when this is presented as conjecture.
It does seem like the article is exaggerating. ;) This could be more about the author presenting a narrative than Pontzer’s data. Bringing in the sports physiologist to argue for the idea of exercise without countering the caloric claims adds a little perhaps predictable dramatic flair.
At some point, there’s just physics. Running a mile isn’t free, benching 100kg isn’t free. These things take work and we can calculate the minimum energy requirement that adaptation can’t escape. Our bodies do not adapt so far that exercise becomes pointless, it only shifts the balance a little (which might be enough to be demotivating for some people, but it’s still relatively minor.) I was under the impression that the total range of metabolic adaptivity for a given person might be on the order of 25%-30% maybe. That might be an over-estimate. I googled a little and found this paper mentioning adaptations of like 8%-15% for severe calorie restriction diets (depending on how RMR is measured).
40km/wk is only 3.4 miles/day. It's only a half hour of moderate exercise a day. It sounds like the study didn't actually measure a significant exercise workload.
It was measuring women who were sedentary and trained for half marathons. For someone who was previously sedentary, 3.4 miles/day is an enormous amount of exercise. It’s certainly far more than the average American gets.
It’s not that much in terms of calories. It is a lot of physical activity for a modern human in a developed nation.
Yes, but "the tiny amounts of exercise typical overweight Americans engage in won't help" is a very different statement than "you can't exercise your way out of obesity" or "you can't outrun a bad diet." The latter is categorically false.
They are in practice true. When people imagine exercising to lose weight, very few imagine that this implies running at a moderate pace for nearly 4 hours per week (while also holding diet to maintenance levels) to lose just 1 pound per week.
The real kicker is that an unchecked diet will offset virtually any amount of exercise. An unchecked diet means people will feel hungrier after exercise and thus eat more. It takes a lot of exercise to reach the point that it manages to outrun appetite and bad eating habits. There are a lot of fat people who work physically demanding jobs.
I think everyone is talking past each other here. From the article:
> As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs
You clearly burn extra calories when exercising, but the thesis of the article is that it doesn't matter in terms of weight loss because your body will adjust to burn the mean level of calories. The obvious exception are athletes whose energy expenditures simply can't be averaged away.
This leads to the conclusion that it's not just exercise that drives weight loss, but diet and exercise (shocking!) that makes a difference, as you have to run at a net loss over the day.
Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.
> Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.
This is well known and true even if the claims made better happened to be entirely false. I’m not dismissing your point, here. I agree fully.
Exercise just doesn’t burn enough calories to really matter. Especially in the face of a poor diet. Running burns ~100 calories per mile (yes, varying based on weight and a little bit based on speed but it’s a close enough rule). A can of soda has ~150 calories. There’s just no competition. Someone trying to lose weight can skip a soda or a candy bar and it’s more effective than running an extra mile.
> Which is laughably ridiculous when you start considering the extremes like Michael Phelps eating 10kcal for breakfast
I think you are missing the fundamental part of the article about the calorie expenditures being adjusted based on non-fat body mass.
So, yes Michael Phelps eats a lot of calories, but him (and other pro athletes) have spent their lives building muscle and keeping fat reserves down. Michael Phelps I think is at a 5% body fat, while the average American is 18%+. He needs more calories for that extra body mass that most people the same height don't have.
No way. 5% is well below optimal for athletic performance. At 5% you’re looking at developing health problems. This is the range bodybuilders aim for on stage because they care about looking shredded more than they care about having joints that work.
Phelps was reportedly 8% when he won all those medals in Beijing.
Exercise obviously must burn calories because work is being done. The body can’t overcome physics.
The nuance, and the surprising thing, is that other parts of the body seem to adjust their energy levels to compensate. If you don’t do a lot of exercise, something else burns calories. If you do exercise, the “something else” burns less.
What is the something else? That’s the mystery that still needs to be solved. And by extension, what are the limits of the something else? After all, there are well-documented examples of extreme athletes who consume lots of calories without gaining mass.
Anecdotally, I have absolutely ran off a bad diet. I burn ~150-250 calories a mile and have ran off 2000+ calories to eat what I wanted with no discernible increase in weight. Did this for years.
In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.
Yeah. Cyclists in the Tour de France typically eat 5000 calories a day, often more in particularly difficult stages. Obviously none of them have a weight problem.
"Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.
The last part isn’t true, at least unless there has been a grave accident. Many pee on themselves during races, but most of the Number 2 is done at port a potties along the way with an assist from the team car or peloton to get back up to speed and get back into place. You might be surprised at how little someone might need #2 when all their calories are from highly digestible into energy food.
I think there's also some other physiological action that trigger defecation as a response during long duration high intensity exercise like marathons and bike races.
Edit: here
"It’s related to the fact that during periods of physical stress, the body shunts blood away from organs that are not necessarily critical at that moment,” Michael Dobson, D.O., a colon and rectal surgeon with Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, tells Mental Floss.
It's a question of what your baseline is. It seems OP may have had (say) a 3500 calorie diet as a baseline, then started exercising, perhaps burning an extra 500 calories but now consuming 4000 calories to feel normal. In your case, it sounds like you had a lower baseline--let's say 2500 calories. You may have consumed as much as 2000 additional calories, but you ran it all off--your comparatively lower calorie count was what felt normal to you, and what you made a habit of aiming for.
It's not true though. If you exercise enough you will be in a calorie deficit regardless of what you eat. I knew rowers that couldn't keep weight on during the season no matter what they ate, and they ate a lot. The exercise is what is causing the calorie deficit, not watching what they ate.
But you can eat the calories you spend in just a few minutes. If you have a pile of Mars bars, that will supply enough energy to compensate an hour on the treadmill.
Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.
My buddy on the rowing team would regularly eat 12 eggs + bacon + sausage & toast for breakfast after rowing. They were eating to excess to try to keep on weight and couldn't actually do it.
But that goes to the other part of the fallacy, because even if you eat a pile of 10 Mars bars, a large amount of that will just get excreted. Meanwhile you'll start to feel physically sick and probably your body will then reject food for a while. CICO does more harm than good in IMHO because you're talking about a complex system.
It is an exception though. Very few people exercise to this level. Similarly you can eat as much as you can if you nicking across Antarctic, but this is not exactly a typical activity.
You tracked what you ate was the key difference. Not the exercise. I did an experiment on myself. I deliberately did not do any exercise and changed my diet. I loss 5kg quicker on my diet than I did when I was running 10km regularly. I think its counter productive to see an obese person in the gym or running as this will certainly lead to injury. The narrative around weight loss should always be eat less calories and food that don't encourage hunger.
Weigh yourself with a digestive tract full of food and water, then weigh yourself after fasting for a day.
At 200lbs I can swing the scale 15lbs/6+kg. Fat people can probably swing some serious numbers.
Seems like a pretty unusual swing though. Gorging then fasting is certainly not typical behavior.
I can see this happening given such behavior, as well as in the "heavier" portion of the population. definitely not a common occurrence across the population though.
when u weigh 400lbs and eat forty twinkings and hour, sure, 5kg weekly fluctations may be normal.
Your fat because you consume to many caloiries for what you put out. Pretty simple.
I went week on/off vego, from being a meat eater near daily, dropped weight without adjusting anything else.
You are what you ate. You cant hide from it. If you look down and see some rolls, thats not cause you didnt exercise enough!
I went from doing gym weekly in my 20s, to my 30s where i dont touch consciously exercise at all yet im bigger, leaner, and have my abs back. My uncle, who at my ate became a fat bastard and never stopped; used to be a body builder on the roids. He had a sweet phsyic for about 1 year.
The easier way to make money in this world, is to fool fat people into thinking your product will let them have their cake, and eat it to. I say fat people the say way people refer to a drug addict. Its the same thing, cept your comfort blanket is legal and readyly accessible, 24/7/7, being pushed at you constantly whenever you look.
I say this as a child of a mother who was/is fat due to being in an abusive relationship with my father. She cheated through every diet she every did. Until she got her stomach stapled; when overnight she SHED weight, was no longer diabetic, and is currently 66yrs old and going strong (stapled around 49).
If you train for endurance sports you'll definitely lose weight without much attention to your diet.
For example, with marathon training, once you start to hit the 6 plus mile your daily run eats up over 1,000 calories.
Near the end of your training your long run days become over 2,000 calories, and even your easy runs becomes 1000+.
That's essentially an entire extra meal, and you're running 5-6 days a week.
If you're just going to the gym for 30-45 minutes, 3-4 days a week, diet will be essential to losing weight. But if you're running 1 hr + a day and 2+ hrs at least once a week it's hard to get enough calories.
It's time that you can use for important things like meditation and consolidating your thoughts, as well as synthesising Vitamin D if it's close to noon and you're not especially far from the equator.
This doesn't fit my observations entirely. I have a friend who runs several miles every morning. He says he does this so he can eat an extra 300-500 calories a day ... which he does. He's thin.
I certainly get that less eating is more effective than exercise but in my head I think as long as you burn more calories than you take in you should lose weight. So if you eat 1800 calories a day, assuming you need 2000 a day, you'll lose weight (-200). If you do some exercise that uses 500 calories and eat 2300 calories you're still at (-200)
FWIW, I agree with your observations, so it’s possible I gave the wrong impression. After learning how to track my intake, it changed my view on exercise, and sometimes I also use exercise as a way to eat more. :)
Like many people I consciously and unconsciously resisted the idea of tracking calories and using calories-in/calories-out (CICO) as my primary tool for both weight loss and exercise. It’s not perfect, as many people here are pointing out. However, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and there are scant alternatives that are demonstrably better. I changed my mind and now I see calorie tracking as a way to be better at both exercise and weight loss. Good exercise training, especially weight lifting, requires eating a bit more than expenditure, and good weight loss requires eating a bit less. Either way, I agree with you that exercise can play a valuable part in weight loss, and I think it has many other physical and mental health benefits.
I dont know ... this one is often repeated. Including in context when completely sedentary people want to improve health (as opposed to "I want loose weight for aesthetic reasons").
> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate
Your body is actually building muscles after exercising. It is also repairing damage caused by exercising. You actually should eat more, but more of the right stuff.
I did… the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of humanity? ;)) was I overcompensated, I ate more than I needed to build muscles and recover from exercise. So I gained weight slowly, or for long periods of time, just failed to lose the extra weigh I had through exercise alone. My problem is that exercise without calorie tracking doesn’t help me lose weight, I have to do both. And once I learned to do both, I automatically figured out at the same time how to lose weight without exercising at all. I still exercise, but now I get to use exercise as a way not just to get strong, but also to eat extra snacks. :)
I think that one problém with calories focus is that it leads to exactly that. You do need to eat more, but not just more in terms of calories. If you will get soon of sugar or skice of bacon after exercising, it will provide calories but still leave you hungry needing more.
Protein like cottage cheese or something like that helps a lot. Figuring out what it is your body needs helps a lot.
Totally agreed. In the same way that I learned late in life that strength and weight are mostly separate, it become more clear that other things we tend to conflate are also separate. Being healthy, being attractive, being strong, and being skinny are all mostly separate things, and working on those things involves different tools and techniques.
It’s definitely possible to lose weight and become less healthy by eating the wrong balance of macros. It’s also possible to become more healthy and/or stronger without losing weight. This is about deciding which goals you want, and figuring out how to get there. It’s easier to do one goal at a time (and all of these goals are extremely difficult to meet individually) but it’s also possible to work on several or all of them a little bit at a time too.
In my (extensive) experience, losing weight is predicated on accurate calorie counting. The trick is to use exercise to lighten the perceived difficulty of your caloric deficit. For example if you're trying to lose a pound a week, it's a lot easier to eat 250 cal below your TDEE and walk for 2.5 miles than it is to eat 500 cal below your TDEE.
> we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into
This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"
It seems to me that CICO is less of a myth and more of an "incomplete model." Having a model is an improvement over no model at all, even if it's oversimplified IMO. For very overweight people it probably doesn't matter quite as much.
If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.
To me the sad part is that it's way too easy to accept as a solid model. It's so simple, feels so elegant and powerful, a lot of people have a hard time seeing what could go wrong with such a beautiful model. They then take decades to realize it didn't mean anything really.
Basically, it's way harder to make people accept it's complex and highly variable when they've already internalized a shiny theory of everything.
Just been reading Why We Eat (Too Much) by Andrew Jenkinson and he is basically saying this - that CICO is true but there is also this feedback system with the 'Calories Out' part so that our body adjusts to physical activity levels (as described in the article) and also to what the 'Calories In' part it is. So while restricting calories in works short-term your body adjusts and also decreases the 'Calories Out'. His argument is that the problem for most people overweight is leptin resistance interfering with the body's feedback mechanisms and basically you need to fix that rather than try and changes either the 'Calories In' or 'Calories Out' directly.
CICO is almost as pernicious and ubiquitous. It really grinds my gears when people try to use “intuition” to understand something super complex with no data at all. People talk about “metabolism” the same way.
Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
Except we have literal truckloads of data on calories and metabolism. Like a lot of human physiology, these things come with Normal (Gaussian) distributions in the human population. There are averages and deviations we can talk about, without having to understanding anything about the inner workings of the human body, right?
