Comment by dahart
3 years ago
> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference.
Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.
I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
Congratulations! I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is. And it's also depressing if I look at the graph that some 40 to 50 year olds seem to still have the metabolism of a toddler - I'm definitely not one of those! OTOH, you can feel superior by thinking these people would be in big trouble if there was a famine, but that's (fortunately) not the world we live in (although it's pretty fucked up if you consider that we are complaining about these first world problems while in other countries people are starving)...
My advise: (as someone who does a lot of working out and calorie control)
Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home.
Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is
(The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)
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> I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is.
Had the same problem. Then switched to intermittent fasting. First two months, nothing happened. Then within a month dropped 10 kg, which got me back to my pre-covid weight. I'm doing 8/16 IF by the way, and eating more than I did before, so I think the CICO theory is stupid :)
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An important thing to keep in mind is that a substantial amount of calories can be burned outside of formal exercise. Incorporating more walking into your day, general activities that involve movement rather than sitting at a desk, etc
I've struggled with this a lot over the past 10 years. I was 60lbs (27kg) over my weight from leaving university 25 years earlier, I sit a lot, and am late forties. The last few years have been harder, and I've been bouncing between a small range, and couldn't 'break out'.
Others have suggested 'writing it down' - not going to argue with that. I don't 'write down' every food I eat, but I do make mental notes every day. What's helped me more though...
2 years ago I bought a fitbit - basic model, nothing fancy, but got serious about tracking my movements. It helped create some easier external documentation about what I was doing. I then moved to an Apple Watch last May, and have been following the '3 circles'. It gave me a target 'move X calories per day' target, do X minutes of 'exercise' every day (exercise seemingly defined as 'get your heart rate above Xbpm').
I've hit those targets ALMOST every day (I missed one calorie target 1 day by 13!). I'm on day ... 206 of my movement streak.
For me, the visual reminders on my wrist help keep me motivated/focused. I 'compete' against a couple of friends with the watch now and then, but just being connected and getting a thumbs up from a friend now and then is motivating.
As others said, track weight daily - I track morning and night. I put it in my iphone. I look at the graphs. I see the downward trend. THIS HELPS A LOT when it bounces back up a bit now and then. I'm up ... around 1.5 lbs from earlier this week. JUST seeing that uptick used to demotivate me. But looking at the downward trend of the last 7 months, I can see the larger direction is down, and I don't stress as much about small upticks. I'm down 25lbs (11kg) from last June, and at this pace will probably be down another 15 or so by this year.
I used to go to a gym, but ... it's a 'process'. I now often just go outside and jog around. There's a run club once per week, and weather permitting, I'll do it, but... I hit those targets every day. Even if it's just running in place, or getting on an exercise bike, or jumping rope. I tell myself "every little bit helps", and tracking every one of those 'little bits' has been the motivating factor for me. May be different for others, but keep going till you find something that works for you.
Took me years to find some 'thing' that clicked for me, but I'm closing in on one year of losing weight based on 'more movement' and 'fewer snacks' and 'better eating'. But it took weeks before there was a trendline to see a downward line.
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.
I'm a bit confused by this point in the article, because it also states:
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Given that "regular" people clearly do not burn 4650 calories per day, and it is possible to burn 4650 calories per day, there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure. I'm guessing it just doesn't happen for regular doses of exercise (including, evidently, walking 14km per day).
Perhaps the body down regulates calorie-consuming processes to a point where it's just the bare minimum, and calorie expenditure increases from there. Or perhaps we should take the opposite view and say that our bodies up regulate unwanted processes (like inflammation) to use the energy of an engine designed to keep running at a certain level?
Either way I find this incredibly interesting. And either way I'm probably also going to keep stuffing my face on a day I run 30km :).
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The article says you can't keep unhealthy diet and get fit just by exercising. Which is true in my experience as well - I was eating over 3000 kcal a day before I started counting calories, and if I haven't reduced that - no reasonable amount of exercise would have helped.
What's tricky is that in early 20s I was eating about as much and it was fine.
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You’re reading that wrong. Of course you burn more calories through exercise. Michael Phelps couldn’t have eaten 12k cals a day if exercise didn’t burn calories.
