Comment by ajuc
3 years ago
Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference.
Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.
I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
Congratulations! I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is. And it's also depressing if I look at the graph that some 40 to 50 year olds seem to still have the metabolism of a toddler - I'm definitely not one of those! OTOH, you can feel superior by thinking these people would be in big trouble if there was a famine, but that's (fortunately) not the world we live in (although it's pretty fucked up if you consider that we are complaining about these first world problems while in other countries people are starving)...
My advise: (as someone who does a lot of working out and calorie control)
Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home.
Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is
(The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)
> Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
Not necessarily. It is important to remember that water weighs ~1lb/pt and there are a lot of things that affect how much water your body is carrying at any given moment. Depending on your body mass, it is not unrealistic to see 5lbs of fluctuation in a single day. On a calorie restricted diet your body will tend to retain water (because it does this for pretty much any stressor), so you may actually see a slight increase in body weight at first even though your TDEE is above your caloric intake.
A more reliable approach, in my opinion, is to do the TDEE calculation for your target weight and set that as your calorie limit.
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I'd love to count calories. I'm just too lazy to measure and research everything I eat, and the alternative is to have only processed foods that are labeled.
It's too bad that we can't just live on Soylent (the actual beverage, not the thing from the book)
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TDEE = Total Daily Energy Expenditure
For me at least it's not that simple. My weight (healthy to low BMI) has been very stable over many years with vastly different amounts of exercising and quality of eating habits within that period. Fat to muscle ratio does move but total weight is stuck even with long runs of lots of junk food.
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Of course, eating less is the ideal solution if you can muster the willpower to actually do it - but that's a big "if" for many people...
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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 :)
Isn’t 2.5kg / week weight loss extreme, and unhealthy or bordering impossible? It seems to be usually recommended to stay below 1kg per week, a healthy rate seems to be closer to 0.5kg/week. I’d assume that something might have been happening the first two months. Could be a measurement problem as well, that you were catching water-weight highs and then maybe changed the timing of your measurements? If you were actually losing closer to 0.8kg / week without knowing it for three months, that’d be about 10kg.
How much more are you eating exactly? Have you changed your exercise routine or physical habits? The problem with calling CICO stupid is that it’s two-thirds physics. The only way to gain mass is to eat it, and the only way to lose mass is to burn it off through RMR and exercise. There’s mountains of data demonstrating that humans gain weight when eating more than they burn, and lose it when burning more than they eat. The people who seem to lose/gain weight abnormally are just people who’s bodies burn calories in unusual ways. That’s rare and statistically unlikely, but even that still follows CICO.
An important thing to keep in mind is that a substantial amount of calories can be burned outside of formal exercise. Incorporating more walking into your day, general activities that involve movement rather than sitting at a desk, etc
I've struggled with this a lot over the past 10 years. I was 60lbs (27kg) over my weight from leaving university 25 years earlier, I sit a lot, and am late forties. The last few years have been harder, and I've been bouncing between a small range, and couldn't 'break out'.
Others have suggested 'writing it down' - not going to argue with that. I don't 'write down' every food I eat, but I do make mental notes every day. What's helped me more though...
2 years ago I bought a fitbit - basic model, nothing fancy, but got serious about tracking my movements. It helped create some easier external documentation about what I was doing. I then moved to an Apple Watch last May, and have been following the '3 circles'. It gave me a target 'move X calories per day' target, do X minutes of 'exercise' every day (exercise seemingly defined as 'get your heart rate above Xbpm').
I've hit those targets ALMOST every day (I missed one calorie target 1 day by 13!). I'm on day ... 206 of my movement streak.
For me, the visual reminders on my wrist help keep me motivated/focused. I 'compete' against a couple of friends with the watch now and then, but just being connected and getting a thumbs up from a friend now and then is motivating.
As others said, track weight daily - I track morning and night. I put it in my iphone. I look at the graphs. I see the downward trend. THIS HELPS A LOT when it bounces back up a bit now and then. I'm up ... around 1.5 lbs from earlier this week. JUST seeing that uptick used to demotivate me. But looking at the downward trend of the last 7 months, I can see the larger direction is down, and I don't stress as much about small upticks. I'm down 25lbs (11kg) from last June, and at this pace will probably be down another 15 or so by this year.
