Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.
The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight.
Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
This doesn't even require you to be an athlete, or do extensive physical activity. Add even a half-hour jog three days a week to your otherwise-mostly-sedentary routine and you'll tend to engage in "compensatory eating" even if you don't realize it.
This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density) than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose to do so.
>that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."
> Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back down if you cease that extra activity.
After I started doing moderately long and fast bike rides (200+km/week, flat and hilly terrain, averaging 70km/ride during summer, 100+ if I have enough time), I have found that:
- compared to "not much exercise" (some periods during winter), it modulates my hunger. I do not eat more, or only proportionally.
- when the rides are longer than cca. 50km, I start losing weight (not just water, weight, sustained)
- after several days with no exercise, my hunger starts to increase again. In other words, I have to exercise to not overeat. I don't understand this effect, but it works for me, and it's been like this for many years.
About 10 years ago I started taking 45 minute daily walks with no other changes in my diet or activities and the extra weight (about 15 lbs overweight) melted away. I made absolutely no effort to eat less and didn't get any hungrier.
> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.
You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.
Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.
I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.
If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.
I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.
I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.
That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.
> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.
For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.
For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.
But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.
Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.
You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".
For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.
An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)
For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.
I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.
Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.
Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.
You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.
I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.
A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.
If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.
And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.
Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.
Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat.
The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.
Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance
Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.
Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute workout.
Not eating those chips is WAY easier than trying to burn them off after the fact.
> Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
That sounds like more or less exactly what the title says to me.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity
Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> not really useful for personal or localised health advice
It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'm not claiming that there's zero issues with eating less, or that people shouldn't exercise, just that the arguments seem to be off base.
I'm going to push back on this a bit, though I agree with some of the sentiment.; to the average person wanting to lose weight, I think the best advice is obviously to eat less via whatever diet works for them (I personally recommend counting calories, but it's not for everyone).
That said, you write:
> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.
First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.
Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.
> It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.
> Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
Yet perhaps taking a huge time commitment during which you won't be able to eat much is exactly what is needed.
I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.
What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?
When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.
Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.
> I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.
That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.
Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.
This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is an advocate for it, and has been for a while.
Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.
I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.
My understanding is that the research shows that a highly active hunter gathering and an inactive office worker burn roughly the same number of calories per day. But I find that hard to believe. What is the office worker's body doing to make up the difference for all the movement and muscle contraction?
I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”
This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.
That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.
In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”
Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet
Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram whatever I can into my body. It’s pretty much whatever I feel like eating, I’m going to eat".
I can't take this Luka slander. The guy carried the ungrateful Mavericks team for 6 seasons averaging 35mpg. He's not out of shape. Same thing with Jokic, 10 seasons of 32mpg average. Their mpg also go up in the playoffs.
People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.
I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for one of the greatest players ever.
I feel you are precisely making the opposite point. Athletes eat more because of their energy expenditure. The same happens with people trying to lose weight. It dramatically increases your hunger making a cut that much harder.
I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work or life.
> The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.
That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.
I think if the goal is to find out what strategies help average people lose weight - who are mostly not athletes or bodybuilders - then excluding athletes is exactly the right thing to do.
>the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.
--you
>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity
--the article headline
I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.
For most people, a 1 hour moderate run is only about 1-2 cookies worth (and only half a Crumbl cookie). Even a marathon run might only burn 2000 calories . a chipotle burrito is 1600 .
In other words, for 95% of people doing activity, they shouldn't eat any surplus if their goal is to maintain or lose weight.
It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it. Loss of this sensation is a major obesity driver. A numbness for nutrients.
Eating while actually being hungry is a great sensation. That's why I stopped snacking/sugar treats, it always spoil my hunger for when it's meal time. On the other hand, when I have having my meal, no restriction on veggies/meat/fish, open bar, I eat as much as I want.
I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of calorie abundance.
I generally tend to feel annoyed when people that are hungry start treating like an emergency.
You're right that it's easy to out-eat the running you can sustain as a regularly fit person, but there's no "only" about 2000 calories
2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to compensate for that marathon
> It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it.