I couldn’t agree more that CICO is a super blunt instrument, but it actually does work, because the alternative we’re comparing to is not tracking input & output at all. You can be a lot wrong, and it’s still better than completely wrong, right? :P Like the amount of noise in my calories estimates is probably at a minimum 10%-15% wrong at all times, same goes for expenditure (maybe even worse) but it seems like the important part isn’t actually the number, it’s the act of establishing and sticking to a budget. For me, mentally, it was the realization that my feelings on hunger and satiety were actually mis-calibrated. This helped me get over the idea of being hungry, and helped me realize the goal wasn’t to overcome hunger, it was to get used to something closer to the correct amount of food.
We have, but most of it seriously flawed because of many issues.
For instance this pretty serious study on diets (http://www.dishlab.org/pubs/MannTomiyamaAmPsy2007.pdf) had to rely on BMI for segmenting the subjects because the whole field had standardized on BMI. Yet we know for decades that BMI based segmentation is meaningless, BMI itself being a clunky relic of the past. Then you can come down on the subject of the studies, repeatability, no possible control group most of the time etc.
We can say that's the best we can do, but we should also accept it's far from being reliable info most of the time.
> it actually does work
well, it doesn't work or not, it's just a concept, an observation like a law of physics. It's like saying gravity works, that's not the info you'd give people having difficulties to build a self balancing robot.
Those statements are technically true, but I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say. There’s nothing flawed about observational data that ignores the inner workings of the system, that’s how all of science works. Like you say, it’s physical observations. There’s nothing flawed about measuring wattage output of exercise while keeping food intake constant and noting that most humans lose weight under such conditions, or of keeping caloric output constant and increasing caloric input and noting that most humans gain weight.
> it doesn’t work or not, it’s just a concept, an observation like a law of physics.
It works as a tool for weight loss. It works for exactly the reason you state, because it’s primarily an observation of physics. The only way I gain mass is via my mouth, and the only way I lose mass is via energy expenditure. If I want to control mass, therefore, tracking and controlling my input and output is more or less guaranteed to work. For sure the input output responses might not be perfectly linear, but that’s expected and not a ‘flaw’. The weight response to calories also can’t be reversed or flat, due to physics, it must be highly correlated, right?
> If I want to control mass, therefore, tracking and controlling my input and output is more or less guaranteed to work.
It's wonderful that your physiology is aligned with your goal of doing this. But in this control pathway there are billions of neurons, trillions of bacteria, I don't know how many biochemical signals, all feeding back into each other. Reducing all of this to "controlling input" is one of the most harmful ideas in public health. For people who struggle with weight it is just setting them up to fail and blame themselves for it. Repeated over, and over, and over.
I’m sorry. I truly empathize. I can only apologize for what it sounds like. I do understand what it feels like to hear this stuff. I felt the same too, for a long, long time. I don’t actually know how to speak about what I think I’ve learned in a way that doesn’t come off as demeaning to some people.
FWIW, my personal philosophy on tracking and controlling my inputs is almost completely focused on figuring out how to turn this away from a “self-control” or willpower problem into a better understanding of what I want. Personally, I think trying to willpower control over eating is absolutely doomed to fail. It’s nearly impossible to meet a budget when you’re expectation is based on being strong enough to overcome hunger. For me, solving this was a mental problem of convincing myself it’s not about willpower at all. I say that like I solved something, but in reality it’s still hard.
I was only referring to the accepted fundamental truths about all human physiology, for instance that food is necessary to live, and that exercising uses some of the food. Even for outliers who’s bodies put on pounds when they merely smell food, measuring calories in and out still works reliably. The number of calories might be abnormal for some people, but they can still reliably calibrate their maintenance input and see effects when increasing or reducing it. I don’t mean for it to sound easy to do, because it’s not easy, I only mean to clarify the goals. The high number of neurons and bacteria and signals actually make this a more stable and predictable system, generally speaking.
> I was only referring to the accepted fundamental truths about all human physiology
CICO is fundamental to human physiology in the same way that "people become indebted because they spend more money than they earn" is fundamental to economics: true, but utterly useless for actually addressing poverty or obesity. An attractive red herring and a dangerous one.
(It's even worse than that: at least we can measure income and expenses. Yet we can't measure caloric intake / expenditure properly.)
I completely agree with you about poverty and obesity. Those are systemic problems and are going to take something else to escape. Choices are removed for people who get stuck in those black holes, and its true that saying “use a budget” isn’t helpful after those happen. It might be helpful long before, but the forces are too strong for people who are spiraling down or stuck there. So, I hear you and I think you’re right about that. I’m not suggesting CICO is a tool to fix obesity.
Moreover, poverty and obesity are related. Poverty is affecting people’s food choices, and the cheap food and fast food we have is a lot of high fat, high sugar, high calorie, and huge portions.
CICO is more useful for people who are stable and fine, not under the poverty line and not obese, but just a little unhappy with their weight. CICO is what bodybuilders and athletes and models use, among many others, people mostly fine-tuning. (Just like how financial budgets are mostly helpful for rich people, and people optimizing their savings, but not particularly helpful for a single parent on minimum wage who’s unable to meet basic necessities.)
For someone who’s not suffering from either poverty or obesity, the difference between money/debt and calories/weight is you can only get money from other people, where you only get calories from yourself.
It doesn’t actually matter that calorie metrics are approximate and not perfect. The reason is because CICO enables a personal science experiment, and a process that can adjust and adapt to imperfect information. What it enables you to do is to calibrate your measurement first. Then, second, either reduce caloric inputs or increase caloric outputs to lose weight while making sure the other one doesn’t change, or do both. For average non-poor and non-obese people, CICO isn’t a prescription, nor is it a dangerous red herring, it’s basic consumer information that is, some say, dangerous to not know, which is why part of the important response to the obesity crisis is to demand accurate caloric labeling on food, to enable consumers to make healthier choices long before obesity. This is only the tip of the iceberg, we need better sugar and portion control and all kinds of things, but it’s a start.
CICO is like a PID controller but even simpler than that, it’s only the wires of a P controller where you are the controller. The only thing CICO says is which input to connect to, and that’s all. A PID controller doesn’t know a thing about the system it controls, it doesn’t have to. All that matters is that the inputs affect the outputs and the outputs can be measured. As long as the system output changes over time with it’s inputs, this P controller setup works. It still works when the underlying system has defects and bugs or differences in manufacturing from other systems, as long as the underlying system is responding to changes in input.
> CICO is what bodybuilders and athletes and models use, among many others, people mostly fine-tuning.
To nitpick, bodybuilders and athletes usually control their diet at a level where calorie counting is not relevant.
An example of that: https://youtu.be/PBfDWstg3Hc
It’s interesting that the overlays always show calorie intake, but you hear the guy and at no point he mentions calories, ever.
He specifically mentions fat, proteins, vitamins, minerals, nutrients and overall quantity. He weights his food at each meal and he probably adjust all of these try and error style, looking at the results. I think calorie estimates are probably meaningless at this point.
> To nitpick, bodybuilders and athletes usually control their diet at a level where calorie counting is not relevant.
To further nitpick, all of bodybuilding is based on a routine of bulking and cutting, where the cutting phase is intentional calorie deficit before competition. Whether or not they track calories per se, all of them are using CICO and proving that it works.
Science work by repeating experiments: I give you a protocol, you repeat it controlling for the same conditions, and validate my results.
As you say ignoring the inner workings would be fine if we had consistent, culture independent widely reproduced results. Thing is, we don’t.
For anything beyond a clinical trials on specific subjects that stay there for days/weeks to be fully studied, we might not even have valid control groups.
This is why I see comments on us having a vast body of studies to look to be more or less a “look a my library, there’s a lot of books” kind of statement that doesn’t really point at us having actual vast knowledge about the subject.
> It works as a tool for weight loss.
Does it ? to get back to the above point, do you see any consistently reproduced studies on large cohorts of people pointing at it working in the long term?
Still not sure what you’re trying to say. Are you skeptical that reducing caloric intake works? Or skeptical that counting calories helps to reduce caloric intake? Are you skeptical about whether calories are a metric? What exactly do you think doesn’t work, and why? Why are you claiming that we don’t have culturally independent results? I don’t believe that’s true.
If you’re asking whether calorie counting has been studied and controlled enough to know if it works as a weight loss tool in practice, the answer is yes. You don’t need a study for this part; it’s physics. If you are maintaining weight and then stop eating you will die. If you are maintaining weight and then cut your diet in half you will lose weight. I posted a link to one survey on this somewhere in this thread that should be easy to find that demonstrates the rate of metabolic adaptation to caloric restriction (it’s about 15%). But you can Google this and find out for yourself, there are many many papers in many many languages, and you looking for your own sources will be better than being skeptical of anything I suggest. The health agencies of every developed country in the world publish caloric recommendations and have resources and research information available.
Literally millions and millions of people globally have successfully used CICO to manage weight, and the primary complaint is not that it doesn’t work, the primary complaint is that it’s difficult to implement and make habitual, it requires too much work and/or control. When most people say “it doesn’t work”, what they mean is “it doesn’t work for me because I couldn’t establish a working routine, the habit doesn’t stick easily.” There are no studies showing normal people reducing their caloric intake significantly and failing to lose weight.
> If you’re asking whether calorie counting has been studied and controlled enough to know if it works as a weight loss tool in practice, the answer is yes. You don’t need a study for this part
This is the shortcut I am pointing at.
You're bringing in a pure assumption. I need an actual, well designed study that shows that your inntuition is in fact correct (to reiterate we're talking weight loss, and in particular stable loss, not some blimp in a three weeks trial)
Can you point to a rock solid study on it? There are countless studies on the most obvious things. Take any of what you call "physics" and you'll have large studies from reputable research labs analysing the long term impact on stricly controlled groups. CICO is not some hippy unknown strategy, the press turns around "obesity crisis" headlines year long, there is no shortage of funding for research."It's obvious so nobody tested it" isn't a valid argument.
Hey listen FWIW, I’ve been overweight (and am now TBH, gained quite a few pounds over the pandemic). I don’t think the obesity crisis is a failure of CICO, I think it’s a failure of big business interests and social engineering and advertising and economics. I don’t think using CICO is easy, I know for a fact, first hand that it’s hard. I don’t think overweight people lack self control, I think that humans evolved to be afraid of hunger for a good reason and that our standards for beauty are completely distorted by mass media.
I’m trying to understand, but I don’t yet understand your objection to the physics. Do you disagree that failing to eat enough will cause death? That’s not an assumption, right?
Here’s the study I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I have no idea if this meets your bar for size or quality. It feels like you’re trying to set the burden of proof as to be so high that you are ensuring it can’t be met.
This argument feels to me like demanding rock solid study of a large cohort of multicultural evidence for gravity. Are there countless valid long terms studies demonstrating the existence of gravity? No, not really, because nobody anywhere denies that gravity exists.
CICO isn’t a specific methodology, nor is it a belief or a surprising theory. Calories-in, calories-out is a completely generic statement about the causes of mass gain and mass loss in the human body. It doesn’t make any claims about the amount of gain or loss. It doesn’t claim that eating a pound makes you gain a pound, it’s simply an observation that eating is the sole mass input of the human body, and energy expenditure is the only controllable output, the only way mass is lost. There are no other alternatives, right? Calories are an approximate measure of what you eat & burn. This is tautological, there is practically nothing to argue there, and there is nothing to debate. A study isn’t necessary because this is an already proven fundamental truth about the human body (and incidentally all life): there are no other sources of weight gain or loss. CICO doesn’t prescribe specific actions either. The way you use this information is up to you. The scientific among us might reasonably start measuring calories first to calibrate their steady state, and then slowly make changes to their inputs and outputs to see what happens.
Anyway, I also don’t need a study personally because it worked for me and it suddenly became clear what everyone who knows this was talking about. I had resisted trying it for a looong time, perhaps on the same grounds you’re resisting the idea. Better than papers might be to experiment on yourself, if you really want to know. First hand knowledge will certainly be more valuable to you than assurances from academics.
Surveying gravity is one of the many measures that are done pretty frequently and very seriously around the globe.
On CICO, the issue is it’s a model that is true at a very low level view of the body mechanism. You are right that it’s very generic, and in theory it makes sense. The disconnect is between that extremely low level view, and what you do with it in practice.
There was this excelent discussion on type 1 disabetes (https://maori.geek.nz/the-unreasonable-math-of-type-1-diabet...). These people have their life on the line and actually monitor their blood levels, and it’s still tough to manage a good guess of the inputs and when/how much sugar will get in the blood. Reading the labels doesn’t give enough info on what will be actually processed, and the real solution becomes real time constant monitoring of the actual blood levels, without relying on a model of how it’s supposed to work.
When you advocate counting calories for a random person on the street, they won’t monitor their blood, they actually are in a worse position as what they care about is not sugar levels but their whole body intake, which there is no way to monitor. And you also won’t be hooking CO2 masks on them everyday to monitor their out, so it’s also a random guess. At this point CI has crazy large variations, and CO is basically unknown, especially as it will change as they change their CI. This is why applying a CICO thinking for someone who’ll change their diet for the rest of their life makes no sense.
An argument I’ve often seen is to just lower CI to the ground until seeing effects. Which basically means obliterating the subjects social and professional life and ask them to keep it that way or it will be their fault if they rebound. That’s not what I call a weight loss strategy.
