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Mice compensate for extra exercise by reducing other physical activity: study

74 points by montrose 9y ago

marcc 9y ago
Of course not. Common advice given to a new runner who is trying to lose weight is "you can't outrun a bad diet". Exercise is super important in maintaining good cardiovascular health, a good mental state, and does help with weight loss.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  In fact, if you run and keep eating too much you'll stay fat and destroy your joints.
solracanobra 9y ago
So what's the benefit of these? We understand that the key to weight loss is calories in, calories out. What's so hard to understand about that..? Maybe I am missing the point. Is this just to gather more evidence to prove caloric deficits are the correct way?
- Faaak 9y ago
  CICO is not exactly true. Not all calories are equal. Fat calories, for example, are much less absorbed by the body than carbohydrates.
  - garrettdc 9y ago
    It does a good enough job at modeling reality that we can make decent predictions with it. While the details of CICO may be more complicated, for someone who is obviously out of shape, the advice of "Eat some extra protein and make sure you are consuming below maintenance calories" works 9/10 times.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Which is why Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig have never changed their formulas, always works for everyone, never have repeat customers, and are nearly broke charities, right?~
      - tacon 9y ago
        Those companies are a nicely disguised cover to maintain one's status quo. An online marketer once pointed out a Jenny Craig(?) advertisement: "Eat all the food you want!" Busted.
  - Andre_Wanglin 9y ago
    It's still CICO. It's just that the way we currently measure the caloric content of a food does not represent what is actually bioavailable.
    - laretluval 9y ago
      So it’s CICO for some unobservable quantity of calories. Real useful.
      - adrianN 9y ago
        It's really useful if you don't change your diet, but eat less of the same stuff as before.
        laretluval 9y ago
        Not necessarily. Bioavailable calories may not be a linear function of calories consumed. CICO is empirically vacuous.
  - azemetre 9y ago
    You're talking about calorie differentials amounting to 40 or 80 per day. Hardly something worth considering for the average person, but I'm sure it gives you easy grant money to chug out reports. If you think obesity is due to the difference between 80 calories or so, you have other drastic immediate concerns (the terrible mental model being one). People aren't becoming obese because their body isn't "processing" fat calories compared to carb calories, they are obese because people eat obscene amounts of food daily. Countries like France and Italy eat massive amounts of carbs in their diets and they don't have obesity issues on the scale of the United States.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    Calories that not abosorbed are calories-through, not calories -in.
- supreme_sublime 9y ago
  The point of these is body positivity basically. You are fat and it isn't your fault. Even if you do exercise it won't be enough. It is strange though, pretty much no one thinks that just exercising is enough. Any workout program will tell you that a 6 pack is made in the kitchen. Lifting weights and doing some cardio will certainly help the process and help you be healthier in general. The biggest factor is nutrition.
  - garrettdc 9y ago
    > The biggest factor is nutrition Yes! > The point of these is body positivity basically. You are fat and it isn't your fault. I didn't see this at all in there. If anything, this is written to people who think they can outwork a bad diet, which is rarely the case for anyone over 16. Nothing in there was about body positivity or anything. It just showed that even when we run and "burn 300 calories" that you are possibly holding that back somewhere else to stay at caloric balance.
    - supreme_sublime 9y ago
      That's fair, I was definitely reading between the lines a bit. Just seems like the kind of article that some people who are deep in denial about their health will point to as "proof" that they are just this way and cannot change.
  - tacon 9y ago
    There is some help in weight control from lean muscle mass. Fat needs about 2 kcals/day/pound to stay alive. Muscle needs something in the 20 kcals/day/pound range to stay alive. Also, having a good amount of lean muscle mass naturally leads to a more active lifestyle in general. But these are still minor compared to basic diet.
- bgentry 9y ago