Not exactly my experience.
My did a exercise schedule involves climbing a mountain every week. The mountain is about 400 meters (that's ~1312 feet, or more than four American football fields laid end-to-end) tall, and the exercise was usually done during afternoon (1 or 2 hours before dinner) without eating lunch.
After two mouths of that, I've noticed:
1. My weight or belly size don't really changed much. I also notice that some people who also frequented the mountain have big bellies.
2. I got very hungry after that, which triggers me to eat more during dinner, usually salty food.
3. The delight of salt becomes craving, probably due to the lost of liquid/electrolyte through sweat (and tears, probably).
4. For comparison, I stops craving salty thing the next day.
I guess you need to actively suppress some of your inner urges to really make the "nutrition feedback sensation" work. Otherwise, exercise more only leads to consume more.
P.S. Also, doctors really can't recommend doing heavy physical activity with empty stomach, as it might increase your heat rate or something (I might be hearing it wrong). I've since changed the schedule so I can eat something before start climbing, though my belly size still remained the same, and I'm still craving for salty food if uncontrolled.
But maybe it's just because I don't know how to do it correctly.
Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means of that. The occasional “cheat” (mostly social events really) slows the process down but don’t really stop it. It’s not really a fast process though… but it strongly depends on how under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping myself between 8000 and 10’000 steps a day was sufficient.
That’s great progress. It comes down to inverting the normal indulgence cycle. Once you discover that under-eating can feel better than over eating – you feel immensely better.
Diet to manage your weight. Exercise to manage your fitness.
It's real simple in theory and real difficult in practice. Super worth it, though. Your entire world starts opening up when things take less energy to do and you have more energy to give. It's very challenging to convey how important it is without living the experience.
Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently. Too many people go through theses cycles of "I'm going to cut out this, this and this to lose X pounds" and then drop it once they hit their goal or it ends up being too hard. While you might not shed pounds as quickly, if you focus on making sure you get varied, satiating, nutritious food(actually nutritious, not falling for the abundance of marketing out there), then you'll have an easier time resisting the temptation to gorge on treats and getting too many calories.
Language changes over time, and "diet" is very commonly used as shorthand for "restrictive food intake" or "caloric restriction." But a reminder that "diet" is short for "dietary intake", and is not prescriptive. "A healthy diet" is a common phrase for "permanently good eating habits."
The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food intake."
> "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice going on in the background," Pontzer says.
I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Spikiness and variability are probably good for you. Its funny that the Bryan Johnson types who closely control every calorie in their body have such a bad reaction to any variability. I don't know if its him, but I heard someone not be able to sleep and their levels got all messed up from one sweet. And their conclusion was sweets are so bad for you, rather than you're building your body to be too fragile to shocks.
The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
That's exactly the point the grandparent comment was making though. Because they aren't chronically eating at competition levels is the reason they aren't overweight. They have a high calorie moment, followed by low calorie stretches.
> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.
Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.
Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.
Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.
In addition to food being much tastier than ever before, it’s also much cheaper. Despite current inflation and cost of living concerns, we spend far less on food than any time in history. Food in the 1960 was almost twice as expensive as it is today. Food costs used to be higher than housing costs!
Depends on the goal is. If you life is full of shocks then build for shocks. If you life is not build for shocks it makes sense to optimize for your existence. You certainly don't want to overfit the model as you are describing but you don't want to build a life around expecting shocks when none arrive. As with all things, it is a balance.
Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.
Some do this, some go on binge fast cycles. Others just eat the food. It's different for everyone. Binge fast cycles are probably the easiest way to train this though.
This is true to an extent and I'm very fond of the saying, but beyond a certain point you can indeed outrun a bad diet.
I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing, BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted without gaining weight.
I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back then that I am unable to today.
So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running than most people want to do!
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."
It's not that it doesn't matter, it's the asymmetry. You can eat a small chocolate bar that costs $1 (or whatever) in about 15 seconds, and it will take you 2 hours of walking to wear off the calories.
