[HN Gopher] Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories
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Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 667 points
Date : 2022-02-18 01:05 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Holy Jesus, that first chart tells a tale. The range of dense
| dots is from 60% to 130% almost throughout working life. Some of
| us are burning 2x what others are burning. Oh, man, dude. That's
| wicked variation _after adjusting for non-fat mass_.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| I always wonder how much of what we consume is actually
| absorbed, specially when factoring gut microbiome and non-
| soluble fibers.
| pengaru wrote:
| I think it was someone in an HN comment who put it best:
|
| > exercise determines shape, diet determines size
| pwned1 wrote:
| Another formulation that I like:
|
| Exercise to build muscle, eat to lose fat
| 14 wrote:
| I came up with a diet to lose weight. I was approaching 200lbs
| and wanted to get it under control so made a simple diet that
| helped me lose 50lbs. I call it the half and half. You take your
| meal and plate it. Then take a second plate and split everything
| exactly down the middle. Eat your first plate and then you wait
| half an hour. If after half hour you want to eat again you can go
| back to your second plate. What ends up happening is some times
| you would go back for more but other times you would get busy. Or
| just not feel hungry. It wasn't long before my stomach started to
| shrink and I would eat smaller and smaller amounts of food. This
| worked incredibly well. I could eat anything type of food I
| wanted just needed to wait half hour before going to my other
| half of my food. I eventually stopped splitting my plates and
| just made very small plates because I realized I would be full
| off a little amount. The only other rule I followed was never
| finish food once I feel full. That last bite of a burger just
| toss it if you feel full.
| ehnto wrote:
| You might have heard of it by now but I suspect you're
| exploiting the mechanism that delays the feeling of satiation
| for roughly 20 minutes after eating. Many people can eat a
| seemingly unlimited amount of food so long as they do it
| quickly.
|
| I think your method is cool because it tricks both the hungry
| and the logical part of your brain into thinking it can totally
| have all the food so long as it waits, but by the time 20
| minutes is up, the satiation chemicals have found their way to
| your brain and it's no longer hungry.
| 14 wrote:
| Thank you. A lot of people just shrug it off when I say I
| have a diet. They look at me and say but you are skinny like
| you ever needed to diet. Well I really was 50lbs heavier at
| one point and that is a lot. I think you nailed on the
| explanation as to why it happens as well. When you know you
| can go back for more it's not some painful I need to starve
| feeling you can reason with yourself and say okay I had my
| first plate it's not going to be bad to wait half an hour
| where as if you had to wait say several hours you may be
| tempted to have just a bit more because of hunger pains. Also
| not being restricted to certain foods makes it easier as well
| because who really wants to make a big change to the foods
| they already eat. Well thank you for commenting.
| dahart wrote:
| > "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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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... :)
| parineum wrote:
| > 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.
| anchochilis wrote:
| 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 :)
| taeric wrote:
| Some of that is just being in your twenties. :). Pretty
| sure just thinking of a hike lost weight back then.
| recursive wrote:
| I picked up biking in my 20s, and was slimmer than I was
| in my teens. That's with no intentional change to diet.
| No one will ever be able to convince me that you can't
| lose weight with exercise. When I was doing ~90 minutes
| of cardio a day, it was impossible not to notice.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| I know such a person which is why I mentioned it. That
| vast range of human physiology is fascinatingly wide. He
| also is very aerobically gifted, possibly related things.
| (efficient engine, but not confirmed with testing, maybe
| just a big engine and loves food)
| taeric wrote:
| Completely fair.
|
| Thinking on it, if food is,I eat it. Any pizza is a
| personal pizza, if you like pizza. :)
|
| Still. Guessing most folks that can ride fifty miles are
| not overweight.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| I successfully lost weight at only twenty miles a day.
| Now... For a time, that also included Queen Anne Hill, in
| Seattle. So a decent amount of climbing. Still, I could
| lose weight easily while biking.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I lost weight on 15-20 miles per day as well.
|
| Also have lost a bunch of weight (or at least replaced
| fat with muscle) from just doing 10-15 minutes of PT
| exercises (strength training, stretching, and yoga) plus
| walking an extra mile or two per day.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Are you sure about those numbers? Running is about
| 1kcal/km/kg of body weight. For cycling to be 5x as
| efficient you would only need 14kcal/km for 70kg man. I
| don't think it's realistic. The numbers I've seen are
| closer to 25kcal/km.
| nightski wrote:
| It has very little to do with distance. I lose weight
| much faster with hiit than riding long distance.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "much faster" is ambiguous here. Ride 150 miles a day
| every day for a week, don't over-eat, and you will lose
| much more weight than you ever could from HIIT. On the
| other hand, that's a lot of hours, and HIIT will easily
| win in terms of weight-loss per unit time.
| nightski wrote:
| How is it ambiguous. You clearly understood I meant
| calories burned per unit time.
| fredophile wrote:
| The ambiguity is what unit of time you care about. With
| HIIT you lose more weight per minute of exercise you do.
| With a lot of LISS you can lose more weight per week than
| you could with HIIT.
| nightski wrote:
| Understood, but the parent I responded to was talking
| about efficiency so I thought that was the context.
|
| In my experience I'm not so sure about that either. I
| can't repeat centuries day after day when I am out of
| shape and need to lose weight. If one can, it's very
| unlikely he/she needs to lose weight.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Paul, you can lose all of your weight without working out
| at all!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You don't know anything about my weight! :))
|
| For sure. But the discussion going on here (and in TFA)
| is the balance between weight loss via exercise and
| weight loss via lower calorie consumption.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| Or live somewhere where you can climb hills on the way to
| the grocery store... : )
| joeld42 wrote:
| Depends. I can do 15 miles at a leisurely pace on a
| social ride and not burn very many calories. I can do
| those same 15 miles at a fast pace and burn 2-3x as many
| calories. And then you can throw in some hills too.
|
| I lost 80 pounds over the last couple years with riding
| average of 12 miles a day.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Paul, if I am doing 50 miles at 300 watts that isn't any
| different than running for two hours. You can set
| whatever level of intensity you want for the duration. 50
| miles a day all out will wear out even olympic athletes.
| Source: I work with olympic athletes and time trial
| champions
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Sure, 50 miles a day @ 300W is not much different than
| running for 2 hours at a sub-7min/mile pace.
|
| But most people cycling 50 miles are not generating 300W
| continuously, and most people running for 2 hours are not
| doing a sub-7min pace for the duration.
|
| ps. I have run for 2 hours at a sub-7 min pace, and
| cycled 50 miles at about 280W.
| [deleted]
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I ride 20-25 miles a day on a stationary bike, at about
| 20-25mph steady rate. It burns a bit over 1000 calories
| during the hour. It's more than enough to make a
| significant change, especially when paired with a half
| hour of weights.
| Fezzik wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| > _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.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| "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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Everybody is 100% responsible for what they eat. There is no
| excuse.
| machinelearning wrote:
| Counting and estimating calories is a skill that should be
| taught in schools.
|
| The public health benefits are unparalleled.
| petercooper wrote:
| 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.
| irrational wrote:
| 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".
| louis___ wrote:
| > 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"
| asiachick wrote:
| 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)
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| elvis10ten wrote:
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| "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 ;)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| *Okinawa, not Osaka. Serves me right for trying to recall
| these things from memory before my morning coffee.
|
| Anyway, search for "blue zones" to learn more, aging
| healthily is an ongoing topic of research
| francisofascii wrote:
| My girlfriend, who was not trying to diet, lost about 20
| lbs when she studies abroad in Italy, because she had to
| walk everywhere.
| theonething wrote:
| What kinds of things do you do to make your entire day
| active?
|
| As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.
| bradgessler wrote:
| 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.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| 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!
| beebmam wrote:
| How is sugar and processed/empty calories a "western" thing?
| What do you mean by "west"?
| Merem wrote:
| "West" probably meaning the US which then also wants to
| include Europe for some reason, despite it making very
| little sense.
| blitzar wrote:
| No need to smear Europe with their high fructose corn
| syrup. There are plenty of empty calories on the table in
| Europe, but they are typically made in a kitchen and not
| in a factory.
| buzzard1 wrote:
| idontwantthis wrote:
| > 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| It does seem like the article is exaggerating. ;) This
| _could_ be more about the author presenting a narrative
| than Pontzer's data. Bringing in the sports physiologist
| to argue for the idea of exercise without countering the
| caloric claims adds a little perhaps predictable dramatic
| flair.
|
| At some point, there's just physics. Running a mile isn't
| free, benching 100kg isn't free. These things take work
| and we can calculate the minimum energy requirement that
| adaptation can't escape. Our bodies do not adapt so far
| that exercise becomes pointless, it only shifts the
| balance a little (which might be enough to be
| demotivating for some people, but it's still relatively
| minor.) I was under the impression that the total range
| of metabolic adaptivity for a given person might be on
| the order of 25%-30% maybe. That might be an over-
| estimate. I googled a little and found this paper
| mentioning adaptations of like 8%-15% for severe calorie
| restriction diets (depending on how RMR is measured).
|
| https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/16/2/196/480196
| dpark wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvoted. That is literally the
| thesis here, that calorie expenditure is essentially
| decoupled from exercise.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| djtango wrote:
| 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!"
| KallDrexx wrote:
| > Which is laughably ridiculous when you start
| considering the extremes like Michael Phelps eating
| 10kcal for breakfast
|
| I think you are missing the fundamental part of the
| article about the calorie expenditures being adjusted
| based on non-fat body mass.
|
| So, yes Michael Phelps eats a lot of calories, but him
| (and other pro athletes) have spent their lives building
| muscle and keeping fat reserves down. Michael Phelps I
| think is at a 5% body fat, while the average American is
| 18%+. He needs more calories for that extra body mass
| that most people the same height don't have.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Michael Phelps I think is at a 5% body fat_
|
| No way. 5% is well below optimal for athletic
| performance. At 5% you're looking at developing health
| problems. This is the range bodybuilders aim for on stage
| because they care about looking shredded more than they
| care about having joints that work.
|
| Phelps was reportedly 8% when he won all those medals in
| Beijing.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Which is laughably ridiculous
|
| We're glad you're here to poke fun at the research of at
| least two people with PhD's centered on this topic.
|
| > when you start considering the extremes
|
| When you start considering the extremes, you often find
| that they can't tell you much about the middle ground.
| Raidion wrote:
| I think everyone is talking past each other here. From
| the article:
|
| > As the athletes' ran more and more over weeks or
| months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to
| make room for the extra exercise costs
|
| You clearly burn extra calories when exercising, but the
| thesis of the article is that it doesn't matter in terms
| of weight loss because your body will adjust to burn the
| mean level of calories. The obvious exception are
| athletes whose energy expenditures simply can't be
| averaged away.
|
| This leads to the conclusion that it's not just exercise
| that drives weight loss, but diet and exercise
| (shocking!) that makes a difference, as you have to run
| at a net loss over the day.
|
| Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly
| unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the
| amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit
| /untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the
| amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit._
|
| This is well known and true even if the claims made
| better happened to be entirely false. I'm not dismissing
| your point, here. I agree fully.
|
| Exercise just doesn't burn enough calories to really
| matter. Especially in the face of a poor diet. Running
| burns ~100 calories per mile (yes, varying based on
| weight and a little bit based on speed but it's a close
| enough rule). A can of soda has ~150 calories. There's
| just no competition. Someone trying to lose weight can
| skip a soda or a candy bar and it's more effective than
| running an extra mile.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| > You actually should eat more
|
| I did... the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of
| humanity? ;)) was I _over_ compensated, 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. :)
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| 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.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| 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.
| csee wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.)
| glenngillen wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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."_
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| > 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Did the research control for that?
| ajuc wrote:
| 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.
| y4mi wrote:
| 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.
| Elte wrote:
| 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 :).
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| When cycling there's this "wall" you hit after a few
| hours. At least I do. After that it's much harder to keep
| pace or go uphill.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Indeed, but you can keep going just about. I've properly
| hit the wall once, and that was an unpleasant experience
| - nearly fainting and seriously in danger of falling off
| my bike, but I think that was largely a hard removal of
| all accessible glycogen, and it was years ago when I was
| relatively green. Now I just tend to eventually find it
| hard and unpleasant.
| nradov wrote:
| There's nothing special about cycling. You can deplete
| your glycogen stores and hit the wall with any aerobic
| activity. If you have a healthy metabolism and stay in
| heart rate zones 1-2 then you'll mostly burn fat stores
| and can cycle for many hours without hitting the wall. At
| higher zone 3+ efforts you'll need periodic carbohydrate
| supplements to keep going.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _seems easier to burn energy on a bike than other forms
| of exercise_
|
| I'm not sure this is true. Cycling isn't weight-bearing
| (you're sitting down) and only engages the large leg
| muscles. Running and rowing likely provide more calorie
| burn for a given RPE (rate of perceived exertion) over a
| fixed time period. Running because it's weight-bearing;
| rowing because it engages more muscle groups. That said,
| you can probably cycle for more hours total, if you have
| nothing else to do.
| naasking wrote:
| Running doesn't burn as much as you think because your
| muscles store energy elastically on the eccentric phase
| of each step. This removes a lot of energy needed for the
| subsequent concentric part.
|
| Contrast this with cycling which is pretty much _all_
| concentric contractions.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Interesting, hadn't considered that aspect. Just goes to
| show how complicated and counter-intuitive this can be.
| naasking wrote:
| Evolution is great at optimizing! Running is so efficient
| for humans that some human tribes use it to hunt
| (persistence hunting). They literally run their prey to
| exhaustion then just walk up and kill them.
| tempestn wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I can definitely see how that works. I'm a cyclist and
| often ride 60-100 miles on a weekend day, plus 3 days pf
| 20-30 miles during the week. That should be a lot of
| extra calories. But, after those long rides, I usually
| need a nap and don't do much else (maybe grocery
| shopping, but definitely not woodworking or other serious
| projects).
|
| That said, at the peak of my training (12 hours/week), I
| can definitely consume more calories without putting on
| weight. Like, a giant bowl of ice cream most nights. But,
| if I continue that diet during recovery periods, I'll put
| on a few pounds. So, it's not that exercise has zero
| impact, but possibly quite a bit smaller an impact that
| one might assume.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > 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.
| aixi wrote:
| 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)
| dahart wrote:
| > what happens once you reach 4560 calories?
|
| There are loads of videos on YouTube of what happens. You
| may or may not want to watch them. Spoiler alert: you
| vomit when you eat too much.
|
| The vomit limit is probably higher than 4560 (which BTW
| has a suspicious number of significant digits), there
| might be a range between too many calories and vomiting
| where your body breaks down the food into waste without
| digesting any more nutrients/calories. Kinda like how if
| you eat too much vitamin C, you'll just pee most of it
| out.
| tempestn wrote:
| Long term, yes. Short term you might be able to get some
| from fat stores. But the claim is that ~4650 is the most
| you can persistently get from food intake per day.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| At some point your body will also fail to exert energy;
| there are also metabolic safeguards ahead of the point
| where your body can no longer manage the energy to keep
| basic functions going where the lower-priority functions
| (immune system, cognitive function, motion muscles) start
| to degrade.
|
| You don't need to be at the limit of human energy intake
| to see what happens to people when their energy
| expenditure greatly exceeds the energy available from
| food over a sustained time period; there is quite a lot
| of medical literature on the effects of such... er...
| malnutrition.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > what happens once you reach 4650 calories?
|
| Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.
|
| > There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our
| bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest
| food and turn it into energy.
|
| Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to
| burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate,
| then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.
|
| If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with
| 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories
| per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories
| per minute.
| ewindal wrote:
| 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.
| csee wrote:
| 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.
| skohan wrote:
| I just have a hard time believing it to be true that _no_
| amount of exercise will increase the overall caloric
| expenditure. For example, I 've done a few multi-week
| bike tours, and we ate an enormous amount of mostly pasta
| every day, and managed to peel off a few pounds each by
| the end of it.
| csee wrote:
| The article mentions a study that tracked energy
| expenditure of runners over many weeks, and found that
| the energy expenditure was much lower at the tail end of
| the experiment, suggesting the body gets accustomed to
| the activity somehow and burns less energy.
| uberduper wrote:
| The study must have tracked non-runners, given the
| conclusion. If they were already runners and the
| conclusion is that they get accustomed to the activity,
| they'd already be accustomed and there'd be no tail end
| difference. So they most likely tested non-runners and
| had them start running. We get more efficient at physical
| exertion with practice. Better coordination of muscle
| groups. Finding a more efficient pace. Correcting form
| deficiencies. These all increase capability or reduce
| energy expenditure.
| csee wrote:
| This assumes that there isn't a spectrum of running
| intensity. In this case they were running 10s of
| kilometres every day during the study, an absurd
| distance. So they were likely experienced runners already
| who were engaging in this extreme competition and took it
| up to an abnormal intensity that they weren't used to.
| ajuc wrote:
| Well one obvious adaptation is losing fat = less energy
| needed to move the body.
| csee wrote:
| We saw a very large reduction in caloric expenditure in
| people who were already very fit runners. So body weight
| changes over the course of the experiment are unlikely to
| explain it.
| necovek wrote:
| And in most places in the article calorie expenditure is
| taken as "corrected for no-fat weight".
| magicalhippo wrote:
| So if they just kept doing the experiment they would end
| up not needing to eat?
|
| Clearly there are some details that matter here...
| e12e wrote:
| It's strange. Go out in freezing weather and stand
| still;you'll get cold. Move about and you get warm. I
| find it unlikely that you can heat up without energy?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Yes, this. These conversations about weight loss are so
| rife with spherical cows and people come to ridiculous
| generalizations because of it. Bodies are complicated and
| varied. "Michael Phelps eats 12kcal a day and yet he's
| not fat" is just a correlation, it doesn't mean anything.
| He's an extreme outlier of a person in many ways.
| imtringued wrote:
| The body absorbs refined carbs very quickly. The glucose
| rush will increase insulin levels to very high levels and
| make you feel hungry again soon leading to the
| consumption of even more calories.
| ajuc wrote:
| I was eating similarly in my 20s and 30s and in 20s I
| kept about 80kg but in 30s I got to 130kg :/
|
| BTW there are diseases that reduce calories absorbed, you
| might want to get checked for colitis ulcerosa and
| crohn's disease. They have nasty side effects so better
| to know earlier even if you don't have the worst
| symptoms.
| Geee wrote:
| No, there's lots of calories in stool, but it depends on
| the type of food. For example, eating lots of fats and
| oils tends to "go through". On the other hand, rate of
| metabolism varies between people too.
| tremon wrote:
| 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 ($E_{available}$).
| ajuc wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160
| 000
|
| I believe you meant kilocalories
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| verytrivial wrote:
| 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.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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).
| ajuc wrote:
| In Poland you write "100 kcal" but say "100 kalorii"
| unless it's in scientific context.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| People everywhere mix those 2 regularly and nobody is
| confused. You don't say you go out for a run to burn some
| kilo calories and so on. Sometimes places like HN are
| needlessly pedantic
| tremon wrote:
| If someone explicitly writes "160 000" calories I'm going
| to assume they meant 160 kcal.
| ajuc wrote:
| Yes, sorry. kcal not cal.
| toolslive wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| 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.
| toolslive wrote:
| 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.
| toolslive wrote:
| If you don't believe it, just look up what the diet on a
| polar expedition looks like.
| dTal wrote:
| What the heck kind of "snack" is 1000 kcal?
| namdnay wrote:
| A single cinnamon roll is nearly 500 calories. As soon as
| you're combining fat and sugar things skyrocket
| dTal wrote:
| I would not class eating TWO cinnamon buns back to back
| as a "snack", but rather "a disgusting pig-out". Am I
| sheltered?
| wccrawford wrote:
| No, I think you have your head on right.
|
| I used to eat a _lot_ of candy, but I never considered
| eating more than a handful of anything a "snack".
|
| That said, what do you call it when you eat something
| that isn't a meal? I don't think most people have any
| word other than "snack" without resorting to things that
| sound like insults, like "pig out". And it's really hard
| for most people to insult themselves.
| namdnay wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of sugar so I wouldn't be able to eat a
| whole cinnamon roll, let alone two. But if I'm doing a
| big hike I'll have no problem demolishing a whole tub of
| rillettes, which must be at least 1000kcal
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Maybe you're just not in a location where that sort of
| eating is common. Like the American south or midwest.
| ajuc wrote:
| In my case 2 buns with garlic butter. But any pastries will
| do.
| artdigital wrote:
| Cinnabon comes to mind
| rob74 wrote:
| 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)...
| lowercased wrote:
| 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.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| 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
| artdigital wrote:
| 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)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
| Tenoke wrote:
| That's why they are telling you (as is common) to compare
| the results on a weekly basis which reduces the variance.
| TDEE calculations from scratch are much much more
| unreliable than empirically finding out and mostly good
| for a starting point.
| artdigital wrote:
| Yes, that's why I suggested weekly
|
| You can of course calculate the TDEE of your target
| weight but like you implied, unless you know your own,
| based on your own metabolism and intake, the data is
| never going to be accurate
|
| For example I eat much less than my bodybuilder friends.
| When I went with the calories that they recommended to me
| I gained so much fat with a very active workout schedule
| and noone had a explanation why. Maybe it's hormones,
| maybe medicine I take, maybe something else. I now eat
| much less than you'd expect from a person with my height
| and age, but I still gain weight, because my actual
| calculated TDEE is comparatively low
|
| Having that data on hand as a reference is incredibly
| helpful to plan my weight progress
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| ddorian43 wrote:
| Just do keto diet or carnivore then. Will be a lot
| easier. You have to give up the cake.
| dan00 wrote:
| You might try an other diet that's more filling and
| creates less cravings. So less carbs and more protein and
| fat. I don't think that willpower really works in this
| regard long term. It only creates frustrations.
| ajuc wrote:
| Counting calories is still very useful, because you learn
| what's "worth it".
|
| For example there are protein bars that are supposedly
| healthy, but they have 150-250 kcal per 50g bar.
|
| On the other hand there are these watery ice creams that
| have about 65 kcal per piece and feel just as indulgent
| if not more.
|
| Other things that are very much "not worth it" on the
| enjoyement/kcal scale is bread and other pastries.
|
| 2 buns with ham is 500 kcal and feels like nothing. A
| whole pan of hot vegetables with some meat is +- the same
| and feels like a proper dinner.
| discordianfish wrote:
| > these watery ice creams that have about 65 kcal per
| piece and feel just as indulgent if not more.
|
| that shows why it's easier for some than for others :)
| mrleinad wrote:
| 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)
| jnsie wrote:
| I was very excited about Soylent years ago...until I
| tried it. I really disliked the flavor, so wouldn't have
| stuck with it regardless, but what really surprised me
| was how much I enjoy the act of sitting down and eating a
| meal. Soylent filled me up, but it never satiated me.
| Regardless of the time savings and predictability, I
| missed the act of eating, if that makes sense.
| bavell wrote:
| Makes total sense to me - we are creatures of habit and
| eating is one of our most sacred rituals. It's deeply
| rooted in our psychology so no surprise to me that one
| would miss the ritual even if satiated.
| ajuc wrote:
| When you cook for yourself it's pretty easy. After a
| month you remember kcal per 100g for each common
| ingredient and the weight is on the box or on the receipt
| anyway.
| xzel wrote:
| With a 10 dollar scale and an App like Lose It, it is
| pretty easy. They have both things with UPC codes for
| easy look up and standard foods, for example brown rice
| or salmon. I keep track and probably spend less than 5
| minutes a day getting everything down. Obviously it will
| be difficult at a restaurant unless you want to bring a
| scale with you or beg the wait staff but largely they
| won't mind and if you're order grilled chicken and veg
| most likely they won't mind measuring the chicken for
| you. Anyways, the stuff on labels are estimates so the
| whole process has some moderate error so as long as you
| estimate fairly you don't have to worry about being crazy
| accurate.
| wrekone wrote:
| A few years back I lost 30 lbs over the course of a year
| using Lose It. I didn't make any major dietary changes
| other than reducing total caloric intake. I found that
| ballpark estimating calories for restaurant food was
| fairly easy and close enough. I never weighed my food. I
| even went over my caloric budget fairly often and would
| just make up for it the next day. Overall, it was
| surprisingly simple to lose the weight but I did find
| myself hungry more often than I would have liked. After
| regaining that weight over the last two years, I recently
| bought an exercise bike. I'm hoping that the regular
| exercise it provides will help suppress my appetite. I
| have been thinking about picking up Lose It again, and
| this thread has convinced me.
| etc_etc wrote:
| MyFitnessPal does a pretty good job. You can scan
| barcodes and it'll (usually) have the calories and
| macros. Also just having a set of scales on hand makes it
| a lot more accurate!