I used to go to a gym, but ... it's a 'process'. I now often just go outside and jog around. There's a run club once per week, and weather permitting, I'll do it, but... I hit those targets every day. Even if it's just running in place, or getting on an exercise bike, or jumping rope. I tell myself "every little bit helps", and tracking every one of those 'little bits' has been the motivating factor for me. May be different for others, but keep going till you find something that works for you.
Took me years to find some 'thing' that clicked for me, but I'm closing in on one year of losing weight based on 'more movement' and 'fewer snacks' and 'better eating'. But it took weeks before there was a trendline to see a downward line.
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 :).
Yeah, the article isn't very clear on this. ISTM the claim is not that exercise doesn't increase energy consumption at all, but just that it increases it by much less than the amount of energy expended in the exercise, because the body (partially) compensates elsewhere. Whether the degree of compensation varies based on amount of exercise I'm not sure, and I wish it had explained. I expect it probably would, as presumably there would only be so much 'low hanging fruit' for your body to use when compensating.
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Yeah, I thought this. There's clearly an amount of exercise that will cause you to lose weight. An interesting question is whether your body prevents you from achieving that.
Cycling was always interesting to me in this context because it seems easier to burn energy on a bike than other forms of exercise.
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> there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure
Of course there is. The problem is that it's much easier to eat than it is to exercise. You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes, and you'd have to run or bike for hours to burn those calories off. A 30 minute jog on a treadmill won't do it.
Most people eat more calories than they need, and would have to exercise much more than they realize to burn them off. So losing weight over a reasonably short period of time almost always requires cutting calories. Few people have enough free time to do it with exercise alone.
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out of context, that quote is really funny; what happens once you reach 4650 calories? you start violating the rules of thermodynamics?
(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)
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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.
There's a huge variation between individuals based on size, sex, and activity level. As a large, fairly active man I have to consume around 3100 kcal per day just to maintain body weight. But a small, sedentary woman might gain weight with even half that consumption.
All else being equal, resting metabolic rate doesn't tend to slow down much as we age. The notion that people in their 20s can eat as they want without gaining weight is mostly a myth. It's more likely that you don't accurately remember what you consumed and your activity level in your early 20s.
You’re reading that wrong. Of course you burn more calories through exercise. Michael Phelps couldn’t have eaten 12k cals a day if exercise didn’t burn calories.
Well that's what the article says. The Hazda who walk 8-12 km a day burn the less calories as an average American (or the same after adjusting for body weight).
Also that Phelps thing is highly questionable. He says he "probably" burns 8-10k, not 12k. Not the type of statement you want to rely on to dismiss all this work.
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The article says pretty explicitly that, while you do burn more calories while exercising, your body finds other ways to compensate and generally keeps about the same total energy expenditure in a day.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to extreme cases like modern athletes, who explicitly push their bodies in many ways that normal fit people don't, and who have teams of doctors and coaches that can force them to keep up with exercise and diet even when their bodies are telling them to stop.
Is it certain that we absorb all of the calories we consume? I went on a backpacking trip with my friends recently and despite similar activity levels everybody was surprised when they noticed that I eat twice as much as anybody else in the group.
Maybe I should bring it up with a doctor, but I feel fine, I just also spend more on food than most.
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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
I would not class eating TWO cinnamon buns back to back as a "snack", but rather "a disgusting pig-out". Am I sheltered?
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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.
it's simple thermodynamics: your body needs to keep its temperature around 37C. It needs energy for this. Heat flows from high temperature (your body) to low temperature (surroundings) via the contact surface (naked skin) or via via (clothing,...) The energy that you lose via heat transfer needs to be compensated. You burn food, fat, tissue,.... (I'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you in what order this happens)
Just try to lower the heating in your house in the winter and run around in a t-shirt iso a pullover.
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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.
The practice of indicating kcals as "Calories" always seemed to be an American thing to me. I don't know how widespread this is outside the US but there are plenty of countries that use "kcal" in nutritional tables and such. People will still colloquially confuse calories and kilocalories a lot but that's largely due to bad translations (similar to mistranslating short billions).
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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.
Actually, I noticed it because the OP wrote kcal in one place and calories in another and since they were using large units I had to read the sentence twice to make sure they meant the same thing. I don't have a problem with the fact that we have a unit that means something in one context and 1000xsomething in another as long we're consistent in naming (only calories or only kcal in the context of diet). And of course I didn't mean to be mean (no pun intended) to the OP - being consistent is good but this is such a minor thing that we could safely ignore and it won't affect our lives at all - now I even feel sorry I paid attention to that.
Yes, sorry. kcal not cal.