> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference.
Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.
I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
Congratulations! I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is. And it's also depressing if I look at the graph that some 40 to 50 year olds seem to still have the metabolism of a toddler - I'm definitely not one of those! OTOH, you can feel superior by thinking these people would be in big trouble if there was a famine, but that's (fortunately) not the world we live in (although it's pretty fucked up if you consider that we are complaining about these first world problems while in other countries people are starving)...
roughly 3/4 of your energy consumption is maintenance (fe keeping body temperature). So you walking/biking might even be irrelevant. If the outdoor temperature was low, this would probably be number 1.
I think a big part of the issue is that popular fitness and weight loss advice has perpetuated the wrong way to exercise to loose weight. When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat, and a high calorie burn number. While the short term results may seem great based on the immediate calories burned, it's actually a terrible strategy for several reasons.
1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate.
2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate.
4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate.
A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate.
Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.
> 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.
I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.
If you fall into a routine CICO isn't that difficult in practice. First, while sleep/stress definitely impact the equation unless you are at an unusual life crisis, the ups and downs mostly balance out over time. Second, I don't recommend counting calories, at least not in the traditional way.
Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.
NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.
> measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7
Is even that sufficient? Like, would you be able to tell the difference between "oxidation done by the body to generate energy for human cells" and "oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"? Maybe you could tell by the mixture of other gases, but I suspect CO2 itself wouldn't suffice.
> When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat
This is a major education/communication issue. When I switched to weightlifting, I started seeing rapid and significant results. And I don't even really sweat from it (except on leg day)
> You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism
This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.
Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so
Strength training to get strong.
Some very bold claims, would love some citations to give them more credibility.
HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.
Meh idk. Look at any long distance runners. They are skinny. Based on my own ancedotal evidence when I am running often I tend to be 20lbs less than when I don't.
You have a few correct points but are mostly spreading misinformation. Repeated exercise will only improve efficiency by a few percent at most, and then only for certain activities. For cycling, efficiency hardly improves at all. The calories shown on gym equipment are often nonsense but the latest generation of fitness trackers are reasonably accurate and can be worn 24/7.
You have to get into really long cardio sessions with no carbohydrate supplements before that has any significant catabolic effect. This is not a concern for casual athletes.
Strength training is great, but it should be combined with some form of cardio in a comprehensive fitness program.
It's definitely true that eating less/healthier is the most important part of weight loss. However, perhaps because exercise played a big role in my own weight loss journey, I do feel like people go too far in dismissing it as a weight loss aid.
First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.
There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.
Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
My own anecdote: I've been a cyclist and/or a runner pretty consistently for the last 20 years. This year I moved to a place where cycling wasn't an option (without driving a long way), and at the same time I injured my knee by overtraining on hills. So I was benched from my typical cardio.
The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.
Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
I get the impression that cardio affects some people differently. I'm taking some time off from my 30+ miles a week running habit to let my foot heal up. I'm now at about 10 miles + cycling and nordic skiing when I can but overall probably 1/2 to 2/3 the cardio than I've been used to for the past 4 or 5 years.
But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.
I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
This is purely anecdotal, with a sample size of one even if it is right, but it seems to me, personally, that exercise suppresses my appetite to some extent. I can't say that this is even real, but if it is, my best guess as to why this might be is that the exercise subtly stimulates/irritates my gut such that I am de-motivated to eat, either by feeling full or subliminally 'sick to my stomach'. After running a marathon without proper training, it was a couple of days before I felt like eating anything.
I am not intending to dispute the fact that you ate more to compensate - you say you did, and I don't doubt it. Nor am I doubting that weight gain is a function of net caloric intake; it is just a suggestion of another way exercise may affect this.
FWIW most of my exercise is running, hiking or kayaking. I am not sure (or perhaps that should be 'even more doubtful') that kayaking has the same effect.
You’re so lucky! I wish exercise made me less hungry. I’ve only felt that when going on very long multi-day hikes… being in severe calorie deficit and having almost nothing sound good to eat. Chocolate was one of the only things that I could stomach. Oh and once I went running about an hour after eating tomato soup, and halfway through starting heaving uncontrollably. But normally, running, gym time, weight lifting and biking all make me hungry. :P
There’s no doubt that appetite and everything around dieting and weight loss has a huge range of variation in behavior and what works. In addition to learning to separate exercise from food, the other thing that took me too long to learn is that weight loss is more mental exercise than physical. Figuring out how to trick myself into calorie tracking and habit forming isn’t easy, and my tricks on myself clearly don’t work for everyone.
This is my experience as well. I also had a trainer confirm this.
I used to eat before and after a workout because I bought into the idea of the body needing fuel to power the workout and fuel to recover. I ended up eating when I wasn’t hungry and feeling heavy or sluggish.
She said the appetite suppression after a workout could last 30-120min and to only eat when I felt hungry. I felt much better after adjusting my eating habits.
From what I've seen and experienced the act of exercising suppresses my appetite. I can't eat a big meal and immediately work out. If I'm a little hungry a few minutes into working out I'm not. But hours later or the next day I'm famished and will eat more. It's like a different kind of hungry--more of a craving.
I think moderate exercise can help with getting used to not over-eating. More strenuous exercise seems to make the body crave larger meals often negating any calories burned.
For me exercise does suppress the urge to eat sugary things. I don't know if it's subconscious or just how my body reacts but on days when I have good exercise, especially long runs I feel less urge to have sugars and more urge to eat chicken, cheese etc.
It doesn't really suppress the urge to eat though. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I must count my calories, I have been counting them for 15+ years now and it has become part of my life.
some would argue that running a marathon isn't exercise and shouldn't be considered as such.
Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.
>A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths
It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook.
Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.
If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories
If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner (which is typically bigger than lunch)
So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
> if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.
A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
When I used to do heavy training (long distance running, weight training) I would eat close to 8k calories a day and I was in fantastic shape. Eating more was necessary to survive, given how much energy I was expending.
The thing is, the 300 calories from rowing shouldn't be compared to the absolute calorific requirement (say 2500 calories) but the surplus. So Maybe I'm overweight because I need 2500 and I eat 3000. Thats 500 too much, but take out 300 and that's 60% of what I need to at least reach equilibrium. It makes a huge difference to how much I need to sacrifice out of my diet.
A few hours on my bike can be 2,000-3,000 additional calories over base metabolic rate. That's not based on made-up calories but actual work from a power meter on the bike.
"You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories.
It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever.
> So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise.
It is a very valid point that dieting / food intake converts to calories way more drastically than exercise.
The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.
The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.
In your example, if you exercise, you can have the pizza as well as the sandwich. This can be significant, because suppose you have those 300 surplus calories 3x/week minus the exercise (not unreasonable, a small snack here and there, right?). 300 calories is about 3 bananas, so it might not even be unhealthy food.
Rough math: 3 * 300 * 4 = 3600 calories surplus/month. A pound of adipose tissue has ~3500 calories IIRC. So you're now gaining a pound of fat a month, and you're not even indulging yourself, really.
In reality, physical activity and diet aren't so steady, so some months you maintain weight, some you lose, and some you gain a lot. But over time it averages out, and you've put on 12lbs in a year.
People often conflate body weight with how they want to look, and when they say they want to lose 20 pounds, what they really want is for their body to look different in some specific ways. Exercise is a very effective way to alter the appearance of our bodies, and far more versatile than diet alone.
Yeah... I don't know that it is that simple. In the summer when I bike twenty miles a day, I am eating far more, and still losing weight.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.
Yeah, for a few years in my 20s I was bike commuting 24 miles/day and running 6-10 miles/day on top of that, with longer runs or hikes on the weekends.
I was in the best shape of my life, felt great and ate whatever I wanted without thinking about it. BUT I was spending 4 hours per day exercising.
Now I have a 6 week old baby and WFH... I manage a 30 minute Peloton a few times a week. Maybe. Even though I try to pay attention the pounds have crept on because there's so little margin for error on 1500 calories/day.
Calorie counting is no way to live, IMO. I miss the days of a long run and guilt-free cheese and beer after :)
its possible to work out enough that compensative eating is not possible, but very few people work out that much, and some people have amazing eating powers, such that even riding a bike 50 miles a day isn’t enough to stop them being fat unless they also count calories.
I agree, maybe you got me a little wrong. I’m more or less talking about the good ol’ adage calories in, calories out. It’s never that simple, amen, but measuring and matching output with intake is a pretty good proxy and works in practice. When calories out is higher, calories in can be higher too (and should be for big exercises). My problem was unregulated calories in, and a tendency to overcompensate a bit.
> It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less.
Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article:
But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.
Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
> People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place
People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.
I think we have fitness wrong in this side of the world. I grew up seeing 60 year olds that were as fit as youths in the west.
They didn’t have a treadmill or did keto diets.
My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle and to avoid lots of western food (sugar, processed, empty calories, I drink only water, etc).
I don’t count calories and can eat twice in the morning. If I counted, both morning meals are less than 600 calories.
I don’t go to a gym, but have maintained a <10% body fat (and 86kg at 190cm height) over the years (without feeling hungry all the time because I eat well). I just do body weight training and make my entire day active (even tho I’m a programmer).
For me, being in shape doesn’t need to be complicated.
There's only one way this actually happens for a majority of the population: exercise being built into daily habits, in a way that's so natural that it almost seems unavoidable.
The Netherlands seems to have the right of it: their urban design strongly supports walking and biking, and indeed, their rates of 'active transportation' are very high.
As a bonus, walk and bike infrastructure is quite cheap to build and maintain compared to car infrastructure.