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you eat a lot of similar stuff, after looking up
| things periodically over time you'll get to be able to
| ballpark calorie counts. Calories aren't really hidden
| that well.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| TDEE = Total Daily Energy Expenditure
| wcrossbow wrote:
| 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.
| artdigital wrote:
| Hmm I have trouble believing that. If you eat less and
| put yourself into a caloric deficit, your body is going
| to start using up fat and to a certain degree muscle,
| that's just how it works and your body is no exception.
| If you work out during a deficit, your body will try to
| retain muscle and use more fat instead. Gaining muscle in
| a deficit is possible, but only in small amounts, if at
| all.
|
| > quality of eating habits within that period
|
| To me this sounds like you aren't actually changing the
| amount of calories that you eat, just the quality of
| them. Eating 2000 calories of McDonalds or 2000 calories
| of high quality food does not matter (or barely matters)
| for losing/gaining weight. If 2000 calories is under your
| TDEE, you can eat 2000 calories of cheesecake and would
| still lose weight (but very unhealthy).
|
| What I see often is people claiming stuff like "I can't
| lose weight" or "I have a slow metabolism", but they
| never actually bother counting how much they eat, and
| because of that have no understanding of what high-
| calorie and low-calorie food is. (For example if I'd ask
| how much calories an average hamburger or a glass of cola
| has, you'd likely have no idea if you haven't counted
| calories before).
|
| It was the same for me, once I started counting I
| realized that I was not eating according to the goals I
| had set at that time, and that the food I ate was
| actually much much less in calories than I thought it
| was.
| curiousllama wrote:
| The key is "fat to muscle ratio"
|
| It's a body recomp from an untrained person. Pretty
| common for new lifters.
|
| You're right though - if they lift better and eat better,
| that'll change.
| amelius wrote:
| > 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 :)
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 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
| wyldfire wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| jvvw wrote:
| 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.
| thisisonthetest wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > truckloads of data on calories and metabolism
|
| We have, but most of it seriously flawed because of many
| issues.
|
| For instance this pretty serious study on diets
| (http://www.dishlab.org/pubs/MannTomiyamaAmPsy2007.pdf)
| had to rely on BMI for segmenting the subjects because
| the whole field had standardized on BMI. Yet we know for
| decades that BMI based segmentation is meaningless, BMI
| itself being a clunky relic of the past. Then you can
| come down on the subject of the studies, repeatability,
| no possible control group most of the time etc.
|
| We can say that's the best we can do, but we should also
| accept it's far from being reliable info most of the
| time.
|
| > it actually does work
|
| well, it doesn't work or not, it's just a concept, an
| observation like a law of physics. It's like saying
| gravity works, that's not the info you'd give people
| having difficulties to build a self balancing robot.
| dahart wrote:
| Those statements are technically true, but I'm not
| exactly sure what you're trying to say. There's nothing
| flawed about observational data that ignores the inner
| workings of the system, that's how all of science works.
| Like you say, it's physical observations. There's nothing
| flawed about measuring wattage output of exercise while
| keeping food intake constant and noting that most humans
| lose weight under such conditions, or of keeping caloric
| output constant and increasing caloric input and noting
| that most humans gain weight.
|
| > it doesn't work or not, it's just a concept, an
| observation like a law of physics.
|
| It works as a tool for weight loss. It works for exactly
| the reason you state, because it's primarily an
| observation of physics. The only way I gain mass is via
| my mouth, and the only way I lose mass is via energy
| expenditure. If I want to control mass, therefore,
| tracking and controlling my input and output is more or
| less guaranteed to work. For sure the input output
| responses might not be perfectly linear, but that's
| expected and not a 'flaw'. The weight response to
| calories also can't be reversed or flat, due to physics,
| it _must_ be highly correlated, right?
| yoz-y wrote:
| 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)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > there is little chance you will not lose weight
| (barring severe health problems).
|
| And you will probably either have severe health problems,
| either have a reduced metabolism to the point you can't
| properly function on a day to day basis.
|
| You'll either give up, the pendulum will swing the other
| way and rebound your weight, and people will blame you
| for being too weak.
|
| Or you'll push through, lose your job and/or continue
| develop eating disorders, hopefully you'll realize you
| can't go on and give up, or you'll get medicated, with
| side effects affecting your appetite and weight
| ingestion, might still end up rebouncing and get blamed
| for it.
|
| You've got a snow ball's chance in hell that you can keep
| your intake very low and be fine with it for the rest of
| your life, but then you're probably already healthy and
| pretty normal weighted, because I don't think anyone who
| can just stop eating extra would stay overweight for long
| with the pressure we apply on obese people as a society.
|
| All of the above is really just par for the course for
| people who get told "just do CICO". People for which it
| actually kinda works don't usually need to be told
| anything in the first place.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > 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?
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| wesleywt wrote:
| 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.
| pverghese wrote:
| 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.
| weq wrote:
| 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).
| esyir wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Weigh yourself with a digestive tract full of food and
| water, then weigh yourself after fasting for a day. At
| 200lbs I can swing the scale 15lbs/6+kg. Fat people can
| probably swing some serious numbers.
| esyir wrote:
| Seems like a pretty unusual swing though. Gorging then
| fasting is certainly not typical behavior.
|
| I can see this happening given such behavior, as well as
| in the "heavier" portion of the population. definitely
| not a common occurrence across the population though.
| nightski wrote:
| I can gain or lose on the order of 15lbs in a single day
| when switching to/from a ketogenic diet due to water
| retention.
| mendigou wrote:
| It's doable depending on your body size. I'm 180cm and 95
| to 99 Kg depending on the day.
|
| When I do weight loss, I can plot it daily and it's going
| down on average but there are large swings on most days.
| ramchip wrote:
| I'd give the commenter the benefit of the doubt that they
| measured over a few days, and not just two isolated data
| points.
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| 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.
| jdrc wrote:
| 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
| soheil wrote:
| 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.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _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 I _m 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.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| 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.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| 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.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| 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.
| artdigital wrote:
| 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
| berdon wrote:
| 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.
| nwiswell wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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...
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| 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.
| koolba wrote:
| It's a double whammy because every ounce of shit is one
| more ounce to drag across the finish line.
| basementcat wrote:
| The reduction in mass undoubtedly makes it easier to
| complete the remainder of the stage.
| [deleted]
| slt2021 wrote:
| It might add some propulsion force if it is diarrhea
| [deleted]
| elmomle wrote:
| 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.
| alostpuppy wrote:
| I've done it before too but if you get an injury it gets bad
| quick.
| bern4444 wrote:
| 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.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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.
| confidantlake wrote:
| 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.
| isitmadeofglass wrote:
| > 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.
| krona wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| 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.
| onethought wrote:
| > 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!"
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Often fast food is the only obvious option
|
| Ironically fast food often has some of the most easily
| available calories and macronutrient ratio. Working out
| the calories and macro for a home-made meal can be much
| more time-consuming
| antihero wrote:
| Sure fast food is convenient if you have little time, but
| people have survived poverty and mental health issues
| long before it.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| Fair point, and and definitely some truth to that. I
| almost added "This works for me, your mileage may vary"
| disclaimer.
|
| I will say that what I said above is _relative_, so if
| you go out for fast food "more than you should" than that
| becomes your baseline. Anything can be a baseline, even
| if not a healthy one.
|
| I also know at least one person who has tried it and
| swears up and down it just doesn't work for them.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| > assumes a certain level or privilege (resources
| time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people
| don't have
|
| Unless you're talking about extremes (e.g. non first-
| world country, homeless, or disabled people etc) I'm
| going to call BS on this.
|
| Everyone eats, and everyone has 24 hours in a day.
|
| I don't know about the rest of the world, but in
| Australia you can buy a 800g can of tomatoes for $1.50, a
| 185g can of tuna for $1.60 and 1kg of rice for $1.40.
|
| You could cook that up on a stove (with just a couple
| portions of rice) in about 30min, giving you two
| nutritious meals for (I'm going to be generous) let's say
| about $4. That's $2 per meal. 3 meals a day gives you a
| total of $42 for food per week.
|
| So are you telling me that fast food costs less than $50
| per week, that 23 hours isn't enough time left in the day
| to do everything else, or am I missing something here?
| [deleted]
| sdoering wrote:
| We once, out of pure interest calculated based on
| nutritional value, the cost of eating on different diets.
| We took the average discount market shopping cart, a
| conscious version, the same for a regular (so more pricy)
| supermarket and did a comparison with ecological as well
| as regional food sourcing.
|
| Based on nutritional value (taking into account to
| fulfill the base needs as well as potentially
| overshooting on salt, fat, sugar and other things like
| Vitamin A just to name an example) we found that
| industrial food is always the more expensive solution.
|
| Yes you can feed people on a very cheap industrial diet
| but they will miss essential nutrients as well as
| overshoot on salt, sugar, and others to detrimental
| health effects.
|
| If you want a balanced diet mostly locally and seasonally
| produce (with added stuff like olive oil and such) cooked
| by yourself was way more cost efficient per nutritional
| value.
|
| The problem is, that it takes time to learn this,
| especially to learn this from experience. Also time to
| relearn how food really tastes without added aroma and
| stuff. Time to learn how to cook efficiently and with
| variation. And so on. We don't learn this anymore. Not
| from our parents, nor otherwise. But the advertising
| tells us how easy it is to just open a fully ready meal,
| pop it in the microwave and be done in 3 minutes.
|
| Instead of enjoying the quality of preparing food
| together as a family/couple. Spending time, experiencing
| the smell of fresh cut food, herbs and so on. We nowadays
| equivalent cooking to a chore.
| timr wrote:
| 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.
| sdoering wrote:
| What I know from personal experience and learned a bit
| through knowledge osmosis (my better half studied
| ecotrophology/nutrition) is that many people
| underestimate how the body adapts to a "new normal" of
| caloric intake when this is well below basal metabolic
| rate/consumption.
|
| On the other hand, the body also likes to get essential
| amino acids, if it does not get them from food, from the
| body's own muscle mass. This leads to a reduction of the
| own muscles and to a low basal metabolic rate.
|
| I cannot judge whether one of the reasons is true, that
| would be the job of a good (!) nutritionist.
| Unfortunately, at least in Germany, the term is not
| protected and anyone, regardless of education, knowledge
| or experience may call himself so. Here there are really
| (especially on social networks) really many false claims.
| vmladenov wrote:
| I don't see how the weight change is relevant in this.
| Muscle weighs more than fat, so your strength training
| caused you to build up some muscle, making you heavier.
| The valuable metric to track would be what % of your body
| is fat mass vs. muscle mass
| nu11ptr wrote:
| I've only used this to go up/down +-10 lbs seasonally
| (although I did permanently drop 40lbs on a one time
| calorie restriction diet about a decade ago, but not
| exactly this method). One thing to keep in mind (you
| probably thought of this already) is your calorie burn
| goes down as you lose weight. So a 160lbs person takes in
| less calories to maintain even weight than a 200lbs
| person, thus you may need to reassess baseline for longer
| cuts. Beyond that, no idea, and yes, everyone is
| individual.
|
| I will say the whole time I have used this I have trained
| with weights extensively (5 days/week standard 3x sets
| per exercise body building routine). I do not know how
| much or little this plays into it, but definitely helps
| with the fat/muscle ratio (obviously).
| nradov wrote:
| The most likely possibility is that you were simply
| underestimating your calorie consumption. A lot of people
| forget to count the creamer in their coffee, the candies
| from the office break room, the little tastes while
| cooking dinner. Unless you have a severe metabolic
| disorder your body will only burn lean muscle mass as a
| last resort when you have exhausted glycogen stores and
| can't sustain the energy demand from fat alone. Some
| weight training is always a good idea, though.
| timr wrote:
| I explicitly overshot the goal by more than 500 calories.
| Yes, there are always mistakes in estimation, but that
| isn't what was happening. Remember, I've done this before
| successfully.
| uberduper wrote:
| A catabolic state induced by caloric deficit will
| absolutely consume lean muscle mass regardless of the
| availability of fat reserves. Muscle stimulus (via weight
| training, for example) and sufficient dietary protein can
| prevent this. But if you're just dieting without
| specifically controlling this, you will lose muscle along
| with the fat.
| leksak wrote:
| For how long were you in a deficit before plateuing?
| There are some adaptations the body will make with
| regards to the thyroid that'll drastically lower your BMR
| bsder wrote:
| > But then I hit a plateau (a high plateau, not a low
| one) where I was unable to drop weight no matter how low
| I cut my calories.
|
| Fat cells "remember" their metabolic environment when
| they were created--ie. they "remember" your weight and
| fight you when you try to reduce it. It's one of the
| problems with dieting to large weight losses.
|
| It is somewhere around 3 years for a fat cell to die off
| and be replaced. You probably need to "hang out" at the
| plateau weight for a bit until the fat cells that
| remember you being heavier die off.
| sizzle wrote:
| I thought you never lose fat cells, they only shrink? Got
| a citation for that assertion?
| bsder wrote:
| It's been a while. IIRC, it was from an article
| discussing the fact that radioactive fallout allows
| critical measurements of cellular lifetimes and that in
| about 25 years the fallout levels will be too low to do
| the experiments. I'll see if I can cough it up.
|
| Sorry, medium link: https://prosetech.medium.com/what-
| nuclear-bombs-tell-us-abou...
|
| > The carbon-14 fat-cell study also revealed that fat
| cells don't last forever. Fat or thin, your body replaces
| roughly 10% of your fat cells every year. If you have
| more fat cells to begin with, you'll have more fat cells
| to replace.
|
| I can't seem to find the study talking about how fat
| cells _remember_ the chemical environment when they are
| created.
| sizzle wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the links and info!
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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).
| achenatx wrote:
| the type of food definitely matters. Carbs somehow 1)
| dont fill you up 2) spike your appetite. When I do low
| carb I feel so much less hungry on lower calories.
|
| The deficit cant be too large, for me 500 is ok, but 1000
| has me ravenous the next day.
|
| Lots of obese people easily lose 2 pounds/week but as you
| get closer to a healthy weight it gets harder.
|
| CICO was the first time I was able to actively lose
| weight in my entire life.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The general observation from most long-term clinical
| studies of obesity, as far as I understand, is that many
| types of diets work to reduce weight in the short term,
| but the weight almost invariably comes back after the
| intervention period ends (usually within 1 year or so
| after the initial weight loss). Conversely, people who
| are normal weight and are forced on a hyper-caloric diet
| for a limited time (say, a few weeks) will gain weight as
| expected, but will naturally lose it back over the next
| period without explicit effort.
|
| This has generally been treated as a lifestyle issue, but
| another possibility gaining traction is that "obesity" is
| a disease in itself, one that tricks your organism is
| seeking to maintain excessive weight, by impacting your
| appetite, BMR, exercise habits etc; this will of course
| usually make people suffering from "obesity" (for lack of
| a better name) over-weight, but the weight can be
| controlled without curing the disease. Basically losing
| weight doesn't cure your "obesity", just like when you
| suffer of diabetes, controlling your diet keeps you
| healthy without curing your diabetes.
|
| The possible causes of this "obesity" disease could well
| be diet related, and definitely refined sugars seem to be
| at least a major culprit.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| Correct, temporary diets don't work. You have to change
| your lifestyle/diet permanently. This means after weight
| loss, you need to adhere to your new caloric intake
| baseline, which will be _lower_ than when you started.
| The more you lost, the lower it will be. This is hard,
| but not impossible to do. I can't speak for the obese
| because I was never there, but I was solidly overweight
| and proceeded to dump 40 lbs a decade ago, and never
| gained it back. Had I gone back to my pre loss diet it
| would have all come back.
|
| NOTE: Before someone points it out, this is NOT
| incompatible with my parent comment. Going on a 500
| cal/day cut and losing say 8 lbs will not lower your
| caloric baseline all that much, so temporary more or less
| works fine. If you use the same method to dump 40 lbs,
| you will need to readjust your baseline when done or you
| absolutely will gain it back as your caloric intake needs
| have been meaningfully reduced.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| leksak wrote:
| > 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
| acchow wrote:
| > 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)
| waterhouse wrote:
| > 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.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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/
| waterhouse wrote:
| Let's consider a specific example: Lactose intolerance.
| The Wiki page for it is pretty good. So, despite the
| name, lactose intolerance refers to lacking the enzyme
| lactase, which is used to break down lactose. If you have
| lactase, then your human cells can use the calories from
| lactose; if you don't, then the bacteria get the lactose.
| Wiki says "Symptoms may include abdominal pain, bloating,
| diarrhea, gas, and nausea", which sounds like the
| bacteria do indeed eat it; if the bacteria couldn't
| extract calories from it either, then I assume it would
| just pass through and there would be no symptoms.
|
| Thus, if Bob and Joe eat the exact same diet that has
| some milk products, and Bob is lactose intolerant while
| Joe isn't, then Bob's cells get fewer calories from that
| diet than Joe's. If Bob and Joe's bodies are otherwise
| identical and follow identical exercise routines, then I
| would assume that, like, if the diet is exactly enough to
| maintain Joe's weight, then Bob would lose weight; and if
| it's exactly enough to maintain Bob's weight, then Joe
| would gain weight. (Right? For sake of illustration, we
| could imagine that most of the diet's calories are from
| milk, and assume Bob can tolerate the nausea.) Yet
| "calories in" (measured as food entering stomach) are
| identical, and "calories out" (measured as CO2) might
| also be identical.
|
| Lactose is a specific, well-understood example of some
| people absorbing nutrients much better than others. I
| think there are other examples, and I expect there's a
| lot of variation in absorption efficiency that's less
| known. When you hear about people who eat lots of food
| and remain thin, I suspect this is part of the
| explanation. And whether their bacteria get the calories
| instead, or whether it passes through untouched, might
| show up in CO2 measurements but I don't think it would be
| related to body fat accumulation.
|
| In a conservation-of-energy sense, "calories in"
| certainly gives you an upper bound on how many observed
| "calories out" you can produce without losing weight. But
| I don't think there's a lower bound on how inefficient
| someone's digestive system can be (except "zero"), or a
| practical upper bound on how much their cells might burn
| energy without us noticing (without close observation). I
| think, if you wanted a complete accounting of calories-
| out that would actually match the input, you'd need to
| add up (a) the heat a person puts out (via contact with
| air and surfaces, also infrared emissions), (b) the work
| they do in a physics sense (e.g. lifting heavy objects),
| and (c) the amount of un-burned calories in their stool
| (or any other excreted substances).
| vintermann wrote:
| > or a practical upper bound on how much their cells
| might burn energy without us noticing
|
| Well, heat dissipation places a bound on that.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| > Lactose is a specific, well-understood example of some
| people absorbing nutrients much better than others. I
| think there are other examples, and I expect there's a
| lot of variation in absorption efficiency that's less
| known. When you hear about people who eat lots of food
| and remain thin, I suspect this is part of the
| explanation. And whether their bacteria get the calories
| instead, or whether it passes through untouched, might
| show up in CO2 measurements but I don't think it would be
| related to body fat accumulation.
|
| Yeah, the blind assertions I have seen that people
| basically always absorb pretty much 100% of the calories
| of the food is weird. We already know that some forms of
| calories like fiber have very low absorption rate. The
| Atwater indirect system of calculating calories takes
| that into account, but is still just an estimation, since
| it uses average calorie values for protein, carbs, and
| fat.
|
| And so I've just noted that calories on packaging is just
| an approximation. An individual food may actually have
| more above average proteins than below average, etc,
| which can skew the real calorie count. For example, nuts
| are known to have less calories than indicated on the
| label, with whole almonds having 20% fewer.
| (https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/138.9.1741S) This is also
| ignoring the fact that many foods, especially those
| prepared by people are not always super consistent in
| sizing. A subway sandwich prepared correctly should on
| average have the calories subway claims, but we all know
| that some locations will follow the correct procdure more
| closely than others. Etc.
|
| The other issue with just blindly going with calorie
| counting (which is really on tracking calories in) is
| that the differences in the calories one takes in will
| cause changes in the calories one expends. Eating fairly
| substancially less than your body is used to will almost
| certainly cause one to feel bad, and avoid doing as much,
| meaning fewer calories out, at least partially offsetting
| the the calorie reduction. But people are generally not
| measuring the calories expended very closely, if they
| bother doing it at all.
| darkerside wrote:
| What? No, I haven't gained weight, my bacteria is just
| getting a little heavy
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > At that point though are we kinda arguing semantics?
| While our microbiome isn't composed of human cells, you
| can still argue it's a part of our functioning organism.
|
| It's not semantics, because when more calories are used
| up by bacteria they only sustain the amount of bacteria
| inside you, which then die and leave your body on a
| relatively quick timescale.
|
| It's like if your fat cells could only store fat for a
| month before it gets discarded.
|
| So it's important to know how much is each, if they can
| both vary.
| hattmall wrote:
| >"oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your
| human cells didn't get"?
|
| That would still be part of calories in.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| 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.
| bluecalm wrote:
| It might also increase dopamine. I have ADHD and there
| are two things that let me focus better and feel less
| hungry: stimulants and exercise.
| pjerem wrote:
| Oh ! I have ADHD too so maybe it's that.