On the linked study:
It’s a meta study based on three prior papers, one of them is “ Decrease in fat oxidation following a meal in weight-reduced individuals: a possible mechanism for weight recidivism. ”
https://europepmc.org/article/MED/8596485
From the abstract:
> Twenty older (age:mean +/- SE, 61 +/- 1 years; range, 56 to 70 y) obese (body mass index > 32 kg/m2) subjects (12 women, eight men) completed an 11-week dietary restriction program in which they lost 9 +/- l kg.
So the research is on 20 “obese” people. Aside from the low number of participants, there’s not even a “healthy” control group here. They’re “obese” by their BMI but they might as well be gym trainees, who knows ? It only lasted 11-weeks, there is no mention of the social conditions of the study ([EDIT: I didn’t realize at first look that all participants where elderly. Which brings in more questions IMO, but I don’t know where to stand on that). So this study is aimed at bringing a single piece of information, but we don’t have enough context to extrapolate that info’s validity in any other context it does it apply to any population at large? are the effects permanent ? do we even get the same effect after 1 month ? was it random fluke from the limited test subjects ? who knows). The title is about weight recidivism but there is 0 follow up on the subjects outside of that 5 hour post meal check.
And that’s just the first study. We could go on and on, my point is we don’t have the “science” on the subject, just a ton of questionnable data points and random intuitive theories, everyone with their beliefs and prejudices.
Athletes have the means to control a lot better what they do, including adjusting everything to their actual body without having to care for grand theories. And many people succeed in getting healthier in many different ways, including by going to different diets that actually increase calories as counted and little change in their daily life.
That’s why I feel it’s a disservice to preach a “one true theory” when it doesn’t help much really.
Hey I truly wish you good luck in your search for what works. I mean it. This seems like overthinking it to me. If CICO doesn’t help you, then don’t use it. I’d love to hear about what alternatives work for you.
Thanks. I didn’t care at all about this until close people started to do random diets they see on instagram. Every single one of those were rooted on pop science, garbage studies and very shaky foundations. That got me to look a lot more on a regular basis into what we actually know, and the answer was “very little”.
I think it’s fine for us to not know much about something. We don’t have all the answers in the universe, we’re just hairless monkeys after all. I just wish more people would be accepting of a “that’s complicated, nobody really knows and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff to see what works for you specifically” approach.
To your question, I am slightly above the prescribed line in a lot of metrics and don’t really do anything special, I am lucky enough it doesn’t have any impact on my life in general.
Ah I wish we’d gotten to this earlier, you make some great interesting points we could talk about more. I think I should bite my tongue though, because my narrative isn’t helping you, and all I wanted to do was be helpful, especially for people who are where I used to be. That might not be you, I just want to say this in a way that would have convinced a younger me earlier. The only thing I’ll say here that is that fad diets are fundamentally different from setting a budget, I completely and totally agree that most fad diets are bullshit, especially the ones on Instagram. Keto has a pretty poor long term outcome rate, for example. The whole point of a diet is to avoid setting a budget, which is the main reason they have low success rates.
I like the way you put it, it’s okay that we don’t know everything, and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff. That really is at the core of what I was trying and failing to say. :) We don’t actually know how gravity works, but we use it anyway. I made an analogy to PID controllers in another comment, maybe that’s a better way to describe calorie I/O; PID controllers know nothing about the thing they control other than it’s output, and yet they are an extremely useful tool.
My wife reminded me of a book that might interest you and might have pointers to some of the research you’re looking for. “The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You“ by Sylvia Tara.
CICO mostly doesn’t work if you count the calories wrong. But if you don’t eat 1000kcal under your actual TDEE, there is little chance you will not lose weight (barring severe health problems).
If you metabolize less or more doesn’t really matter as it gives you a hard maximum of what you could potentially ingest (both in the TDEE calculation and the restricted diet)
> there is little chance you will not lose weight (barring severe health problems).
And you will probably either have severe health problems, either have a reduced metabolism to the point you can’t properly function on a day to day basis.
You’ll either give up, the pendulum will swing the other way and rebound your weight, and people will blame you for being too weak.
Or you’ll push through, lose your job and/or continue develop eating disorders, hopefully you’ll realize you can’t go on and give up, or you’ll get medicated, with side effects affecting your appetite and weight ingestion, might still end up rebouncing and get blamed for it.
You’ve got a snow ball’s chance in hell that you can keep your intake very low and be fine with it for the rest of your life, but then you’re probably already healthy and pretty normal weighted, because I don’t think anyone who can just stop eating extra would stay overweight for long with the pressure we apply on obese people as a society.
All of the above is really just par for the course for people who get told “just do CICO”. People for which it actually kinda works don’t usually need to be told anything in the first place.
This misses the point of the article, it isn't that you unconsciouly eat more when you exercise, it's that moderate exercise simply doesn't burn that many calories (if any) once your body is accustomed to it.
Yeah, that’s not really true, because physics. The article’s “myth busting” is overstating the evidence. Human metabolic systems do have some adaptation. It slows down a bit when we’re not eating enough to maintain status quo, and it speeds up a bit when we’re exercising more. But it doesn’t come anywhere close to compensating for all of the effort. If you read more carefully, you will find that the article is talking about compensating behaviors, in fact quite similar to what happens to me when I overeat. The other compensating behavior mentioned in the article is becoming more sedentary after exercise, this has some of the same effect as eating, however it’s far easier to accidentally over-compensate by eating than by following exercise with couch time.
I absolutely unconsciously eat more when I exercise. I know because I measured it. And once I measured it and focused on exercising while also eating a constant amount, surprise surprise, I actually lost weight. This is well known to many many people, well studied and understood, and has a metric ton of actual data to back it up. If this article is claiming to challenge that, then this article is wrong. (But IMO it’s not actually challenging known physics, it’s just written in a misleading way.)
Exercise is portrayed as virtuous in our society, whereas counting calories and portions isn't.
I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.
You can totally loose weight by exercising, it's just regular people don't exercise hard enough. If you do pro athlete levels of exercise it will start affecting your weight a lot.
I've never met someone doing pro-athlete levels of exercise that doesn't stick to some sort of regimented diet. Have you? And even if you do meet those folks, chances are they simply don't eat as much as before due to spending more time, well, exercising, and it makes for a caloric deficit, albeit accidental.
And that's the thing: Once you start changing your diet - the stuff you eat or the timing of your food - to do the exercise, you can't really say it is the exercise affecting your weight.
Myself when I was doing pro-level amount of brazillian jiu jitsu without really having any regimented diet on days where I wasn't eating candy and ice cream and training for 3+ hours I was could literally see the weight loss in the mirror on the next day.
Well you can, but only if the exercise is putting your calories under your TDEE. Sure there are slight body changes ongoing if you exercise enough (recomp) while staying on your normal intake, but basically
I'm not affiliated with Noom [1] in any way but want to plug them because I've seen the incredible results from following their recommendations.
People talk a lot about reducing caloric intake but there's little talk on how a normal person can hope to achieve that. The key Noom offers is calorie density. If you eat lots of food that has a low calorie density per unit of volume (eg cabbage, cauliflower) you can reduce your calories and still feel very full. Just go easy on the extremely high calorie density foods (eg olive oil) and you'll be more likely to hit your goals.
Also, it's really really hard to do calorie restrictions AND have intense exercise. From what I've seen in the Noom community people have a lot more success when they first focus on losing pounds then focus on building strength and fitness; many people at that point find they have to increase calories in order to continue seeing results when they're working out a lot. I suppose it takes a lot of calories to build muscle. I wonder what your body does to those injured muscles if it doesn't have the calories available to repair them?
The general rule I find helpful is that diet=size and exercise=shape. Being aware of this really helps me limit my food intake even when I’m exercising a ton.
That really depends on the exercise you’re doing and what “shape” you’re going for. Putting tons of time into running won’t make someone look like they lift weights. Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape” except to the extent that it helps them lose weight.
"Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape”"
This just isn't true. It generally won't take away fat, but lifting weights won't remove the fat either (it doesn't matter how strong your stomach is, you aren't seeing it if you have a layer of fat on top). But if you are already thin - or thinner in places - most of the aerobic exercise will build appropriate muscle. Walking makes for changes in the lower half of the body, for example. It still won't make you look like you lift weights, true, but there is still change.
I’m not so sure it is understating, at the risk of projecting out from a sample size of 1 (my personal experience). I’ve been quite active for a couple of decades with a semi-regular gym routine and multiple marathons (and all of the running required in between). Holidays and other things would interrupt schedules from time to time, I might lapse for an extended period, but for the better part of 20 years I’ve weighed 76kgs +/- 3kgs. Stop running and eat bad for a few months I hit the top end of that range. But I revert back very quickly.
Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter.
It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.
From my own experience, if I'm lifting weights and working out, my hunger shoots up and I start wanting to eat everything in sight.
When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.
You can keep weight off with exercise; it's just a lot more than you would think.
I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts.
Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.
I once saw a data tables with lots of diets. There was a column with the name of the diet, what you typically ate on the diet, etc. But the final column was "How does this diet work?" Every single row said the same thing, something like: "By eating a caloric deficit".
Yeah more or less exactly right. It’s maybe not hungrier per se, but I was eating until I felt “full”. I found out there are a couple of different problems with that. Waiting until “full” means I’m not stopping early and not able to put myself into calorie deficit, which is a longer-winded way of saying yeah I just got 300 calories hungrier. But I also have discovered that I’m a little miscalibrated on what “full” should feel like. I was eating a little past full and into a deeper level of satiated. Meaning, in short, slightly overeating.
And to add a little color, my exercise routines have usually involved more than 300 cals of workout, probably closer to 700-1000. This is important, because when not tracking the extra food, it’s really easy to overshoot 1000 calories by 300. The exercises have varied a lot over the years, from running and biking to weight lifting and sports like soccer & ultimate frisbee. I’ve been aiming for around 3 days/week workouts for like 10-20 years. I have periods of less, and occasionally more (especially in the summer) and have managed to keep it up more or less consistently. I eat more when exercising, but never lost weight consistently until I learned the open secret, that for me monitoring intake is what makes exercise work as a weight loss tool.
It's even worse than that. It's about eating the same thing every day, that's how you lose weight. Most people give up because you have to know what's in different food and then track it somehow. Counting calories is a herculean task, but if you already know the same exact food has 80% of daily calorie intake then you never have to count calories and there is literally no work involved in losing weight.
It's about eating the same thing every day, that's how you lose weight
This simply isn't true at all, and you don't have to count calories per se. I lost quite a bit simply changing my diet. I kept most of it off for years: I gained some back when I quit nicotine, though (Quitting smoking changed my sense of hunger, and Im still upset about that). It wasn't quick weight loss and it came in stages, but I didn't count calories nor spend too much time thinking about food. I simply focused on getting more fruits, vegetables, and legumes when I could. (I completely dropped meat outside of fish, but it isn't necessary and was losing weight before that). I also rarely eat out, even when I've had work/school (I just brought something). This meant I could pretty well eat what I wanted and would just choose lower calorie things by default. As long as I ate fairly well most of the time*, I was OK. I didn't have to suffer the PMS hunger I get either: I would just eat something.
You can eat the same thing every day, mind you, and I've met a lot of folks that do. Generally, however, it is a lifestyle choice and you have to be careful to make sure you have enough vitamins and things. One of the three folks I'm thinking of made themselves sick by not including enough vegetables.
You need exercise and a healthy diet to lose weight. Sure you could sit on the couch all day and eat very little and you'd probably lose weight, but you'd have to eat so little that it probably wouldn't be possible without developing an eating disorder. However, if your diet is really bad, eating way too much sugary food, then yes, exercise alone won't really help much.
Yes, many people are selectively deaf to the phrase "combined with a sensible diet" when it comes to weight loss, or other health advice. I'd venture that it's subconscious desires to keep the food intake that invoke mental filters to just not hear that part; or, to rationalize that your food intake is ok.
I had a friend who wanted to lose weight, and so he’d walk about one mile to a local restaurant, where he’d proceed to eat a 1,200 calorie meal. It’s not as if he didn’t burn calories while walking, but he severely overestimated how many calories he had burned.
that s terrible. I thought it would be common knowledge by now, the mixed really does a disservice to people who genuinely want to lose weight. I think the myth is perpetuated by sports goodS marketing
I mean, yes... but at least for me exercise also makes me crave healthier foods. As a result I end up sometimes eating more volume but less calories. Like, when I'm cycling regularly it's hard not to lose weight.
1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
2. The only plausible mechanisms for why exercise wouldn't result in more overall caloric burn is that less energy is expended in non exercising states, eg the body is trying to conserve energy and either reduces metabolism or reduces fidgeting, walking, etc. This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
1. Phelps seems to be guessing: "Maybe eight to ten thousand calories per day," he writes... Also, the research shows there is extreme variation in people's resting BMR (perhaps due to large variation in height, body weight, stress levels, etc), so you eating 3500 calories isn't decisive against the thesis of this article.
2. That is exactly his hypothesis, and he has produced evidence for this hypothesis in a recent experiment. I don't know why you are presenting this as some kind of counter-argument.
