> “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)...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
"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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
This example is kind of bad :-)
You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general.
And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting weights, your example is precisely how you <<would>> lose weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio routine.
Instead of increasing the weight, you'd increase the reps or the motion you use for lifting weights.
> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
I don't understand, your body optimizes, and uses 20% less energy. However, you are still using the 80% which is more than not doing anything at all don't you?
> Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science.
I think this is quite the claim, maybe you should provide some evidence. I think it sounds reasonable to assume that those that lack the scientific basis will use storytelling to convince, because they have nothing else. But I'm not sure about the reverse.
Here we have storytelling, but the story is peppered with some data from experiments that support the claim. So how does storytelling imply lack of evidence?
No you’re not alone in it. But yes there are plenty of us who find it a really effective way to get drawn into an article. It works for me through infectious enthusiasm. If I have a sense of a curious mind trying to figure something out, I get interested in the thing they’re trying to figure out too. Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything made me interested in tons of scientific areas I never considered interesting before, because it is all about fascinating people repeatedly failing then eventually succeeding in understanding some natural phenomenon. The human angle is the perfect gateway for me. Maybe if I had more discipline I could just force myself to start reading a dry, factual scientific article in a field of little immediate interest to me until I start to notice data points that pique my own curiosity. But it’s so much easier for me to get infected with the curiosity of some compelling character who is overflowing with it. And it sticks better in the memory.
If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.
There are different kinds of articles out there. Some are about getting the information across, some give the context and the story behind it. Some aren't even about the science at all. I wouldn't compare John McPhee to a Geology textbook. And I wouldn't say it's correct that this article was "ostensibly and nominally" about just calories. The headline is "Scientists bust myths about calories". It's about the scientists as much as it is about the calories.
Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that give context and explain not just the research but the people behind it. Let people enjoy things.
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.?
science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.
Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work?
Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling.
You are not alone. A subset of HN users have an identity marker around having a preference for "explicit material claims and nothing else for color or emotion". They then enjoy signaling this preference to their tribe in the comments. I've found it best to ignore them.
I would agree in principle, but puffed up articles rarely give you the kind of insight you are referring to.
I doubt what colour dog they had and their preference for cornflakes instead of oatmeal at buffets is going to let you enter their scientific mind as such.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I stopped reading after three sentences and couldn't find the scientific paragraph right away so I just when to the HN comment section to see if some could give me the gist of the story.
Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing
You’re not alone. This reads like one of Grandpa Simpson’s stories about onions.
I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too.
I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.
Thats generally what I do, I skip to the last paragraph, read it, and if I've missed any important context (that I care about of course), I go up one, rinse and repeat until I get the point they're making, or until I get bored and decide I can quite happily live my life without knowing the busted myths
It is a genre. You may prefer drier style. On occassion, I do as well. But sometimes I enjoy fluffy writing like this, especially in the human-contact-starved covid days.
I would say "live and let live". There is enough written content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.
It would be nice if articles actually made use of the possibilities of the Web: show me just the brief summary of what it's about, and let me click links to choose whether to read more about the science, or more about the 40 hectares of woods where the guy grew up.
This is a reason we shouldn't feel ashamed about developing a habit of skimming. In many cases it's simply a proper adaption to an incredibly low signal to noise ratio in most articles you're exposed to on the internet.
It’s maybe three paragraphs total of his life, then it’s back to the findings. I skipped those paragraphs too.
The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer’s past decade or so of work (and I do find the work to be really interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can probably try reading the original papers.
Skipped it totally. That's the part of scientific American intended for bored readers more interested in gossip. The part after it is quite cool. The conclusions are basically drawn from how much CO2 is exhaled. So the key contribution seems to be the data collection methods.
I didn't know this about myself, but apparently I feel the same because I exited there after finding out very little about the claim in the title of the article.
Yeah, this is a really strange article. It reads more like a human interest story about this one scientist's bio, with his work sprinkled in.
I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait and switch.
I'm really having a hard time reading this. They lost me even before, when they said he likes hiking and he's not fat. Good science can come from the worst people. Show me the data, no need to sell me the authors.