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| quantified wrote:
| Some levels, yes, appetite-suppressing. When appetite
| returns, it can be with a vengeance.
| lhuser123 wrote:
| 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.
| impjohn wrote:
| I also have that gut feeling, mind the pun. It stands to
| reason to me that since metabolism is incredibly complex,
| any slight variation in any of the parameters can lead to
| significant differences observed at an overall
| operational level. It's also very obvious people are
| reporting a wide range of experiences for the same
| activity
| uberduper wrote:
| We're not _that_ different. And a lot _is_ known. There
| isn't anyone on earth with incurable obesity.
| [deleted]
| sdoering wrote:
| 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.
| MayeulC wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| After a long bike ride, apart from being much hungrier
| than usual, food tastes better. Mediocre food becomes
| good, good food becomes the best thing you've ever eaten.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, that's the way I've felt when I've gone for a hike.
| The food tastes better and I will happily eat an amount
| of food that I later regret.
| Moru wrote:
| I have no apetite at all after biking for two hours.
| However, if I drink any diet soda or piece of candy with
| sweetener, I will be ravenously hungry in 10 minutes. Has
| always been like this so I stay away from that stuff.
|
| My exercise is a game called Turf. Mostly played in
| Sweden where there are a lot of zones close by. I bike
| quite relaxed for 1-4 minuts and stand still for 20
| seconds in the zone, then repeat until next zone. It's a
| bit harder during winter with all the snow though. I have
| done nothing to my diet and lost about 20 kilo the last
| year. The GPS says I traveled about 3500 km the last year
| at my slow pace.
| achenatx wrote:
| 100% this for me. I do intermittent fasting and my first
| meal is around 2pm. I do brazilian jiu jitsu around 6-9
| and skip dinner. When I come home Im not hungry at all
| for at least an hour. Ill get a little hungry and if I
| eat or drink anything, the floodgates open and I cant
| stop eating. It is better to go to sleep a little hungry.
|
| I try to have a 500 calorie deficit. If I have more than
| about 500 (say 1000) Im fine that day, but the next day
| Im ravenous and tend to overeat.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Oof this was me yesterday. Ate one large meal and snack
| between 2pm and 5pm because I had a work event in the
| evening. Got home around 9:30pm and really wanted to eat
| something and I almost did.
|
| Drank a few cans of seltzer and wound up staying up doing
| emails and chores until 2am. Woke up at 9am today and I'm
| feeling a bit hungry at 11:20am, but even if I eat
| something now, it will be a net negative compared to what
| I would have eaten last night.
| foxfluff wrote:
| The activity makes a big difference for me though.
| Running for example tends to not have a major impact on
| appetite.. sometimes I feel like it actually lowers my
| desire to eat. That's based on relatively short runs
| though (45-90 mins of activity). I don't know how I'd
| feel after a marathon.
|
| If I ride a bike for 3 hours, I feel like I could eat a
| horse.
| rory wrote:
| This matches my experience. Swimming or biking makes me
| hungry. Running a reasonably long distance (say, 7+
| miles) makes me a slightly nauseous and not hungry at
| all. Maybe it's because running causes more jostling
| and/or beats up non-muscle parts of the body more?
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| sizzle wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >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
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > 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
| nkurz wrote:
| You are forgetting that the human body is nowhere near
| 100% efficient at burning fuel to put power into a pedal.
| To produce 400 watts of mechanical power, the body
| consumes about 4 times that amount of fuel (25%
| efficiency). Consuming 2000 kcal over 3 hours is thus
| closer to the more realistic 200W of power to the pedals,
| and even the higher ranges make sense if he's a good
| athlete. See this article:
| https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-
| convert...
| balfirevic wrote:
| > You are forgetting that the human body is nowhere near
| 100% efficient at burning fuel to put power into a pedal.
|
| I'm not, because the parent poster explicitly said
| "That's not based on made-up calories but actual work
| from a power meter on the bike."
|
| Which seems absurd, hence my comment.
| 3maj wrote:
| _Looks at wahoo kickr in corner_
|
| Hello old friend, we meet again.
| jniedrauer wrote:
| 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.
| impjohn wrote:
| Feels to me like pushing your body to extremes is akin to
| a metabolic shock and your system rebooting in another
| operating mode. Probably needs another reboot to go into
| regular mode, so your apetite will also vary in the
| meantime
| kinghtown wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| For the majority of regular people feeling tired and worn
| out is more likely to be caused by lack of sleep and too
| much booze than by lack of food or excessive exercise.
| kinghtown wrote:
| I meant more from training hard for long term. Most
| people are not at this level or pushing that hard. Normal
| people would definitely benefit from lifestyle changes
| outside of the gym if they are tired and worn out.
| copperx wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Olympic swimmers are NOT
| spending 4 hours a day in the pool, and certainly not 6.
| rolisz wrote:
| A couple of years ago I took swimming lessons from the
| Swiss butterfly swimming champion and he said he trained
| about 20 hours a week and that to get to Olympic levels,
| he'd have to train even more. For swimming it's possible
| to train much more than in other sports, because it
| doesn't do as much joint damage, because you're in water.
| thetadot wrote:
| https://www.reference.com/world-view/michael-phelps-
| training...
| lmm wrote:
| I spent years failing to lose weight through diet. I took
| up endurance cycling and in one day (13 or 20 hours) I
| burn off a kilo or more, even with the increased eating.
| Afterwards I'll put that back on in about two months, but
| as long as I keep doing one or two of these events every
| month I come out ahead.
|
| I don't know how things are for anyone else, but it
| worked for me, shrug.
| watwut wrote:
| I had very similar experience. I lost weight with no much
| additional effort when I started to do a lot sport. I did
| not focused on food much, I was doing sport for weight
| loss unrelated reasons. And it dropped.
|
| Attempts to loose weight by diet only all failed. To make
| it worst, there is also aspect of most common diet advice
| being plain wrong. It focuses on calories too much. It
| completely ignores what your body needs, so you end up in
| nutritional deficiency - this kind or that kind. And that
| will affect a lot and eventually you will stop diet and
| start to feel so much better _and healthier_ after
| stopping it.
| bsder wrote:
| > I always feel there are some methodology issues in
| sports science studies like small sample sizes or strange
| metrics.
|
| The calorie stuff is from both oxygen and deuterated
| water studies. You burn the same amount of calories and
| your system just shunts them around. The science on this
| is one of the few things in nutrition that is quite
| solid.
|
| This has the effect, for example, that if you exercise a
| lot, this actually suppresses your immune system making
| you more likely to get sick.
| rdtwo wrote:
| mtmickush wrote:
| 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.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| 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.
| paavoova wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| > 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.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| >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.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I just plugged a 300 pound person in to a calculator for
| a "moderate" walking speed, and that'd burn nearly 500
| calories in an hour.
| sersi wrote:
| Most 300 pound people I know cannot walk for an hour at a
| moderate walking speed.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You are severely overestimating the physical abilities of
| a severely obese person.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I'm a 40 year old guy who's been sitting behind a desk
| writing software for two decades. I was in good shape in
| my 20s but haven't exercised significantly in a very long
| time.
|
| It took me about three months to get up to that speed,
| cycling every other day. I started out doing 10 miles, at
| 10mph.
|
| Three months isn't all that long for an exercise program.
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| Not that it matters, but reporting mph for a stationary
| bike (indoor trainer I assume) is meaningless in this
| context. This could mean that you're cycling anywhere
| between 0 and 2000 Watts.
|
| I cycle on and off for ~8 years (35yo) and going at 20mph
| in the real world for an hour or more became possible
| only after a few years for me.
| nradov wrote:
| Color me skeptical. In order to burn 1000 kcal in 60
| minutes a cyclist would have to sustain a power output of
| about 280 W. Do you have a calibrated power meter, or are
| you going by the "vanity" calories displayed by most
| stationary bikes?
|
| There are certainly plenty of trained cyclists who can
| maintain that power output, but I've never seen anyone
| reach that level after only 3 months. If you really did
| that then you're an extreme genetic outlier with an
| unusually fast training response.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I don't know, actually. I'll check it out later today. I
| do know my heart rate is around 150-160 throughout.
|
| I did a lot of cycling in my 20s and while I'm at least a
| decade out of shape I'm sure I'm relying a lot on past
| training.
| nradov wrote:
| High aerobic fitness evaporates pretty quickly. The
| training you did a decade ago will not carry over to
| today. However, there are a few genetic outliers who can
| quickly build up a high level of fitness with just a
| short training program. You could be one of them, but
| it's more likely you're just getting bad data.
|
| Absolute heart rate doesn't tell us much about calorie
| consumption because there's a huge variation between
| individuals. If we know the athlete's size, sex, and
| threshold heart rate then we can start to make some kind
| of estimate. But to get an accurate number it really
| takes a properly calibrated power meter (or more complex
| lab tests involving exhaled gas measurement).
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| It seems doubtful the measurements would be far off. The
| numbers fit with the expected 50 or so calories per mile
| biked.
| nradov wrote:
| It's doubtful that your measurements are even close to
| accurate. If you're on a stationary bike then the
| distance displayed is completely meaningless. The
| equipment manufacturers just show those numbers to make
| their customers feel good. In terms of calories they are
| in no way comparable to real outdoor cycling. You can get
| a great workout on a stationary bike but you need to be
| realistic about the true power output.
|
| What is the actual power output in watts? Has it been
| properly calibrated? If not then you're just fooling
| yourself.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| "Completely meaningless" and "in no way comparable?"
|
| These statements are rather extreme and seem impossible
| to support. Energy output per mile with real world
| cycling has enormous variance as well. Why so much
| concern for precision regarding one and not the other?
|
| I don't think there's much point in continuing here.
| aixi wrote:
| same here, I'm in my late 20s and was generally unhealthy
| because of the pandemic, and I burn 630-700 calories per
| 30 minutes worked out
| nradov wrote:
| That is unlikely. How are you measuring calorie burn?
| You're probably overestimating.
|
| As a point of comparison, an average size man would have
| to run at a speed of at least 11 mph (18 km/h) in order
| to burn that many calories in 30 minutes. Not impossible,
| but well beyond what most of us can manage.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > That assumes a "normal person" will not compensate for
| the effort with a snack.
|
| You're also assuming the same normal person will not
| compensate for their healthy lunch with a snack.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| >An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's
| diet.
|
| Pretty sure most people shouldn't be eating 3000
| calories/day.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Probably not, but the average American does eat about
| 3600/day.
| ngngngng wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Avoiding calorie dense foods is big, yeah. But exercise
| is exercise and at higher levels (1+ hour/day) the
| caloric burn is very significant compared to baseline
| metabolic rates.
|
| Yes, our bodies are built to take in more calories than
| we can burn (thankfully!), but if you keep your eating
| habits constant the exercise will make a huge difference.
| it_does_follow wrote:
| 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.
| lostmsu wrote:
| This would be nice if 1hr+ a day would not be 5% of your
| conscious life.
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| 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.
| bluecalm wrote:
| 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.
| soperj wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| IMO CICO is right but not useful. It's like saying that
| if you just read math books and did the exercises, you'd
| get a math degree easily.
|
| That's true of course, but the problem for most people is
| sticking to the plan, not whether that plan would
| actually work.
|
| We see athletes sticking to their plans but they are
| pretty special in terms of what they can get themselves
| to do.
| soperj wrote:
| 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.
| vl wrote:
| 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.
| soperj wrote:
| It still makes the premise that you can't defeat a bad diet
| bullshit.
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| There is no culture in a world that would consider it
| normal to run 26.2 miles with no breaks. Walking it in a
| span of a day is massively different. Anyone who does
| hiking can do it. The same people however can not run
| that distance.
|
| Even marathon runners run marathons only on competitions.
| The chance of injury or sickness after is too high in
| order to make it worthy. And after, you are supposed to
| rest for multiple days even if not injured. Again, 26.2
| miles is 8 hours of hiking and you are pretty much
| guaranteed to be ok after it.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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
| nelblu wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| neltnerb wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I used this however to cut one meal per day. I'd eat
| breakfast late, a bit before regular lunch time, and then
| get hungry leaving work. Riding the bike home made the
| hunger go away, and it stayed away for about half an
| hour, enough time to cook dinner.
|
| The result was that I wasn't superhungry when I started
| eating. I also tried to eat high protein, high fiber
| meals so I'd stay full for longer.
| EGreg wrote:
| Intermittent fasting can help repair a lot of things in
| your body, make you live longer, etc.
|
| Vegans live on average 10 year longer!
|
| The hunger you feel the first day btw is not "real"
| hunger, it's just your stomach growling and you being
| used to eat. After you ignore hunger for 3 days, your
| body stops wanting food. That's if you want to do a
| cleanse. (I've never done one though)
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| Is it known if the meat causes people to die sooner, or
| is it just that people who are vegan are correlated with
| people who care about their health so they do other
| things that cause the 10 year effect?
|
| I feel like a non-lethal poison like a flea killer or
| something would cause a 10 year lifespan drop, so it
| would be surprising if meat were as deadly as flea killer
| poison.
| fredophile wrote:
| I'd guess the lack of processed foods is a big part of
| it. Until recently if you were vegan you pretty much had
| to make everything from scratch. I'd also guess that the
| average vegan is more health conscious than the average
| meat eater.
| blitzar wrote:
| When compared with the SAD standard american diet, any
| diet intervention (short of eating double portions of the
| SAD) is going yield positive results.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| I hear this is a very dangerous game if taken to an
| extreme. You have to be very disciplined once you take it
| beyond 3 days. David Blaine did it for 44 days and I
| believe he has liver damage now? He talks about it on Joe
| Rogan.
| vl wrote:
| Professional athletes cut for several days quite often.
| It's well researched area.
|
| But better way for regular people is just do OMAD. You
| get used to it after first three days, which are brutal.
| So, strong motivation is required, but still easier than
| real cut for bodybuilders or fighters.
| sdoering wrote:
| Short fasting has been shown to have positive health
| effects when done right. Even short fasting can be
| dangerous and should absolutely not be done without prior
| consultation of a medical professional.
|
| That being said 'clesnding' has been disproven
| scientifically so many times, I think there must be a
| Necromancer for bad nutritional myths out there. I just
| can't understand why this myth (together with others)
| always comes back from the grave.
|
| Regarding vegans. Yes a primarily plant-based diet has
| been shown in studies to be beneficial to health.
| Depending on the environment of the test subjects. For
| practical purposes in western/northern societies that
| holds true.
|
| The important word is plant based. Because without either
| taking extreme care of the (especially) micro nutrients
| as a vegan you either need to substitute or be extra
| cautious. And of omnivores with a primarily plant based
| diet also look at their nutritional balance, caloric
| intake and such, the difference between diets in the
| studied groups vanished.
|
| So one could say if eating primarily plant based and
| being mindful of our diet and nutritional needs, there is
| no difference scientifically.
|
| The only remaining difference is one of personal values
| and believes. The question of how (or if) do we want to
| have animals treated to firm our diet. Personally I would
| add to look at how do we want the humans in the food
| production chain treated as well and how do we want our
| diets to have an ecological impact.
|
| But as said - these are existential because deeply
| personal value questions that can't be scientifically
| discussed.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| > Vegans live on average 10 year longer!
|
| Interesting if it's actually true. I doubt there are any
| good studies about that, though.
| awb wrote:
| > 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.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| 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.
| russdill wrote:
| I feel like from reading through this thread is that
| everyone has a body that manages hunger and metabolism
| differently.
| netfortius wrote:
| 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 ...
| bena wrote:
| Yeah. A single snickers is over 200 calories. That's 30 minutes
| of running.
|
| Eating is incredibly efficient.
| vl wrote:
| OMAD works wonders. First three days are brutal, and then you
| get used to it.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| 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.
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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?
| frostwarrior wrote:
| I'm starting to think that these kind of scientific
| studies, that focus on a single factor and rule every
| other variable aside, are not the best way to analyze
| weight loss.
|
| Because following that logic, exercise supposedly does
| not work if you want to lose weight. But if every study
| around aerobic exercise arrives at that conclusion, why
| aren't the majority of athletes overweight? Where are the
| fat runners?
|
| Is this a survivor bias? (Fat people even with great
| aerobic capacity end up hurting their joints so they stop
| running)
|
| Is it because the addition of exercise generates other
| kind of changes in the body, like less insulin
| resistance, and overall more signals in the body to burn
| fat rather than store it?
|
| Do runners spontaneously change their diets once they get
| used to their new lifestyle? Maybe the food they used to
| eat, both in amount and in composition, makes them
| uncomfortable so they start making lasting changes?
|
| Yes, it does look like running a static amount every time
| has diminishing results. But, overall, people who run
| tend to be less overweight. And a lot of overweight
| people who start doing exercise and stick to it, tend to
| lose the weight, or at least they lose fat and gain
| muscle.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| There's an idea in the fitness industry called "skinny
| fat". Thin people who "look" and eat healthy but when you
| actually look at their body composition have no muscle
| and relatively high fat percentage.
|
| I'm my experience people severely underestimate the
| effects of having more muscles mass and the changes it
| can cause when you lose some from lack of training.
|
| It also bleeds into peoples thinking. People view
| exercise as a way to lose weight. And eating less is,
| rightly, a more efficient way of losing weight. But body
| composition really matters not just for losing weight,
| but just life in general.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I am _pretty_ sure my diet stayed pretty tight, as I
| monitor my caloric intake using my smartphone and it
| remained pretty consistent. Obviously this could be
| skewed for other reasons so it 's not gospel.
|
| The "much" is carrying a lot of weight, so to speak, in
| your comment. As a reference I went from running ~25
| miles a week to just walking a fraction of that as I've
| recovered. I did keep up my other non-cardio calisthenics
| throughout, though.
|
| Some napkin math suggests I was over my calorie target by
| just shy of 300 calories per day over the course of this
| time period.
| obpe wrote:
| That's very interesting because with some more napkin
| math...
|
| If we assume 3500 additional calories is 1 lb of fat
| stored on your body, then 3500/300 = 11.6 days you gained
| 1lb
|
| Assuming 6 months is 180 days, then 180/11.6 = 15.5 lbs
| over 6 months
| coryfklein wrote:
| Also the article did say specifically that the hunter-
| gatherers were within 10% TEE of the average US person.
| That's order-of-magnitude in line with the 300
| calories/day, given that the NHS recommended calories/day
| for men is 2500 and 10% of that is 250 calories.
| mmmpop wrote:
| 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.
| everforward wrote:
| 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.
| mmmpop wrote:
| >> Running form probably plays into that as well, if
| you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're
| swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
|
| Yep, my form is atrocious and inefficient due to bunions
| and Morton's toe which has evolved into hammer toe.
|
| I'd argue that I burn calories more efficiently, however
| :)
| uhtred wrote:
| 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.
| locallost wrote:
| I was wondering about this recently. My fitness tracker estimates
| seemed just a bit high for months now, that you'd think those
| extra burned calories (500-1000 per day) would result in less
| weight. But no, the only weight I lost was in the time periods I
| was actively skipping meals or snacks.
| sfx77 wrote:
| I don't believe this research. I think the measurement of burning
| calories might be flawed. If you don't burn more calories by
| exercising how does Michael Phelps have a six pack with his
| 10,000 calorie a day diet?
| caffeine wrote:
| This article really needs a TLDR. Reading it in between the
| cookies notice, the subscribe modal, and trying to slog through a
| detailed history of everything this guy has done since he was
| 10...
|
| Has anyone managed to get through this who could post here: what
| is the conclusion about humans burning calories?
| mjsweet wrote:
| I read somewhere that the only way we lose weight is by exhaling.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| The article seems to miss what is (at least to me) the most
| interesting follow-up question: if exercise doesn't cause a
| person to burn significantly more Calories throughout the day to
| induce weight loss, then what does?
|
| I'm somewhat hard-pressed to believe the answer is diet alone.
| Anecdotally, when I was running 100 miles per week in college for
| cross country, I ate three or four giant meals per day and
| maintained a very low weight. Ten years later, I have an injury
| that makes most types of exercise difficult, and I've observed
| that I really can't eat more than one meal per day (dinner),
| otherwise my weight starts to creep up.
|
| I find it odd that Calories are used in relation to weight gain,
| because (kilo)calories are a unit of energy, and excess weight is
| due to excess fat. Is there a simple linear relationship between
| the extractable energy content in food (as determined by the
| Atwater system) and the conversion of food components into fat by
| the digestive system? I find that hard to believe. Shouldn't we
| be using a mass balance rather than an energy balance? If you
| could observe digestion at the atomic level, you would simply
| quantify which atoms from food end up in fat stores and which
| leave the body via other processes. Presumably, these atoms could
| then be bucketed into source categories (e.g. certain types of
| proteins or carbohydrates). I wouldn't be surprised if exercise
| somehow alters the fat accumulation process even if it doesn't
| significantly affect human metabolism.
| akeck wrote:
| If I recall correctly, capital "C" Calorie, used in nutrition,
| is another term for kilocalorie. Lowercase "c" calorie is the
| SI unit. 1 kcal/Calorie is 1000 calories.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| That's correct. I used a lowercase "c" for (kilo)calorie to
| highlight that explicitly, but capital "C" elsewhere.
| csee wrote:
| The article proposes stress and inflammation.
| twoheadedboy wrote:
| The obvious follow up I was expecting that wasn't in the
| article was "do people who exercise have less stress response
| to stimuli?".
|
| They talk about a "caloric balance sheet" so this makes sense
| to me.
| projektfu wrote:
| Fat stores are considered, metabolically, as stored energy as
| they expand and diminish based on the metabolizable energy of
| the diet, which may be different from the measured total
| energy.
|
| But you're definitely right! There's a great Mr. Wizard-style
| TEDx video about it: https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE
| rdiddly wrote:
| Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English
| teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the
| Appalachian bla bla bla..."
|
| You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The
| one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually
| uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is
| ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly
| happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and
| not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog
| he has etc.?
| jbotz wrote:
| Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of
| insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive
| work?