Well yeah, the sugar is also there to produce the soft squishy texture people expect from sandwich bread as well as the aiding the Maillard reaction when it's grilled. Miss me with a grilled cheese made with any other kind of loaf.
But we are talking about bread here, even in the absence of sugar and oil it's
still got plenty of calories for you. Grain St Methode's white bread, a no added sugar brand is 180 cals for two slices and Wonder Bread, famously packed with sugar, is 140 cals for two slices. It's the bread which is making you fat, the sugar isn't moving the needle in any direction as far as the obesity crisis is concerned.
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
It's a whole lot easier to hit up a drive through or grab a tub of ice cream at the grocery store when you're driving a car.
You're not wrong, though. Walking around doesn't burn a lot of calories (~100/mile), but most people become overweight by only slightly overeating on a daily basis, over a long period of time. One can of soda has 140 Calories. 140 excess daily Calories is an extra pound of fat per month.
Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30 hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's essentially a full time job.
I once trained pretty hard for several months for a martial arts competition. I upped my calorie intake to keep up with the training and put on about ~15lb of muscle. What people don't tell you about this sort of intensive training is just much extra time you spend each week shopping, cooking, eating and taking a shit - on top of all the training!
My conclusion was that past a certain point you need to use liquid sugar (soda especially) to get your body to put on weight past a certain point.
Even with absurd amounts of fat, carbs and proteins I could not process enough food to put on the weight I wanted too. Sugar is the backbone of massive weight gain.
I can confirm the same from my messenger days. On days when deliveries were sparse, we found ourselves moving from cafe to bakery, eating more pastries than a doctor would recommend. Regardless of the day's activity levels we would generally drink large amounts of beer after work and sometimes during. Maintaining weight and satisfying our appetites was always a more pressing concern.
I'm not a dietician, but when I read things like this NPR report, I wonder how much of it is motivated reasoning. "It is not your fault", is always a good come-on for a sales pitch. This report seems like something people would like to hear, especially if they haven't come to enjoy strenuous exercise.
That said, I've always had a bias against highly processed foods.
what is "processed" versus "highly processed" versus "ultra processed"?
the way these things are described feels very much like people are using a dowsing rod to find where to dig a well, or something. mumbo-jumbo.
I'm sure even "super ultra giga processed" foods are fine for you so long as you don't eat a lot of them. I'm not even sure that "processed" is bad at all. I don't want to eat raw cashews, I'll die (as will anyone else) I want those processed by cooking. Is pre-cooked food "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" or something else? all of the above; it depends on who you ask.
I don't know of any level of "processed" which is bad, I just know that if you consume 10k calories per day and only burn 3k, you're going to gain weight, level of "processed" probably doesn't matter. And I think that's all this study is saying: unless you're extremely active, you can't burn 10k calories a day, your body really limits how many calories you can burn in a day unless you are physically working enough to actually turn that amount of energy into physical work.
anyway, yeah. i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative.
Yeah. Sure, your body can adjust how much calories are burned when you're idle, but it can only do so much. If you're burning thousands of calories on daily activity, it's gotta come from somewhere.
I see fork put-downs touted by random influencers and life coach type people on the internet, but this feels like one of those things that sounds profound but isn't based on any research other than someone's individual anecdotal experience.
That is not what any of the studies I have read find, particularly not past the short term: past calorie restriction diets is one of the factors associated with developing obesity.
I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going fully remote.
I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my level of activity remained unchanged.
A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight, and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range. Again, level of activity remained unchanged.
About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) quite regularly — about 2.5 hours per week, averaging right in the middle of my target heart rate zone. Diet remained the same. Weight remained mostly unchanged (still in my ideal weight range — I’ve maybe lost 5 or so pounds, but I lost way more weight when only changing my diet).
So — for me — diet has definitely had more impact on my weight than my level of activity.
The difference in metabolic activity as you age is relatively small until you are quite old, like a single digit percentage difference. You can go look at any TDEE calculator and see this.
