5 ms·

FWIW, my experience disagrees with this. I was overweight, started running (starting around 9mi/wk, when I got bored and stopped I was up around 24mi/wk), and s

FWIW, my experience disagrees with this. I was overweight, started running (starting around 9mi/wk, when I got bored and stopped I was up around 24mi/wk), and started losing weight quickly, lost a ton of it over a year, after which I was at a very good weight for me. Now, as the piece touches on, that exercise did change my eating, but the outcome of that isn't clear to me -- I stopped eating/snacking for a few hours before a run so I wouldn't cramp. But I also started eating a lot more outside of those exercise windows, as running so much made me quite ravenous at times. Ate anything and everything I wanted and I just kept dropping weight as long as I kept running. Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.

jacorreia 10y ago
It's literally just calories in vs. calories out. If 400 calories/day meets your weight loss goals, all you have to do is make sure that the calories you expend + the calories you no longer intake = 400. The ratio of those two factors completely varies from person to person on what their motivation levels are going to be, but as long as it works for you it will result in the same amount of weight loss as any other ratio
- pjlegato 10y ago
  The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong. "Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
  - fattylite 10y ago
    The conclusion is: "10) So what actually works for weight loss? At the individual level, some very good research on what works for weight loss comes from the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has parsed the traits, habits, and behaviors of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of one year. They currently have more than 10,000 members enrolled in the study, and these folks respond to annual questionnaires about how they've managed to keep their weight down. The researchers behind the study found that people who have had success losing weight share a few things in common: They weigh themselves at least once a week. They restrict their calorie intake, stay away from high-fat foods, and watch their portion sizes. They also exercise regularly. But note: These folks use physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes. Every reliable expert I've ever spoken to on weight loss says the most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully. In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits. " It doesn't upend it, it basically just says "Don't count calorie expenditures as part of your caloric deficit", which has been standard advice for every resource I've used for quite some time.
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      The theory says that as you do additional exercise, you get diminishing returns in terms of the number of calories you burn. As your exercise level increases, you have to do ever more exercise to burn the same number of calories, because the body has various compensatory mechanisms designed to avoid weight loss. The traditional model proposes a much simpler linear relationship: do an additional unit of exercise and you will burn X more calories, forever. He says that is incorrect and you actually get diminishing returns, where additional units of exercise burn ever fewer calories rather than just a constant.
      - fattylite 10y ago
        I understand that. My point was that I've never seen a plan where people tell you to eat as much as you want as long as you do x hours of activity per day. The only plans I've seen like that are for strong men competitors or where the Rock ate like $300 worth of food every day and worked out for six hours daily.
- Scramblejams 10y ago
  I (despite the article) am mostly in agreement with you, but I think that calories out is a very complex subject. For example, when I calculated how many calories I was burning on my longer runs, it ended up being around 3000 calories/week. However, as I said before, my intake went up. Way up. I ate like an idiot. Donuts? Yeah. Cheeseburgers? Sometimes ordered two. Dr. Pepper? Bring the two liter! I absolutely added more than 3000 calories to my diet after I started running. And yet despite all that, I just kept dropping weight. The human body is a very complex, non-linear thing. Discerning operating principles by looking solely at inputs and outputs is a hard problem.
fattylite 10y ago
It's just a bad title. The title should have been "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight without changing your diet". If you eat the same amount as you did before, assuming that was maintenance calories, you will lose weight if you begin exercising. The problem is when you're intaking 1500 more calories than necessary before you start exercising. You can't burn that off to the point of a deficit with exercise alone.
- Scramblejams 10y ago
  Except I didn't eat the same as before. I ate more, way, way more.
  - dpark 10y ago
    I bet you didn't, and this is the problem with anecdotal evidence. People are terrible at tracking their actual caloric intake and expenditures. 24 miles a week is a decent bit, but it isn't that much. If you add 24 miles a week but eat a lot more, you will gain weight.
    - Scramblejams 10y ago
      No, it's not that much. But they were very high intensity miles. My typical routine was to do a half mile walking warmup, then over the course of 5-8 minutes of running, gradually adjust my pace so my breathing was very close to my sustainable max. Then I'd continue adjusting my speed to keep my breathing there for the rest of the run. (All those running guides that say you should be able to carry on a conversation while you're running? Yeah, that wasn't me at all. I was huffing and puffing like mad the entire time.) I accumulated that mileage over 3 runs/week, no more than one hour total each time, so that distance was done in a 3 hour period. And about the food? Umm, it wasn't even close. Before the running, my idea of a snack was a little piece of cheese or a yogurt. After I started running, a snack was a Carl's Jr. Famous Star cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd order two. I became notable among my football player brothers-in-law for my capacity, regularly demonstrated, for out-eating them. My wife still talks about a particularly memorable restaurant visit where I basically ate 3 large, complete entrees. My calorie intake was ridiiiiiculous. Eating like that was both enjoyable and entertaining, and it didn't seem to interfere with my fitness, so I did it all the time. And still I lost weight. Crazy. The body is a strange machine.
pjlegato 10y ago
I'd bet there is some exercise intensity threshold step function at work. The article says exercise is, "only around 10 to 30 percent [of total energy expenditure] depending on the person (and excluding professional athletes that workout as a job)," implying that when you are doing lots and lots of hardcore exercise almost every day, it will use up a greater percentage of calories.
- Scramblejams 10y ago
  Yeah, I've wondered the same. I recall another study -- no idea where I'd find it now -- which did body scans of runners. They found that runners which averaged 11mi/wk had substantial interior fat deposits. Runners that averaged 17mi/wk had very little. Actually, did a bit of Googling, looks like it might have been a study by Dr. Uwe Schütz published in 2009, found a mention of it here: http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/weight-loss/running-the-life-saving-workout/8408-2.html http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/weight-loss/running-the-life-s...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

