Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight • Hacker News Board

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#91

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #72

taiboku wrote: post #22

This article misses a key point: increased muscle mass correlates with increased calorie burn. Not all exercise is created equal. Exercise that doesn't build muscle is indeed ineffective at burning fat. But exercise that DOES build muscle has a compounding effect on burning fat. Your muscles require more energy to maintain, so they will burn more calories just by existing.

Mental health benefits, however, are mostly achieved with endurance training, as well as cardiovascular health, mobility in old age and resilience to age-related injuries (hip fractures, mostly). Swimming probably offers the best tradeoff b/w weight loss, cardio, muscle gain & safety (if only it weren't so boring)

Swimming is boring? Not to me.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#92

Post by dota_fanatic » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:34 PM UTC

WalterSear wrote: post #59

taiboku wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, You seem to be right! I just spent the last several minutes reading reputable sources and they all seem to agree with you. In fact, they indicate a pound of muscle burns more like 6 calories. You win, Internet.

It's building the muscle that takes calories.

And then using them regularly to do a lot of work. There's no free lunch when it comes to moving something heavy from point A to point B.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#93

Post by a_small_island » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

ethan_g wrote: post #42

maxerickson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This effect is pretty small. Like 10 calories a day for a pound of muscle (which is quite a bit of muscle to add). It still matters, a few calories a day for a year ends up being pounds of weight, but adjusting calories out of the diet is going to be a better first strategy.

Building muscle can burn crazy calories though. It's quite common for normal men (I'm not talking about pro athletes, just ordinary guys) on strength training programs to add 500-1000 calories/day to their diet, and not gain fat. I wish the article would have mentioned this, because it only seems to talk about cardio exercise, which indeed makes it difficult to burn a lot of calories.

Hogwash. Strength training does not increase caloric burn by 500, much less 1000 calories per day. The purpose for adding calories while strength training is to "bulk", ie gain fat + build muscle at an efficient rate. This is generally between 100-325 calories over your TDEE, or breakeven point of caloric burn.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#94

Post by joshvm » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

misterspaceman wrote: post #84

paulsutter wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - percent bodyfat is a much better target metric than weight.

Agreed. The problem is that weighing yourself is easy, but measuring body fat is way harder. Most of the at-home measurement tools are wildly inaccurate; the accurate ones are either expensive or inconvenient.

I don't trust the absolute numbers, but the data from my FitBit Aria has a pretty low variance over time:

http://imgur.com/5AgKU9F

It does seem to be tracking reasonably well - I've lost a bit of fat, but not a significant amount since then. Given what I see in the mirror, I think 16-17% is about right. There are some weird fluctuations, but we're talking 1-2% day to day. The range of the graph is about 4-5%.

The trick is to measure several times a day if you get the chance (or at the very least when you get up and when you go to bed) to smooth out any fluctuations.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#95

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #91

matt4077 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mental health benefits, however, are mostly achieved with endurance training, as well as cardiovascular health, mobility in old age and resilience to age-related injuries (hip fractures, mostly). Swimming probably offers the best tradeoff b/w weight loss, cardio, muscle gain & safety (if only it weren't so boring)

Swimming is boring? Not to me.

Indeed, OP may want to try switching strokes and speeds every lap, or getting a waterproof MP3 player. It doesn't have to be for everyone, though.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#96

Post by tzs » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:46 PM UTC

greenwalls wrote: post #9

I guess it's just a coincidence that most athletes aren't overweight. It doesn't have anything to do with them exercising?

Amusingly, if you go by BMI, quite a few pro athletes are overweight, or even obese. (This is a good illustration of how idiotic BMI can be...).

For instance, Michael Jordan was slightlu overweight according to BMI. Shaquille O'Neal was past overweight and into obese. Wilt Chamberlin was overweight.

Leaving basketball for boxing, Muhammad Ali was well into overweight. Mike Tyson was obese.

How about American Football? I'm going to exclude line positions since a large part of their job is to be a wall and so we'd expect them to go for mass. Quarterbacks Dan Marino and Joe Montana: overweight. In fact, five of the last six Heisman Trophy winners (who were all quarterbacks) are overweight, and one is obese. The last four non-quarterback Heisman winners were running backs, and two were overweight and two were obese.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#97

Post by Cerium » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:46 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #12

samfisher83 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It you a eat a lot of fat you will get fat too. Its all about moderation. If you eat 4000 calories of FAT everyday you will get fat.

Eating 4000 calories of anything will make you fat.

Have fun eating 4000 calories of carrots, cabbage, broccoli.. even eating brown rice is hard! Carrots have about 200 calories per pound, so we are talking about 20 pounds of carrots per day. Brown rice (cooked) has about 200 calories per cup, so again, 20 cups of brown rice?

Meanwhile a cup of vegetable oil has about 1900 calories.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#98

Post by pascalxus » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:49 PM UTC

dota_fanatic wrote: post #90

pascalxus wrote: post #85

Our body's software is so hopelessly out of date. It's programmed to preserve fat at all cost: something quite useful, say 2 million years ago when famines were happening almost every day. Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are…

It's utterly easier to just make and advertise addictive food, completely throwing nutritional quality out the window. What if you could even claim your addictive, mostly empty junk is healthy? Therefore funding and studies with the intention of obfuscation and the control of the progress of understanding. The world would have to look very, very different than today's for something like an iBody app to come into bein…

Yes. Consumers are mainly to blame for this. As long as consumers keep buying the garbage (solutions that don't work/never had any chance of working) they're pumping out, businesses don't have much incentive to create anything that works. It's appalling to me, how people can continue to spend so much money on gimmicks and appetite suppressants that clearly don't work.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#99

Post by ghshephard » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:49 PM UTC

Depends on how quickly you want to lose weight, and whether that's your only goal. If, as a 150 pound male, your RMR is about 1500 kcal/day, and you eat at least 1000 kcal/day (anything less probably isn't healthy - you do need to supply your body with nutrition, and also avoid going into starvation mode) - then you are running a 500kcal/day deficit - about 3500 kcal/week, or 1 pound of weight loss. If you want to lose any more than that, eating less, outside of a metabolic lab environment, is probably not going to be effective (you either have your RMR drop as your body goes into starvation mode, or you end up binge eating as your body reacts to the massive deficit of calories).

This only allows for increased caloric output - and it's relatively simple to do 500 kcal/additional aerobic exercise/day - an hour of brisk walking, with maybe 30 minutes of stair climbing does the trick. This gets you from 1 pound of weight loss a week, to 2 pounds, and has the additional benefit of increasing your VO2 Max.

This doesn't even touch on the importance of resistance strength training exercise, and how key that is to maintaining a healthy body while dropping weight - it's all to easy to turn into a lightweight flabby weak person by just not eating/exercising.

Re: Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight

#100

Post by edraferi » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

dota_fanatic wrote: post #90

pascalxus wrote: post #85

Our body's software is so hopelessly out of date. It's programmed to preserve fat at all cost: something quite useful, say 2 million years ago when famines were happening almost every day. Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are…

It's utterly easier to just make and advertise addictive food, completely throwing nutritional quality out the window. What if you could even claim your addictive, mostly empty junk is healthy? Therefore funding and studies with the intention of obfuscation and the control of the progress of understanding. The world would have to look very, very different than today's for something like an iBody app to come into bein…

There is some very interesting work happening in this area. Specifically: how can we make money by preserving & building health?

This is the foundation of the whole pay-for-outcome revolution pushed by the ACA. They want to pay doctors for keeping people healthy, not for the lengths they go to fix you when you're sick.

Doing this requires more data than we have now and new market structures.