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The myth of outrunning your diet

williamjbarry.substack.com

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Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#31

Post by Ferret7446 »

colechristensen wrote: post #6
nawgz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

You're missing something. More or less anyone can get to the point of being active enough where their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor. It's not genetic or "some people" kind of thing, everybody has this limit and can hit it and people who are really excited about exercise and do a tremendous amount of it have to have strategies about how to get enough calories in their body on a day to day basi…

> their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor

That depends on what "calories" you're consuming (as I responded to another comment, calories are not just calories). If you're getting calories through animal fat, then indeed absorption is a limiting factor. If you're chugging pure glucose/sucrose dissolved in water, then that limit is significantly higher, and you start hitting the physical limit of how much liquid volume can physically move through your body without it being a torture method.

Which actually leads to the primary cause of the obesity epidemic: the prevalence of sugar, and particularly in forms that get directly absorbed into the body.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#32

Post by rkomorn »

colechristensen wrote: post #6
nawgz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

You're missing something. More or less anyone can get to the point of being active enough where their body's ability to absorb calories is a limiting factor. It's not genetic or "some people" kind of thing, everybody has this limit and can hit it and people who are really excited about exercise and do a tremendous amount of it have to have strategies about how to get enough calories in their body on a day to day basi…

> It's a lot of activity to get to this point

Yes. Like multiple hours a day lot. That's why it's a "myth". It takes an amount of time, effort, and focus, that isn't particularly reasonable for I'd say almost all people.

Fundamentally, I agree with you that it's possible: I pretty much did it myself with ~12 hours of hard cycling a week, but I just think your take is wrong because it basically boils down to nitpicking "myth".

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#33

Post by [deleted] »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #28
watwut wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

[deleted]

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#35

Post by thefz »

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…

Yes, outliers gonna outlie.

I also know runners that purposely eat at severe deficit to lose muscle mass and be lighter. Which is idiotic, like wanting to lose brain cells to win a chess competition.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#36

Post by weird-eye-issue »

ehnto wrote: post #30
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 com…

You are completely wrong because over the long term, thermodynamics isn’t just a theory — it’s the governing principle. No matter how “inefficient” the body is at using or storing energy, it still obeys conservation of energy. If you consistently burn more calories than you consume, your body has to draw on stored energy (fat, muscle, glycogen, etc.) to make up the difference. That’s not up for debate — it’s been proven across thousands of controlled metabolic studies.

Yes, the short-term details can vary — sometimes you’re burning glycogen, sometimes fat — but over weeks and months, a sustained calorie deficit always results in weight loss. The body doesn’t magically create energy out of thin air because its “efficiency” fluctuates. You can argue that diet composition and hormones affect how easy it is to maintain that deficit, but not the fundamental physics behind it.

So while you’re right that biology is messy in the short term, thermodynamics still wins every single time when you zoom out.

It doesn't matter what source you are burning your energy from at any given time for long term weight. Let's say you eat a bunch of carbs and then you go for a run, well you're probably going to burn those carbs off first (depending on how hard you run and other factors). Which according to you doesn't matter since it's not burning stored fat. But if you didn't go for that run then those carbs would turn into fat later.... And if you go for a really long run (or you take it easier) then you will start burning the stored fat. But either way it doesn't actually matter because calories in / calories out still is the determining factor.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#37

Post by jokoon »

Physical activity also makes me less hungry.

The problem is that physical activity is unnatural and not intuitive. Biology is about saving energy, not spending it to keep everything healthy.

Bad mental health leads me to do less physical activity. Bad mental health also makes physical activity more difficult and painful.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#38

Post by watwut »

taeric wrote: post #16

I don't understand the angle here? Go check out the cross country running team of your local high school. They will literally have to have carb loading parties for the kids so that they are able to do the run the next day. The article even largely acknowledges this with working with kids and exercise. So if the myth is simply "we are fat because we don't exercise more", agreed. But the effectiveness of the new drugs…

My thinking and experience went kind of the opposite way. We are focusing so much on making it effective and hard ... that we removed all pleasure from exercising and sport. Of course it takes a lot of self control to go do it, when the whole experience actually massively sux and no matter what you do, it is not enough. And of course then you will give up on that once you are under pressure or stressed or have a lot of work.

The people who I know personally who move physically a lot ... like it. They need additional self control to skip the sport session and go clean the house. They either found activity that they fall in love with, the sport doubles as social outlet for them or they made it pleasant by tweaking how it is done.

> Statistically, nobody is a runner on their first few years. It takes time. And is hard.

It does not have to be. The first beginner period of a sport if normally the most pleasant one - you are getting quick improvements at first. Unless of course you go all hard to yourself and let all the motivation being eaten by guilt that you can run only for 4km instead of 15km yet.

Or, you dont have to run which is indeed inherently boring for quite a lot of people. You can roller skate instead. You can go for very long walk spending 2h listening to podcasts and shows.

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#39

Post by singularity2001 »

jokoon wrote: post #37

Physical activity also makes me less hungry. The problem is that physical activity is unnatural and not intuitive. Biology is about saving energy, not spending it to keep everything healthy. Bad mental health leads me to do less physical activity. Bad mental health also makes physical activity more difficult and painful.

> physical activity is unnatural

Very wrong way to put it

Re: The myth of outrunning your diet

#40

Post by lan321 »

lovich wrote: post #11
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…

I'm not understanding your math? 3-4 times that would be 7200-9600 calories a day, already more than your example of the Rock. Regardless > 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. Yes, if you eat more calories than you expend, because…

His point is that it's significantly easier to go way over the maintenance calories compared to making up with exercise if you just eat whatever you feel like. Essentially that you can consume X calories much easier than you can exercise it out.

With proper diet I'm pretty sure the limit would be like 160kg for a healthy (TBD) body. Strongmen, when I watched regularly, were 160-185kg, with somewhat unhealthy bodies. If you eat junk, that limit comes lower since you can't exercise as efficiently. If you work 40hrs a week, that limit goes down further, since you can't live in the gym and hospital/sport clinic.

Of course, realistically, the sweet spot is IMO in the middle. Don't replace water with blended ice cream but also don't live in the gym or focus too much on it. Dry scooping teacups of some sketchy preworkout called "eXTREME PsYcHo SUPREME ViOlEnCe" with a bunch of other sketchy pills that make your third leg point at people all day and make your skin itch probably isn't worth it.

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