7 ms·

Exercise is good, even necessary, but it doesn't really help you with weight loss since your body compensate for it in other ways. It's what and how much you e

by kiba 7y ago

Exercise is good, even necessary, but it doesn't really help you with weight loss since your body compensate for it in other ways. It's what and how much you eat that matters.

shadowtree 7y ago
Not my experience, let me explain: I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle. If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy). A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard. People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese.
- w0utert 7y ago
  >> People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food This is bad advice, it's been shown over and over again that in the long term people don't manage to lose weight by exercising. They give up, don't exercise enough, overestimate how many calories they burnt, over-compensate by eating more and/or unhealthier ('because I earned it after taking a run'), etc. You don't have to 'diet' to lose weight, just try to eat a little less each day, and watch what you are eating. Only 100 calories less than what you need each day, and you'll steadily lose maybe ~3KG a year.
  - zbobet2012 7y ago
    However, exercise is the largest driving factor in health _not_ weight https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/treadmill_performance_predicts_mortality https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/treadmil.... For weightloss _diet and exercise_ is the way to go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4429709/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4429709/.
    - okmokmz 7y ago
      >Objectively measured physical activity may not be the key determinant of unhealthy weight gain in children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ >Prospective studies, however, find little evidence of the more physically active members of a population gaining less excess weight than those who are the least physically active. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract >TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724
      - zbobet2012 7y ago
        > However, exercise is the largest driving factor in health _not_ weight Citing a bunch of studies about obesity changes nothing about the fact that _exercise_ is more important to health outcomes than _weight_. Another source for you: https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/1/83 https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/1/83 > There was no significant trend across BMI categories for mortality after adjustment for fitness. Being skinny isn't being healthy, being _fit_ is being healthy.
        okmokmz 7y ago
        >Citing a bunch of studies about obesity changes nothing about the fact that _exercise_ is more important to health outcomes than _weight_. This is pretty funny. They directly address and contradict the point your trying to make. Even the source you posted contradicts what you are trying to argue. Nice try though
  - reroute1 7y ago
    Metabolism increases can also affect you long after a workout, and building muscle instead of fat is also beneficial for the system as a whole. These cannot be recreated with just diet.
  - TheCoelacanth 7y ago
    Is that research for level of activity in general or for "exercise"?
- kiba 7y ago
  Not my experience, let me explain: Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. Research suggests that your body compensate for any activity expenditure to maintain caloric burn within that specific range. This is known as constrained total energy expenditure. I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle. If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy). A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard. I don't trust smartwatches and other devices to track caloric expenditure accurately given that they seemed to have constantly overestimate how much I burn. This does not dissuade me from making sure that I get at least an hour of exercise everyday. People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese. I agree that people should not do anything special, but here we are in a food environment that makes this difficult.
  - CJKinni 7y ago
    > Not my experience, let me explain: >> Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. My research suggests that... Can you cite your research. It's hard to criticize someone for giving an anecdote then going on to cite 'your research without citing it.
    - okmokmz 7y ago
      Here are a few >Objectively measured physical activity may not be the key determinant of unhealthy weight gain in children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ >Prospective studies, however, find little evidence of the more physically active members of a population gaining less excess weight than those who are the least physically active. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract >TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724
- x2f10 7y ago
  >People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. It's unlikely a 30m run and a 30m walk is going to burn off their excess calories.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  >If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy). An Olympic level athlete might burn 30 kcal per minute at their best. I would bet a regular person burns at most 15 kcal per minute while running, so that's 450 kcal for a 30 min run, and maybe a couple hundred more for a walk. People consume that in a single large sugary coffee or soda drink. You can't ignore inputs.
  - plausibilities 7y ago
    Having an extra negative 400 to 500 calorie offset on a daily basis can be incredibly helpful considering a lot of creeping weight gain is caused by a caloric surplus of only a couple hundred per day.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      From the looks of many Americans I’ve seen, their problem is a lot more than a couple hundred kcal per day.
      - ska 7y ago
        A couple hundred kcal per day for 10 years is about 200lb.
        reroute1 7y ago
        Thank you for putting some perspective on this! It's a huge aggregate in the long run.
        im3w1l 7y ago
        It doesn't work like he says. You can't just sum up the number of calories and convert it to pounds of fat. If you eat a few hundred calories too many you will rise in weight. But increasing your weight means your metabolism will increase. In the end you will reach an equilibrium were your weight is high enough that your metabolism equals your intake, and you will stop gaining weight. Let's take a 5"10 male aged 25 weight 170 pounds. According to some calculator they will have a basal metabolism (how much you use if you stay in bed all day) of 1850 kcal / day. Lets say they eat 450 kcal / day too much. i.e. 2300 kcal / day. By running the metabolism calculator backwards we find that they stabilize on a weight of 245 pounds. Thats a seriously overweight, to be sure, but it is also well below 200 pounds of extra weight.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  In my experience diet is necessary to lose weight, but exercise makes dieting a lot easier.
technocratius 7y ago
Exactly. Burning e.g. 500 calories on daily basis is much more strenuous on both your body and your agenda than cutting 500 calories from your diet.
- shadowtree 7y ago
  You're commenting under an article showing scientific evidence that this is not true :)