  At the pure physical level, yes: calories remaining = calories in - calories out However, the "calories out" portion of that equation is actually quite complicated. In recent years many studies have indicated that the body does not process all calories in the same way. So "calories out" depends on a lot of things, including: - metabolism, which can be increased by exercise and muscle mass - what specific kind of "calories in" you're getting, and how your body processes these - calories burned directly by exercise To highlight one specific example of this, a calorie of fructose may be processed by the body very differently than a calorie of, say, vegetable fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
  - xutopia 9y ago
    The process for storing fat as fat is paradoxically very difficult for the body chemically. The easiest way for the body to add stores of fat reserves is through sugar and the more refined (HFCS comes to mind) it is the easiest it is for the body.
    - kmm 9y ago
      Can you source that? Because as far as I can tell, de novo lipogenesis is a relatively rare process, exactly because our body prefers to just store the fat in the blood as fat. Sugar is burned preferentially, and only when your carb intake exceeds your total daily energy expenditure, it will start converting it to fat: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981 I'm not sure what chemically needs to happen, fat is transported from the bowel to the bloodstream in a relatively complex process, but once it's in the blood, it's in the same form as in storage, as triglycerides. In fact, the triglyceride content of a person's fat stores will reflect their diet, which is a strong indication it comes directly from the food without processing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4072956 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4072956
    - tacon 9y ago
      Paleo Diet & Strength Training Biochemistry | Doug McGuff M.D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7GB3h82tcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7GB3h82tcQ
- jmull 9y ago
  > We understand that the key to weight loss is calories in, calories out. That's not at all true. CICO is a straightforward restatement of a law of thermodynamics, and I'm not disputing that at all. But from a weight-loss perspective, understanding CICO isn't necessarily that helpful, and certainly not "the key". The difficult question is how any particular individual can make CO > CI. (Well, actually, the goal is to balance CO with CI at a healthy weight, but of course that's step 2 for a lot of people.) There are many millions of people for whom the answer to that question is not known. I suspect it's because Human metabolism is complicated, with numerous overlapping and interacting mechanisms and system, where the parameters for how they interact vary by individual... hormones, habits, social network, culture, taste, access to food options, physical health, your job, etc., can all be significant factors, depending on the individual. Meanwhile, food producers of various sorts are often acting at cross-purposes, since their goal is to make as much money as possible, not necessarily help people lose weight.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    > CICO is a straightforward restatement of a law of thermodynamics The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems only. Show me the ecosystem where food consumed and a human body is a perfectly closed system with no other inputs/outputs and I'll show you how that does not resemble the real world and you are making underlying assumptions you cannot prove.
    - bitwize 9y ago
      In a closed system, CI=CO=0, by definition, so I think you've got the wrong thermodynamic law.
      - WorldMaker 9y ago
        Apologies, I did mean the First Law, but the criticism still applies. The First Law of Thermodynamics also includes a closed system assumption.
        9y ago
- pubby 9y ago
  I used to bash CICO as being an over-simplification until I actually looked at the numbers. The average american eats 3600 calories per day. Fat ones eat more; perhaps 4000 to 8000. This is far beyond amounts recommended to lose weight effectively: 1500 or less. There are lots of variables in human nutrition and metabolism, but the biggest by far is the fact that people are eating 3-5x the amount of food they should.
obeattie 9y ago
So I think the theory is that when we take up exercise, we move less during non-exercise time. They explored this in mice by tracking their movements with infrared devices. But surely we have oodles of data from devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches to know whether this behaviour is true for humans or not.
- garrettdc 9y ago
  One problem with those is that they are easy to capture fake/inaccurate data. Couple that with non-running exercise activities and you have an even more difficult equation to solve for.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  We may move less during non-exercise time, but also eat more, because we are extra hungry from exercising. exercisers, whatever their species, tend to become hungrier and consume more calories after physical activity. They also may grow more sedentary outside of exercise sessions. Together or separately, these changes could compensate for the extra energy used during exercise, meaning that, over all, energy expenditure doesn’t change and a person’s or rodent’s weight remains stubbornly the same.