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Anecdotally, this has been my experience as well. I tend to think of my base metabolic rate as the integral over my physical activity over the last N years (it used to be N=5, but even that window is way too small I think now). Point being, you can be inactive for a long time without a meaningful change in body fat/weight, but eventually your body adjusts. Or rather, the first gain in body fat is offset by the loss of muscle weight. Once you're at a slower metabolic rate and less muscle, exercise becomes more difficult and it takes years of consistent activity to raise your metabolic rate again.
I'm not sure how base metabolic rate relates to incidental energy expenditure. My gut feeling is that every body has its own limits on energy expenditure, and max TDEE doesn't need to correlate directly with base metabolic rate. That's why I mentioned the integral above. I tend to think of $TDEE_{max} \simeq MBR_{base} + E_{available}$ but $MBR_{base} \simeq \int_{t=-5}^0 TEE(t)$ -- and in my experience, weight loss correlates more with base metabolic rate than with caloric intake ($E_{available}$).
What the heck kind of "snack" is 1000 kcal?
A single cinnamon roll is nearly 500 calories. As soon as you’re combining fat and sugar things skyrocket
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Cinnabon comes to mind
In my case 2 buns with garlic butter. But any pastries will do.
a slightly-larger-than-normal slice of pecan pie will easily get to 1000kcal. a la mode and you don't even need a normal sized slice.
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.
Standing still in -10C/-20C is pretty uncomfortable, but walking is perfectly fine and you even get hot after a while. So I'm not sure this is true.
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> the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000
I believe you meant kilocalories
In the context of nutrition the word calories always means dietary calories, so the kilo- prefix is redundant unless discussing physics, or commenting on HN...Ooooh, ok.
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Can you show me a representative sample of places where English speakers refer to [unit of energy] burned by exercise and mean anything else other than kilocalories while saying anything else other than calories?
No, you can't, you're showing hypercorrection and lack of fluency.
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Yes, sorry. kcal not cal.
I think a big part of the issue is that popular fitness and weight loss advice has perpetuated the wrong way to exercise to loose weight. When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat, and a high calorie burn number. While the short term results may seem great based on the immediate calories burned, it's actually a terrible strategy for several reasons.
1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate.
2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate.
4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate.
A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate.
Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.
> 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.
I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.
I know this isn't rigorous but it definitely matches up with my personal experience -- I'll be hungrier, often ravenously so, after strenuous activity.
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I have a bias towards the idea that we are very different, and it really depends on many unknown factors that apply only to one specific individual.
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I know, anecdata, but on my off dates (I go swimming in the early morning three days a week) I have to fight not eating breakfast early and then needing lunch and dinner in the evening.
On my swim-days I have no problem with a late breakfast leading me to be able to skip lunch and enjoy my dinner.
But I have no other insight as my own experience.
It has a lot of backing when you look at people changing jobs without gaining or losing weight. We think of exercise in terms of X minutes on a treadmill, but people working long days of physical labor can more than double their daily caloric needs and will eat accordingly without prompting.
There where plenty of old jokes about lumberjack breakfasts and people eating skills tall stacks of pancakes. These guys weren’t trying to gain or lose weight just keep going for another day of hard labor, but when you start talking 6-8,000 calories per day it’s an insane amount of food.
Also, some of the feedback mechanisms involved are quiet slow and can take weeks to kick in. Your body doesn’t need to balance things every day as gaining or losing significant weight takes time.
Also anecdotal, but I’m not an athlete (like, the inverse of an athlete, I’m overweight and don’t move enough) and moderate exercising does, in my case, suppress some appetite. I eat les after exercising.
My 2 cents theory is that it suppress the "stress induced" appetite.
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If you are low on sugar (therefore hungry) for a while, your body will start burning fat (lipolysis) to restore sugar levels. This will suppress apetite.
It's easy to experience, although it can take longer for lipolysis to start if you're not used to. Of course, eating sugar during or before exercise delays it.
Some levels, yes, appetite-suppressing. When appetite returns, it can be with a vengeance.
