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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

#131

Post by alberth »

I know this can be a touchy subject, but honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising.

It’s just basic thermodynamics.

The energy (calories) you take in has to go somewhere. Some of it gets used for daily activity, but if you take in more than you burn, your body has to store the extra—it doesn’t have any other way to deal with it.

At the end of the day, it really is just a matter of calories in vs. calories out.

Exercise just helps burn more of your excess energy so that it doesn’t get converted into (weight) storage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

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

#132

Post by standardUser »

testing22321 wrote: post #8

I’ve been thinking about writing a book on this topic: “No overweight person eats well”. By very definition of a person is overweight, they got there by eating poorly, and are continuing to do so. They have eaten more energy than they use, this energy storage in fat.

> They have eaten...

Notice the past tense there?

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

#133

Post by somethingAlex »

alberth wrote: post #131

I know this can be a touchy subject, but honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s just basic thermodynamics. The energy (calories) you take in has to go somewhere. Some of it gets used for daily activity, but if you take in more than you burn, your body has to store the extra—it doesn’t have any other way to deal with it. At the end of the day, it really is just a matter of calories in vs. calories out. Exercise ju…

Yeah it's odd we needed a whole article for this. "You can't out exercise a bad diet" has always been true outside of the most extreme cases (competitive athletes).

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

#134

Post by roguecoder »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #20

I have been, rather lazily I suppose, trying to tweak my diet in such as way as to lose weight; and with little to show for it. I'm not sure that there is much if any processed food still in my diet (maybe just the English muffin in the morning?). I stopped buying/drinking soda pop decades ago (a low-hanging fruit indeed — I lost almost 10 pounds within a month of making that dietary change alone). And since I have t…

How bodies related to food varies _wildly_. For example, my body has difficulty processing certain foods, so I lost a ton of weight switching from "healthy" fruits and veggies and plant-based protein to mostly pre-processed carbs and fatty meat. (Low FODMAP, for folks who are curious: be ready to learn chemistry to figure out what is safe to eat.)

That diet isn't going to have the same effect for most people, but in my case it significantly lowered my inflammation and general discomfort, which led me to lose 90lbs with no actual effort on my part.

I knew one dude who was always hungry and it turned out he just desperately needed B12. Now he snacks on B12 gummies and feels much better. Debugging our bodies is more complicated than debugging a software program, but no programmer would say "Just run the program less!" if someone complained a program was eating up all the CPU.

The one thing that is always good for humans, whether we lose weight or not, is some physical activity. Whatever we can enjoy enough to do regularly, without injury, is a great choice.

I wish the medical profession would stop focusing on diet, when it doesn't understand it and calorie restrictive diets are one of two lifestyle components we know actually do contribute to obesity.

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

#136

Post by BobaFloutist »

baseballdork wrote: post #80
bko wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure he cuts back his calories, but 70 hotdogs is about 21k calories. I don't think he goes into a 21k calorie deficit over the next few weeks. That's an insane deficit. That would be the equivalent of not eating for 8.5 days, which is not possible since it would mess with his training. He probably cuts it back some fraction of that, say 10k and his body's increased metabolism adjusts for the rest.

Doesn't that beg the question of why anyone gets fat if your metabolism can just... increase to cover some arbitrary amount of calories?

It's because our bodies want to get fat, because storing calories is evolutionarily advantageous (or at least was).

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

#137

Post by MichaelNolan »

nordsieck wrote: post #57
bko wrote: 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…

> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to r…

In addition to food being much tastier than ever before, it’s also much cheaper. Despite current inflation and cost of living concerns, we spend far less on food than any time in history. Food in the 1960 was almost twice as expensive as it is today. Food costs used to be higher than housing costs!

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...

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

#138

Post by reverendsteveii »

Delphiza wrote: post #32

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…

>the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.

--you

>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity

--the article headline

I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.

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

#139

Post by bawolff »

Delphiza wrote: post #32

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…

> 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.

That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.

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

#140

Post by TMWNN »

amai wrote: post #111

Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight. Try it or your money back!

>Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight.

No.

I ran 10km three times a week and didn't lose a pound. https://np.reddit.com/r/running/comments/1vq3k1/should_i_do_...> Every bit of my weight loss has always come from counting calories.

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