  - at-fates-hands 9y ago
    I remember when I got out of college and had stopped playing sports. My roommate at the time convinced me to start weight lifting and training hard at the gym. I was taking all kinds of supplements (creatine, various amino acids, whey protein, etc), working out 1.5 to 2 hours at a time, and it was working, albeit slowly. Looking back a few years later, I realized maybe I didn't see the big changes I was expecting since my roommate and I would hit the Burger King on the way home since we were always so hungry after working out. It dawned on me we were completely erasing all the work we just did in the matter of twenty minutes eating cheeseburgers and onion rings with several cups of pop to boot.
    - azemetre 9y ago
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
"Fork putdowns" have been the commonly recommended "exercise" for weight loss by many in fitness community for a long time for good reason :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- komali2 9y ago
  For the obese gamers chugging mountain dew(me, and my friends) the biggest difference came from switching to drinking water. That got us down to weights that seemed feasible to diet and exercise our ways further down. It was a super simple shift and wrought such a significant change to our body shape and weight that we were motivated to do the "hard" things - i.e. diet and exercise.
  - aklemm 9y ago
    Quitting sugary drinks is one of the best things I ever did.
byteCoder 9y ago
For weight loss, diet is more important than exercise, by far. There are several aphorisms about this: 1. "Abs are made in the kitchen." 2. "You can't outrun a bad diet." Personally, I've found that carb restriction (e.g., Keto) has worked well for me for keeping my blood sugar (A1c) levels down (with an added bonus of weight loss). YMMV
- Retric 9y ago
  If you start burning 5,000+ calories per day eating enough can feel like a chore. That's outside the realm of possible for a 40+ hour per week office drone, but it does apply to some people.
  - garrettdc 9y ago
    This is why we were given cheesecake :)
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    5k kcal / day is professional athlete levels of activity. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-country-skiing-food.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... Burning 15kcal per minute is a stretch for most people, and with family life and economic constraints, I doubt most people can spare more than 30 to 45 min per day for HIIT exercise. My point is its only realistic to budget burning 400 to 600 kcal due to exercise. It's far easier to eat more than what any normal person can burn even with excercise, so without a naturally high metabolism, a proper, restricted diet is a necessity.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- garrettdc 9y ago
  I've seen keto work great for a lot of people. Generally, they have been those that tended to overeat on carbs and junk foods like chips, soda, pizza, etc. The mechanism at the end of the day is still caloric restriction that leads to weight loss. Keto is just a means to that end.
douglaswlance 9y ago
People tend to compartmentalize "exercise" as the thing they do at the gym or a couple times a week; instead of the activity they're doing all day, every day. You are always exercising to a certain degree, every second of every day. From sleeping to full exertion--you're always somewhere along that spectrum of physical activity.
dljsjr 9y ago
This headline could not be more uninformative if it tried unless it was totally off topic. Like probably a lot of people here, I read the headline and said to myself "no shit, of course diet matters" but then I read the article and the conclusion is actually pretty interesting: CICO is of course still king and that's not at all what this is about; this group did a mouse study and found that when they increased the amount of exercise available to the mice (and they started to exercise more), something happened that was not fatigue related that cause them to be MORE sedentary when they were not exercising, and in fact the increase in sedentary behavior almost perfectly counteracted the increased energy consumption from the running (they still ended up slightly net negative but extremely minor). It's a short article and worth the read. Still a garbage headline.
- tgb 9y ago
  Good summary, but the difference was only that they would have burned 45% more extra calories from their exercise had they not reduced their other activities. If this is the same in humans, then you would just want to multiply your extra calories burned from your workout by about 0.7 to get how much you will have burned net accounting for your less movement throughout the day. That's not that far off from the naive estimate, so I'm not sure that this should really make a difference in our thinking about exercise and diet. (In particular, "extremely minor" seems far too strong a phrase and even "slightly" seems pushing it.)