I think it depends heavily on what you do. When you run, you tend to eat less, me definitely. When you weight lift, do body weight exercises, do anything that builds muscle, you need to eat. Personally I get more hungry about HIIT too.
And that additional eating is not a bad thing either. It is body needing supply to build muscles. For most beginners, that is a good thing.
Yeah, this is me. I naturally eat a lot less when I am exercising than when I am not. I'll often exercise in the morning and then have no desire to eat until dinner time.
If you fall into a routine CICO isn't that difficult in practice. First, while sleep/stress definitely impact the equation unless you are at an unusual life crisis, the ups and downs mostly balance out over time. Second, I don't recommend counting calories, at least not in the traditional way.
Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.
NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.
Based on your description, I will venture a guess that you are not obese / grossly overweight. There is good evidence from various studies that obese/overweight people are not typically able to achieve this - usually their craving for food is far too powerful to just control simply by falling into a routine; or, the body sometimes finds other ways to adjust (the lipostat model).
This is really the problem with CICO - it is definitely correct in an abstract sense (weight doesn't come from thin air, and neither does food you eat magically disappear), but the factors controlling calories in and calories out are far more complex. Human behavior is far from being entirely rationally determined. Our choices (particularly in regards to food, exercise, and other basic needs) are to a great extent controlled by our metabolism, even though it often doesn't seem that way.
This probably explains why people rarely lose weight on the long term - you can allow yourself to be forced to eat less than your body thinks it needs for a while, and obviously you'll lose weight; but you will go right back up to your "normal" weight as soon as the forcing stops (program ends, willpower exhausted etc).
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I have also done almost exactly this process, and it worked for years to regulate my weight. But then I hit a plateau (a high plateau, not a low one) where I was unable to drop weight no matter how low I cut my calories. I started at a range that I knew had worked in the past, and lowered it over the course of weeks, well past the point where I was miserable. I even tried more complicated things, like varying my intake, doing on weeks and off weeks, etc. Nothing worked.
I wasn't sure what was causing it, so I hypothesized that I was low on muscle mass, and took up weight training. Then I gained ten pounds.
I'm not sure what the upshot is here, but my guess is that this approach indiscriminately consumes lean muscle mass if you don't pair it with muscle-building exercises.
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> Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat
I appreciate you are trying to be helpful. But most of what you said assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have. People working long hour jobs, or double jobs, or balancing kids/parent responsibilities. Often fast food is the only obvious option, and people aren't buying it until well into the throws of a low blood sugar event.
This coupled with metabolic/genetic differences can really muck up any given diet. What works of you doesn't just not work for everyone, it isn't even possible for everyone to follow.
That said, I know you are being helpful - my words or more to help those that might read them and be saying: "I did all that and it didn't work!"
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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.
Yeah, that's a very good point. This is kinda getting off into the weeds from the original point, but interesting weeds nonetheless :).
This study[0] says that measuring CO2 is not enough, and that indirect calorimetry is the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure (EE).
"Calculated EE based on CO2 measurement was not sufficiently accurate to consider the results as an alternative to measured EE by indirect calorimetry. Therefore, EE measured by indirect calorimetry remains as the gold standard to guide nutrition therapy."
Google says "Indirect calorimetry is the method by which measurements of respiratory gas exchange (oxygen consumption, V O 2 and carbon dioxide production, V CO 2 ) are used to estimate the type and amount of substrate oxidized and the amount of energy produced by biological oxidation."
So getting back to your point, if bacteria are feasting on part of the calories and producing CO2, it seems that it would throw off the results even using indirect calorimetry. At that point though are we kinda arguing semantics? While our microbiome isn't composed of human cells, you can still argue it's a part of our functioning organism. It seems it would be nearly impossible to measure human digested calories vs bacteria digested calories, so maybe the results are close enough. Also, many beneficial bacteria release calories that we can consume, like butyric acid, which further complicates things.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5251283/
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>"oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"?
That would still be part of calories in.
> 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.
The change in metabolic rate is a homeostatic adaptation of the body due to increased energy expenditure due to exercise. You can measure it in a metabolic chamber, and 200-300 calories per day during rest time is not unusual for male athletes.
