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> Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average I have a problem with this hard statement based on the data because: > He realized he had to go back to basics, measuring the calories expended by humans and animals walking and running on treadmills. > He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another team’s study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons I've always heard that humans, due to ou…
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.
> “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…
Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.
NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.
> “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…
>A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook. Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories. If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner…
"You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories.
It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever.
> So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise.
The real takeaway is that there are no absolutes.
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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.
> As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs
You clearly burn extra calories when exercising, but the thesis of the article is that it doesn't matter in terms of weight loss because your body will adjust to burn the mean level of calories. The obvious exception are athletes whose energy expenditures simply can't be averaged away.
This leads to the conclusion that it's not just exercise that drives weight loss, but diet and exercise (shocking!) that makes a difference, as you have to run at a net loss over the day.
Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.
> “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…
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.
I was in the best shape of my life, felt great and ate whatever I wanted without thinking about it. BUT I was spending 4 hours per day exercising.
Now I have a 6 week old baby and WFH... I manage a 30 minute Peloton a few times a week. Maybe. Even though I try to pay attention the pounds have crept on because there's so little margin for error on 1500 calories/day.
Calorie counting is no way to live, IMO. I miss the days of a long run and guilt-free cheese and beer after :)
> “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…
> 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…
High altitude suppresses appetite in general and your body does not get enough oxygen to meaningfully process food above about 25,000 feet. Everest summit day via the South Col starts at about that altitude.
Plus it’s freezing cold and everything takes forever to do. I don’t think there is much eating at all on Everest summit day, let alone 20,000 calories.
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> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate The wild thing is he’s saying that’s not true either. He’s saying you never burned the extra calories in the first place.
That’s the part that’s at least slightly exaggerated, or giving a misleading impression. Exercise absolutely burns more than 0 calories, and I definitely was burning some. Calorie burn from exercise is straightforward to approximately measure, and many people walking around with iWatches and FitBits and heart monitors are doing so. What’s well known to many people is that exercise burns far fewer calories than you wi…
This in particular feels really hand wavy: “After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.”
What does “barely” mean? 40km/week isn’t that much in terms of calorie burn. The 100 calories/mile rule of thumb says this would imply ~350 calories/day. And this article says a woman would have a daily calorie expenditure of 2400 already (seems high, though). So this is only 15%. But anyway, this drops after adaptation seemingly, so does “barely more” mean 50 calories/day? Or does it mean 300? Because those are very different. And to where is the difference attributable? Because someone going from sedentary to trained runner is going to get a lot more efficient at running. “Less energy on inflammation” is really hard to swallow as the primary source of adaptation, especially when this is presented as conjecture.
It’s sad that majority of people hit the gym or go for a run when they want to lose weight. Without diet it’s pointless. But what’s worse, diet change is also about finding a new balance that fits your body. If you start exercising at the same time, you are throwing your body drastically off current balance and it’s probably much harder to find a new one.
I'm also skeptical of that balance theory. A exercised body would produce more reliable eating and satiation signals to aid in balance, if 'balance' is even how the new diet is calibrated.