  - dljsjr 9y ago
    I based that on this quote: >These changes in how they spent their time neatly managed to almost counteract the extra calorie costs from running, says Daniel Lark, a research fellow in molecular physiology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, who led the new study. And as this is a mouse study I make no comments on how to extrapolate that to humans. If this is behavioral and not biological then it might not translate at all.
- dang 9y ago
  If you can get it into 80 chars we'll change the headline above. Edit: eloff wins for simplicity and good English.
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mikenew 9y ago
I would love to see resistance training looked at in comparison to distance running, which is usually what's meant by "exercise" in this context. The theory behind jogging for exercise is that you'll raise your calorie output, but as the article states, you may just end up compensating by being less energetic throughout the rest of the day or feeling hungrier and eating more. The idea behind resistance training is that you apply a stress to your muscles, and in response to that stress your body dedicates a higher than normal percentage of the calories you take in to repairing and rebuilding your muscle fiber. Anecdotally, I've been powerlifting for the past 2 years or so as my "exercise", and while I weigh about what I did two years ago, my body looks completely different. Weightlifting may not cause you to lose weight, but no one actually wants to lose weight, they want to lose fat.
- paulcole 9y ago
  Do you think that distance running doesn't apply stress to the muscles?
  - mikenew 9y ago
    Anabolic and catabolic stress is dramatically different. Just compare the body of an olympic marathon runner vs an olympic weightlifter. The limiting factor for jogging is usually your cardiovascular system, and you stop when you feel exhausted, not when your leg muscles can't move anymore. That's why it's referred to as "cardio". In weightlifting you stress your muscles to near the point of failure, not your cardiovascular system.
    - paulcole 9y ago
      > Just compare the body of an olympic marathon runner vs an olympic weightlifter Is this a useful comparison? Olympic marathoners are small people who are extremely weight conscious. Olympic weightlifters are also very aware of their weights as they compete in weight classes. > The limiting factor for jogging is usually your cardiovascular system, and you stop when you feel exhausted, not when your leg muscles can't move anymore. No offense but this is just telling me you're guessing and don't know much about distance running or jogging. Most average people who run for exercise stop because they've finished their workout not from exhaustion.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
> "In most of these experiments, the participants lost far less weight than would have been expected, mathematically, given how many additional calories they were burning with their workouts." Maybe it's the sceptic in me, but I'm reading this as: the calorie model is broken, or at least flawed. When someone else reproduces this I'll give it a second chance. As it is, calorie fail aside, I get the feeling someone beat up their data and/or had an odd set of mice. That is "get different mice, we're not finding anything interesting." Personally, I'm extremely unlikely to change my diet + exercise habits over a mouse.
imhelpingu 9y ago
Exercise modulates my appetite such that I eat much healthier. I know it's anecdotal, but this effect is patently obviously to me.
- majos 9y ago
  I find that it makes it easier for me to eat more, to the extent that as I try to gain weight I've taken up sprinting again -- I just find it easier to eat more after sprinting, more I'm sure than I actually burn in 15 minutes of sprints.
lukeschlather 9y ago
This article (and the study) sort of is working from a faulty premise, which is that losing weight is a good thing. There's a lot of evidence that losing fat is a good thing, but if you increase your muscle mass by 10% and your fat mass by 3%, is that bad? What if you decrease your muscle mass by 5% and also decrease your fat mass by 5%? Without accurately measuring that sort of thing, I worry most diet studies only muddle the conversation with meaningless anecdotes when it's unclear what the weight loss actually consisted of.
- bo1024 9y ago
  Another common false implication is that weight loss is the "only" good thing. Cardiovascular health is important as well.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Sugar causes cardiovascular inflammation and doesn’t satiate you. A high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet (ie “ketogenic”) will cause weight loss with no exercise while increasing cardiovascular health (stick to plant material if you can versus a meat heavy diet, to keep colorectal cancer at bay). If you pick one exercise to do, lift weights, either to increase or maintain muscle mass.