I don't know if I can accept that offhand because high levels of muscle atrophy is a human adapted trait specifically to save calories for the brain. If muscle maintenance costs were so insignificant why would we have adapted a trait to make us physically weaker?
This is anecdotal but the difference between what I can eat working on a farm with having lots of muscle mass and sitting around on a computer with that same muscle mass was not really significant. But the difference between sitting at a desk with a lot of muscle mass and sitting at a desk with noticeably less muscle mass is night and day in how much I have to eat. With small and inconsistent amounts of strength exercise to maintain a bit more muscle mass again, my caloric expenditure went back up, far beyond what is lost from the exercise itself.
Some very bold claims, would love some citations to give them more credibility.
HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.
Meh idk. Look at any long distance runners. They are skinny. Based on my own ancedotal evidence when I am running often I tend to be 20lbs less than when I don't.
You have a few correct points but are mostly spreading misinformation. Repeated exercise will only improve efficiency by a few percent at most, and then only for certain activities. For cycling, efficiency hardly improves at all. The calories shown on gym equipment are often nonsense but the latest generation of fitness trackers are reasonably accurate and can be worn 24/7.
You have to get into really long cardio sessions with no carbohydrate supplements before that has any significant catabolic effect. This is not a concern for casual athletes.
Strength training is great, but it should be combined with some form of cardio in a comprehensive fitness program.
> latest generation of fitness trackers are reasonably accurate and can be worn 24/7.
I've heard claims of 30% inaccuracy. Not sure if that applies to the absolute latest generation but I'd be happy to know if my understanding is outdated
It's definitely true that eating less/healthier is the most important part of weight loss. However, perhaps because exercise played a big role in my own weight loss journey, I do feel like people go too far in dismissing it as a weight loss aid.
First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.
There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.
Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
My own anecdote: I've been a cyclist and/or a runner pretty consistently for the last 20 years. This year I moved to a place where cycling wasn't an option (without driving a long way), and at the same time I injured my knee by overtraining on hills. So I was benched from my typical cardio.
The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.
Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
The article seems to indicate that, counterintuitively, your Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) wouldn't have changed much after you stopped the regular cycling (see the section about how hunter gatherers walking 8-14 km a day had the same TEE as average US), so your weight gain may have been from second-order effects of coming back to your diet.
Do you remember whether your diet changed at this time as well?
Some other anecdotes shared here seem to share a similar theme, that exercise helps in losing weight on a more meta-level by shifting yourself into a generally healthier mindset which, in turn, seems to help you eat "healthier" foods, which is probably a proxy for "low-calorie foods" like fruit and vegetables. Maybe when you're sedentary it's easier to reach for the bag of potato chips?
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My own anecdote - when I started cycling about 6 miles to work each, I was ravenous by lunchtime and had much larger lunches than previously - put on a lot of weight.
I get the impression that cardio affects some people differently. I'm taking some time off from my 30+ miles a week running habit to let my foot heal up. I'm now at about 10 miles + cycling and nordic skiing when I can but overall probably 1/2 to 2/3 the cardio than I've been used to for the past 4 or 5 years.
But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.
I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
Those "calories burned" calculators are also not very good, so you may just be in the margin of error.
It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to propel a given weight 5 miles. It's hard to tell how many calories a person burns to produce that energy. Your ratios of aerobic to anaerobic respiration are going to impact that wildly, which will depend on how much oxygen your body can absorb and how quickly you're burning through oxygen. There's a huge gap in the amount of energy cells get from each. Aerobic respiration produces up to 38 ATP per glucose, while anaerobic produces only 2 ATP per glucose.
Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
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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.
For me I lose my appetite for about a half hour, I was taught it's simply blood from your stomach being used elsewhere. After a short recovery period I'm definitely extra hungry.
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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.
I feel like from reading through this thread is that everyone has a body that manages hunger and metabolism differently.
Pretty sure this is the same for me, I don't eat before the gym in the morning and if anything feel slightly less like eating after.
From what I've seen and experienced the act of exercising suppresses my appetite. I can't eat a big meal and immediately work out. If I'm a little hungry a few minutes into working out I'm not. But hours later or the next day I'm famished and will eat more. It's like a different kind of hungry--more of a craving.