Just a simple scan of some foods and some exercise calorie amounts and times should show it.
Reasonably tiring exercise on a bike could burn 10 Cal per minute, so maybe 600 an hour. But swallowing a few packs of crisps or a few chocolate bars could fill that right back up in a couple of minutes. If you were speed eating you could swallow it in under a minute.
Think about if your weight is steady, how long you spend eating and how long you spend using energy. It can easily be the case that you spent all your calories in 23.5 hours and were eating for just half an hour.
The time ratio is so lopsided it's hard to come up with a plan where exercise carries most of the weight loss vs just eating less.
If you think of your energy use as base rate plus exercise rate, because your base rate is sustained for the whole day you'd have to exercise like crazy for a long time to make up any difference to what you eat.
That’s the part that’s at least slightly exaggerated, or giving a misleading impression. Exercise absolutely burns more than 0 calories, and I definitely was burning some. Calorie burn from exercise is straightforward to approximately measure, and many people walking around with iWatches and FitBits and heart monitors are doing so. What’s well known to many people is that exercise burns far fewer calories than you wish it did, and less than it feels like. ;) The article points out that aerobic exercise adjusts your RMR and it becomes more efficient over time. However, it does not become 100% efficient, even though the article seems to suggest it and doesn’t bother with any fine print. It doesn’t bother to differentiate between running and weight lifting either, and we adjust to those differently.
Anecdotally, I have absolutely ran off a bad diet. I burn ~150-250 calories a mile and have ran off 2000+ calories to eat what I wanted with no discernible increase in weight. Did this for years.
In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.
Yeah. Cyclists in the Tour de France typically eat 5000 calories a day, often more in particularly difficult stages. Obviously none of them have a weight problem.
"Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.
It's a question of what your baseline is. It seems OP may have had (say) a 3500 calorie diet as a baseline, then started exercising, perhaps burning an extra 500 calories but now consuming 4000 calories to feel normal. In your case, it sounds like you had a lower baseline--let's say 2500 calories. You may have consumed as much as 2000 additional calories, but you ran it all off--your comparatively lower calorie count was what felt normal to you, and what you made a habit of aiming for.
It's not true though. If you exercise enough you will be in a calorie deficit regardless of what you eat. I knew rowers that couldn't keep weight on during the season no matter what they ate, and they ate a lot. The exercise is what is causing the calorie deficit, not watching what they ate.
But you can eat the calories you spend in just a few minutes. If you have a pile of Mars bars, that will supply enough energy to compensate an hour on the treadmill.
Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.
It is an exception though. Very few people exercise to this level. Similarly you can eat as much as you can if you nicking across Antarctic, but this is not exactly a typical activity.
You tracked what you ate was the key difference. Not the exercise. I did an experiment on myself. I deliberately did not do any exercise and changed my diet. I loss 5kg quicker on my diet than I did when I was running 10km regularly. I think its counter productive to see an obese person in the gym or running as this will certainly lead to injury. The narrative around weight loss should always be eat less calories and food that don't encourage hunger.
If you train for endurance sports you'll definitely lose weight without much attention to your diet.
For example, with marathon training, once you start to hit the 6 plus mile your daily run eats up over 1,000 calories.
Near the end of your training your long run days become over 2,000 calories, and even your easy runs becomes 1000+.
That's essentially an entire extra meal, and you're running 5-6 days a week.
If you're just going to the gym for 30-45 minutes, 3-4 days a week, diet will be essential to losing weight. But if you're running 1 hr + a day and 2+ hrs at least once a week it's hard to get enough calories.
This doesn't fit my observations entirely. I have a friend who runs several miles every morning. He says he does this so he can eat an extra 300-500 calories a day ... which he does. He's thin.
I certainly get that less eating is more effective than exercise but in my head I think as long as you burn more calories than you take in you should lose weight. So if you eat 1800 calories a day, assuming you need 2000 a day, you'll lose weight (-200). If you do some exercise that uses 500 calories and eat 2300 calories you're still at (-200)
FWIW, I agree with your observations, so it’s possible I gave the wrong impression. After learning how to track my intake, it changed my view on exercise, and sometimes I also use exercise as a way to eat more. :)
Like many people I consciously and unconsciously resisted the idea of tracking calories and using calories-in/calories-out (CICO) as my primary tool for both weight loss and exercise. It’s not perfect, as many people here are pointing out. However, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and there are scant alternatives that are demonstrably better. I changed my mind and now I see calorie tracking as a way to be better at both exercise and weight loss. Good exercise training, especially weight lifting, requires eating a bit more than expenditure, and good weight loss requires eating a bit less. Either way, I agree with you that exercise can play a valuable part in weight loss, and I think it has many other physical and mental health benefits.
I dont know ... this one is often repeated. Including in context when completely sedentary people want to improve health (as opposed to "I want loose weight for aesthetic reasons").
> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate
Your body is actually building muscles after exercising. It is also repairing damage caused by exercising. You actually should eat more, but more of the right stuff.
I did… the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of humanity? ;)) was I overcompensated, I ate more than I needed to build muscles and recover from exercise. So I gained weight slowly, or for long periods of time, just failed to lose the extra weigh I had through exercise alone. My problem is that exercise without calorie tracking doesn’t help me lose weight, I have to do both. And once I learned to do both, I automatically figured out at the same time how to lose weight without exercising at all. I still exercise, but now I get to use exercise as a way not just to get strong, but also to eat extra snacks. :)
In my (extensive) experience, losing weight is predicated on accurate calorie counting. The trick is to use exercise to lighten the perceived difficulty of your caloric deficit. For example if you're trying to lose a pound a week, it's a lot easier to eat 250 cal below your TDEE and walk for 2.5 miles than it is to eat 500 cal below your TDEE.
> we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into
This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"
It seems to me that CICO is less of a myth and more of an "incomplete model." Having a model is an improvement over no model at all, even if it's oversimplified IMO. For very overweight people it probably doesn't matter quite as much.
If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.
CICO is almost as pernicious and ubiquitous. It really grinds my gears when people try to use “intuition” to understand something super complex with no data at all. People talk about “metabolism” the same way.
Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
This misses the point of the article, it isn't that you unconsciouly eat more when you exercise, it's that moderate exercise simply doesn't burn that many calories (if any) once your body is accustomed to it.
Yeah, that’s not really true, because physics. The article’s “myth busting” is overstating the evidence. Human metabolic systems do have some adaptation. It slows down a bit when we’re not eating enough to maintain status quo, and it speeds up a bit when we’re exercising more. But it doesn’t come anywhere close to compensating for all of the effort. If you read more carefully, you will find that the article is talking about compensating behaviors, in fact quite similar to what happens to me when I overeat. The other compensating behavior mentioned in the article is becoming more sedentary after exercise, this has some of the same effect as eating, however it’s far easier to accidentally over-compensate by eating than by following exercise with couch time.
I absolutely unconsciously eat more when I exercise. I know because I measured it. And once I measured it and focused on exercising while also eating a constant amount, surprise surprise, I actually lost weight. This is well known to many many people, well studied and understood, and has a metric ton of actual data to back it up. If this article is claiming to challenge that, then this article is wrong. (But IMO it’s not actually challenging known physics, it’s just written in a misleading way.)
Exercise is portrayed as virtuous in our society, whereas counting calories and portions isn't.
I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.
You can totally loose weight by exercising, it's just regular people don't exercise hard enough. If you do pro athlete levels of exercise it will start affecting your weight a lot.
I've never met someone doing pro-athlete levels of exercise that doesn't stick to some sort of regimented diet. Have you? And even if you do meet those folks, chances are they simply don't eat as much as before due to spending more time, well, exercising, and it makes for a caloric deficit, albeit accidental.
And that's the thing: Once you start changing your diet - the stuff you eat or the timing of your food - to do the exercise, you can't really say it is the exercise affecting your weight.
Well you can, but only if the exercise is putting your calories under your TDEE. Sure there are slight body changes ongoing if you exercise enough (recomp) while staying on your normal intake, but basically
I'm not affiliated with Noom [1] in any way but want to plug them because I've seen the incredible results from following their recommendations.
People talk a lot about reducing caloric intake but there's little talk on how a normal person can hope to achieve that. The key Noom offers is calorie density. If you eat lots of food that has a low calorie density per unit of volume (eg cabbage, cauliflower) you can reduce your calories and still feel very full. Just go easy on the extremely high calorie density foods (eg olive oil) and you'll be more likely to hit your goals.
Also, it's really really hard to do calorie restrictions AND have intense exercise. From what I've seen in the Noom community people have a lot more success when they first focus on losing pounds then focus on building strength and fitness; many people at that point find they have to increase calories in order to continue seeing results when they're working out a lot. I suppose it takes a lot of calories to build muscle. I wonder what your body does to those injured muscles if it doesn't have the calories available to repair them?
The general rule I find helpful is that diet=size and exercise=shape. Being aware of this really helps me limit my food intake even when I’m exercising a ton.
That really depends on the exercise you’re doing and what “shape” you’re going for. Putting tons of time into running won’t make someone look like they lift weights. Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape” except to the extent that it helps them lose weight.
I’m not so sure it is understating, at the risk of projecting out from a sample size of 1 (my personal experience). I’ve been quite active for a couple of decades with a semi-regular gym routine and multiple marathons (and all of the running required in between). Holidays and other things would interrupt schedules from time to time, I might lapse for an extended period, but for the better part of 20 years I’ve weighed 76kgs +/- 3kgs. Stop running and eat bad for a few months I hit the top end of that range. But I revert back very quickly.
Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter.
It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.