|
| Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does
| matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a
| similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's
| gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What
| can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One
| popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but
| after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
| oblio wrote:
| HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with
| probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in
| the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about
| this and turn it into virtue signaling.
|
| "Look how bad I am at reading people."
|
| "I'm worse than you at..."
|
| "I'm so bad that..."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
|
| > Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground
| covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Seems a bit harsh to jump right into an accusation of the
| dreaded virtue signaling!
|
| Would you agree at least that there's a balance to be made,
| and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all
| facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an
| avalanche of color)?
|
| I don't want _no_ color, but I agree with others here that
| many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards
| fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example
| -- it's increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these
| days.
|
| Titles matter. A title like "A Short History of Nearly
| Everything" pretty clearly tells you that there's going to
| be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title
| like "Scientist busts myths about how humans burn
| calories", you ought to deliver on those promised myth-
| busting new facts!
|
| I think it's interesting to consider a) is this a real
| change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by
| technology? (i.e. by ads)
| oblio wrote:
| Most science articles I've seen, since times immemorial,
| provide some background for the researchers or the study
| subjects.
|
| At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for
| extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have
| article minimum word requirements to account for the
| second part.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I would agree in principle, but puffed up articles rarely
| give you the kind of insight you are referring to.
|
| I doubt what colour dog they had and their preference for
| cornflakes instead of oatmeal at buffets is going to let you
| enter their scientific mind as such.
| L_Rahman wrote:
| You are not alone. A subset of HN users have an identity
| marker around having a preference for "explicit material
| claims and nothing else for color or emotion". They then
| enjoy signaling this preference to their tribe in the
| comments. I've found it best to ignore them.
| [deleted]
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| Verbiage is proof of work, and journalists need to make a
| living, just the same as planning-to-plan product managers.
|
| You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per
| minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I
| tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-
| reading instincts.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is a genre. You may prefer drier style. On occassion, I do
| as well. But sometimes I enjoy fluffy writing like this,
| especially in the human-contact-starved covid days.
|
| I would say "live and let live". There is enough written
| content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.
| playpause wrote:
| No you're not alone in it. But yes there are plenty of us who
| find it a really effective way to get drawn into an article. It
| works for me through infectious enthusiasm. If I have a sense
| of a curious mind trying to figure something out, I get
| interested in the thing they're trying to figure out too. Bill
| Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything made me interested
| in tons of scientific areas I never considered interesting
| before, because it is all about fascinating people repeatedly
| failing then eventually succeeding in understanding some
| natural phenomenon. The human angle is the perfect gateway for
| me. Maybe if I had more discipline I could just force myself to
| start reading a dry, factual scientific article in a field of
| little immediate interest to me until I start to notice data
| points that pique my own curiosity. But it's so much easier for
| me to get infected with the curiosity of some compelling
| character who is overflowing with it. And it sticks better in
| the memory.
|
| If it's a field I already have a strong personal
| interest/background in, then I generally just want to get
| straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn't read a
| long form popsci article like this one. But
| calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that's not very exciting,
| yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit),
| so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything
|
| I have read that book multiple times, first when I was 10. It
| left a huge impression on me. I heartily recommend it.
|
| Bill Bryson in general is a great author. One of my
| favorites.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Yeah, this is a really strange article. It reads more like a
| human interest story about this one scientist's bio, with his
| work sprinkled in.
|
| I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting
| to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially
| notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait
| and switch.
| michalu wrote:
| Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial"
| claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will
| provide storytelling instead of science.
|
| The whole premise of that "You can't exercise your way out of
| obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running
| than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about
| it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure
| that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why
| when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster,
| lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body
| greater burden to carry.
|
| If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of
| course I won't lose weight.
|
| You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians"
| who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make
| name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay"
| or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of
| the day and they get media exposure.
| [deleted]
| FrankyHollywood wrote:
| > If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift
| that of course I won't lose weight.
|
| I don't understand, your body optimizes, and uses 20% less
| energy. However, you are still using the 80% which is more
| than not doing anything at all don't you?
| jeltz wrote:
| Plus at least for running you can just run faster and make
| up for that 20% effioency gain. I personally do not think
| excercise is very good for losing weight but that
| particular argument is BS.
| carlmr wrote:
| > Whenever there's insignificant science making
| "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with
| sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of
| science.
|
| I think this is quite the claim, maybe you should provide
| some evidence. I think it sounds reasonable to assume that
| those that lack the scientific basis will use storytelling to
| convince, because they have nothing else. But I'm not sure
| about the reverse.
|
| Here we have storytelling, but the story is peppered with
| some data from experiments that support the claim. So how
| does storytelling imply lack of evidence?
| 1_player wrote:
| > What's so controversial about it?
|
| Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there"
| than you burn moving about.
|
| Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but
| it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles
| because you had a portion of fries.
|
| There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones
| the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because
| muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to
| lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and
| takes less time than going for a 5 mile run.
|
| > body optimizes for energy expenditure
|
| No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance.
| Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next
| famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the
| body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no
| other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat,
| we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and
| you'll do great.
| mantas wrote:
| > Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there"
| than you burn moving about.
|
| Bullshit. My body goes through 1600-ish kcal on an idle
| day.
|
| If I go out on a 4h steady bicycle ride (= 100km), I go
| through 2000 kcal on ride alone. That's much more than my
| body burns just being there.
| me_me_me wrote:
| I don't get it, how is that a myth or controversial.
|
| Cutting empty calories is the easiest to remove calories
| from daily total.
|
| Exercise further decreases the ratio of calories in
| calories out.
|
| Bottom line is: calories in - calories out.
|
| There are caveats there for sure, like increasing muscle
| mass increases idle caloric burn. Different types of food
| have different effect promoting or impeding metabolism.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| calories in - calories out was debunked a while ago.
| Different types of food and diet cause different degrees
| of weight gain or loss.
|
| For an extreme example compare 100 calories of glucose to
| 100 calories of fibre, both are types of sugar. The fibre
| contains an extra electron that acts like a shell, and
| the body has to expend energy breaking that bond to make
| it digestible. So most fibre passes through you without
| affecting your weight.
|
| The most useful measure of food is the Glycemic Load. Not
| Glycemic Index which is a measure of the net glucose in
| the food. Glycemic Load is a measure of how the body
| responds to the food. E.g. cold potatoes have the same
| calories and GI as hot potatoes, but their measured GL is
| actually lower, so cold potatoes are better for
| controlling weight.
| edanm wrote:
| > calories in - calories out was debunked a while ago.
|
| No, it wasn't. It's the generally accepted model of human
| weight gain. It's what most scientists who study this
| topic believe to be true. (And really, it's the only
| model that makes any sense, and is incredibly easy to
| test)
|
| They only people who disagree with this model are
| considered to be outside the mainstream of science. They
| might be right (I don't think so though) - but it's
| certainly not debunked.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Just because the USDA is 30 years behind the science
| doesn't make them right. There are hundreds of studies
| now debunking it. Do you really want to contend that 100
| calories of fibre is the same as 100 calories of glucose?
| Ridiculous. In fact, the calories model never had broad
| academic support. Ansel Keys research is a joke today.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Obviously if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you'll
| lose weight. But the inverse is not necessarily true.
| It's possible to consume more calories than you burn and
| still lose weight, because your body doesn't necessarily
| utilize all calories consumed.
| tlamponi wrote:
| > calories in - calories out was debunked a while ago.
|
| Not really, it's just that calories-in is worst-case
| that's what's on the foods box, you cannot magically
| produce more energy but it's well known that not
| everything can be processed by the metabolism with the
| same efficiency.
|
| So with extremes like your example the difference is
| naturally huge, but that doesn't matter in practice if
| one balances their consumption just somewhat it averages
| out and approaches something between upper (100%) and
| lower (0%) of efficiency, and in reality it rather close
| to the upper bound (averaged) as our metabolisms are
| quite efficient with the food most humans actually put
| into them.
|
| Your glycemic index rule holds does not violate the
| calories in calories out rule, it's just more precise
| regarding the actual upper bound.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Not really. E.g. look at my second example, cold potatoes
| vs hot potatoes. Same calories, same exact ingredients,
| but hot potatoes are significantly worse than cold
| potatoes.
|
| I dont have the link to hand, but there is a GL database
| maintained by Harvard, I think, that demonstrates this. I
| will look it up later for you.
| jghn wrote:
| It's still calories in vs calories out. What changed is
| that our understanding of what determines calories in and
| calories out has become more nuanced. For instance, your
| examples
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| My examples demonstrate that calories in / calories out
| is false. I don't quite get your point? A calorie is a
| measure of the useful energy released from burning stuff
| in a furnace. It was invented to compare the efficiency
| of different fuels for steam engines. It has no relevance
| to humans, who don't use a furnace and steam power, but a
| complex chain of cascading chemical reactions.
| jghn wrote:
| What I mean is that "calories in" is not literally
| calculated by the total energy you put in your mouth, but
| rather the energy your body absorbs from that. And as you
| note that might be different based on the food, how the
| food is prepared, content of the food, etc.
|
| Likewise "calories out" is not literally calculated by
| adding up your movement & exercise. We know that things
| like hormonal levels, etc can all impact how much energy
| your body is expending.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _The fibre contains an extra electron that acts like a
| shell, and the body has to expend energy breaking that
| bond to make it digestible._
|
| I'm not a nutritional expert, but...this sounds like bro
| science. Do you have a source for this, or can someone
| who knows this better speak to it?
| mantas wrote:
| Not sure about exact process. But whole fruit has
| dramatically lower glycemic index than juice of the same
| fruit.
| mantas wrote:
| Guess what else has massive effect on metabolism?
| Exercise.
|
| Also, various workouts have a lot of other important
| effects. Increasing bone strength, improving body
| resistance to inflammatory processes, developing micro
| vascular system... simply managing calorie in/out ratio
| won't get you any of this. And dropping weight in a dumb
| way may do more harm than good.
| [deleted]
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Did you read the article? because this specific thing is
| what the science that the article covers explains.
|
| tl;dr: your body burns roughly the same amount of
| calories regardless of exercise. However, it allocates
| those calories differently: if you don't spend them on
| exercise then it will spend them on stress (and
| presumably other stuff).
|
| Which totally makes sense as to why my depression &
| anxiety fade if I run or work hard.
| g4zj wrote:
| > your body burns roughly the same amount of calories
| regardless of exercise
|
| Can you explain how this makes sense?
|
| Different physical activities (running vs. sitting, for
| example) require different amounts of energy to perform.
| Calories are a unit of measurement for this energy. It
| sounds like you (via referencing the article) are
| claiming that a human will expend the same amount of
| energy in a given period of time regardless of their
| physical activity.
| mantas wrote:
| Depression and anxiety fades because endurance exercises
| release certain hormones and help to flush out kortizol.
|
| And yes, it allocates calories towards building fat.
| Which is a weeeee different from burning them.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "If I go out on a 4h steady bicycle ride (= 100km), I go
| through 2000 kcal on ride alone."
|
| What do you mean 'on that ride alone', are you doing more
| than 4 hours of excersise a day, every day? Because
| that's like 0.1% of the population, most can't even fit
| that in their diary, let alone have the stamina/etc.
|
| Average bloke goes to the gym for an hour couple times a
| week, at that level you calorie consumption is basically
| unchanged - its withing an error margin of natural
| variability of food you eat.
| mantas wrote:
| I used to ride amateur cycling races, then just do a nice
| amount of rides/runs.. Now I'm in situation where time
| outside the house is hard to manage. I try to cut the
| calories, but weight keeps growing and overall health
| decreasing. Looking forward to stabilising family
| circumstances to have time to head out enough...
|
| From what I observed myself, cutting calories is very
| difficult and result is miniscule. Adding some cardio
| (2h/week? 5h/week?) helps so much more and allows more
| flexibility with food. Also cutting calories does not
| help to increased overall immunity. Cutting calories is
| hard on mood (as in, no sugar high and tasty foods are
| limited) yet exercising allows to keep tasty foods AND
| gives runner's high. Win-win...
|
| As for tight schedule, I don't believe in gyms. People
| waste so much time driving to/from favourite/affordable
| gyms... Running right out home and doing body-weight
| exercises at home would be both more beneficial to one's
| health and cheaper.
|
| P.S. I mean regular non-exercise day is 1600kcal. 4 hours
| ride would be 2000kcal. So exercise day would be ~ 3400.
| Obviously it long-ride is weekend affair. Then one or two
| run 10k runs or quick 1h ride (another 1k kcal each). So
| ideally it adds +500kcal/day. And a lot of cardiovascular
| health. Well, it was 2 years ago before kid was born...
| Now it has a loooooot of variation.
| jeltz wrote:
| While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way
| to lose weight I think that you understate how many
| calories running burns.
|
| When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot
| more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about
| 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build)
| which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per
| week).
| the-alt-one wrote:
| I have no clue how many calories running burns, but the
| act of moving around leaves you less time to eat :).
| Getting fat in the dark winters of Sweden is more likely
| for me, because I'm just bored and don't want to go
| outside as much so I sit inside and eat chocolate.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Think about it this way. The rate at which you burn
| calories is directly proportional to the rate at which
| you breathe out CO2 because that what happens with carbon
| you burn.
|
| So if every day you train for an hour so that your
| breathing is 3 times faster, then you have additional two
| hours of burning in a day. 23 usual hours plus one worth
| 3. So you have 26 instead of 24 hours in a day.
|
| It's way easier to put 15% less on your plate every day
| than to intensly train for an hour each day while keeping
| portions the same.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Also, you don't absorb everything you eat. Actually, let
| me be clear: I have no evidence for this. But the fact
| that my weight is so consistent despite my radically
| inconsistent eating and exercising suggests to me that my
| body can regulate digestion. When I'm in a period when
| I'm overeating, my body just doesn't absorb so much.
|
| Again, more speculation, but i would imagine that
| metabolic disorders involve digestive regulation issues,
| not just lack of exercise and overeating.
| stedaniels wrote:
| You are arguing a different point. They argued that doing
| exercise burns more calories than sitting idle.
|
| @1_player said: > Your body burns incredibly more energy
| just "being there" than you burn moving about.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I was objecting to the word "incredibly".
| tgb wrote:
| You're assuming that breathing rate is proportional to
| CO2 breathed out, which I doubt. I barely breath any
| faster while running than while just sitting here, much
| less than 3x.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It is directly proportional because of how lungs work.
| The percentage of CO2 in exhaled air is roughly the same
| regardless of how fast you are breathing (if you don't
| artificially accelerate your breathing beyond what your
| body dictates).
|
| Lungs can't put in more CO2 in breathed out air.
|
| If you breath only slightly faster when you are running
| than when you are sitting that must mean you ran quite a
| lot and optimized your stride so that you don't burn much
| more calories running than sitting.
|
| But more likely explanation is that you are not aware how
| fast exactly you are breathing when sitting and running.
| Try to measure it. Also take into account that you might
| be taking shallower breaths when you are sitting.
|
| Just blow up a balloon when you are sitting and when you
| are running with your normal exhaled breath for few
| seconds to test it.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Yes but in numbers it is way more. If I bike for an hour
| I burn 700-1000kcal . Thats not 15 but 50% of the dayli
| calorie intake... i am no expert btw. My understanding is
| that the problem is more that after 20 minuts of sport,
| at a certain heart rate, is starting to burn fat...but
| not body fat. More free floating fat. And it takes one
| hour or so to start burning bodymass. So the fuel for one
| hour sport is what I ate before and not my bodyfat.
| Another example. I do mountaineering, mostly 1 week
| walking in the alps for 10h a day. Thats around 4000kcal
| more burned a day. And there I see instant results with
| all my friends coming with me . They get thin very fast.
| Around 500g of body mass a day :)
| scotty79 wrote:
| > If I bike for an hour I burn 700-1000kcal . Thats not
| 15 but 50% of the dayli calorie intake...
|
| That's estimated and probably impossible.
|
| 1000 kcal is 4184000 joules, divided by 3600 it gives you
| around 1100W
|
| Human at rest burns about 100W. Pro-cyclist can do
| additional 400W. There's no way you can burn energy at
| the rate of 1.1kW consistently for an hour unless you
| literally set yourself on fire.
|
| EDIT:
|
| I was wrong.
|
| Apparently 700kcal burned per hour of cycling is a pretty
| realistic number.
| https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-
| convert...
|
| Also resting kcal burn might be around 1800 per day. So
| 40% increase in of calories burned by hour of cycling per
| day every day is achievable.
|
| The question is how can you breathe out additional ~10h
| of CO2 within an hour?
|
| 3 times deeper breathes 3 times faster? Because that
| carbon has to go somewhere.
| nckthrn wrote:
| Cycling is only approximately 25% mechanically efficient,
| so the parent is correct. There's a lot of heat to get
| rid of.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Apparently 700kcal burned per hour of cycling is a pretty
| realistic number.
|
| https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-
| convert...
|
| Also resting kcal burn might be around 1800 per day. So
| 40% increase in of calories burned by hour of cycling per
| day every day is achievable.
|
| The question is how can you breathe out additional ~10h
| of CO2 within an hour?
|
| 3 times deeper breathes 3 times faster? Because that
| carbon has to go somewhere.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The CO2 concentration going up in the blood increases the
| efficiency of respiration (because it is ultimately
| diffusion).
|
| You don't necessarily need to exchange 10 times the
| volume of air to deal with the additional CO2.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Range given for concentration of CO2 on exhaled air is
| 4-5%
|
| So it looks like it could be 25% difference at most.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I doubt the 4-5% you saw is a first principle of
| breathing.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Why not? CO2 levels in blood must be tightly controlled.
| It probably can't get twice as high as usual.
|
| If there's already 4% of CO2 in the air around you it's
| an immediate danger. While you can spend 10 minutes in
| 3%. If your body could bump up CO2 in exhaled air from 4%
| to 8% then you'd probably have bo problem surviving in
| air thay contains 4%.
| yetihehe wrote:
| If you are pro-athlete, I think you could, but 1kW is
| probably about max a human can burn for longer periods. I
| managed to output 500W for 5 minutes of rowing, but I'm
| overweight couch potato.
| christoph wrote:
| I think you need to account for human inefficiency. I
| have to burn more than 1 joule to output 1 joule on a
| bike. The average efficiency of a human on a bike is
| somewhere around 20 to 25%.
| hervature wrote:
| You are forgetting about the efficiency of the human
| body. Roughly, only 21% of your power is transferred to
| the bike. So a professional adding 400W to the bike is
| actually consuming ~1900W of power. This all matches up
| with their nutrition [1]. Namely
|
| > They averaged 91 g of carbs every hour across all of
| the stages.
|
| That's nearly 400 calories worth of sugar simply while
| riding the bike. In fact, I would say cycling is a clear
| counterproof of this article. Their equations are
| literally (calories in)*efficiency = power and they know
| exactly how much to feed. I don't disagree that 99% of
| people are better served eating less, but doing cardio
| for 2 hours a day + diet management will lead to very
| quick weight loss. "Very quick" here is 2lbs/week but
| people have some insane expectations.
|
| [1] - https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2021/07/01/how-
| much-do-th...
| CJefferson wrote:
| The problem is, it isn't efficient if you are overweight
| :)
|
| When I was at my heaviest weight, I could only do a
| normal-speed walk, which burned relatively little
| calories.
|
| At my lightest, I was also having to go out of my way to
| eat extra calories, as I was cycling so much, and a fast
| 90 minute cycle would leave me light-headed if I didn't
| eat some extra calories.
| watwut wrote:
| This is primary that thing where exercising makes you
| more fit and in the long term more active in general.
| Because what was previously tiring straining activity
| suddenly becomes pleasurable. And if you eventually
| manage to stumble upon activity you actually like, it is
| way easier to do it then to sit at home hungry, passive
| and obsessed about how miserable you feel (until said
| person will break and eat a candy or something similar).
| zeckalpha wrote:
| TEE is what the article discusses measuring, not the
| energy burned during the exercises but the total in the
| day. The data in the referenced studies indicate the body
| compensates for the calories burned running by cutting
| back in energy use elsewhere.
| oblio wrote:
| > If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift
| that of course I won't lose weight.
|
| This example is kind of bad :-)
|
| You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general.
|
| And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting
| weights, your example is precisely how you <<would>> lose
| weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even
| better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio
| routine.
|
| Instead of increasing the weight, you'd increase the reps or
| the motion you use for lifting weights.
| episteme wrote:
| This is not accurate, weightlifting with a reasonably
| difficult weight for your strength level is one of the most
| effective ways to burn calories.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| It is accurate. He didn't use the phrase "burn calories"
| at all ;)
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Btw as far as I know the only way to burn bodymass with
| sports is to have a heart rate of 120-140 for at least
| one hour. And then it starts. And to loose one gramm of
| fat one needs to burn 4kcal ( it takes 4kcal to generate
| the fuel from the body. Fat has usualy 8kcal). Also to
| loose around 200g of bodyfat a day one has to run at
| least 2 hours. ( with 500kcal/hour burned)
| episteme wrote:
| You burn bodymass by spending more energy than you
| intake. Lifting something very heavy a few times will
| take a lot of energy and if you do a few sets the muscles
| will need repairing before they can work optimally again,
| which means your body will use energy doing this for the
| next couple of days. Overall a lot of energy used.
| otikik wrote:
| The scenario was "20lbs for 3 years".
|
| Most "standard adults" (e.g no injuries, obesity or
| illnesses) would not consider 20 lbs "difficult", to
| start with. And especially not after 6 months of regular
| practice.
| edanm wrote:
| I used to think this too, it's a popular talking point in
| favor of strength training.
|
| But as far as I know it's wrong.
|
| A one hour session of strength training will involve some
| amount of work, and a lot of rest. Compared to doing
| cardio, where an hour of work is an entire hour of
| elevated energy expenditure, you're effectively burning a
| lot less during strength training.
|
| In addition, the "after burn" effect is very minor (in
| the extra tens of calories only range).
| oblio wrote:
| Isn't it anaerobic exercise, though, and from what I
| remember to lose weight you want aerobic exercise?
