[HN Gopher] Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new st...
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Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
Author : andsoitis
Score : 197 points
Date : 2025-07-24 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| bko wrote:
| > "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical
| activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and
| spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice
| going on in the background," Pontzer says.
|
| I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its
| metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's
| not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that can
| eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Spikiness and
| variability are probably good for you. Its funny that the Bryan
| Johnson types who closely control every calorie in their body
| have such a bad reaction to any variability. I don't know if its
| him, but I heard someone not be able to sleep and their levels
| got all messed up from one sweet. And their conclusion was sweets
| are so bad for you, rather than you're building your body to be
| too fragile to shocks.
|
| The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you
| eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of
| time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every
| day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to
| lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think
| it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some
| period of time for your body to react.
| mhogers wrote:
| Interesting - training for spikiness/variability is a positive
| view, e.g. embrace the lack of occasional sleep, it trains you
| to be more resilient.
| bko wrote:
| This is built into a lot of religions and cultural practices
| with fasting or restrictions. Spikiness is lindy
| BJones12 wrote:
| > That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a
| weeks worth of food and not be overweight.
|
| Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting
| calories [0]
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/SVS0ioOdfuE?t=225
| goda90 wrote:
| That's exactly the point the grandparent comment was making
| though. Because they aren't chronically eating at competition
| levels is the reason they aren't overweight. They have a high
| calorie moment, followed by low calorie stretches.
| baseballdork wrote:
| That wasn't my takeaway from that comment.
|
| > Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of
| food you eat as long as it's not chronic.
|
| Suggests that your metabolism is changing, as though your
| body becomes more or less efficient at burning calories
| because you're eating more or less. Instead, these guys eat
| a huge surplus of calories and then go into a deficit to
| get back to their standard weight.
| bko wrote:
| Sure he cuts back his calories, but 70 hotdogs is about
| 21k calories. I don't think he goes into a 21k calorie
| deficit over the next few weeks. That's an insane
| deficit. That would be the equivalent of not eating for
| 8.5 days, which is not possible since it would mess with
| his training. He probably cuts it back some fraction of
| that, say 10k and his body's increased metabolism adjusts
| for the rest.
| baseballdork wrote:
| Doesn't that beg the question of why anyone gets fat if
| your metabolism can just... increase to cover some
| arbitrary amount of calories?
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's because our bodies want to get fat, because storing
| calories is evolutionarily advantageous (or at least
| was).
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| It would be interesting to know what amount of the
| calories from the 70 hot dogs is actually absorbed,
| versus how much is excreted without being absorbed.
| BJones12 wrote:
| A 21K deficit over 3 weeks would be 1000 Cal/day of
| deficit. For comparison, this is the amount of deficit
| required to lose 2 pounds per week, which many people do.
| johtso wrote:
| Isn't there a limit to how many calories your body can
| store in a certain period of time? After a certain point
| wont there be a lot of waste?
| boringg wrote:
| Depends on the goal is. If you life is full of shocks then
| build for shocks. If you life is not build for shocks it makes
| sense to optimize for your existence. You certainly don't want
| to overfit the model as you are describing but you don't want
| to build a life around expecting shocks when none arrive. As
| with all things, it is a balance.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if
| you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period
| of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles
| every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be
| possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the
| extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some
| kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
|
| Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.
|
| Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.
|
| Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame -
| not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty.
| Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with
| other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And
| one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as
| possible.
|
| Another things many companies probably try to optimize their
| food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and
| therefore buy, more of their products.
|
| ---
|
| 1. From Renaissance Periodization
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| In addition to food being much tastier than ever before, it's
| also much cheaper. Despite current inflation and cost of
| living concerns, we spend far less on food than any time in
| history. Food in the 1960 was almost twice as expensive as it
| is today. Food costs used to be higher than housing costs!
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-
| waves/2020/november/average-s...
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-
| ame...
| 0x737368 wrote:
| Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as
| "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty
| much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions
| once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to
| eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.
| BrawnyBadger53 wrote:
| Some do this, some go on binge fast cycles. Others just eat
| the food. It's different for everyone. Binge fast cycles are
| probably the easiest way to train this though.
| a3w wrote:
| The timing of when I eat changes, if I gain weight. Eating pizza
| after jogging? Fat on belly.
|
| Eating as much pizza as I want, but going to bed after on empty
| stomach after running, or putting the running in the morning
| while doing about 12 to 16 hour slots of intermitted fasting?
| Hello, six-pack.
| ricciardo wrote:
| That is a pretty interesting observation. I always thought it
| was solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned. For
| example, you burn ~2500 through just living, if you eat a pizza
| that contains 3000 calories, no matter the time at which you
| eat it, will you not still gain fat?
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Calorie counting works, but "use this one weird trick to
| target belly fat and achieve six pack" sells books.
| mecsred wrote:
| Its all anecdotal all the way down, so here's another grain
| of salt to add to the pile.
|
| (Calories in - calories out) is correct enough to be the
| single most reliable metric, and will serve you right 99% of
| the time. My "one level deeper" understanding is that there
| are a few transfer functions applied to calories in. So of
| the technically available calories you eat, how much does
| your body absorb. Then, when the calories are biologically
| available, how does your body spend them?
|
| So the idea would be, if you eat the pizza at the right time
| you reduce calories in. Either you will digest less calories,
| or your body will allocated them differently at different
| times of the day.
|
| Unfortunately these things aren't really measurable so it's
| very hard to separate from hearsay.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned.
|
| It is, but CI\CO as advice doesn't take in to account that
| you aren't a machine and we aren't calculating gas mileage.
| The system is both adaptive and reactive. CI and CO changes
| based on the situation, and you have no way to accurately
| measure.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's why you don't worry about Calories Out. You measure
| Calories In daily and then your weight at a sample rate
| that's long enough that it averages out most weirdness -
| probably weekly. If your weight is going up, reduce caloric
| consumption.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Can we all please acknowledge that intermittent fasting is just
| a form of calories restriction? If you ate a pizza after
| jogging, but that was all you ate all day, your results would
| probably be different as well.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Does it matter? Intermittent fasting is a form of calorie
| restriction I can be successful at, eating 3 tiny meals a day
| is one I fail at.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It does because you framed it as a matter of timing.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The timing makes me lose weight. The mechanism by which
| it does so is a black box.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| But this black box has "you eat less calories" written in
| whiteout across it.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| But it doesn't matter to me. One method makes me so
| miserably hungry 24/7 that I quit after a few weeks of
| agony, the other makes me forget all about food entirely.
|
| This seems to bother people, who always tell me to do it
| the "right" way, which to them apparently means using
| willpower to endure endless suffering.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's fine, you can live in your world of magic. I don't
| care for intermittent fasting, it been easier for me to
| calorie count, but both of our systems are CI/CO. If we
| can acknowledge the core concept is that weight loss is
| done through caloric restriction we can then expand that
| to more implementations, because, as you've pointed out,
| the "right" way is very personal.
| cthalupa wrote:
| No one in this thread cares about this being the "right"
| way, they care about being accurate in what we're
| discussing.
|
| Intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore, sugar diet, etc.,
| all work when they work because it is caloric
| restriction.
| npteljes wrote:
| Yes, it does. Because for somebody else, the three tiny
| meals might work, and intermittent fasting doesn't, and it
| would equally be good at the result.
| com2kid wrote:
| This is true to an extent and I'm very fond of the saying, but
| beyond a certain point you can indeed outrun a bad diet.
|
| I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing,
| BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted
| without gaining weight.
|
| I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad
| for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back
| then that I am unable to today.
|
| So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running
| than most people want to do!
| jchw wrote:
| Yeah. Sure, your body can adjust how much calories are burned
| when you're idle, but it can only do so much. If you're burning
| thousands of calories on daily activity, it's gotta come from
| somewhere.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yeah, this is a scale problem.
|
| You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking
| city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that
| this doesn't matter.
|
| But if you take the common American diet where the _bread_ of
| your sandwich is shelf-stable because it 's packed with sugar
| and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size,
| "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes
| "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
|
| It's not that it doesn't matter, it's the asymmetry. You can
| eat a small chocolate bar that costs $1 (or whatever) in
| about 15 seconds, and it will take you 2 hours of walking to
| wear off the calories.
| const_cast wrote:
| It's more complicated than this, because muscle raises your
| basal metabolic rate.
|
| If you look at bodybuilders, they're buring 400 calories a
| day, regardless of exercise. Having an extra 100 pounds of
| muscle means your body just burns A LOT of calories doing
| absolutely nothing.
|
| This is part of the reason why men burn more calories than
| woman just right out of the gate.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| A pound of fat burns ~3 calories, while muscle is ~8 per
| day. Sure, it is different, but unless you are the Rock,
| most people do not have enough muscle mass to make a
| difference.
| snozolli wrote:
| _You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a
| walking city, look around and see the difference. I can 't
| accept that this doesn't matter._
|
| It's a whole lot easier to hit up a drive through or grab a
| tub of ice cream at the grocery store when you're driving a
| car.
|
| You're not wrong, though. Walking around doesn't burn a lot
| of calories (~100/mile), but most people become overweight by
| only slightly overeating on a daily basis, over a long period
| of time. One can of soda has 140 Calories. 140 excess daily
| Calories is an extra pound of fat per month.
| Spivak wrote:
| Well yeah, the sugar is also there to produce the soft
| squishy texture people expect from sandwich bread as well as
| the aiding the Maillard reaction when it's grilled. Miss me
| with a grilled cheese made with any other kind of loaf.
|
| But we are talking about _bread_ here, even in the absence of
| sugar and oil it 's still got plenty of calories for you.
| Grain St Methode's white bread, a no added sugar brand is 180
| cals for two slices and Wonder Bread, famously packed with
| sugar, is 140 cals for two slices. It's the bread which is
| making you fat, the sugar isn't moving the needle in any
| direction as far as the obesity crisis is concerned.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Exercise definitely helps you improve your eating patterns.
| In particular it helps you deal with stress which is a source
| of bad food habits.
| bluedino wrote:
| You were also younger.
|
| I used to house whole pizzas for lunch. Now I only eat 2 slices
| and weigh the same.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The difference in metabolic activity as you age is relatively
| small until you are quite old, like a single digit percentage
| difference. You can go look at any TDEE calculator and see
| this.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| I can confirm the same from my messenger days. On days when
| deliveries were sparse, we found ourselves moving from cafe to
| bakery, eating more pastries than a doctor would recommend.
| Regardless of the day's activity levels we would generally
| drink large amounts of beer after work and sometimes during.
| Maintaining weight and satisfying our appetites was always a
| more pressing concern.
|
| I'm not a dietician, but when I read things like this NPR
| report, I wonder how much of it is motivated reasoning. "It is
| not your fault", is always a good come-on for a sales pitch.
| This report seems like something people would like to hear,
| especially if they haven't come to enjoy strenuous exercise.
|
| That said, I've always had a bias against highly processed
| foods.
| naikrovek wrote:
| what is "processed" versus "highly processed" versus "ultra
| processed"?
|
| the way these things are described feels very much like
| people are using a dowsing rod to find where to dig a well,
| or something. mumbo-jumbo.
|
| I'm sure even "super ultra giga processed" foods are fine for
| you so long as you don't eat a lot of them. I'm not even sure
| that "processed" is bad at all. I don't want to eat raw
| cashews, I'll die (as will anyone else) I want those
| processed by cooking. Is pre-cooked food "processed" or
| "highly processed" or "ultra processed" or something else?
| all of the above; it depends on who you ask.
|
| I don't know of any level of "processed" which is bad, I just
| know that if you consume 10k calories per day and only burn
| 3k, you're going to gain weight, level of "processed"
| probably doesn't matter. And I think that's all this study is
| saying: unless you're extremely active, you can't burn 10k
| calories a day, your body really limits how many calories you
| can burn in a day unless you are physically working enough to
| actually turn that amount of energy into physical work.
