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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

#451

Post by bratwurst3000 »

scotty79 wrote: post #441
jeltz wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way to lose weight I think that you understate how many calories running burns. When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).

Think about it this way. The rate at which you burn calories is directly proportional to the rate at which you breathe out CO2 because that what happens with carbon you burn. So if every day you train for an hour so that your breathing is 3 times faster, then you have additional two hours of burning in a day. 23 usual hours plus one worth 3. So you have 26 instead of 24 hours in a day. It's way easier to put 15% less…

Yes but in numbers it is way more. If I bike for an hour I burn 700-1000kcal . Thats not 15 but 50% of the dayli calorie intake… i am no expert btw. My understanding is that the problem is more that after 20 minuts of sport, at a certain heart rate, is starting to burn fat…but not body fat. More free floating fat. And it takes one hour or so to start burning bodymass. So the fuel for one hour sport is what I ate before and not my bodyfat. Another example. I do mountaineering, mostly 1 week walking in the alps for 10h a day. Thats around 4000kcal more burned a day. And there I see instant results with all my friends coming with me . They get thin very fast. Around 500g of body mass a day :)

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#452

Post by oblio »

iainmerrick wrote: post #443
oblio wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling. "Look how bad I am at reading people." "I'm worse than you at..." "I'm so bad that..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE > Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sh…

Seems a bit harsh to jump right into an accusation of the dreaded virtue signaling! Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)? I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online rec…

Most science articles I've seen, since times immemorial, provide some background for the researchers or the study subjects.

At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have article minimum word requirements to account for the second part.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#453

Post by bratwurst3000 »

episteme wrote: post #411
oblio wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight. This example is kind of bad :-) You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general. And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting weights, your example is precisely how you > lose weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio routine. I…

This is not accurate, weightlifting with a reasonably difficult weight for your strength level is one of the most effective ways to burn calories.

Not on time. You cant lift weihgts for hours. But riding a bike or running goes for at least an hour. Golf burns a lot of calories because it takes 3 hours to complete. And lifting weight is also the wrong „zone“ for burning fat. It only burns avaible sugar. And to have that much fuel one needs to eat much ….

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#454

Post by dTal »

namdnay wrote: post #416
dTal wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck kind of "snack" is 1000 kcal?

A single cinnamon roll is nearly 500 calories. As soon as you’re combining fat and sugar things skyrocket

I would not class eating TWO cinnamon buns back to back as a "snack", but rather "a disgusting pig-out". Am I sheltered?

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#455

Post by jokoon »

It's really annoying that when there isn't good science on a subject, a lot of people will expose their own certainties that they think makes sense.

Metabolism, the gut flora, those are pretty complex processes. Bacterial imbalance in the gut is a good trail to follow.

Of course ceasing food intake for 1 year would make anybody lose weight, but you can't tell everyone to run 50 miles a week to lose weight. There are obviously other root causes for obesity.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#456

Post by bratwurst3000 »

oblio wrote: post #450
episteme wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not accurate, weightlifting with a reasonably difficult weight for your strength level is one of the most effective ways to burn calories.

Isn't it anaerobic exercise, though, and from what I remember to lose weight you want aerobic exercise?

Thats correct. Yes it burns much fuel but also the wrong one

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#457

Post by artdigital »

wcrossbow wrote: post #430
artdigital wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advise: (as someone who does a lot of working out and calorie control) Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE. And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lo…

For me at least it's not that simple. My weight (healthy to low BMI) has been very stable over many years with vastly different amounts of exercising and quality of eating habits within that period. Fat to muscle ratio does move but total weight is stuck even with long runs of lots of junk food.

Hmm I have trouble believing that. If you eat less and put yourself into a caloric deficit, your body is going to start using up fat and to a certain degree muscle, that's just how it works and your body is no exception. If you work out during a deficit, your body will try to retain muscle and use more fat instead. Gaining muscle in a deficit is possible, but only in small amounts, if at all.

> quality of eating habits within that period

To me this sounds like you aren't actually changing the amount of calories that you eat, just the quality of them. Eating 2000 calories of McDonalds or 2000 calories of high quality food does not matter (or barely matters) for losing/gaining weight. If 2000 calories is under your TDEE, you can eat 2000 calories of cheesecake and would still lose weight (but very unhealthy).

What I see often is people claiming stuff like "I can't lose weight" or "I have a slow metabolism", but they never actually bother counting how much they eat, and because of that have no understanding of what high-calorie and low-calorie food is. (For example if I'd ask how much calories an average hamburger or a glass of cola has, you'd likely have no idea if you haven't counted calories before).

It was the same for me, once I started counting I realized that I was not eating according to the goals I had set at that time, and that the food I ate was actually much much less in calories than I thought it was.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#458

Post by mantas »

1_player wrote: post #382
michalu wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> What's so controversial about it? Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about. Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries. There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensiv…

> Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.

Bullshit. My body goes through 1600-ish kcal on an idle day.

If I go out on a 4h steady bicycle ride (= 100km), I go through 2000 kcal on ride alone. That’s much more than my body burns just being there.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#459

Post by JackMorgan »

0x640x6D wrote: post #216
JackMorgan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some friends and I are currently doing a thru hike of the Appalachian Trail, and only ten days in the four of us clocked 7, 8, 10, and 17 pounds lost... But we're hiking 6+ hours a day with heavy packs. We've been eating easily ~3000kcal each daily. I think at the extreme edges, nutrition science is a lot less well understood. We were very surprised to see we'd lost anything at all, as we're stopping to eat 300 calor…

Seems early to start the thru hike. How many people are on the trail?

It's already at least 10 people at each shelter every night. There's ~60 people scheduled to leave on 2/22/22, and ~60 on 3/1/22. It's going to be real busy real soon, this year will be packed by March.

We're taking it pretty slow and getting off trail whenever the weather turns sketchy (like last night possible thunderstorms). The real part we're concerned about is getting over the Smokies without getting stuck up there in the snow.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#460

Post by Avalaxy »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #365
kwhitefoot wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No. If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.

You're wrong, it is very well possible with algorithms, and it has been a thing for many years already. For example check the Auto TLDR bot for Reddit. Here's an example of what it could look like for the article posted here: https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc...

It's not even hard to do, you mostly have to count token frequencies which is hardly machine learning. Although you could also do it with BERT.

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