uniformlyrandom 7y ago
You are correct for weight loss. The only reliable way to lose weight is to consume fewer calories. However, when it comes to supporting your current weight, it is fairly easy to hit equilibrium with exercise.
Mvhsz 7y ago
Not sure why this is down voted, excerpt from the abstract shows that they view nutrition as the main reason for the gap. > There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. It's pretty widely accepted that nutrition trumps exercise in weight loss. I will say that my observations align with OP, urban lifestyles tend to be less sedentary then suburban/rural. But my observations could also be skewed by age differences, which presumably this study controlled for (didn't read the whole thing).
- livueta 7y ago
  Some anecdata: I spend a decent amount of time in a small (~3k) town in the American west that's the largest place for about two hours in any direction. It has one grocery store. Prices and selection in this (non-chain) store are genuinely appalling. Fresh fruit and veg is expensive and generally low in quality. As a result, nobody but the occasional out-of-towner fisherman buys it, so there's no incentive to stock more/better stuff. It's kinda like a slightly scaled up version of the basket of brown bananas in the bodega: a desultory corner of the store where there's visible dust on the apples. What do many folks buy instead? TV dinners. Lots of them. It's not uncommon to see a cart in the checkout line that's nothing but about twenty TV dinners, cheap beer and maybe a loaf or two of wonder bread. Not everyone lives like that, but it's common enough that it's rare for me to leave that store without feeling kinda sad. So, yeah, food deserts aren't just an urban problem. n.b. on reflection, a partial counterexample: the Walmart in the nearest larger (~20k) town, despite having more produce and similar goodies on offer, also does a very brisk trade in TV dinners. Access to nutrition is probably relevant, but there's got to also be broader cultural/economic/wellness issues at play.
  - mledu 7y ago
    How many Dollar Stores are in your town? Here is very interesting podcast outlining how Dollar Stores kill supermarkets that carry necessary products like produce. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/26/717665452/episode-909-dollar-stores-vs-lettuce https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/26/717665452/epis...
ndarwincorn 7y ago
As with most absolutist statements, the truth is somewhere in between--the inverse is true there as well. If you don't do anything to keep caloric expenditure constant and just restrict intake, your body will reduce expenditure to match the reduced intake. And to the person you're replying to's point, where the walking/stairs/etc. involved in city life might serve keep that expenditure constant for someone who's otherwise sedentary, that's not the case for someone driving everywhere and topping out at 1000 steps a day.
- kiba 7y ago
  And to the person you're replying to's point, where the walking/stairs/etc. involved in city life might serve keep that expenditure constant for someone who's otherwise sedentary, that's not the case for someone driving everywhere and topping out at 1000 steps a day. Research shown that those expenditure doesn't matter. Your body adjusts. Nevertheless, we should create an environment that encourages everyday physical activity.
- falcolas 7y ago
  > your body will reduce expenditure to match the reduced intake. There's a floor to how far your body can compensate for reduced intake - starvation. There's not such a simple ceiling to stop you from eating back up to what you exercise.
- 08-15 7y ago
  > your body will reduce expenditure to match the reduced intake No, it won't. You need about 2000 kcal/d just to maintain body temperature. That's assuming a constant heat output of 100W. A bit less is surely possible, muss less isn't. Reduce food intake below that, and you will lose weight. Because physics.
  - lostapathy 7y ago
    Lots of people maintain or even gain weight on under 2000 kcal/day. BMR varies greatly with the size of the individual.
southphillyman 7y ago
Basically. "Abs get created in the kitchen not in the gym" I wasted dozens of hours of my life trying to jog off a horrible diet. I have heard some anecdotes of professional athletes who have horrible diets. I believe Chad Johnson survived off of multiple Mcdonald meals a day during his career. Those are unique cases of individuals having the required genetics and being able to spend hours a day with elite trainers
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  The important corollary to that is if you want to look good with your shirt off you should probably spend some time in the gym as well.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  McDonalds isn't implicitly a horrible diet. Burgers are made of meat.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  You don't need special genetics. All it takes is a continuous sink for calories (sustained aerobic exercise) that can be freely replaced with extra food. That means doing something other than sitting all day, driving home, and watching TV for four hours before bed. Also not going to happen with one hour a week on a treadmill or any of the low intensity fad exercise trends.
- Eric_WVGG 7y ago
  > The amount that Olympic swimmers eat is legendary... Michael Phelps —- he of 21 gold medals and counting -— made headlines when he boasted of his 12,000-calorie-a-day diet: > > Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelette. One bowl of grain. Three slices of French toast topped. Three chocolate-chip pancakes. > > Lunch: One pound of pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread, plus energy drinks. > > Dinner: One pound of pasta, an entire pizza, and even more energy drinks.
  - 7y ago
LorenPechtel 7y ago
Disagree. I just climbed the highest peak in this part of the state. Assuming my FitBit data is accurate I was 2,500 calories behind that day--the next day I ate normally. That's more than half a pound of weight loss. It's not my first time up there, either.
- sambal 7y ago
  You disagree with the idea that eating matters more than exercise because your literal climb to the top of a mountain shaved off an extra Big Mac meal in calories?
- kaesar14 7y ago
  Most Americans aren't climbing a mountain a day to overcome terrible eating habits.
08-15 7y ago
> It's what and how much you eat that matters. It's only how much you eat. Conservation of energy still applies, and 3500 kcal are still a pound of fat. It doesn't matter where the calories come from, they always end up either burned or as fat. The "how much" is regulated by negative feedback. Whenever you eat sugar, insulin is secreted, which ends the craving. Whenever you eat fat or protein, leptin is secreted, which causes a feeling of satiation. Leptin is secreted by fatty tissue, so the fatter you are, the earlier you are satiated. As a result, everyone has an equilibrium weight at which he will eat exactly enough to replace the expended energy. But that's not what's happening right now. We tend to constantly gain weight. Slowly, but without an apparent limit or any kind of feedback. That's where the "what you eat" comes in. Something is fouling up the feedback mechanism. Maybe something that causes the release of neither insulin nor leptin. Something we now consume in bulk, but didn't use to. Maybe we shouldn't do that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by kiba 7y ago