3. That blog post isn't a coherent critique. The post's two points are that the drinking solution is also used for measuring energy intake, and that the Hadza actually burn far less calories than Western people until such numbers are adjusted. This first point isn't relevant without further explanation, and the second point only serves to further support the thesis.
1. I used to eat less calories and exercise less and was fat. Also for elite athletes TEE experiments have been fine.
2. Studies in nutrition science are a dime a dozen. Like in psychology, you should apply common sense to interpret the results. In this case, the implication is that the Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human bodies.
> The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
> the implication is that the Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human bodies.
I can't make sense of these statements.
The author thinks that couch potatoes have more stress and inflammation (and probably more fidgeting, etc, too), and these things burn calories which explains the results. That's the opposite to what you say here, which is that the results suggest that being a couch potato is normal.
> From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories.
That was my first thought as well.
It's even more evident with certain types of sports. Take cycling for example. Lifting mass up a mountain is going to take quite a bit of energy; maintaining a constant speed in the face of wind resistance will take energy. That energy has to come from somewhere.
> 1. then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories.
Some don't. Think about marathon runners (which would be pretty close to the tribe studied), they have a muscle ratio that is way lower than your Phelps example and their body composition if also probably more efficient than yours (I don't know you, but let's assume). I wouldn't be surprised if a pro marathon runner would have be close to your 3.5K a day when going through light training.
Think of it through different angles: mountain trekkers aren't packing 80kg of sugar to go through their trekking, their bodies are way more efficient at doing these tasks and need less calories to work than what we'd expect from a random person. It literally means doing more with less.
> This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
This happens to everyone. From your link: "In fact, your body is hard wired to maintain energy balance within a fairly small range."
> 3.
It seems well argued but just really nitpicky. It goes into the whole energy intake vs energy spent debate to explain why they don't agree with the methodology, but don't prove why they think the conclusion is wrong. It's as if I'd nitpick your use of calorie intake measurements and explain in great details how it's approximation of an approximation and we have no way to actually know someone's actual intake calorie, without ever engaging with your actual points.
> 1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
I agree and I'm in the same boat. After 10 years of running ~70km/week, I'm eating way more, have dropped 20lb, and am healthier and stronger.
> The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
I think people underestimate what being active and excercise actually mean. Our ancestors were vastly more active than we are today. The amount of movement that was required for foraging, hunting, agriculture is hard for most modern people to imagine.
Even the act of preparing the food that was gathered/hunted/harvested was so much more manual and energy intense than what we are accustomed to today.
For most of our evolutionary history basically everything we did was powered by our bodies. Today we have machines for everything, and a high standard of comfort.
It's true that calorie restriction is easier for most people than excercise, but I think it's because.. to put it bluntly.. we've become lazy.
>> somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato
What I got out of the article wasn't that sitting still and not thinking can somehow burn calories; just that strenuous mental activities can burn a great deal more energy in humans than in apes. This is believable to me. I'm a person who falls asleep doing math in my head every night. I got a chance, during a year of pandemic lockdown, to experiment with my own body in this way.
I only eat once per day. I don't keep fixed hours; sometimes I'll stay up for 24, sleep for 16; other times I'm regularly 8/16 sleep/wake. I don't have a set bedtime. I try to maintain 16/48 sleep/wake over any given period.
No matter what, I only eat one meal every 24 hours. I've been doing this for about 20 years.
This makes it easy to measure when I get hungry in relationship to my last meal. My body is well trained to expect about a 24 hour delay; I have no appetite and don't think about food until around 22 hours post-dinner.
Under lockdown conditions, I began to notice that I wasn't hungry as expected on days where I hadn't spent >= 6 hours working on strenuous code. If I took a day off and "couch potato'd", I might not eat at all for 48 hours. But if I focused on code for 8+ hours, I would be hungry on time or early.
I started to experiment with this. I figured out that if I took a 1 hour walk, plus 4 hours programming, it made me hungry right around where 6+ hours of code did. A 1 hour walk - to me - seems about equal to 2 hours of writing code in terms of what my body feedback gives me about my calorie burn.
I don't walk very fast, and I code very intensely.
But that's just it - this article is about solving math problems as a way to burn calories. I have a nice new M1 Mac that only ever turns its fans on or gets warm when I'm using all 10 cores. Last night my task falling asleep was to calculate randomly chosen x/128ths as percentages to five decimal places. My daytime task was harder; and now I'm hungry. And I haven't walked anywhere today.
However: Couch potato, this ain't. And the point about the body's reduced expectation of physical output is probably accurate as well.
Yes, those marathon runners mentioned might reduce their TEE from 6200 to 4900 kcal/day. But that is still way more than most office workers eat.
And if you check the article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw0341#
==
The reduction in TEE among RAUSA subjects can be partly attributed to marginally reduced body mass and daily mileage (table S3). Still, even after accounting for these changes, Week 20 TEE was 596 kcal/day lower (range, 400 to 923 kcal/day) than expected
==
So they did loose weight during the marathons and the metabolic compensation is less than half of what you would think reading the original article.
==
...
The magnitude of metabolic response in RAUSA athletes (~600 kcal/day, ~20% TEE) is similar to the degree of adaptation reconstructed for the most physically active subjects in a recent cross-sectional study (17) and may reflect humans’ maximal capacity for metabolic compensation.
==
So if 20% percent is the maximum, it means that if you try to outrun your diet, you might have to eventually exercise 25% more. Except by then you will probably have more muscle mass that will burn more calories even when not exercising. And you will be able to exercise more in less time.
I don't think you read it properly ... what I got from the article is that there is large energy compensation happening, but it's not endless, there is a threshold.
Ie. scientists wouldn't think that average Hadza hunter burns same calories as average sedentary guy from US ... which is the point of this new discovery ... the lifestyle is different enough that you would not think the expenditure will be similar. We always knew there is compensation happening, but we didn't think that much.
But, if Phelps burns 8k calories ... then he perhaps far far exceeds the amount of exercise the average Hadza hunter outputs ... at that point, the body can't just shift some energy expenditure around and compensate for it .. it will in fact need lot more energy to support the physical output.
The article even proposes what the ceiling of input calories (and therefore sustainable output expenditure) is. 4650 cal for 85kg man. So obviously, it doesn't claim that every human on the planet burns the same amount of calories no matter what they do. It only claims that for example energy requirement differences between somebody who outputs 200kcal or 1000kcal in exercise are nearly erased because the body compensates on the BMR. Obviously there is a hard limit on how much body can compensate and save energy by cutting it from other processes.
Don't forget Phelps also spends most of his exercise time in water. The body expends energy to maintain thermal equilibrium, and water absorbs heat much more quickly than the air. With several hours of swimming each day, that energy will add up.
Very relevant point. They sure as hell don't make the "Olympic tier" pools at my gym anywhere near body temperature; I probably spent the first few minutes psyching myself up for the shock then another few minutes getting used to the temperature and recovering from that shock. I don't know for sure but based on my understanding, based on the size of the pool my body would expend energy at a tremendous rate even if I just grabbed the ladder rail and stayed still.
I do think the point is also partly that what most people consider 'a good amount of exercise' isn't really very strenuous. Doing a bit of cardio and weights at the gym 3x a week isn't enough to offset a bad diet. If you run 10k every day, that's a very different ballgame because you meaningfully burn more calories than a regular diet gives you.
It's also incredibly easy, at least in America, to consume way too many calories. To meaningfully lose weight you have to drastically change your diet or drastically up your movement.
But, surely the researcher is aware of people like Phelps. It wasn’t addressed in this article for the masses, but I wonder if he addresses people like Phelps in his actual research papers.
> If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
Simply having more muscle mass can burn calories too. Most people don't spend most of their time training either, so comparing to elite athletes is fairly irrelevant.
Swedish speed skater Nils Van Der Poel drinks cream and eats crisps, LOTS of it, while training just to get enough calories in his body to continue training so number 1 is faulty.
A linked article describing a scientist trying to rigorously find out how weight changes and energy expenditure and diet are connected, revealing the little we do know and the vast sea of what we do not know.
The discussion here: full of anecdotes and bro science berating one another "that's not how it works, it works like this", "I personally do this-and-that", "you just have to x-y-z, it's that simple".
Yes, but this is one study out of thousands. It's not because it's a paper by PhDs that you just have to take all their results as the new truth and ignore the rest of the literature. It's way way more "bro science"-like to just look at the latest controversial study/paper/research's results while ignoring everything else. Consensus is important and even more so with such a controversial result.
Also, how is it bad for people to contrast what they see in real life with what the study shows? Michael Phelps and other athletes actually eat more calories, that's a fact. So it makes sense to question why that would be the case if the conclusion we see here was true. Again, a scientific paper isn't the bible-you can actually question it, and you don't have to just accept it as truth.
This article is not a scientific paper. It's describing some effects that are observed in a lab.
The world is not so binary as you make it out to be. The article is not forming a "new truth". Of course elite athletes are eating a lot. Nobody was questioning that. Neither do anecdotes stating "I trained my butt off, it worked" negate what's in the article.
The topic is complex, too complex to be pressed into a simple slogan. The article is not "controversial" to anybody remotely knowledgeable about biology.
You can question that the world is complex, but that won't make it less complex.
The article itself mixes results of studies with strong opinions like:
> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist > John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie > ideas that refuses to die.”
Yes. And no. Bro science is more or less useless. But the article isn't super useful either. Calories burned are "adjusted for nonfat body mass." Adjusted how?
Fat stores energy. Food adds energy. Exercise uses energy. Those aren't "myths." The article (not talking about the scientist) is very difficult to understand, but it seems to come down on the "myth" side of that dilemma. Mostly. Kind of.
When you do the math, your body turns out to be extremely efficient. Two full hours of very hard exercise burns the equivalent of one average sized lunch meal.
Skipping meals/cutting calories is, by far, the easiest way to lose weight.
Maybe your suggestion might be a cataclysmic -1000 calories per day, either by (a) skipping a large lunch completely and not changing exercise, or (b) by doing those two hours of hard exercise and not changing diet. That person will tend to lose around two pounds a week either way over the long term. (Of course I don't really know what numbers you have in mind.)
But losing two pounds a week is insane.
So let's look at safer, more normal behavior. Call it -300 calories per day: either cutting diet by a medium order of fries each day (and keeping exercise fixed) or doing 40 minutes of moderate exercise (and keeping diet fixed). Then the person will tend to lose a pound about every 12 days over the long term. That is still rapid weight loss either way.
If the same person starts riding a bike 40 minutes a day but doesn't count calories, the results could be anything. They could easily put on weight. Who knows?
> So let's look at safer, more normal behavior. Call it -300 calories per day: either cutting diet by a medium order of fries each day (and keeping exercise fixed) or doing 40 minutes of moderate exercise (and keeping diet fixed).
That's not how it works though, and the article we are discussing here is hinting at that. The mechanisms are very complex. Going for a run for 40 min that "burns" 300 calories versus not going on that run won't create a calorie deficit of 300 calories. Because "everything else equal" is never going to happen.
There could be tons of effects happening to offset this. Eating more? Eating subtly different things? Eating it in different ways that impact nutrient uptake? More efficient nutrient uptake even when eating the same things in the same way at the same time? Changing patterns of movement that now use less energy? Change in overall metabolism (body temperature, body movements, ...)? Less stress, saving energy? ...? This is a very complex topic and "calories in versus calories out" is just not cutting it. And that's what the article is about. It's an approximation, but a so coarse one that it's barely usable for anything.
It's a popular science article. What did you expect? If you want all the details, read the actual published studies. For the general public, scientists need to simplify things.
Which "facts" does the article call "myths"? The word "myth" exists twice in it, one of which is in the heading.
That's just part of phrasing everything in catchy popular science terms. Apparently, if you don't do that, then nobody is going to read your article as it reads too boring. (I also find that sad.)
The "train yourself out of obesity" idea that one of the interviewed scientists calls "zombie idea" is not an "ordinary long-accepted fact". Maybe in bro science circles, where obese people are generally just regarded as lazy who just don't get their act together, but that's now how actual medical experts think about this.
The article is another piece in the puzzle of trying to understand how things work. It's not a "myth buster".
The problem is that the funders of scientific research (corporations, governments, military) see zero upside in finding simple answers. There's simply no money in 'better living'.
This sort of research is only of value in so far as it moves forward some sort of saleable treatment.
In the meantime, the more confused you are about what to eat and how to treat your body - the better. It is when people are damaged that the medical industry makes its money.
In summary, the incentives for health are in reverse (and perverse, IMO). People get paid for treating disease (and even keeping them unwell!) but not for keeping people healthy.
On the other hand, the incentives on Youtube are the other way around. No matter how complex an issue, "these 5 tricks will make you lose weight" or "avoid these 3 foods and you'll be as ripped as me" are what gets the most clicks. And is always total crap.
> Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass.
I love this intro.
> His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits.
This is funny to me because my own logs reflect this going back to about 2015. I can more easily drop 10, 20, or however many pounds when not exercising than I can when exercising. That was a really weird one because it opened up a bunch of other problems.
One follow-on problem that came up quickly: How to develop skills requiring fitness during those times, or how to maintain endurance levels when you're intentionally lowering your exercise exposure so you can lose weight. That kind of situation is pretty interesting.