|
| anyway, yeah. i immediately distrust anyone that starts
| mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra
| processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think
| they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not
| quantitative.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| >Wise Cheez Doodles Honey Bbq Cheese Flavored Corn Snacks,
| Honey; Bbq; Cheese
|
| >CORN MEAL, VEGETABLE OIL (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE
| FOLLOWING: CORN, COTTONSEED, SUNFLOWER, OR CANOLA OIL),
| SUGAR, SALT, HONEY, CORN STARCH, FRUCTOSE, WHEY, DEXTROSE
| MONOHYDRATE, MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE (FLAVOR ENHANCER), TOMATO
| POWDER, CHEDDAR CHEESE, (CULTURED MILK, SALT ENZYMES),
| ONION POWDER, BUTTER (CREAM, SALT), BLUE CHEESE FLAVOR,
| BUTTERMILK SOLIDS, MALTODEXRIN, YELLOW 5 LAKE, YELLOW 6
| LAKE, GARLIC POWDER, PAPRIKA EXTRACT, NATURAL FLAVORS
| (CONTAINS CELERY), SOYBEAN OIL, LACTIC ACID, CITRIC ACID,
| SODIUM PHOSPHATE, ENZYME MODIFIED BUTTER OIL, YELLOW 5,
| YELLOW 6, AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE
| (VITAMIN B1), DISODIUM GUANYLATE, DISODIUM INOSINATE
| Legend2440 wrote:
| The big thing about processed food is that it is "purified"
| in a sense to strip it down to just starches, sugar, and
| fats. Think sweet corn vs corn syrup.
|
| If you eat only processed foods but limit your calories,
| you will not become overweight. But you will not be getting
| enough fiber or micronutrients, and you will probably not
| feel full either.
| quesera wrote:
| > _i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning
| "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed"
| because I don't think those are defined. I think they're
| speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative._
|
| Don't be afraid to use the web to dispel your confusion!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_foods
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
| _Wintermute wrote:
| Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30
| hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's
| definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's
| essentially a full time job.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I once trained pretty hard for several months for a martial
| arts competition. I upped my calorie intake to keep up with
| the training and put on about ~15lb of muscle. What people
| don't tell you about this sort of intensive training is just
| much extra time you spend each week shopping, cooking, eating
| and taking a shit - on top of all the training!
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| The most effective exercise for weight loss is fork put-downs.
| roguecoder wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| That is not what any of the studies I have read find,
| particularly not past the short term: past calorie
| restriction diets is one of the factors associated with
| developing obesity.
| g3f32r wrote:
| Isn't that a bit of a truism?
|
| A _past_ calorie restriction is associated with a _current_
| calorie surplus.
|
| Obviously if the calorie restriction were being continued,
| one wouldn't be developing obesity.
| cthalupa wrote:
| "Fork put downs" does not mean a crash diet or anything
| like that.
|
| It means permanently adjusting your caloric intake to
| levels that allow you to reach and maintain a healthy body
| weight and body fat makeup.
|
| If you're eating 6000 calories a day there is no way you're
| out-exercising that diet while working a full time job.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| And plate push aways
| jader201 wrote:
| Anecdotal counterpoint:
|
| I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going
| fully remote.
|
| I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my
| level of activity remained unchanged.
|
| A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight,
| and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range.
| Again, level of activity remained unchanged.
|
| About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) quite
| regularly -- about 2.5 hours per week, averaging right in the
| middle of my target heart rate zone. Diet remained the same.
| Weight remained mostly unchanged (still in my ideal weight
| range -- I've maybe lost 5 or so pounds, but I lost way more
| weight when only changing my diet).
|
| So -- _for me_ -- diet has definitely had more impact on my
| weight than my level of activity.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| People tend to adjust their activity to maintain their energy
| expenditure without consciously thinking about it.
|
| So a 30 minute session in the day might be followed by more
| time on the sofa later on.
| jader201 wrote:
| I don't think I could spend much more time on the sofa
| before I started cycling. :)
| testing22321 wrote:
| I've been thinking about writing a book on this topic: "No
| overweight person eats well".
|
| By very definition of a person is overweight, they got there by
| eating poorly, and are continuing to do so. They have eaten more
| energy than they use, this energy storage in fat.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I think there are an infinite number of true statements you
| could make about unhealthy or overweight people. What makes for
| a good book or article is finding the true statement you can
| say that actually sways behavior. I'm skeptical your message
| would succeed in this
| standardUser wrote:
| > They have eaten...
|
| Notice the past tense there?
| testing22321 wrote:
| And / or continue to eat. Present tense.
|
| If they were currently eating well, they would lose weight
| and not be overweight
| sophia01 wrote:
| The title is disappointing: it implies a causal relationship. The
| study was an observational study.
|
| Indeed, you _can_ outrun a bad diet: we all know that. The study
| just shows that the lack of activity isn 't the main reason for
| obesity. Both things can be true simultaneously.
| BrawnyBadger53 wrote:
| "Running is a statistically ineffective means of weight
| reduction" doesn't make for a catchy headline. This can
| suffice.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree. A good title could be "You _can_ outrun a bad diet.
| You just won 't".
| momocowcow wrote:
| Nice clean journalistic blurb from NPR. Case close! Too much food
| makes you fat, not genetics. Until the next article in a month.
| gry wrote:
| Too much food is not the conclusion. It's the food itself.
| taeric wrote:
| Reminds me of a video I saw recently that pointed out the absurd
| number of calories professional athletes burn. Upshot of that
| video was that you almost certainly can run to lose weight. Just
| don't expect it to be an easy task.
|
| At a personal level, I can also say that it is flat out hard to
| eat large amounts of food if you are staying active. The
| stereotype of wanting an after meal nap is legit.
|
| It is also somewhat interesting to see other places try and
| contend with just how much food your average person in the US has
| at their ready disposal.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _At a personal level, I can also say that it is flat out hard
| to eat large amounts of food if you are staying active._
|
| I've never had that problem. When I exercise a lot, my body
| just starts to crave a higher proportion of calorie-dense foods
| - ice cream, cheese, breads. The actual volume of food might
| not go up all that much, but the balance changes.
|
| Of course, "a lot" for me is 10-15 hours cardio/week plus 3-4
| hours/week weight training. My baseline is 3-5 hours cardio and
| the same 3-4 weight training. I only ramp up to 10+ hours
| cardio if I have a major event planned (100 mile mtn bike race
| or similar).
| taeric wrote:
| I think it is safe to say that 10-15 hours of cardio a week
| is far far more than most people get. Hick, 6-10 hours of
| exercise a week is almost certainly multiples of what most
| people do. :D
|
| But, yeah, I was meaning volume as well as certain types. As
| I understand it, at the elite levels, you actually have to
| train your body in how to consume enough to stay active for
| the full event. It isn't like you can just down a few cheese
| burgers and then head off to a race.
|
| Ice cream remains an amusing one, to me. People are convinced
| it is among the worst snacks you can do, and yet I have yet
| to meet a very active person that doesn't love some form of
| ice cream on a regular basis.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It ought to be obvious. A chocolate donut, large Frappuccino or
| pick your unhealthy food of choice are about equivalent to half
| an hour of running. Given how many people throw in a snack like
| that several times per day good luck burning that off with
| exercise.
|
| One of the most straight forward things to lose weight is just
| limiting yourself to two or three actual meals, black coffee,
| tea, etc.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Starbucks did an impressive job of convincing people they love
| coffee when a lot of them actually just like morning/mid-day
| dessert with some trace coffee flavoring.
| astura wrote:
| Nobody who is ordering a frapachino is convinced they are
| ordering because they like coffee, especially considering
| that the half of the frapachino menu is non-coffee flavors.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I make coffee at home but have noticed how fast the sugar jar
| needs to be refilled. I'm the only one who drinks coffee, it's
| surprising how much sugar i consume drinking coffee. I bet i
| use 2-3 tablespoons of pure sugar from my coffee consumption
| alone.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I used to have sugar in my tea. I gradually reduced it to
| zero and now I don't miss it at all.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I have been, rather lazily I suppose, trying to tweak my diet in
| such as way as to lose weight; and with little to show for it.
|
| I'm not sure that there is much if any processed food still in my
| diet (maybe just the English muffin in the morning?). I stopped
| buying/drinking soda pop decades ago (a low-hanging fruit indeed
| -- I lost almost 10 pounds within a month of making that dietary
| change alone).
|
| And since I have tried little things like switching to peanut
| butter that contains only peanuts (no salt, no sugar, not palm
| oil -- sure, I have to stir it when I open it for the first
| time). I've moved to whole grain bread. Other small changes like
| that I can't remember right now.
|
| I still have a BMI that's too high.
|
| The only time I have significantly lost weight was when I was
| prepping for intestinal surgery nearly a decade ago. I was at the
| time worried that eating too much would literally kill me (I was
| worried about bursting my intestine) that I ate very small
| portions for each meal.
|
| I'm not sure why I can't change my habits such that I continue to
| eat those small portions (now that the fear is gone).
| knicholes wrote:
| Try a diet plan where you prep your own meals and intake a
| specific amount of calories. I've used Clean Simple Eats in the
| past. Diet only works. Diet+exercise works better, and adds all
| of the benefits of exercise.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I walk over 2 miles a day. My doctor suggested weight
| training (which I had not thought of as a way to lose weight
| -- I don't think of it as an aerobic workout).
| nradov wrote:
| Two miles is almost nothing.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Have you tried introducing a food scale? Not with the intent of
| changing your portions or anything like that - just out of idle
| curiosity to confirm how much you're eating?
|
| I found that I was eating over double the amount of nut butter
| that I was estimating once I started weighing it. After a
| couple of months I was able to go back to eyeballing it while
| remaining accurate.
|
| A lot of wisdom suggests being +/- 300 calories from your TDEE
| to cut/bulk. Three tablespoons of peanut butter is ~285
| calories. So it's entirely possible that something as small as
| an estimation error is responsible for whether you're gaining
| or maintaining. Same goes for eyeballing cooking oils, seeds &
| nuts, and, to a lesser extent, processed carbs.
| redox99 wrote:
| A good diet only helps so much. Of course with enough self
| control, a caloric deficit will make you lose weight, but you
| need to make yourself perpetually hungry. Eating clean without
| measuring and limiting portions is not enough for people whose
| appetite is naturally higher.
|
| Ozempic was the only thing that actually solved my hunger. I
| would eat healthy, do exercise, but without ozempic my appetite
| was unstoppable and would think of food 24/7.
|
| BTW you can still improve your diet. PB and bread are bad for
| weight loss. Go with high protein, low carb. But even that was
| not enough for me.
| tartoran wrote:
| Aren't you worried at all about side effects from ozempic and
| what happens when you stop taking it?
| sunshowers wrote:
| Not the GP but I'm already on several meds that are
| lifelong -- one more doesn't faze me.
| cthalupa wrote:
| What side effects? Stomach discomfort when you start on the
| med and titrate up?
|
| Current recommendations on the GLP-1s is to keep using them
| even after goal weight.
| redox99 wrote:
| No. I believe the health benefits of not being overweight,
| both physical and self esteem, heavily outweigh the side
| effects.
|
| I plan to keep taking it for life (or some equivalent
| drug).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, lat week switched to two eggs for breakfast (now 1/2 an
| English muffin so I have something to put the eggs on).
|
| But I wonder if Ozempic is not a bad idea. My BMI is below 30
| -- which is what my doctor said is her threshold for
| recommending something like Ozempic. So I feel like I should
| just keep working on the self-discipline a little harder.
|
| Intermittent fasting keeps coming up and I have not tried it.
| I think that will be my experiment in the coming months.
| redox99 wrote:
| I was slightly under 30 too. The mental focus and not
| having any food noise is so worth it. It was a constant
| struggle that just vanished.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| You're trying to eat clean instead of lean/volumous. Why care
| about palm oil or salt in peanut butter if it's still like
| straight fat that you're passing on your bread every day? The
| actual diet move would be to switch that to some fruit and low
| fat yogurt. Same thing with whole grain bread, you just got
| some more fiber and vitamins but the calories are mostly all
| there still, especially if it's sandwich bread.
|
| Clean/natural/unprocessed is an independent variable from
| fattening. There is correlation in that processed foods are
| sometimes highly palatable, but there is no causation. To
| illustrate, you could top your toast with either honey or Mrs
| Butterworth's Sugar Free syrup. Honey will add like 10x more
| calories, but is unprocessed, while the syrup is as processed
| as there can be
| adonese wrote:
| This time last year I was in Kampala for roughly 4 months. I
| used to cook at home and I avoided any process food. Zero to
| little carb. I was walking a lot though and quite regularly
| (the weather there is just so good). Now, one year later I
| moved to Dubai and I think I gained around 10kg.
