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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

#221

Post by neogodless »

goda90 wrote: post #48
SeanAnderson wrote: post #24

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),…

Language changes over time, and "diet" is very commonly used as shorthand for "restrictive food intake" or "caloric restriction." But a reminder that "diet" is short for "dietary intake", and is not prescriptive. "A healthy diet" is a common phrase for "permanently good eating habits."

The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food intake."

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

#222

Post by kelnos »

SirMaster wrote: post #174
jorvi wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point of the study though. If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn more calories than your baseline. But if you do that workout often enough, for various reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure. This means that if you want to lose weight consistently, working out is useless in that sense. You might see benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but eventually your body ad…

How exactly can your body adjust that much though? There is some minimum baseline level of calorie burn to stay alive and keep your body temp etc. If you workout enough calories that exceeds the minimum baseline to keep you alive, the body can't adapt below that or adapt into the negative. For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories, so that's 12,000 a week for 6 times a week. What's the lowest a b…

> For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories

ogging a mile will burn around 100kcal, a bit more if you're decently overweight, let's be generous and say 150kcal. Someone who isn't in good shape and is overweight (the kind of person we're likely talking about) isn't going to be running that fast, maybe 3mph. So that's 6 miles in 2 hours. Even if I'm incredibly generous and say they'll burn 200kcal/mi, that's only 1200kcal. But in reality it's probably more like 900kcal.

But let's be real here. Your average (even above-average) overweight person with a not-so-great diet is not going to be jogging for 2 hours. Maybe they'll jog for an hour. So 450-600kcal. And maybe they'll do that 2-3 times a week.

1350-1800kcal extra burned every week is great! Except that still probably won't be what happens, exactly. Unless this person is also counting calories, or consciously working hard to keep their exact same diet, they will probably unconsciously eat more. Adding a 9mi/week jogging regimen to your life, especially if you're overweight, is going to make you more hungry than usual, so you will eat more. How much? Well, hard to say. Maybe enough so that you still end up with a calorie deficit, but in many (most, I'd guess) cases you'll still have a surplus, even if less than before.

This is all still a good thing! A 500kcal surplus per week when you're running 9 miles is much better than a 1500kcal surplus every week with no exercise. But this (hopefully) demonstrates that it's not as simple as "I'll just add some exercise and that'll get my weight under control". You need to change your diet, and take in fewer calories. It's hard. But it's the only way -- for the vast majority of people -- that this will work.

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

#223

Post by lukeschlather »

kelnos wrote: post #208
3acctforcom wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet lol. It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)

So you didn't outrun a bad diet. You counted calories and matched your diet to your exercise (or vice versa) to get the weight outcome you wanted. I think some here are narrowly interpreting "bad diet" to mean "lots of junk food". While yes, that's not a great diet, what's really meant is a diet where calorie intake regularly exceeds expenditure, regardless of what you're eating. Even if you eat only the healthiest o…

I don't think that's a reasonable way to define the phrase. If "bad diet" is defined in terms of how much exercise you do, then "you can't outrun a bad diet" is a tautology.

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

#224

Post by tonyedgecombe »

coffeefirst wrote: post #12
com2kid wrote: post #7

This is true to an extent and I'm very fond of the saying, but beyond a certain point you can indeed outrun a bad diet. I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing, BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted without gaining weight. I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back then that I am un…

Yeah, this is a scale problem. You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter. But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "re…

Exercise definitely helps you improve your eating patterns. In particular it helps you deal with stress which is a source of bad food habits.

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

#225

Post by fknorangesite »

swat535 wrote: post #109
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 sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it. Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty o…

> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.

> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.

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

#226

Post by tshaddox »

djtango wrote: post #110
savanaly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat. The other thing is that if you track >>performance Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance

Your examples sound like fairly short-term biological responses to intense activity, which are likely different than long-term biological response to a significant increase in daily calorie expenditure.

I've done a fair amount of wilderness backpacking. It's common to lose your appetite for the first few days due to the change in environment, schedule, activity, etc. But pretty quickly your body will realize this is going to keep happening and it's going to need to make up the extra 1000+ calories you're burning every day.

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

#227

Post by jdietrich »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #142
nluken wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so. If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can,…

> you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight I don’t know if any athlete who can sustain themselves on a junk diet.

Elite endurance athletes have awful diets by any normal standard, because the only way to fuel yourself adequately for a stage of the Tour de France or an ultramarathon is with nauseating amounts of refined carbohydrates. It's not even the fun kind of junk, just a constant effort to eat as much carbohydrate as your gut can possibly tolerate.

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

#228

Post by larrik »

More data: I once lost 80 pounds purely through dieting. I really didn't change my exercise habits at all throughout (vs before I dieted).

I was partially testing this theory, in fact. This was a decade ago, but I was aware of this line of thinking at the time. Specifically, that dieting is more important for losing weight, and exercising is more important for being healthy (losing weight alone really didn't make me noticeably healthier, btw).

I found that, for me, this was entirely true.

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

#229

Post by lukeschlather »

jorvi wrote: post #154
djtango wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat. The other thing is that if you track >>performance Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance

That's the point of the study though. If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn more calories than your baseline. But if you do that workout often enough, for various reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure. This means that if you want to lose weight consistently, working out is useless in that sense. You might see benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but eventually your body ad…

I lost between 50-70 pounds in a year, and I used a Garmin smartwatch which I wear all hours to track my calorie expenditure, which is pretty accurate. I think this effectively allows you to ignore the kind of exercise. You just keep track of your calorie burn. If your workout doesn't burn enough calories, you do more.

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

#230

Post by jader201 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #217
jader201 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal counterpoint: I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going fully remote. I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my level of activity remained unchanged. A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight, and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range. Again, level of activity remained unchanged. About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) qu…

People tend to adjust their activity to maintain their energy expenditure without consciously thinking about it. So a 30 minute session in the day might be followed by more time on the sofa later on.

I don’t think I could spend much more time on the sofa before I started cycling. :)
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