Having lost 40lbs in the past couple of years, diet and walking have been key. It's just so much easier to burn fat by not eating it, than it is to try to burn it off with exercise. You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity, but eating one chocolate chip muffin? You can do that and gulp down a big glass of milk in 5 minutes like it's nothing.
>You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity
That's because you are doing it on a treadmill...
Try doing a more fun activity outside in the world and in nature. Like cycling.
I can cycle for 120 miles outdoors in about 6 hours in a single day and have a positive experience and memory of doing it and that burns about 8200 calories according to a calculators for my weight.
Unfortunately I think you'll find that many people just don't actually enjoy these sorts of activities. To me, cycling 120 miles (or even just 20 miles) is not something I'm interested in doing regularly.
I've tried various things, and I've found that I can get myself to go outside running (usually 3-5 miles in one session) a few times a week, but even that feels like a chore. I've been doing hot yoga (as well as a yoga-adjacent class that I think of more as "strength training and cardio with yoga features") for the past year and a half, which I actually somewhat enjoy. But it took me double-digit years to find exercise activities that I can actually get myself to do.
Go to the gym regularly? Really hard to find the motivation, though I do my best to go if I'm traveling in a place where I can't go to my (national chain) yoga studio. Cycling? Not my cup of tea. Playing a sport? Nope. Climbing? Tried it, didn't find it interesting. Hiking? Sure, on occasion, but not regularly enough to count as regular exercise. I'm just not really interested in any of those things enough to do them multiple times per week. And I think that's the case for many people.
If I could maintain my weight, leg muscle tone, and cardiovascular health without running, I'd never run ever again. I don't get that "runner's high" that people talk about (or if I do, it's not very intense, and fades very quickly). In addition to whole-body muscle tone, the yoga gives me some nice mental benefits, so I'd probably keep that up, but if it didn't, I'd drop it immediately.
There is a psychological method that I found to be very helpful. Thinking of companies that sell packaged foods as your adversary.
They want to take your health, make you addicted to what they are selling and also take your money. Not very different from a drug dealer.
When in this mindset, avoiding these things feels like winning and taking care of myself, don’t need to worry about if sugar is really bad or if eating these things is normal. Or if I deserve a treat after working hard all day etc.
After some time I just keep winning and losing weight and don’t really have any cravings to eat bad “food”.
And fruit tends to be cheaper than packaged food too.
Whenever the topic of weight loss comes up, I always make the same recommendation: Lift weights.
Lifting weights increases your muscle mass. Muscle burns calories, even at rest, which raises your TDEE. (A bodybuilder will burn more calories sitting on the couch than someone who doesn't lift weights).
For most folks (myself included) cardio sucks. You _could_ jog for an hour every day and burn x-hundred calories due to the increased energy expended... Or you could go lift weights a few times a week, and after a couple months, naturally burn more at rest due to increased muscle mass.
I say this as not a nutritionist nor a doctor, but I don't believe I'm off base here. Feel free to correct me on this if I am.
I'm a fan of weightlifting, and agree that there are numerous health benefits to doing so, but I think the extra calorie burning is over-hyped. From what I've read you get 6-10 calories per pound of muscle per day, at rest. Not nothing, but for folks who aren't looking to body build I'm not sure it makes much of a difference. Or maybe over a long enough time span it does, I dunno.
It does matter over a long enough time span, but otherwise I agree - don't get into resistance training for the extra potential calorie burn/metabolism boost, it's a quick way to burn out. Get into it for the numerous health benefits that resistance training brings, the effects of which get especially important as you get older.
You can lose upwards of 3% of muscle pass per year at 60+, and this process can start as early as 30-35 years old. It gets harder and harder to build muscle as you age too, so the more you can build and maintain early on in your life, the better off you'll be in old age.
Other than aesthetic goals, that's most of what got me into weightlifting. I'd prefer not to be so frail when I'm older and want to maintain my independence as long as possible. Not to mention, being strong just makes general day-to-day tasks easier.
I think there are a couple of underlooked points for weightlifting's contribution to sustainable weight loss.