> Azy, a 113-kilogram (249 lb.) adult male (orangutan), for example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day ... When adjusted for body mass, (humans) burn ... 60% more than orangutans
Oh and
> “She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”
This is really curious and fascinating stuff. Thanks op for posting.
PS:
> He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
An interesting source here is the Fiennes and Stroud expedition to cross Antarctica in 1992. Stroud (a physician) actually tested how many calories they were burning each day using the doubly-labeled water method, and at one point (ascent to the polar plateau) it was up to 11k. So it is definitely possible to temporarily push the limit - as the article acknowledges - but these are exceptional circumstances.
Another related extreme case was the first person to solo-ski to the north pole. They pre-loaded, mostly on olive oil, packing on tens of kg in body fat, all of which (and more) was gone by the time they were done. I don't recall the daily calorie expenditures but it was gigantic. They did this because there is some mechanical advantage carrying a good chunk of one's energy supply directly on your own bones rather than towing it in the sled.
Fiennes and Stroud lost about 25kg each crossing Antarctica; I don’t know if they pre-loaded beforehand (hopefully they did, losing that much!) but they certainly ran a deficit as a strategic trade-off against their sled weight. Hauling a kilo of fat on a sled is definitely less efficient than carrying it on your own body.
Supposedly their calories during the expedition were primarily from butter, which they mixed into every food and even ate on its own. Apparently you get used to it.
Some friends and I are currently doing a thru hike of the Appalachian Trail, and only ten days in the four of us clocked 7, 8, 10, and 17 pounds lost... But we're hiking 6+ hours a day with heavy packs. We've been eating easily ~3000kcal each daily. I think at the extreme edges, nutrition science is a lot less well understood. We were very surprised to see we'd lost anything at all, as we're stopping to eat 300 calories almost every waking hour.
6hrs a day @ 3 mph = 18 miles per day, 100 calories per mile without packs = 1800 calories per day on top of basal metabolic needs. Given your user name, I'd guess that you're male, and given that you're hiking the AT and have already started, I'd also guess that you're younger rather than older, so I'd peg your basal metabolism at around 2200-2400 calories. Add in the packs and the hills, and it should be clear why you're losing weight.
It's already at least 10 people at each shelter every night. There's ~60 people scheduled to leave on 2/22/22, and ~60 on 3/1/22. It's going to be real busy real soon, this year will be packed by March.
We're taking it pretty slow and getting off trail whenever the weather turns sketchy (like last night possible thunderstorms). The real part we're concerned about is getting over the Smokies without getting stuck up there in the snow.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...
The estimate is probably off for extreme circumstances and those people probably aren’t fully digesting and using all of those calories. The accurate number would be interesting.
I too have found that cardio isn’t very good for dropping weight, but packing on some muscle does a lot to shift body composition. Maintaining more lean mass simply requires more calories.
I'm baffled by the take away from the study. If a sedentary person and an athletic person burn about the same, doesn't that just mean the sedentary person's energy is being spent on maintaining and accumulating fat mass? But why is that waffled about instead of stated?
Major Edit: more concise example
>As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.
Cells don't live for free and fat is stored in cells. So yes storing fat burns calories, just far less than muscle. And that's just the direct expenditure.
I see a few numbers thrown out for how many calories a pound of fat burns a day, but that direct burn is only one way additional fat would lead to energy use. A heavier person while less "active" will burn more during day to day due to carrying a heavier mass. I'm sure there's plenty more ways but I'm not going to go do a deep dive.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
I think a lot of these stats are myths meant to accentuate the difficulty of the task. Pontzer’s book discusses Michael Phelps and the lack of an actual source to the rumours he was eating gargantuan amounts during training.
So I'm not sure about everest climbers, 20k sounds pretty crazy.
But I can speak first hand as a former athlete who has had access to NFL players and Olympians. 8-10k during peak active training happens all the time
Long term average might be 4-5k.
You have to remember that these people are often on PEDs that allow them to train all day.
Shit I was a serious powerlifter back in the day and would routinely eat 6-7k calories (weighed) during 2adays depending on how my weight was fluctuating. Add some more height, PEDs, and cardio and I'm almost there.
I think the difference between what is mentioned in the article is #1 obviously PEDs #2 body breakdown and recovery, which might be more in e.g. lifters and swimmers than long distance runners
I believe him. As a nowhere-near-olympics division 1 swimmer, I had developed a major weight loss problem my freshman year. I actually was required to log my calories and meet with a sports nutritionist weekly. After 6000 calories a day, I was shoving so much food in my mouth, I felt like it wasn't possible to eat any more than I did. She prescribed Snickers bars as a way to top off my calories every day without contributing too much to feeling full. I was targeting 7000 calories a day, and I don't think I ever consistently reached that goal, but around that time my weight stabilized.
There are a lot of people who maintain a high degree of fitness, and for them I can imagine 4000 calories is about right. But there are some types of training that are consistently pushing your physical limits. I don't have any sort of data to back this up, but it has long been my theory that the reason why elite athletes can burn so many calories is because they aren't actually burning them in the traditional sense of cells oxidizing chemical energy to create work...they've crossed over into the territory of muscle tissues being torn up and resynthesized so much that your body can no longer do so efficiently.
As an analogy, typically in manufacturing there are always efficiencies that can be extracted. But in very mature industries where there aren't any easy efficiencies to eek out of the system, you have to start making tradeoffs. One common tradeoff is throughout vs yield. You can increase your throughout, but in order to do do so, you have to cut corners on processes and subsequently increase the total amount of waste in the process.
And as a "maybe this is related" data point: 82% of marathon runners suffer from Acute Kidney Injury. Your kidneys have one job: waste disposal. It would be easy to infer that at the boundaries of human conditioning, the kidneys aren't up to the task of processing all of the waste that the body is producing.
Michael Phelps directly says in one of his auto biographies that he was eating 8-10k calories a day. I don’t think you can call that a rumor.
Of course he could be off a bit, but it seems unlikely that he’s off by a factor of 2.
He lists the foods that he ate, and it definitely sounds like it was close to 10k calories. His coach also discussed his diet, and backs up his claims.
I've read a decent number of books about climbing big peaks. In all of them they said they were so nauseous on summit day from being in the death zone, they could barely force down a protein bar.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
Yeah, I'm not convinced the article passes the smell test.
Michael Phelps discussed his diet extensively, suggesting he ate 10k a day while training. Other athletes talk about similar meal sizes. This suggests that once they stop exercising (thus eventually losing lean muscle mass and requiring less calories) that they would not see a change in their weight, yet there are a lot of old fat athletes (possibly just of a certain generation) out there.
Where are you getting those numbers for Everest climbers? I have a very hard time believing them.
High altitude suppresses appetite in general and your body does not get enough oxygen to meaningfully process food above about 25,000 feet. Everest summit day via the South Col starts at about that altitude.
Plus it’s freezing cold and everything takes forever to do. I don’t think there is much eating at all on Everest summit day, let alone 20,000 calories.
It raises the blood sugar levels as the body supplies the muscles with carbohydrates, and triggers a complementary response in appetite hormones.
Finally, and most importantly:
Exercise releases dopamine.
Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule deficit equals starvation.
So whilst it does not directly impact weight loss. It still makes it (a bit) easier.
Plus there are an enormous quantity of other factors in health that are impacted by exercise.
Bodily strength is entirely responsible, for example, for stopping you getting a "bad back."
The less strength you have in your back muscles, the more strain your vertebra and ligaments are under. Hence your body falls apart quickly and more easily.
You definitely need both kilo-joule control and strengthening exercise if you want to keep your life on track.
For long years I didn't really try to loose weight, because I thought it would require me to work out, which I didn't want to do. I know enough people with joint problems very likely relating to the amount of work out they did/do, even though they never were overweight. Two years back I decided to go against convential wisdom and attempt weight loss without any work out at all. With tremendous success. I understand that working out helps general health, but so does weight loss. So I refuse to feel bad.
It's so weird that you feel pressure to feel bad about how you went about it :( I apologize that society is so messed up. Caloric reduction without exercise is totally a valid way to lose weight! There are plenty of people that do it - you get tired when you diet, and so "hibernating" can help. It works for you and that's all that matters.
I know, for instance, Penn Teller lost his weight in the same way - he decided to just eat baked/boiled potatoes with nothing else and just chilled out for a 100 days and lost 100 lbs. That's what worked for him!
I feel like it's a more complicated story going on.
Post exercise I will often have a sort of hunger roller coaster. Naively, imagining the body's metabolism, hunger is responding to perception of a calorie deficit in the blood : organs demanding energy and blood sugar decreasing, forcing burning of calories from stored reserves.
But what if your body is able to efficiently maintain glucose levels? in that case exercise might not induce hunger, in fact it might be that exercise stimulates alternative pathways that release energy and these stay active even after you finish exercising. This might well be much more the case for well trained athletes than regular people. Or it might depend on diet or loads of other factors.
Personally, I have found that exercise is nearly pointless any time other than right before I eat. So exercising before breakfast is perfect because the stimulated hunger response is immediately satisfied by eating breakfast. But I don't eat more breakfast than I usually would, so it's a win.
While I don't experience any euphoria, I agree that intermittent fasting doesn't affect my mood negatively. After the first few weeks, you don't even think about it anymore. And being able to go out, eat a normal meal at a restaurant without worrying about math, or 'cheating on a diet', is pretty positive mentally when you can still fit into a size 6 dress.
When I do 24 hr fasts (going from dinner to dinner), which is not that often, in the early afternoon until dinner time I get a big energy boost and very enhanced mood. That first time, I thought that it felt like I was high on something.
"You can’t outrun a bad diet" seems to be the party line among fitness people these days. Anecdotally speaking that's not really true for a lot of people. I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm. Before I picked up running I was moderately overweight. If I can't run for a prolonged period of time, then I start gaining weight again. I've met plenty of people who run similar mileage and many of them also have pretty bad dietary habits but none of them are oeverweight. Note that I'm not saying that this is healthy (it clearly isn't).
However, I still think that there is a lot of truth to the "you can't outrun a bad diet" statement. A lot of people who occasionally go for a run are likely to overestimate their energy expenditure and feel like they have to eat a cow to compensate. I think, however, that the statement becomes less and less true the more excessive the exercise gets. If you burn thousands of calories day in day out with exercise it seems to become harder to overcompensate this every time with excess food intake.
I think the bigger issue with exercise is a mental one. Weight loss seems to be a pretty bad motivation for exercising. Most people I know who picked up running for the sole purpose of losing weight eventually gave up or they are stuck with their 5km weekend park run, which, of course, is rather pointless for their objective. 100% of the avid runners I know (including myself) don't care about their weight. I could probably lose more weight (or improve my long term health) if I changed my diet, but it's simply something that I'm not interested in. I run because it's fun and a somewhat low body weight seems to be a by-product of that.
I think I agree with your general point, and specifically agree that that statement is targeted as "mainstream advice", and might not be literally true. However, one point of disagreement:
> I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm.
That is not necessarily a "bad diet" for weight loss purposes. It's an unhealthy diet, but as long as you're not eating too much of all those foods, it won't make you gain weight. It's only bad because most people who are eating these kinds of foods will be eating too much of them (because they are much less filling for the amount of calories that they contain).
Yeah. I think the advice on diet is a good one for mainstream audiences. Giving nuance is difficult when people are looking for quick answers.
I had the same experience for a long time. People would see me eat Oreos, pizza, ice cream, pop tarts, etc. and they’d say, “how are you so incredibly thin if you eat all that garbage?” And I’d respond that I just eat less - I don’t eat a lot. And it was true. I’d eat garbage but I’d eat so little that I’d maintain an incredibly low weight. Now as I’m older and stress has gotten better - I’ve started eating more and gained weight due to it. It’s all due to the quantity/amount-of-calories.
The article seems to miss what is (at least to me) the most interesting follow-up question: if exercise doesn’t cause a person to burn significantly more Calories throughout the day to induce weight loss, then what does?
I’m somewhat hard-pressed to believe the answer is diet alone. Anecdotally, when I was running 100 miles per week in college for cross country, I ate three or four giant meals per day and maintained a very low weight. Ten years later, I have an injury that makes most types of exercise difficult, and I’ve observed that I really can’t eat more than one meal per day (dinner), otherwise my weight starts to creep up.
I find it odd that Calories are used in relation to weight gain, because (kilo)calories are a unit of energy, and excess weight is due to excess fat. Is there a simple linear relationship between the extractable energy content in food (as determined by the Atwater system) and the conversion of food components into fat by the digestive system? I find that hard to believe. Shouldn’t we be using a mass balance rather than an energy balance? If you could observe digestion at the atomic level, you would simply quantify which atoms from food end up in fat stores and which leave the body via other processes. Presumably, these atoms could then be bucketed into source categories (e.g. certain types of proteins or carbohydrates). I wouldn’t be surprised if exercise somehow alters the fat accumulation process even if it doesn’t significantly affect human metabolism.
Fat stores are considered, metabolically, as stored energy as they expand and diminish based on the metabolizable energy of the diet, which may be different from the measured total energy.
If I recall correctly, capital "C" Calorie, used in nutrition, is another term for kilocalorie. Lowercase "c" calorie is the SI unit. 1 kcal/Calorie is 1000 calories.