Verbiage is proof of work, and journalists need to make a living, just the same as planning-to-plan product managers.
You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-reading instincts.
I hate this type of journalism. Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website.
This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer. But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and hard to read.
>Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website.
It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this makes the story better...
I have always thought it pretty straight forward: you consume food and some of the carbon atoms become part of you. When you exhale, carbon atoms leave you in the form of CO2. When you exercise your breathing increases and thus you exhale slightly more carbon. You can only breathe so fast for so long.
I was wondering about this recently. My fitness tracker estimates seemed just a bit high for months now, that you'd think those extra burned calories (500-1000 per day) would result in less weight. But no, the only weight I lost was in the time periods I was actively skipping meals or snacks.
I don't even know if counting calories works. I feel that when I'm in a calorie deficit my body just gets colder which means it is burning less calories which in turn means I might not be losing any weight.
I lose weight when I exercise, but I don't burn nearly enough calories to account for the weight lost. My guess is that the exercise reduces stress which inhibits stress eating, so my intake drops.
What the article doesn't mention is that the "extra reserves" in the body, i.e., the calories that are currently used and are not burnt when exercising, must be a constant (the body can only skip burning calories that it gets) whereas exercise can be scaled.
Say you are overweight on a 3000kcal diet and start exercising. It is physically impossible to not lose weight if you exercise for more than 3000kcal. You might not lose weight if you exercise a more modest 1000kcal or even just 500 - but the statement that you cannot outrun your diet is trivially false. It might just be much harder than one might naively assume.
Man people will invent anything to avoid eating less and exercising more. Sorry professor but the human body obeys the laws of physics. Calories in, calories out.
In my experience TDEE calculators are mostly best guesses and the more expensive the bestester the guess. This is mostly showing in various age ranges and pregnancy, you can expect variance compared to what is calculated. (not sure which method was used for this study as the calculated baseline for what was their expected TDEE) The use for this with TDEE is expect variance in age ranges in the graphic, ultimately there is no way to know until you test yourself with a diet for a few weeks.
The biggest thing is showing how much mental stress plays into calorie burning, enough where an average western lifestyle can have the same calorie burned as a hunter gatherer.
> calories are obviously the measure of how much heat you get from burning something, not the heat itself that you're "burning"
I think that's exactly the point: calories can only measure how much we're burning, but what we're burning matters just as much, if not more. If your gas service was cut off, you would (I hope) not pump crude oil into your furnace instead. It might be accurate (as far as it goes) to say that a furnace is a machine for turning hydrocarbon fluids into heat, but you probably respect your furnace and its requirements too much to do something like that. Most people, including too many exercise and nutrition "experts", are all too happy to make oversimplifications nearly as silly when thinking about our own bodies.
This article really needs a TLDR. Reading it in between the cookies notice, the subscribe modal, and trying to slog through a detailed history of everything this guy has done since he was 10…
Has anyone managed to get through this who could post here: what is the conclusion about humans burning calories?
I am a scientist (biology field) and I have been exercising and playing competitive sports for more than 35 years at this point. I used to be a hard-nosed calorie counter and I got fantastic results by counting calories, which means I had visible veins in my belly area. I read Ancel Keys experiments, and I used to say that there were no fat people coming back from war back in the day: calorie reduction works.
I used intermittent fasting, high protein, low-ish carb, daily variation in calories (e.g., 4 days at 1500-1800, 3 days at 2500).
The pandemic starts, I had surgery a month before the working from home mandates, I stopped smoking (5 cigarettes a day, we know they tend to suppress appetite, but it not like meth, there are plenty of fat smokers) and I quickly, say in two months, put on around 10 kg (90 to 100 kg+), and for the first time since I was an early teenager, I had a belly.
I was exercising less, not counting calories at all, I was not spending calories going outside (work, errands, nights out all got cancelled), and I was hungry all the time despite eating more than usual. All factors that can explain my weight gain.
This unfortunate situation goes on for one year more or less, then I started losing some weight by simply eating less and going out more, at least that was my explanation. But I noticed a visible change in body shape and composition after a two-week vacation in which my diet was McDonald's at nights and a huge breakfast in the morning with all calorie-dense food, basically.