- the weight that you are gaining with a surplus diet turns into muscle instead of fat. You can take diet breaks and just gain muscle faster which will help when returning to a deficit.
- the increased 100-200 calories from lifting can make a 100 calorie deficit easier to adhere to as it's a smaller proportion of your total.
- weightlifting reduces stress which is a common cause for over eating.
I used to believe this (as did many people) but no longer do. The amount of extra calories burned with a higher muscle mass is just not significant enough to make this a relevant idea.
Of course, there are many, many other reasons to lift weights. Health and longevity aside, the reason most people want to lose weight is to look better - so what they should really aim for isn't to lose weight, it's to lose fat and increase muscle mass. For that, you need both a caloric deficit and weight lifting.
This is true, but I don't think the extra calorie burn via extra muscle mass is dramatic enough to move the needle that much. Studies are a bit weak here, but a quick search suggests that a pound of muscle mass burns between 4.5 and 7 calories per day. That's... not that much. A bodybuilder that's putting on competition-worthy levels of muscle mass is going to be spending several hours every single day at the gym lifting weights, and very few people are going to sign up for that just for the hope of losing some weight.
I've been doing some strength training (arms, legs, core) for the past year and a half. Nothing too heavy, but enough that I can see nice muscle-tone changes in my body, and I notice that day-to-day physical tasks are easier. At most, I've put on about 10lbs of muscle (and honestly it's probably more like half that). So I'm burning another 45 to 70 calories per day. That's like... 4 to 7 plain potato chips of calories.
So lift if you want to look good, be generally stronger (core strength is especially good for you!), or just feel healthier. And sure, the act of lifting those weights will burn calories that you weren't otherwise burning. But the muscle mass you gain isn't going to burn a useful amount of extra calories per day.
And yes, cardio does suck! Unfortunately, doing only strength training is leaving out really important parts of your body that need to be strong and healthy: your heart and lungs. I'm in decent physical shape, but if I stop working on cardio even for a month or so, walking up the four flights of stairs in my condo building leaves me a little winded, and I don't like that feeling.
I guess my point is: do cardio and strength training to increase your general level of health and fitness. But if you want to lose weight, change your diet. Change it sustainably and permanently. If you just change it until you get to your target weight, you're going to put those pounds right back on afterward.
The weight lifting also triggers stronger hormonal responses due to the additional mechanical loading. Mechanoreceptors in your body will stimulate a chain reaction by way of the hypothalamus (HPG axis) that ultimately causes a ramp in testosterone and other hormones. Your body effectively has a built-in steroid dispenser that you can control.
The scale is really dramatic in my experience. The more the lifting sucks, the more your body will compensate. This trend can be non-linear for a good period of time before you begin to plateau. The tricky bit is not pushing too far and injuring yourself early on.
One interesting hybrid is running or walking with a weighted vest on. This requires some extra precautions - the vest should be very, very snug on your body. You don't want it slinging around and imposing weird lateral loads.
Or do both! I primarily train Muay Thai these days, but I mix in two minimalist kettlebell strength sessions per week. 20 minutes of emom double kettlebell ABCs with some sets of pull-ups at the end keeps me in zone 3-4. So I'm getting some cardio conditioning while doing my strength training. Sure, it's hard to overload at a certain point with kettlebells, but making a goal to be able to OHP double 24kg bells will get most people pretty far.
There are other advantages beyond just burning calories. Lean muscle tissue acts as glucose sink. When you eat you'll have more reserve capacity to store that energy temporarily in your muscles rather than triggering growth of adipose tissue.
Most powerlifters intentionally maintain a signficant caloric surplus in order to bulk up. Some bulkers even chug straight-up olive oil to meet their daily caloric goals.
Readit News
The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.
Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density) than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose to do so.
Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."
This is one reason bodybuilders (the closest thing to professional dieters) will only do low intensity cardio -- walking etc -- when cutting weight.
High intensity cardio burns calories but increases appetite disproportionately. Albeit otherwise excellent for overall health.
It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back down if you cease that extra activity.