74 points by montrose 9y ago

Of course not. Common advice given to a new runner who is trying to lose weight is "you can't outrun a bad diet". Exercise is super important in maintaining good cardiovascular health, a good mental state, and does help with weight loss.

cup-of-tea 9y ago
In fact, if you run and keep eating too much you'll stay fat and destroy your joints.

solracanobra 9y ago

So what's the benefit of these? We understand that the key to weight loss is calories in, calories out. What's so hard to understand about that..? Maybe I am missing the point. Is this just to gather more evidence to prove caloric deficits are the correct way?

Faaak 9y ago
CICO is not exactly true. Not all calories are equal. Fat calories, for example, are much less absorbed by the body than carbohydrates.
- garrettdc 9y ago
  It does a good enough job at modeling reality that we can make decent predictions with it. While the details of CICO may be more complicated, for someone who is obviously out of shape, the advice of "Eat some extra protein and make sure you are consuming below maintenance calories" works 9/10 times.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Which is why Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig have never changed their formulas, always works for everyone, never have repeat customers, and are nearly broke charities, right?~
    - tacon 9y ago
      Those companies are a nicely disguised cover to maintain one's status quo. An online marketer once pointed out a Jenny Craig(?) advertisement: "Eat all the food you want!" Busted.
- Andre_Wanglin 9y ago
  It's still CICO. It's just that the way we currently measure the caloric content of a food does not represent what is actually bioavailable.
  - laretluval 9y ago
    So it’s CICO for some unobservable quantity of calories. Real useful.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      It's really useful if you don't change your diet, but eat less of the same stuff as before.
      - laretluval 9y ago
        Not necessarily. Bioavailable calories may not be a linear function of calories consumed. CICO is empirically vacuous.
- azemetre 9y ago
  You're talking about calorie differentials amounting to 40 or 80 per day. Hardly something worth considering for the average person, but I'm sure it gives you easy grant money to chug out reports. If you think obesity is due to the difference between 80 calories or so, you have other drastic immediate concerns (the terrible mental model being one). People aren't becoming obese because their body isn't "processing" fat calories compared to carb calories, they are obese because people eat obscene amounts of food daily. Countries like France and Italy eat massive amounts of carbs in their diets and they don't have obesity issues on the scale of the United States.
- rimliu 9y ago
  Calories that not abosorbed are calories-through, not calories -in.
supreme_sublime 9y ago
The point of these is body positivity basically. You are fat and it isn't your fault. Even if you do exercise it won't be enough. It is strange though, pretty much no one thinks that just exercising is enough. Any workout program will tell you that a 6 pack is made in the kitchen. Lifting weights and doing some cardio will certainly help the process and help you be healthier in general. The biggest factor is nutrition.
- garrettdc 9y ago
  > The biggest factor is nutrition Yes! > The point of these is body positivity basically. You are fat and it isn't your fault. I didn't see this at all in there. If anything, this is written to people who think they can outwork a bad diet, which is rarely the case for anyone over 16. Nothing in there was about body positivity or anything. It just showed that even when we run and "burn 300 calories" that you are possibly holding that back somewhere else to stay at caloric balance.
  - supreme_sublime 9y ago
    That's fair, I was definitely reading between the lines a bit. Just seems like the kind of article that some people who are deep in denial about their health will point to as "proof" that they are just this way and cannot change.
- tacon 9y ago
  There is some help in weight control from lean muscle mass. Fat needs about 2 kcals/day/pound to stay alive. Muscle needs something in the 20 kcals/day/pound range to stay alive. Also, having a good amount of lean muscle mass naturally leads to a more active lifestyle in general. But these are still minor compared to basic diet.
