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Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

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Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#101

Post by topocite »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #87
tsimionescu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to eat roughly somewhere between 1300 and 2000 Cal every day to maintain your weight even if you are doing to exercise at all. If you want to lose weight, it's far easier to remove 800 Cal from your diet, at least time wise, then it is to exercise 800 Cal's worth every day. Either way, if you're losing weight at any appreciable rate, you will feel hungry (at least if it's not chemically induced in some way,…

This is well-intentioned but I think it oversimplifies in ways that can actually be harmful. "Just get used to being hungry" is rough advice to give people - chronic hunger is one of the main reasons diets fail, and framing weight loss as a willpower contest against hunger ignores that satiety is heavily influenced by _what_ you eat, not just how much. A 400 kcal meal of protein, fat, and fiber will keep you full for…

No, the common "wisdom" you are puppeting here is harmful because it just doesn't work.

We have been telling people for decades now to be worried that they might harm themselves by too much restriction and it is just wrong. What is harmful is being over weight. What is harmful is then confusing people that they are somehow going to lose weight without much restriction or being hungry.

This also scales really bad with age because as you age the CNS recovery gets worse and worse compared to muscle recovery.

At 55, there is simply no way for me to lose weight other than being hungry. It is impossible to recover from the amount of exercise that would be needed. The reality is that no one needs to worry about too much restriction until they are down to around 12% or so body fat. The fact a person's bodyfat % is never mentioned in this is exemplary of how bad the standard advise is.

Most people have too much leptin and leptin resistance. Then those same people get the same bad advise over and over to not restrict too much because you don't want to be like an anorexic or extreme athlete and have too low of leptin. Of course, ignoring that the anorexic and extreme athlete are going to have incredibly low bodyfat percentages.

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#103

Post by jahnu »

danlitt wrote: post #99
jahnu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, imho. The language used here is subtle and I could be clearer myself. It talks about the paradox that suggests the work _appears_ to come from nowhere, which we should all agree is impossible, thus a paradox, not that it does actually come from nowhere. Just that we don't know exactly where. The page doesn't offer an explanation for the appearance of the paradox. For me the line "The studies suggest that c…

I guess when you say "work" you mean precisely mechanical work. If so, I don't think it is implied anywhere that the work "comes from nowhere". If a person is doing mechanical work then that work must come from respiration, ultimately. There is nowhere else for it to come from. If a person does 2000 calories of mechanical work and consumes 2000 calories of energy then there is nothing left over for anything else, and…

No misunderstanding, thanks for your reply. It's been a nice wee sub-thread going on here. Food for thought ;)

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#104

Post by wongarsu »

canucker2016 wrote: post #48
matwood wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a lot to take daily. Most studies have settled on loading isn’t needed and 5g/day is enough. I just take 5g/day with my morning coffee/water.

Most creatine studies focus on the effects of creatine on physical activity, especially wrt resistance training. Rhonda Patrick has made several YouTube videos about creatine and you can find more information about creatine at her website - https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine . One of her creatine videos mentions that your muscles will take up ingested creatine faster than the brain. So for any creatine to…

To add another data point, a 2024 study [1] on the mental effects of single doses of creatine was using 0.35g/kg of creatinemonohydrate, or about 28g for a typical adult male. Though obviously high doses are safer if you just do them once

And an earlier 2018 article [2] argued that "Evidence suggests that the blood–brain barrier is an obstacle for circulating cre- atine, which may require larger doses and/or longer protocols to increase brain creatine as compared to muscle. In fact, the broad spectrum of creatine sup plementation studies that span different dosing pr- tocols (e.g. high-dose short-term, low dose longer- term), co-ingestion of other nutrients/compounds (e.g. carbohydrate, protein, insulin), different popu lations (e.g. vegetarians, elderly, patients, athletes) is unavailable for brain creatine adaptations"

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-9

2: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bruno-Gualano/publicati...

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#105

Post by helsinkiandrew »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #83
jahnu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> debunk the popular myth for my friends that exercise burns a lot of calories Can you expand on that please? Because I can tell you as a matter of fact that when I go for a run for an hour I burn well over 800 calories.

> Can you expand on that please? Because I can tell you as a matter of fact that when I go for a run for an hour I burn well over 800 calories Sure - how did you arrive at the 800 kcal figure? Most likely a wearable or an app, and those estimates are based on rough linear regressions from weight, age, sex, and heart rate - not actual calorimetry. The error margins on those numbers are significant, but the devices pre…

> That's what I mean by "myth" - not that exercise burns zero calories, but that the popular mental model of "I ran for an hour so I earned X calories of food" is built on inaccurate measurements

Over the last few of decades there's been a lot of lab research calculating the gross efficiency of the human body with different factors (size, sex, fitness etc) and I think these estimates that sports apps give are very close.

If you cycle with with something that can measure power output you can calculate the mechanical work done by the body exactly during that exercise period and convert to energy "burnt" (1 watt/hour = 3.6 kJ = ~0.86 kcal). 220 Watts for an hour (I couldn't do that but a good cyclist can) is about 800 calories.