Exercise is good, even necessary, but it doesn't really help you with weight loss since your body compensate for it in other ways. It's what and how much you eat that matters.

shadowtree 7y ago

Not my experience, let me explain: I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle. If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy). A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard. People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese.

w0utert 7y ago
>> People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food This is bad advice, it's been shown over and over again that in the long term people don't manage to lose weight by exercising. They give up, don't exercise enough, overestimate how many calories they burnt, over-compensate by eating more and/or unhealthier ('because I earned it after taking a run'), etc. You don't have to 'diet' to lose weight, just try to eat a little less each day, and watch what you are eating. Only 100 calories less than what you need each day, and you'll steadily lose maybe ~3KG a year.
- zbobet2012 7y ago
  However, exercise is the largest driving factor in health _not_ weight https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/treadmill_performance_predicts_mortality https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/treadmil.... For weightloss _diet and exercise_ is the way to go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4429709/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4429709/.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    >Objectively measured physical activity may not be the key determinant of unhealthy weight gain in children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ >Prospective studies, however, find little evidence of the more physically active members of a population gaining less excess weight than those who are the least physically active. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract >TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724
    - zbobet2012 7y ago
      > However, exercise is the largest driving factor in health _not_ weight Citing a bunch of studies about obesity changes nothing about the fact that _exercise_ is more important to health outcomes than _weight_. Another source for you: https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/1/83 https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/1/83 > There was no significant trend across BMI categories for mortality after adjustment for fitness. Being skinny isn't being healthy, being _fit_ is being healthy.
      - okmokmz 7y ago
        >Citing a bunch of studies about obesity changes nothing about the fact that _exercise_ is more important to health outcomes than _weight_. This is pretty funny. They directly address and contradict the point your trying to make. Even the source you posted contradicts what you are trying to argue. Nice try though
- reroute1 7y ago
  Metabolism increases can also affect you long after a workout, and building muscle instead of fat is also beneficial for the system as a whole. These cannot be recreated with just diet.
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago
  Is that research for level of activity in general or for "exercise"?
kiba 7y ago
Not my experience, let me explain: Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. Research suggests that your body compensate for any activity expenditure to maintain caloric burn within that specific range. This is known as constrained total energy expenditure. I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle. If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy). A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard. I don't trust smartwatches and other devices to track caloric expenditure accurately given that they seemed to have constantly overestimate how much I burn. This does not dissuade me from making sure that I get at least an hour of exercise everyday. People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese. I agree that people should not do anything special, but here we are in a food environment that makes this difficult.
- CJKinni 7y ago
  > Not my experience, let me explain: >> Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. My research suggests that... Can you cite your research. It's hard to criticize someone for giving an anecdote then going on to cite 'your research without citing it.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    Here are a few >Objectively measured physical activity may not be the key determinant of unhealthy weight gain in children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044163/ >Prospective studies, however, find little evidence of the more physically active members of a population gaining less excess weight than those who are the least physically active. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832897?dopt=Abstract >TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/93/2/427/4597724