|
| The only difference being the amount of processed food and the
| lack of my daily walking routines. But granted, I gained 10kg
| while im on one meal a day.
| goda90 wrote:
| Have you tried intermittent fasting? There's a lot of
| controversy around the impacts of fasting, but there's one
| simple fact involved: it's harder to exceed your calorie needs
| for a day in 1 or 2 meals than in 3 or more because at some
| point you are just too full to eat more. If you're focused on
| getting lots of veggies in your limited meals, the number of
| calories that "fit in your stomach" will also go down.
|
| Assuming you don't have some metabolic disorders, you'll get
| used to being hungry for part of the day.
| diath wrote:
| The first problem with people unable to lose weight is simply
| not counting calories and trying to "switch to healthier food
| and eyeball it". You have to have a kitchen scale and measure
| portions. Track every meal in an app. It's annoying at first,
| but once you get in the habit, it's just part of preparing the
| meal. When you do that, you will be able to tell which meals in
| your diet are high calorie (which, some are surprisingly
| calorie dense contrary to what a lot of people think), and find
| replacements or downsize the portions accordingly.
|
| The second problem is people simply not being honest with their
| calorie tracking. You may only eat 3 meals but then when you're
| hungry you will eat a handful of raisins, peanuts, or something
| else, a lot of people will think to themselves "well, it's just
| a handful, so it can't be that many calories" - but repeated
| habit of eating those adds up, and most people don't account
| for that in their calorie tracking app. Similar to adding a
| small bit of, say, butter to your pan before making scrambled
| eggs. You may think, "it's only about 10 grams of butter, it's
| not much so why bother tracking it", but that 10 grams of
| butter is 75 calories, over the course of a month of preparing
| scrambled eggs every morning for breakfast, that's 2250 kcal,
| after 3 months, that's an entire KILO of bodyweight fat that
| you either gained or could have lost - small things add up.
|
| Sometimes (but less frequently) it's also hormonal issues, you
| may want to go to a clinic to do a bloodtest (specifically
| thyroid hormones and diabetes markers).
|
| Also, low intensity cardio (slow pace incline
| treadmill/stairmaster) can go a long way in aiding weight loss.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yep. It's almost always either not tracking or not being
| honest with tracking.
|
| It's possible to overeat anything - whether a food is
| "healthy" or not, while important, isn't what matters for
| weight loss. Burning more calories than you consume is what
| is important for weight loss.
|
| Where I see folks, particularly men, fail most often is in
| their mid-late thirties. Sedentary lifestyle, wants to lose
| the "dad bod." Someone in that situation, with no physical
| activity, would actually have a fairly low TDEE so a 500
| cal/day deficit might look like eating in a range of
| 1500-1700 calories/day, which if they are like the average
| American and used to consuming 3500+ calories/day, will be
| quite the shock - so they are almost immediately super
| hungry, and might start out with good intentions with
| tracking what they eat but will frequently miss all the
| little snacks here and there, or just haven't developed the
| skill of meal prepping, and properly weighing out their food.
|
| It's a lot of work, and requires a lot of dedication. Too
| many articles out there that just simplify it down to "Eat
| less, move more" but don't do enough to actually educate
| folks on what that really looks like.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Any good resources you recommend on this? Speaking as an
| early forties Dad :)
| thewebguyd wrote:
| First, figure out your TDEE (Total Daily Energy
| Expenditure) to figure out how much of a deficit you need
| to eat in to lose weight at your desired rate.
|
| You can start off with one of those online calculators
| (like this one: https://tdeecalculator.net/). 1 to
| 2lbs/week is generally healthy and sustainable. Losing
| weight too fast can cause you to lose a lot of muscle as
| well, which is generally what you don't want (resistance
| training will help with this)
|
| I like this TDEE spreadsheet, as the formulas aren't
| always accurate for everyone: https://drive.google.com/fi
| le/d/0B7gGXXQIy4R4ejRRNkZHZHFDOW8...
|
| You log what you eat and your weight everyday, after a
| few weeks you should have a pretty good picture of your
| TDEE and know how much you need to eat for your desired
| weight loss. What was important for me, is that if you
| add in exercise, try not to eat back what you burned from
| the exercise - smart watches/fitbits aren't always
| accurate in their estimates, so just use the exercise as
| an opportunity to dig a little deeper of a deficit (and
| for the other health benefits).
|
| As much of a pain in the ass it is, you'll want to weigh
| your food for a while, down to individual ingredients
| including cooking oil, as it's really easy to
| underestimate how much you consume (2 tbps of olive oil
| is 120 calories, for example - that adds up over the
| course of a week if you are using that much or more every
| time you cook).
|
| The reddit r/fitness wiki has a wealth of information on
| diet and routines as well, I highly recommend skimming it
| over: https://thefitness.wiki/
|
| If you are able I'd recommend resistance training along
| with diet as well. Building muscle will help boost your
| metabolism a bit, help with aesthetic goals, and getting
| stronger will only help you as you get older. No need to
| go crazy here, even just 2 to 3 days/week, especially for
| a beginner, can give you some pretty big improvements. A
| lot of people think they need to hit the gym 6 days/week
| like a body builder but it's not necessary at all.
|
| Lastly, take progress photos and/or body measurements as
| well. You'll hit periods, especially if you are
| resistance training, where the scale isn't moving, but
| you could still very well be losing body fat so the
| photos/measurements can be helpful to keep your
| motivation through these periods. Expect your weight to
| fluctuate a lot too day to day, what's important is the
| average trend over time, not necessarily day to day.
|
| Hope that helps!
| nerdjon wrote:
| So I will first emphasize, try to avoid a "diet" and feeling
| the need to eliminate anything.
|
| Unless you just really struggle with impulse control and you
| need those guard rails, for me the only way that I managed to
| loose about 45 lbs was by looking at things this way.
|
| I did not cut a single thing out of my diet, what I did was
| make smart choices/swaps at home that still satisfied cravings
| most of the time so when I want to go to the store and get a
| candy bar I will go to the store and get a candy bar and not
| feel bad about it.
|
| Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore, I have
| switched almost entirely to water outside of milk in my coffee.
| When I am out I may sometimes grab a soda but meh.
|
| I make homemade peanut butter. I buy dry roasted unsalted
| peanuts, add in a small amount of salt and its great.
|
| Trying a bunch of different apples and finding the sweetest
| apples I could find, and then eating that with peanut butter
| for some added protein.
|
| Strawberries with chocolate humas.
|
| I started making my own chicken stock which had more flavor and
| less sodium.
|
| Making my own heartier soups that tasted great.
|
| Also... Seasoning. More than just salt and pepper. Some really
| good (non American generally) seasoning will go a long way and
| is basically a zero calory way to really good food.
|
| Other random small changes that are very situational for you.
| Look at your snacking habbits, that is where most of my issues
| came in.
|
| Where I could I would choose things that would also increase my
| protein intake. I didn't go crazy. I never counted calories or
| anything and the weight just came off. Sure I could have lost a
| bit more had I done that, but I am at the point now that is the
| 10 more lbs going to make that big of a difference in the grand
| scheme of things as I work towards gaining more muscle anyways.
|
| I realize this may not work for everyone, but I am not on any
| sort of "diet" in any traditional sense of the word. What I am
| doing now is perfectly sustainable for the rest of my life
| because I can still live my life and largely eat what I want
| within reason. I had taco bell today and don't feel bad about
| it in the slightest.
|
| I should add that during most of this weight loss I did not
| change my workout habbits. I was focusing on my nutrition
| first. I do live in a city and I walk everywhere, but that did
| not change in this time.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful. Commit
| to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself to better
| eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just 'eat
| healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of calorie
| content of food.
|
| Like I straight up just don't eat nut butters anymore because
| they are a massive calorie bomb, and I find the loose nuts more
| satiating. When you track for a while you start building an
| instinct for optimizing the satiety/calorie ratio of your
| meals.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful.
| Commit to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself
| to better eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just
| 'eat healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of
| calorie content of food.
|
| Just to add to this - periodically track again as well and
| keep track of your weight progress and bodyfat % if you are
| able.
|
| If you aren't also building muscle, as you lose weight your
| total energy expenditure will decrease as well so after a
| while what was enough of a calorie deficit for you may no
| longer be in a deficit as you lose weight. So if you notice
| you start stalling after a while, start tracking again to see
| if your TDEE has changed and adjust as needed.
| roguecoder wrote:
| How bodies related to food varies _wildly_. For example, my
| body has difficulty processing certain foods, so I lost a ton
| of weight switching from "healthy" fruits and veggies and
| plant-based protein to mostly pre-processed carbs and fatty
| meat. (Low FODMAP, for folks who are curious: be ready to learn
| chemistry to figure out what is safe to eat.)
|
| That diet isn't going to have the same effect for most people,
| but in my case it significantly lowered my inflammation and
| general discomfort, which led me to lose 90lbs with no actual
| effort on my part.
|
| I knew one dude who was always hungry and it turned out he just
| desperately needed B12. Now he snacks on B12 gummies and feels
| much better. Debugging our bodies is more complicated than
| debugging a software program, but no programmer would say "Just
| run the program less!" if someone complained a program was
| eating up all the CPU.
|
| The one thing that is always good for humans, whether we lose
| weight or not, is some physical activity. Whatever we can enjoy
| enough to do regularly, without injury, is a great choice.
|
| I wish the medical profession would stop focusing on diet, when
| it doesn't understand it and calorie restrictive diets are one
| of two lifestyle components we know actually do contribute to
| obesity.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Diet to manage your weight. Exercise to manage your fitness.
|
| It's real simple in theory and real difficult in practice. Super
| worth it, though. Your entire world starts opening up when things
| take less energy to do and you have more energy to give. It's
| very challenging to convey how important it is without living the
| experience.
| goda90 wrote:
| Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently. Too many
| people go through theses cycles of "I'm going to cut out this,
| this and this to lose X pounds" and then drop it once they hit
| their goal or it ends up being too hard. While you might not
| shed pounds as quickly, if you focus on making sure you get
| varied, satiating, nutritious food(actually nutritious, not
| falling for the abundance of marketing out there), then you'll
| have an easier time resisting the temptation to gorge on treats
| and getting too many calories.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I think you read "diet" and "exercise" as verbs when I was
| using them as nouns :) My grammar wasn't great, though, so
| that's on me.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently.
|
| Colloquially the former can mean the latter. But yes,
| anything that cannot be sustained is doomed to fail.
| neogodless wrote:
| Language changes over time, and "diet" is _very_ commonly
| used as shorthand for "restrictive food intake" or "caloric
| restriction." But a reminder that "diet" is short for
| "dietary intake", and is not prescriptive. "A healthy diet"
| is a common phrase for "permanently good eating habits."
|
| The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer
| to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food
| intake."
| post_break wrote:
| Having lost 40lbs in the past couple of years, diet and walking
| have been key. It's just so much easier to burn fat by not eating
| it, than it is to try to burn it off with exercise. You'll find
| that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity,
| but eating one chocolate chip muffin? You can do that and gulp
| down a big glass of milk in 5 minutes like it's nothing.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels
| like an eternity
|
| That's because you are doing it on a treadmill...
|
| Try doing a more fun activity outside in the world and in
| nature. Like cycling.
|
| I can cycle for 120 miles outdoors in about 6 hours in a single
| day and have a positive experience and memory of doing it and
| that burns about 8200 calories according to a calculators for
| my weight.
| laurent_du wrote:
| At some point in my life I was eating 400g of nutella every day.
| I was also running 26km per day. I didn't get fat.
| freetime2 wrote:
| > We also excluded those listed as "athletes" in the database
| and those with TEEs greater than 25 MJ/d (all of these excluded
| individuals were from High HDI populations)
|
| This study specifically excluded athletes, so its conclusions
| would be applicable to someone running 26km per day.
| Lerc wrote:
| I think it is fairly accepted that most of the health benefits of
| exercise apply regardless of your weight loss.
| Delphiza wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not
| representative of the study. The study compares energy
| expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people
| sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found
| that difference in energy expenditure does not account for
| differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely
| reason.
