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Comment by throwaway09223

3 years ago

40km/wk is only 3.4 miles/day. It's only a half hour of moderate exercise a day. It sounds like the study didn't actually measure a significant exercise workload.

It was measuring women who were sedentary and trained for half marathons. For someone who was previously sedentary, 3.4 miles/day is an enormous amount of exercise. It’s certainly far more than the average American gets.

It’s not that much in terms of calories. It is a lot of physical activity for a modern human in a developed nation.

  • Yes, but "the tiny amounts of exercise typical overweight Americans engage in won't help" is a very different statement than "you can't exercise your way out of obesity" or "you can't outrun a bad diet." The latter is categorically false.

    • They are in practice true. When people imagine exercising to lose weight, very few imagine that this implies running at a moderate pace for nearly 4 hours per week (while also holding diet to maintenance levels) to lose just 1 pound per week.

      The real kicker is that an unchecked diet will offset virtually any amount of exercise. An unchecked diet means people will feel hungrier after exercise and thus eat more. It takes a lot of exercise to reach the point that it manages to outrun appetite and bad eating habits. There are a lot of fat people who work physically demanding jobs.