- compared to "not much exercise" (some periods during winter), it modulates my hunger. I do not eat more, or only proportionally.
- when the rides are longer than cca. 50km, I start losing weight (not just water, weight, sustained)
- after several days with no exercise, my hunger starts to increase again. In other words, I have to exercise to not overeat. I don't understand this effect, but it works for me, and it's been like this for many years.
About 10 years ago I started taking 45 minute daily walks with no other changes in my diet or activities and the extra weight (about 15 lbs overweight) melted away. I made absolutely no effort to eat less and didn't get any hungrier.
Dead Comment
You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.
Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.
If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.
I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.
That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.
For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.
For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.
But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.
Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.
Easier to just cut carbs.
An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)
It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)
It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.
> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.
Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.
Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.
Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.
You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.
A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.
If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.
People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of activity, probably because it feels strenuous.
4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but means next to nothing for energy expenditure.
The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.
Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance
Caveats for the pedantic:
If you've found yourself overweight and sedentary, you are unlikely to adopt a level of exercise needed to outrun your bad diet.
All else being equal, the person with the better diet will have a better body comp (or achieve a goal body comp easier).
Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.
Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute workout.
Not eating those chips is WAY easier than trying to burn them off after the fact.
Deleted Comment
That sounds like more or less exactly what the title says to me.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity
Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> not really useful for personal or localised health advice
It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'm not claiming that there's zero issues with eating less, or that people shouldn't exercise, just that the arguments seem to be off base.
That said, you write:
> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.
First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.
Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.
> It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.
> Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
Yet perhaps taking a huge time commitment during which you won't be able to eat much is exactly what is needed.
Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.
What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?
When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.
Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.
[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...
You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.
That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.
Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.
Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.
I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.
This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.
That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.
In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”
People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.
I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for one of the greatest players ever.
I was absolutely shredded and still ate stuff like katsu curry weekly
Kristian essentially eats pasta and Nutella and bread all day.
So technically, yes, you can outrun a bad diet..
Though me thinks this article is aimed at the average person.
I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work or life.
That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.
--you
>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity
--the article headline
I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.
In other words, for 95% of people doing activity, they shouldn't eat any surplus if their goal is to maintain or lose weight.
It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it. Loss of this sensation is a major obesity driver. A numbness for nutrients.
I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of calorie abundance. I generally tend to feel annoyed when people that are hungry start treating like an emergency.
2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to compensate for that marathon
Not exactly my experience.
My did a exercise schedule involves climbing a mountain every week. The mountain is about 400 meters (that's ~1312 feet, or more than four American football fields laid end-to-end) tall, and the exercise was usually done during afternoon (1 or 2 hours before dinner) without eating lunch.
After two mouths of that, I've noticed:
1. My weight or belly size don't really changed much. I also notice that some people who also frequented the mountain have big bellies.
2. I got very hungry after that, which triggers me to eat more during dinner, usually salty food.
3. The delight of salt becomes craving, probably due to the lost of liquid/electrolyte through sweat (and tears, probably).
4. For comparison, I stops craving salty thing the next day.
I guess you need to actively suppress some of your inner urges to really make the "nutrition feedback sensation" work. Otherwise, exercise more only leads to consume more.
P.S. Also, doctors really can't recommend doing heavy physical activity with empty stomach, as it might increase your heat rate or something (I might be hearing it wrong). I've since changed the schedule so I can eat something before start climbing, though my belly size still remained the same, and I'm still craving for salty food if uncontrolled.
But maybe it's just because I don't know how to do it correctly.
You seem self aware that’s a good starting point
Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means of that. The occasional “cheat” (mostly social events really) slows the process down but don’t really stop it. It’s not really a fast process though… but it strongly depends on how under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping myself between 8000 and 10’000 steps a day was sufficient.
It's real simple in theory and real difficult in practice. Super worth it, though. Your entire world starts opening up when things take less energy to do and you have more energy to give. It's very challenging to convey how important it is without living the experience.
The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food intake."
Colloquially the former can mean the latter. But yes, anything that cannot be sustained is doomed to fail.