I would highly encourage anyone to read Pontzer’s book, Burn. I just finished it and found it to be incredibly eye opening and well written. The TL;DR is that we need to think of calories like a relatively fixed budget rather than additive, and that the primary benefit of exercise is that it consumes that budget more than it expands it (hence not effective for weight loss), but by consuming that budget there is less budget to go around for unhealthy things like inflammation, excess hormone creation, etc (which is why exercise is so beneficial to health).
> but by consuming that budget there is less budget to go around for unhealthy things like inflammation, excess hormone creation, etc (which is why exercise is so beneficial to health).
You dont understand inflammation, inflammation is like a nuclear bomb going off, however certain chemicals found in the diet will turn that nuclear bomb into an array of guided missiles.
We are complex chemical reactions, eat the wrong stuff you get sick, eat the right stuff you get well, but you need to make the right chemical reactions take place and reduce the wrong chemical reactions.
The problem with scientific study is they generally focus on what they can test directly or indirectly this is why we now see complete reversals in some medical thinking & theories.
Sure exercise and other output will consume calories, but if you focus on just calories, you ignore the properties of the chemicals and ill health will occur.
He is referring to chronic low grade inflammation - not acute inflammation from specific chemicals. He cites studies. If you read them I would love to hear your take because you are correct - I am not an expert on inflammation!
What causes low grade inflammation? Generally Fat, what is fat and is anyone measuring what else is inside the lipid like fat soluble vitamins, hormones etc?
> He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
It still doesnt look at the what the short and long term effect is, he doesnt quantify it with this person can consume 4650cal but be dead next week does he?
Its just a throw away statement, it means nothing and his ego/beliefs/followers are getting him into print before a larger audience. Because we are not able to quantify his statement properly, the media could be complicit in murder/manslaughter depending on what people know and remembered at the time.
Our lifespans are limited by the traditional domesticated foods we eat, ie farm grown foods. However now that we are seening labgrown foods like fungi meat replacements and lab grown meats, the questions with those are do they contain enough of the chemicals to be good for health or not?
You only need a few chemicals to grow cancer lines in a test tube for example, but cancer cells are not that functional in the scheme of things are they? They are just cells which have lost their normal function in the body.
And I'm not qualified in anything, I cant even say if my GCSE are accurate because I never got my exam papers back to check my answers again the study books!
Holy Jesus, that first chart tells a tale. The range of dense dots is from 60% to 130% almost throughout working life. Some of us are burning 2x what others are burning. Oh, man, dude. That's wicked variation after adjusting for non-fat mass.
This leads me to believe that obesity isn't an excess consumption of calories through food, but variation between people in how efficient or inefficient their digestive absorption is. Obese people don't need less food, they need a molecular knob to turn down the absorption of nutrients in their gut.
I think of exercise and weight loss as completely separate.
Almost everyone should exercise. Whether you're skinny, normal weight or overweight. Exercise makes you healthy. It also tends to make skinny people eat more and overweight people eat less, though not always. Form a workout plan with fixed amounts of exercise, like 30-90 minutes per day: any extra exercise isn't bad if you want it, but it doesn't really have any more benefits.
If exercise helps you lose weight? Good. If not? Well it still has benefits. It's generally easier to lose weight through diet. If you really don't like exercise, you don't have to exercise much, and you can do workouts you like.
It’s sad that majority of people hit the gym or go for a run when they want to lose weight. Without diet it’s pointless. But what’s worse, diet change is also about finding a new balance that fits your body. If you start exercising at the same time, you are throwing your body drastically off current balance and it’s probably much harder to find a new one.
I wouldn't necessarily advise someone to diet without starting exercise. Exercise encourages healthier eating in a few physical ways, and for many the two are part of a mental lifestyle self-image which admittedly shouldn't exist but can still motivate.
I'm also skeptical of that balance theory. A exercised body would produce more reliable eating and satiation signals to aid in balance, if 'balance' is even how the new diet is calibrated.
The twist is that if you get healthier by changing your eating habits, it will probably be easier for to start/increase exercise, and will continue to make you healthier while you take on exercising.
Better eating is I think the most impacting thing you can do, exercising being the close second.
Absolutely. I think starting with either is totally viable, and it sounds like we agree that the only combination that probably won't work is exercising but never getting around to changing a bad diet.
> If you start exercising at the same time, you are throwing your body drastically off current balance and it’s probably much harder to find a new one.
This is for sure a [Citation Needed] claim.
Exercise has been shown in numerous studies to be health protective and also to be muscle maintaining.
I would love to know why you think exercising is not a net positive. I expect that greater than 99% off doctors, nutritionists, dieticians, and anyone else involved in human dietary health would agree that you should start exercising now if you are not already exercising, regardless of your diet (and absent specific contraindications).
The point is don’t try to change everything at once. I am not questioning health benefits of sports. But change of diet is a big change - not only biologically, but also mentally, logistically, practically, financially, etc. Change of exercise is equally massive change. It’s kinda logical that trying to juggle too many things at once is more likely to fail.
This is an entirely different thesis. You said that starting diet and exercise together is harder in terms of your body finding balance. Now you’re talking primarily about logistics and mental impact.
I wrote biologically and mentally as first two points, these concern your body.
With diet you need to find what to eat, how much, how often, so that you’re not hungry, grumpy, tired, sick, etc. and still consistently lose weight. It’s gonna take a couple of weeks for your body to adjust.
Exercise will also drastically affect your hunger, tiredness, etc. It’s gonna be harder to find new balance (or rather dysbalance with consistent weight loss) when you can’t really read which changes in your body are caused by diet and which by exercise. Higher chance of disappointment and quitting.
I’d say just change diet, find what works for you consistently, add exercise only a few weeks later, tweak diet accordingly.
Some of the papers have strange errors that suprise me that they passed peer review. For example, "Extreme events reveal an alimentary limit on sustained maximal human energy expenditure" by Thurber, others, and Pontzer has a figure labeled "Fig. 3 Maximal Energy Intake". First, it appears that one of the charts is labeled incorrectly. I assume it is the first one, and they swapped "Overfeeding" with "Endurance". Second, it seems that taking the disparate types of "event" and putting them together on the Energy Intake graph causes them to have a flat slope, whereas the slope would be somewhat positive for the subgroups.
This was like one of the first few things I looked at in this body of research, I wasn't combing through everything to find an error. But it's strange. Finding an error quickly is a red flag to me.
Overall the study I'm looking at is interesting. I'm not sure they adequately demonstrated the finding of a caloric intake limit of 2.5x BMR but there appears to be a definite negative correlation of duration of sustained activity and energy expenditure (or metabolic scope, a multiple of basal metabolic rate). The numbers are very tightly clustered around the trendline, which is kind of odd, given how widely the numbers vary in other graphs. So either this is a very close correlation or something is strange with the data.
Glancing through the papers in PubMed, I think that the implications in the article are way stronger than the papers support. One paper said that perhaps 25% of the calories expended in exercise are borrowed from a reduction in BMR. The article made it seem like they were completely offset. The article referenced above apparently used two very different groups (overfeeding and endurance competition), and used the first to study the limit of energy intake and the second to study the long-term limit of energy expenditure, but people are making claims about energy intake in endurance athletes. Maybe when you're working hard, the gut is able to adapt and pull in more calories. Perhaps there is a limit to how much the gut is willing to accept when there is a calorie surplus.
> Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average
I have a problem with this hard statement based on the data because:
> He realized he had to go back to basics, measuring the calories expended by humans and animals walking and running on treadmills.
> He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another team’s study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons
I've always heard that humans, due to our upright posture, are extremely efficient when it comes to walking and running and so if you want to increase you calories usage via exercise you should lift weights as we are much less efficient at this. I have also heard it will would increase your resting calorie usage as well due to repairing/reinforcing the muscle. I will note calorie management has always been heavily emphasized to me: "you can't out-run a fork"
Perhaps that is wrong and a good data based analysis would disprove these common gym tropes I've heard but from my read of this article they only "bust" the morning breakfast channel myths of burning calories.
Lifting weights is a poor way to burn calories. It’s a great way to build muscle and be healthier, but lifting weights is less efficient than aerobic exercise in terms of pure calorie burn.
e.g. Moderate intensity aerobic exercise burns 200-300 calories in 30 minutes. Moderate intensity weightlifting is 90-130 in the same time. You need vigorous weightlifting to get up to 250 in 30 minutes. Even taking into consideration post-exercise burn, weight lifting will at best get you too the same efficiency as aerobic exercise.
I can't find the link but I remember reading an article about weight lifting raising the resting calorie use for quite some time after the exercise. Also as you say you retain more muscle, and that muscle requires calories at rest potentially altering the overall calculation. I still agree with the overall premise that fixing your diet is probably the most important aspect of weight loss though.
May main take-away was from the article it read that they focused on running as the primarily measured exercise. So it might not provide the best full picture when looking at other exercise methods.
For sure, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) is a thing. It is real and measurable. But it’s not some crazy effect that offsets the fact that aerobic exercise is about 2x as calorie intensive as weight training during the actual exercise. As I recall the best way to drive up EPOC is to engage in high intensity interval training. HIIT has a much larger effect on EPOC than weight training (again, if I recall correctly).
Calories burned from extra muscle are not as important as people like to imagine. It’s like cardio. Do enough and it has an effect, but in terms of what normal humans should expect, it’s not going to do much, because normal people are simply not going to build enough muscle to matter much. The average person isn’t going to build 40 extra pounds of lean mutant. Most of the claims about how many calories muscle will burn are also not backed up by any science so far as I can tell.
I do agree that this article doesn’t cover a lot of stuff, though. I’m doubtful about the stuff claimed even about running because it feels so have wavey. The one potentially compelling study was on women who went from sedentary to running half marathons and the claim is that they “barely” burned more calories at the end than at the beginning, but “barely” is almost meaningless. Plus they did burn more so the whole thesis is in question.
What's the metric used to calculate average here? And what range of workout is included in the data. Seems like there was just too little focus given to this to call it a myth outright.
It also runs against my own experience. For the past six months I've begun exercising and changed nothing else and I've seen amazing improvement in all aspects of my life including losing fat. The type of workout I'm doing is full body and covers a range of different movements and weights. And arguably anyone serious about losing weight would do the same. If all they're doing is comparing running to dieting then I can't help but feel it's short sighted.
> I've always heard that humans, due to our upright posture, are extremely efficient when it comes to walking and running and so if you want to increase you calories usage via exercise you should lift weights as we are much less efficient at this.
Weight lifting builds muscles. It does makes you more hungry. In addition, you can end up heavier then originally, because muscles weight more then fat. I mean, yes, it will be good weight, the weight composed of muscle, there is no rational reason to go out of way to avoid it. But, it is not loosing weight.
This is very depressing. I find it incredibly difficult to lose weight dieting. And now it's telling me I just wasted all this money on a treadmill (and the effort it took to get it down into the basement).
> I find it incredibly difficult to lose weight dieting
Me too, and so many people do. I hope the treadmill helps, because it can.
FWIW, the article is making intentionally controversial statements and implications. Don’t let it convince you that exercise is wasted; it’s not.
Building a new habit, whether exercise or diet, is the hardest & most important port. I think it’s 90% mental, figuring out how to not give up and not let myself get depressed.
Might not work for you at all, but some tricks that helped me… I resisted counting calories for decades while I exercised a lot. Then I finally tried counting calories, and somehow managed to hold it and it worked. A coworker had lost a lot of weight and when I asked him about it in passing, without stopping to talk, he flashed his phone and mumbled “counting calories, man”, as if it was the easiest most obvious thing ever. That hit me a bit hard and stuck with me. So, it took time, many months. I set my calorie goal to my goal weight, not below. This meant it took longer than necessary to lose weight. I was interested in making sure I knew what it felt like to eat the right amount every day, forever. It helped me mentally to save room in my budget for a small treat snack at the end of the day. Starting with tracking but not restricting calories is a good way to put together your tools (e.g. a phone app) & daily workflow without worrying about being hungry. Calorie counts don’t have to be perfect, just doing it for a while and trying to be accurate, and you’ll get a very good sense for how many cals things have.
If you find dieting difficult because you get hungry, look at the keto diet, which reduces hunger.
When you eat carbs your body turns them to sugar because that's all it can do with it. Then your pancreas notices there is too much sugar in your body and tells it to store it in the fat cells for later use as energy. When the sugar is cleared out of your body, you become hungry again. This process only takes a couple of hours which is why people who eat carbs get hungry between meals.
Instead, eat healthy fats. They don't cause your sugar levels to spike so they don't cause you to have that sugar crash and hungry feeling. You can remain feeling full for 8 hours on fat.
Of course you also need proteins so make sure you get enough. Proteins do cause your sugar levels to go up some, but no where near as much as carbs do so they don't cause a crash either.
If you have a low sustaining calorie level due to past diets, you might want to look up reverse dieting to make the whole thing easier. But even with a low level you shouldnt have much problems once you manage to track your input and arent dependent on junkfood. At the end of the day its an invisible red or green number.