Fast forward a few months, some improvement here and there, but I am still not at my pre-pandemic fitness level, still a bit fat, muscles not as visible as I like.
I then go to NYC for a couple of weeks and my diet is McDonald's, ice cream and nothing of the healthy sort. Sure, humidity, heat, walking much more, they can all contribute to non-trivial increase in energy expenditure. But I come back looking like a million bucks, pre-pandemic fitness level if not better.
I keep in shape, then I get covid and I pretty quickly put some weight on (again...), say 5-10 pounds (sure, these swings are also water stored in glycogen, some of the weight quickly gained also goes away pretty quickly). I then go on a long-weekend vacation, walk much more than usual but no exercise (gym, running, combat sports), eat and drink more than usual, and, again, I observe a visible change in my body composition. I am leaner, I lost weight, I see (some) abs.
Someone could say, you are simply exercising more via walking and other non-exercise related energy expenditure, and MCDonald's two times a day can be at < 2k calories, which is plenty deficit for my body to lose weight. But as someone who has been tracking calories for a long time and has exercised for decades, I don't think it explains what I am seeing.
I have problems now accepting that our metabolism and our physiology is not a lot more malleable than I (and science) thought it was. I now start to believe that our "state of mind" (conscious or unconscious) can have a much bigger effect on our physiology, including metabolism, than expected according to "settled science". I am talking about our "mind" perceiving a new state of world (vacation for example) and very quickly adapting to the new perceived "stress" by changing my physiology, it could be different nutrient partitioning (decrease insulin resistance?) or simply higher metabolic rate.
Or it could be the opposite, such as perceived "normal life" as stressful thus increasing, say, insulin resistance, and vacation as "relaxed mode", decreasing cortisol and insulin resistance etc.
We all know we can "think" ourselves sick, but we "think" ourselves leaner?
Our bodies self-correct to maintain a constant calorie expenditure. Marathoners and lean-mean bush people were found to burn as many calories daily as a middle aged woman from Chicago. Takeaway: eat less if you want to lose weight.
> “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)...
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And yet the article you're commenting on says that you don't burn more calories by exercising... If it is true, it definitely changes the narrative.
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What the heck kind of "snack" is 1000 kcal?
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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.
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> the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000
I believe you meant kilocalories
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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> 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)
> a terrible strategy
It may be less effective for losing weight, but exercise, including and especially cardio, is a great and essential strategy for other health reasons.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> exercise suppresses my appetite to some extent
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.
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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.
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>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.
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But what if I like pizza?
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.
The real takeaway is that there are no absolutes.
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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 :)
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
> My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle
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.
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What kinds of things do you do to make your entire day active?
As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.
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How is sugar and processed/empty calories a "western" thing? What do you mean by "west"?
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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.
> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate
The wild thing is he’s saying that’s not true either. He’s saying you never burned the extra calories in the first place.
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.
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Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. That is literally the thesis here, that calorie expenditure is essentially decoupled from exercise.
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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.
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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.
I’ve done it before too but if you get an injury it gets bad quick.
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.
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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.
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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.
Not sure what was your starting weight. But 5 kg is within the realm of normal weight fluctuations over a week for an average American.
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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.
This would be nice if 1hr+ a day would not be 5% of your conscious life.
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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.
> You actually should eat more
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. :)
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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"
Counting and estimating calories is a skill that should be taught in schools.
The public health benefits are unparalleled.
> losing weight happens by eating less
To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation.
Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
- Calories over TDEE: You gain weight
- Calories under TDEE: You lose weight
It's that simple
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?
https://www.noom.com/
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.
> exercise=shape
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.
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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".
Everybody is 100% responsible for what they eat. There is no excuse.
> losing weight happens by eating less
If your BMR is say... 1,800 calories a day and you exercise 300 calories worth... do you just get 300 calories hungrier to offset the exercise?
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.
Yeah. A single snickers is over 200 calories. That's 30 minutes of running.
