8 ms·

From the paper "Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an addi

by Zanta 9y ago

From the paper "Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an additional 39 g of carbon from the body, raising the total by about 20% to 240 g. For comparison, a single 100 g muffin represents about 20% of an average person’s total daily energy requirement. Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily foiled by relatively small quantities of excess food."

misterdata 9y ago
The question is whether the body spends any energy outside of that hour after exercising (e.g. by growing muscle, etc.) than it would otherwise. That would make exercise more effective when considering longer periods of time.
- adamc 9y ago
  That's not the only way it helps. It tends to curb appetite.
- darioush 9y ago
  It helps in other non-measurable ways too. If you know you're going to go for a run in 2-3 hours, you're going to not eat an entire pizza for lunch, for example.
k__ 9y ago
200g are what would be "breathed out" in one hour without exercise? So you can only increase your "burn rate" by 20%?
- finnh 9y ago
  Increasing your basal rate of caloric consumption (and, thus, CO2 exhaled) is hard.
- Filligree 9y ago
  A remarkable fraction of your energy consumption is spent on basic maintenance, and of the rest, far more than you'd think is spent on the brain. Your body is extremely efficient, by engineering standards, but that includes locomotion. Exercise is still a good way to drop in weight, but not simply due to burning up the fat; that could happen anyway. What seems to be happening is that the exercise improves the body's budgeting logic, probably by putting you back in a regime evolution already dealt with. The way to drop in weight isn't to exercise (as such), and it isn't to eat less. All the logic that says those count, is valid, but you have to account for the body fighting back. The goal is to eat less because you don't feel hungry, not despite feeling hungry. Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves.
  - yetihehe 9y ago
    > Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves. Yep, tried this recently with closed loop weight control. After about 8-10kg (from 116kg) lost it's almost impossible to keep on going, you can't control yourself enough to not eat.
    - sparkzilla 9y ago
      I have lost the same amount from about the same weight in the past eight weeks or so, and will have no trouble continuing. The key (for me at least) is to eat a big lunch (around 1000 calories) of whatever you like (today I had burger and fries) and then have a couple of small snacks to a total of 200-300 calories in the evening (I'm eating a Muller corner yoghurt right now). The problem with most diets is that they starve you throughout the day, when the actual problem is habitual snacking. With this method, the most you have to wait is until the next day, when you can eat whatever you like again for lunch. Originally I intended to have a cheat day every 10 days, but I've barely needed them.
  - Jhsto 9y ago
    > The goal is to eat less because you don't feel hungry, not despite feeling hungry. Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves. I'm not sure if I understand this correctly, but isn't this a bad practice? I mean, I can agree with the sentiment of eating too many times per day. E.g. if you tend to eat snacks and then soon after a real meal, then you should definitely use your willpower to just skip the snacks before your upcoming meal. But as far as I know, if you don't exercise and instead just starve yourself, the body first burns through your muscles before it gets to fat. If that's so, then some exercise is crucial to upkeep your muscles even while on a calory deficiency.
- mikeash 9y ago
  200g is what a typical sedentary person breathes out in a day. You can definitely increase your burn rate by way more than 20% with heavy exercise. A Tour de France bicyclist will burn several thousand calories (4,000-7,000 depending on the stage and rider) in only about six hours. For comparison, a typical sedentary person will burn 2,000-2,500 calories per day. It can be physically difficult to eat enough at that rate, and riders lose a substantial amount of weight over the race. (A friend once told me about an endurance cyclist he knew who would eat a big bowl of cereal each morning, except instead of milk he'd use olive oil. Disgusting, but an effective way to get enough calories in.) It's pretty tough for most of us to achieve anything like that much exercise, of course. Even Tour de France riders only do it for a few weeks at a time.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Thanks, that was what I wanted to know.
StevePerkins 9y ago
I can't help but groan at some of the "obvious" health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around. "Calories in, calories out!" "You can't outrun a bad diet!" "Weight is lost in the kitchen!" Sure, things ultimately boil down to intake-vs-expenditure. However, it IS more complicated than that in practice. As software developers, we complain when management makes decisions based on inadequate or poor metrics. But likewise there so many more benefits to physical exercise that aren't captured by a diet and exercise tracking app. During times when I've been 100% sedentary for long periods, I experience overwhelming cravings for sugar and crappy foods. When I force myself to take up any consistent exercise, even just a 30 min walk in the morning or lunchtime... then the cravings subside and regular meals are sufficient. This is fairly common. Exercise has so many physical and mental health benefits. But even just looking at weight management alone, exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session. Something that doesn't get captured by your tracker app or wearable gadget. So often, when I hear somebody smugly minimizing the importance of exercise to health and weight management, it's a person who is too-clever-by-half. They're constantly dabbling with soylent shakes or paleo/keto fad diets... because the truth is they're just lazy and don't want to get off their ass, and look to rationalize that. EDIT: At least half of these replies are completely missing my point altogether. I'm not saying that there is a binary choice to be made between "good diet" OR "exercise", and that you should make the latter choice rather than the former. I'm saying that treating this as a binary choice in the first place is ridiculous. Exercise correlates with proper eating, it's not incidental or ancillary. It's ineffective to tell someone to "go the gym" without changing their eating habits? Well sure, but telling them to "go keto" without worrying about physical activity will be no more successful a year out. It's the pretense that most people can consistently stick with one of these things, and not both together, that is absurd.
- beardbandit 9y ago
  "I can't help but groan at some of the "obvious" health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around." On the flip side, the people that are told this are the ones that are annoyingly attempting to maintain their bad eating habits while just adding exercise, or adding fab foods, or anything really to delude themselves into thinking they can continue to eat the same way.
srcmap 9y ago
I wish there is a way to allow one to enjoy eating but control how much to absorb the food.
- colanderman 9y ago
  I'm not sure whether you're being serious, but as a serious answer, that unabsorbed food has to go somewhere. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects
- nradov 9y ago
  Enjoy eating by picking better quality food in small portions instead of focusing on quantity.
bo1024 9y ago
That quote is deceptive. An hour's jogging will burn at least 500 calories even for quite small people going quite slow, perhaps 700-800 for larger or faster ones. That would be a massive muffin and significantly more than 20% of an average calorie consumption.
- ac29 9y ago
  Muffins can have quite a lot of calories. The (admittedly fairly large) ones at Costco are over 600 calories: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/kirkland-costco-blueberry-muffin-205473697 http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/kirkland-costco-bl...
  - bo1024 9y ago
    Okay, but not a small amount of food as they describe/imply.

