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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

#351

Post by playpause »

rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

No you’re not alone in it. But yes there are plenty of us who find it a really effective way to get drawn into an article. It works for me through infectious enthusiasm. If I have a sense of a curious mind trying to figure something out, I get interested in the thing they’re trying to figure out too. Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything made me interested in tons of scientific areas I never considered interesting before, because it is all about fascinating people repeatedly failing then eventually succeeding in understanding some natural phenomenon. The human angle is the perfect gateway for me. Maybe if I had more discipline I could just force myself to start reading a dry, factual scientific article in a field of little immediate interest to me until I start to notice data points that pique my own curiosity. But it’s so much easier for me to get infected with the curiosity of some compelling character who is overflowing with it. And it sticks better in the memory.

If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#352

Post by michalu »

rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science.

The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster, lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body greater burden to carry.

If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.

You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians" who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay" or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of the day and they get media exposure.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#353

Post by antihero »

onethought wrote: post #131
nu11ptr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fall into a routine CICO isn't that difficult in practice. First, while sleep/stress definitely impact the equation unless you are at an unusual life crisis, the ups and downs mostly balance out over time. Second, I don't recommend counting calories, at least not in the traditional way. Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat…

> Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat I appreciate you are trying to be helpful. But most of what you said assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have. People working long hour jobs, or double jobs, or balancing kids/parent responsibilities. Often fast food is the only obvious option, and people aren't buying i…

Sure fast food is convenient if you have little time, but people have survived poverty and mental health issues long before it.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#354

Post by imtringued »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #308
ewindal wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re reading that wrong. Of course you burn more calories through exercise. Michael Phelps couldn’t have eaten 12k cals a day if exercise didn’t burn calories.

Is it certain that we absorb all of the calories we consume? I went on a backpacking trip with my friends recently and despite similar activity levels everybody was surprised when they noticed that I eat twice as much as anybody else in the group. Maybe I should bring it up with a doctor, but I feel fine, I just also spend more on food than most.

The body absorbs refined carbs very quickly. The glucose rush will increase insulin levels to very high levels and make you feel hungry again soon leading to the consumption of even more calories.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#355

Post by yoz-y »

thisisonthetest wrote: post #162
makeitdouble wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> losing weight happens by eating less To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation. Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth

CICO is almost as pernicious and ubiquitous. It really grinds my gears when people try to use “intuition” to understand something super complex with no data at all. People talk about “metabolism” the same way. Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.

CICO mostly doesn’t work if you count the calories wrong. But if you don’t eat 1000kcal under your actual TDEE, there is little chance you will not lose weight (barring severe health problems).

If you metabolize less or more doesn’t really matter as it gives you a hard maximum of what you could potentially ingest (both in the TDEE calculation and the restricted diet)

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#356

Post by isitmadeofglass »

_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…

> You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism

This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.

Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so Strength training to get strong.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#359

Post by kwhitefoot »

rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

Could machine learning could help with this? Could some algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles just leaving the useful stuff?

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#360

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

ajuc wrote: post #192
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…

Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference. Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day. I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum o…

> the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000

I believe you meant kilocalories

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