Eating is incredibly efficient.
OMAD works wonders. First three days are brutal, and then you get used to it.
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.
Thank you for the TL;DR! I started this extraordinary life history article and after the first "n" paragraphs I forgot why I was reading it ...
The conclusion is almost certainly wrong:
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.
3. Finally, this blog post dives into some methodological issues: https://darrendahly.github.io/post/2012-08-31-hunter-gathere...
EDIT: Increased metabolism due to muscle mass is not as big an effect as you’d think: https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
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.
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> 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.
> strenuous mental activities can burn a great deal more energy in humans
Could be the body stress response associated with doing those activities
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.
Suddenly it does not look so hopeless.
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.
I think the debate has been settled a long time ago:
https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257
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.
About Phelps - he need to build, maintain and condition a whole lot of muscle mass.
He’s incredibly far from a normal human - he’s a true specialist.
Lots more energy goes in to that, compared to losing excess fat and living a “normal” human hunter gatherer existence.
The whole system change once you go google scale, so to speak, and phelps is gmail.
In the words of Ido Portal: we’re human first, movers second and specialists last.
I see relevance in this research in the human/mover perspective.
> 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.
True, but the effect is not as big as you would think, see eg: https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
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.
Irony.
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.
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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.
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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.
Much better, eh?
The military has no interest in figuring out how the body expends energy?
This. And it is brutal. It’s truly amazing how many Michael Phelps or “when I was twenty” responses there are.
> 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.
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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.
A lot of an initial 10 pounds of weight loss can be dehydration and less food in the process of digestion.
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Seems early to start the thru hike. How many people are on the trail?
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> 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.
If storing fat burned calories, it would make for a pretty poor way to store calories...
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> 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.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/marathon-running-and-...
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.
They could just be shitting out the excess calories, and the article directly says,
"Elite athletes can push the limits for several months, as the study of marathoners showed, but can’t sustain it indefinitely, Pontzer says."
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.
Napkin math: 20,000 calories is 36 Big Mac burgers
In vegetable oil it would be about 4.8lbs of oil - that’s probably not at all plausible for digestion or bowel control
The thing is, exercise still reduces appetite.
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.
> The thing is, exercise still reduces appetite.
Not for me. I work out about 3 times a week, never felt like my appetite got smaller on workout days.
Intermittent fasting is nice however. There are pangs of hunger occasionally, but if I power through them, they go away after 1 hour usually.
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!
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/news/...
>exercise still reduces appetite
This was one of the big surprises for me. When I'm exercising regularly, food tastes better, and yet I'm satisfied with less of it.
"Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule deficit equals starvation."
I practice intermittent fasting a lot and I cannot say that it affects my mood negatively. But I was very grumpy when I ate "five small meals a day".
It seems that the digestive system is more OK with being totally empty than being just half full all the time.
> exercise still reduces appetite
Please be careful generalizing anectodal facts. Lots of people, me included, have otherwise experience.
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.
Fasting isn’t a mood killer, it actually has the opposite effect. IF gives me an energy boost and associated euphoria.
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.
What is your IF schedule like? Can you expand on the euphoria?
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"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.
But you’re definitely right! There’s a great Mr. Wizard-style TEDx video about it: https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE
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.
That’s correct. I used a lowercase “c” for (kilo)calorie to highlight that explicitly, but capital “C” elsewhere.
The article proposes stress and inflammation.
The obvious follow up I was expecting that wasn’t in the article was “do people who exercise have less stress response to stimuli?”.
They talk about a “caloric balance sheet” so this makes sense to me.
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!
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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.
I always wonder how much of what we consume is actually absorbed, specially when factoring gut microbiome and non-soluble fibers.
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.
I think it was someone in an HN comment who put it best:
> exercise determines shape, diet determines size
Another formulation that I like:
Exercise to build muscle, eat to lose fat
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.
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> 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.
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exercise without diet is still good for your health even if it doesn't lead to lower weight
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.
Maybe I'm way off base.
> 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.
Example data from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...
Weightlifting is great but it’s not better for burning calories. It’s much better for retaining muscle while dieting, though.