From my own experience, if I'm lifting weights and working out, my hunger shoots up and I start wanting to eat everything in sight.
When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.
You can keep weight off with exercise; it's just a lot more than you would think.
I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts.
Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.
I once saw a data tables with lots of diets. There was a column with the name of the diet, what you typically ate on the diet, etc. But the final column was "How does this diet work?" Every single row said the same thing, something like: "By eating a caloric deficit".
Yeah more or less exactly right. It’s maybe not hungrier per se, but I was eating until I felt “full”. I found out there are a couple of different problems with that. Waiting until “full” means I’m not stopping early and not able to put myself into calorie deficit, which is a longer-winded way of saying yeah I just got 300 calories hungrier. But I also have discovered that I’m a little miscalibrated on what “full” should feel like. I was eating a little past full and into a deeper level of satiated. Meaning, in short, slightly overeating.
And to add a little color, my exercise routines have usually involved more than 300 cals of workout, probably closer to 700-1000. This is important, because when not tracking the extra food, it’s really easy to overshoot 1000 calories by 300. The exercises have varied a lot over the years, from running and biking to weight lifting and sports like soccer & ultimate frisbee. I’ve been aiming for around 3 days/week workouts for like 10-20 years. I have periods of less, and occasionally more (especially in the summer) and have managed to keep it up more or less consistently. I eat more when exercising, but never lost weight consistently until I learned the open secret, that for me monitoring intake is what makes exercise work as a weight loss tool.
It's even worse than that. It's about eating the same thing every day, that's how you lose weight. Most people give up because you have to know what's in different food and then track it somehow. Counting calories is a herculean task, but if you already know the same exact food has 80% of daily calorie intake then you never have to count calories and there is literally no work involved in losing weight.
It's about eating the same thing every day, that's how you lose weight
This simply isn't true at all, and you don't have to count calories per se. I lost quite a bit simply changing my diet. I kept most of it off for years: I gained some back when I quit nicotine, though (Quitting smoking changed my sense of hunger, and Im still upset about that). It wasn't quick weight loss and it came in stages, but I didn't count calories nor spend too much time thinking about food. I simply focused on getting more fruits, vegetables, and legumes when I could. (I completely dropped meat outside of fish, but it isn't necessary and was losing weight before that). I also rarely eat out, even when I've had work/school (I just brought something). This meant I could pretty well eat what I wanted and would just choose lower calorie things by default. As long as I ate fairly well most of the time*, I was OK. I didn't have to suffer the PMS hunger I get either: I would just eat something.
You can eat the same thing every day, mind you, and I've met a lot of folks that do. Generally, however, it is a lifestyle choice and you have to be careful to make sure you have enough vitamins and things. One of the three folks I'm thinking of made themselves sick by not including enough vegetables.
You need exercise and a healthy diet to lose weight. Sure you could sit on the couch all day and eat very little and you'd probably lose weight, but you'd have to eat so little that it probably wouldn't be possible without developing an eating disorder. However, if your diet is really bad, eating way too much sugary food, then yes, exercise alone won't really help much.
Yes, many people are selectively deaf to the phrase "combined with a sensible diet" when it comes to weight loss, or other health advice. I'd venture that it's subconscious desires to keep the food intake that invoke mental filters to just not hear that part; or, to rationalize that your food intake is ok.
I had a friend who wanted to lose weight, and so he’d walk about one mile to a local restaurant, where he’d proceed to eat a 1,200 calorie meal. It’s not as if he didn’t burn calories while walking, but he severely overestimated how many calories he had burned.
that s terrible. I thought it would be common knowledge by now, the mixed really does a disservice to people who genuinely want to lose weight. I think the myth is perpetuated by sports goodS marketing
I mean, yes... but at least for me exercise also makes me crave healthier foods. As a result I end up sometimes eating more volume but less calories. Like, when I'm cycling regularly it's hard not to lose weight.
1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
2. The only plausible mechanisms for why exercise wouldn't result in more overall caloric burn is that less energy is expended in non exercising states, eg the body is trying to conserve energy and either reduces metabolism or reduces fidgeting, walking, etc. This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
1. Phelps seems to be guessing: "Maybe eight to ten thousand calories per day," he writes... Also, the research shows there is extreme variation in people's resting BMR (perhaps due to large variation in height, body weight, stress levels, etc), so you eating 3500 calories isn't decisive against the thesis of this article.
2. That is exactly his hypothesis, and he has produced evidence for this hypothesis in a recent experiment. I don't know why you are presenting this as some kind of counter-argument.
3. That blog post isn't a coherent critique. The post's two points are that the drinking solution is also used for measuring energy intake, and that the Hadza actually burn far less calories than Western people until such numbers are adjusted. This first point isn't relevant without further explanation, and the second point only serves to further support the thesis.
1. I used to eat less calories and exercise less and was fat. Also for elite athletes TEE experiments have been fine.
2. Studies in nutrition science are a dime a dozen. Like in psychology, you should apply common sense to interpret the results. In this case, the implication is that the Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human bodies.
> From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories.
That was my first thought as well.
It's even more evident with certain types of sports. Take cycling for example. Lifting mass up a mountain is going to take quite a bit of energy; maintaining a constant speed in the face of wind resistance will take energy. That energy has to come from somewhere.
> 1. then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories.
Some don't. Think about marathon runners (which would be pretty close to the tribe studied), they have a muscle ratio that is way lower than your Phelps example and their body composition if also probably more efficient than yours (I don't know you, but let's assume). I wouldn't be surprised if a pro marathon runner would have be close to your 3.5K a day when going through light training.
Think of it through different angles: mountain trekkers aren't packing 80kg of sugar to go through their trekking, their bodies are way more efficient at doing these tasks and need less calories to work than what we'd expect from a random person. It literally means doing more with less.
> This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
This happens to everyone. From your link: "In fact, your body is hard wired to maintain energy balance within a fairly small range."
> 3.
It seems well argued but just really nitpicky. It goes into the whole energy intake vs energy spent debate to explain why they don't agree with the methodology, but don't prove why they think the conclusion is wrong. It's as if I'd nitpick your use of calorie intake measurements and explain in great details how it's approximation of an approximation and we have no way to actually know someone's actual intake calorie, without ever engaging with your actual points.
> 1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
I agree and I'm in the same boat. After 10 years of running ~70km/week, I'm eating way more, have dropped 20lb, and am healthier and stronger.
> The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
I think people underestimate what being active and excercise actually mean. Our ancestors were vastly more active than we are today. The amount of movement that was required for foraging, hunting, agriculture is hard for most modern people to imagine.
Even the act of preparing the food that was gathered/hunted/harvested was so much more manual and energy intense than what we are accustomed to today.
For most of our evolutionary history basically everything we did was powered by our bodies. Today we have machines for everything, and a high standard of comfort.
It's true that calorie restriction is easier for most people than excercise, but I think it's because.. to put it bluntly.. we've become lazy.
>> somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato
What I got out of the article wasn't that sitting still and not thinking can somehow burn calories; just that strenuous mental activities can burn a great deal more energy in humans than in apes. This is believable to me. I'm a person who falls asleep doing math in my head every night. I got a chance, during a year of pandemic lockdown, to experiment with my own body in this way.
I only eat once per day. I don't keep fixed hours; sometimes I'll stay up for 24, sleep for 16; other times I'm regularly 8/16 sleep/wake. I don't have a set bedtime. I try to maintain 16/48 sleep/wake over any given period.
No matter what, I only eat one meal every 24 hours. I've been doing this for about 20 years.
This makes it easy to measure when I get hungry in relationship to my last meal. My body is well trained to expect about a 24 hour delay; I have no appetite and don't think about food until around 22 hours post-dinner.
Under lockdown conditions, I began to notice that I wasn't hungry as expected on days where I hadn't spent >= 6 hours working on strenuous code. If I took a day off and "couch potato'd", I might not eat at all for 48 hours. But if I focused on code for 8+ hours, I would be hungry on time or early.
I started to experiment with this. I figured out that if I took a 1 hour walk, plus 4 hours programming, it made me hungry right around where 6+ hours of code did. A 1 hour walk - to me - seems about equal to 2 hours of writing code in terms of what my body feedback gives me about my calorie burn.
I don't walk very fast, and I code very intensely.
But that's just it - this article is about solving math problems as a way to burn calories. I have a nice new M1 Mac that only ever turns its fans on or gets warm when I'm using all 10 cores. Last night my task falling asleep was to calculate randomly chosen x/128ths as percentages to five decimal places. My daytime task was harder; and now I'm hungry. And I haven't walked anywhere today.
However: Couch potato, this ain't. And the point about the body's reduced expectation of physical output is probably accurate as well.
Yes, those marathon runners mentioned might reduce their TEE from 6200 to 4900 kcal/day. But that is still way more than most office workers eat.
And if you check the article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw0341#
==
The reduction in TEE among RAUSA subjects can be partly attributed to marginally reduced body mass and daily mileage (table S3). Still, even after accounting for these changes, Week 20 TEE was 596 kcal/day lower (range, 400 to 923 kcal/day) than expected
==
So they did loose weight during the marathons and the metabolic compensation is less than half of what you would think reading the original article.
==
...
The magnitude of metabolic response in RAUSA athletes (~600 kcal/day, ~20% TEE) is similar to the degree of adaptation reconstructed for the most physically active subjects in a recent cross-sectional study (17) and may reflect humans’ maximal capacity for metabolic compensation.
==
So if 20% percent is the maximum, it means that if you try to outrun your diet, you might have to eventually exercise 25% more. Except by then you will probably have more muscle mass that will burn more calories even when not exercising. And you will be able to exercise more in less time.