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Thats correct. Yes it burns much fuel but also the wrong
| one
| oblio wrote:
| I'm confused. I'm being downvoted but you're saying I'm
| right?
| watwut wrote:
| > This is not accurate, weightlifting with a reasonably
| difficult weight for your strength level is one of the
| most effective ways to burn calories.
|
| It wont make you loose weight however. It will likely
| make you _gain_ weight as your muscles will grow. Which
| is explicit goal of many guys who start lifting weights.
| viceroyalbean wrote:
| True, but for many people "lose weight" is really code
| for "lose body fat", since that has desirable health and
| aesthetic benefits.
| episteme wrote:
| No, it won't, unless you are eating excess calories. It
| takes a lot of energy to repair muscles and grow them.
| watwut wrote:
| Muscles weight more then fat. This is something that
| easily and regularly happen. I am not even saying it is
| bad thing to happen.
| cataphract wrote:
| I think that this depends on your training regimen. You
| can train for strength, not muscle mass. This is
| especially important for some athletes, like cyclists,
| where extra weight is a liability (more mass for the same
| force means less acceleration).
|
| When the gyms closed for the pandemic, I lost 5 kg of
| muscle. After coming back, I started doing fewer sets and
| have not regained the muscle mass. But my strength (the
| amount of weight I can lift) is now very close to pre-
| pandemic levels.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Not on time. You cant lift weihgts for hours. But riding
| a bike or running goes for at least an hour. Golf burns a
| lot of calories because it takes 3 hours to complete. And
| lifting weight is also the wrong ,,zone" for burning fat.
| It only burns avaible sugar. And to have that much fuel
| one needs to eat much ....
| fastball wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you have that backwards. What you're
| describing is effectively trying to turn weigh-lifting into
| cardio, while most research shows that interval training /
| weigh training are more effective at burning calories than
| steady-state cardio.
| antman wrote:
| One does not only lose weight because of the exercise
| itself, but by retaining muscles since they are a major
| calorific expenditure factor. Large mass muscles burn
| calories e.g. glutes
| tgb wrote:
| Sadly, muscle only burns 12.6 kcal / kg /day at rest [1].
| If you put on an impressive 20kg of muscle that would
| only increase total expenditure by 250 kcal a day. If you
| want your muscles to burn calories, you'd better be
| exercising them.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2980962/
| beowulfey wrote:
| It's maybe three paragraphs total of his life, then it's back
| to the findings. I skipped those paragraphs too.
|
| The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer's past decade
| or so of work (and I do find the work to be really
| interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can
| probably try reading the original papers.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I had a very similar outburst recently :p
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344510
| abhinavm wrote:
| I hate this type of journalism. Article writers are driven by
| metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric
| they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website.
|
| This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied
| well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer.
| But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and
| hard to read.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by
| publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to
| optimise is time spent on the website._
|
| It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not
| just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this
| makes the story better...
| joeld42 wrote:
| There are different kinds of articles out there. Some are about
| getting the information across, some give the context and the
| story behind it. Some aren't even about the science at all. I
| wouldn't compare John McPhee to a Geology textbook. And I
| wouldn't say it's correct that this article was "ostensibly and
| nominally" about just calories. The headline is "Scientists
| bust myths about calories". It's about the scientists as much
| as it is about the calories.
|
| Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that
| give context and explain not just the research but the people
| behind it. Let people enjoy things.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's apparently the canonical way all long story/articles have
| to be written. It's as if those people wanted to be authors
| instead of journalists...
| thecleaner wrote:
| Skipped it totally. That's the part of scientific American
| intended for bored readers more interested in gossip. The part
| after it is quite cool. The conclusions are basically drawn
| from how much CO2 is exhaled. So the key contribution seems to
| be the data collection methods.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Could machine learning could help with this? Could some
| algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles
| just leaving the useful stuff?
| Avalaxy wrote:
| Yes. See https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/ar
| ticle/sc... for example.
| fbanon wrote:
| I would expect machine learning to be more useful in
| generating this kind of fluff.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| No.
|
| If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch
| cargo cult on top.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| You're wrong, it is very well possible with algorithms, and
| it has been a thing for many years already. For example
| check the Auto TLDR bot for Reddit. Here's an example of
| what it could look like for the article posted here: https:
| //smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc...
|
| It's not even hard to do, you mostly have to count token
| frequencies which is hardly machine learning. Although you
| could also do it with BERT.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Seems like a lot of work (and a lot of time to get working
| reliably) for a relatively minor issue that can be mostly
| fixed by skim reading
| aulin wrote:
| I'm really having a hard time reading this. They lost me even
| before, when they said he likes hiking and he's not fat. Good
| science can come from the worst people. Show me the data, no
| need to sell me the authors.
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| _Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for
| the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about
| the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.?_
|
| science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read
| it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to
| make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the
| science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Actually, both Nature and Science call themselves
| 'magazines', and they have plenty of pop-science-compatible
| content, mixed with primary literature.
|
| Arxiv needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because
| much of the content is not peer-reviewed.
| hwers wrote:
| This is a reason we shouldn't feel ashamed about developing a
| habit of skimming. In many cases it's simply a proper adaption
| to an incredibly low signal to noise ratio in most articles
| you're exposed to on the internet.
| gima wrote:
| Props to this.
|
| I have developed a habit of skipping to the end of the whole
| page, and reading towards the beginning, paragraph-by-
| paragraph. Works..sometimes :D
| periheli0n wrote:
| You could read his papers if you're only interested in the
| science?
| jdrc wrote:
| Yes there is a name i think for that rambling on with
| insignificant details about the person
|
| At best it should be seen as a warning for possible biases in
| the science due to the person's background or upbringing, or
| random life anecdote.
| cataphract wrote:
| I just skipped over that part...
| mcv wrote:
| It would be nice if articles actually made use of the
| possibilities of the Web: show me just the brief summary of
| what it's about, and let me click links to choose whether to
| read more about the science, or more about the 40 hectares of
| woods where the guy grew up.
| periheli0n wrote:
| You could go to the primary literature and read the
| abstracts.
| tomerv wrote:
| I hate that, and I usually just skip that part. No point
| fighting it, I guess.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Paste bin copy with most of the fluff paragraphs removed:
| https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| raldi wrote:
| Right? Can someone just list the myths and their refutations so
| I can move on with my life?
| Lio wrote:
| You're not alone. This reads like one of Grandpa Simpson's
| stories about onions.
|
| I also like the way they've broken my browser's reader mode
| too.
|
| I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2
| paragraphs of articles like this. If there's no actual content
| there then move on without reading.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Thats generally what I do, I skip to the last paragraph, read
| it, and if I've missed any important context (that I care
| about of course), I go up one, rinse and repeat until I get
| the point they're making, or until I get bored and decide I
| can quite happily live my life without knowing the busted
| myths
| Dinux wrote:
| I was thinking the exact same thing. I stopped reading after
| three sentences and couldn't find the scientific paragraph
| right away so I just when to the HN comment section to see if
| some could give me the gist of the story.
|
| Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its
| my take that no one really cares about who ate what this
| morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing
| aembleton wrote:
| I think they're written this way for seo optimisation.
| oblio wrote:
| That's funny. SEO optimization for keywords "woods" and
| "Appalachians"? :-)
|
| No, it's written that way to turn the person into a) a
| character, b) a relatable character.
|
| Regular people like stories, not dry facts piled up.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Isn't it mainly to provide more space for ads?
| oblio wrote:
| Probably a bit of both.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I didn't know this about myself, but apparently I feel the same
| because I exited there after finding out very little about the
| claim in the title of the article.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Indeed I find a lot of NYtimes articles are filled with fluff
| like this and I find myself skipping to the core info.
| tonymet wrote:
| it's not complicated : eat less walk more . increase both until
| you see a change . and stop the obsession with food it's not
| healthy
|
| no phD needed
| ravenstine wrote:
| Although it may seem surprising to some that humans put on more
| fat than their fellow apes, this is at least somewhat predictable
| when you look at other ways in which humans are different from
| other apes.
|
| Putting aside our intellect, we our developing towards having
| little to no fur came with the benefit of being able to sweat,
| which means we could track animals further than they could
| persist. It allowed us to effectively outrun, or outwalk, herds
| of animals.
|
| That comes with a tradeoff, which is the lack of fur means not
| being able to retain as much heat in the cold. Being able to
| store more fat is the obvious alternative.
| learc83 wrote:
| How do his results line up real world data like soldiers needing
| about 5k calories a day when active. Or athletes like Michael
| Phelps consuming 8k-10k calories a day while training?
| dugite-code wrote:
| From my read of the article the data is heavily biased towards
| running as the exercise of choice, probably because measuring
| CO2 is easy and non-intrusive to do on a treadmill. They do
| mention utilizing doubly labeled water but don't say if they
| only used that for sedentary participants or measured a wider
| range of exercises.
|
| Given I have always heard/read how efficient humans are at
| running if they didn't account for the differing exercise
| methods the conclusion being offered in _this_ article may be
| flawed.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Running isn't efficient at high speeds. The same with
| cycling. It's funny to see people buy a bike for exercise and
| then roll along at a crawl, expending less energy than
| walking.
| dpark wrote:
| Running isn't much less efficient at higher speeds. It's
| harder because the calorie burn per unit time is higher,
| but the calorie burn per unit distance doesn't vary that
| much.
| octodog wrote:
| It's more exercise than driving a car though, which is why
| I think people do that.
| ehnto wrote:
| You're right, cycle commuting falls in a great niche.
| It's still fast enough to cover decent distances in a
| reasonable amount of time, you can still carry your
| grocery shopping, and it's healthier than driving while
| still achieving most of the same things.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Cycling is roughly 5x more efficient than running/walking
| for similar effort. Thinking you will lose much weight by
| cycling is generally mistaken, unless you plan to cycle
| very long distances or are extremely obese already and do
| very little existing exercise (and this is discounting most
| of what TFA is saying too).
| bagacrap wrote:
| wouldn't efficiency correlate to effort? pretty sure the
| "effort" is the feeling of burning calories. If an elite
| athlete can run for an hour and burn 2000 calories in
| that time, they will beat a less elite athlete who can
| run for 1900 calories in an hour, all else equal. Put
| them on bicycles or a rower and they'll be able to burn
| the exact same number of calories (assuming sufficient
| training in the target exercise medium) because the
| limiting factor is their body's ability to process
| oxygen, not the exact form factor of the exercise.
| ehnto wrote:
| I'm not sure it makes sense to look at it that way
| either. What if it takes you 100 calories to move 100
| meters but your competitor only takes 80 calories to move
| 100 meters?
| ehnto wrote:
| I can't line up my real world experience with this article, I
| have to suspect that he may be right for his specific study
| parameters but that may not actually be applicable to
| generalized advice as it's being interpreted here.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| That's a good point. Humans are natural runners and hikers
| and it stands to reason that it is very efficient compared to
| saw something like working in a warehouse all day moving
| around heaving inventory or back in the old days when people
| would burn thousands of extra calories a day with say being a
| lumberjack or coal miner.
| markmark wrote:
| I think something is being lost in the reporting. The article
| itself mentions 2400 kcal for a 75kg woman, and then a
| paragraph later talks about Race across the USA runners burning
| 5000+ kcal.
|
| I think the key is in this sentence: " According to Herman,
| humans who are more active don't have that much higher TEE as
| you'd predict". ie, you have a higher Total Energy Expenditure,
| but it's by less than you would calculate from just adding the
| energy expenditure of the added exercise.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| The thing is the human body is amazing at knowing how much
| food it needs and will persuade you over the long haul to eat
| enough food to balance out the extra caloric usage whether
| you like it or not. His point is that eating healthy is
| important and watching it is more important than exercise (by
| far)
| sjsvsnd wrote:
| plorkyeran wrote:
| The obvious answer is that even if the body does become more
| efficient and reduce calories burned on other things, there's
| an upper limit to that. The Hazda walk 14 km per day, which is
| only 800 calories per day. By professional athlete standards,
| that's a relaxing offseason level of exercise. It's plausible
| that your body could cut its base calorie consumption from 2000
| to 1200 and stay at a stable weight while only consuming 2000
| calories, but it certainly can't cut it to -500 calories and
| stay at a stable weight while burning 2500 a day exercising and
| only eating 2000.
| abathur wrote:
| I didn't read the article, but it may be relevant that (IIRC)
| swimmers lose a lot of these calories just to maintaining body
| temperature while in water for a significant fraction of each
| day (any activity that involves spending a lot of time in water
| may just be quantitatively abnormal?)
| bagacrap wrote:
| The article mentions that but dismisses it with some hokey
| assertion that professional cyclists used to mainline their
| calories... does not touch on how elite athletes in other
| sports or decades get by.
| thebigjewbowski wrote:
| Those are anecdotes and I have one of my own that really has me
| questioning this;
|
| I've lost 85 lbs since the beginning of May. I lost 40/85 just
| since the beginning of December through today.
|
| When I exercise I clearly lose weight more quickly. Since
| December I've been running like crazy, at least 5-10km 5-6
| days/week. When I lift weights I drop pounds even faster.
|
| Edit: Makes me wonder, though, -- if I walk in the morning and
| solve puzzles on leetcode, would I burn more calories? When I
| run at night if I solve random math problems in my head will I
| burn more calories?
| pleb_nz wrote:
| For years I've heard Gym buffs say
|
| 'fitness starts in the gym, weightloss in the kitchen'
| dehrmann wrote:
| The version I've heard is simply "abs are made in the kitchen."
| ehnto wrote:
| Or the related quote, "Abs are made in the kitchen" (edit: oops
| someone beat me to that). Even someone who's never done a lick
| of physical training can have visible abs if their bodyfat % is
| low enough. Meanwhile some of the strongest people I know do
| not have visible abs.
| voisin wrote:
| I would highly encourage anyone to read Pontzer's book, Burn. I
| just finished it and found it to be incredibly eye opening and
| well written. The TL;DR is that we need to think of calories like
| a relatively fixed budget rather than additive, and that the
| primary benefit of exercise is that it consumes that budget more
| than it expands it (hence not effective for weight loss), but by
| consuming that budget there is less budget to go around for
| unhealthy things like inflammation, excess hormone creation, etc
| (which is why exercise is so beneficial to health).
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > but by consuming that budget there is less budget to go
| around for unhealthy things like inflammation, excess hormone
| creation, etc (which is why exercise is so beneficial to
| health).
|
| You dont understand inflammation, inflammation is like a
| nuclear bomb going off, however certain chemicals found in the
| diet will turn that nuclear bomb into an array of guided
| missiles.
|
| We are complex chemical reactions, eat the wrong stuff you get
| sick, eat the right stuff you get well, but you need to make
| the right chemical reactions take place and reduce the wrong
| chemical reactions.
|
| The problem with scientific study is they generally focus on
| what they can test directly or indirectly this is why we now
| see complete reversals in some medical thinking & theories.
|
| Sure exercise and other output will consume calories, but if
| you focus on just calories, you ignore the properties of the
| chemicals and ill health will occur.
| voisin wrote:
| He is referring to chronic low grade inflammation - not acute
| inflammation from specific chemicals. He cites studies. If
| you read them I would love to hear your take because you are
| correct - I am not an expert on inflammation!
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| What causes low grade inflammation? Generally Fat, what is
| fat and is anyone measuring what else is inside the lipid
| like fat soluble vitamins, hormones etc?
|
| > He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man
| would be about 4650 calories per day.
|
| It still doesnt look at the what the short and long term
| effect is, he doesnt quantify it with this person can
| consume 4650cal but be dead next week does he? Its just a
| throw away statement, it means nothing and his
| ego/beliefs/followers are getting him into print before a
| larger audience. Because we are not able to quantify his
| statement properly, the media could be complicit in
| murder/manslaughter depending on what people know and
| remembered at the time.
|
| Our lifespans are limited by the traditional domesticated
| foods we eat, ie farm grown foods. However now that we are
| seening labgrown foods like fungi meat replacements and lab
| grown meats, the questions with those are do they contain
| enough of the chemicals to be good for health or not? You
| only need a few chemicals to grow cancer lines in a test
| tube for example, but cancer cells are not that functional
| in the scheme of things are they? They are just cells which
| have lost their normal function in the body.
|
| And I'm not qualified in anything, I cant even say if my
| GCSE are accurate because I never got my exam papers back
| to check my answers again the study books!
| [deleted]
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| If your only goal is weightloss, then yes - but just weighting
| 50kg doesn't mean it is healthy. You can have fat at 50kg, just
| in the wrong places. Activity provides many positive effects,
| such as better immune system, better distribution of nutrients in
| the body etc. Trying to loose just weight without a training plan
| is not productive.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Is there a tldr on the research that doesn't involve his life
| story or what his coworkers think of him?
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| You could read one of the book reviews:
| https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-bus...
|
| Still not great as a tl;dr though.
|
| Maybe the book summary on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-
| Research-Really-Calories-Healthy...
| icedistilled wrote:
| Since the article is comparing non-fat mass is this saying that
| someone with 60kg of non-fat mass will burn the same amount of
| calories if 1. their overall mass is 75 kg and they're athletic
| or 2. have more fat mass being 85 kg overall and non-athletic?
| I'm not sure what i'm missing but that isn't shocking or
| surprising. I feel like someone's trying to pull a fast one here.
|
| "female farmers in western Africa used the same amount of energy
| daily when adjusted for fat-free body mass as women in Chicago
| --about 2400 kilocalories for a 75-kilogram woman. "
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Why does article call hydrogen and oxygen isotopes harmless to
| human body? Is there a sound science behind the claim?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Pontzer was the guest on one of my favorite podcasts last summer.
| Great discussion with him: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-
| podcast/examining-energy-evoluti...
| drakonka wrote:
| I wonder if this could partly explain why some people gain muscle
| easily without eating more when lifting regularly. Common wisdom
| says you have to eat more to make up for the extra energy
| expenditure, or otherwise your muscle growth will be limited. But
| I'm just not that hungry. Yet not purposefully supplementing with
| more food during training regimens never seemed to hinder my
| muscle growth. Then again, I don't know that. Maybe I would've
| gained even _more_ muscle if I'd been eating more. Anecdotally,
| it just seemed like muscle has come on pretty easily regardless
| of how much I eat. Could the body simply be redirecting more of
| my calories to growing muscle during these periods while keeping
| the total expenditure the same?
| YaBomm wrote:
| sfifs wrote:
| Please is there a summary of the findings anywhere? I'm beginning
| to lose patience with these pieces that mix narrative, character
| profiles and actual results.
| LaserToy wrote:
| There is a new book about it called: Burn: New Research Blows the
| Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay
| Healthy
|
| The only way is to eat less.and to eat less we need to eat less
| manufactured food designed to be addictive
| allisdust wrote:
| Can't they get to the science part without dramatising the
| scientist. It's a long slog with tidbits thrown here and there. I
| hate articles like this that assume that reader is up for
| biography instead of the core subject. We get it. Everyone's
| story is unique. No need to hash all that uniqueness in every
| article about their work.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Can someone tldr? I read several paragraphs and know so much
| about this scientist but so little about the myths he's supposed
| to bust.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| On the matter of food and weight...
|
| What of the people who tend toward being thin or lithe? I'm 181cm
| and 68kg (5'11.26" and 150 pounds) at 40 years old.
|
| I can eat and quantity of any food in perpetuity and not gain
| weight. Although they doesn't mean I don't feel unwell if I were
| to, say, eat way too much of something.
|
| If I lift weights I gain a small amount of muscle mass, but not
| much.
|
| What's the theory(ies) of what is going on in the bodies of those
| like this?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| My brother-in-law is even thinner than you. He can eat a lot of
| stuff.
|
| He also has Crohn's disease. I don't want to say that you have,
| too, but perhaps your digestive system isn't completely OK.
| That may include composition of your microbiome. Have you ever
| seen any change after taking probiotics?
| xedrac wrote:
| You're like my wife and her siblings. They can eat just about
| anything without putting on any significant weight. The running
| theory is that the food is not absorbed as efficiently,
| possibly due to it moving through the bowels too quickly, as
| some of them have IBS.
| kart23 wrote:
| I thought I was like this. Track your calories. Eat 3000
| calories a day, and a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight
| (150 grams for you). And I promise you'll gain weight, unless
| you have something wrong with your digestive system. It's
| actually pretty hard to eat like that consistently for many
| skinny people.
| xweber wrote:
| There's this great book 'Why calories don't count' by Dr Giles
| Yeo. It discusses how the human body processes food and extracts
| energy from it - and how current calorie labels on food items
| don't account for this process. Highly recommended.
| borroka wrote:
| I am a scientist (biology field) and I have been exercising and
| playing competitive sports for more than 35 years at this point.
| I used to be a hard-nosed calorie counter and I got fantastic
| results by counting calories, which means I had visible veins in
| my belly area. I read Ancel Keys experiments, and I used to say
| that there were no fat people coming back from war back in the
| day: calorie reduction works. I used intermittent fasting, high
| protein, low-ish carb, daily variation in calories (e.g., 4 days
| at 1500-1800, 3 days at 2500).
|
| The pandemic starts, I had surgery a month before the working
| from home mandates, I stopped smoking (5 cigarettes a day, we
| know they tend to suppress appetite, but it not like meth, there
| are plenty of fat smokers) and I quickly, say in two months, put
| on around 10 kg (90 to 100 kg+), and for the first time since I
| was an early teenager, I had a belly.
|
| I was exercising less, not counting calories at all, I was not
| spending calories going outside (work, errands, nights out all
| got cancelled), and I was hungry all the time despite eating more
| than usual. All factors that can explain my weight gain.
|
| This unfortunate situation goes on for one year more or less,
| then I started losing some weight by simply eating less and going
| out more, at least that was my explanation. But I noticed a
| visible change in body shape and composition after a two-week
| vacation in which my diet was McDonald's at nights and a huge
| breakfast in the morning with all calorie-dense food, basically.
|
| Fast forward a few months, some improvement here and there, but I
| am still not at my pre-pandemic fitness level, still a bit fat,
| muscles not as visible as I like. I then go to NYC for a couple
| of weeks and my diet is McDonald's, ice cream and nothing of the
| healthy sort. Sure, humidity, heat, walking much more, they can
| all contribute to non-trivial increase in energy expenditure. But
| I come back looking like a million bucks, pre-pandemic fitness
| level if not better.
|
| I keep in shape, then I get covid and I pretty quickly put some
| weight on (again...), say 5-10 pounds (sure, these swings are
| also water stored in glycogen, some of the weight quickly gained
| also goes away pretty quickly). I then go on a long-weekend
| vacation, walk much more than usual but no exercise (gym,
| running, combat sports), eat and drink more than usual, and,
| again, I observe a visible change in my body composition. I am
| leaner, I lost weight, I see (some) abs.
|
| Someone could say, you are simply exercising more via walking and
| other non-exercise related energy expenditure, and MCDonald's two
| times a day can be at < 2k calories, which is plenty deficit for
| my body to lose weight. But as someone who has been tracking
| calories for a long time and has exercised for decades, I don't
| think it explains what I am seeing.
|
| I have problems now accepting that our metabolism and our
| physiology is not a lot more malleable than I (and science)
| thought it was. I now start to believe that our "state of mind"
| (conscious or unconscious) can have a much bigger effect on our
| physiology, including metabolism, than expected according to
| "settled science". I am talking about our "mind" perceiving a new
| state of world (vacation for example) and very quickly adapting
| to the new perceived "stress" by changing my physiology, it could
| be different nutrient partitioning (decrease insulin resistance?)
| or simply higher metabolic rate. Or it could be the opposite,
| such as perceived "normal life" as stressful thus increasing,
| say, insulin resistance, and vacation as "relaxed mode",
| decreasing cortisol and insulin resistance etc. We all know we
| can "think" ourselves sick, but we "think" ourselves leaner?