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.
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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.
Maybe by "fixed budget", he actually means "fixed budget per kilogram".
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).
It is not a waste. The benefit of being active by using that treadmill is huge in many ways not limited to just weight loss.
> 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.
This video of Dr. Sarah Hallberg explains this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ
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.
You need strength and a sedentary lifestyle robs you of necessary strength. The treadmill is a great idea.
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.
Were you trolling me with delicious cannelloni there? :)
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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 feel like this is already known?
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.".
> Eating candy to account for the energy expenditure of the mentally taxing game
That reminds me of someone who made a fanny-pack that tracks your walk/run progress and dispenses M&Ms.
https://hackaday.com/2021/07/30/step-n-snack-fanny-pack-moti...
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.
Pontzer was the guest on one of my favorite podcasts last summer. Great discussion with him: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/examining-energy-evoluti...
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.
On the matter of food and weight...
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.
“Pontzer is happy to expound on weight loss on The Dr. Oz Show…”
And I’m happy to stop reading the article right here and ignore everything this quack has to say.
Is there a browser extension that removes all of the fluff and narration from what attempts to be a scientific article?
"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.
I got curious and did a bunch of research.
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.
> when adjusted for nonfat body mass
> when adjusted for fat-free body mass
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 lose fat, the biochemistry requires conversion of long chain hydrocarbons (fats) to carbon dioxide and water. For a good explanation see:
https://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/where-does-fat-go/11015048
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.
Has anyone considered that every N years a scientific “discovery”in a given field invalidates a previous one?
Commonly in more theoretical sciences like nutritional science, psychology, and astrophysics?
In other words, is anything really truly reliable in these domains?
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.
This is precisely how science works…
Check out “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn when you get the chance.
For years I've heard Gym buffs say
'fitness starts in the gym, weightloss in the kitchen'
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.
The version I've heard is simply "abs are made in the kitchen."
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.
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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.
> What's so controversial about it?
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.
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> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
This example is kind of bad :-)
You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general.
And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting weights, your example is precisely how you <<would>> lose weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio routine.
Instead of increasing the weight, you'd increase the reps or the motion you use for lifting weights.
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> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
I don't understand, your body optimizes, and uses 20% less energy. However, you are still using the 80% which is more than not doing anything at all don't you?
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> Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science.
I think this is quite the claim, maybe you should provide some evidence. I think it sounds reasonable to assume that those that lack the scientific basis will use storytelling to convince, because they have nothing else. But I'm not sure about the reverse.
Here we have storytelling, but the story is peppered with some data from experiments that support the claim. So how does storytelling imply lack of evidence?
No you’re not alone in it. But yes there are plenty of us who find it a really effective way to get drawn into an article. It works for me through infectious enthusiasm. If I have a sense of a curious mind trying to figure something out, I get interested in the thing they’re trying to figure out too. Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything made me interested in tons of scientific areas I never considered interesting before, because it is all about fascinating people repeatedly failing then eventually succeeding in understanding some natural phenomenon. The human angle is the perfect gateway for me. Maybe if I had more discipline I could just force myself to start reading a dry, factual scientific article in a field of little immediate interest to me until I start to notice data points that pique my own curiosity. But it’s so much easier for me to get infected with the curiosity of some compelling character who is overflowing with it. And it sticks better in the memory.
If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.
> Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything
I have read that book multiple times, first when I was 10. It left a huge impression on me. I heartily recommend it.
Bill Bryson in general is a great author. One of my favorites.
There are different kinds of articles out there. Some are about getting the information across, some give the context and the story behind it. Some aren't even about the science at all. I wouldn't compare John McPhee to a Geology textbook. And I wouldn't say it's correct that this article was "ostensibly and nominally" about just calories. The headline is "Scientists bust myths about calories". It's about the scientists as much as it is about the calories.
Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that give context and explain not just the research but the people behind it. Let people enjoy things.
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.?
science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.
Actually, both Nature and Science call themselves 'magazines', and they have plenty of pop-science-compatible content, mixed with primary literature.
Arxiv needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because much of the content is not peer-reviewed.
Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work?
Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling.
"Look how bad I am at reading people."
"I'm worse than you at..."
"I'm so bad that..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
> Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
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You are not alone. A subset of HN users have an identity marker around having a preference for "explicit material claims and nothing else for color or emotion". They then enjoy signaling this preference to their tribe in the comments. I've found it best to ignore them.
I would agree in principle, but puffed up articles rarely give you the kind of insight you are referring to.
I doubt what colour dog they had and their preference for cornflakes instead of oatmeal at buffets is going to let you enter their scientific mind as such.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I stopped reading after three sentences and couldn't find the scientific paragraph right away so I just when to the HN comment section to see if some could give me the gist of the story.
Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing
I think they're written this way for seo optimisation.
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You’re not alone. This reads like one of Grandpa Simpson’s stories about onions.
I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too.
I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.
Thats generally what I do, I skip to the last paragraph, read it, and if I've missed any important context (that I care about of course), I go up one, rinse and repeat until I get the point they're making, or until I get bored and decide I can quite happily live my life without knowing the busted myths
It is a genre. You may prefer drier style. On occassion, I do as well. But sometimes I enjoy fluffy writing like this, especially in the human-contact-starved covid days.
I would say "live and let live". There is enough written content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.
Right? Can someone just list the myths and their refutations so I can move on with my life?
It would be nice if articles actually made use of the possibilities of the Web: show me just the brief summary of what it's about, and let me click links to choose whether to read more about the science, or more about the 40 hectares of woods where the guy grew up.
You could go to the primary literature and read the abstracts.
This is a reason we shouldn't feel ashamed about developing a habit of skimming. In many cases it's simply a proper adaption to an incredibly low signal to noise ratio in most articles you're exposed to on the internet.
Props to this.
I have developed a habit of skipping to the end of the whole page, and reading towards the beginning, paragraph-by-paragraph. Works..sometimes :D
Paste bin copy with most of the fluff paragraphs removed: https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN
It’s maybe three paragraphs total of his life, then it’s back to the findings. I skipped those paragraphs too.
The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer’s past decade or so of work (and I do find the work to be really interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can probably try reading the original papers.
Skipped it totally. That's the part of scientific American intended for bored readers more interested in gossip. The part after it is quite cool. The conclusions are basically drawn from how much CO2 is exhaled. So the key contribution seems to be the data collection methods.
It's apparently the canonical way all long story/articles have to be written. It's as if those people wanted to be authors instead of journalists...
I didn't know this about myself, but apparently I feel the same because I exited there after finding out very little about the claim in the title of the article.
Could machine learning could help with this? Could some algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles just leaving the useful stuff?
Yes. See https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc... for example.
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I would expect machine learning to be more useful in generating this kind of fluff.
Seems like a lot of work (and a lot of time to get working reliably) for a relatively minor issue that can be mostly fixed by skim reading
No.
If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.
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Yeah, this is a really strange article. It reads more like a human interest story about this one scientist's bio, with his work sprinkled in.
I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait and switch.
Indeed I find a lot of NYtimes articles are filled with fluff like this and I find myself skipping to the core info.
Yes there is a name i think for that rambling on with insignificant details about the person
At best it should be seen as a warning for possible biases in the science due to the person's background or upbringing, or random life anecdote.
I'm really having a hard time reading this. They lost me even before, when they said he likes hiking and he's not fat. Good science can come from the worst people. Show me the data, no need to sell me the authors.
I hate that, and I usually just skip that part. No point fighting it, I guess.
I had a very similar outburst recently :p
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344510
You could read his papers if you're only interested in the science?
I just skipped over that part...
Verbiage is proof of work, and journalists need to make a living, just the same as planning-to-plan product managers.
You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-reading instincts.
I hate this type of journalism. Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website.
This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer. But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and hard to read.
>Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website.
It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this makes the story better...
What is happening here? I've measured for a fact with myself where I eat more and workout more and lose weight.
I have always thought it pretty straight forward: you consume food and some of the carbon atoms become part of you. When you exhale, carbon atoms leave you in the form of CO2. When you exercise your breathing increases and thus you exhale slightly more carbon. You can only breathe so fast for so long.