I don't think you read it properly ... what I got from the article is that there is large energy compensation happening, but it's not endless, there is a threshold.
Ie. scientists wouldn't think that average Hadza hunter burns same calories as average sedentary guy from US ... which is the point of this new discovery ... the lifestyle is different enough that you would not think the expenditure will be similar. We always knew there is compensation happening, but we didn't think that much.
But, if Phelps burns 8k calories ... then he perhaps far far exceeds the amount of exercise the average Hadza hunter outputs ... at that point, the body can't just shift some energy expenditure around and compensate for it .. it will in fact need lot more energy to support the physical output.
The article even proposes what the ceiling of input calories (and therefore sustainable output expenditure) is. 4650 cal for 85kg man. So obviously, it doesn't claim that every human on the planet burns the same amount of calories no matter what they do. It only claims that for example energy requirement differences between somebody who outputs 200kcal or 1000kcal in exercise are nearly erased because the body compensates on the BMR. Obviously there is a hard limit on how much body can compensate and save energy by cutting it from other processes.
Don't forget Phelps also spends most of his exercise time in water. The body expends energy to maintain thermal equilibrium, and water absorbs heat much more quickly than the air. With several hours of swimming each day, that energy will add up.
Very relevant point. They sure as hell don't make the "Olympic tier" pools at my gym anywhere near body temperature; I probably spent the first few minutes psyching myself up for the shock then another few minutes getting used to the temperature and recovering from that shock. I don't know for sure but based on my understanding, based on the size of the pool my body would expend energy at a tremendous rate even if I just grabbed the ladder rail and stayed still.
I do think the point is also partly that what most people consider 'a good amount of exercise' isn't really very strenuous. Doing a bit of cardio and weights at the gym 3x a week isn't enough to offset a bad diet. If you run 10k every day, that's a very different ballgame because you meaningfully burn more calories than a regular diet gives you.
It's also incredibly easy, at least in America, to consume way too many calories. To meaningfully lose weight you have to drastically change your diet or drastically up your movement.
But, surely the researcher is aware of people like Phelps. It wasn’t addressed in this article for the masses, but I wonder if he addresses people like Phelps in his actual research papers.
> If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
Simply having more muscle mass can burn calories too. Most people don't spend most of their time training either, so comparing to elite athletes is fairly irrelevant.
Swedish speed skater Nils Van Der Poel drinks cream and eats crisps, LOTS of it, while training just to get enough calories in his body to continue training so number 1 is faulty.
A linked article describing a scientist trying to rigorously find out how weight changes and energy expenditure and diet are connected, revealing the little we do know and the vast sea of what we do not know.
The discussion here: full of anecdotes and bro science berating one another "that's not how it works, it works like this", "I personally do this-and-that", "you just have to x-y-z, it's that simple".
Yes, but this is one study out of thousands. It's not because it's a paper by PhDs that you just have to take all their results as the new truth and ignore the rest of the literature. It's way way more "bro science"-like to just look at the latest controversial study/paper/research's results while ignoring everything else. Consensus is important and even more so with such a controversial result.
Also, how is it bad for people to contrast what they see in real life with what the study shows? Michael Phelps and other athletes actually eat more calories, that's a fact. So it makes sense to question why that would be the case if the conclusion we see here was true. Again, a scientific paper isn't the bible-you can actually question it, and you don't have to just accept it as truth.
This article is not a scientific paper. It's describing some effects that are observed in a lab.
The world is not so binary as you make it out to be. The article is not forming a "new truth". Of course elite athletes are eating a lot. Nobody was questioning that. Neither do anecdotes stating "I trained my butt off, it worked" negate what's in the article.
The topic is complex, too complex to be pressed into a simple slogan. The article is not "controversial" to anybody remotely knowledgeable about biology.
You can question that the world is complex, but that won't make it less complex.
The article itself mixes results of studies with strong opinions like:
> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist > John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie > ideas that refuses to die.”
Yes. And no. Bro science is more or less useless. But the article isn't super useful either. Calories burned are "adjusted for nonfat body mass." Adjusted how?
Fat stores energy. Food adds energy. Exercise uses energy. Those aren't "myths." The article (not talking about the scientist) is very difficult to understand, but it seems to come down on the "myth" side of that dilemma. Mostly. Kind of.
When you do the math, your body turns out to be extremely efficient. Two full hours of very hard exercise burns the equivalent of one average sized lunch meal.
Skipping meals/cutting calories is, by far, the easiest way to lose weight.
It's a popular science article. What did you expect? If you want all the details, read the actual published studies. For the general public, scientists need to simplify things.
The problem is that the funders of scientific research (corporations, governments, military) see zero upside in finding simple answers. There's simply no money in 'better living'.
This sort of research is only of value in so far as it moves forward some sort of saleable treatment.
In the meantime, the more confused you are about what to eat and how to treat your body - the better. It is when people are damaged that the medical industry makes its money.
In summary, the incentives for health are in reverse (and perverse, IMO). People get paid for treating disease (and even keeping them unwell!) but not for keeping people healthy.
On the other hand, the incentives on Youtube are the other way around. No matter how complex an issue, "these 5 tricks will make you lose weight" or "avoid these 3 foods and you'll be as ripped as me" are what gets the most clicks. And is always total crap.
> Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass.
I love this intro.
> His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits.
This is funny to me because my own logs reflect this going back to about 2015. I can more easily drop 10, 20, or however many pounds when not exercising than I can when exercising. That was a really weird one because it opened up a bunch of other problems.
One follow-on problem that came up quickly: How to develop skills requiring fitness during those times, or how to maintain endurance levels when you're intentionally lowering your exercise exposure so you can lose weight. That kind of situation is pretty interesting.
> Azy, a 113-kilogram (249 lb.) adult male (orangutan), for example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day ... When adjusted for body mass, (humans) burn ... 60% more than orangutans
Oh and
> “She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”
This is really curious and fascinating stuff. Thanks op for posting.
PS:
> He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
An interesting source here is the Fiennes and Stroud expedition to cross Antarctica in 1992. Stroud (a physician) actually tested how many calories they were burning each day using the doubly-labeled water method, and at one point (ascent to the polar plateau) it was up to 11k. So it is definitely possible to temporarily push the limit - as the article acknowledges - but these are exceptional circumstances.
Another related extreme case was the first person to solo-ski to the north pole. They pre-loaded, mostly on olive oil, packing on tens of kg in body fat, all of which (and more) was gone by the time they were done. I don't recall the daily calorie expenditures but it was gigantic. They did this because there is some mechanical advantage carrying a good chunk of one's energy supply directly on your own bones rather than towing it in the sled.
Some friends and I are currently doing a thru hike of the Appalachian Trail, and only ten days in the four of us clocked 7, 8, 10, and 17 pounds lost... But we're hiking 6+ hours a day with heavy packs. We've been eating easily ~3000kcal each daily. I think at the extreme edges, nutrition science is a lot less well understood. We were very surprised to see we'd lost anything at all, as we're stopping to eat 300 calories almost every waking hour.
6hrs a day @ 3 mph = 18 miles per day, 100 calories per mile without packs = 1800 calories per day on top of basal metabolic needs. Given your user name, I'd guess that you're male, and given that you're hiking the AT and have already started, I'd also guess that you're younger rather than older, so I'd peg your basal metabolism at around 2200-2400 calories. Add in the packs and the hills, and it should be clear why you're losing weight.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...
The estimate is probably off for extreme circumstances and those people probably aren’t fully digesting and using all of those calories. The accurate number would be interesting.
I too have found that cardio isn’t very good for dropping weight, but packing on some muscle does a lot to shift body composition. Maintaining more lean mass simply requires more calories.
I'm baffled by the take away from the study. If a sedentary person and an athletic person burn about the same, doesn't that just mean the sedentary person's energy is being spent on maintaining and accumulating fat mass? But why is that waffled about instead of stated?
Major Edit: more concise example
>As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
I think a lot of these stats are myths meant to accentuate the difficulty of the task. Pontzer’s book discusses Michael Phelps and the lack of an actual source to the rumours he was eating gargantuan amounts during training.
So I'm not sure about everest climbers, 20k sounds pretty crazy.
But I can speak first hand as a former athlete who has had access to NFL players and Olympians. 8-10k during peak active training happens all the time
Long term average might be 4-5k.
You have to remember that these people are often on PEDs that allow them to train all day.
Shit I was a serious powerlifter back in the day and would routinely eat 6-7k calories (weighed) during 2adays depending on how my weight was fluctuating. Add some more height, PEDs, and cardio and I'm almost there.
I think the difference between what is mentioned in the article is #1 obviously PEDs #2 body breakdown and recovery, which might be more in e.g. lifters and swimmers than long distance runners
I believe him. As a nowhere-near-olympics division 1 swimmer, I had developed a major weight loss problem my freshman year. I actually was required to log my calories and meet with a sports nutritionist weekly. After 6000 calories a day, I was shoving so much food in my mouth, I felt like it wasn't possible to eat any more than I did. She prescribed Snickers bars as a way to top off my calories every day without contributing too much to feeling full. I was targeting 7000 calories a day, and I don't think I ever consistently reached that goal, but around that time my weight stabilized.
There are a lot of people who maintain a high degree of fitness, and for them I can imagine 4000 calories is about right. But there are some types of training that are consistently pushing your physical limits. I don't have any sort of data to back this up, but it has long been my theory that the reason why elite athletes can burn so many calories is because they aren't actually burning them in the traditional sense of cells oxidizing chemical energy to create work...they've crossed over into the territory of muscle tissues being torn up and resynthesized so much that your body can no longer do so efficiently.