|
| The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would
| exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a
| little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a
| cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive
| 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your
| calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not
| conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it
| suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than
| reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic
| development."
|
| Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely
| pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is
| more of a study on economic development, and not really useful
| for personal or localised health advice. It observes that
| economically developed population groups may be more sedentary,
| but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-
| gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more
| energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why
| the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic
| development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary
| intake) than daily activity.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their
| diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good
| physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People
| just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take
| it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and
| a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet
| bsoles wrote:
| Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of
| junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge
| daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview
| with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram
| whatever I can into my body. It's pretty much whatever I feel
| like eating, I'm going to eat".
| 71153750 wrote:
| I think the challenge with swimming is that there is
| thermodynamics of swimming through water to also contend
| with. So your body is also having to keep warm whilst
| losing heat to better heat conducting fluid (water vs air).
| But I still agree, if Phelps was running or even walking
| with the same effort he could eat similarly.
| drdec wrote:
| How many hours per day was he swimming?
| recursive wrote:
| A lot. But a possible amount.
| drdec wrote:
| Clearly a possibly amount since he did it.
|
| Would it be possible for someone who was not supporting
| themselves that way? I.e. for someone with a 40 hr / week
| job?
| recursive wrote:
| I don't know about possible, but I'm sure the Michael
| Phelps regimen is wildly impractical for everyone,
| including Michael Phelps.
|
| My personal experience is that "outrunning" a poor diet
| is absolutely possible, and I kind of did it
| unintentionally. I started biking to work out of
| necessity. I wasn't planning to lose weight, but it
| happened. I had no weight loss ambitions or plans, but it
| was probably a good thing.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but I think we can still safely say you can't outrun
| a bad diet when only less than 1% of people who try are
| successful at it.
| 0x737368 wrote:
| I can't take this Luka slander. The guy carried the
| ungrateful Mavericks team for 6 seasons averaging 35mpg. He's
| not out of shape. Same thing with Jokic, 10 seasons of 32mpg
| average. Their mpg also go up in the playoffs.
|
| People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the
| "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some
| players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.
|
| I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his
| talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a
| better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for
| one of the greatest players ever.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| I'm a Luka fan, but he does look a (hehe) little chubby
| these past 2 seasons and it has impacted his game
| noticeably. Just compare the explosiveness from his first
| seasons to now
| 0x737368 wrote:
| Doesn't matter how you look, if you can play those kind
| of minutes and perform like they do you're in athletic
| shape. Luka and Jokic don't need to be super slim like
| Edwards, Morant and Westbrook because they don't rely on
| supernatural athleticism - they rely on other facets of
| their game where having a bit more mass is advantageous
| or at the very least not detrimental.
|
| In any case, Doncic got bullied and embarrassed by Mavs
| FO's comments about his weight and work ethic(complete
| lies to try and save face for their terrible and shady
| trade) so you can look forward to a slimmer Luka next
| season.
| djtango wrote:
| When I did my first two fights in muay thai I wasn't watching
| my weight neither changing my diet during fight camp and came
| in 6kg underweight.
|
| I was absolutely shredded and still ate stuff like katsu
| curry weekly
| savanaly wrote:
| Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in
| with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of
| dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed
| with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more
| pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that
| is true of almost every single English true statement ever
| written.
| djtango wrote:
| Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with
| my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay
| thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes
| have to force myself to eat.
|
| The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you
| naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for
| people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend
| tracking and setting time goals.
|
| Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance
| jorvi wrote:
| That's the point of the study though.
|
| If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn
| more calories than your baseline.
|
| But if you do that workout often enough, for various
| reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure.
|
| This means that if you want to lose weight consistently,
| working out is useless in that sense. You might see
| benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but
| eventually your body adjusts.
|
| Working out is great for a plethora of reasons. And this
| calorie budget rebalancing is one of them, since it means
| inflammation or auto-immune responses get downregulated.
|
| Losing weight is not one of those benefits. Whereas it is
| often held up as such which leads to intense disappointment
| and relapse with overweight people, because they think "oh,
| if I just go for six intense two-hour jogs a week, I can
| keep eating sumptuously."
| SirMaster wrote:
| How exactly can your body adjust that much though? There
| is some minimum baseline level of calorie burn to stay
| alive and keep your body temp etc.
|
| If you workout enough calories that exceeds the minimum
| baseline to keep you alive, the body can't adapt below
| that or adapt into the negative.
|
| For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000
| calories, so that's 12,000 a week for 6 times a week.
|
| What's the lowest a body will adapt to slow it's baseline
| metabolic rate? I am reading that the BMR can only reduce
| by like maybe 15-20% due to body adaptation.
|
| This would put their baseline calorie burn at around
| 1500, and then if they are burning ~1700 a day from their
| jogging, they can eat 3200 a day to maintain or 3000 to
| even slowly lose weight over time, which is a decent
| amount that you can have a pretty fun "diet" of what you
| consume IMO.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000
| calories_
|
| ogging a mile will burn around 100kcal, a bit more if
| you're decently overweight, let's be generous and say
| 150kcal. Someone who isn't in good shape and is
| overweight (the kind of person we're likely talking
| about) isn't going to be running that fast, maybe 3mph.
| So that's 6 miles in 2 hours. Even if I'm _incredibly_
| generous and say they 'll burn 200kcal/mi, that's only
| 1200kcal. But in reality it's probably more like 900kcal.
|
| But let's be real here. Your average (even above-average)
| overweight person with a not-so-great diet is _not_ going
| to be jogging for 2 hours. _Maybe_ they 'll jog for an
| hour. So 450-600kcal. And _maybe_ they 'll do that 2-3
| times a week.
|
| 1350-1800kcal extra burned every week is great! Except
| that still probably won't be what happens, exactly.
| Unless this person is also counting calories, or
| consciously working hard to keep their _exact_ same diet,
| they will probably unconsciously eat more. Adding a 9mi
| /week jogging regimen to your life, especially if you're
| overweight, is going to make you more hungry than usual,
| so you will eat more. How much? Well, hard to say. Maybe
| enough so that you still end up with a calorie deficit,
| but in many (most, I'd guess) cases you'll still have a
| surplus, even if less than before.
|
| This is all still a good thing! A 500kcal surplus per
| week when you're running 9 miles is much better than a
| 1500kcal surplus every week with no exercise. But this
| (hopefully) demonstrates that it's not as simple as "I'll
| just add some exercise and that'll get my weight under
| control". You need to change your diet, and take in fewer
| calories. It's hard. But it's the only way -- for the
| vast majority of people -- that this will work.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I never really found the eating more when exercising more
| that compelling personally. I mainly meal prep and eat
| the same amount whether or not I work out and how hard I
| work out.
|
| I feel like saying that someone is going to eat more
| because they are start exercising a lot is a separate
| topic. But I would think that someone who has the
| willpower to start exercising drastically more also has
| the willpower to control what they physically put in
| their mouth. I have personally found that stopping
| putting things in my mouth to eat is easier than getting
| myself to exercise as much as I would like to, so I don't
| think it's a guarantee that someone choosing to exercise
| more will automatically eat more.
| nradov wrote:
| For a 200 lb man, just _jogging_ doesn 't burn 1000
| kcal/hr. You have to actually _run_ at a pace of about
| 8:30 min /mi. People who can sustain that for 2 hours per
| day every day are not overweight in the first place.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I lost between 50-70 pounds in a year, and I used a
| Garmin smartwatch which I wear all hours to track my
| calorie expenditure, which is pretty accurate. I think
| this effectively allows you to ignore the kind of
| exercise. You just keep track of your calorie burn. If
| your workout doesn't burn enough calories, you do more.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Your examples sound like fairly short-term biological
| responses to intense activity, which are likely different
| than long-term biological response to a significant
| increase in daily calorie expenditure.
|
| I've done a fair amount of wilderness backpacking. It's
| common to lose your appetite for the first few days due to
| the change in environment, schedule, activity, etc. But
| pretty quickly your body will realize this is going to keep
| happening and it's going to need to make up the extra 1000+
| calories you're burning every day.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Totally agree with you here. The phrase "rounds to true".
|
| Caveats for the pedantic:
|
| If you've found yourself overweight and sedentary, you are
| unlikely to adopt a level of exercise needed to outrun your
| bad diet.
|
| All else being equal, the person with the better diet will
| have a better body comp (or achieve a goal body comp easier).
| procaryote wrote:
| I wondered how these things work out in practice, as the
| difficulty of adhering to a diet or exercise plan is a real
| factor
|
| I found this
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3339766/
|
| TL;DR; in that study of 4k people:
|
| "A substantial proportion of obese U.S. adults who
| attempted to lose weight reported weight loss, at least in
| the short term. Obese adults were more likely to report
| achieving meaningful weight loss if they ate less fat,
| exercised more, used prescription weight loss medications,
| or participated in commercial weight loss programs."
|
| Also somewhat interesting that eating diet products
| negatively correlated with weight loss
|
| One could read that as exercising more or eating less both
| work.
| bsder wrote:
| This is precisely it.
|
| Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That
| tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three
| bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.
|
| Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute
| workout.
|
| Not eating those chips is _WAY_ easier than trying to burn
| them off after the fact.
| drooby wrote:
| Magnus Midtbo has Kristian Blummrnfelt on his show, who is the
| Olympic gold medalist for triathlon.
|
| Kristian essentially eats pasta and Nutella and bread all day.
|
| So technically, yes, you can outrun a bad diet..
|
| Though me thinks this article is aimed at the average person.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the
| central point: it is _vastly_ to go into calorific deficit by
| altering diet than increasing exercise.
|
| Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from
| McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.
|
| What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or
| running vigorously for an hour?
|
| When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you
| see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You
| get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories
| just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to
| change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories.
| There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of
| calorie deficit.
|
| Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is
| because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it
| is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.
|
| [1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-
| loss/in-...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the
| central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by
| altering diet than increasing exercise.
|
| You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have
| appeared after "vastly". I assume you mean easier, but in
| fact that's not true for a lot of people.
|
| > You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000
| calories just to maintain that weight.
|
| That's wildly inaccurate. It's more like 5k than 20k.
| Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with
| weight given similar activity patterns.
|
| Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already
| gotten to 600+ lbs.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _You left out the key word in that sentence, which should
| have appeared after "vastly". I assume you mean easier, but
| in fact that's not true for a lot of people._
|
| Not sure I agree with that. I think it's probably true that
| adopting even a minimal exercise regimen is easier than
| adjusting diet, for most people.
|
| But actually turning that new exercise regimen into a
| calorie deficit is significantly harder. Not only do you
| have to exercise probably quite a bit per week to get you
| into a deficit, you have to actively work to not eat more.
| If you start an exercise regimen, I guarantee you're going
| to be hungrier, and unless you're very strict with
| yourself, you can easily eat enough extra to wipe out most
| or all of the new calorie "savings".
| nightski wrote:
| I feel you are precisely making the opposite point. Athletes
| eat more because of their energy expenditure. The same happens
| with people trying to lose weight. It dramatically increases
| your hunger making a cut that much harder.
|
| I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a
| sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just
| can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to
| many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower
| when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work
| or life.
| swat535 wrote:
| > The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would
| exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.
|
| You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no
| idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can
| tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about
| it.
|
| Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories
| but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of
| protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| You very much can outrun a bad diet as far as _weight loss
| /gain_ goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet
| lol.
|
| It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your
| calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)
| kelnos wrote:
| So you didn't outrun a bad diet. You counted calories and
| matched your diet to your exercise (or vice versa) to get
| the weight outcome you wanted.
|
| I think some here are narrowly interpreting "bad diet" to
| mean "lots of junk food". While yes, that's not a great
| diet, what's really meant is a diet where calorie intake
| regularly exceeds expenditure, regardless of what you're
| eating.
|
| Even if you eat only the healthiest of foods, if your
| intake is too much for what you're burning, that's still a
| "bad diet".