bgentry 9y ago
At the pure physical level, yes: calories remaining = calories in - calories out However, the "calories out" portion of that equation is actually quite complicated. In recent years many studies have indicated that the body does not process all calories in the same way. So "calories out" depends on a lot of things, including: - metabolism, which can be increased by exercise and muscle mass - what specific kind of "calories in" you're getting, and how your body processes these - calories burned directly by exercise To highlight one specific example of this, a calorie of fructose may be processed by the body very differently than a calorie of, say, vegetable fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
- xutopia 9y ago
  The process for storing fat as fat is paradoxically very difficult for the body chemically. The easiest way for the body to add stores of fat reserves is through sugar and the more refined (HFCS comes to mind) it is the easiest it is for the body.
  - kmm 9y ago
    Can you source that? Because as far as I can tell, de novo lipogenesis is a relatively rare process, exactly because our body prefers to just store the fat in the blood as fat. Sugar is burned preferentially, and only when your carb intake exceeds your total daily energy expenditure, it will start converting it to fat: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981 I'm not sure what chemically needs to happen, fat is transported from the bowel to the bloodstream in a relatively complex process, but once it's in the blood, it's in the same form as in storage, as triglycerides. In fact, the triglyceride content of a person's fat stores will reflect their diet, which is a strong indication it comes directly from the food without processing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4072956 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4072956
  - tacon 9y ago
    Paleo Diet & Strength Training Biochemistry | Doug McGuff M.D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7GB3h82tcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7GB3h82tcQ
jmull 9y ago
> We understand that the key to weight loss is calories in, calories out. That's not at all true. CICO is a straightforward restatement of a law of thermodynamics, and I'm not disputing that at all. But from a weight-loss perspective, understanding CICO isn't necessarily that helpful, and certainly not "the key". The difficult question is how any particular individual can make CO > CI. (Well, actually, the goal is to balance CO with CI at a healthy weight, but of course that's step 2 for a lot of people.) There are many millions of people for whom the answer to that question is not known. I suspect it's because Human metabolism is complicated, with numerous overlapping and interacting mechanisms and system, where the parameters for how they interact vary by individual... hormones, habits, social network, culture, taste, access to food options, physical health, your job, etc., can all be significant factors, depending on the individual. Meanwhile, food producers of various sorts are often acting at cross-purposes, since their goal is to make as much money as possible, not necessarily help people lose weight.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  > CICO is a straightforward restatement of a law of thermodynamics The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems only. Show me the ecosystem where food consumed and a human body is a perfectly closed system with no other inputs/outputs and I'll show you how that does not resemble the real world and you are making underlying assumptions you cannot prove.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    In a closed system, CI=CO=0, by definition, so I think you've got the wrong thermodynamic law.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Apologies, I did mean the First Law, but the criticism still applies. The First Law of Thermodynamics also includes a closed system assumption.
      - 9y ago
pubby 9y ago
I used to bash CICO as being an over-simplification until I actually looked at the numbers. The average american eats 3600 calories per day. Fat ones eat more; perhaps 4000 to 8000. This is far beyond amounts recommended to lose weight effectively: 1500 or less. There are lots of variables in human nutrition and metabolism, but the biggest by far is the fact that people are eating 3-5x the amount of food they should.