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#106

Post by tuesdaynight »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #78
sva_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> debunk the popular myth for my friends that exercise burns a lot of calories Depends on your level of exercise. I often cycle 100km per day and can tell you if I ate only the 2000 kcal I hypothetically need I would go into a strong deficit.

> if I ate only the 2000 kcal I hypothetically need I would go into a strong deficit Right, and that's kind of my point - the "2000 kcal" figure is itself part of the problem. It's a rough global average that doesn't account for your sex, age, weight, body composition, activity level, or even climate. It's a number on a food label, not a physiological reality for any specific person. And even if you could nail down y…

Thank you for your comment. I didn't know about protein and carbs and fat calories not being metabolically equal. I'm hoping that calories counting apps would account that in, but I know that it's probably not the case

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#107

Post by Miraltar »

Paracompact wrote: post #86
fifticon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, I can easily tell bad AI slop, because it is just that - sloppy - the bullet points, the 'delving' and all that. But how can you tell this article was also AI-tainted? On a second skim, I can sort of sense some of it - the bulletpoint-enthusiasm, the idiosyncratic segues (?) that link sections/paragraphs of the text. But it didn't trigger for me immediately, or cause me concern..? I'm worrying that soon, I w…

It's very clear to me on its face that it's AI, but not "obvious as the sky is blue" others seem to be implying. I would dislike the writing style even if it weren't AI. For the record, an AI detector that appears to have put work into reliability and that I trust very much from my own testing, Pangram ( https://www.pangram.com ), says this is 100% AI generated. I've used it plenty before when experimenting with AI-c…

Your detector did not work well on an AI-collab writing fiction project I did a while ago, tagged it as 100% human even with high confidence for the most part. But to be fair, most detectors weren't significantly better, although this one gave a justification that made sense https://aidetector.com/

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#108

Post by tsimionescu »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #87
tsimionescu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to eat roughly somewhere between 1300 and 2000 Cal every day to maintain your weight even if you are doing to exercise at all. If you want to lose weight, it's far easier to remove 800 Cal from your diet, at least time wise, then it is to exercise 800 Cal's worth every day. Either way, if you're losing weight at any appreciable rate, you will feel hungry (at least if it's not chemically induced in some way,…

This is well-intentioned but I think it oversimplifies in ways that can actually be harmful. "Just get used to being hungry" is rough advice to give people - chronic hunger is one of the main reasons diets fail, and framing weight loss as a willpower contest against hunger ignores that satiety is heavily influenced by _what_ you eat, not just how much. A 400 kcal meal of protein, fat, and fiber will keep you full for…

I don't think I implied that the only thing that matters to weight loss is CICO, and that you only need willpower to lose weight. I don't personally believe this at all.

My point was instead that whatever effort you can spend on weight loss is better spent on managing your diet than increasing your level of activity (though I should also say that fitness is important beyond weight loss). Even when I said you can reduce 800 Cal of food, that doesn't mean "just skip a meal" (though that is also a valid strategy for some people). It can also mean "eat different kinds of food".

However, I do strongly believe that for any weight loss at a significant pace (say, 1kg/month or faster), and assuming it's not just a correction after a short stint of overeating (as in, it's more than losing 1-2kg you put on over Christmas) - then some feeling of hunger is inevitable. Losing long-term accumulated weight is going against your body's "wishes" (especially in the lipostat model, where your body has a set fat% equilibrium that it seeks to maintain), and hunger is an inevitable response to that. How much hunger you will feel can be controlled by better food choices and so on, but you will have to also get used to feeling some level of hunger.

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#109

Post by koliber »

This kind of correlates with a wisdom I've heard before:

You don't suffer from a lack of time, but rather a lack of energy. And actually, you don't suffer from a lack of energy, but a lack of activation energy.

We colloquially refer to activation energy as motivation. But maybe that's not the whole story. Some of it is willpower and personality, but maybe some of it is a buildup of adenosine.

This squares with my personal experience. It's harder to start things after day's worth of intense mental effort.

Re: Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

#110

Post by tsimionescu »

SubNoize wrote: post #90
tsimionescu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to eat roughly somewhere between 1300 and 2000 Cal every day to maintain your weight even if you are doing to exercise at all. If you want to lose weight, it's far easier to remove 800 Cal from your diet, at least time wise, then it is to exercise 800 Cal's worth every day. Either way, if you're losing weight at any appreciable rate, you will feel hungry (at least if it's not chemically induced in some way,…

For cardio sure but for weight training you're burning calories and tearing muscle fibres to increase size/strength. Also depending on the running you're doing, you're likely staying fitter. Sure it's easier to fast but you're missing out on the other benefits associated with exercise.

> Sure it's easier to fast but you're missing out on the other benefits associated with exercise.

This is very true, exercise is very important for health regardless of its effect on weight.

> For cardio sure but for weight training you're burning calories and tearing muscle fibres to increase size/strength.

True, but you need to spend even more time to rack up 800 Cal worth of exercise by weight training compared to doing cardio, as a beginner or even an intermediate level gym goer.

It is also true though that weight training, if you actually successfully build muscle mass, can significantly increase your BMR and thus help with losing weight in that way, even if you're not spending hours or lifting hundreds of kilos at every session.

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