I think moderate exercise can help with getting used to not over-eating. More strenuous exercise seems to make the body crave larger meals often negating any calories burned.
For me exercise does suppress the urge to eat sugary things. I don't know if it's subconscious or just how my body reacts but on days when I have good exercise, especially long runs I feel less urge to have sugars and more urge to eat chicken, cheese etc.
It doesn't really suppress the urge to eat though. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I must count my calories, I have been counting them for 15+ years now and it has become part of my life.
some would argue that running a marathon isn't exercise and shouldn't be considered as such.
Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.
To be clear: I only mentioned that marathon because it was a particularly clear case of the effect exercise seems to have on my appetite, and I am not recommending it as an exercise regimen.
And while it is not for most people (and definitely not me), there are people I know who thrive on running marathons and the training for it, while otherwise living perfectly normal lives. There is a hypothesis that cursorial / persistence / endurance hunting was a a stage in our ancestors' evolution, and that we have inherited some of the traits of that lifestyle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
That's a POV, and you could marshall evidence to defend it.
But it's mostly a hand-wavy assertion too, and there's other evidence against it. There are cultures around the world (low populations, to be sure) where repeatedly traversing 26.2 miles a day would not be considered particularly abnormal.
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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.
> A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
That assumes a “normal person” will not compensate for the effort with a snack.
A “reward” pint of ice cream will re-add more calories than the hour of cycling. A “standard serving” will nearly match your half hour.
And that’s an hour at 20mph, which really isn’t in any way the norm.
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Most people can't manage to burn 1000 kcal in a 60 minute workout. I am a large man in fairly good shape and have to put in a pretty hard effort to hit those numbers. People who are smaller or not well trained are going to be significantly lower.
Measuring stationary bike workouts in terms of mph is kind of meaningless. What actually matters is the measured power output based on the resistance setting.
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>A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes
It is also something at most a tiny minority of the obese population can do.
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An hour will replace a third of a healthy persons diet.
Fats are the secret to obesity, hands down. I have a remarkably small appetite and I can easily down 1000 calories of ice cream in a single sitting (a single pint of Ben and Jerry's. You can row like crazy for 30 minutes, but if you have two extra candy bars, it's meaningless.
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>An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
Pretty sure most people shouldn't be eating 3000 calories/day.
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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.
One of the cruel aspects of endurance sports is that they suppress your appetite. You can go out and burn 6000 calories in one race, spend the whole time thinking about all the delicious food you're going to reward yourself with, and then you get there and have zero desire to eat. You sometimes can't even start refeeding until the next day.
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I always feel there are some methodology issues in sports science studies like small sample sizes or strange metrics.
While I do agree with you that sustained, high level activity requires and burns more calories, I think that the advice coming out of there, exercise is less efficient than diet for weight loss, is going to absolutely be true for the majority of gym goers who quite frankly are phoning it in whenever they work out.
Like, for example, an olympic swimmer may eat 5000-10,000 calories in a day, but they are spending around 4-6 hours a day in a cold pool training at a world class level (body needs to keep warm somehow regardless of effort.) But a normal person may only swim for 20 minutes at a much gentler pace. This person should still be eating in line with calorie guidelines and macros for age/sex.
The reality is that diet needs to be flexible based on results. Not losing weight? Eat fewer carbs or calories. Feeling tired and worn out? Eat more or exercise less based on your physique and goals.
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> A few hours on my bike can be 2,000-3,000 additional calories over base metabolic rate.
Are you sure? 2000 kcal in 3 hours is 770 watts of power output.
Edit: Wikipedia [0] says "During a bicycle race, an elite cyclist can produce close to 400 watts of mechanical power over an hour and in short bursts over double that - 1000 to 1100 watts; modern racing bicycles have greater than 95% mechanical efficiency. An adult of good fitness is more likely to average between 50 and 150 watts for an hour of vigorous exercise."
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power
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After a 2000 kcal high intensity cycling workout I'm so tired that I don't even feel like eating. I have to force myself to eat something because I know I need it for recovery.
Looks at wahoo kickr in corner
Hello old friend, we meet again.