obeattie 9y ago

So I think the theory is that when we take up exercise, we move less during non-exercise time. They explored this in mice by tracking their movements with infrared devices. But surely we have oodles of data from devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches to know whether this behaviour is true for humans or not.

garrettdc 9y ago
One problem with those is that they are easy to capture fake/inaccurate data. Couple that with non-running exercise activities and you have an even more difficult equation to solve for.
WillPostForFood 9y ago
We may move less during non-exercise time, but also eat more, because we are extra hungry from exercising. exercisers, whatever their species, tend to become hungrier and consume more calories after physical activity. They also may grow more sedentary outside of exercise sessions. Together or separately, these changes could compensate for the extra energy used during exercise, meaning that, over all, energy expenditure doesn’t change and a person’s or rodent’s weight remains stubbornly the same.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  I remember when I got out of college and had stopped playing sports. My roommate at the time convinced me to start weight lifting and training hard at the gym. I was taking all kinds of supplements (creatine, various amino acids, whey protein, etc), working out 1.5 to 2 hours at a time, and it was working, albeit slowly. Looking back a few years later, I realized maybe I didn't see the big changes I was expecting since my roommate and I would hit the Burger King on the way home since we were always so hungry after working out. It dawned on me we were completely erasing all the work we just did in the matter of twenty minutes eating cheeseburgers and onion rings with several cups of pop to boot.
  - azemetre 9y ago

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago

"Fork putdowns" have been the commonly recommended "exercise" for weight loss by many in fitness community for a long time for good reason :)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
komali2 9y ago
For the obese gamers chugging mountain dew(me, and my friends) the biggest difference came from switching to drinking water. That got us down to weights that seemed feasible to diet and exercise our ways further down. It was a super simple shift and wrought such a significant change to our body shape and weight that we were motivated to do the "hard" things - i.e. diet and exercise.
- aklemm 9y ago
  Quitting sugary drinks is one of the best things I ever did.

byteCoder 9y ago

For weight loss, diet is more important than exercise, by far. There are several aphorisms about this: 1. "Abs are made in the kitchen." 2. "You can't outrun a bad diet." Personally, I've found that carb restriction (e.g., Keto) has worked well for me for keeping my blood sugar (A1c) levels down (with an added bonus of weight loss). YMMV

Retric 9y ago
If you start burning 5,000+ calories per day eating enough can feel like a chore. That's outside the realm of possible for a 40+ hour per week office drone, but it does apply to some people.
- garrettdc 9y ago
  This is why we were given cheesecake :)
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  5k kcal / day is professional athlete levels of activity. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-country-skiing-food.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... Burning 15kcal per minute is a stretch for most people, and with family life and economic constraints, I doubt most people can spare more than 30 to 45 min per day for HIIT exercise. My point is its only realistic to budget burning 400 to 600 kcal due to exercise. It's far easier to eat more than what any normal person can burn even with excercise, so without a naturally high metabolism, a proper, restricted diet is a necessity.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
garrettdc 9y ago
I've seen keto work great for a lot of people. Generally, they have been those that tended to overeat on carbs and junk foods like chips, soda, pizza, etc. The mechanism at the end of the day is still caloric restriction that leads to weight loss. Keto is just a means to that end.

douglaswlance 9y ago

People tend to compartmentalize "exercise" as the thing they do at the gym or a couple times a week; instead of the activity they're doing all day, every day. You are always exercising to a certain degree, every second of every day. From sleeping to full exertion--you're always somewhere along that spectrum of physical activity.

dljsjr 9y ago

This headline could not be more uninformative if it tried unless it was totally off topic. Like probably a lot of people here, I read the headline and said to myself "no shit, of course diet matters" but then I read the article and the conclusion is actually pretty interesting: CICO is of course still king and that's not at all what this is about; this group did a mouse study and found that when they increased the amount of exercise available to the mice (and they started to exercise more), something happened that was not fatigue related that cause them to be MORE sedentary when they were not exercising, and in fact the increase in sedentary behavior almost perfectly counteracted the increased energy consumption from the running (they still ended up slightly net negative but extremely minor). It's a short article and worth the read. Still a garbage headline.

tgb 9y ago
Good summary, but the difference was only that they would have burned 45% more extra calories from their exercise had they not reduced their other activities. If this is the same in humans, then you would just want to multiply your extra calories burned from your workout by about 0.7 to get how much you will have burned net accounting for your less movement throughout the day. That's not that far off from the naive estimate, so I'm not sure that this should really make a difference in our thinking about exercise and diet. (In particular, "extremely minor" seems far too strong a phrase and even "slightly" seems pushing it.)
- dljsjr 9y ago
  I based that on this quote: >These changes in how they spent their time neatly managed to almost counteract the extra calorie costs from running, says Daniel Lark, a research fellow in molecular physiology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, who led the new study. And as this is a mouse study I make no comments on how to extrapolate that to humans. If this is behavioral and not biological then it might not translate at all.
dang 9y ago
If you can get it into 80 chars we'll change the headline above. Edit: eloff wins for simplicity and good English.

