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The myth of outrunning your diet

williamjbarry.substack.com

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Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#21

Post by plorkyeran »

nawgz wrote: post #5
colechristensen wrote: post #2

God, that's a lot of writing. One, you absolutely can "outrun" a diet. If you've known anyone a little bit too much into fitness then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight. I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym. I'm not saying it's healthy, but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's diffic…

> ... then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight. I'm not trying to strawman here, but I've never met a person like that who was ever overweight at any point in their life. It seems pretty obvious to me that saying "some people can't eat enough to put on weight / get fat" is a distinct thing from saying "someone who cannot stop putting on weight / getting fatter will almost…

I peaked at about 200 pounds, got really into cycling, and then had to put a lot of work into my diet to get back up to 160. I think there’s a bunch of obvious reasons why this is uncommon even if you pretend there’s zero metabolic differences between people, so it’s very hard to say how much it’s something that can’t happen for people versus merely being something that could but doesn’t.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#22

Post by paulddraper »

colechristensen wrote: post #2

God, that's a lot of writing. One, you absolutely can "outrun" a diet. If you've known anyone a little bit too much into fitness then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight. I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym. I'm not saying it's healthy, but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's diffic…

> but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid

It’s not stupid. It’s true.

Simple math, exercise does not burn “that many” calories.

Diet, hormones, and genetics have far larger effects than exercise, relatively speaking.

(Exercise is A+ fantastic for a number of reasons. But a secondary mechanism for weight control.)

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#23

Post by Synaesthesia »

I exercise a fair bit, and I still struggle to lose weight, I'm doing about 500 calories of movement a day, which means my maintenance diet is about 2500 calories. Trust me, it's really easy to go over that. So yes if you want to lose weight, it's just a fact that you need to look at your diet primarily.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#24

Post by colechristensen »

paulddraper wrote: post #22
colechristensen wrote: post #2

God, that's a lot of writing. One, you absolutely can "outrun" a diet. If you've known anyone a little bit too much into fitness then you've known someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight. I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym. I'm not saying it's healthy, but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's diffic…

> but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid It’s not stupid. It’s true. Simple math, exercise does not burn “that many” calories. Diet, hormones, and genetics have far larger effects than exercise, relatively speaking. (Exercise is A+ fantastic for a number of reasons. But a secondary mechanism for weight control.)

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Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#26

Post by fcpk »

Almost all of the comments here seem to miss a point. Weight lods can be extremely difficult because : 1. your body metabolism will adapt really fast to caloric restrictions 2. losing weight is easy, not regaining it is a challenge in adapting your body set point 3. having enough time to exercise to the point where calories are a deficit is a luxury many can't afford 4.the psychological state of many people is a primary cause of their obesity, and fixing this is also a lot harder.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#27

Post by yetihehe »

watwut wrote: post #17
solatic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight There's a big difference between someone who feels satiated too quickly and someone who has a lot of difficulty feeling satiated. It has nothing to do with how much exercise someone gets. It's also much more difficult to eat large quantities of clean calories (for putting on muscle) compared to eating large quantities of dirty calories (putting on…

Exercise definitely affects apetite and in both ways - it can make you eat more or less. Calories are calories, neither dirty or clean.

Yes, but we measure calories by burning food items in oxygen in calorimeters. Burning fat gives X amount of heat, burning fiber gives Y amount of heat. Fat and fiber both have calories when you burn them in a furnace. But body does not use fiber for calories, you won't get fat on fiber. That is the distinction between dirty and clean calories, not everything burnable will be usable for energy in body and not everything that body actually digests will be stored in fat tissue.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#28

Post by Ferret7446 »

watwut wrote: post #17
solatic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone who has struggled to eat enough to maintain and build weight There's a big difference between someone who feels satiated too quickly and someone who has a lot of difficulty feeling satiated. It has nothing to do with how much exercise someone gets. It's also much more difficult to eat large quantities of clean calories (for putting on muscle) compared to eating large quantities of dirty calories (putting on…

Exercise definitely affects apetite and in both ways - it can make you eat more or less. Calories are calories, neither dirty or clean.

Calories are not calories, because they're a unit of energy, and humans aren't batteries. We "use" energy in the form of countless chemicals and reactions, so things get complicated fast.

It's far easier to instead talk about mass, because one gram is indeed one gram, until humans evolve anti-matter producing organs. If you eat X and excrete Y, your body mass will change by X-Y. If you want to lose 1 kg, you will have to exhale 0.8 kg [1] of carbon atoms (you breath in O2 and exhale CO2).

[1]: There are a lot of different "calorie" molecules in your body, but generally all of them are some combination of C, H, O, which turns into CO2 and H2O at roughly 4:1 ratio by mass. So 80% is lost via exhaling C, and the H2O gets processed by your body normally, and is generally lost as urine or sweat, unless you're dehydrated.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#29

Post by zargon »

colechristensen wrote: post #24
paulddraper wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but saying it isn't possible to exercise so much it's difficult to keep weight on is stupid It’s not stupid. It’s true. Simple math, exercise does not burn “that many” calories. Diet, hormones, and genetics have far larger effects than exercise, relatively speaking. (Exercise is A+ fantastic for a number of reasons. But a secondary mechanism for weight control.)

[flagged]

You're seriously out of line here. Go review the site guidelines.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#30

Post by ehnto »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #15
preommr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had a friend who would drink a gallon of whole milk a day to maintain weight because he did so much at the gym. That's around 2.4k calories. That's like three slices of costco pizza and a large coke. I can do that like 3-4 times and I am not even that fat. And that's like half to a third of the absolute peak. Like the rock who basicaly works out all day, eats 5-7k calories. The point is there are people that are…

> The point is there are people that are eating large fries and triple thick milkshakes as snacks driving from place to place because it makes them feel happy instead of just eating to feel full. And you just can't outrun that. You literally can. You just need to burn more calories than you take in. It would be difficult but not impossible and is simple math and thermodynamics.

The thermodynamics argument misses the fact that our body is not a single input, output engine. The body will use energy from several different sources, with different efficiencies. It will store energy in different forms, with different efficiencies, and it throws away a lot of energy that you put into it.

Yes, if you spend energy, it has to come from somewhere, but it's only in really specific scenarios that it comes from fat. No one is measuring how much they actually burn either, so we are all just theory crafting that someone burnt X and put in Y so they should be losing fat stores. Maybe they burned Y from blood sugar, super efficient, before it was stored into fat, great. Or maybe they stored it as fat overnight, and they are burning 98% of their breakfast from bloodsugar and only 2% from fat stores. Some people's bodies will have them completely tired out before they even hit their fat, that's a lack of fitness not a caloric deficit.

In general yeah, thermodynamics wins, but the details do matter.

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