by Zanta 9y ago

misterdata 9y ago

The question is whether the body spends any energy outside of that hour after exercising (e.g. by growing muscle, etc.) than it would otherwise. That would make exercise more effective when considering longer periods of time.

adamc 9y ago
That's not the only way it helps. It tends to curb appetite.
darioush 9y ago
It helps in other non-measurable ways too. If you know you're going to go for a run in 2-3 hours, you're going to not eat an entire pizza for lunch, for example.

k__ 9y ago

200g are what would be "breathed out" in one hour without exercise? So you can only increase your "burn rate" by 20%?

finnh 9y ago
Increasing your basal rate of caloric consumption (and, thus, CO2 exhaled) is hard.
Filligree 9y ago
A remarkable fraction of your energy consumption is spent on basic maintenance, and of the rest, far more than you'd think is spent on the brain. Your body is extremely efficient, by engineering standards, but that includes locomotion. Exercise is still a good way to drop in weight, but not simply due to burning up the fat; that could happen anyway. What seems to be happening is that the exercise improves the body's budgeting logic, probably by putting you back in a regime evolution already dealt with. The way to drop in weight isn't to exercise (as such), and it isn't to eat less. All the logic that says those count, is valid, but you have to account for the body fighting back. The goal is to eat less because you don't feel hungry, not despite feeling hungry. Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves.
- yetihehe 9y ago
  > Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves. Yep, tried this recently with closed loop weight control. After about 8-10kg (from 116kg) lost it's almost impossible to keep on going, you can't control yourself enough to not eat.
  - sparkzilla 9y ago
    I have lost the same amount from about the same weight in the past eight weeks or so, and will have no trouble continuing. The key (for me at least) is to eat a big lunch (around 1000 calories) of whatever you like (today I had burger and fries) and then have a couple of small snacks to a total of 200-300 calories in the evening (I'm eating a Muller corner yoghurt right now). The problem with most diets is that they starve you throughout the day, when the actual problem is habitual snacking. With this method, the most you have to wait is until the next day, when you can eat whatever you like again for lunch. Originally I intended to have a cheat day every 10 days, but I've barely needed them.
- Jhsto 9y ago
  > The goal is to eat less because you don't feel hungry, not despite feeling hungry. Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves. I'm not sure if I understand this correctly, but isn't this a bad practice? I mean, I can agree with the sentiment of eating too many times per day. E.g. if you tend to eat snacks and then soon after a real meal, then you should definitely use your willpower to just skip the snacks before your upcoming meal. But as far as I know, if you don't exercise and instead just starve yourself, the body first burns through your muscles before it gets to fat. If that's so, then some exercise is crucial to upkeep your muscles even while on a calory deficiency.
mikeash 9y ago
200g is what a typical sedentary person breathes out in a day. You can definitely increase your burn rate by way more than 20% with heavy exercise. A Tour de France bicyclist will burn several thousand calories (4,000-7,000 depending on the stage and rider) in only about six hours. For comparison, a typical sedentary person will burn 2,000-2,500 calories per day. It can be physically difficult to eat enough at that rate, and riders lose a substantial amount of weight over the race. (A friend once told me about an endurance cyclist he knew who would eat a big bowl of cereal each morning, except instead of milk he'd use olive oil. Disgusting, but an effective way to get enough calories in.) It's pretty tough for most of us to achieve anything like that much exercise, of course. Even Tour de France riders only do it for a few weeks at a time.
- k__ 9y ago
  Thanks, that was what I wanted to know.