I was wondering about this recently. My fitness tracker estimates seemed just a bit high for months now, that you'd think those extra burned calories (500-1000 per day) would result in less weight. But no, the only weight I lost was in the time periods I was actively skipping meals or snacks.
I couldn't finish the article due to the excessive fluff! Reading the comments, I'm glad I wasn't the only one.
How about summarizing the main points at the top for those who are interested in real information instead of the height and weight of the scientist?
If this is true, how does Michael Phelps have a six pack with a 10,000 calorie a day habit?
There is a new book about it called: Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy
The only way is to eat less.and to eat less we need to eat less manufactured food designed to be addictive
I don't even know if counting calories works. I feel that when I'm in a calorie deficit my body just gets colder which means it is burning less calories which in turn means I might not be losing any weight.
I lose weight when I exercise, but I don't burn nearly enough calories to account for the weight lost. My guess is that the exercise reduces stress which inhibits stress eating, so my intake drops.
What the article doesn't mention is that the "extra reserves" in the body, i.e., the calories that are currently used and are not burnt when exercising, must be a constant (the body can only skip burning calories that it gets) whereas exercise can be scaled.
Say you are overweight on a 3000kcal diet and start exercising. It is physically impossible to not lose weight if you exercise for more than 3000kcal. You might not lose weight if you exercise a more modest 1000kcal or even just 500 - but the statement that you cannot outrun your diet is trivially false. It might just be much harder than one might naively assume.
Man people will invent anything to avoid eating less and exercising more. Sorry professor but the human body obeys the laws of physics. Calories in, calories out.
Why do swimmers eat 8 meals a day without gaining weight ?
We should be glad the human body is this efficient and that we can reduce the resources we consume instead of finding ways to pander to our gluttony.
I wonder: Does this research mean that current TDEE calculators are incorrect? Or is the research more about how those numbers are correct?
In my experience TDEE calculators are mostly best guesses and the more expensive the bestester the guess. This is mostly showing in various age ranges and pregnancy, you can expect variance compared to what is calculated. (not sure which method was used for this study as the calculated baseline for what was their expected TDEE) The use for this with TDEE is expect variance in age ranges in the graphic, ultimately there is no way to know until you test yourself with a diet for a few weeks.
The biggest thing is showing how much mental stress plays into calorie burning, enough where an average western lifestyle can have the same calorie burned as a hunter gatherer.
Why does article call hydrogen and oxygen isotopes harmless to human body? Is there a sound science behind the claim?
"You can't burn calories. Calories is a measure of heat. You can't burn heat." - Bart Kay
CICO, Calories in/Calories out also doesn't work like that in the human body, because the human body is not a closed system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crA0MLKleBQ
In that case, explain to me how my house gets warm from burning caloric gas
... calories are obviously the measure of how much heat you get from burning something, not the heat itself that you're "burning"
> calories are obviously the measure of how much heat you get from burning something, not the heat itself that you're "burning"
I think that's exactly the point: calories can only measure how much we're burning, but what we're burning matters just as much, if not more. If your gas service was cut off, you would (I hope) not pump crude oil into your furnace instead. It might be accurate (as far as it goes) to say that a furnace is a machine for turning hydrocarbon fluids into heat, but you probably respect your furnace and its requirements too much to do something like that. Most people, including too many exercise and nutrition "experts", are all too happy to make oversimplifications nearly as silly when thinking about our own bodies.
But will keeping a fast metabolism due to exercise ultimately shorten our lifespan?
I read somewhere that the only way we lose weight is by exhaling.
it’s not complicated : eat less walk more . increase both until you see a change . and stop the obsession with food it’s not healthy
no phD needed
Hunger complicates it.
Wow, this is a milestone indeed.
Abstract bullshit considered as an overturn of a simple experimental evidence even a freshman could set up and measure.
This article really needs a TLDR. Reading it in between the cookies notice, the subscribe modal, and trying to slog through a detailed history of everything this guy has done since he was 10…
Has anyone managed to get through this who could post here: what is the conclusion about humans burning calories?