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Is there a browser extension that removes all of the fluff and
| narration from what attempts to be a scientific article?
| deepnotderp wrote:
| The conclusion is almost certainly wrong:
|
| 1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes
| wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg
| Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K
| calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure
| you I'd be a lot fatter...
|
| 2. The only plausible mechanisms for why exercise wouldn't result
| in more overall caloric burn is that less energy is expended in
| non exercising states, eg the body is trying to conserve energy
| and either reduces metabolism or reduces fidgeting, walking, etc.
| This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
|
| The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle
| of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a
| body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and
| their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their
| metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
|
| 3. Finally, this blog post dives into some methodological issues:
| https://darrendahly.github.io/post/2012-08-31-hunter-gathere...
|
| EDIT: Increased metabolism due to muscle mass is not as big an
| effect as you'd think:
| https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
| elevaet wrote:
| > 1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes
| wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg
| Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K
| calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure
| you I'd be a lot fatter...
|
| I agree and I'm in the same boat. After 10 years of running
| ~70km/week, I'm eating way more, have dropped 20lb, and am
| healthier and stronger.
|
| > The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary
| lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal"
| lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is
| "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying
| to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
|
| I think people underestimate what being active and excercise
| actually mean. Our ancestors were vastly more active than we
| are today. The amount of movement that was required for
| foraging, hunting, agriculture is hard for most modern people
| to imagine.
|
| Even the act of preparing the food that was
| gathered/hunted/harvested was so much more manual and energy
| intense than what we are accustomed to today.
|
| For most of our evolutionary history basically everything we
| did was powered by our bodies. Today we have machines for
| everything, and a high standard of comfort.
|
| It's true that calorie restriction is easier for most people
| than excercise, but I think it's because.. to put it bluntly..
| we've become lazy.
| valzam wrote:
| I do think the point is also partly that what most people
| consider 'a good amount of exercise' isn't really very
| strenuous. Doing a bit of cardio and weights at the gym 3x a
| week isn't enough to offset a bad diet. If you run 10k every
| day, that's a very different ballgame because you meaningfully
| burn more calories than a regular diet gives you.
|
| It's also incredibly easy, at least in America, to consume way
| too many calories. To meaningfully lose weight you have to
| drastically change your diet or drastically up your movement.
| goda90 wrote:
| Don't forget Phelps also spends most of his exercise time in
| water. The body expends energy to maintain thermal equilibrium,
| and water absorbs heat much more quickly than the air. With
| several hours of swimming each day, that energy will add up.
| nelgaard wrote:
| Yes, those marathon runners mentioned might reduce their TEE
| from 6200 to 4900 kcal/day. But that is still way more than
| most office workers eat.
|
| And if you check the article:
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw0341# == The
| reduction in TEE among RAUSA subjects can be partly attributed
| to marginally reduced body mass and daily mileage (table S3).
| Still, even after accounting for these changes, Week 20 TEE was
| 596 kcal/day lower (range, 400 to 923 kcal/day) than expected
| ==
|
| So they did loose weight during the marathons and the metabolic
| compensation is less than half of what you would think reading
| the original article.
|
| == ... The magnitude of metabolic response in RAUSA athletes
| (~600 kcal/day, ~20% TEE) is similar to the degree of
| adaptation reconstructed for the most physically active
| subjects in a recent cross-sectional study (17) and may reflect
| humans' maximal capacity for metabolic compensation. ==
|
| So if 20% percent is the maximum, it means that if you try to
| outrun your diet, you might have to eventually exercise 25%
| more. Except by then you will probably have more muscle mass
| that will burn more calories even when not exercising. And you
| will be able to exercise more in less time.
|
| Suddenly it does not look so hopeless.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 1. then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories.
|
| Some don't. Think about marathon runners (which would be pretty
| close to the tribe studied), they have a muscle ratio that is
| way lower than your Phelps example and their body composition
| if also probably more efficient than yours (I don't know you,
| but let's assume). I wouldn't be surprised if a pro marathon
| runner would have be close to your 3.5K a day when going
| through light training.
|
| Think of it through different angles: mountain trekkers aren't
| packing 80kg of sugar to go through their trekking, their
| bodies are way more efficient at doing these tasks and need
| less calories to work than what we'd expect from a random
| person. It literally means doing more with less.
|
| > This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss
| diets.
|
| This happens to everyone. From your link: "In fact, your body
| is hard wired to maintain energy balance within a fairly small
| range."
|
| > 3.
|
| It seems well argued but just really nitpicky. It goes into the
| whole energy intake vs energy spent debate to explain why they
| don't agree with the methodology, but don't prove why they
| think the conclusion is wrong. It's as if I'd nitpick your use
| of calorie intake measurements and explain in great details how
| it's approximation of an approximation and we have no way to
| actually know someone's actual intake calorie, without ever
| engaging with your actual points.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a
| lot fatter...
|
| Simply having more muscle mass can burn calories too. Most
| people don't spend most of their time training either, so
| comparing to elite athletes is fairly irrelevant.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| True, but the effect is not as big as you would think, see
| eg: https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolism
| con...
| ckastner wrote:
| > _From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes
| wouldn 't need a lot of calories._
|
| That was my first thought as well.
|
| It's even more evident with certain types of sports. Take
| cycling for example. Lifting mass up a mountain is going to
| take quite a bit of energy; maintaining a constant speed in the
| face of wind resistance will take energy. That energy has to
| come from somewhere.
| csee wrote:
| 1. Phelps seems to be guessing: "Maybe eight to ten thousand
| calories per day," he writes... Also, the research shows there
| is extreme variation in people's resting BMR (perhaps due to
| large variation in height, body weight, stress levels, etc), so
| you eating 3500 calories isn't decisive against the thesis of
| this article.
|
| 2. That is exactly his hypothesis, and he has produced evidence
| for this hypothesis in a recent experiment. I don't know why
| you are presenting this as some kind of counter-argument.
|
| 3. That blog post isn't a coherent critique. The post's two
| points are that the drinking solution is also used for
| measuring energy intake, and that the Hadza actually burn far
| less calories than Western people until such numbers are
| adjusted. This first point isn't relevant without further
| explanation, and the second point only serves to further
| support the thesis.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| 1. I used to eat less calories and exercise less and was fat.
| Also for elite athletes TEE experiments have been fine.
|
| 2. Studies in nutrition science are a dime a dozen. Like in
| psychology, you should apply common sense to interpret the
| results. In this case, the implication is that the Hunter
| gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human
| bodies.
| csee wrote:
| > The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary
| lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal"
| lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter
| gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically
| tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems
| quite unlikely. > the implication is that the
| Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle
| for human bodies.
|
| I can't make sense of these statements.
|
| The author thinks that couch potatoes have more stress and
| inflammation (and probably more fidgeting, etc, too), and
| these things burn calories which explains the results.
| That's the opposite to what you say here, which is that the
| results suggest that being a couch potato is normal.
| mrcode007 wrote:
| I think the debate has been settled a long time ago:
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257
| irrational wrote:
| But, surely the researcher is aware of people like Phelps. It
| wasn't addressed in this article for the masses, but I wonder
| if he addresses people like Phelps in his actual research
| papers.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| About Phelps - he need to build, maintain and condition a whole
| lot of muscle mass.
|
| He's incredibly far from a normal human - he's a true
| specialist.
|
| Lots more energy goes in to that, compared to losing excess fat
| and living a "normal" human hunter gatherer existence.
|
| The whole system change once you go google scale, so to speak,
| and phelps is gmail.
|
| In the words of Ido Portal: we're human first, movers second
| and specialists last.
|
| I see relevance in this research in the human/mover
| perspective.
| kolla wrote:
| Swedish speed skater Nils Van Der Poel drinks cream and eats
| crisps, LOTS of it, while training just to get enough calories
| in his body to continue training so number 1 is faulty.
| noduerme wrote:
| >> somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato
|
| What I got out of the article wasn't that sitting still and not
| thinking can somehow burn calories; just that strenuous mental
| activities _can_ burn a great deal more energy in humans than
| in apes. This is believable to me. I 'm a person who falls
| asleep doing math in my head every night. I got a chance,
| during a year of pandemic lockdown, to experiment with my own
| body in this way.
|
| I only eat once per day. I don't keep fixed hours; sometimes
| I'll stay up for 24, sleep for 16; other times I'm regularly
| 8/16 sleep/wake. I don't have a set bedtime. I try to maintain
| 16/48 sleep/wake over any given period.
|
| No matter what, I only eat one meal every 24 hours. I've been
| doing this for about 20 years.
|
| This makes it easy to measure when I get hungry in relationship
| to my last meal. My body is well trained to expect about a 24
| hour delay; I have no appetite and don't think about food until
| around 22 hours post-dinner.
|
| Under lockdown conditions, I began to notice that I wasn't
| hungry as expected on days where I hadn't spent >= 6 hours
| working on strenuous code. If I took a day off and "couch
| potato'd", I might not eat at all for 48 hours. But if I
| focused on code for 8+ hours, I would be hungry on time or
| early.
|
| I started to experiment with this. I figured out that if I took
| a 1 hour walk, plus 4 hours programming, it made me hungry
| right around where 6+ hours of code did. A 1 hour walk - to me
| - seems about equal to 2 hours of writing code in terms of what
| my body feedback gives me about my calorie burn.
|
| I don't walk very fast, and I code very intensely.
|
| But that's just it - this article is about solving math
| problems as a way to burn calories. I have a nice new M1 Mac
| that only ever turns its fans on or gets warm when I'm using
| all 10 cores. Last night my task falling asleep was to
| calculate randomly chosen x/128ths as percentages to five
| decimal places. My daytime task was harder; and now I'm hungry.
| And I haven't walked anywhere today.
|
| However: Couch potato, this ain't. And the point about the
| body's reduced expectation of physical output is probably
| accurate as well.
| csee wrote:
| > strenuous mental activities can burn a great deal more
| energy in humans
|
| Could be the body stress response associated with doing those
| activities
| kohlerm wrote:
| Of fine running alone might not help you to lose weight. Also
| there might be a feedback loop to not eat too much crap for a
| serious runner. E.g. running with less weight is just more fun
| :-) But does that mean other activities where you gain muscle
| mass would not help to keep your weight in an acceptable range? I
| could be very well the case that burn more energy because you
| have more muscles.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| I wonder: Does this research mean that current TDEE calculators
| are incorrect? Or is the research more about _how_ those numbers
| are correct?
| AnEro wrote:
| In my experience TDEE calculators are mostly best guesses and
| the more expensive the bestester the guess. This is mostly
| showing in various age ranges and pregnancy, you can expect
| variance compared to what is calculated. (not sure which method
| was used for this study as the calculated baseline for what was
| their expected TDEE) The use for this with TDEE is expect
| variance in age ranges in the graphic, ultimately there is no
| way to know until you test yourself with a diet for a few
| weeks.
|
| The biggest thing is showing how much mental stress plays into
| calorie burning, enough where an average western lifestyle can
| have the same calorie burned as a hunter gatherer.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| > when adjusted for nonfat body mass
|
| > when adjusted for fat-free body mass
|
| The article is not cheating, but it's not underlining this bit
| which is essential. It's talking about aerobic exercise, which
| means "trying to run your way to being thin doesn't work". Which
| may be news for some people on HN from what I see, but is far
| from being new or controversial.
|
| On the other hand, building muscle gives you a perpetual "eat
| more" card. It permanently increases your fat free mass, and thus
| your TEE. I haven't heard anything about a similar increase in
| appetite - if anything, bodybuilders struggle to eat enough
| calories. So, boys and girls, definitely hit the gym. Just stay
| away from the stepper and pick up some weights. Also don't forget
| protein intake when you do that.
| themagician wrote:
| I have always thought it pretty straight forward: you consume
| food and some of the carbon atoms become part of you. When you
| exhale, carbon atoms leave you in the form of CO2. When you
| exercise your breathing increases and thus you exhale slightly
| more carbon. You can only breathe so fast for so long.
| qaq wrote:
| "You can't exercise your way ..." You sure as hell can but it's a
| lot of effort. There was a decent stretch of time when I
| exercised for 2.5-3h per day 5-6 days per week while maintaining
| very unhealthy diet (we owned a pizza place that had Leffe on
| tap). Still managed to loose 20+ pounds in half a year.
| akeck wrote:
| I lose weight when I exercise, but I don't burn nearly enough
| calories to account for the weight lost. My guess is that the
| exercise reduces stress which inhibits stress eating, so my
| intake drops.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| What I feel much of this misses is the effect of exercise on
| metabolism. You have two energy pathways in your body, the quick
| glucose burning pathway and the slow and efficient fat burning
| pathway. By getting your heart rate up into the edge of the zone
| in which you are using that fat burning pathway but almost into
| the quicker glucose burning pathway, you work that pathway out
| and become more metabolically efficient / healthy.
|
| Yes you can lose weight or maintain weight without exercise, but
| you can still get diabetes or other aspects of metabolic
| syndrome.
|
| Plus exercise does help burn more calories. Sure it's not as
| strong of an effect, but it helps. The more metabolically healthy
| you are the more capable you become of managing weight from what
| I can tell, but obviously to a certain degree you are a victim of
| your genetics.
| EGreg wrote:
| OK, so then, what does make people lose weight? And all those
| pounds come off? How do you help someone who is mildly obese go
| to having a bikini body?
|
| I read you lose calories by breathing heavily, as the CO2 leaves
| your body, etc.
|
| In my opinion, it's not about aerobics, but building muscle mass.
| Women who pack on muscle burn more calories at rest than women
| who don't. They may weigh the same but the fat is replaced by
| muscle. (Women need fat, though, so too much of this can be bad.)
| tommiegannert wrote:
| I wonder if the body is constantly hitting the upper limit of
| something, like temperature or kidney flow. If the parts of the
| human body are very elastic in their energy use, then this means
| we're overall _maximizing_ energy expenditure. I guess that could
| make sense while there 's an excess of available energy in the
| guts, which would otherwise go to waste.
| wildmanx wrote:
| Irony.
|
| A linked article describing a scientist trying to rigorously find
| out how weight changes and energy expenditure and diet are
| connected, revealing the little we do know and the vast sea of
| what we do not know.
|
| The discussion here: full of anecdotes and bro science berating
| one another "that's not how it works, it works like this", "I
| personally do this-and-that", "you just have to x-y-z, it's that
| simple".
| verisimi wrote:
| The problem is that the funders of scientific research
| (corporations, governments, military) see zero upside in
| finding simple answers. There's simply no money in 'better
| living'.
|
| This sort of research is only of value in so far as it moves
| forward some sort of saleable treatment.
|
| In the meantime, the more confused you are about what to eat
| and how to treat your body - the better. It is when people are
| damaged that the medical industry makes its money.
|
| In summary, the incentives for health are in reverse (and
| perverse, IMO). People get paid for treating disease (and even
| keeping them unwell!) but not for keeping people healthy.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The military has no interest in figuring out how the body
| expends energy?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yes, but this is one study out of thousands. It's not because
| it's a paper by PhDs that you just have to take all their
| results as the new truth and ignore the rest of the literature.
| It's way way more "bro science"-like to just look at the latest
| controversial study/paper/research's results while ignoring
| everything else. Consensus is important and even more so with
| such a controversial result.
|
| Also, how is it bad for people to contrast what they see in
| real life with what the study shows? Michael Phelps and other
| athletes actually eat more calories, that's a fact. So it makes
| sense to question why that would be the case if the conclusion
| we see here was true. Again, a scientific paper isn't the
| bible-you can actually question it, and you don't have to just
| accept it as truth.
| wildmanx wrote:
| This article is not a scientific paper. It's describing some
| effects that are observed in a lab.
|
| The world is not so binary as you make it out to be. The
| article is not forming a "new truth". Of course elite
| athletes are eating a lot. Nobody was questioning that.
| Neither do anecdotes stating "I trained my butt off, it
| worked" negate what's in the article.
|
| The topic is complex, too complex to be pressed into a simple
| slogan. The article is not "controversial" to anybody
| remotely knowledgeable about biology.
|
| You can question that the world is complex, but that won't
| make it less complex.
| tom-thistime wrote:
| Yes. And no. Bro science is more or less useless. But the
| article isn't super useful either. Calories burned are
| "adjusted for nonfat body mass." Adjusted how?
|
| Fat stores energy. Food adds energy. Exercise uses energy.
| Those aren't "myths." The article (not talking about the
| scientist) is very difficult to understand, but it seems to
| come down on the "myth" side of that dilemma. Mostly. Kind of.
| wildmanx wrote:
| It's a popular science article. What did you expect? If you
| want all the details, read the actual published studies. For
| the general public, scientists need to simplify things.
| tom-thistime wrote:
| I'd expect them not to call ordinary long-accepted facts
| "myths" without some kind of coherent explanation. That
| isn't simplification.
| wildmanx wrote:
| Which "facts" does the article call "myths"? The word
| "myth" exists twice in it, one of which is in the
| heading.
|
| That's just part of phrasing everything in catchy popular
| science terms. Apparently, if you don't do that, then
| nobody is going to read your article as it reads too
| boring. (I also find that sad.)
|
| The "train yourself out of obesity" idea that one of the
| interviewed scientists calls "zombie idea" is not an
| "ordinary long-accepted fact". Maybe in bro science
| circles, where obese people are generally just regarded
| as lazy who just don't get their act together, but that's
| now how actual medical experts think about this.
|
| The article is another piece in the puzzle of trying to
| understand how things work. It's not a "myth buster".
| koheripbal wrote:
| When you do the math, your body turns out to be extremely
| efficient. Two full hours of very hard exercise burns the
| equivalent of one average sized lunch meal.
|
| Skipping meals/cutting calories is, by far, the easiest way
| to lose weight.
| tom-thistime wrote:
| Let's get specific.
|
| Maybe your suggestion might be a cataclysmic -1000 calories
| per day, either by (a) skipping a large lunch completely
| and not changing exercise, or (b) by doing those two hours
| of hard exercise and not changing diet. That person will
| tend to lose around two pounds a week either way over the
| long term. (Of course I don't really know what numbers you
| have in mind.)
|
| But losing two pounds a week is insane.
|
| So let's look at safer, more normal behavior. Call it -300
| calories per day: either cutting diet by a medium order of
| fries each day (and keeping exercise fixed) or doing 40
| minutes of moderate exercise (and keeping diet fixed). Then
| the person will tend to lose a pound about every 12 days
| over the long term. That is still rapid weight loss either
| way.
|
| If the same person starts riding a bike 40 minutes a day
| but doesn't count calories, the results could be anything.
| They could easily put on weight. Who knows?
| wildmanx wrote:
| > So let's look at safer, more normal behavior. Call it
| -300 calories per day: either cutting diet by a medium
| order of fries each day (and keeping exercise fixed) or
| doing 40 minutes of moderate exercise (and keeping diet
| fixed).
|
| That's not how it works though, and the article we are
| discussing here is hinting at that. The mechanisms are
| very complex. Going for a run for 40 min that "burns" 300
| calories versus not going on that run won't create a
| calorie deficit of 300 calories. Because "everything else
| equal" is never going to happen.
|
| There could be tons of effects happening to offset this.
| Eating more? Eating subtly different things? Eating it in
| different ways that impact nutrient uptake? More
| efficient nutrient uptake even when eating the same
| things in the same way at the same time? Changing
| patterns of movement that now use less energy? Change in
| overall metabolism (body temperature, body movements,
| ...)? Less stress, saving energy? ...? This is a very
| complex topic and "calories in versus calories out" is
| just not cutting it. And that's what the article is
| about. It's an approximation, but a so coarse one that
| it's barely usable for anything.
| foobiekr wrote:
| This. And it is brutal. It's truly amazing how many Michael
| Phelps or "when I was twenty" responses there are.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| The article itself mixes results of studies with strong
| opinions like:
|
| > "You can't exercise your way out of obesity," says
| evolutionary physiologist > John Speakman of the Chinese
| Academy of Sciences. "It's one of those zombie > ideas that
| refuses to die."
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I think of exercise and weight loss as completely separate.
|
| Almost everyone should exercise. Whether you're skinny, normal
| weight or overweight. Exercise makes you healthy. It also tends
| to make skinny people eat more and overweight people eat less,
| though not always. Form a workout plan with fixed amounts of
| exercise, like 30-90 minutes per day: any extra exercise isn't
| bad if you want it, but it doesn't really have any more benefits.
|
| If exercise helps you lose weight? Good. If not? Well it still
| has benefits. It's generally easier to lose weight through diet.
| If you really don't like exercise, you don't have to exercise
| much, and you can do workouts you like.
| xwdv wrote:
| But will keeping a fast metabolism due to exercise ultimately
| shorten our lifespan?
| bluecalm wrote:
| I would like to see some answers on this one. First, why are we
| adjusting for lean body mass? I mean if you're 120kg with 50kg of
| extra fat you will obviously burn more calories by carrying that
| around. Someone who doesn't have additional 50kg of fat will need
| to exercise to burn the same amount of calories. It's well known
| in fitness circles for years now. It would be surprising if lean
| sedentary people burnt as many calories as active ones.
|
| The limit of 4650kcal per day doesn't sound right. A lot of
| endurance athletes, even amateurs, burn more than that. How much
| you can digest is limited (common wisdom is 60-90g of carbs per
| hour when exercising which is 240-360 calories). Still there are
| also glycogen stores for additional 1500-2000 kcal as well as
| your fat stores which are heavily in use during long lasting
| endurance effort. I assume the limit is meant for long term which
| would make more sense.
|
| The fact about ultra marathoners who burnt 6200 kcal at the
| beginning of the race but only 4900 at the end is interesting.
| Assuming they weigh say 60kg then it takes around 2500kcal to run
| a marathon. There is a lot of other stuff going on if they burnt
| 6200 per day. It would be interesting to see if there aren't
| other information that explains the difference (like hills for
| example).