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mikenew 9y ago

I would love to see resistance training looked at in comparison to distance running, which is usually what's meant by "exercise" in this context. The theory behind jogging for exercise is that you'll raise your calorie output, but as the article states, you may just end up compensating by being less energetic throughout the rest of the day or feeling hungrier and eating more. The idea behind resistance training is that you apply a stress to your muscles, and in response to that stress your body dedicates a higher than normal percentage of the calories you take in to repairing and rebuilding your muscle fiber. Anecdotally, I've been powerlifting for the past 2 years or so as my "exercise", and while I weigh about what I did two years ago, my body looks completely different. Weightlifting may not cause you to lose weight, but no one actually wants to lose weight, they want to lose fat.

paulcole 9y ago
Do you think that distance running doesn't apply stress to the muscles?
- mikenew 9y ago
  Anabolic and catabolic stress is dramatically different. Just compare the body of an olympic marathon runner vs an olympic weightlifter. The limiting factor for jogging is usually your cardiovascular system, and you stop when you feel exhausted, not when your leg muscles can't move anymore. That's why it's referred to as "cardio". In weightlifting you stress your muscles to near the point of failure, not your cardiovascular system.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    > Just compare the body of an olympic marathon runner vs an olympic weightlifter Is this a useful comparison? Olympic marathoners are small people who are extremely weight conscious. Olympic weightlifters are also very aware of their weights as they compete in weight classes. > The limiting factor for jogging is usually your cardiovascular system, and you stop when you feel exhausted, not when your leg muscles can't move anymore. No offense but this is just telling me you're guessing and don't know much about distance running or jogging. Most average people who run for exercise stop because they've finished their workout not from exhaustion.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

> "In most of these experiments, the participants lost far less weight than would have been expected, mathematically, given how many additional calories they were burning with their workouts." Maybe it's the sceptic in me, but I'm reading this as: the calorie model is broken, or at least flawed. When someone else reproduces this I'll give it a second chance. As it is, calorie fail aside, I get the feeling someone beat up their data and/or had an odd set of mice. That is "get different mice, we're not finding anything interesting." Personally, I'm extremely unlikely to change my diet + exercise habits over a mouse.

imhelpingu 9y ago

Exercise modulates my appetite such that I eat much healthier. I know it's anecdotal, but this effect is patently obviously to me.

majos 9y ago
I find that it makes it easier for me to eat more, to the extent that as I try to gain weight I've taken up sprinting again -- I just find it easier to eat more after sprinting, more I'm sure than I actually burn in 15 minutes of sprints.

lukeschlather 9y ago

This article (and the study) sort of is working from a faulty premise, which is that losing weight is a good thing. There's a lot of evidence that losing fat is a good thing, but if you increase your muscle mass by 10% and your fat mass by 3%, is that bad? What if you decrease your muscle mass by 5% and also decrease your fat mass by 5%? Without accurately measuring that sort of thing, I worry most diet studies only muddle the conversation with meaningless anecdotes when it's unclear what the weight loss actually consisted of.

bo1024 9y ago
Another common false implication is that weight loss is the "only" good thing. Cardiovascular health is important as well.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Sugar causes cardiovascular inflammation and doesn’t satiate you. A high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet (ie “ketogenic”) will cause weight loss with no exercise while increasing cardiovascular health (stick to plant material if you can versus a meat heavy diet, to keep colorectal cancer at bay). If you pick one exercise to do, lift weights, either to increase or maintain muscle mass.