If the problem is with self control, remember that torturing yourself and viewing it as a battle can be counterproductive. If you just starve yourself you will likely bounce back directly afterwards. Its about making an actual change and normalizing your eating. For that i found it helpful to first stick to my sustaining calorie level, so planing what you eat at the level you dont gain or loose weight. You can then build on that structure with cutting out the addictive stuff, eating slower and figuring out being full vs not hungry.
Personally i found a week of just boiled potatoes incredibly helpful (you will have to work really hard to gain weight with just plain potatoes) to kick the addictive stuff and break with bad habits. Its like with any other drug and abstinence wont kill you in this case.
Dont beat yourself up, its one step at a time and with better planing you can make the steps a lot easier.
You did not waste that money if it helps you exercise. The body needs to move to stay healthy. Never mind the weight, get your heart going a couple of times a week. When this is a habit, start to push a little. I think you will find that you feel a lot better after.
I find that I eat a lot healther when I'm not stressed out. Exercise helps with that.
The reality of exercise and diet is sort of depressing: it is much, much harder to get in shape than it is to stay in shape.
You can spend months with completely different habits, and see almost no difference. Your muscles build up from the inside, and your fat burns off from the outside. Muscle is also denser when you get on the scale.
There is a silver lining. Muscles burn calories faster than other cells in day-to-day life. If you're persistent and patient, you will get there eventually.
Alcohol also trips a lot of people up. It'll run you about 100-200 calories/drink, and it metabolizes like sugar.
I've lost 40 kg (88 lbs) just by exercising: never counted calories, lots of pizzas and whatever. When people say "you can't exercise out of a bad diet" my first question is "What do you mean by "exercise?". And then you discover that exercise in their mind is 30 minutes of brisk walking, 3 days a week and nothing more. That's not exercising, that a sedentary lifestyle.
Cardio is great for general health, and cannelloni shave off a few extra calories even once you’re good at it. Buy some weights, and put on a few pounds of muscle. The muscle costs more calories to maintain, so for your same diet you can shift you body composition a little. For a beginner you can see a lot of results in about three lifting sessions a week in only a handful of weeks.
There are plenty people who are skinny and who don't exercise and are not healthy. Exercise helps you get more healthy, it's not all about how thin you are. Walking/running is great exercise and great for you in terms of your overall health even if they doesn't help you lose weight directly. It does help your mental health.
I watched some anime Netflix years ago where the main character played a board game. Eating candy to account for the energy expenditure of the mentally taxing game was in the script.
I read an article about Magnus Carlsen exercising and eating a strict diet so he could cope with the energy expenditure of high level chess for long periods.
It's weird to see it now framed as like a revolution that making this girl do rapid math problems increased her calorie expenditure.
I don't know if it's the mental difficulty or the stress associated with the task that is causing the energy to be burnt. I'd like some clarity on that if anyone has studies.
> I feel like this is already known?
I'm not sure about that. I heard a lot of people say "exercise doesn't help you lose weight because you eat more", not "exercise doesn't help you lose weight, because it doesn't really burn calories.".
I came up with a diet to lose weight. I was approaching 200lbs and wanted to get it under control so made a simple diet that helped me lose 50lbs. I call it the half and half. You take your meal and plate it. Then take a second plate and split everything exactly down the middle. Eat your first plate and then you wait half an hour. If after half hour you want to eat again you can go back to your second plate. What ends up happening is some times you would go back for more but other times you would get busy. Or just not feel hungry. It wasn't long before my stomach started to shrink and I would eat smaller and smaller amounts of food. This worked incredibly well. I could eat anything type of food I wanted just needed to wait half hour before going to my other half of my food. I eventually stopped splitting my plates and just made very small plates because I realized I would be full off a little amount. The only other rule I followed was never finish food once I feel full. That last bite of a burger just toss it if you feel full.
You might have heard of it by now but I suspect you're exploiting the mechanism that delays the feeling of satiation for roughly 20 minutes after eating. Many people can eat a seemingly unlimited amount of food so long as they do it quickly.
I think your method is cool because it tricks both the hungry and the logical part of your brain into thinking it can totally have all the food so long as it waits, but by the time 20 minutes is up, the satiation chemicals have found their way to your brain and it's no longer hungry.
Thank you. A lot of people just shrug it off when I say I have a diet. They look at me and say but you are skinny like you ever needed to diet. Well I really was 50lbs heavier at one point and that is a lot. I think you nailed on the explanation as to why it happens as well. When you know you can go back for more it’s not some painful I need to starve feeling you can reason with yourself and say okay I had my first plate it’s not going to be bad to wait half an hour where as if you had to wait say several hours you may be tempted to have just a bit more because of hunger pains. Also not being restricted to certain foods makes it easier as well because who really wants to make a big change to the foods they already eat. Well thank you for commenting.
So the main argument in the article is the claim that your total energy expenditure is more or less constant, and independent of "exercise". In the sense that if you spend 500kcal on running, your body will "not do" something else it would have done otherwise (e.g. stress about stuff) that would have cost 500kcals.
In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than day 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.
Ok, that is an interesting finding. But this sounds very specific to aerobic exercise.
The article then mentions how they monitored an active indigenous population, and were "surprised" to find out that "when controlled for non-fat body mass this active population had the same TEE as western sedentary populations" (emphasis mine).
Why is this at all surprising. We've known for ages that muscle increase leads to a basal metabolic rate increase.
The article tries hard to give a visual impression that two similarly rotund people (one from fat and one from muscle) would have an equal TEE, but if you dig into the claim, it's exactly the opposite. In order to get that non-fat body mass difference, you need to exercise. Its just that this needs to be anaerobic rather than aerobic.
We also know that obese people have higher BMRs than their thinner counterparts. Now if the claim in this article is true, then it would imply that the increase in BMR in obese people is exclusively due to a parallel increase in muscle. But we know that muscle increases with obesity. So again, not very surprising.
So, the claim "exercise doesnt work" indeed lacks nuance. Particularly in not addressing aerobic vs anaerobic exercise.
> So the main argument in the article is the claim that your total energy expenditure is more or less constant, and independent of "exercise". In the sense that if you spend 500kcal on running, your body will "not do" something else it would have done otherwise (e.g. stress about stuff) that would have cost 500kcals.
> In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than day 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.
That's wild. Running a marathon will easily burn north of 2000kcals. That's a lot of "something else" the body will have to "not do" to compensate for.
FTA: Pontzer’s findings have a discouraging implication for people wanting to lose weight. “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie ideas that refuses to die.”
I think that’s true, but have one remark: those studies all scale by fat-free body mass. Exercise can increase that, so exercise that grows your muscles, combined with maintaining the same diet should decrease the derivative of weight over time.
That doesn’t imply you’ll lose weight; if you were gaining weight fast, chances are it will just make you gain weight a bit slower. Even if you’ll lose weight, chances are it will be too slowly to motivate you to continue.
Also note that most obese people already have strong muscles (if you weigh 200kg and can walk, you’re carrying around 100kg or so) and, because of their weight, are injury prone. Becoming stronger through exercise may be very hard for them.
What always gets lost in discussion about weight control, IMO, is that it is a mental game. The biological aspects are pretty easy. CICO works. Diets are a strategy for achieving CICO. And ultimately whether you can stick to it is largely a mental thing.
So if you want to lose weight, figure out first why you have a problem to begin with. Because if you don't, then you will lose for a while purely through motivation, and then gain it back when your focus changes to something else.
Of course, there are physiological inputs to the state of mind, as well, which may very well be uncontrollable and largely genetic, so even if you achieve your personal ideal it may not be the body you dream of.
The article is very interesting to read, except the part where his personal life is spotlit. Finally something more nuanced research done on this. In my lifetime I was told pretty contradictory views on how fat metabolism works and what exactly 'exercise' means. You cannot eat the same and hope to loose weight just by exercising more. You would be burning 'cheap calories' first, but the fat tissue stays untouched, as it is more expensive to burn. Changing or regulating diet correctly reduces the intake of those cheap calories, most of them are liquid or in processed food, like beer, alcohol in general, processed sugar, some dairy products, and so on.
Exercise and the right diet complement each other, and according to this guy it makes only sense: exercise forces the metabolism to burn calories for physical activity instead of stress response, and that means lower levels of stress hormones. The correct diet forces the metabolism to burn glucose stored in the muscle tissue first, and then slowly starts using the energy from the regions where the digestive tract is.
So after decades, the right balance between diet and exercise is still the better way to loose weight and be healthier, however this guy says that body burns calories differently than assumed, each activity burns calories, even if it's sitting on a couch all day.
I would like to see some answers on this one. First, why are we adjusting for lean body mass? I mean if you're 120kg with 50kg of extra fat you will obviously burn more calories by carrying that around. Someone who doesn't have additional 50kg of fat will need to exercise to burn the same amount of calories. It's well known in fitness circles for years now. It would be surprising if lean sedentary people burnt as many calories as active ones.
The limit of 4650kcal per day doesn't sound right. A lot of endurance athletes, even amateurs, burn more than that. How much you can digest is limited (common wisdom is 60-90g of carbs per hour when exercising which is 240-360 calories). Still there are also glycogen stores for additional 1500-2000 kcal as well as your fat stores which are heavily in use during long lasting endurance effort. I assume the limit is meant for long term which would make more sense.
The fact about ultra marathoners who burnt 6200 kcal at the beginning of the race but only 4900 at the end is interesting. Assuming they weigh say 60kg then it takes around 2500kcal to run a marathon. There is a lot of other stuff going on if they burnt 6200 per day. It would be interesting to see if there aren't other information that explains the difference (like hills for example).
Please is there a summary of the findings anywhere? I'm beginning to lose patience with these pieces that mix narrative, character profiles and actual results.
It's really annoying that when there isn't good science on a subject, a lot of people will expose their own certainties that they think makes sense.
Metabolism, the gut flora, those are pretty complex processes. Bacterial imbalance in the gut is a good trail to follow.
Of course ceasing food intake for 1 year would make anybody lose weight, but you can't tell everyone to run 50 miles a week to lose weight. There are obviously other root causes for obesity.
What of the people who tend toward being thin or lithe? I'm 181cm and 68kg (5'11.26" and 150 pounds) at 40 years old.
I can eat and quantity of any food in perpetuity and not gain weight. Although they doesn't mean I don't feel unwell if I were to, say, eat way too much of something.
If I lift weights I gain a small amount of muscle mass, but not much.
What's the theory(ies) of what is going on in the bodies of those like this?
I thought I was like this. Track your calories. Eat 3000 calories a day, and a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight (150 grams for you). And I promise you'll gain weight, unless you have something wrong with your digestive system. It's actually pretty hard to eat like that consistently for many skinny people.
My brother-in-law is even thinner than you. He can eat a lot of stuff.
He also has Crohn's disease. I don't want to say that you have, too, but perhaps your digestive system isn't completely OK. That may include composition of your microbiome. Have you ever seen any change after taking probiotics?
You're like my wife and her siblings. They can eat just about anything without putting on any significant weight. The running theory is that the food is not absorbed as efficiently, possibly due to it moving through the bowels too quickly, as some of them have IBS.
"You can’t exercise your way ..."
You sure as hell can but it's a lot of effort. There was a decent stretch of time when I exercised for 2.5-3h per day 5-6 days per week while maintaining very unhealthy diet (we owned a pizza place that had Leffe on tap). Still managed to loose 20+ pounds in half a year.
This is all very depressing. I'm one of those people with a limited menu (possibly an eating disorder) of things I will eat. I don't like complex dishes (anything eastern), seafood, vegetables, and fruits only in smoothies. I definitely ingest too much sugar and drink diet Coke.
For myself, I think exercising somehow makes me eat better. It's just a naturally occurring thing that if I start Couch to 5k, after a couple of weeks I stop eating greasy food, chips, pizza, and I eat salads and all around healthier and smaller portions.
So I guess when I lost weight in the past, it was because of the effects of exercising. Not the exercise itself.
Wish I could solve the eating problems, but I'm 58. I get severe anxiety if anyone tries to get me to eat things I don't like. I've skipped dinner parties and other events if I think the food won't be what I like.
This is interesting. However I would love to learn more about the “doubly labeled water method”. For example, how accurate is the test result? What’s the individual variance? Do animals and humans react the same way to it?
It’s important because all the findings seem to be based on it, but the specifics are not discussed.
It relies on the fact that carbon dioxide is transmitted from tissues to lungs in blood as carbonic acid. The carbonic acid is formed by water and carbon dioxide.
It seems extremely accurate as long as you believe the distribution of labeled water equalizes in the body. You can readily see exactly how much labeled oxygen was lost via CO2 (via the carbonic acid reaction).
As long as metabolism and blood transport works the same in all animals, seems reliable.
What I feel much of this misses is the effect of exercise on metabolism. You have two energy pathways in your body, the quick glucose burning pathway and the slow and efficient fat burning pathway. By getting your heart rate up into the edge of the zone in which you are using that fat burning pathway but almost into the quicker glucose burning pathway, you work that pathway out and become more metabolically efficient / healthy.
Yes you can lose weight or maintain weight without exercise, but you can still get diabetes or other aspects of metabolic syndrome.
Plus exercise does help burn more calories. Sure it’s not as strong of an effect, but it helps. The more metabolically healthy you are the more capable you become of managing weight from what I can tell, but obviously to a certain degree you are a victim of your genetics.
