The myth of outrunning your diet

Post by chucksta » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

gopalv wrote: post #7

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…

> 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 honestly might be an absorption issue, not an intake issue - you can hit aerobic limits enough for your body to skip digesting stuff & just shove protein directly out of the stomach instead of bothering to break it down. My experience with this was a brief high altitude climb above 5km in the sky,…

Post by silexia » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

DLeyland wrote: post #46

Synaesthesia wrote: post #23

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.

I'm naturally skinny and trying to gain weight (muscle mass) and also do around 500 calories a day of movement so aiming for 3000 calories. It just goes to show what a big influence baseline appetite and food choices make because I find it really hard to eat that much and always wonder how people manage it in just three meals

Post by bryanlarsen » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #54

Synaesthesia wrote: post #23

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.

Is 500 calories of movement a lot? Googling says that is running for about 45 minutes? Or walking for 90 minutes. Doing housework would only need about 2 hours to hit that.

Post by jokoon » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 3:19 PM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #39

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

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Oct 23, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

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…