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote: <<"She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test
| and 30% in the interview," Pontzer says. "Think about any other
| process that boosts your energy by about 40%.">>
|
| So that's why I became fat as a pig since I started freelancing
| more than 14 years ago. Because I'm no longer stressed in
| corporation bullshit politics and actually enjoy working with my
| clients. Stress free life means less energy used, means eating
| will get more food transformed into fat. Also probably why I
| didn't exceeded a certain number, I am at current weight for like
| a decade now, and I still eat like a pig but I don't gain weight
| anymore.
|
| Seems is time to go run for politics, increase the stress in my
| life /s.
| gverrilla wrote:
| seo.org
| amai wrote:
| "He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be
| about 4650 calories per day.
|
| Speakman thinks that limit is too low, noting that cyclists in
| the Tour de France in the 1980s and '90s exceeded it. But they
| were injecting fat and glucose directly into their bloodstreams,
| a practice Pontzer thinks might have helped them bypass the
| physiological limits on converting food into energy."
|
| Is this really true, that cyclists are injecting fat and glucose
| directly into their bloodstreams? I can't believe that. I have
| never heard that before.
| Someone wrote:
| FTA: _Pontzer's findings have a discouraging implication for
| people wanting to lose weight. "You can't exercise your way out
| of obesity," says evolutionary physiologist John Speakman of the
| Chinese Academy of Sciences. "It's one of those zombie ideas that
| refuses to die."_
|
| I think that's true, but have one remark: those studies all scale
| by fat-free body mass. Exercise can increase that, so exercise
| that grows your muscles, combined with maintaining the same diet
| should decrease the derivative of weight over time.
|
| That doesn't imply you'll lose weight; if you were gaining weight
| fast, chances are it will just make you gain weight a bit slower.
| Even if you'll lose weight, chances are it will be too slowly to
| motivate you to continue.
|
| Also note that most obese people already have strong muscles (if
| you weigh 200kg and can walk, you're carrying around 100kg or so)
| and, because of their weight, are injury prone. Becoming stronger
| through exercise may be very hard for them.
| Janiya wrote:
| On a warm Wednesday morning in October, Herman Pontzer puts on a
| wrinkled lab coat, adjusts his mask, and heads into his lab at
| Duke University, hoping to stress out a student !!
|
| https://www.pfmlogin.net/
| choeger wrote:
| What the article doesn't mention is that the "extra reserves" in
| the body, i.e., the calories that are currently used and are not
| burnt when exercising, must be a constant (the body can only skip
| burning calories that it gets) whereas exercise can be scaled.
|
| Say you are overweight on a 3000kcal diet and start exercising.
| It is physically impossible to not lose weight if you exercise
| for more than 3000kcal. You might not lose weight if you exercise
| a more modest 1000kcal or even just 500 - but the statement that
| you cannot outrun your diet is trivially false. It might just be
| much harder than one might naively assume.
| josefrichter wrote:
| It's sad that majority of people hit the gym or go for a run when
| they want to lose weight. Without diet it's pointless. But what's
| worse, diet change is also about finding a new balance that fits
| your body. If you start exercising at the same time, you are
| throwing your body drastically off current balance and it's
| probably much harder to find a new one.
| bagacrap wrote:
| exercise without diet is still good for your health even if it
| doesn't lead to lower weight
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily advise someone to diet without starting
| exercise. Exercise encourages healthier eating in a few
| physical ways, and for many the two are part of a mental
| lifestyle self-image which admittedly shouldn't exist but can
| still motivate.
|
| I'm also skeptical of that balance theory. A exercised body
| would produce more reliable eating and satiation signals to aid
| in balance, if 'balance' is even how the new diet is
| calibrated.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The twist is that if you get healthier by changing your
| eating habits, it will probably be easier for to
| start/increase exercise, and will continue to make you
| healthier while you take on exercising.
|
| Better eating is I think the most impacting thing you can do,
| exercising being the close second.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Absolutely. I think starting with either is totally viable,
| and it sounds like we agree that the only combination that
| probably won't work is exercising but never getting around
| to changing a bad diet.
| josefrichter wrote:
| It's is viable. Just unnecessarily difficult. Change
| diet, wait a few weeks, start exercising.
| dpark wrote:
| > _If you start exercising at the same time, you are throwing
| your body drastically off current balance and it's probably
| much harder to find a new one._
|
| This is for sure a [Citation Needed] claim.
|
| Exercise has been shown in numerous studies to be health
| protective and also to be muscle maintaining.
|
| I would love to know why you think exercising is not a net
| positive. I expect that greater than 99% off doctors,
| nutritionists, dieticians, and anyone else involved in human
| dietary health would agree that you should start exercising now
| if you are not already exercising, regardless of your diet (and
| absent specific contraindications).
| josefrichter wrote:
| The point is don't try to change everything at once. I am not
| questioning health benefits of sports. But change of diet is
| a big change - not only biologically, but also mentally,
| logistically, practically, financially, etc. Change of
| exercise is equally massive change. It's kinda logical that
| trying to juggle too many things at once is more likely to
| fail.
| dpark wrote:
| This is an entirely different thesis. You said that
| starting diet and exercise together is harder in terms of
| your _body_ finding balance. Now you're talking primarily
| about logistics and mental impact.
| josefrichter wrote:
| I wrote biologically and mentally as first two points,
| these concern your body.
|
| With diet you need to find what to eat, how much, how
| often, so that you're not hungry, grumpy, tired, sick,
| etc. and still consistently lose weight. It's gonna take
| a couple of weeks for your body to adjust.
|
| Exercise will also drastically affect your hunger,
| tiredness, etc. It's gonna be harder to find new balance
| (or rather dysbalance with consistent weight loss) when
| you can't really read which changes in your body are
| caused by diet and which by exercise. Higher chance of
| disappointment and quitting.
|
| I'd say just change diet, find what works for you
| consistently, add exercise only a few weeks later, tweak
| diet accordingly.
| quattrofan wrote:
| zenlf wrote:
| This is interesting. However I would love to learn more about the
| "doubly labeled water method". For example, how accurate is the
| test result? What's the individual variance? Do animals and
| humans react the same way to it?
|
| It's important because all the findings seem to be based on it,
| but the specifics are not discussed.
| usaar333 wrote:
| I got curious and did a bunch of research.
|
| It relies on the fact that carbon dioxide is transmitted from
| tissues to lungs in blood as carbonic acid. The carbonic acid
| is formed by water and carbon dioxide.
|
| It seems extremely accurate as long as you believe the
| distribution of labeled water equalizes in the body. You can
| readily see exactly how much labeled oxygen was lost via CO2
| (via the carbonic acid reaction).
|
| As long as metabolism and blood transport works the same in all
| animals, seems reliable.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| This is all very depressing. I'm one of those people with a
| limited menu (possibly an eating disorder) of things I will eat.
| I don't like complex dishes (anything eastern), seafood,
| vegetables, and fruits only in smoothies. I definitely ingest too
| much sugar and drink diet Coke.
|
| For myself, I think exercising somehow makes me eat better. It's
| just a naturally occurring thing that if I start Couch to 5k,
| after a couple of weeks I stop eating greasy food, chips, pizza,
| and I eat salads and all around healthier and smaller portions.
|
| So I guess when I lost weight in the past, it was because of the
| effects of exercising. Not the exercise itself.
|
| Wish I could solve the eating problems, but I'm 58. I get severe
| anxiety if anyone tries to get me to eat things I don't like.
| I've skipped dinner parties and other events if I think the food
| won't be what I like.
| projektfu wrote:
| Some of the papers have strange errors that suprise me that they
| passed peer review. For example, "Extreme events reveal an
| alimentary limit on sustained maximal human energy expenditure"
| by Thurber, others, and Pontzer has a figure labeled "Fig. 3
| Maximal Energy Intake". First, it appears that one of the charts
| is labeled incorrectly. I assume it is the first one, and they
| swapped "Overfeeding" with "Endurance". Second, it seems that
| taking the disparate types of "event" and putting them together
| on the Energy Intake graph causes them to have a flat slope,
| whereas the slope would be somewhat positive for the subgroups.
|
| This was like one of the first few things I looked at in this
| body of research, I wasn't combing through everything to find an
| error. But it's strange. Finding an error quickly is a red flag
| to me.
|
| Overall the study I'm looking at is interesting. I'm not sure
| they adequately demonstrated the finding of a caloric intake
| limit of 2.5x BMR but there appears to be a definite negative
| correlation of duration of sustained activity and energy
| expenditure (or metabolic scope, a multiple of basal metabolic
| rate). The numbers are very tightly clustered around the
| trendline, which is kind of odd, given how widely the numbers
| vary in other graphs. So either this is a very close correlation
| or something is strange with the data.
|
| Glancing through the papers in PubMed, I think that the
| implications in the article are way stronger than the papers
| support. One paper said that perhaps 25% of the calories expended
| in exercise are borrowed from a reduction in BMR. The article
| made it seem like they were completely offset. The article
| referenced above apparently used two very different groups
| (overfeeding and endurance competition), and used the first to
| study the limit of energy intake and the second to study the
| long-term limit of energy expenditure, but people are making
| claims about energy intake in endurance athletes. Maybe when
| you're working hard, the gut is able to adapt and pull in more
| calories. Perhaps there is a limit to how much the gut is willing
| to accept when there is a calorie surplus.
|
| Maybe I'm way off base.
| erfgh wrote:
| I don't even know if counting calories works. I feel that when
| I'm in a calorie deficit my body just gets colder which means it
| is burning less calories which in turn means I might not be
| losing any weight.
| xurukefi wrote:
| "You can't outrun a bad diet" seems to be the party line among
| fitness people these days. Anecdotally speaking that's not really
| true for a lot of people. I run > 100km/week pretty much all year
| round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad
| diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza,
| fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm. Before
| I picked up running I was moderately overweight. If I can't run
| for a prolonged period of time, then I start gaining weight
| again. I've met plenty of people who run similar mileage and many
| of them also have pretty bad dietary habits but none of them are
| oeverweight. Note that I'm not saying that this is healthy (it
| clearly isn't).
|
| However, I still think that there is a lot of truth to the "you
| can't outrun a bad diet" statement. A lot of people who
| occasionally go for a run are likely to overestimate their energy
| expenditure and feel like they have to eat a cow to compensate. I
| think, however, that the statement becomes less and less true the
| more excessive the exercise gets. If you burn thousands of
| calories day in day out with exercise it seems to become harder
| to overcompensate this every time with excess food intake.
|
| I think the bigger issue with exercise is a mental one. Weight
| loss seems to be a pretty bad motivation for exercising. Most
| people I know who picked up running for the sole purpose of
| losing weight eventually gave up or they are stuck with their 5km
| weekend park run, which, of course, is rather pointless for their
| objective. 100% of the avid runners I know (including myself)
| don't care about their weight. I could probably lose more weight
| (or improve my long term health) if I changed my diet, but it's
| simply something that I'm not interested in. I run because it's
| fun and a somewhat low body weight seems to be a by-product of
| that.
| edanm wrote:
| I think I agree with your general point, and specifically agree
| that that statement is targeted as "mainstream advice", and
| might not be literally true. However, one point of
| disagreement:
|
| > I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on
| extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting
| mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and
| burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm.
|
| That is not necessarily a "bad diet" for weight loss purposes.
| It's an unhealthy diet, but as long as you're not eating _too
| much_ of all those foods, it won 't make you gain weight. It's
| only bad because most people who are eating these kinds of
| foods will be eating too much of them (because they are much
| less filling for the amount of calories that they contain).
| bradlys wrote:
| Yeah. I think the advice on diet is a good one for mainstream
| audiences. Giving nuance is difficult when people are looking
| for quick answers.
|
| I had the same experience for a long time. People would see
| me eat Oreos, pizza, ice cream, pop tarts, etc. and they'd
| say, "how are you so incredibly thin if you eat all that
| garbage?" And I'd respond that I just eat less - I don't eat
| a lot. And it was true. I'd eat garbage but I'd eat so little
| that I'd maintain an incredibly low weight. Now as I'm older
| and stress has gotten better - I've started eating more and
| gained weight due to it. It's all due to the quantity/amount-
| of-calories.
| [deleted]
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > Exercise doesn't help you burn more energy on average; active
| hunter-gatherers in Africa don't expend more energy daily than
| sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don't burn
| more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body
| mass.
|
| I love this intro.
|
| > His message that exercise won't help you lose weight "lacks
| nuance," says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the
| University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge
| dieters into less healthy habits.
|
| This is funny to me because my own logs reflect this going back
| to about 2015. I can more easily drop 10, 20, or however many
| pounds when not exercising than I can when exercising. That was a
| really weird one because it opened up a bunch of other problems.
|
| One follow-on problem that came up quickly: How to develop skills
| requiring fitness during those times, or how to maintain
| endurance levels when you're intentionally lowering your exercise
| exposure so you can lose weight. That kind of situation is pretty
| interesting.
|
| > Azy, a 113-kilogram (249 lb.) adult male (orangutan), for
| example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day ... When adjusted for
| body mass, (humans) burn ... 60% more than orangutans
|
| Oh and
|
| > "She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30%
| in the interview," Pontzer says. "Think about any other process
| that boosts your energy by about 40%."
|
| This is really curious and fascinating stuff. Thanks op for
| posting.
|
| PS:
|
| > He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be
| about 4650 calories per day.
|
| Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently
| eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit
| day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really
| temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are
| apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K
| on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...
|
| The estimate is probably off for extreme circumstances and
| those people probably aren't fully digesting and using all of
| those calories. The accurate number would be interesting.
|
| I too have found that cardio isn't very good for dropping
| weight, but packing on some muscle does a lot to shift body
| composition. Maintaining more lean mass simply requires more
| calories.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are
| apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K
| on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they
| can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
|
| Yeah, I'm not convinced the article passes the smell test.
|
| Michael Phelps discussed his diet extensively, suggesting he
| ate 10k a day while training. Other athletes talk about similar
| meal sizes. This suggests that once they stop exercising (thus
| eventually losing lean muscle mass and requiring less calories)
| that they would not see a change in their weight, yet there are
| a lot of old fat athletes (possibly just of a certain
| generation) out there.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| They could just be shitting out the excess calories, and the
| article directly says,
|
| "Elite athletes can push the limits for several months, as
| the study of marathoners showed, but can't sustain it
| indefinitely, Pontzer says."
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| > Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are
| apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K
| on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they
| can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
|
| An interesting source here is the Fiennes and Stroud expedition
| to cross Antarctica in 1992. Stroud (a physician) actually
| tested how many calories they were burning each day using the
| doubly-labeled water method, and at one point (ascent to the
| polar plateau) it was up to 11k. So it is definitely possible
| to temporarily push the limit - as the article acknowledges -
| but these are exceptional circumstances.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Another related extreme case was the first person to solo-ski
| to the north pole. They pre-loaded, mostly on olive oil,
| packing on tens of kg in body fat, all of which (and more)
| was gone by the time they were done. I don't recall the daily
| calorie expenditures but it was gigantic. They did this
| because there is some mechanical advantage carrying a good
| chunk of one's energy supply directly on your own bones
| rather than towing it in the sled.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Fiennes and Stroud lost about 25kg each crossing
| Antarctica; I don't know if they pre-loaded beforehand
| (hopefully they did, losing that much!) but they certainly
| ran a deficit as a strategic trade-off against their sled
| weight. Hauling a kilo of fat on a sled is definitely less
| efficient than carrying it on your own body.
|
| Supposedly their calories during the expedition were
| primarily from butter, which they mixed into every food and
| even ate on its own. Apparently you get used to it.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| Some friends and I are currently doing a thru hike of the
| Appalachian Trail, and only ten days in the four of us clocked
| 7, 8, 10, and 17 pounds lost... But we're hiking 6+ hours a day
| with heavy packs. We've been eating easily ~3000kcal each
| daily. I think at the extreme edges, nutrition science is a lot
| less well understood. We were very surprised to see we'd lost
| anything at all, as we're stopping to eat 300 calories almost
| every waking hour.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 6hrs a day @ 3 mph = 18 miles per day, 100 calories per mile
| without packs = 1800 calories per day on top of basal
| metabolic needs. Given your user name, I'd guess that you're
| male, and given that you're hiking the AT and have already
| started, I'd also guess that you're younger rather than
| older, so I'd peg your basal metabolism at around 2200-2400
| calories. Add in the packs and the hills, and it should be
| clear why you're losing weight.
| colechristensen wrote:
| A lot of an initial 10 pounds of weight loss can be
| dehydration and less food in the process of digestion.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| That's a good point.
| 0x640x6D wrote:
| Seems early to start the thru hike. How many people are on
| the trail?
| JackMorgan wrote:
| It's already at least 10 people at each shelter every
| night. There's ~60 people scheduled to leave on 2/22/22,
| and ~60 on 3/1/22. It's going to be real busy real soon,
| this year will be packed by March.
|
| We're taking it pretty slow and getting off trail whenever
| the weather turns sketchy (like last night possible
| thunderstorms). The real part we're concerned about is
| getting over the Smokies without getting stuck up there in
| the snow.
| voisin wrote:
| > Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are
| apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K
| on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they
| can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
|
| I think a lot of these stats are myths meant to accentuate the
| difficulty of the task. Pontzer's book discusses Michael Phelps
| and the lack of an actual source to the rumours he was eating
| gargantuan amounts during training.
| desmosxxx wrote:
| So I'm not sure about everest climbers, 20k sounds pretty
| crazy.
|
| But I can speak first hand as a former athlete who has had
| access to NFL players and Olympians. 8-10k during peak active
| training happens all the time
|
| Long term average might be 4-5k.
|
| You have to remember that these people are often on PEDs that
| allow them to train all day.
|
| Shit I was a serious powerlifter back in the day and would
| routinely eat 6-7k calories (weighed) during 2adays depending
| on how my weight was fluctuating. Add some more height, PEDs,
| and cardio and I'm almost there.
|
| I think the difference between what is mentioned in the
| article is #1 obviously PEDs #2 body breakdown and recovery,
| which might be more in e.g. lifters and swimmers than long
| distance runners
| learc83 wrote:
| Michael Phelps directly says in one of his auto biographies
| that he was eating 8-10k calories a day. I don't think you
| can call that a rumor.
|
| Of course he could be off a bit, but it seems unlikely that
| he's off by a factor of 2.
|
| He lists the foods that he ate, and it definitely sounds like
| it was close to 10k calories. His coach also discussed his
| diet, and backs up his claims.
| darksaints wrote:
| I believe him. As a nowhere-near-olympics division 1 swimmer,
| I had developed a major weight loss problem my freshman year.
| I actually was required to log my calories and meet with a
| sports nutritionist weekly. After 6000 calories a day, I was
| shoving so much food in my mouth, I felt like it wasn't
| possible to eat any more than I did. She prescribed Snickers
| bars as a way to top off my calories every day without
| contributing too much to feeling full. I was targeting 7000
| calories a day, and I don't think I ever consistently reached
| that goal, but around that time my weight stabilized.
|
| There are a lot of people who maintain a high degree of
| fitness, and for them I can imagine 4000 calories is about
| right. But there are some types of training that are
| consistently pushing your physical limits. I don't have any
| sort of data to back this up, but it has long been my theory
| that the reason why elite athletes can burn so many calories
| is because they aren't actually burning them in the
| traditional sense of cells oxidizing chemical energy to
| create work...they've crossed over into the territory of
| muscle tissues being torn up and resynthesized so much that
| your body can no longer do so efficiently.
|
| As an analogy, typically in manufacturing there are always
| efficiencies that can be extracted. But in very mature
| industries where there aren't any easy efficiencies to eek
| out of the system, you have to start making tradeoffs. One
| common tradeoff is throughout vs yield. You can increase your
| throughout, but in order to do do so, you have to cut corners
| on processes and subsequently increase the total amount of
| waste in the process.
|
| And as a "maybe this is related" data point: 82% of marathon
| runners suffer from Acute Kidney Injury. Your kidneys have
| one job: waste disposal. It would be easy to infer that at
| the boundaries of human conditioning, the kidneys aren't up
| to the task of processing all of the waste that the body is
| producing.
|
| https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/marathon-running-
| and-...