As an analogy, typically in manufacturing there are always efficiencies that can be extracted. But in very mature industries where there aren't any easy efficiencies to eek out of the system, you have to start making tradeoffs. One common tradeoff is throughout vs yield. You can increase your throughout, but in order to do do so, you have to cut corners on processes and subsequently increase the total amount of waste in the process.
And as a "maybe this is related" data point: 82% of marathon runners suffer from Acute Kidney Injury. Your kidneys have one job: waste disposal. It would be easy to infer that at the boundaries of human conditioning, the kidneys aren't up to the task of processing all of the waste that the body is producing.
Michael Phelps directly says in one of his auto biographies that he was eating 8-10k calories a day. I don’t think you can call that a rumor.
Of course he could be off a bit, but it seems unlikely that he’s off by a factor of 2.
He lists the foods that he ate, and it definitely sounds like it was close to 10k calories. His coach also discussed his diet, and backs up his claims.
I've read a decent number of books about climbing big peaks. In all of them they said they were so nauseous on summit day from being in the death zone, they could barely force down a protein bar.
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
Yeah, I'm not convinced the article passes the smell test.
Michael Phelps discussed his diet extensively, suggesting he ate 10k a day while training. Other athletes talk about similar meal sizes. This suggests that once they stop exercising (thus eventually losing lean muscle mass and requiring less calories) that they would not see a change in their weight, yet there are a lot of old fat athletes (possibly just of a certain generation) out there.
Where are you getting those numbers for Everest climbers? I have a very hard time believing them.
High altitude suppresses appetite in general and your body does not get enough oxygen to meaningfully process food above about 25,000 feet. Everest summit day via the South Col starts at about that altitude.
Plus it’s freezing cold and everything takes forever to do. I don’t think there is much eating at all on Everest summit day, let alone 20,000 calories.
It raises the blood sugar levels as the body supplies the muscles with carbohydrates, and triggers a complementary response in appetite hormones.
Finally, and most importantly:
Exercise releases dopamine.
Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule deficit equals starvation.
So whilst it does not directly impact weight loss. It still makes it (a bit) easier.
Plus there are an enormous quantity of other factors in health that are impacted by exercise.
Bodily strength is entirely responsible, for example, for stopping you getting a "bad back."
The less strength you have in your back muscles, the more strain your vertebra and ligaments are under. Hence your body falls apart quickly and more easily.
You definitely need both kilo-joule control and strengthening exercise if you want to keep your life on track.
For long years I didn't really try to loose weight, because I thought it would require me to work out, which I didn't want to do. I know enough people with joint problems very likely relating to the amount of work out they did/do, even though they never were overweight. Two years back I decided to go against convential wisdom and attempt weight loss without any work out at all. With tremendous success. I understand that working out helps general health, but so does weight loss. So I refuse to feel bad.
It's so weird that you feel pressure to feel bad about how you went about it :( I apologize that society is so messed up. Caloric reduction without exercise is totally a valid way to lose weight! There are plenty of people that do it - you get tired when you diet, and so "hibernating" can help. It works for you and that's all that matters.
I know, for instance, Penn Teller lost his weight in the same way - he decided to just eat baked/boiled potatoes with nothing else and just chilled out for a 100 days and lost 100 lbs. That's what worked for him!
I feel like it's a more complicated story going on.
Post exercise I will often have a sort of hunger roller coaster. Naively, imagining the body's metabolism, hunger is responding to perception of a calorie deficit in the blood : organs demanding energy and blood sugar decreasing, forcing burning of calories from stored reserves.
But what if your body is able to efficiently maintain glucose levels? in that case exercise might not induce hunger, in fact it might be that exercise stimulates alternative pathways that release energy and these stay active even after you finish exercising. This might well be much more the case for well trained athletes than regular people. Or it might depend on diet or loads of other factors.
Personally, I have found that exercise is nearly pointless any time other than right before I eat. So exercising before breakfast is perfect because the stimulated hunger response is immediately satisfied by eating breakfast. But I don't eat more breakfast than I usually would, so it's a win.
While I don't experience any euphoria, I agree that intermittent fasting doesn't affect my mood negatively. After the first few weeks, you don't even think about it anymore. And being able to go out, eat a normal meal at a restaurant without worrying about math, or 'cheating on a diet', is pretty positive mentally when you can still fit into a size 6 dress.
"You can’t outrun a bad diet" seems to be the party line among fitness people these days. Anecdotally speaking that's not really true for a lot of people. I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm. Before I picked up running I was moderately overweight. If I can't run for a prolonged period of time, then I start gaining weight again. I've met plenty of people who run similar mileage and many of them also have pretty bad dietary habits but none of them are oeverweight. Note that I'm not saying that this is healthy (it clearly isn't).
However, I still think that there is a lot of truth to the "you can't outrun a bad diet" statement. A lot of people who occasionally go for a run are likely to overestimate their energy expenditure and feel like they have to eat a cow to compensate. I think, however, that the statement becomes less and less true the more excessive the exercise gets. If you burn thousands of calories day in day out with exercise it seems to become harder to overcompensate this every time with excess food intake.
I think the bigger issue with exercise is a mental one. Weight loss seems to be a pretty bad motivation for exercising. Most people I know who picked up running for the sole purpose of losing weight eventually gave up or they are stuck with their 5km weekend park run, which, of course, is rather pointless for their objective. 100% of the avid runners I know (including myself) don't care about their weight. I could probably lose more weight (or improve my long term health) if I changed my diet, but it's simply something that I'm not interested in. I run because it's fun and a somewhat low body weight seems to be a by-product of that.
I think I agree with your general point, and specifically agree that that statement is targeted as "mainstream advice", and might not be literally true. However, one point of disagreement:
> I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm.
That is not necessarily a "bad diet" for weight loss purposes. It's an unhealthy diet, but as long as you're not eating too much of all those foods, it won't make you gain weight. It's only bad because most people who are eating these kinds of foods will be eating too much of them (because they are much less filling for the amount of calories that they contain).
Yeah. I think the advice on diet is a good one for mainstream audiences. Giving nuance is difficult when people are looking for quick answers.
I had the same experience for a long time. People would see me eat Oreos, pizza, ice cream, pop tarts, etc. and they’d say, “how are you so incredibly thin if you eat all that garbage?” And I’d respond that I just eat less - I don’t eat a lot. And it was true. I’d eat garbage but I’d eat so little that I’d maintain an incredibly low weight. Now as I’m older and stress has gotten better - I’ve started eating more and gained weight due to it. It’s all due to the quantity/amount-of-calories.
The article seems to miss what is (at least to me) the most interesting follow-up question: if exercise doesn’t cause a person to burn significantly more Calories throughout the day to induce weight loss, then what does?
I’m somewhat hard-pressed to believe the answer is diet alone. Anecdotally, when I was running 100 miles per week in college for cross country, I ate three or four giant meals per day and maintained a very low weight. Ten years later, I have an injury that makes most types of exercise difficult, and I’ve observed that I really can’t eat more than one meal per day (dinner), otherwise my weight starts to creep up.
I find it odd that Calories are used in relation to weight gain, because (kilo)calories are a unit of energy, and excess weight is due to excess fat. Is there a simple linear relationship between the extractable energy content in food (as determined by the Atwater system) and the conversion of food components into fat by the digestive system? I find that hard to believe. Shouldn’t we be using a mass balance rather than an energy balance? If you could observe digestion at the atomic level, you would simply quantify which atoms from food end up in fat stores and which leave the body via other processes. Presumably, these atoms could then be bucketed into source categories (e.g. certain types of proteins or carbohydrates). I wouldn’t be surprised if exercise somehow alters the fat accumulation process even if it doesn’t significantly affect human metabolism.
Fat stores are considered, metabolically, as stored energy as they expand and diminish based on the metabolizable energy of the diet, which may be different from the measured total energy.
If I recall correctly, capital "C" Calorie, used in nutrition, is another term for kilocalorie. Lowercase "c" calorie is the SI unit. 1 kcal/Calorie is 1000 calories.
I would highly encourage anyone to read Pontzer’s book, Burn. I just finished it and found it to be incredibly eye opening and well written. The TL;DR is that we need to think of calories like a relatively fixed budget rather than additive, and that the primary benefit of exercise is that it consumes that budget more than it expands it (hence not effective for weight loss), but by consuming that budget there is less budget to go around for unhealthy things like inflammation, excess hormone creation, etc (which is why exercise is so beneficial to health).
> but by consuming that budget there is less budget to go around for unhealthy things like inflammation, excess hormone creation, etc (which is why exercise is so beneficial to health).
You dont understand inflammation, inflammation is like a nuclear bomb going off, however certain chemicals found in the diet will turn that nuclear bomb into an array of guided missiles.
We are complex chemical reactions, eat the wrong stuff you get sick, eat the right stuff you get well, but you need to make the right chemical reactions take place and reduce the wrong chemical reactions.
The problem with scientific study is they generally focus on what they can test directly or indirectly this is why we now see complete reversals in some medical thinking & theories.
Sure exercise and other output will consume calories, but if you focus on just calories, you ignore the properties of the chemicals and ill health will occur.
He is referring to chronic low grade inflammation - not acute inflammation from specific chemicals. He cites studies. If you read them I would love to hear your take because you are correct - I am not an expert on inflammation!
Readit News
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.
I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
I believe you meant kilocalories
1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate.
2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate.
4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate.
A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate.
Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.
This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.
I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.
Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.
NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.