x2f10 7y ago
>People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. It's unlikely a 30m run and a 30m walk is going to burn off their excess calories.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
>If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy). An Olympic level athlete might burn 30 kcal per minute at their best. I would bet a regular person burns at most 15 kcal per minute while running, so that's 450 kcal for a 30 min run, and maybe a couple hundred more for a walk. People consume that in a single large sugary coffee or soda drink. You can't ignore inputs.
- plausibilities 7y ago
  Having an extra negative 400 to 500 calorie offset on a daily basis can be incredibly helpful considering a lot of creeping weight gain is caused by a caloric surplus of only a couple hundred per day.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    From the looks of many Americans I’ve seen, their problem is a lot more than a couple hundred kcal per day.
    - ska 7y ago
      A couple hundred kcal per day for 10 years is about 200lb.
      - reroute1 7y ago
        Thank you for putting some perspective on this! It's a huge aggregate in the long run.
        im3w1l 7y ago
        It doesn't work like he says. You can't just sum up the number of calories and convert it to pounds of fat. If you eat a few hundred calories too many you will rise in weight. But increasing your weight means your metabolism will increase. In the end you will reach an equilibrium were your weight is high enough that your metabolism equals your intake, and you will stop gaining weight. Let's take a 5"10 male aged 25 weight 170 pounds. According to some calculator they will have a basal metabolism (how much you use if you stay in bed all day) of 1850 kcal / day. Lets say they eat 450 kcal / day too much. i.e. 2300 kcal / day. By running the metabolism calculator backwards we find that they stabilize on a weight of 245 pounds. Thats a seriously overweight, to be sure, but it is also well below 200 pounds of extra weight.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
In my experience diet is necessary to lose weight, but exercise makes dieting a lot easier.

technocratius 7y ago

Exactly. Burning e.g. 500 calories on daily basis is much more strenuous on both your body and your agenda than cutting 500 calories from your diet.

shadowtree 7y ago
You're commenting under an article showing scientific evidence that this is not true :)

uniformlyrandom 7y ago

You are correct for weight loss. The only reliable way to lose weight is to consume fewer calories. However, when it comes to supporting your current weight, it is fairly easy to hit equilibrium with exercise.

Mvhsz 7y ago

Not sure why this is down voted, excerpt from the abstract shows that they view nutrition as the main reason for the gap. > There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. It's pretty widely accepted that nutrition trumps exercise in weight loss. I will say that my observations align with OP, urban lifestyles tend to be less sedentary then suburban/rural. But my observations could also be skewed by age differences, which presumably this study controlled for (didn't read the whole thing).

livueta 7y ago
Some anecdata: I spend a decent amount of time in a small (~3k) town in the American west that's the largest place for about two hours in any direction. It has one grocery store. Prices and selection in this (non-chain) store are genuinely appalling. Fresh fruit and veg is expensive and generally low in quality. As a result, nobody but the occasional out-of-towner fisherman buys it, so there's no incentive to stock more/better stuff. It's kinda like a slightly scaled up version of the basket of brown bananas in the bodega: a desultory corner of the store where there's visible dust on the apples. What do many folks buy instead? TV dinners. Lots of them. It's not uncommon to see a cart in the checkout line that's nothing but about twenty TV dinners, cheap beer and maybe a loaf or two of wonder bread. Not everyone lives like that, but it's common enough that it's rare for me to leave that store without feeling kinda sad. So, yeah, food deserts aren't just an urban problem. n.b. on reflection, a partial counterexample: the Walmart in the nearest larger (~20k) town, despite having more produce and similar goodies on offer, also does a very brisk trade in TV dinners. Access to nutrition is probably relevant, but there's got to also be broader cultural/economic/wellness issues at play.
- mledu 7y ago
  How many Dollar Stores are in your town? Here is very interesting podcast outlining how Dollar Stores kill supermarkets that carry necessary products like produce. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/26/717665452/episode-909-dollar-stores-vs-lettuce https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/26/717665452/epis...