Can someone tldr? I read several paragraphs and know so much about this scientist but so little about the myths he's supposed to bust.
I am a scientist (biology field) and I have been exercising and playing competitive sports for more than 35 years at this point. I used to be a hard-nosed calorie counter and I got fantastic results by counting calories, which means I had visible veins in my belly area. I read Ancel Keys experiments, and I used to say that there were no fat people coming back from war back in the day: calorie reduction works. I used intermittent fasting, high protein, low-ish carb, daily variation in calories (e.g., 4 days at 1500-1800, 3 days at 2500).
The pandemic starts, I had surgery a month before the working from home mandates, I stopped smoking (5 cigarettes a day, we know they tend to suppress appetite, but it not like meth, there are plenty of fat smokers) and I quickly, say in two months, put on around 10 kg (90 to 100 kg+), and for the first time since I was an early teenager, I had a belly.
I was exercising less, not counting calories at all, I was not spending calories going outside (work, errands, nights out all got cancelled), and I was hungry all the time despite eating more than usual. All factors that can explain my weight gain.
This unfortunate situation goes on for one year more or less, then I started losing some weight by simply eating less and going out more, at least that was my explanation. But I noticed a visible change in body shape and composition after a two-week vacation in which my diet was McDonald's at nights and a huge breakfast in the morning with all calorie-dense food, basically.
Fast forward a few months, some improvement here and there, but I am still not at my pre-pandemic fitness level, still a bit fat, muscles not as visible as I like. I then go to NYC for a couple of weeks and my diet is McDonald's, ice cream and nothing of the healthy sort. Sure, humidity, heat, walking much more, they can all contribute to non-trivial increase in energy expenditure. But I come back looking like a million bucks, pre-pandemic fitness level if not better.
I keep in shape, then I get covid and I pretty quickly put some weight on (again...), say 5-10 pounds (sure, these swings are also water stored in glycogen, some of the weight quickly gained also goes away pretty quickly). I then go on a long-weekend vacation, walk much more than usual but no exercise (gym, running, combat sports), eat and drink more than usual, and, again, I observe a visible change in my body composition. I am leaner, I lost weight, I see (some) abs.
Someone could say, you are simply exercising more via walking and other non-exercise related energy expenditure, and MCDonald's two times a day can be at < 2k calories, which is plenty deficit for my body to lose weight. But as someone who has been tracking calories for a long time and has exercised for decades, I don't think it explains what I am seeing.
I have problems now accepting that our metabolism and our physiology is not a lot more malleable than I (and science) thought it was. I now start to believe that our "state of mind" (conscious or unconscious) can have a much bigger effect on our physiology, including metabolism, than expected according to "settled science". I am talking about our "mind" perceiving a new state of world (vacation for example) and very quickly adapting to the new perceived "stress" by changing my physiology, it could be different nutrient partitioning (decrease insulin resistance?) or simply higher metabolic rate. Or it could be the opposite, such as perceived "normal life" as stressful thus increasing, say, insulin resistance, and vacation as "relaxed mode", decreasing cortisol and insulin resistance etc. We all know we can "think" ourselves sick, but we "think" ourselves leaner?
seo.org
Is there a tldr on the research that doesn’t involve his life story or what his coworkers think of him?
You could read one of the book reviews: https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-bus...
Still not great as a tl;dr though.
Maybe the book summary on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Research-Really-Calories-Healthy...
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tldr tl;dr
Our bodies self-correct to maintain a constant calorie expenditure. Marathoners and lean-mean bush people were found to burn as many calories daily as a middle aged woman from Chicago. Takeaway: eat less if you want to lose weight.
When I want to lose weight I do this one simple thing ... I stop eating as much.
Fasting really isn't all that difficult once you train your brain around it.
You simply can't gain weight if you are consuming less. You don't need a triple PhD to understand the law of conservation of mass.
If you want to read something fairly extreme I suggest the following.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/
Now this isn't a guide on how to lose weight, but it should give everyone some insight into what the human metabolism is capable of.