Is even that sufficient? Like, would you be able to tell the difference between "oxidation done by the body to generate energy for human cells" and "oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"? Maybe you could tell by the mixture of other gases, but I suspect CO2 itself wouldn't suffice.
This is a major education/communication issue. When I switched to weightlifting, I started seeing rapid and significant results. And I don't even really sweat from it (except on leg day)
It may be less effective for losing weight, but exercise, including and especially cardio, is a great and essential strategy for other health reasons.
This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.
Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so Strength training to get strong.
HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.
You have to get into really long cardio sessions with no carbohydrate supplements before that has any significant catabolic effect. This is not a concern for casual athletes.
Strength training is great, but it should be combined with some form of cardio in a comprehensive fitness program.
First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.
There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.
Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.
Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.
I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
I am not intending to dispute the fact that you ate more to compensate - you say you did, and I don't doubt it. Nor am I doubting that weight gain is a function of net caloric intake; it is just a suggestion of another way exercise may affect this.
FWIW most of my exercise is running, hiking or kayaking. I am not sure (or perhaps that should be 'even more doubtful') that kayaking has the same effect.
There’s no doubt that appetite and everything around dieting and weight loss has a huge range of variation in behavior and what works. In addition to learning to separate exercise from food, the other thing that took me too long to learn is that weight loss is more mental exercise than physical. Figuring out how to trick myself into calorie tracking and habit forming isn’t easy, and my tricks on myself clearly don’t work for everyone.
This is my experience as well. I also had a trainer confirm this.
I used to eat before and after a workout because I bought into the idea of the body needing fuel to power the workout and fuel to recover. I ended up eating when I wasn’t hungry and feeling heavy or sluggish.
She said the appetite suppression after a workout could last 30-120min and to only eat when I felt hungry. I felt much better after adjusting my eating habits.
I think moderate exercise can help with getting used to not over-eating. More strenuous exercise seems to make the body crave larger meals often negating any calories burned.
It doesn't really suppress the urge to eat though. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I must count my calories, I have been counting them for 15+ years now and it has become part of my life.
Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.
It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook.
Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.
If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories
If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner (which is typically bigger than lunch)
So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
When I used to do heavy training (long distance running, weight training) I would eat close to 8k calories a day and I was in fantastic shape. Eating more was necessary to survive, given how much energy I was expending.
The thing is, the 300 calories from rowing shouldn't be compared to the absolute calorific requirement (say 2500 calories) but the surplus. So Maybe I'm overweight because I need 2500 and I eat 3000. Thats 500 too much, but take out 300 and that's 60% of what I need to at least reach equilibrium. It makes a huge difference to how much I need to sacrifice out of my diet.
"You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories.
It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever.
> So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise.
The real takeaway is that there are no absolutes.
The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.
The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.
Rough math: 3 * 300 * 4 = 3600 calories surplus/month. A pound of adipose tissue has ~3500 calories IIRC. So you're now gaining a pound of fat a month, and you're not even indulging yourself, really.
In reality, physical activity and diet aren't so steady, so some months you maintain weight, some you lose, and some you gain a lot. But over time it averages out, and you've put on 12lbs in a year.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.
I was in the best shape of my life, felt great and ate whatever I wanted without thinking about it. BUT I was spending 4 hours per day exercising.
Now I have a 6 week old baby and WFH... I manage a 30 minute Peloton a few times a week. Maybe. Even though I try to pay attention the pounds have crept on because there's so little margin for error on 1500 calories/day.
Calorie counting is no way to live, IMO. I miss the days of a long run and guilt-free cheese and beer after :)
Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article:
But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.
Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.
They didn’t have a treadmill or did keto diets.
My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle and to avoid lots of western food (sugar, processed, empty calories, I drink only water, etc).
I don’t count calories and can eat twice in the morning. If I counted, both morning meals are less than 600 calories.
I don’t go to a gym, but have maintained a <10% body fat (and 86kg at 190cm height) over the years (without feeling hungry all the time because I eat well). I just do body weight training and make my entire day active (even tho I’m a programmer).
For me, being in shape doesn’t need to be complicated.
There's only one way this actually happens for a majority of the population: exercise being built into daily habits, in a way that's so natural that it almost seems unavoidable.
The Netherlands seems to have the right of it: their urban design strongly supports walking and biking, and indeed, their rates of 'active transportation' are very high.
As a bonus, walk and bike infrastructure is quite cheap to build and maintain compared to car infrastructure.
As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.
Reasonably tiring exercise on a bike could burn 10 Cal per minute, so maybe 600 an hour. But swallowing a few packs of crisps or a few chocolate bars could fill that right back up in a couple of minutes. If you were speed eating you could swallow it in under a minute.
Think about if your weight is steady, how long you spend eating and how long you spend using energy. It can easily be the case that you spent all your calories in 23.5 hours and were eating for just half an hour.
The time ratio is so lopsided it's hard to come up with a plan where exercise carries most of the weight loss vs just eating less.
If you think of your energy use as base rate plus exercise rate, because your base rate is sustained for the whole day you'd have to exercise like crazy for a long time to make up any difference to what you eat.
The wild thing is he’s saying that’s not true either. He’s saying you never burned the extra calories in the first place.
In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.
"Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.
Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.
For example, with marathon training, once you start to hit the 6 plus mile your daily run eats up over 1,000 calories.
Near the end of your training your long run days become over 2,000 calories, and even your easy runs becomes 1000+.
That's essentially an entire extra meal, and you're running 5-6 days a week.
If you're just going to the gym for 30-45 minutes, 3-4 days a week, diet will be essential to losing weight. But if you're running 1 hr + a day and 2+ hrs at least once a week it's hard to get enough calories.
I certainly get that less eating is more effective than exercise but in my head I think as long as you burn more calories than you take in you should lose weight. So if you eat 1800 calories a day, assuming you need 2000 a day, you'll lose weight (-200). If you do some exercise that uses 500 calories and eat 2300 calories you're still at (-200)
Like many people I consciously and unconsciously resisted the idea of tracking calories and using calories-in/calories-out (CICO) as my primary tool for both weight loss and exercise. It’s not perfect, as many people here are pointing out. However, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and there are scant alternatives that are demonstrably better. I changed my mind and now I see calorie tracking as a way to be better at both exercise and weight loss. Good exercise training, especially weight lifting, requires eating a bit more than expenditure, and good weight loss requires eating a bit less. Either way, I agree with you that exercise can play a valuable part in weight loss, and I think it has many other physical and mental health benefits.
> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate
Your body is actually building muscles after exercising. It is also repairing damage caused by exercising. You actually should eat more, but more of the right stuff.
I did… the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of humanity? ;)) was I overcompensated, I ate more than I needed to build muscles and recover from exercise. So I gained weight slowly, or for long periods of time, just failed to lose the extra weigh I had through exercise alone. My problem is that exercise without calorie tracking doesn’t help me lose weight, I have to do both. And once I learned to do both, I automatically figured out at the same time how to lose weight without exercising at all. I still exercise, but now I get to use exercise as a way not just to get strong, but also to eat extra snacks. :)
This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"
The public health benefits are unparalleled.
To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation.
Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth
If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.
Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
I absolutely unconsciously eat more when I exercise. I know because I measured it. And once I measured it and focused on exercising while also eating a constant amount, surprise surprise, I actually lost weight. This is well known to many many people, well studied and understood, and has a metric ton of actual data to back it up. If this article is claiming to challenge that, then this article is wrong. (But IMO it’s not actually challenging known physics, it’s just written in a misleading way.)
I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.
And that's the thing: Once you start changing your diet - the stuff you eat or the timing of your food - to do the exercise, you can't really say it is the exercise affecting your weight.
- Calories over TDEE: You gain weight
- Calories under TDEE: You lose weight
It's that simple
People talk a lot about reducing caloric intake but there's little talk on how a normal person can hope to achieve that. The key Noom offers is calorie density. If you eat lots of food that has a low calorie density per unit of volume (eg cabbage, cauliflower) you can reduce your calories and still feel very full. Just go easy on the extremely high calorie density foods (eg olive oil) and you'll be more likely to hit your goals.
Also, it's really really hard to do calorie restrictions AND have intense exercise. From what I've seen in the Noom community people have a lot more success when they first focus on losing pounds then focus on building strength and fitness; many people at that point find they have to increase calories in order to continue seeing results when they're working out a lot. I suppose it takes a lot of calories to build muscle. I wonder what your body does to those injured muscles if it doesn't have the calories available to repair them?
https://www.noom.com/
That really depends on the exercise you’re doing and what “shape” you’re going for. Putting tons of time into running won’t make someone look like they lift weights. Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape” except to the extent that it helps them lose weight.
Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter.
It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.
When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.
I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts.
Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.
If your BMR is say... 1,800 calories a day and you exercise 300 calories worth... do you just get 300 calories hungrier to offset the exercise?
And to add a little color, my exercise routines have usually involved more than 300 cals of workout, probably closer to 700-1000. This is important, because when not tracking the extra food, it’s really easy to overshoot 1000 calories by 300. The exercises have varied a lot over the years, from running and biking to weight lifting and sports like soccer & ultimate frisbee. I’ve been aiming for around 3 days/week workouts for like 10-20 years. I have periods of less, and occasionally more (especially in the summer) and have managed to keep it up more or less consistently. I eat more when exercising, but never lost weight consistently until I learned the open secret, that for me monitoring intake is what makes exercise work as a weight loss tool.