ndarwincorn 7y ago

As with most absolutist statements, the truth is somewhere in between--the inverse is true there as well. If you don't do anything to keep caloric expenditure constant and just restrict intake, your body will reduce expenditure to match the reduced intake. And to the person you're replying to's point, where the walking/stairs/etc. involved in city life might serve keep that expenditure constant for someone who's otherwise sedentary, that's not the case for someone driving everywhere and topping out at 1000 steps a day.

kiba 7y ago
And to the person you're replying to's point, where the walking/stairs/etc. involved in city life might serve keep that expenditure constant for someone who's otherwise sedentary, that's not the case for someone driving everywhere and topping out at 1000 steps a day. Research shown that those expenditure doesn't matter. Your body adjusts. Nevertheless, we should create an environment that encourages everyday physical activity.
falcolas 7y ago
> your body will reduce expenditure to match the reduced intake. There's a floor to how far your body can compensate for reduced intake - starvation. There's not such a simple ceiling to stop you from eating back up to what you exercise.
08-15 7y ago
> your body will reduce expenditure to match the reduced intake No, it won't. You need about 2000 kcal/d just to maintain body temperature. That's assuming a constant heat output of 100W. A bit less is surely possible, muss less isn't. Reduce food intake below that, and you will lose weight. Because physics.
- lostapathy 7y ago
  Lots of people maintain or even gain weight on under 2000 kcal/day. BMR varies greatly with the size of the individual.

southphillyman 7y ago

Basically. "Abs get created in the kitchen not in the gym" I wasted dozens of hours of my life trying to jog off a horrible diet. I have heard some anecdotes of professional athletes who have horrible diets. I believe Chad Johnson survived off of multiple Mcdonald meals a day during his career. Those are unique cases of individuals having the required genetics and being able to spend hours a day with elite trainers

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
The important corollary to that is if you want to look good with your shirt off you should probably spend some time in the gym as well.
SamReidHughes 7y ago
McDonalds isn't implicitly a horrible diet. Burgers are made of meat.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
You don't need special genetics. All it takes is a continuous sink for calories (sustained aerobic exercise) that can be freely replaced with extra food. That means doing something other than sitting all day, driving home, and watching TV for four hours before bed. Also not going to happen with one hour a week on a treadmill or any of the low intensity fad exercise trends.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
> The amount that Olympic swimmers eat is legendary... Michael Phelps —- he of 21 gold medals and counting -— made headlines when he boasted of his 12,000-calorie-a-day diet: > > Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelette. One bowl of grain. Three slices of French toast topped. Three chocolate-chip pancakes. > > Lunch: One pound of pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread, plus energy drinks. > > Dinner: One pound of pasta, an entire pizza, and even more energy drinks.
- 7y ago

LorenPechtel 7y ago

Disagree. I just climbed the highest peak in this part of the state. Assuming my FitBit data is accurate I was 2,500 calories behind that day--the next day I ate normally. That's more than half a pound of weight loss. It's not my first time up there, either.

sambal 7y ago
You disagree with the idea that eating matters more than exercise because your literal climb to the top of a mountain shaved off an extra Big Mac meal in calories?
kaesar14 7y ago
Most Americans aren't climbing a mountain a day to overcome terrible eating habits.

08-15 7y ago

> It's what and how much you eat that matters. It's only how much you eat. Conservation of energy still applies, and 3500 kcal are still a pound of fat. It doesn't matter where the calories come from, they always end up either burned or as fat. The "how much" is regulated by negative feedback. Whenever you eat sugar, insulin is secreted, which ends the craving. Whenever you eat fat or protein, leptin is secreted, which causes a feeling of satiation. Leptin is secreted by fatty tissue, so the fatter you are, the earlier you are satiated. As a result, everyone has an equilibrium weight at which he will eat exactly enough to replace the expended energy. But that's not what's happening right now. We tend to constantly gain weight. Slowly, but without an apparent limit or any kind of feedback. That's where the "what you eat" comes in. Something is fouling up the feedback mechanism. Maybe something that causes the release of neither insulin nor leptin. Something we now consume in bulk, but didn't use to. Maybe we shouldn't do that.

deleted 7y ago

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