StevePerkins 9y ago

I can't help but groan at some of the "obvious" health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around. "Calories in, calories out!" "You can't outrun a bad diet!" "Weight is lost in the kitchen!" Sure, things ultimately boil down to intake-vs-expenditure. However, it IS more complicated than that in practice. As software developers, we complain when management makes decisions based on inadequate or poor metrics. But likewise there so many more benefits to physical exercise that aren't captured by a diet and exercise tracking app. During times when I've been 100% sedentary for long periods, I experience overwhelming cravings for sugar and crappy foods. When I force myself to take up any consistent exercise, even just a 30 min walk in the morning or lunchtime... then the cravings subside and regular meals are sufficient. This is fairly common. Exercise has so many physical and mental health benefits. But even just looking at weight management alone, exercise tends to ramp up your metabolism for hours after each exercise session. Something that doesn't get captured by your tracker app or wearable gadget. So often, when I hear somebody smugly minimizing the importance of exercise to health and weight management, it's a person who is too-clever-by-half. They're constantly dabbling with soylent shakes or paleo/keto fad diets... because the truth is they're just lazy and don't want to get off their ass, and look to rationalize that. EDIT: At least half of these replies are completely missing my point altogether. I'm not saying that there is a binary choice to be made between "good diet" OR "exercise", and that you should make the latter choice rather than the former. I'm saying that treating this as a binary choice in the first place is ridiculous. Exercise correlates with proper eating, it's not incidental or ancillary. It's ineffective to tell someone to "go the gym" without changing their eating habits? Well sure, but telling them to "go keto" without worrying about physical activity will be no more successful a year out. It's the pretense that most people can consistently stick with one of these things, and not both together, that is absurd.

beardbandit 9y ago
"I can't help but groan at some of the "obvious" health and weight loss platitudes that get smugly thrown around." On the flip side, the people that are told this are the ones that are annoyingly attempting to maintain their bad eating habits while just adding exercise, or adding fab foods, or anything really to delude themselves into thinking they can continue to eat the same way.

srcmap 9y ago

I wish there is a way to allow one to enjoy eating but control how much to absorb the food.

colanderman 9y ago
I'm not sure whether you're being serious, but as a serious answer, that unabsorbed food has to go somewhere. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects
nradov 9y ago
Enjoy eating by picking better quality food in small portions instead of focusing on quantity.

bo1024 9y ago

That quote is deceptive. An hour's jogging will burn at least 500 calories even for quite small people going quite slow, perhaps 700-800 for larger or faster ones. That would be a massive muffin and significantly more than 20% of an average calorie consumption.

ac29 9y ago
Muffins can have quite a lot of calories. The (admittedly fairly large) ones at Costco are over 600 calories: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/kirkland-costco-blueberry-muffin-205473697 http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/kirkland-costco-bl...
- bo1024 9y ago
  Okay, but not a small amount of food as they describe/imply.