jacorreia 10y ago

It's literally just calories in vs. calories out. If 400 calories/day meets your weight loss goals, all you have to do is make sure that the calories you expend + the calories you no longer intake = 400. The ratio of those two factors completely varies from person to person on what their motivation levels are going to be, but as long as it works for you it will result in the same amount of weight loss as any other ratio

pjlegato 10y ago
The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong. "Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
- fattylite 10y ago
  The conclusion is: "10) So what actually works for weight loss? At the individual level, some very good research on what works for weight loss comes from the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has parsed the traits, habits, and behaviors of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of one year. They currently have more than 10,000 members enrolled in the study, and these folks respond to annual questionnaires about how they've managed to keep their weight down. The researchers behind the study found that people who have had success losing weight share a few things in common: They weigh themselves at least once a week. They restrict their calorie intake, stay away from high-fat foods, and watch their portion sizes. They also exercise regularly. But note: These folks use physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes. Every reliable expert I've ever spoken to on weight loss says the most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully. In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits. " It doesn't upend it, it basically just says "Don't count calorie expenditures as part of your caloric deficit", which has been standard advice for every resource I've used for quite some time.
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    The theory says that as you do additional exercise, you get diminishing returns in terms of the number of calories you burn. As your exercise level increases, you have to do ever more exercise to burn the same number of calories, because the body has various compensatory mechanisms designed to avoid weight loss. The traditional model proposes a much simpler linear relationship: do an additional unit of exercise and you will burn X more calories, forever. He says that is incorrect and you actually get diminishing returns, where additional units of exercise burn ever fewer calories rather than just a constant.
    - fattylite 10y ago
      I understand that. My point was that I've never seen a plan where people tell you to eat as much as you want as long as you do x hours of activity per day. The only plans I've seen like that are for strong men competitors or where the Rock ate like $300 worth of food every day and worked out for six hours daily.
Scramblejams 10y ago
I (despite the article) am mostly in agreement with you, but I think that calories out is a very complex subject. For example, when I calculated how many calories I was burning on my longer runs, it ended up being around 3000 calories/week. However, as I said before, my intake went up. Way up. I ate like an idiot. Donuts? Yeah. Cheeseburgers? Sometimes ordered two. Dr. Pepper? Bring the two liter! I absolutely added more than 3000 calories to my diet after I started running. And yet despite all that, I just kept dropping weight. The human body is a very complex, non-linear thing. Discerning operating principles by looking solely at inputs and outputs is a hard problem.

fattylite 10y ago

It's just a bad title. The title should have been "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight without changing your diet". If you eat the same amount as you did before, assuming that was maintenance calories, you will lose weight if you begin exercising. The problem is when you're intaking 1500 more calories than necessary before you start exercising. You can't burn that off to the point of a deficit with exercise alone.

Scramblejams 10y ago
Except I didn't eat the same as before. I ate more, way, way more.
- dpark 10y ago
  I bet you didn't, and this is the problem with anecdotal evidence. People are terrible at tracking their actual caloric intake and expenditures. 24 miles a week is a decent bit, but it isn't that much. If you add 24 miles a week but eat a lot more, you will gain weight.
  - Scramblejams 10y ago
    No, it's not that much. But they were very high intensity miles. My typical routine was to do a half mile walking warmup, then over the course of 5-8 minutes of running, gradually adjust my pace so my breathing was very close to my sustainable max. Then I'd continue adjusting my speed to keep my breathing there for the rest of the run. (All those running guides that say you should be able to carry on a conversation while you're running? Yeah, that wasn't me at all. I was huffing and puffing like mad the entire time.) I accumulated that mileage over 3 runs/week, no more than one hour total each time, so that distance was done in a 3 hour period. And about the food? Umm, it wasn't even close. Before the running, my idea of a snack was a little piece of cheese or a yogurt. After I started running, a snack was a Carl's Jr. Famous Star cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd order two. I became notable among my football player brothers-in-law for my capacity, regularly demonstrated, for out-eating them. My wife still talks about a particularly memorable restaurant visit where I basically ate 3 large, complete entrees. My calorie intake was ridiiiiiculous. Eating like that was both enjoyable and entertaining, and it didn't seem to interfere with my fitness, so I did it all the time. And still I lost weight. Crazy. The body is a strange machine.

pjlegato 10y ago

I'd bet there is some exercise intensity threshold step function at work. The article says exercise is, "only around 10 to 30 percent [of total energy expenditure] depending on the person (and excluding professional athletes that workout as a job)," implying that when you are doing lots and lots of hardcore exercise almost every day, it will use up a greater percentage of calories.

Scramblejams 10y ago
Yeah, I've wondered the same. I recall another study -- no idea where I'd find it now -- which did body scans of runners. They found that runners which averaged 11mi/wk had substantial interior fat deposits. Runners that averaged 17mi/wk had very little. Actually, did a bit of Googling, looks like it might have been a study by Dr. Uwe Schütz published in 2009, found a mention of it here: http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/weight-loss/running-the-life-saving-workout/8408-2.html http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/weight-loss/running-the-life-s...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]