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I don't think that's a reasonable way to define the
| phrase. If "bad diet" is defined in terms of how much
| exercise you do, then "you can't outrun a bad diet" is a
| tautology.
| nluken wrote:
| I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad
| diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason.
| You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever
| approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need
| to do so.
|
| If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at
| the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+
| miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat
| just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most
| people can't fit that much training into their lives without
| making it their life's primary focus at the expense of
| everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training
| if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.
|
| I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I
| appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition
| has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat
| 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in
| front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn
| please and not gain weight_
|
| I don't know if any athlete who can sustain themselves on a
| junk diet.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Elite endurance athletes have awful diets by any normal
| standard, because the only way to fuel yourself
| adequately for a stage of the Tour de France or an
| ultramarathon is with nauseating amounts of refined
| carbohydrates. It's not even the fun kind of junk, just a
| constant effort to eat as much carbohydrate as your gut
| can possibly tolerate.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Sure but for the purposes of mass communication or creating
| helpful and memorable aphorisms "you can't out run a bad
| diet" is an appropriate summarization of the research.
|
| If it's all ppl get out of it, the worst that might happen
| is that a handful of up & coming elite athletes might need
| their coaches to help them unlearn it, as opposed to the
| status quo where literal millions of ppl are trying &
| failing to outrun their diets.
| nluken wrote:
| Yes and I understand that. I was specifically replying to
| a comment about this phrase being a myth for athletes.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, and that's fine. A saying that's true for 99% of
| people is a perfectly good saying. In the vast, vast
| majority of cases, "you can't outrun a bad diet" is
| completely true.
|
| Your time running 85 miles a week is so outside the norm
| that your experience isn't even worth mentioning when
| evaluating that saying.
| standardUser wrote:
| And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun
| (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine.
| He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.
| cthalupa wrote:
| The point of the saying is to get most people to understand
| that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss
| is their diet, not their exercise levels.
|
| Pointing out that elite endurance athletes and olympic
| athletes can have high calorie requirements isn't helpful
| or the point. Yes, energy must come from somewhere, but
| even among the generally fit and active portion of the
| population, only a vanishingly small number of them
| exercise at the intensity and time requirements to burn so
| many calories as to not easily have all of that thwarted
| with a single meal.
| meroes wrote:
| Not disagreeing but I think it's worth adding, "but you can
| outrun a slightly bad diet".
| milesvp wrote:
| I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college.
| I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at
| my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of
| moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did
| the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I
| was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It
| became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere
| around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you
| are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the
| desire to eat just isn't as strong.
|
| That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of
| time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not
| hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot
| of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry
| here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for
| me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs
| hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is
| to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a
| tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body
| needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective,
| is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other
| direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of
| weight gain.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Reminds me of when I got my first job at 17...I worked at a
| large department/grocery store. My job primarily consisted
| of pushing karts from the corrals back to the store.
|
| In an 8 hour shift, I likely walked ~15 miles, with half of
| that time pushing up to a dozen karts. For lunch, I'd go to
| the McDonald's and get a Super Size (Since this was when
| that still existed) Double Quarter Pounder meal with a
| Coke. I'd chug the whole coke and then refill it. This meal
| was easily 3,000 calories, and I'd eat it 3 times a week.
|
| After about two months on the job, I'd STILL lost about 5
| lbs.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Polar explorers Fienes and Stroud were eating locks of
| butter and still losing weight on their sled pulling
| expedition. It was estimated that they were buring up to
| 11,000 calories a day.
| raydev wrote:
| Your McD's meal was probably closer to 2000 calories,
| even with the giant Coke. For a short period I ate one
| meal a day, even when I thought I went over maintenance
| with a massive fast food treat, I'd still be 4-500 cals
| under if I was active that day.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup, we have a limit in our ability to take in and
| metabolize calories, although it is somewhat flexible in
| that if you do it enough you'll get better at it. Look at
| the people who do the long thru-hikes. Stuff like the
| Appalachian Trail (Georgia to the highest point in Maine),
| PCT or CDT (both run from the Mexican border to the
| Canadian border). They will hit saturation on the ability
| to take in calories, although enough time out there can
| increase the ability to metabolize fat (very useful in that
| it has about 2x the calories per pound of other food)
|
| But you are right that it's very definitely about the
| balance.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming
| from.
|
| For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's
| effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have
| the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to
| actually burn significant calories.
|
| For athletes that are running marathons or doing
| powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders
| that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have
| massive diets because lifting that much weight takes
| significant energy.
|
| But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad
| diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm
| completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to
| slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but
| after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs
| are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs
| means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100
| calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.
|
| Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go
| up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start
| outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long
| time.
|
| Easier to just cut carbs.
| theodric wrote:
| My anecdata:
|
| - a year of busting my ass on the bike almost daily: -15kg
|
| - a year of restricting calories to ~1200/day and not doing
| much else: -40kg
|
| - 2 years of sitting in my apartment being afraid of COVID
| and drinking too much: +50kg
|
| Conclusion: booze is a really great way to put on a lot of
| weight quickly
| arealaccount wrote:
| [ throws out the protein powder ]
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| my anecdata aligns with yours. A year of cardio every day
| and resistance 6 days a week bought me no weight loss, 2
| years of limiting myself to 1800 cals/day on top of that
| stripped me of 25% of my body weight.
| darkwater wrote:
| Cool, but being physically active is not just to lose
| weight but to gain health. Your heart works more, your
| lungs work more, they develop a bit more, putting more
| oxygen in your body and the effects compound over time.
| So if you can, do both: control calories intake and
| exercise.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| If you're drinking beer or wine it is certainly very
| calorie dense. You're looking at 208 kcal per pint of
| beer or 123 kcal for a 5oz pour of wine. A pound of fat
| takes about 3,500 excess calories, or 16 pints of beer.
| So if you drink 2 a day all else equal you could gain
| nearly 1 lb a week.
| brailsafe wrote:
| All impressive numbers, but it seems like the move would
| be to keep doing #1 while being slightly less restrictive
| about #2 and just as restrictive about #3, which will
| eventually leave you not just lighter, but with a good
| level of fitness if you aren't already there. It's way
| easier to keep excess weight off and feel great about it
| if you're practicing athletics of some sort regularly
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Another thing you can do is one day of regular calories,
| and one day of zero. You still average to 1200 a day, but
| I think it's better for you for several reasons you can
| look into if interested.
| neilv wrote:
| Did you pause the the jogging until in better shape, to
| avoid causing lasting damage?
|
| Maybe try an elliptical, rowing erg, bike, or swimming?
| r_p4rk wrote:
| Powerlifting does not take as many calories as you'd think.
| In fact, lifting in general is surprisingly easy on the
| calorie requirement, so most powerlifters and bodybuilders
| incorporate cardio as part of their routine. You will burn
| a lot more calories by walking 10,000 steps a day for 1
| month than you would doing an intense lifting session each
| day.
|
| The reason you're probably thinking as to why lifters eat a
| huge amount is precisely because they're already large and
| muscular. Just 5% less bodyfat at the same weight results
| in roughly 200 more calories at maintenance for someone
| that is around 93kg.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| A vigorous weightlifting workout for an hour will burn
| about 400kcal[1], which is roughly equivalent to walking
| 10k steps depending on your body weight. Another way to
| think of this is 100 minutes of brisk walking will round
| out to about 400kcal.
|
| You don't really burn more calories walking, it's just
| easy to do and fit in around other things.
|
| [1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calc
| ulating...
| jaco6 wrote:
| You're wrong about that, look up videos of strongmen and
| bodybuilder meals/eating routines. The 2 hour workouts at
| the top of these fields are very calorie intensive.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Bodybuilders eat a lot in the offseason because they're
| on tons of drugs and trying to maximize the amount of
| lean mass they can put on, and they eat more in general
| because when you have 100lb+ more muscle than the average
| person you have a significantly higher base metabolic
| rate. You can go on a variety of PED related forums and
| find IFBB pro's posting food logs, etc., and see that
| these crazy eating routines are limited to certain parts
| of the year, and even then have been falling out of favor
| - the 'lean bulk' for pros is more popular than ever.
|
| Very few IFBB pros are working out in 2 hour sessions,
| either. Coaches understand junk volume way better now and
| know that a lot of the work being done previously just
| wasn't providing much muscle growth stimulus after a
| certain point. Most are spending <8 hours in the gym each
| week in general.
|
| The top of the bodybuilding field is not eating a ton of
| food because of their lifting routines burning a bunch of
| calories.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day and do
| resistance training 6 days/week. I also have limited myself
| to 1800 cals/day and at least 130g protein. For two years I
| was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training
| and maintaining 210lbs which, at my height, is bordering on
| clinical obesity. If you could be healthy just by training
| and eating what you want I would have done it twice.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I don't understand how you wouldn't lose weight. Are you
| sure the 1800 kcals is accurate. Are you including what
| you drink?
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Oh no, I lost weight when I was on the 1800kcal. it was
| when I was working out what I intuitively feel like is a
| lot more than most people but still eating what I wanted
| that I didn't lose weight, which anecdotally fits with
| the premise of the article.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The
| average American diet is 3600 cals/day
| (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-
| eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs
| ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight
| (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need
| 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at
| 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour
| (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-
| burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in
| 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you
| could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for
| about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a
| person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of
| people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the
| most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you
| can't out-train a bad diet".
| mwest217 wrote:
| For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a
| difficult task. I wouldn't quite categorize diets like the
| one described in
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-
| cou... as "a bad diet", but it's certainly a quantity and
| density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most
| people with a normal energy expenditure.
|
| An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that
| essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for
| months. Turns out when you're hiking 25-30 miles / day, it's
| awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when
| you're also trying to optimize for lightweight food)
| mdtancsa wrote:
| For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k
| run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about
| 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you
| start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about
| how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.
| kccoder wrote:
| I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many,
| many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a
| bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll
| have a difficult time eating enough food.
|
| A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I
| could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by
| mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was
| easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams
| of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining
| muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a
| mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal
| trainer was telling me to eat more.
|
| If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever
| you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio
| per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming
| from.
|
| It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of
| the universe.
|
| > it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating
| junk and not feel guilty about it.
|
| Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight
| loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to
| the gym.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have
| no idea where it's coming from.
|
| People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of
| activity, probably because it feels strenuous.
|
| 4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but
| means next to nothing for energy expenditure.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >the link between economic development and obesity is likely
| related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.
|
| --you
|
| >Food -- not lack of exercise -- fuels obesity
|
| --the article headline
|
| I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a
| hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would
| love for someone to help me understand better please.
| bawolff wrote:
| > The study compares energy expenditure across different
| economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus
| hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy
| expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so
| points to consumption as the likely reason.
|
| That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously
| it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the
| obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies
| in the first place.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Why unsurprisingly?
| bgro wrote:
| I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random
| average person to understand is limited to approximately the
| following single sentence: "A balance of diet and exercise is
| the key to losing weight."
|
| This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I
| classify it as incorrect.
|
| That statement is exploitative of how the English language is
| understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any
| other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual
| information.
|
| In other words, the sentence likely translates something
| similar to the following incorrect statement: "A perfectly
| level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to
| the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this
| is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy
| [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily
| recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic]
| plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories]
| are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are
| equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no
| value without the other."
| stouset wrote:
| > anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity
| knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will
| lose weight.
|
| Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows
| that you _will_ up your calorie intake unless you take explicit
| and intentional effort not to.
| Natsu wrote:
| > Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity
| knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take
| explicit and intentional effort not to.
|
| It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back
| down if you cease that extra activity.
| kelnos wrote:
| This doesn't even require you to be an athlete, or do
| extensive physical activity. Add even a half-hour jog three
| days a week to your otherwise-mostly-sedentary routine and
| you'll tend to engage in "compensatory eating" even if you
| don't realize it.
|
| This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose
| weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the
| extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more
| (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density)
| than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose
| to do so.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| This is one reason bodybuilders (the closest thing to
| professional dieters) will only do low intensity cardio --
| walking etc -- when cutting weight.
|
| High intensity cardio burns calories but increases appetite
| disproportionately. Albeit otherwise excellent for overall
| health.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I hate /fit/ and the bodybuilding forums so much. Stupid
| memes like this, SS, GOMAD, and related exist and continue
| to be parroted because of them. No, using a segway to move
| in between weight machines will not preserve your gains.
