Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout

vo2maxpro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 151 posts

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

#91

Post by danlitt »

jahnu wrote: post #59
lebuin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OP may be referring to the idea that the total number of calories burned in a day doesn't meaningfully change under a workout regime. Working out does burn calories, but after a few session your body starts to compensate by burning less calories in other areas (e.g. immune and reproductive system). The net result is close to zero, except in very demanding workout regimes. I don't have the background to fully…

So this is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_paradox I seems like it's only part of the story. If you increase exercise but also increase calorific input to match then you won't lose weight. But, the laws of energy conservation being what they are, I don't think anyone disputes that if you very significantly increase exercise but also maintain calorific input then you will lose weight as the energy must co…

> I don't think anyone disputes that if you very significantly increase exercise but also maintain calorific input then you will lose weight

This is exactly what is disputed by the link you posted. They measured directly the energy expenditure (the number of calories burned by respiration) in a high-activity hunter-gatherer tribe, and in relatively low-activity industrialized societies, and found they were almost the same. So the number of calories the people consumed was not measured or relevant (and must also have been roughly the same if neither group was actively gaining weight).

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

yorwba wrote: post #67
nothrabannosir wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or please just put the prompt in a blog post instead.

Who would read a blog post that just says "Think of a topic that users of an app for monitoring blood oxygen might be interested in, do a web search for related articles and synthesize them into a blog post. Make sure to draw on your own personal experience to make it more engaging"? I'm sure the actual ad at the bottom had more human effort put into it than this article. The website owner didn't even bother to check…

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by derbOac »

raincole wrote: post #47
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #26

I found the AI writing of this post to really detract from its message. Give your agent meaningful writing samples of your own work and use those as a ‘style transfer’ basis for blog posts to get something far more true to your own voice.

It's well-structured and the message is clear. Are we intentionally prompting LLM to write badly now? Do we have to manually write bad essays to avoid AI accusation?

There's confidently hallucinated citations, which makes it bad writing either way.

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

#95

Post by jahnu »

danlitt wrote: post #91
jahnu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_paradox I seems like it's only part of the story. If you increase exercise but also increase calorific input to match then you won't lose weight. But, the laws of energy conservation being what they are, I don't think anyone disputes that if you very significantly increase exercise but also maintain calorific input then you will lose weight as the energy must co…

> I don't think anyone disputes that if you very significantly increase exercise but also maintain calorific input then you will lose weight This is exactly what is disputed by the link you posted. They measured directly the energy expenditure (the number of calories burned by respiration) in a high-activity hunter-gatherer tribe, and in relatively low-activity industrialized societies, and found they were almost the…

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 controlling caloric intake may be more necessary for managing weight than exercise alone." is a possible conclusion for the apparent paradox. Note the words "may" and "alone" which indicate uncertainty. I deliberately used the phrase "very significantly" to suggest we would probably all agree that there is some bound on observing the paradox which is why I used Phelps as an example. To repeat and be clear, I think the paradox as described on the page does not say that with a very significant increase in energy expenditure there will be no weight loss with a constant calorific intake.

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

#97

Post by asimovDev »

BoppreH wrote: post #39
nick486 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it sort of depends on how you look at it. If 800 is an hour of running - that's probably "a lot" for quite a few people. But 800 is also just a sandwich. Which isn't all that much. So if you view this from a time use perspective, just skipping that sandwich is way better than running for an hour. And many people can't spare an hour a day just to make up for a sandwich. Hence - "not a lot" - Its too expensive…

I agree with the general message, but I'm curious what ingredients go in your 800 calorie sandwich. That's more than a double Big Mac with 4 patties (780 kcal)!

Maybe the Elvis sandwich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_butter,_banana_and_baco...

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

#98

Post by jahnu »

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…

Thanks for fleshing out your comment. Because initially it did kind of suggest to me you were saying it burns no calories or makes _little_ difference.

I agree with all you posted.

> Curious though - do you track your intake with the same rigour, and if so, do you find the numbers actually add up in practice?

To return the courtesy, for the purposes of discussion I picked a rough estimate and rounded down significantly the actual amount I typically run. More often it's 1.5 hours a run and supposedly >1000 calories given my weight, heart rate, terrain, and speed. I also assumed the calculations are way overestimating my actual calories spent so just went for something somewhat plausible for the sake of a HN comment. As you noted calories aren't accurately reported by devices. I do not pay attention to it in massive detail either. But in practice since I run an average of about 25km a week but can vary from 0 for some weeks to 50 for others and I keep relatively good eye on my diet I notice significant changes in weight over time that tallies with effort. Three months of below that 20ishk a week and I will put on 2-3kg. The next three months I increase to 35ish+ a week and it drops off again. Would I swear to it in a court of law that I'm not miscounting meals? No way. But I feel reasonably comfortable that this is an accurate description.

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

#99

Post by danlitt »

jahnu wrote: post #95
danlitt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think anyone disputes that if you very significantly increase exercise but also maintain calorific input then you will lose weight This is exactly what is disputed by the link you posted. They measured directly the energy expenditure (the number of calories burned by respiration) in a high-activity hunter-gatherer tribe, and in relatively low-activity industrialized societies, and found they were almost the…

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 they would lose weight one way or another. But this is much more extreme than what was observed, or what happens when a person ordinarily does exercise.

The "Energy paradox" is not a logical paradox at all. It is just a confusing fact. The observed fact was that two different groups with apparently very different activity levels respire almost exactly the same amount. In other words, that an increased, but not necessarily extreme, level of mechanical work does not appear to correlate with an increased level of calorie burn. Not just that the relationship is non-linear, that the relationship does not seem to exist at all (at the measured level of exercise).

I was very careful with my words this time, hopefully there is no more misunderstanding. I think we still disagree unless by "very significantly increase exercise" you mean something like running multiple hours per day every day.

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

#100

Post by sanswork »

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…

I tracked intake, calories burned(from Apple watch with activity tracking turned on for any specific exercise) and weight for 12 weeks as part of 75 hard and found my daily weight decreases were exactly in line with what you'd expect given the estimated deficit 95% of days and 100% at the weekly level.

I don't track consistently anymore only when I'm working towards a goal but when I have more than 2 weeks data these days it seems pretty spot on to the point I can calculate the tracked captors to target to get the desired rate of change in weight pretty consistently.

Post reply on HN