I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Spikiness and variability are probably good for you. Its funny that the Bryan Johnson types who closely control every calorie in their body have such a bad reaction to any variability. I don't know if its him, but I heard someone not be able to sleep and their levels got all messed up from one sweet. And their conclusion was sweets are so bad for you, rather than you're building your body to be too fragile to shocks.
The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting calories [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/SVS0ioOdfuE?t=225
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Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.
Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.
Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.
Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.
---
1. From Renaissance Periodization
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...
I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing, BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted without gaining weight.
I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back then that I am unable to today.
So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running than most people want to do!
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."
It's not that it doesn't matter, it's the asymmetry. You can eat a small chocolate bar that costs $1 (or whatever) in about 15 seconds, and it will take you 2 hours of walking to wear off the calories.
But we are talking about bread here, even in the absence of sugar and oil it's still got plenty of calories for you. Grain St Methode's white bread, a no added sugar brand is 180 cals for two slices and Wonder Bread, famously packed with sugar, is 140 cals for two slices. It's the bread which is making you fat, the sugar isn't moving the needle in any direction as far as the obesity crisis is concerned.
It's a whole lot easier to hit up a drive through or grab a tub of ice cream at the grocery store when you're driving a car.
You're not wrong, though. Walking around doesn't burn a lot of calories (~100/mile), but most people become overweight by only slightly overeating on a daily basis, over a long period of time. One can of soda has 140 Calories. 140 excess daily Calories is an extra pound of fat per month.
My conclusion was that past a certain point you need to use liquid sugar (soda especially) to get your body to put on weight past a certain point.
Even with absurd amounts of fat, carbs and proteins I could not process enough food to put on the weight I wanted too. Sugar is the backbone of massive weight gain.
I'm not a dietician, but when I read things like this NPR report, I wonder how much of it is motivated reasoning. "It is not your fault", is always a good come-on for a sales pitch. This report seems like something people would like to hear, especially if they haven't come to enjoy strenuous exercise.
That said, I've always had a bias against highly processed foods.
the way these things are described feels very much like people are using a dowsing rod to find where to dig a well, or something. mumbo-jumbo.
I'm sure even "super ultra giga processed" foods are fine for you so long as you don't eat a lot of them. I'm not even sure that "processed" is bad at all. I don't want to eat raw cashews, I'll die (as will anyone else) I want those processed by cooking. Is pre-cooked food "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" or something else? all of the above; it depends on who you ask.
I don't know of any level of "processed" which is bad, I just know that if you consume 10k calories per day and only burn 3k, you're going to gain weight, level of "processed" probably doesn't matter. And I think that's all this study is saying: unless you're extremely active, you can't burn 10k calories a day, your body really limits how many calories you can burn in a day unless you are physically working enough to actually turn that amount of energy into physical work.
anyway, yeah. i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative.
I'm skeptical that this actually does anything.
That is not what any of the studies I have read find, particularly not past the short term: past calorie restriction diets is one of the factors associated with developing obesity.
I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going fully remote.
I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my level of activity remained unchanged.
A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight, and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range. Again, level of activity remained unchanged.
About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) quite regularly — about 2.5 hours per week, averaging right in the middle of my target heart rate zone. Diet remained the same. Weight remained mostly unchanged (still in my ideal weight range — I’ve maybe lost 5 or so pounds, but I lost way more weight when only changing my diet).
So — for me — diet has definitely had more impact on my weight than my level of activity.
So a 30 minute session in the day might be followed by more time on the sofa later on.
I used to house whole pizzas for lunch. Now I only eat 2 slices and weigh the same.
That's because you are doing it on a treadmill...
Try doing a more fun activity outside in the world and in nature. Like cycling.
I can cycle for 120 miles outdoors in about 6 hours in a single day and have a positive experience and memory of doing it and that burns about 8200 calories according to a calculators for my weight.