|
| The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to
| justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply
| colossal. I applaud folks like Chloe Ting (a "cardio bunny"
| aesthetic youtuber who specialize in Calistenics) who roast
| these guys by challenging them (bodybuilder roid bros) to
| keep up with her on her exercise routines. Watching these
| dudes collapse again and again because they have pathetic
| endurance and don't do meaningful cardio reminds is
| delicious to say the least.
|
| If you get your diet advice from Zyzz, Rich Piana, or the
| rest of the memeloards of fitness, you deserve what's
| coming to you. Don't skip leg day.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| literally get on a tredmill, angle it, and walk for an hour
| or two
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You're full of shit and I'm an ex fat kid who used extensive
| athletic physical activity to lose all my weight and keep it
| off for over a decade now.
|
| Regular cardio regulates your metabolism and in-turn reduces
| food cravings. You'll feel hungry after an hour of working
| out - but you'll be surprised at how quickly you feel full
| after you start eating!
|
| Furthermore, food cravings of the kind that fattiest tend to
| have usually start going away after doing regular cardio for
| a number of reasons - primarily because a fast metabolism
| means that the negative feelings from eating like shit are
| felt within minutes/hours instead of hours/days. The science
| around insulin regulation caused by physical activity is the
| relevant bit here.
|
| The meme of "you cant outrun your fork" is a psyop from
| fatties who don't want to admit that they are lazy. We are
| lucky that GLP-1 drugs have made most of this argument a moot
| point - but don't kid yourself, you will NOT naturally
| increase your calorie intake above your physical activity
| level if that physical activity level is meaningful (i.e.
| 1hr+ of serious exertion, like swimming laps)
| 6510 wrote:
| I just got a rather heavy physical job. Every shift is
| humbling. :P
|
| I see a personal trainer on youtube one time who summarized
| all the components of weight loss so wonderfully I cant
| help but feel I butcher the topic whenever I talk about it.
|
| The number one thing is sleeping. Go though the carnival of
| things people try to get their sleep sorted out.
|
| The second thing is stress of both kinds. You need to be
| able to calm the fuck down. The body stores as much as
| possible in survival mode.
|
| Then comes food. Your body need to adjust to burning fat
| for energy. People do this with tiny fasts and keto but (my
| entirely untested theory) is that you should fast for as
| long as it feels comfortable (no stress) then break the
| fast with keto. You start with something small, wait a bit
| then can eat quite a lot as long as there is no sugar and
| no carbs on the plate (keto). Then you do the next fast for
| as long as you can comfortably do. If you feel like
| complete shit eat some potatoes or even sugar and get back
| to the routine. Switching from carbs to fat cold turkey
| creates unwanted stress.
|
| Then (if you didn't already) start mixing in a small amount
| of moderate physical activity. Walking for an hour per day
| is the goal. Keep an eye on what feels comfortable. Stay in
| the comfort zone. You may have to shorten the fast or eat a
| bit more between the fasts.
|
| You don't have to go there but there are people who
| regularly fast for weeks and only have some cravings the
| first 1-2 days. They are obviously losing weight when they
| do that.
|
| There are people who add [mild] strength training, will eat
| more and gain muscle weight. The good kind of weight.
|
| If you add cardio you will also eat more but (like you
| said) you will feel like shit almost instantly after eating
| shit. From my experience I think it might actually kill you
| if you drain your reserves and try to replenish it with
| bullshit, say deep fried mars bars. You will be less
| capable fighting of diseases, infections or injuries when
| completely drained. You will quickly accumulate all the
| right stomach bacteria to create cravings for all the right
| things to eat.
|
| Whatever you chose to do, it isn't about what you can do
| and accomplish today. It has to be a routine that will last
| 10-20 years. If you go from extensive athletic physical
| activity to sitting on the sofa for a few months the
| athletic digestive system is still there.
|
| There was a fun study where they looked at big eaters both
| skinny and fat. Both ate just about everything but the
| skinny ones ate a lot more fat and the fat ones ate a lot
| more carbs. It seems to suggest that for the really lazy
| fat people an extra bucket of chicken to avoid eating a
| pizza might be worth a shot. More butter and more eggs per
| slice of bread. Two steaks and 1/3 the potatoes. etc
|
| I'm not saying it will work but it would be fascinating if
| it did.
| cthalupa wrote:
| This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to
| fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy
| expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't
| the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is
| an advocate for it, and has been for a while.
|
| Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough
| exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the
| current evidence seems to suggest that there is _a lot_ of
| wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up
| for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes
| time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike
| daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do
| much for your weight a year in.
|
| I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of
| the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans
| have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend
| significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000
| steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting
| other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy
| stores would be beneficial.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| My understanding is that the research shows that a highly
| active hunter gathering and an inactive office worker burn
| roughly the same number of calories per day. But I find that
| hard to believe. What is the office worker's body doing to
| make up the difference for all the movement and muscle
| contraction?
| wredcoll wrote:
| Human bodies are highly efficient at certain movements,
| e.g. walking. There's also a complicated part of hunter
| gatherer life style where you don't _know_ if you 'll find
| something if you walk another mile, so often the response
| is to just... not do that.
|
| Being able to have a life style where you're _constantly_
| expending energy, like training athletes do, really only
| works if you 're guaranteed food, which is generally not
| how hunter gathering works.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Lots and lots (and lots) of small subconscious movements
| throughout the day. Many thousands of them. Moving your
| heard around, tilting it a bit, wiggling your toes, rolling
| your shoulders, scratching an itch, etc.
|
| Anecdotally, I believe I have a personal example of the
| sort of thing that changes. I went from being ultra-
| sedentary to exercising 5+ days a week over the past year.
| My body had enough of these tics that they had long since
| passed over the subconscious and unnoticed level into "why
| the fuck do I keep bouncing my legs around all the time
| when sitting or in bed." Now, I never do. After years of
| trying, I stopped making any sort of intentional effort to
| stop - and even things like weighted blankets, etc., in the
| past did nothing.
|
| Now, I just don't do it. I fidget less at my desk while
| working. I make a whole lot less 'random' movements for no
| discernible reason.
|
| Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a
| day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing,
| and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually
| pushes you to the levels you see with more regular
| exercise.
|
| (Now, of course, exercise is hugely important for a variety
| of other health factors)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Glad to hear that exercize has worked for you.
|
| >Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course
| of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're
| doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended
| eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more
| regular exercise.
|
| Fidgeting will obviously burn some calories. But I find
| it hard to believe that fidgeting will burn the same
| amount of calories as sustained exersize.
|
| I have heard some suggestion that the extra energy is
| being burned at a cellular level (causing inflammation).
| But would be office work get hot if that was the case?
| Beijinger wrote:
| Deja vue, but it is really a new article.
|
| There are older studies: Epub 2015
|
| It is time to bust the myth of physical inactivity and obesity:
| you cannot outrun a bad diet
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25904145/
| kingstnap wrote:
| Everyone in bodybuilding or adjacent crowds already knows this.
|
| How fat you are is entirely a function of how much you eat. If
| you want to put on weight, you bulk by eating more. If you want
| to lose weight, you cut with reduced calories.
|
| The idea you could instead bulk by doing less cardio and cut by
| doing more sounds completely crazy. In reality, you do more
| exercise on a bulk because, duh, you can recover from more volume
| when eating a surplus.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight
| than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
|
| So running can help but you still need a calorie deficit. Eating
| and burning more boosts your metabolism - if you measure a body
| builder during a bulk they are like a furnace, burning 1-2k over
| baseline. They still put on fat but it's a lot less than what
| you'd think given the amounts they're eating.
| snozolli wrote:
| _If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you 'll lose a lot more
| weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000._
|
| Each of those is a 1,000 Calorie deficit.
|
| _if you measure a body builder during a bulk_
|
| Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from
| bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-
| enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's
| honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids
| against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really
| doesn't apply.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| So you're saying your metabolism is the same when you eat 1k
| calories vs 4k?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Your metabolism differences are already accounted for when
| you talk about how much you are burning, you don't get to
| count metabolism twice.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| > Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from
| bodybuilders taking steroids.
|
| Since when? Are you sure you don't mean 'blast' and 'cruise',
| which specifically has connotations of steroid usage?
|
| > When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic
| stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.
|
| Why wouldn't it apply?
| cthalupa wrote:
| > Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from
| bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-
| enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's
| honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids
| against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really
| doesn't apply.
|
| What. Even natural bodybuilders go through cut and bulk
| cycles. And plenty of enhanced bodybuilders don't use clen or
| DNP, even IFBB pros.
|
| Someone new to resistance training, significantly overweight,
| or both, can add pounds and pounds of lean body mass while in
| a deficit. But that stops when those things stop. You have to
| be in a surplus to add muscle mass if you're no longer a
| novice lifter or significantly overweight. And it is
| basically impossible to perfectly balance your diet so that
| you don't gain any body fat in this situation while still
| being able to efficiently add muscle mass.
|
| For a non-enhanced person that doesn't have the benefits of
| strong nutrient partitioning effects from AAS and HGH it is
| even more difficult to do so.
|
| Lean bulks are more popular than ever but they're still bulks
| and they're still followed by cuts - just cycled much less
| frequently.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more
| weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
|
| No, you'll lose less weight (I mean, assuming the difference in
| what you are burning is from exercise, if you find a way, e.g.
| by some chemical intervention, to kick your metabolism up to
| burning 4x your baseline amount _without_ doing additional
| exercise, this doesn 't apply), because you have the same
| calorie deficit and more of the weight you lose (unless you are
| in fairly great shape to start with, more than 100% of the
| weight you lose!) will be fat, and it takes a greater calorie
| deficit to lose a pound of fat than a pound of muscle.
|
| OTOH, most people want to lose fat and avoid losing muscle, so
| this is a good thing, but its not more weight loss.
| 71153750 wrote:
| This reminds a little of Usain Bolt famously having chicken
| nuggets before his final at the Beijing Olympics. Although hardly
| indicative of a bad diet that he may or may not have had.
|
| I think as well there is some difficulty with variability between
| people that isn't clear or maybe doesn't matter at scale. The
| article linked study was across 43 nations with 4213 adults. Yet
| there may still be individuals who can argue differently. CICO
| (calories in vs calories out) must apply to us all, but the
| composition has an affect on what the body chooses to store vs
| how energised or hungry/satiated we feel. A bad diet could
| perhaps me we feel we have less enthusiasm for running or other
| activities. Age, lifestyle, and even cultural factors are massive
| in affecting metabolism (more the foremost) and of course what we
| consume (the latter two).
|
| I run a fair amount (over 2000km/1200 miles in 2025) and find
| that once I start doing above ~70km/43 miles in a week whatever
| eating habits I have are indeed outcompeted by my running and
| weight loss is inevitable. Even so it does slow around a BMI of
| 23 for me for longer than I am able to be consistent with the
| running to observe further effects. Still my point is that my
| diet isn't anything to write home about and I anecdotally I feel
| that as far as weightloss is concerned I can very much outrun it.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| The chicken nugget thing is to avoid food poisoning though,
| right? It's because McDonald's food logistics results in hyper-
| consistent food irrespective of where you're at in the world
| and the last thing an Olympic competitor wants is to risk
| getting food poisoning from eating foreign food. I don't think
| Usain eats chicken nuggets on the reg.
| 71153750 wrote:
| I don't know the reason and think your reasoning is probably
| sound. Although at the same I wonder if chicken nuggets were
| really the only option? I'll make a grand assumption that
| most athletes weren't on the chicken nugget diet.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Chickens nuggets aren't necessarily that unhealthy even?
| They have about as much saturated fat as generic chicken
| thighs. Inherently food at Mcdonalds isn't that bad for you
| as long as you don't overeat and take a few supplements.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| A Snickers bar might have been better strategically. Safe to
| eat _and_ lots of energy.
| justinmarsan wrote:
| I do bouldering and I eat fast food multiple times a week, I
| can definitely outclimb my poor diet... I probably helps that I
| don't eat breakfast though...
|
| It's well known though that as you build muscle, your rest
| calorie consumption increases, so probably if you
| build/maintain enough muscle, then you can just outrun your
| intake, since you consume more without doing anything to start
| with...