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 :)
Some of that is just being in your twenties. :). Pretty sure just thinking of a hike lost weight back then.
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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.
Riding a bicycle? It's roughly 5x more efficient than running or walking. If you want to lose weight from cycling, you're going to have ride significantly further than 50 miles a day.
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I'm guessing there are very few folks getting fifty miles a day in, and still heavily overweight. Possible, to be sure. Just very unlikely.
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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.
> It’s never that simple
The details might differ some but the overall advice is the same.
If you want to lose weight, eat less.
If you want to be in better shape, exercise.
If you want to improve your health, change your diet (and probably exercise).
A big issue is that people conflate those three objectives.
Being skinny doesn't mean you're healthy and exercising doesn't mean you'll lose weight.
I exercise quite a bit and have always had an extra 10-15 lbs up until semi-recently when I put those three things together and quit eating so much. I still eat plenty of junk food and I've lost about 20 lbs and kept it off.
If you're unhappy with your weight, eat less. If that doesn't work, eat less. Some people might have an easier or harder time with that because we're all different but the advice is the same.
Certainly agreed that compensation for exercise is a dangerous and likely way to gain weight. Is why, in the winter, I have a tendency to gain weight... :)
> It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less.
Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article:
But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.
Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
> People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place
People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.
Did the research control 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.
> 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.
"Traditionally" the people of Osaka, Sicily and various Greek islands are actually best at maintaining such healthy lifestyles, from what I recall from studies on longevity. Good diets, lots of mild exercise from long walks (on hilly terrain) and strong socal ties. I say traditionally because of course these studies can only really look at the lifestyles of past generations.
With that in mind the flat landscape of the Netherlands might be giving us a slight disadvantage ;)
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My girlfriend, who was not trying to diet, lost about 20 lbs when she studies abroad in Italy, because she had to walk everywhere.
What kinds of things do you do to make your entire day active?
As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.
I find that I need time to think and time do code.
When I’m coding I’m obviously sitting at my desk. At some point I get tired of that or hit a wall, then stop, and have to think about that to do next.
Instead of sitting at my desk thinking I’ll go for a walk, go outside and work on a project around the house, go for a swim, hike somewhere. During that time I’m mulling in the problem in my head coming up with solutions.
Once I finish with that activity, I’ll set back down and try a few if the ideas I came up with while doing those activities.
According to my Apple Watch, I get between 25-55 min of activity on a given day.
I think a good way is to take any chance to move around.
Ido Portal, for all his eccentric weirdness, knows things:
> The body will become better at whatever you do, or don’t do. If you don’t move, your body will make you better at not moving. If you move, your body will allow more movement.
I’m personally thinking in terms of micro-habits that eventually form a lifestyle, and it’s all about total lifetime reps, if you will.
For example, I have a height adjustable desk, and have replaced the chair with a pilates ball. I still stand, or sit on my knees, more than sitting down on it.
I believe there’s a problem with some of the ergonomic setups we use - if you keep moving, and shift around you shouldn’t need it. If you do, you’re already “losing it” and should probably be changing things up more frequently during the days. Now this is easy to say, and for some people, probably not true.
I’m basically continuously fighting the path of least resistance. I’m in war with the comfy a* brain!
How is sugar and processed/empty calories a "western" thing? What do you mean by "west"?
"West" probably meaning the US which then also wants to include Europe for some reason, despite it making very little sense.
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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.
I would really like to see raw data because it feels like the story being told can’t possibly be complete.
This in particular feels really hand wavy: “After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.”
What does “barely” mean? 40km/week isn’t that much in terms of calorie burn. The 100 calories/mile rule of thumb says this would imply ~350 calories/day. And this article says a woman would have a daily calorie expenditure of 2400 already (seems high, though). So this is only 15%. But anyway, this drops after adaptation seemingly, so does “barely more” mean 50 calories/day? Or does it mean 300? Because those are very different. And to where is the difference attributable? Because someone going from sedentary to trained runner is going to get a lot more efficient at running. “Less energy on inflammation” is really hard to swallow as the primary source of adaptation, especially when this is presented as conjecture.
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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.
Which is laughably ridiculous when you start considering the extremes like Michael Phelps eating 10kcal for breakfast.