This simply isn't true at all, and you don't have to count calories per se. I lost quite a bit simply changing my diet. I kept most of it off for years: I gained some back when I quit nicotine, though (Quitting smoking changed my sense of hunger, and Im still upset about that). It wasn't quick weight loss and it came in stages, but I didn't count calories nor spend too much time thinking about food. I simply focused on getting more fruits, vegetables, and legumes when I could. (I completely dropped meat outside of fish, but it isn't necessary and was losing weight before that). I also rarely eat out, even when I've had work/school (I just brought something). This meant I could pretty well eat what I wanted and would just choose lower calorie things by default. As long as I ate fairly well most of the time*, I was OK. I didn't have to suffer the PMS hunger I get either: I would just eat something.
You can eat the same thing every day, mind you, and I've met a lot of folks that do. Generally, however, it is a lifestyle choice and you have to be careful to make sure you have enough vitamins and things. One of the three folks I'm thinking of made themselves sick by not including enough vegetables.
Eating is incredibly efficient.
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1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
2. The only plausible mechanisms for why exercise wouldn't result in more overall caloric burn is that less energy is expended in non exercising states, eg the body is trying to conserve energy and either reduces metabolism or reduces fidgeting, walking, etc. This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
3. Finally, this blog post dives into some methodological issues: https://darrendahly.github.io/post/2012-08-31-hunter-gathere...
EDIT: Increased metabolism due to muscle mass is not as big an effect as you’d think: https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
2. That is exactly his hypothesis, and he has produced evidence for this hypothesis in a recent experiment. I don't know why you are presenting this as some kind of counter-argument.
3. That blog post isn't a coherent critique. The post's two points are that the drinking solution is also used for measuring energy intake, and that the Hadza actually burn far less calories than Western people until such numbers are adjusted. This first point isn't relevant without further explanation, and the second point only serves to further support the thesis.
2. Studies in nutrition science are a dime a dozen. Like in psychology, you should apply common sense to interpret the results. In this case, the implication is that the Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human bodies.
That was my first thought as well.
It's even more evident with certain types of sports. Take cycling for example. Lifting mass up a mountain is going to take quite a bit of energy; maintaining a constant speed in the face of wind resistance will take energy. That energy has to come from somewhere.
Some don't. Think about marathon runners (which would be pretty close to the tribe studied), they have a muscle ratio that is way lower than your Phelps example and their body composition if also probably more efficient than yours (I don't know you, but let's assume). I wouldn't be surprised if a pro marathon runner would have be close to your 3.5K a day when going through light training.
Think of it through different angles: mountain trekkers aren't packing 80kg of sugar to go through their trekking, their bodies are way more efficient at doing these tasks and need less calories to work than what we'd expect from a random person. It literally means doing more with less.
> This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
This happens to everyone. From your link: "In fact, your body is hard wired to maintain energy balance within a fairly small range."
> 3.
It seems well argued but just really nitpicky. It goes into the whole energy intake vs energy spent debate to explain why they don't agree with the methodology, but don't prove why they think the conclusion is wrong. It's as if I'd nitpick your use of calorie intake measurements and explain in great details how it's approximation of an approximation and we have no way to actually know someone's actual intake calorie, without ever engaging with your actual points.
I agree and I'm in the same boat. After 10 years of running ~70km/week, I'm eating way more, have dropped 20lb, and am healthier and stronger.
> The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
I think people underestimate what being active and excercise actually mean. Our ancestors were vastly more active than we are today. The amount of movement that was required for foraging, hunting, agriculture is hard for most modern people to imagine.
Even the act of preparing the food that was gathered/hunted/harvested was so much more manual and energy intense than what we are accustomed to today.
For most of our evolutionary history basically everything we did was powered by our bodies. Today we have machines for everything, and a high standard of comfort.
It's true that calorie restriction is easier for most people than excercise, but I think it's because.. to put it bluntly.. we've become lazy.
What I got out of the article wasn't that sitting still and not thinking can somehow burn calories; just that strenuous mental activities can burn a great deal more energy in humans than in apes. This is believable to me. I'm a person who falls asleep doing math in my head every night. I got a chance, during a year of pandemic lockdown, to experiment with my own body in this way.
I only eat once per day. I don't keep fixed hours; sometimes I'll stay up for 24, sleep for 16; other times I'm regularly 8/16 sleep/wake. I don't have a set bedtime. I try to maintain 16/48 sleep/wake over any given period.
No matter what, I only eat one meal every 24 hours. I've been doing this for about 20 years.
This makes it easy to measure when I get hungry in relationship to my last meal. My body is well trained to expect about a 24 hour delay; I have no appetite and don't think about food until around 22 hours post-dinner.
Under lockdown conditions, I began to notice that I wasn't hungry as expected on days where I hadn't spent >= 6 hours working on strenuous code. If I took a day off and "couch potato'd", I might not eat at all for 48 hours. But if I focused on code for 8+ hours, I would be hungry on time or early.
I started to experiment with this. I figured out that if I took a 1 hour walk, plus 4 hours programming, it made me hungry right around where 6+ hours of code did. A 1 hour walk - to me - seems about equal to 2 hours of writing code in terms of what my body feedback gives me about my calorie burn.
I don't walk very fast, and I code very intensely.
But that's just it - this article is about solving math problems as a way to burn calories. I have a nice new M1 Mac that only ever turns its fans on or gets warm when I'm using all 10 cores. Last night my task falling asleep was to calculate randomly chosen x/128ths as percentages to five decimal places. My daytime task was harder; and now I'm hungry. And I haven't walked anywhere today.
However: Couch potato, this ain't. And the point about the body's reduced expectation of physical output is probably accurate as well.
Could be the body stress response associated with doing those activities
And if you check the article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw0341# == The reduction in TEE among RAUSA subjects can be partly attributed to marginally reduced body mass and daily mileage (table S3). Still, even after accounting for these changes, Week 20 TEE was 596 kcal/day lower (range, 400 to 923 kcal/day) than expected ==
So they did loose weight during the marathons and the metabolic compensation is less than half of what you would think reading the original article.
== ... The magnitude of metabolic response in RAUSA athletes (~600 kcal/day, ~20% TEE) is similar to the degree of adaptation reconstructed for the most physically active subjects in a recent cross-sectional study (17) and may reflect humans’ maximal capacity for metabolic compensation. ==
So if 20% percent is the maximum, it means that if you try to outrun your diet, you might have to eventually exercise 25% more. Except by then you will probably have more muscle mass that will burn more calories even when not exercising. And you will be able to exercise more in less time.
Suddenly it does not look so hopeless.
Ie. scientists wouldn't think that average Hadza hunter burns same calories as average sedentary guy from US ... which is the point of this new discovery ... the lifestyle is different enough that you would not think the expenditure will be similar. We always knew there is compensation happening, but we didn't think that much.
But, if Phelps burns 8k calories ... then he perhaps far far exceeds the amount of exercise the average Hadza hunter outputs ... at that point, the body can't just shift some energy expenditure around and compensate for it .. it will in fact need lot more energy to support the physical output.
The article even proposes what the ceiling of input calories (and therefore sustainable output expenditure) is. 4650 cal for 85kg man. So obviously, it doesn't claim that every human on the planet burns the same amount of calories no matter what they do. It only claims that for example energy requirement differences between somebody who outputs 200kcal or 1000kcal in exercise are nearly erased because the body compensates on the BMR. Obviously there is a hard limit on how much body can compensate and save energy by cutting it from other processes.
https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7257
It's also incredibly easy, at least in America, to consume way too many calories. To meaningfully lose weight you have to drastically change your diet or drastically up your movement.
He’s incredibly far from a normal human - he’s a true specialist.
Lots more energy goes in to that, compared to losing excess fat and living a “normal” human hunter gatherer existence.
The whole system change once you go google scale, so to speak, and phelps is gmail.
In the words of Ido Portal: we’re human first, movers second and specialists last.
I see relevance in this research in the human/mover perspective.
Simply having more muscle mass can burn calories too. Most people don't spend most of their time training either, so comparing to elite athletes is fairly irrelevant.
A linked article describing a scientist trying to rigorously find out how weight changes and energy expenditure and diet are connected, revealing the little we do know and the vast sea of what we do not know.
The discussion here: full of anecdotes and bro science berating one another "that's not how it works, it works like this", "I personally do this-and-that", "you just have to x-y-z, it's that simple".
Also, how is it bad for people to contrast what they see in real life with what the study shows? Michael Phelps and other athletes actually eat more calories, that's a fact. So it makes sense to question why that would be the case if the conclusion we see here was true. Again, a scientific paper isn't the bible-you can actually question it, and you don't have to just accept it as truth.
The world is not so binary as you make it out to be. The article is not forming a "new truth". Of course elite athletes are eating a lot. Nobody was questioning that. Neither do anecdotes stating "I trained my butt off, it worked" negate what's in the article.
The topic is complex, too complex to be pressed into a simple slogan. The article is not "controversial" to anybody remotely knowledgeable about biology.
You can question that the world is complex, but that won't make it less complex.
> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist > John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie > ideas that refuses to die.”
Fat stores energy. Food adds energy. Exercise uses energy. Those aren't "myths." The article (not talking about the scientist) is very difficult to understand, but it seems to come down on the "myth" side of that dilemma. Mostly. Kind of.
Skipping meals/cutting calories is, by far, the easiest way to lose weight.
This sort of research is only of value in so far as it moves forward some sort of saleable treatment.
In the meantime, the more confused you are about what to eat and how to treat your body - the better. It is when people are damaged that the medical industry makes its money.
In summary, the incentives for health are in reverse (and perverse, IMO). People get paid for treating disease (and even keeping them unwell!) but not for keeping people healthy.
Much better, eh?
I love this intro.
> His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits.