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I've read a decent number of books about climbing big peaks.
| In all of them they said they were so nauseous on summit day
| from being in the death zone, they could barely force down a
| protein bar.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Where are you getting those numbers for Everest climbers? I
| have a very hard time believing them.
|
| High altitude suppresses appetite in general and your body does
| not get enough oxygen to meaningfully process food above about
| 25,000 feet. Everest summit day via the South Col starts at
| about that altitude.
|
| Plus it's freezing cold and everything takes forever to do. I
| don't think there is much eating at all on Everest summit day,
| let alone 20,000 calories.
| redisman wrote:
| Napkin math: 20,000 calories is 36 Big Mac burgers
|
| In vegetable oil it would be about 4.8lbs of oil - that's
| probably not at all plausible for digestion or bowel control
| draw_down wrote:
| icedistilled wrote:
| I'm baffled by the take away from the study. If a sedentary
| person and an athletic person burn about the same, doesn't that
| just mean the sedentary person's energy is being spent on
| maintaining and accumulating fat mass? But why is that waffled
| about instead of stated?
|
| Major Edit: more concise example
|
| >As the athletes' ran more and more over weeks or months, their
| metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra
| exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you're a couch
| potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily,
| leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal
| processes such as a stress response.
| NautilusWave wrote:
| If storing fat burned calories, it would make for a pretty
| poor way to store calories...
| icedistilled wrote:
| Cells don't live for free and fat is stored in cells. So
| yes storing fat burns calories, just far less than muscle.
| And that's just the direct expenditure.
|
| I see a few numbers thrown out for how many calories a
| pound of fat burns a day, but that direct burn is only one
| way additional fat would lead to energy use. A heavier
| person while less "active" will burn more during day to day
| due to carrying a heavier mass. I'm sure there's plenty
| more ways but I'm not going to go do a deep dive.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Man people will invent anything to avoid eating less and
| exercising more. Sorry professor but the human body obeys the
| laws of physics. Calories in, calories out.
| badrabbit wrote:
| What is happening here? I've measured for a fact with myself
| where I eat more and workout more and lose weight.
| dugite-code wrote:
| > Exercise doesn't help you burn more energy on average
|
| I have a problem with this _hard_ statement based on the data
| because:
|
| > He realized he had to go back to basics, measuring the calories
| expended by humans and animals walking and running on treadmills.
|
| > He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another
| team's study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons
|
| I've always heard that humans, due to our upright posture, are
| extremely efficient when it comes to walking and running and so
| if you want to increase you calories usage via exercise you
| should lift weights as we are much less efficient at this. I have
| also heard it will would increase your resting calorie usage as
| well due to repairing/reinforcing the muscle. I will note calorie
| management has always been heavily emphasized to me: "you can't
| out-run a fork"
|
| Perhaps that is wrong and a good data based analysis would
| disprove these common gym tropes I've heard but from my read of
| this article they only "bust" the morning breakfast channel myths
| of burning calories.
| dpark wrote:
| Lifting weights is a poor way to burn calories. It's a great
| way to build muscle and be healthier, but lifting weights is
| less efficient than aerobic exercise in terms of pure calorie
| burn.
|
| e.g. Moderate intensity aerobic exercise burns 200-300 calories
| in 30 minutes. Moderate intensity weightlifting is 90-130 in
| the same time. You need vigorous weightlifting to get up to 250
| in 30 minutes. Even taking into consideration post-exercise
| burn, weight lifting will at best get you too the same
| efficiency as aerobic exercise.
|
| Example data from:
| https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...
|
| Weightlifting is great but it's not better for burning
| calories. It's _much_ better for retaining muscle while
| dieting, though.
| dugite-code wrote:
| I can't find the link but I remember reading an article about
| weight lifting raising the resting calorie use for quite some
| time _after_ the exercise. Also as you say you retain more
| muscle, and that muscle requires calories at rest potentially
| altering the overall calculation. I still agree with the
| overall premise that fixing your diet is probably the most
| important aspect of weight loss though.
|
| May main take-away was from the article it read that they
| focused on running as the primarily measured exercise. So it
| might not provide the best full picture when looking at other
| exercise methods.
| dpark wrote:
| For sure, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) is
| a thing. It is real and measurable. But it's not some crazy
| effect that offsets the fact that aerobic exercise is about
| _2x as calorie intensive_ as weight training during the
| actual exercise. As I recall the best way to drive up EPOC
| is to engage in high intensity interval training. HIIT has
| a much larger effect on EPOC than weight training (again,
| if I recall correctly).
|
| Calories burned from extra muscle are not as important as
| people like to imagine. It's like cardio. Do enough and it
| has an effect, but in terms of what normal humans should
| expect, it's not going to do much, because normal people
| are simply not going to build enough muscle to matter much.
| The average person isn't going to build 40 extra pounds of
| lean mutant. Most of the claims about how many calories
| muscle will burn are also not backed up by any science so
| far as I can tell.
|
| I do agree that this article doesn't cover a lot of stuff,
| though. I'm doubtful about the stuff claimed even about
| running because it feels so have wavey. The one potentially
| compelling study was on women who went from sedentary to
| running half marathons and the claim is that they "barely"
| burned more calories at the end than at the beginning, but
| "barely" is almost meaningless. Plus they _did_ burn more
| so the whole thesis is in question.
| dpark wrote:
| Lol. "40 extra pounds of lean mutant."
|
| Too late to fix the typos now.
| biophysboy wrote:
| Maybe by "fixed budget", he actually means "fixed budget per
| kilogram".
| watwut wrote:
| > I've always heard that humans, due to our upright posture,
| are extremely efficient when it comes to walking and running
| and so if you want to increase you calories usage via exercise
| you should lift weights as we are much less efficient at this.
|
| Weight lifting builds muscles. It does makes you more hungry.
| In addition, you can end up heavier then originally, because
| muscles weight more then fat. I mean, yes, it will be good
| weight, the weight composed of muscle, there is no rational
| reason to go out of way to avoid it. But, it is not loosing
| weight.
| isaiahg wrote:
| What's the metric used to calculate average here? And what
| range of workout is included in the data. Seems like there was
| just too little focus given to this to call it a myth outright.
|
| It also runs against my own experience. For the past six months
| I've begun exercising and changed nothing else and I've seen
| amazing improvement in all aspects of my life including losing
| fat. The type of workout I'm doing is full body and covers a
| range of different movements and weights. And arguably anyone
| serious about losing weight would do the same. If all they're
| doing is comparing running to dieting then I can't help but
| feel it's short sighted.
| thedogeye wrote:
| Why do swimmers eat 8 meals a day without gaining weight ?
| dmitrij wrote:
| It's nice when science confirms personal experience.
|
| Early 2020 I started to change my life. Exercise, healthier food,
| weight control. My conclusions: I got stronger, had less back
| pain and less fat, felt calmer. Weight went down significantly.
|
| After restaurants opened, I started again eating more fat and
| drinking more wine while continuing exercising and eating healthy
| at home. Strength and calm stayed, weight got up.
|
| My conclusion: exercise is good in any aspect, but weight control
| also needs control of calories intake.
| Oras wrote:
| I couldn't finish the article due to the excessive fluff! Reading
| the comments, I'm glad I wasn't the only one.
|
| How about summarizing the main points at the top for those who
| are interested in real information instead of the height and
| weight of the scientist?
| urthor wrote:
| The thing is, exercise still reduces appetite.
|
| It raises the blood sugar levels as the body supplies the muscles
| with carbohydrates, and triggers a complementary response in
| appetite hormones.
|
| Finally, and most importantly:
|
| Exercise releases dopamine.
|
| Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule deficit
| equals starvation.
|
| So whilst it does not directly impact weight loss. It still makes
| it (a bit) easier.
|
| Plus there are an enormous quantity of other factors in health
| that are impacted by exercise.
|
| Bodily strength is entirely responsible, for example, for
| stopping you getting a "bad back."
|
| The less strength you have in your back muscles, the more strain
| your vertebra and ligaments are under. Hence your body falls
| apart quickly and more easily.
|
| You definitely need both kilo-joule control and strengthening
| exercise if you want to keep your life on track.
| rolisz wrote:
| > The thing is, exercise still reduces appetite.
|
| Not for me. I work out about 3 times a week, never felt like my
| appetite got smaller on workout days.
|
| Intermittent fasting is nice however. There are pangs of hunger
| occasionally, but if I power through them, they go away after 1
| hour usually.
| e40 wrote:
| Fasting isn't a mood killer, it actually has the opposite
| effect. IF gives me an energy boost and associated euphoria.
| cagmz wrote:
| What is your IF schedule like? Can you expand on the
| euphoria?
| e40 wrote:
| When I do 24 hr fasts (going from dinner to dinner), which
| is not that often, in the early afternoon until dinner time
| I get a big energy boost and very enhanced mood. That first
| time, I thought that it felt like I was high on something.
| cassandratt wrote:
| While I don't experience any euphoria, I agree that
| intermittent fasting doesn't affect my mood negatively. After
| the first few weeks, you don't even think about it anymore.
| And being able to go out, eat a normal meal at a restaurant
| without worrying about math, or 'cheating on a diet', is
| pretty positive mentally when you can still fit into a size 6
| dress.
| stkdump wrote:
| For long years I didn't really try to loose weight, because I
| thought it would require me to work out, which I didn't want to
| do. I know enough people with joint problems very likely
| relating to the amount of work out they did/do, even though
| they never were overweight. Two years back I decided to go
| against convential wisdom and attempt weight loss without any
| work out at all. With tremendous success. I understand that
| working out helps general health, but so does weight loss. So I
| refuse to feel bad.
| gilbetron wrote:
| It's so weird that you feel pressure to feel bad about how
| you went about it :( I apologize that society is so messed
| up. Caloric reduction without exercise is totally a valid way
| to lose weight! There are plenty of people that do it - you
| get tired when you diet, and so "hibernating" can help. It
| works for you and that's all that matters.
|
| I know, for instance, Penn Teller lost his weight in the same
| way - he decided to just eat baked/boiled potatoes with
| nothing else and just chilled out for a 100 days and lost 100
| lbs. That's what worked for him!
|
| https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-
| nutrition/news/...
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >exercise still reduces appetite
|
| This was one of the big surprises for me. When I'm exercising
| regularly, food tastes better, and yet I'm satisfied with less
| of it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule
| deficit equals starvation."
|
| I practice intermittent fasting a lot and I cannot say that it
| affects my mood negatively. But I was very grumpy when I ate
| "five small meals a day".
|
| It seems that the digestive system is more OK with being
| totally empty than being just half full all the time.
| SergeAx wrote:
| > exercise still reduces appetite
|
| Please be careful generalizing anectodal facts. Lots of people,
| me included, have otherwise experience.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I feel like it's a more complicated story going on.
|
| Post exercise I will often have a sort of hunger roller
| coaster. Naively, imagining the body's metabolism, hunger is
| responding to perception of a calorie deficit in the blood :
| organs demanding energy and blood sugar decreasing, forcing
| burning of calories from stored reserves.
|
| But what if your body is able to efficiently maintain glucose
| levels? in that case exercise might not induce hunger, in
| fact it might be that exercise stimulates alternative
| pathways that release energy and these stay active even after
| you finish exercising. This might well be much more the case
| for well trained athletes than regular people. Or it might
| depend on diet or loads of other factors.
|
| Personally, I have found that exercise is nearly pointless
| any time other than right before I eat. So exercising before
| breakfast is perfect because the stimulated hunger response
| is immediately satisfied by eating breakfast. But I don't eat
| more breakfast than I usually would, so it's a win.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I feel like this is already known?
|
| I watched some anime Netflix years ago where the main character
| played a board game. Eating candy to account for the energy
| expenditure of the mentally taxing game was in the script.
|
| I read an article about Magnus Carlsen exercising and eating a
| strict diet so he could cope with the energy expenditure of high
| level chess for long periods.
|
| It's weird to see it now framed as like a revolution that making
| this girl do rapid math problems increased her calorie
| expenditure.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Eating candy to account for the energy expenditure of the
| mentally taxing game
|
| That reminds me of someone who made a fanny-pack that tracks
| your walk/run progress and dispenses M&Ms.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2021/07/30/step-n-snack-fanny-pack-moti...
| csee wrote:
| I don't know if it's the mental difficulty or the stress
| associated with the task that is causing the energy to be
| burnt. I'd like some clarity on that if anyone has studies.
|
| > I feel like this is already known?
|
| I'm not sure about that. I heard a lot of people say "exercise
| doesn't help you lose weight because you eat more", not
| "exercise doesn't help you lose weight, because it doesn't
| really burn calories.".
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| tldr tl;dr
|
| Our bodies self-correct to maintain a constant calorie
| expenditure. Marathoners and lean-mean bush people were found to
| burn as many calories daily as a middle aged woman from Chicago.
| Takeaway: eat less if you want to lose weight.
| NautilusWave wrote:
| I found the unquestioned valuing of weight-loss throughout the
| article tiresome. It also seemed to be entirely besides the
| point; not once did it mention any research Pontzer had done on
| the topic. My frustration with the article was only compounded by
| the repeated use of the term du jour, "inflammation". How he
| confidently states that exercise can reduce this nebulous
| phenomenon, basically without any evidence, is incredibly
| dangerous.
| gunshai wrote:
| When I want to lose weight I do this one simple thing ... I stop
| eating as much.
|
| Fasting really isn't all that difficult once you train your brain
| around it.
|
| You simply can't gain weight if you are consuming less. You don't
| need a triple PhD to understand the law of conservation of mass.
|
| If you want to read something fairly extreme I suggest the
| following.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/
|
| Now this isn't a guide on how to lose weight, but it should give
| everyone some insight into what the human metabolism is capable
| of.
| dschuetz wrote:
| The article is very interesting to read, except the part where
| his personal life is spotlit. Finally something more nuanced
| research done on this. In my lifetime I was told pretty
| contradictory views on how fat metabolism works and what exactly
| 'exercise' means. You cannot eat the same and hope to loose
| weight just by exercising more. You would be burning 'cheap
| calories' first, but the fat tissue stays untouched, as it is
| more expensive to burn. Changing or regulating diet correctly
| reduces the intake of those cheap calories, most of them are
| liquid or in processed food, like beer, alcohol in general,
| processed sugar, some dairy products, and so on.
|
| Exercise and the right diet complement each other, and according
| to this guy it makes only sense: exercise forces the metabolism
| to burn calories for physical activity instead of stress
| response, and that means lower levels of stress hormones. The
| correct diet forces the metabolism to burn glucose stored in the
| muscle tissue first, and then slowly starts using the energy from
| the regions where the digestive tract is.
|
| So after decades, the right balance between diet and exercise is
| still the better way to loose weight and be healthier, however
| this guy says that body burns calories differently than assumed,
| each activity burns calories, even if it's sitting on a couch all
| day.
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| Wow, this is a milestone indeed.
|
| Abstract bullshit considered as an overturn of a simple
| experimental evidence even a freshman could set up and measure.
| [deleted]
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| I've a question I've never seen addressed. It's likely that some
| of what you consume is actually utilized ... and that some, if
| it's not needed, is just 'ignored' (excreted). Oxygen needed?
| Very little.
|
| Also some people can eat and eat, whatever they want, and not
| gain a lot of weight. Genetics has to be part of it.
| pwrrr wrote:
| "You can't burn calories. Calories is a measure of heat. You
| can't burn heat." - Bart Kay
|
| CICO, Calories in/Calories out also doesn't work like that in the
| human body, because the human body is not a closed system.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crA0MLKleBQ
| Aachen wrote:
| In that case, explain to me how my house gets warm from burning
| caloric gas
|
| ... calories are obviously the measure of how much heat you get
| from burning something, not the heat itself that you're
| "burning"
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > calories are obviously the measure of how much heat you get
| from burning something, not the heat itself that you're
| "burning"
|
| I think that's exactly the point: calories can only measure
| _how much_ we 're burning, but _what_ we 're burning matters
| just as much, if not more. If your gas service was cut off,
| you would (I hope) not pump crude oil into your furnace
| instead. It might be accurate (as far as it goes) to say that
| a furnace is a machine for turning hydrocarbon fluids into
| heat, but you probably respect your furnace and its
| requirements too much to do something like that. Most people,
| including too many exercise and nutrition "experts", are all
| too happy to make oversimplifications nearly as silly when
| thinking about our own bodies.
| vee2xx wrote:
| We should be glad the human body is this efficient and that we
| can reduce the resources we consume instead of finding ways to
| pander to our gluttony.
| dandare wrote:
| > Then Pontzer asks a set of questions designed to boost a
| student's stress levels: What's her dream job, and what exactly
| is she going to do after graduation?
|
| or
|
| > launches into a time-honored method to boost her blood
| pressure: He gives her an oral math test.
|
| Anybody else noticed this gem? I would like to see a list of
| topics like this - for just to be a better conversationalist.
|
| (It reminds me of how people who don't have children (or don't
| understand children) when meeting a child they don't know often
| ask it the only thing they vaguely know about every's child life
| - how is school?)
| digitcatphd wrote:
| Has anyone considered that every N years a scientific
| "discovery"in a given field invalidates a previous one?
|
| Commonly in more theoretical sciences like nutritional science,
| psychology, and astrophysics?
|
| In other words, is anything really truly reliable in these
| domains?
| purplepatrick wrote:
| This is precisely how science works...
|
| Check out "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn
| when you get the chance.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Nutritional science is in its own realm of unreliability,
| because it depends a lot on people self-reporting what they
| eat, over years and decades.
|
| Things like continuous glucose monitors are starting to
| proliferate, so the measurements are going to get better and
| more reliable, but it will still take a lot of time to come
| with some good long term studies where the self-reporting
| factor is no longer critical.
| jokoon wrote:
| It's really annoying that when there isn't good science on a
| subject, a lot of people will expose their own certainties that
| they think makes sense.
|
| Metabolism, the gut flora, those are pretty complex processes.
| Bacterial imbalance in the gut is a good trail to follow.
|
| Of course ceasing food intake for 1 year would make anybody lose
| weight, but you can't tell everyone to run 50 miles a week to
| lose weight. There are obviously other root causes for obesity.
| sfx77 wrote:
| If this is true, how does Michael Phelps have a six pack with a
| 10,000 calorie a day habit?
| iguana_lawyer wrote:
| "Pontzer is happy to expound on weight loss on The Dr. Oz
| Show..."
|
| And I'm happy to stop reading the article right here and ignore
| everything this quack has to say.
| tpoacher wrote:
| So the main argument in the article is the claim that your total
| energy expenditure is more or less constant, and independent of
| "exercise". In the sense that if you spend 500kcal on running,
| your body will "not do" something else it would have done
| otherwise (e.g. stress about stuff) that would have cost
| 500kcals.
|
| In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and
| not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than day
| 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.
|
| Ok, that is an interesting finding. But this sounds very specific
| to aerobic exercise.
|
| The article then mentions how they monitored an active indigenous
| population, and were "surprised" to find out that " _when
| controlled for non-fat body mass_ this active population had the
| same TEE as western sedentary populations " (emphasis mine).
|
| Why is this at all surprising. We've known for ages that muscle
| increase leads to a basal metabolic rate increase.
|
| The article tries hard to give a _visual_ impression that two
| similarly rotund people (one from fat and one from muscle) would
| have an equal TEE, but if you dig into the claim, it 's exactly
| the opposite. In order to get that non-fat body mass difference,
| _you need to exercise_. Its just that this needs to be anaerobic
| rather than aerobic.
|
| We also know that obese people have higher BMRs than their
| thinner counterparts. Now if the claim in this article is true,
| then it would imply that the increase in BMR in obese people is
| exclusively due to a parallel increase in muscle. But we know
| that muscle increases with obesity. So again, not very
| surprising.
|
| So, the claim "exercise doesnt work" indeed lacks nuance.
| Particularly in not addressing aerobic vs anaerobic exercise.
| xurukefi wrote:
| > So the main argument in the article is the claim that your
| total energy expenditure is more or less constant, and
| independent of "exercise". In the sense that if you spend
| 500kcal on running, your body will "not do" something else it
| would have done otherwise (e.g. stress about stuff) that would
| have cost 500kcals.
|
| > In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today
| and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than
| day 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.
|
| That's wild. Running a marathon will easily burn north of
| 2000kcals. That's a lot of "something else" the body will have
| to "not do" to compensate for.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This is very depressing. I find it incredibly difficult to lose
| weight dieting. And now it's telling me I just wasted all this
| money on a treadmill (and the effort it took to get it down into
| the basement).
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Cardio is great for general health, and cannelloni shave off a
| few extra calories even once you're good at it. Buy some
| weights, and put on a few pounds of muscle. The muscle costs
| more calories to maintain, so for your same diet you can shift
| you body composition a little. For a beginner you can see a lot
| of results in about three lifting sessions a week in only a
| handful of weeks.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Were you trolling me with delicious cannelloni there? :)
| tsatsawayy wrote:
| The reality of exercise and diet is sort of depressing: it is
| much, much harder to get in shape than it is to stay in shape.
|
| You can spend months with completely different habits, and see
| almost no difference. Your muscles build up from the inside,
| and your fat burns off from the outside. Muscle is also denser
| when you get on the scale.
|
| There is a silver lining. Muscles burn calories faster than
| other cells in day-to-day life. If you're persistent and
| patient, you will get there eventually.
|
| Alcohol also trips a lot of people up. It'll run you about
| 100-200 calories/drink, and it metabolizes like sugar.
| robotburrito wrote:
| It is not a waste. The benefit of being active by using that
| treadmill is huge in many ways not limited to just weight loss.
| jms703 wrote:
| You need strength and a sedentary lifestyle robs you of
| necessary strength. The treadmill is a great idea.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| There are plenty people who are skinny and who don't exercise
| and are not healthy. Exercise helps you get more healthy, it's
| not all about how thin you are. Walking/running is great
| exercise and great for you in terms of your overall health even
| if they doesn't help you lose weight directly. It does help
| your mental health.
| progre wrote:
| You did not waste that money if it helps you exercise. The body
| needs to move to stay healthy. Never mind the weight, get your
| heart going a couple of times a week. When this is a habit,
| start to push a little. I think you will find that you feel a
| lot better after.
|
| I find that I eat a lot healther when I'm not stressed out.
| Exercise helps with that.
| dahart wrote:
| > I find it incredibly difficult to lose weight dieting
|
| Me too, and _so_ many people do. I hope the treadmill helps,
| because it can.
|
| FWIW, the article is making intentionally controversial
| statements and implications. Don't let it convince you that
| exercise is wasted; it's not.
|
| Building a new habit, whether exercise or diet, is the hardest
| & most important port. I think it's 90% mental, figuring out
| how to not give up and not let myself get depressed.
|
| Might not work for you at all, but some tricks that helped
| me... I resisted counting calories for _decades_ while I
| exercised a lot. Then I finally tried counting calories, and
| somehow managed to hold it and it worked. A coworker had lost a
| lot of weight and when I asked him about it in passing, without
| stopping to talk, he flashed his phone and mumbled "counting
| calories, man", as if it was the easiest most obvious thing
| ever. That hit me a bit hard and stuck with me. So, it took
| time, many months. I set my calorie goal to my goal weight, not
| below. This meant it took longer than necessary to lose weight.
| I was interested in making sure I knew what it felt like to eat
| the right amount every day, forever. It helped me mentally to
| save room in my budget for a small treat snack at the end of
| the day. Starting with tracking but not restricting calories is
| a good way to put together your tools (e.g. a phone app) &
| daily workflow without worrying about being hungry. Calorie
| counts don't have to be perfect, just doing it for a while and
| trying to be accurate, and you'll get a very good sense for how
| many cals things have.
| math_denial wrote:
| I've lost 40 kg (88 lbs) just by exercising: never counted
| calories, lots of pizzas and whatever. When people say "you
| can't exercise out of a bad diet" my first question is "What do
| you mean by "exercise?". And then you discover that exercise in
| their mind is 30 minutes of brisk walking, 3 days a week and
| nothing more. That's not exercising, that a sedentary
| lifestyle.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| If you have a low sustaining calorie level due to past diets,
| you might want to look up reverse dieting to make the whole
| thing easier. But even with a low level you shouldnt have much
| problems once you manage to track your input and arent
| dependent on junkfood. At the end of the day its an invisible
| red or green number.
|
| If the problem is with self control, remember that torturing
| yourself and viewing it as a battle can be counterproductive.
| If you just starve yourself you will likely bounce back
| directly afterwards. Its about making an actual change and
| normalizing your eating. For that i found it helpful to first
| stick to my sustaining calorie level, so planing what you eat
| at the level you dont gain or loose weight. You can then build
| on that structure with cutting out the addictive stuff, eating
| slower and figuring out being full vs not hungry.
|
| Personally i found a week of just boiled potatoes incredibly
| helpful (you will have to work really hard to gain weight with
| just plain potatoes) to kick the addictive stuff and break with
| bad habits. Its like with any other drug and abstinence wont
| kill you in this case.
|
| Dont beat yourself up, its one step at a time and with better
| planing you can make the steps a lot easier.
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