The article is not cheating, but it's not underlining this bit which is essential. It's talking about aerobic exercise, which means "trying to run your way to being thin doesn't work". Which may be news for some people on HN from what I see, but is far from being new or controversial.
On the other hand, building muscle gives you a perpetual "eat more" card. It permanently increases your fat free mass, and thus your TEE. I haven't heard anything about a similar increase in appetite - if anything, bodybuilders struggle to eat enough calories. So, boys and girls, definitely hit the gym. Just stay away from the stepper and pick up some weights. Also don't forget protein intake when you do that.
I wonder if this could partly explain why some people gain muscle easily without eating more when lifting regularly. Common wisdom says you have to eat more to make up for the extra energy expenditure, or otherwise your muscle growth will be limited. But I'm just not that hungry. Yet not purposefully supplementing with more food during training regimens never seemed to hinder my muscle growth. Then again, I don't know that. Maybe I would've gained even _more_ muscle if I'd been eating more. Anecdotally, it just seemed like muscle has come on pretty easily regardless of how much I eat. Could the body simply be redirecting more of my calories to growing muscle during these periods while keeping the total expenditure the same?
There's this great book 'Why calories don't count' by Dr Giles Yeo. It discusses how the human body processes food and extracts energy from it - and how current calorie labels on food items don't account for this process. Highly recommended.
Quote: <<“She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”>>
So that's why I became fat as a pig since I started freelancing more than 14 years ago. Because I'm no longer stressed in corporation bullshit politics and actually enjoy working with my clients. Stress free life means less energy used, means eating will get more food transformed into fat. Also probably why I didn't exceeded a certain number, I am at current weight for like a decade now, and I still eat like a pig but I don't gain weight anymore.
Seems is time to go run for politics, increase the stress in my life /s.
To burn fat, you need to eat less food so you tap into your fat stores, but you also need to breathe in oxygen and breathe out the carbon dioxide and water.
Exercise essentially helps to decrease your glycogen stores so you get to a fat burning state and in breathing more which will help get more oxygen for the reaction and expel the carbon dioxide and water that are produced.
Nutritional science is in its own realm of unreliability, because it depends a lot on people self-reporting what they eat, over years and decades.
Things like continuous glucose monitors are starting to proliferate, so the measurements are going to get better and more reliable, but it will still take a lot of time to come with some good long term studies where the self-reporting factor is no longer critical.
Or the related quote, "Abs are made in the kitchen" (edit: oops someone beat me to that). Even someone who's never done a lick of physical training can have visible abs if their bodyfat % is low enough. Meanwhile some of the strongest people I know do not have visible abs.
I don't believe this research. I think the measurement of burning calories might be flawed. If you don't burn more calories by exercising how does Michael Phelps have a six pack with his 10,000 calorie a day diet?
Although it may seem surprising to some that humans put on more fat than their fellow apes, this is at least somewhat predictable when you look at other ways in which humans are different from other apes.
Putting aside our intellect, we our developing towards having little to no fur came with the benefit of being able to sweat, which means we could track animals further than they could persist. It allowed us to effectively outrun, or outwalk, herds of animals.
That comes with a tradeoff, which is the lack of fur means not being able to retain as much heat in the cold. Being able to store more fat is the obvious alternative.
Since the article is comparing non-fat mass is this saying that someone with 60kg of non-fat mass will burn the same amount of calories if 1. their overall mass is 75 kg and they're athletic or 2. have more fat mass being 85 kg overall and non-athletic? I'm not sure what i'm missing but that isn't shocking or surprising. I feel like someone's trying to pull a fast one here.
"female farmers in western Africa used the same amount of energy daily when adjusted for fat-free body mass as women in Chicago —about 2400 kilocalories for a 75-kilogram woman. "
> Then Pontzer asks a set of questions designed to boost a student’s stress levels: What’s her dream job, and what exactly is she going to do after graduation?
or
> launches into a time-honored method to boost her blood pressure: He gives her an oral math test.
Anybody else noticed this gem? I would like to see a list of topics like this - for just to be a better conversationalist.
(It reminds me of how people who don't have children (or don't understand children) when meeting a child they don't know often ask it the only thing they vaguely know about every's child life - how is school?)
"He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Speakman thinks that limit is too low, noting that cyclists in the Tour de France in the 1980s and ’90s exceeded it. But they were injecting fat and glucose directly into their bloodstreams, a practice Pontzer thinks might have helped them bypass the physiological limits on converting food into energy."
Is this really true, that cyclists are injecting fat and glucose directly into
their bloodstreams? I can't believe that. I have never heard that before.
How do his results line up real world data like soldiers needing about 5k calories a day when active. Or athletes like Michael Phelps consuming 8k-10k calories a day while training?
From my read of the article the data is heavily biased towards running as the exercise of choice, probably because measuring CO2 is easy and non-intrusive to do on a treadmill. They do mention utilizing doubly labeled water but don't say if they only used that for sedentary participants or measured a wider range of exercises.
Given I have always heard/read how efficient humans are at running if they didn't account for the differing exercise methods the conclusion being offered in this article may be flawed.
That's a good point. Humans are natural runners and hikers and it stands to reason that it is very efficient compared to saw something like working in a warehouse all day moving around heaving inventory or back in the old days when people would burn thousands of extra calories a day with say being a lumberjack or coal miner.
I can't line up my real world experience with this article, I have to suspect that he may be right for his specific study parameters but that may not actually be applicable to generalized advice as it's being interpreted here.
Running isn't efficient at high speeds. The same with cycling. It's funny to see people buy a bike for exercise and then roll along at a crawl, expending less energy than walking.
Cycling is roughly 5x more efficient than running/walking for similar effort. Thinking you will lose much weight by cycling is generally mistaken, unless you plan to cycle very long distances or are extremely obese already and do very little existing exercise (and this is discounting most of what TFA is saying too).
wouldn't efficiency correlate to effort? pretty sure the "effort" is the feeling of burning calories. If an elite athlete can run for an hour and burn 2000 calories in that time, they will beat a less elite athlete who can run for 1900 calories in an hour, all else equal. Put them on bicycles or a rower and they'll be able to burn the exact same number of calories (assuming sufficient training in the target exercise medium) because the limiting factor is their body's ability to process oxygen, not the exact form factor of the exercise.
I'm not sure it makes sense to look at it that way either. What if it takes you 100 calories to move 100 meters but your competitor only takes 80 calories to move 100 meters?
Running isn’t much less efficient at higher speeds. It’s harder because the calorie burn per unit time is higher, but the calorie burn per unit distance doesn’t vary that much.
You're right, cycle commuting falls in a great niche. It's still fast enough to cover decent distances in a reasonable amount of time, you can still carry your grocery shopping, and it's healthier than driving while still achieving most of the same things.
Those are anecdotes and I have one of my own that really has me questioning this;
I’ve lost 85 lbs since the beginning of May. I lost 40/85 just since the beginning of December through today.
When I exercise I clearly lose weight more quickly. Since December I’ve been running like crazy, at least 5-10km 5-6 days/week. When I lift weights I drop pounds even faster.
Edit: Makes me wonder, though, — if I walk in the morning and solve puzzles on leetcode, would I burn more calories? When I run at night if I solve random math problems in my head will I burn more calories?
The obvious answer is that even if the body does become more efficient and reduce calories burned on other things, there's an upper limit to that. The Hazda walk 14 km per day, which is only 800 calories per day. By professional athlete standards, that's a relaxing offseason level of exercise. It's plausible that your body could cut its base calorie consumption from 2000 to 1200 and stay at a stable weight while only consuming 2000 calories, but it certainly can't cut it to -500 calories and stay at a stable weight while burning 2500 a day exercising and only eating 2000.
I didn't read the article, but it may be relevant that (IIRC) swimmers lose a lot of these calories just to maintaining body temperature while in water for a significant fraction of each day (any activity that involves spending a lot of time in water may just be quantitatively abnormal?)
I think something is being lost in the reporting. The article itself mentions 2400 kcal for a 75kg woman, and then a paragraph later talks about Race across the USA runners burning 5000+ kcal.
I think the key is in this sentence: " According to Herman, humans who are more active don’t have that much higher TEE as you’d predict". ie, you have a higher Total Energy Expenditure, but it's by less than you would calculate from just adding the energy expenditure of the added exercise.
The thing is the human body is amazing at knowing how much food it needs and will persuade you over the long haul to eat enough food to balance out the extra caloric usage whether you like it or not. His point is that eating healthy is important and watching it is more important than exercise (by far)
The article mentions that but dismisses it with some hokey assertion that professional cyclists used to mainline their calories... does not touch on how elite athletes in other sports or decades get by.
It's nice when science confirms personal experience.
Early 2020 I started to change my life. Exercise, healthier food, weight control. My conclusions: I got stronger, had less back pain and less fat, felt calmer. Weight went down significantly.
After restaurants opened, I started again eating more fat and drinking more wine while continuing exercising and eating healthy at home. Strength and calm stayed, weight got up.
My conclusion: exercise is good in any aspect, but weight control also needs control of calories intake.
OK, so then, what does make people lose weight? And all those pounds come off? How do you help someone who is mildly obese go to having a bikini body?
I read you lose calories by breathing heavily, as the CO2 leaves your body, etc.
In my opinion, it's not about aerobics, but building muscle mass. Women who pack on muscle burn more calories at rest than women who don't. They may weigh the same but the fat is replaced by muscle. (Women need fat, though, so too much of this can be bad.)
I found the unquestioned valuing of weight-loss throughout the article tiresome. It also seemed to be entirely besides the point; not once did it mention any research Pontzer had done on the topic. My frustration with the article was only compounded by the repeated use of the term du jour, "inflammation". How he confidently states that exercise can reduce this nebulous phenomenon, basically without any evidence, is incredibly dangerous.
Of fine running alone might not help you to lose weight. Also there might be a feedback loop to not eat too much crap for a serious runner. E.g. running with less weight is just more fun :-) But does that mean other activities where you gain muscle mass would not help to keep your weight in an acceptable range? I could be very well the case that burn more energy because you have more muscles.
I wonder if the body is constantly hitting the upper limit of something, like temperature or kidney flow. If the parts of the human body are very elastic in their energy use, then this means we're overall maximizing energy expenditure. I guess that could make sense while there's an excess of available energy in the guts, which would otherwise go to waste.
Can't they get to the science part without dramatising the scientist. It's a long slog with tidbits thrown here and there. I hate articles like this that assume that reader is up for biography instead of the core subject. We get it. Everyone's story is unique. No need to hash all that uniqueness in every article about their work.
If your only goal is weightloss, then yes - but just weighting 50kg doesn't mean it is healthy. You can have fat at 50kg, just in the wrong places. Activity provides many positive effects, such as better immune system, better distribution of nutrients in the body etc. Trying to loose just weight without a training plan is not productive.
I've a question I've never seen addressed. It's likely that some of what you consume is actually utilized ... and that some, if it's not needed, is just 'ignored' (excreted). Oxygen needed? Very little.
Also some people can eat and eat, whatever they want, and not gain a lot of weight. Genetics has to be part of it.
Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..."
You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.?
Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science.
The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster, lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body greater burden to carry.
If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians" who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay" or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of the day and they get media exposure.
Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.
Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries.
There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and takes less time than going for a 5 mile run.
> body optimizes for energy expenditure
No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance. Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat, we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and you'll do great.
While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way to lose weight I think that you understate how many calories running burns.
When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).
Think about it this way. The rate at which you burn calories is directly proportional to the rate at which you breathe out CO2 because that what happens with carbon you burn.
So if every day you train for an hour so that your breathing is 3 times faster, then you have additional two hours of burning in a day. 23 usual hours plus one worth 3. So you have 26 instead of 24 hours in a day.
It's way easier to put 15% less on your plate every day than to intensly train for an hour each day while keeping portions the same.
You're assuming that breathing rate is proportional to CO2 breathed out, which I doubt. I barely breath any faster while running than while just sitting here, much less than 3x.
It is directly proportional because of how lungs work. The percentage of CO2 in exhaled air is roughly the same regardless of how fast you are breathing (if you don't artificially accelerate your breathing beyond what your body dictates).
Lungs can't put in more CO2 in breathed out air.
If you breath only slightly faster when you are running than when you are sitting that must mean you ran quite a lot and optimized your stride so that you don't burn much more calories running than sitting.
But more likely explanation is that you are not aware how fast exactly you are breathing when sitting and running. Try to measure it. Also take into account that you might be taking shallower breaths when you are sitting.
Just blow up a balloon when you are sitting and when you are running with your normal exhaled breath for few seconds to test it.
Yes but in numbers it is way more. If I bike for an hour I burn 700-1000kcal . Thats not 15 but 50% of the dayli calorie intake… i am no expert btw. My understanding is that the problem is more that after 20 minuts of sport, at a certain heart rate, is starting to burn fat…but not body fat. More free floating fat. And it takes one hour or so to start burning bodymass. So the fuel for one hour sport is what I ate before and not my bodyfat. Another example. I do mountaineering, mostly 1 week walking in the alps for 10h a day. Thats around 4000kcal more burned a day. And there I see instant results with all my friends coming with me . They get thin very fast. Around 500g of body mass a day :)
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.