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Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

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Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#71

Post by cf141q5325 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #36

This is very depressing. I find it incredibly difficult to lose weight dieting. And now it's telling me I just wasted all this money on a treadmill (and the effort it took to get it down into the basement).

If you have a low sustaining calorie level due to past diets, you might want to look up reverse dieting to make the whole thing easier. But even with a low level you shouldnt have much problems once you manage to track your input and arent dependent on junkfood. At the end of the day its an invisible red or green number.

If the problem is with self control, remember that torturing yourself and viewing it as a battle can be counterproductive. If you just starve yourself you will likely bounce back directly afterwards. Its about making an actual change and normalizing your eating. For that i found it helpful to first stick to my sustaining calorie level, so planing what you eat at the level you dont gain or loose weight. You can then build on that structure with cutting out the addictive stuff, eating slower and figuring out being full vs not hungry.

Personally i found a week of just boiled potatoes incredibly helpful (you will have to work really hard to gain weight with just plain potatoes) to kick the addictive stuff and break with bad habits. Its like with any other drug and abstinence wont kill you in this case.

Dont beat yourself up, its one step at a time and with better planing you can make the steps a lot easier.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#72

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

_9omd wrote: post #65
dahart wrote: post #4

> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to ex…

I think a big part of the issue is that popular fitness and weight loss advice has perpetuated the wrong way to exercise to loose weight. When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat, and a high calorie burn number. While the short term results may seem great based on the immediate calories burned, it's actually a terrible strategy…

> 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.

This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.

I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#73

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #41
mannykannot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is purely anecdotal, with a sample size of one even if it is right, but it seems to me, personally, that exercise suppresses my appetite to some extent. I can't say that this is even real, but if it is, my best guess as to why this might be is that the exercise subtly stimulates/irritates my gut such that I am de-motivated to eat, either by feeling full or subliminally 'sick to my stomach'. After running a marat…

some would argue that running a marathon isn't exercise and shouldn't be considered as such. Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.

That's a POV, and you could marshall evidence to defend it.

But it's mostly a hand-wavy assertion too, and there's other evidence against it. There are cultures around the world (low populations, to be sure) where repeatedly traversing 26.2 miles a day would not be considered particularly abnormal.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#74

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gameswithgo wrote: post #63
taeric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... I don't know that it is that simple. In the summer when I bike twenty miles a day, I am eating far more, and still losing weight. Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.

its possible to work out enough that compensative eating is not possible, but very few people work out that much, and some people have amazing eating powers, such that even riding a bike 50 miles a day isn’t enough to stop them being fat unless they also count calories.

Riding a bicycle? It's roughly 5x more efficient than running or walking. If you want to lose weight from cycling, you're going to have ride significantly further than 50 miles a day.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#75

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

djtango wrote: post #60
dpark wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. That is literally the thesis here, that calorie expenditure is essentially decoupled from exercise.

Which is laughably ridiculous when you start considering the extremes like Michael Phelps eating 10kcal for breakfast. The issue is the uptick in energy burn is unintuitive especially in the world energy dense high-processed food As an ex once put "you have to run 5 miles to earn a cupcake - totally not worth it!"

> Which is laughably ridiculous

We're glad you're here to poke fun at the research of at least two people with PhD's centered on this topic.

> when you start considering the extremes

When you start considering the extremes, you often find that they can't tell you much about the middle ground.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#76

Post by Fezzik »

dahart wrote: post #4

> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to ex…

The general rule I find helpful is that diet=size and exercise=shape. Being aware of this really helps me limit my food intake even when I’m exercising a ton.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#77

Post by ch4s3 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #36

This is very depressing. I find it incredibly difficult to lose weight dieting. And now it's telling me I just wasted all this money on a treadmill (and the effort it took to get it down into the basement).

Cardio is great for general health, and cannelloni shave off a few extra calories even once you’re good at it. Buy some weights, and put on a few pounds of muscle. The muscle costs more calories to maintain, so for your same diet you can shift you body composition a little. For a beginner you can see a lot of results in about three lifting sessions a week in only a handful of weeks.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#78

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

dugite-code wrote: post #40
learc83 wrote: post #7

How do his results line up real world data like soldiers needing about 5k calories a day when active. Or athletes like Michael Phelps consuming 8k-10k calories a day while training?

From my read of the article the data is heavily biased towards running as the exercise of choice, probably because measuring CO2 is easy and non-intrusive to do on a treadmill. They do mention utilizing doubly labeled water but don't say if they only used that for sedentary participants or measured a wider range of exercises. Given I have always heard/read how efficient humans are at running if they didn't account fo…

Running isn't efficient at high speeds. The same with cycling. It's funny to see people buy a bike for exercise and then roll along at a crawl, expending less energy than walking.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#79

Post by taeric »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #74
gameswithgo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its possible to work out enough that compensative eating is not possible, but very few people work out that much, and some people have amazing eating powers, such that even riding a bike 50 miles a day isn’t enough to stop them being fat unless they also count calories.

Riding a bicycle? It's roughly 5x more efficient than running or walking. If you want to lose weight from cycling, you're going to have ride significantly further than 50 miles a day.

I successfully lost weight at only twenty miles a day. Now... For a time, that also included Queen Anne Hill, in Seattle. So a decent amount of climbing. Still, I could lose weight easily while biking.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#80

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #42
themodelplumber wrote: post #2

> Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass. I love this intro. > His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansa…

> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc. An interesting source here is the Fiennes and Stroud expedition to cross Antarctica in 1992. Stroud (a physician) actually tested how many calories they were burning each day usi…

Another related extreme case was the first person to solo-ski to the north pole. They pre-loaded, mostly on olive oil, packing on tens of kg in body fat, all of which (and more) was gone by the time they were done. I don't recall the daily calorie expenditures but it was gigantic. They did this because there is some mechanical advantage carrying a good chunk of one's energy supply directly on your own bones rather than towing it in the sled.
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