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Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

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Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#41
If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.

So running can help but you still need a calorie deficit. Eating and burning more boosts your metabolism - if you measure a body builder during a bulk they are like a furnace, burning 1-2k over baseline. They still put on fat but it's a lot less than what you'd think given the amounts they're eating.

Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#42
post #6
post #2

> "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice going on in the background," Pontzer says. I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that…

> That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting calories [0] [0] https://youtu.be/SVS0ioOdfuE?t=225

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Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#44
post #4

The timing of when I eat changes, if I gain weight. Eating pizza after jogging? Fat on belly. Eating as much pizza as I want, but going to bed after on empty stomach after running, or putting the running in the morning while doing about 12 to 16 hour slots of intermitted fasting? Hello, six-pack.

That is a pretty interesting observation. I always thought it was solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned. For example, you burn ~2500 through just living, if you eat a pizza that contains 3000 calories, no matter the time at which you eat it, will you not still gain fat?

>solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned.

It is, but CI\CO as advice doesn't take in to account that you aren't a machine and we aren't calculating gas mileage. The system is both adaptive and reactive. CI and CO changes based on the situation, and you have no way to accurately measure.

Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#45
This reminds a little of Usain Bolt famously having chicken nuggets before his final at the Beijing Olympics. Although hardly indicative of a bad diet that he may or may not have had.

I think as well there is some difficulty with variability between people that isn't clear or maybe doesn't matter at scale. The article linked study was across 43 nations with 4213 adults. Yet there may still be individuals who can argue differently. CICO (calories in vs calories out) must apply to us all, but the composition has an affect on what the body chooses to store vs how energised or hungry/satiated we feel. A bad diet could perhaps me we feel we have less enthusiasm for running or other activities. Age, lifestyle, and even cultural factors are massive in affecting metabolism (more the foremost) and of course what we consume (the latter two).

I run a fair amount (over 2000km/1200 miles in 2025) and find that once I start doing above ~70km/43 miles in a week whatever eating habits I have are indeed outcompeted by my running and weight loss is inevitable. Even so it does slow around a BMI of 23 for me for longer than I am able to be consistent with the running to observe further effects. Still my point is that my diet isn't anything to write home about and I anecdotally I feel that as far as weightloss is concerned I can very much outrun it.

Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#46

Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason. The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so…

Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet

Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#47

Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason. The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so…

Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.

Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#48

Diet to manage your weight. Exercise to manage your fitness. It's real simple in theory and real difficult in practice. Super worth it, though. Your entire world starts opening up when things take less energy to do and you have more energy to give. It's very challenging to convey how important it is without living the experience.

Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently. Too many people go through theses cycles of "I'm going to cut out this, this and this to lose X pounds" and then drop it once they hit their goal or it ends up being too hard. While you might not shed pounds as quickly, if you focus on making sure you get varied, satiating, nutritious food(actually nutritious, not falling for the abundance of marketing out there), then you'll have an easier time resisting the temptation to gorge on treats and getting too many calories.

Re: Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds

#50

This reminds a little of Usain Bolt famously having chicken nuggets before his final at the Beijing Olympics. Although hardly indicative of a bad diet that he may or may not have had. I think as well there is some difficulty with variability between people that isn't clear or maybe doesn't matter at scale. The article linked study was across 43 nations with 4213 adults. Yet there may still be individuals who can argu…

The chicken nugget thing is to avoid food poisoning though, right? It's because McDonald's food logistics results in hyper-consistent food irrespective of where you're at in the world and the last thing an Olympic competitor wants is to risk getting food poisoning from eating foreign food. I don't think Usain eats chicken nuggets on the reg.
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