| 71153750 wrote:
| I agree. Also age and other activities factor in I'm sure. I
| suspect you carry your bouldering mat and do some walking to
| and from boulders.
|
| I think it stands to reason that if we took an overweight
| person and trained them to eat what you or I eat and then
| move like you or I move, they'd end up losing weight.
|
| For me though, I know that I can be running say 50km/31 miles
| a week regularly and that if there is weight loss, it is
| impercetible to me. But up it with just two more runs and I
| believe I do start outrunning my diet. Again, this is an n=1
| and ignores pretty much every other factor in my life.
| snozolli wrote:
| _I eat fast food multiple times a week_
|
| This doesn't mean anything. Just like improving your
| climbing, what matters is consistency. Count your calories
| and macros and you'll see that your total intake is
| reasonable. The processed vs unprocessed argument is
| negligible when you're only partaking occasionally.
|
| When I was younger, I couldn't understand why I was thinner
| than my friends. We'd go out to eat and I'd stuff down a huge
| meal with the best of them. Turns out that they were eating
| like that at _every_ meal, while I was having cereal for
| breakfast and a less calorie-dense lunch or dinner.
|
| _as you build muscle, your rest calorie consumption
| increases_
|
| The difference is tiny. Yes, you _can_ outrun or out-muscle a
| bad diet at the extremes, but that 's like saying BMI isn't a
| useful metric. You're not 1970s Schwarzenegger or Phelps.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > BMI isn't a useful metric
|
| People these days are generally also significantly taller
| than malnourished Belgians were back in the 1840s. That
| skews it a bit since the formula itself is still the same.
|
| I guess it's still a marginally useful metric in some case
| but now that when can accurately measure body fat, muscle
| weight etc. there is no point paying attention to it that
| much.
| chistev wrote:
| What's wrong with chicken nuggets?
| 71153750 wrote:
| Perhaps a poorly picked example but generally they're not
| considered a healthy food item as they exist in the category
| of both fast and fried food. The implication being that
| they're more processed resulting in less good fasts and are
| higher in calorie per gram. Like most foods the dose
| determines the poison I suppose.
| pqtyw wrote:
| But nutritionally they are about the same as non lean
| chicken?
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Chicken McNuggets Ingredients: Boneless skinless chicken
| breast, Water, Liquid vegetable oil shortening (canola
| oil, corn oil, hydrogenated soybean oil), Wheat flour,
| Yellow corn flour, Modified corn starch, Rice starch,
| Salt, Seasoning (wheat starch, yeast extract, salt,
| natural flavour), Spices, Baking powder, Sodium aluminum
| phosphate, Canola oil, Baking soda, Sugars (dextrose),
| Wheat starch, Corn starch. Cooked in vegetable oil (high
| oleic low linoleic canola oil and/or canola oil, corn
| oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, citric acid,
| dimethylpolysiloxane).
|
| -- https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca/product/4-chicken-
| mcnugge...
| pqtyw wrote:
| Yes but the macros are more or less comparable? It's
| chicken breast with extra saturated fat and stuff.
| quesera wrote:
| This is precisely the point of the article.
|
| Macronutrient profiles are, apparently, not the relevant
| axis of differentiation.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I always found it strange McDonalds was an Olympics sponsor and
| seeing their ads for Big Macs, etc.
|
| Like I wonder what the Grimace's 400 meters time is.
| mglvsky wrote:
| Neither good diet can solely help avoiding to be skinny-fat
|
| edit: grammar
| RobKohr wrote:
| I cut out drinks with sugar in them, eating after dinner, and in
| general just eating healthy meals.
|
| I lift weights about 3 days a week, and am fairly fit
| strengthwise.
|
| All this lowered my fat levels down to a reasonable level, but
| still left me with about 23% body fat and a bit of a belly, and
| that remained consistent. Trying to diet didn't really cause any
| maintainable change.
|
| What I found has helped is doing a 24 hour fast once a week. This
| really means just eating one dinner a little earlier (4:30pm) and
| then skipping breakfast and lunch and drinking water with
| electrolytes added.
|
| With keeping the rest of the days calorie intake the same, I have
| shaved off consistently 1 pound a week and 1/2" from my
| waistline.
|
| This has been going for 5 weeks now, and I have gone from 23% to
| 19.7% based on navy body fat formula.
|
| What is great is I have no cravings or feelings that I am
| depriving myself except for the last 8 hrs of the weekly fast.
| The rest of the week, I eat well.
|
| My plan is to bring myself down to 15% and then continuing to
| measure. If I get above 15% I fast that week, if I don't then I
| don't fast, so it basically becomes like a controllable throttle.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.
|
| That's not a surprise. Changing diet composition can in the
| short-run lead to lower caloric intake than what preceeded
| (e.g. SAD diet), but doesn't guarantee a sustained caloric
| deficit, which is why controlling for macros like fat or carbs
| eventually hits a wall. What are you going to do when there are
| no more carbs to cut? If you have a lot of excess to lose, you
| can't "intuitively" eat your way down to your target.
|
| The fasts work similarly owing to deficit: a fasted day lowers
| the average caloric intake for the week (assuming you don't
| overcompensate other days). As with macros, here again, what
| are you going to do to increase deficit further? Fast for 48
| hours? If with a fast your caloric intake isn't dropping
| further week-to-week, weight loss will stagnate.
|
| Whichever approach, one of the pitfalls is steep deficit
| followed by metabolic adaptation i.e. crashing metabolism. This
| is why it's helpful to keep a small caloric deficit, and
| incrementally change your intake target. That is only reliably
| achieved by tracking calories.
| specproc wrote:
| I'm from a western country, but live outside the OECD. Currently
| on a trip back home and the food is disgusting.
|
| Everything tastes sweet, is invariably hyper-processed, and
| supplied by a narrow pool of companies.
|
| My diet in my host country isn't great, but it's so much easier
| to eat well. Fresh fruit and veg is more readily available,
| cheaper and frankly tastier. I wouldn't say people are any more
| or less sedentary, particularly in the capital city in which I
| live.
|
| The study is supported by my limited experience.
| nunez wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading the study wrong, but it doesn't seem like they
| accounted for caloric intake at all?
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420902122
|
| They accounted for total EE and basal EE, but the data they've
| supplied in the appendix doesn't track caloric intake.
|
| This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible
| to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American
| football linebackers) and also having a low TEE and being skinny
| as a rail (by basically not eating, i.e. most fad diets).
|
| Also, they categorize most of Africa as either horticulturalist,
| agropastoralist (why couldn't they say "farmers"???) or hunter-
| gatherer) despite the table at the bottom ranking their economies
| as "lowHDI", and the BEE for this cohort is N/A, which
| invalidates their PAL ratio (TEE/BEE).
|
| idk this seems like a "fat ppl bad" study to me.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely
| possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat
| (American football linebackers)
|
| Linemen would be a better example than linebackers here.
| Linebackers tend (like most positions other than line, and
| especially offensive line, positions) to have body fat
| percentages at the high end of the normal range, rather than
| being "insanely fat".
| SirMaster wrote:
| You can, it just takes work and discipline.
|
| For example jogging at about 7mph for 2 hours a day for a 180lb
| man would burn about 13,200 calories a week. I know people who
| jog like this.
|
| Or I know people who cycle 250-400 miles a week which burns about
| 17,000-27,000 calories a week!
| 71153750 wrote:
| Somewhat orthogonally related, I saw post on X by Nassim Taleb
| [1] concerning the idea that if you are very active then your
| heightened consumption of food may cover your nutrient bases
| better. So perhaps, loosely paraphrased, you could outrun and
| thus out-eat your nutrient imblance?
|
| 1: https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1684885140093206528
| tartoran wrote:
| I personally lost some weight and am now lean by simply changing
| my eating habits to intermittent fasting. I got so used to it
| that now it's effortless to continue.
| amai wrote:
| Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight. Try it or
| your money back!
| simmerup wrote:
| Good luck getting an obese person to do that
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight.
|
| No.
|
| I ran 10km three times a week and didn't lose a pound. <https:/
| /np.reddit.com/r/running/comments/1vq3k1/should_i_do_...> Every
| bit of my weight loss has always come from counting calories.
| roguecoder wrote:
| In twin studies the only things that have been associated with
| obesity are past calorie restrictive diets and soda consumption.
| All these other studies are usually picking up on either socio-
| economic or environmental factors, rather than actual behaviors
| we can control.
|
| The reason to exercise isn't to avoid obesity: it is because the
| health benefits of exercise have nothing to do with weight.
| Careful, moderate exercising is good for our bodies, all on its
| own.
|
| Whereas there is shockingly little evidence that obesity itself
| causes most correlated health conditions, rather than being a
| symptom (of stress, alienation, environmental contamination,
| inflammatory conditions, etc) correlated with the causes of those
| conditions. The weight with the lowest all-cause mortality is
| being "overweight".
|
| But of course, "work less" is a lot harder to make money off of
| than "lose weight", so any science that can be twisted to prop up
| the weight loss industry will get spread far and wide.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Yes, exercise is good for you regardless of weight. We should
| all do it.
|
| But the idea that there is little evidence that obesity causes
| health issues is absurd. There's absolutely mountains of
| evidence, and we have very firm understandings of the
| mechanisms underlying many of these issues, too. Hell, just
| being _bigger_ , even if it's all muscle mass, is bad for your
| heart.
|
| The all-cause mortality curve is J shaped because many more of
| the people at 10% bf are there because of disease and not
| because they're shredded from a strict diet and a consistent
| exercise.
|
| I've lost roughly 100lb of fat over the past 9 months. I have
| gotten back to lifting 5 days a week, but even before that with
| just losing weight my health markers improved significantly,
| I've felt better, aches and pains and discomforts have all but
| disappeared, etc. My stress, alienation, environmental
| contamination, etc. conditions are all the same, and I'm
| working just as much, if not more.
| benabbott wrote:
| Whenever the topic of weight loss comes up, I always make the
| same recommendation: Lift weights. Lifting weights increases your
| muscle mass. Muscle burns calories, even at rest, which raises
| your TDEE. (A bodybuilder will burn more calories sitting on the
| couch than someone who doesn't lift weights). For most folks
| (myself included) cardio sucks. You _could_ jog for an hour every
| day and burn x-hundred calories due to the increased energy
| expended... Or you could go lift weights a few times a week, and
| after a couple months, naturally burn more at rest due to
| increased muscle mass.
|
| I say this as not a nutritionist nor a doctor, but I don't
| believe I'm off base here. Feel free to correct me on this if I
| am.
| mritterhoff wrote:
| I'm a fan of weightlifting, and agree that there are numerous
| health benefits to doing so, but I think the extra calorie
| burning is over-hyped. From what I've read you get 6-10
| calories per pound of muscle per day, at rest. Not nothing, but
| for folks who aren't looking to body build I'm not sure it
| makes much of a difference. Or maybe over a long enough time
| span it does, I dunno.
| aethrum wrote:
| Yeah it's not terrible, but having 10 extra pounds of muscle
| burning almost 100 calories a day extra, thats like a pound
| of fat every month and a bit.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It does matter over a long enough time span, but otherwise I
| agree - don't get into resistance training for the extra
| potential calorie burn/metabolism boost, it's a quick way to
| burn out. Get into it for the numerous health benefits that
| resistance training brings, the effects of which get
| especially important as you get older.
|
| You can lose upwards of 3% of muscle pass per year at 60+,
| and this process can start as early as 30-35 years old. It
| gets harder and harder to build muscle as you age too, so the
| more you can build and maintain early on in your life, the
| better off you'll be in old age.
|
| Other than aesthetic goals, that's most of what got me into
| weightlifting. I'd prefer not to be so frail when I'm older
| and want to maintain my independence as long as possible. Not
| to mention, being strong just makes general day-to-day tasks
| easier.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I think you'd still need to adjust your diet signifiantly. Most
| powerlifters don't look particularly in shape.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Or do both! I primarily train Muay Thai these days, but I mix
| in two minimalist kettlebell strength sessions per week. 20
| minutes of emom double kettlebell ABCs with some sets of pull-
| ups at the end keeps me in zone 3-4. So I'm getting some cardio
| conditioning while doing my strength training. Sure, it's hard
| to overload at a certain point with kettlebells, but making a
| goal to be able to OHP double 24kg bells will get most people
| pretty far.