The issue is the uptick in energy burn is unintuitive especially in the world energy dense high-processed food
As an ex once put "you have to run 5 miles to earn a cupcake - totally not worth it!"
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Total body calorie expenditure seems decoupled.
Exercise obviously must burn calories because work is being done. The body can’t overcome physics.
The nuance, and the surprising thing, is that other parts of the body seem to adjust their energy levels to compensate. If you don’t do a lot of exercise, something else burns calories. If you do exercise, the “something else” burns less.
What is the something else? That’s the mystery that still needs to be solved. And by extension, what are the limits of the something else? After all, there are well-documented examples of extreme athletes who consume lots of calories without gaining mass.
Anecdotally, I have absolutely ran off a bad diet. I burn ~150-250 calories a mile and have ran off 2000+ calories to eat what I wanted with no discernible increase in weight. Did this for years.
In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.
Yeah. Cyclists in the Tour de France typically eat 5000 calories a day, often more in particularly difficult stages. Obviously none of them have a weight problem.
"Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.
The last part isn’t true, at least unless there has been a grave accident. Many pee on themselves during races, but most of the Number 2 is done at port a potties along the way with an assist from the team car or peloton to get back up to speed and get back into place. You might be surprised at how little someone might need #2 when all their calories are from highly digestible into energy food.
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I think there's also some other physiological action that trigger defecation as a response during long duration high intensity exercise like marathons and bike races.
Edit: here
"It’s related to the fact that during periods of physical stress, the body shunts blood away from organs that are not necessarily critical at that moment,” Michael Dobson, D.O., a colon and rectal surgeon with Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, tells Mental Floss.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/648541/why-marathon-runn...
The reduction in mass undoubtedly makes it easier to complete the remainder of the stage.
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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.
My buddy on the rowing team would regularly eat 12 eggs + bacon + sausage & toast for breakfast after rowing. They were eating to excess to try to keep on weight and couldn't actually do it.
But that goes to the other part of the fallacy, because even if you eat a pile of 10 Mars bars, a large amount of that will just get excreted. Meanwhile you'll start to feel physically sick and probably your body will then reject food for a while. CICO does more harm than good in IMHO because you're talking about a complex system.
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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.
It still makes the premise that you can't defeat a bad diet bullshit.
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.
Are you sure, I get a one or two kg swing, but 5kg of weight seems a bit extreme.
I'm not American, but in my part of the world people tend to have gradual trends to weight, not sudden swings.
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when u weigh 400lbs and eat forty twinkings and hour, sure, 5kg weekly fluctations may be normal.
Your fat because you consume to many caloiries for what you put out. Pretty simple.
I went week on/off vego, from being a meat eater near daily, dropped weight without adjusting anything else.
You are what you ate. You cant hide from it. If you look down and see some rolls, thats not cause you didnt exercise enough!
I went from doing gym weekly in my 20s, to my 30s where i dont touch consciously exercise at all yet im bigger, leaner, and have my abs back. My uncle, who at my ate became a fat bastard and never stopped; used to be a body builder on the roids. He had a sweet phsyic for about 1 year.
The easier way to make money in this world, is to fool fat people into thinking your product will let them have their cake, and eat it to. I say fat people the say way people refer to a drug addict. Its the same thing, cept your comfort blanket is legal and readyly accessible, 24/7/7, being pushed at you constantly whenever you look.
I say this as a child of a mother who was/is fat due to being in an abusive relationship with my father. She cheated through every diet she every did. Until she got her stomach stapled; when overnight she SHED weight, was no longer diabetic, and is currently 66yrs old and going strong (stapled around 49).
I'd give the commenter the benefit of the doubt that they measured over a few days, and not just two isolated data points.
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.
It's time that you can use for important things like meditation and consolidating your thoughts, as well as synthesising Vitamin D if it's close to noon and you're not especially far from the equator.
Most people watch tv for 4-5 hours per day and it's far from the only time waster out there.
Something went wrong when very moderate volume of exercise (1 hour per day) is seen as a huge time commitment.