I've tried various things, and I've found that I can get myself to go outside running (usually 3-5 miles in one session) a few times a week, but even that feels like a chore. I've been doing hot yoga (as well as a yoga-adjacent class that I think of more as "strength training and cardio with yoga features") for the past year and a half, which I actually somewhat enjoy. But it took me double-digit years to find exercise activities that I can actually get myself to do.
Go to the gym regularly? Really hard to find the motivation, though I do my best to go if I'm traveling in a place where I can't go to my (national chain) yoga studio. Cycling? Not my cup of tea. Playing a sport? Nope. Climbing? Tried it, didn't find it interesting. Hiking? Sure, on occasion, but not regularly enough to count as regular exercise. I'm just not really interested in any of those things enough to do them multiple times per week. And I think that's the case for many people.
If I could maintain my weight, leg muscle tone, and cardiovascular health without running, I'd never run ever again. I don't get that "runner's high" that people talk about (or if I do, it's not very intense, and fades very quickly). In addition to whole-body muscle tone, the yoga gives me some nice mental benefits, so I'd probably keep that up, but if it didn't, I'd drop it immediately.
They want to take your health, make you addicted to what they are selling and also take your money. Not very different from a drug dealer.
When in this mindset, avoiding these things feels like winning and taking care of myself, don’t need to worry about if sugar is really bad or if eating these things is normal. Or if I deserve a treat after working hard all day etc.
After some time I just keep winning and losing weight and don’t really have any cravings to eat bad “food”.
And fruit tends to be cheaper than packaged food too.
I say this as not a nutritionist nor a doctor, but I don't believe I'm off base here. Feel free to correct me on this if I am.
You can lose upwards of 3% of muscle pass per year at 60+, and this process can start as early as 30-35 years old. It gets harder and harder to build muscle as you age too, so the more you can build and maintain early on in your life, the better off you'll be in old age.
Other than aesthetic goals, that's most of what got me into weightlifting. I'd prefer not to be so frail when I'm older and want to maintain my independence as long as possible. Not to mention, being strong just makes general day-to-day tasks easier.
- the weight that you are gaining with a surplus diet turns into muscle instead of fat. You can take diet breaks and just gain muscle faster which will help when returning to a deficit.
- the increased 100-200 calories from lifting can make a 100 calorie deficit easier to adhere to as it's a smaller proportion of your total.
- weightlifting reduces stress which is a common cause for over eating.
Of course, there are many, many other reasons to lift weights. Health and longevity aside, the reason most people want to lose weight is to look better - so what they should really aim for isn't to lose weight, it's to lose fat and increase muscle mass. For that, you need both a caloric deficit and weight lifting.
I've been doing some strength training (arms, legs, core) for the past year and a half. Nothing too heavy, but enough that I can see nice muscle-tone changes in my body, and I notice that day-to-day physical tasks are easier. At most, I've put on about 10lbs of muscle (and honestly it's probably more like half that). So I'm burning another 45 to 70 calories per day. That's like... 4 to 7 plain potato chips of calories.
So lift if you want to look good, be generally stronger (core strength is especially good for you!), or just feel healthier. And sure, the act of lifting those weights will burn calories that you weren't otherwise burning. But the muscle mass you gain isn't going to burn a useful amount of extra calories per day.
And yes, cardio does suck! Unfortunately, doing only strength training is leaving out really important parts of your body that need to be strong and healthy: your heart and lungs. I'm in decent physical shape, but if I stop working on cardio even for a month or so, walking up the four flights of stairs in my condo building leaves me a little winded, and I don't like that feeling.
I guess my point is: do cardio and strength training to increase your general level of health and fitness. But if you want to lose weight, change your diet. Change it sustainably and permanently. If you just change it until you get to your target weight, you're going to put those pounds right back on afterward.
The scale is really dramatic in my experience. The more the lifting sucks, the more your body will compensate. This trend can be non-linear for a good period of time before you begin to plateau. The tricky bit is not pushing too far and injuring yourself early on.
One interesting hybrid is running or walking with a weighted vest on. This requires some extra precautions - the vest should be very, very snug on your body. You don't want it slinging around and imposing weird lateral loads.