This is funny to me because my own logs reflect this going back to about 2015. I can more easily drop 10, 20, or however many pounds when not exercising than I can when exercising. That was a really weird one because it opened up a bunch of other problems.
One follow-on problem that came up quickly: How to develop skills requiring fitness during those times, or how to maintain endurance levels when you're intentionally lowering your exercise exposure so you can lose weight. That kind of situation is pretty interesting.
> Azy, a 113-kilogram (249 lb.) adult male (orangutan), for example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day ... When adjusted for body mass, (humans) burn ... 60% more than orangutans
Oh and
> “She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”
This is really curious and fascinating stuff. Thanks op for posting.
PS:
> He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
An interesting source here is the Fiennes and Stroud expedition to cross Antarctica in 1992. Stroud (a physician) actually tested how many calories they were burning each day using the doubly-labeled water method, and at one point (ascent to the polar plateau) it was up to 11k. So it is definitely possible to temporarily push the limit - as the article acknowledges - but these are exceptional circumstances.
The estimate is probably off for extreme circumstances and those people probably aren’t fully digesting and using all of those calories. The accurate number would be interesting.
I too have found that cardio isn’t very good for dropping weight, but packing on some muscle does a lot to shift body composition. Maintaining more lean mass simply requires more calories.
Major Edit: more concise example
>As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.
I think a lot of these stats are myths meant to accentuate the difficulty of the task. Pontzer’s book discusses Michael Phelps and the lack of an actual source to the rumours he was eating gargantuan amounts during training.
But I can speak first hand as a former athlete who has had access to NFL players and Olympians. 8-10k during peak active training happens all the time
Long term average might be 4-5k.
You have to remember that these people are often on PEDs that allow them to train all day.
Shit I was a serious powerlifter back in the day and would routinely eat 6-7k calories (weighed) during 2adays depending on how my weight was fluctuating. Add some more height, PEDs, and cardio and I'm almost there.
I think the difference between what is mentioned in the article is #1 obviously PEDs #2 body breakdown and recovery, which might be more in e.g. lifters and swimmers than long distance runners
There are a lot of people who maintain a high degree of fitness, and for them I can imagine 4000 calories is about right. But there are some types of training that are consistently pushing your physical limits. I don't have any sort of data to back this up, but it has long been my theory that the reason why elite athletes can burn so many calories is because they aren't actually burning them in the traditional sense of cells oxidizing chemical energy to create work...they've crossed over into the territory of muscle tissues being torn up and resynthesized so much that your body can no longer do so efficiently.
As an analogy, typically in manufacturing there are always efficiencies that can be extracted. But in very mature industries where there aren't any easy efficiencies to eek out of the system, you have to start making tradeoffs. One common tradeoff is throughout vs yield. You can increase your throughout, but in order to do do so, you have to cut corners on processes and subsequently increase the total amount of waste in the process.
And as a "maybe this is related" data point: 82% of marathon runners suffer from Acute Kidney Injury. Your kidneys have one job: waste disposal. It would be easy to infer that at the boundaries of human conditioning, the kidneys aren't up to the task of processing all of the waste that the body is producing.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/marathon-running-and-...
Of course he could be off a bit, but it seems unlikely that he’s off by a factor of 2.
He lists the foods that he ate, and it definitely sounds like it was close to 10k calories. His coach also discussed his diet, and backs up his claims.
Yeah, I'm not convinced the article passes the smell test.
Michael Phelps discussed his diet extensively, suggesting he ate 10k a day while training. Other athletes talk about similar meal sizes. This suggests that once they stop exercising (thus eventually losing lean muscle mass and requiring less calories) that they would not see a change in their weight, yet there are a lot of old fat athletes (possibly just of a certain generation) out there.
"Elite athletes can push the limits for several months, as the study of marathoners showed, but can’t sustain it indefinitely, Pontzer says."
High altitude suppresses appetite in general and your body does not get enough oxygen to meaningfully process food above about 25,000 feet. Everest summit day via the South Col starts at about that altitude.
Plus it’s freezing cold and everything takes forever to do. I don’t think there is much eating at all on Everest summit day, let alone 20,000 calories.
In vegetable oil it would be about 4.8lbs of oil - that’s probably not at all plausible for digestion or bowel control
Dead Comment
It raises the blood sugar levels as the body supplies the muscles with carbohydrates, and triggers a complementary response in appetite hormones.
Finally, and most importantly:
Exercise releases dopamine.
Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule deficit equals starvation.
So whilst it does not directly impact weight loss. It still makes it (a bit) easier.
Plus there are an enormous quantity of other factors in health that are impacted by exercise.
Bodily strength is entirely responsible, for example, for stopping you getting a "bad back."
The less strength you have in your back muscles, the more strain your vertebra and ligaments are under. Hence your body falls apart quickly and more easily.
You definitely need both kilo-joule control and strengthening exercise if you want to keep your life on track.
Not for me. I work out about 3 times a week, never felt like my appetite got smaller on workout days.
Intermittent fasting is nice however. There are pangs of hunger occasionally, but if I power through them, they go away after 1 hour usually.
I know, for instance, Penn Teller lost his weight in the same way - he decided to just eat baked/boiled potatoes with nothing else and just chilled out for a 100 days and lost 100 lbs. That's what worked for him!
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/news/...
This was one of the big surprises for me. When I'm exercising regularly, food tastes better, and yet I'm satisfied with less of it.
I practice intermittent fasting a lot and I cannot say that it affects my mood negatively. But I was very grumpy when I ate "five small meals a day".
It seems that the digestive system is more OK with being totally empty than being just half full all the time.
Please be careful generalizing anectodal facts. Lots of people, me included, have otherwise experience.
Post exercise I will often have a sort of hunger roller coaster. Naively, imagining the body's metabolism, hunger is responding to perception of a calorie deficit in the blood : organs demanding energy and blood sugar decreasing, forcing burning of calories from stored reserves.
But what if your body is able to efficiently maintain glucose levels? in that case exercise might not induce hunger, in fact it might be that exercise stimulates alternative pathways that release energy and these stay active even after you finish exercising. This might well be much more the case for well trained athletes than regular people. Or it might depend on diet or loads of other factors.
Personally, I have found that exercise is nearly pointless any time other than right before I eat. So exercising before breakfast is perfect because the stimulated hunger response is immediately satisfied by eating breakfast. But I don't eat more breakfast than I usually would, so it's a win.
However, I still think that there is a lot of truth to the "you can't outrun a bad diet" statement. A lot of people who occasionally go for a run are likely to overestimate their energy expenditure and feel like they have to eat a cow to compensate. I think, however, that the statement becomes less and less true the more excessive the exercise gets. If you burn thousands of calories day in day out with exercise it seems to become harder to overcompensate this every time with excess food intake.
I think the bigger issue with exercise is a mental one. Weight loss seems to be a pretty bad motivation for exercising. Most people I know who picked up running for the sole purpose of losing weight eventually gave up or they are stuck with their 5km weekend park run, which, of course, is rather pointless for their objective. 100% of the avid runners I know (including myself) don't care about their weight. I could probably lose more weight (or improve my long term health) if I changed my diet, but it's simply something that I'm not interested in. I run because it's fun and a somewhat low body weight seems to be a by-product of that.
> I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm.
That is not necessarily a "bad diet" for weight loss purposes. It's an unhealthy diet, but as long as you're not eating too much of all those foods, it won't make you gain weight. It's only bad because most people who are eating these kinds of foods will be eating too much of them (because they are much less filling for the amount of calories that they contain).
I had the same experience for a long time. People would see me eat Oreos, pizza, ice cream, pop tarts, etc. and they’d say, “how are you so incredibly thin if you eat all that garbage?” And I’d respond that I just eat less - I don’t eat a lot. And it was true. I’d eat garbage but I’d eat so little that I’d maintain an incredibly low weight. Now as I’m older and stress has gotten better - I’ve started eating more and gained weight due to it. It’s all due to the quantity/amount-of-calories.
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I’m somewhat hard-pressed to believe the answer is diet alone. Anecdotally, when I was running 100 miles per week in college for cross country, I ate three or four giant meals per day and maintained a very low weight. Ten years later, I have an injury that makes most types of exercise difficult, and I’ve observed that I really can’t eat more than one meal per day (dinner), otherwise my weight starts to creep up.
I find it odd that Calories are used in relation to weight gain, because (kilo)calories are a unit of energy, and excess weight is due to excess fat. Is there a simple linear relationship between the extractable energy content in food (as determined by the Atwater system) and the conversion of food components into fat by the digestive system? I find that hard to believe. Shouldn’t we be using a mass balance rather than an energy balance? If you could observe digestion at the atomic level, you would simply quantify which atoms from food end up in fat stores and which leave the body via other processes. Presumably, these atoms could then be bucketed into source categories (e.g. certain types of proteins or carbohydrates). I wouldn’t be surprised if exercise somehow alters the fat accumulation process even if it doesn’t significantly affect human metabolism.
But you’re definitely right! There’s a great Mr. Wizard-style TEDx video about it: https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE
They talk about a “caloric balance sheet” so this makes sense to me.
You dont understand inflammation, inflammation is like a nuclear bomb going off, however certain chemicals found in the diet will turn that nuclear bomb into an array of guided missiles.
We are complex chemical reactions, eat the wrong stuff you get sick, eat the right stuff you get well, but you need to make the right chemical reactions take place and reduce the wrong chemical reactions.
The problem with scientific study is they generally focus on what they can test directly or indirectly this is why we now see complete reversals in some medical thinking & theories.
Sure exercise and other output will consume calories, but if you focus on just calories, you ignore the properties of the chemicals and ill health will occur.
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