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. :)
I think that one problém with calories focus is that it leads to exactly that. You do need to eat more, but not just more in terms of calories. If you will get soon of sugar or skice of bacon after exercising, it will provide calories but still leave you hungry needing more.
Protein like cottage cheese or something like that helps a lot. Figuring out what it is your body needs helps a lot.
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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.
To me the sad part is that it's way too easy to accept as a solid model. It's so simple, feels so elegant and powerful, a lot of people have a hard time seeing what could go wrong with such a beautiful model. They then take decades to realize it didn't mean anything really.
Basically, it's way harder to make people accept it's complex and highly variable when they've already internalized a shiny theory of everything.
Just been reading Why We Eat (Too Much) by Andrew Jenkinson and he is basically saying this - that CICO is true but there is also this feedback system with the 'Calories Out' part so that our body adjusts to physical activity levels (as described in the article) and also to what the 'Calories In' part it is. So while restricting calories in works short-term your body adjusts and also decreases the 'Calories Out'. His argument is that the problem for most people overweight is leptin resistance interfering with the body's feedback mechanisms and basically you need to fix that rather than try and changes either the 'Calories In' or 'Calories Out' directly.
CICO is almost as pernicious and ubiquitous. It really grinds my gears when people try to use “intuition” to understand something super complex with no data at all. People talk about “metabolism” the same way.
Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
Except we have literal truckloads of data on calories and metabolism. Like a lot of human physiology, these things come with Normal (Gaussian) distributions in the human population. There are averages and deviations we can talk about, without having to understanding anything about the inner workings of the human body, right?
I couldn’t agree more that CICO is a super blunt instrument, but it actually does work, because the alternative we’re comparing to is not tracking input & output at all. You can be a lot wrong, and it’s still better than completely wrong, right? :P Like the amount of noise in my calories estimates is probably at a minimum 10%-15% wrong at all times, same goes for expenditure (maybe even worse) but it seems like the important part isn’t actually the number, it’s the act of establishing and sticking to a budget. For me, mentally, it was the realization that my feelings on hunger and satiety were actually mis-calibrated. This helped me get over the idea of being hungry, and helped me realize the goal wasn’t to overcome hunger, it was to get used to something closer to the correct amount of food.
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CICO mostly doesn’t work if you count the calories wrong. But if you don’t eat 1000kcal under your actual TDEE, there is little chance you will not lose weight (barring severe health problems).
If you metabolize less or more doesn’t really matter as it gives you a hard maximum of what you could potentially ingest (both in the TDEE calculation and the restricted diet)
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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.
Myself when I was doing pro-level amount of brazillian jiu jitsu without really having any regimented diet on days where I wasn't eating candy and ice cream and training for 3+ hours I was could literally see the weight loss in the mirror on the next day.
Well you can, but only if the exercise is putting your calories under your TDEE. Sure there are slight body changes ongoing if you exercise enough (recomp) while staying on your normal intake, but basically
- 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.
"Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape”"
This just isn't true. It generally won't take away fat, but lifting weights won't remove the fat either (it doesn't matter how strong your stomach is, you aren't seeing it if you have a layer of fat on top). But if you are already thin - or thinner in places - most of the aerobic exercise will build appropriate muscle. Walking makes for changes in the lower half of the body, for example. It still won't make you look like you lift weights, true, but there is still change.
I’m not so sure it is understating, at the risk of projecting out from a sample size of 1 (my personal experience). I’ve been quite active for a couple of decades with a semi-regular gym routine and multiple marathons (and all of the running required in between). Holidays and other things would interrupt schedules from time to time, I might lapse for an extended period, but for the better part of 20 years I’ve weighed 76kgs +/- 3kgs. Stop running and eat bad for a few months I hit the top end of that range. But I revert back very quickly.
Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter.
It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.
From my own experience, if I'm lifting weights and working out, my hunger shoots up and I start wanting to eat everything in sight.
When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.
You can keep weight off with exercise; it's just a lot more than you would think.
I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts.
Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.
I once saw a data tables with lots of diets. There was a column with the name of the diet, what you typically ate on the diet, etc. But the final column was "How does this diet work?" Every single row said the same thing, something like: "By eating a caloric deficit".
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 ...