| bob1029 wrote:
| The weight lifting also triggers stronger hormonal responses
| due to the additional mechanical loading. Mechanoreceptors in
| your body will stimulate a chain reaction by way of the
| hypothalamus (HPG axis) that ultimately causes a ramp in
| testosterone and other hormones. Your body effectively has a
| built-in steroid dispenser that you can control.
|
| The scale is really dramatic in my experience. The more the
| lifting sucks, the more your body will compensate. This trend
| can be non-linear for a good period of time before you begin to
| plateau. The tricky bit is not pushing too far and injuring
| yourself early on.
|
| One interesting hybrid is running or walking with a weighted
| vest on. This requires some extra precautions - the vest should
| be very, very snug on your body. You don't want it slinging
| around and imposing weird lateral loads.
| nradov wrote:
| There are other advantages beyond just burning calories. Lean
| muscle tissue acts as glucose sink. When you eat you'll have
| more reserve capacity to store that energy temporarily in your
| muscles rather than triggering growth of adipose tissue.
| lrvick wrote:
| I do not have time for lots of exercise beyond the occasional
| walk but I hated that I was 40lb over my healthy/ideal weight I
| used to be. So I simply ignored all the tactics of others in my
| life chronically struggling to lose weight or keep it of and did
| the research on the Standard American Diet.
|
| All data pointed to Americans simply consume way way too many
| processed foods, carbs, and artificial sugars. No one should be
| surprised, but no one wants to change this because shit food
| tastes so good. I simply dropped all high processed foods,
| dropped to about 100g of carbs a day, and cut out soda
| completely. All the extra weight fell right off over 6 months. I
| did nothing else. Also my dopamine response has changed and
| healthy food and canned sparkling water now feels as good to
| consume as fast food and soda used to.
|
| Meanwhile friends with the same problem try lots of exercise and
| never lose any weight, and others use ozempic with no diet
| changes and also lose no weight. No one wants to hear they have
| to do something as hard as a permanent major diet change, but
| blame biology and terrible nutrition education. I am just the
| messenger.
|
| YMMV, but my own experience certainly agrees with this study.
|
| Commit to stop eating like an overweight American long term and
| you are likely to stop looking like one.
| alberth wrote:
| I know this can be a touchy subject, but honestly, it shouldn't
| be surprising.
|
| It's just basic thermodynamics.
|
| The energy (calories) you take in has to go somewhere. Some of it
| gets used for daily activity, but if you take in more than you
| burn, your body has to store the extra--it doesn't have any other
| way to deal with it.
|
| At the end of the day, it really is just a matter of calories in
| vs. calories out.
|
| Exercise just helps burn more of your excess energy so that it
| doesn't get converted into (weight) storage.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
| somethingAlex wrote:
| Yeah it's odd we needed a whole article for this. "You can't
| out exercise a bad diet" has always been true outside of the
| most extreme cases (competitive athletes).
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Thermodynamics only apply to closed systems. Your body can
| easily expel unprocessed calories/sugar in urine and feces
| (hence diabetics historically being diagnosed by their
| characteristically sweet urine).
|
| Whether it's more likely than the average human body to do so,
| to process them for immediate energy, or to process them for
| longer term storage in conjunction with how it benchmarks your
| hunger and satiation signals is colloquially known as your
| "metabolism".
|
| Want to tell me next how the laws of mechanical engineering
| conclusively prove that no one human being can be stronger than
| another, since we all weigh the same?
| npteljes wrote:
| Maybe it shouldn't be surprising, but without the knowledge,
| the opposite of the thing can be explained the same as the
| thing itself. For example, "The energy you take in has to go
| somewhere", but I also poop everyday, so maybe I just poop out
| the unnecessary calories? I know it works for water soluble
| vitamins for example.
|
| Hindsight is 20/20 in this case. It's nice that the explanation
| is not complicated ("calories in, calories out"), but many
| other simple things have been thought of as true, only to be
| put on their head by science. I welcome the scientific
| confirmation, and I hold that the path to knowledge it's not
| straightforward at all.
| just-working wrote:
| Calories in, calories out: the pareto-optimized answer to weight
| loss
| tonymet wrote:
| For most people, a 1 hour moderate run is only about 1-2 cookies
| worth (and only half a Crumbl cookie). Even a marathon run might
| only burn 2000 calories . a chipotle burrito is 1600 .
|
| In other words, for 95% of people doing activity, they shouldn't
| eat any surplus if their goal is to maintain or lose weight.
|
| It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as
| it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation.
| You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you
| ingest it. Loss of this sensation is a major obesity driver. A
| numbness for nutrients.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Eating while actually being hungry is a great sensation. That's
| why I stopped snacking/sugar treats, it always spoil my hunger
| for when it's meal time. On the other hand, when I have having
| my meal, no restriction on veggies/meat/fish, open bar, I eat
| as much as I want.
|
| I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of
| calorie abundance. I generally tend to feel annoyed when people
| that are hungry start treating like an emergency.
| tonymet wrote:
| Plus everything tastes ten times better. Even white rice or a
| slice of bread tastes divine when hungry
| procaryote wrote:
| You're right that it's easy to out-eat the running you can
| sustain as a regularly fit person, but there's no "only" about
| 2000 calories
|
| 2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a
| healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat
| appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to
| compensate for that marathon
| tonymet wrote:
| For fatties the benefit is even greater
| yoz-y wrote:
| If you burn 2k calories daily exercising you are no longer
| gen pop. The case still stands, statistically nobody is out-
| exercising a bad diet.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Strava said I burned near 4k calories on my last marathon.
| tonymet wrote:
| And most people eat more than 2 chipotles a day , even with
| no marathons
| tmvphil wrote:
| I don't think a chipotle burrito is actually 1600 calories
| unless you do something non-standard. Probably 800-1100
| tonymet wrote:
| Fair enough but people are eating those daily plus 2 more
| meals. They don't need any additional food , even if they
| were running a marathon every day
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| You're mistaking active calories as the only calories you
| burn a day. There's a reason the caloric intake
| recommendation is ~2kcal/day, because your RMR (resting
| metabolic rate) is ~2kcal/day. Meaning if you were to
| literally sit in bed all day, you are "burning" ~2kcal/day.
| On top of that you have your incidental energy expenditure
| per day (TDEE), aka walking to the fridge, taking a shit,
| general locomotion, etc. You then have active calories
| burned _on top of that_. If you were to run a marathon,
| that means you would need to eat ~5kcal in one day _to
| break even_.
| tonymet wrote:
| Yes I'm advocating eating less. It sounds like we agree
| with each other. What did I miss?
| znpy wrote:
| +1 for undernourishment.
|
| Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto
| fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means
| of that. The occasional "cheat" (mostly social events really)
| slows the process down but don't really stop it. It's not
| really a fast process though... but it strongly depends on how
| under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping
| myself between 8000 and 10'000 steps a day was sufficient.
| tonymet wrote:
| That's great progress. It comes down to inverting the normal
| indulgence cycle. Once you discover that under-eating can
| feel better than over eating - you feel immensely better.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Something my doctor has told me on more than one occasion, be he
| was also quick to add a statement about the importance of
| exercise for overall fitness. But.. want to lose weigh, change
| your diet.
| Rendello wrote:
| I find when I exercise more, I tend to eat better:
|
| - I enjoy running, and eating poorly will affect my ability to
| run in the short-term, as lots of junk food makes my running
| experience that day poorer; and
|
| - Recently I've started going to the gym. Best to be fairly
| lean to see those new muscles, though I don't take it to an
| extreme. I prefer a balance.
|
| Shifting the consequences from long to short- and medium-term
| helps!
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| To add: Exercise builds strength, including cardiovascular.
| Just having a low bodyfat % isn't the epitome of health,
| there's plenty of facets to focus on.
|
| I have a friend with a heart condition, prior to surgery he
| couldn't even walk 100 ft or stand for more than a minute. He
| put on significant weight, partially due to lifestyle changes
| when his heart was failing. Now he _has_ to walk a lot to
| strengthen his heart again, and he's working on his diet to
| lose weight as a whole separate component. The walking has
| nothing to do with weight loss for him, it's purely about
| strength. I think a lot of people fail to make any kind of
| distinction there, and they just think of exercise as a way to
| lose weight.
| bfrog wrote:
| Any athlete really knows this to be true. You don't lose weight
| running/lifting/biking, you lose it in the kitchen.
|
| Multi-day hiking forces the issue as you have to carry the
| kitchen on your back.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yep. This has been pretty much common knowledge as long as I've
| been alive. As someone who lifts, it's been ingrained in my
| mind "abs are built in the kitchen, not the gym."
|
| Sleep is also a commonly overlooked but incredibly important
| aspect. You could be busting your ass in the gym, have your
| diet on point, but not be making gains if you don't sleep or
| sleep poorly. For hypertrophy focused folks, muscle isn't built
| in the gym, it's built while you sleep - you tear it down in
| the gym so that it can rebuild during recovery.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| In other news: a group of scientists announced today the results
| of their recent study, where they conclude that drowning is not
| caused by a lack of swimming, but instead seems to be due to
| water. Other scientists have refuted the claim and point out
| defects in the study criteria. In response, US officials have
| pulled funding from the National Science Foundation for any
| further studies into the causes of drowning, calling any claim of
| drowning that doesn't end with the sentence "the will of God" as
| unpatriotic.
| regnull wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence: I found that it's super easy to eat way more
| than you should by just having some food laying around. And I
| don't mean just Cheetos - "healthy" food will set you back rather
| quickly as well. The amount of exercise doesn't matter that much
| - with the calorie density of common snacks, you will out-eat
| your exercise really fast. I don't think I'm that bad in that
| sense, but until I started keeping a track of what I eat and the
| count the calories, nothing worked. Yes it's a hassle, but I
| vibe-coded an app that does image analysis and tracks your
| calories. Shameless plug: HeartLens on app store,
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heartlens-your-health-tracker/...
| josefrichter wrote:
| I thought this is common knowledge.
|
| 1 Snickers bar = 30 minutes of running.
|
| You can lose 100 pounds without getting up from the couch, but
| you cannot lose 100 pounds by running, if you keep eating
| Snickers bars.
| recursive wrote:
| You can lose 100 pounds either way.
| larrik wrote:
| More data: I once lost 80 pounds purely through dieting. I really
| didn't change my exercise habits at all throughout (vs before I
| dieted).
|
| I was partially testing this theory, in fact. This was a decade
| ago, but I was aware of this line of thinking at the time.
| Specifically, that dieting is more important for losing weight,
| and exercising is more important for being healthy (losing weight
| alone really didn't make me noticeably healthier, btw).
|
| I found that, for me, this was entirely true.
| cluckindan wrote:
| The more processed foods one eats, the more one is exposed to
| PFAS and plasticizers with endocrine activity.
|
| That is the smoking gun here, not the amounts of calories people
| are eating.
| Whatarethese wrote:
| Calories in vs Calories out. Just stop eating so much.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| Our resting metabolic rate is pretty high. Turns out livers, and
| brains use a lot of calories.
|
| But the value of exercise is that you form more capillary
| structure to oxygenate blood
| lizardking wrote:
| Abs are made in the kitchen, as they say.
| hbn wrote:
| That advice is usually more for people who are already fit but
| don't have abs.
|
| You can maintain a healthy level of fitness by adding some
| exercise into your life and being mindful of what you eat. But
| maintaining abs is a whole other project you practically have
| to center your life around. And indeed, it's mostly a matter of
| very strict dieting.
| lizardking wrote:
| Okay then, how about "you can't outrun a bad diet"? Pick your
| favorite conventional wisdom fitness aphorism as it applies
| to you, but it's the same underlying principle.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The only time I ever got close to having a 6-pack was from 16
| days trekking in the Himalayas, culminating in summitting Mera
| Peak (~21,000 ft). I did not reduce my calorie consumption. But
| it was just a temporary change.
| nixass wrote:
| It's dead simple.
|
| Calories deficit makes weight loss, everything else is laziness
| mullingitover wrote:
| There is a simple and very low-impact exercise which affects
| obesity: the fork put-down.
| kazinator wrote:
| We already know that in "thin countries", it's not that way
| because of everyone exercising like mad.
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