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> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the imp

• louis___ 5y ago
  > we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Everybody is 100% responsible for what they eat. There is no excuse.
• idontwantthis 5y ago
  > it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate The wild thing is he’s saying that’s not true either. He’s saying you never burned the extra calories in the first place.
  • dpark 5y ago
    Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. That is literally the thesis here, that calorie expenditure is essentially decoupled from exercise.
    • djtango 5y ago
      Which is laughably ridiculous when you start considering the extremes like Michael Phelps eating 10kcal for breakfast. The issue is the uptick in energy burn is unintuitive especially in the world energy dense high-processed food As an ex once put "you have to run 5 miles to earn a cupcake - totally not worth it!"
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        > Which is laughably ridiculous We're glad you're here to poke fun at the research of at least two people with PhD's centered on this topic. > when you start considering the extremes When you start considering the extremes, you often find that they can't tell you much about the middle ground.
        • Raidion 5y ago
          I think everyone is talking past each other here. From the article: > As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs You clearly burn extra calories when exercising, but the thesis of the article is that it doesn't matter in terms of weight loss because your body will adjust to burn the mean level of calories. The obvious exception are athletes whose energy expenditures simply can't be averaged away. This leads to the conclusion that it's not just exercise that drives weight loss, but diet and exercise (shocking!) that makes a difference, as you have to run at a net loss over the day. Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.
          • dpark 5y ago
            > Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit. This is well known and true even if the claims made better happened to be entirely false. I’m not dismissing your point, here. I agree fully. Exercise just doesn’t burn enough calories to really matter. Especially in the face of a poor diet. Running burns ~100 calories per mile (yes, varying based on weight and a little bit based on speed but it’s a close enough rule). A can of soda has ~150 calories. There’s just no competition. Someone trying to lose weight can skip a soda or a candy bar and it’s more effective than running an extra mile.
  • dahart 5y ago
    That’s the part that’s at least slightly exaggerated, or giving a misleading impression. Exercise absolutely burns more than 0 calories, and I definitely was burning some. Calorie burn from exercise is straightforward to approximately measure, and many people walking around with iWatches and FitBits and heart monitors are doing so. What’s well known to many people is that exercise burns far fewer calories than you wish it did, and less than it feels like. ;) The article points out that aerobic exercise adjusts your RMR and it becomes more efficient over time. However, it does not become 100% efficient, even though the article seems to suggest it and doesn’t bother with any fine print. It doesn’t bother to differentiate between running and weight lifting either, and we adjust to those differently.
    • dpark 5y ago
      I would really like to see raw data because it feels like the story being told can’t possibly be complete. This in particular feels really hand wavy: “After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.” What does “barely” mean? 40km/week isn’t that much in terms of calorie burn. The 100 calories/mile rule of thumb says this would imply ~350 calories/day. And this article says a woman would have a daily calorie expenditure of 2400 already (seems high, though). So this is only 15%. But anyway, this drops after adaptation seemingly, so does “barely more” mean 50 calories/day? Or does it mean 300? Because those are very different. And to where is the difference attributable? Because someone going from sedentary to trained runner is going to get a lot more efficient at running. “Less energy on inflammation” is really hard to swallow as the primary source of adaptation, especially when this is presented as conjecture.
      • throwaway09223 5y ago
        40km/wk is only 3.4 miles/day. It's only a half hour of moderate exercise a day. It sounds like the study didn't actually measure a significant exercise workload.
        • dpark 5y ago
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• wesleywt 5y ago
  You tracked what you ate was the key difference. Not the exercise. I did an experiment on myself. I deliberately did not do any exercise and changed my diet. I loss 5kg quicker on my diet than I did when I was running 10km regularly. I think its counter productive to see an obese person in the gym or running as this will certainly lead to injury. The narrative around weight loss should always be eat less calories and food that don't encourage hunger.
  • pverghese 5y ago
    Not sure what was your starting weight. But 5 kg is within the realm of normal weight fluctuations over a week for an average American.
    • weq 5y ago
      when u weigh 400lbs and eat forty twinkings and hour, sure, 5kg weekly fluctations may be normal. Your fat because you consume to many caloiries for what you put out. Pretty simple. I went week on/off vego, from being a meat eater near daily, dropped weight without adjusting anything else. You are what you ate. You cant hide from it. If you look down and see some rolls, thats not cause you didnt exercise enough! I went from doing gym weekly in my 20s, to my 30s where i dont touch consciously exercise at all yet im bigger, leaner, and have my abs back. My uncle, who at my ate became a fat bastard and never stopped; used to be a body builder on the roids. He had a sweet phsyic for about 1 year. The easier way to make money in this world, is to fool fat people into thinking your product will let them have their cake, and eat it to. I say fat people the say way people refer to a drug addict. Its the same thing, cept your comfort blanket is legal and readyly accessible, 24/7/7, being pushed at you constantly whenever you look. I say this as a child of a mother who was/is fat due to being in an abusive relationship with my father. She cheated through every diet she every did. Until she got her stomach stapled; when overnight she SHED weight, was no longer diabetic, and is currently 66yrs old and going strong (stapled around 49).
    • esyir 5y ago
      Are you sure, I get a one or two kg swing, but 5kg of weight seems a bit extreme. I'm not American, but in my part of the world people tend to have gradual trends to weight, not sudden swings.
• berdon 5y ago
  Anecdotally, I have absolutely ran off a bad diet. I burn ~150-250 calories a mile and have ran off 2000+ calories to eat what I wanted with no discernible increase in weight. Did this for years. In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.
  • nwiswell 5y ago
    Yeah. Cyclists in the Tour de France typically eat 5000 calories a day, often more in particularly difficult stages. Obviously none of them have a weight problem. "Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.
    • ohyoutravel 5y ago
      The last part isn’t true, at least unless there has been a grave accident. Many pee on themselves during races, but most of the Number 2 is done at port a potties along the way with an assist from the team car or peloton to get back up to speed and get back into place. You might be surprised at how little someone might need #2 when all their calories are from highly digestible into energy food.
      • koolba 5y ago
        It’s a double whammy because every ounce of shit is one more ounce to drag across the finish line.
    • basementcat 5y ago
      The reduction in mass undoubtedly makes it easier to complete the remainder of the stage.
      • deleted 5y ago
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• mannykannot 5y ago
  This is purely anecdotal, with a sample size of one even if it is right, but it seems to me, personally, that exercise suppresses my appetite to some extent. I can't say that this is even real, but if it is, my best guess as to why this might be is that the exercise subtly stimulates/irritates my gut such that I am de-motivated to eat, either by feeling full or subliminally 'sick to my stomach'. After running a marathon without proper training, it was a couple of days before I felt like eating anything. I am not intending to dispute the fact that you ate more to compensate - you say you did, and I don't doubt it. Nor am I doubting that weight gain is a function of net caloric intake; it is just a suggestion of another way exercise may affect this. FWIW most of my exercise is running, hiking or kayaking. I am not sure (or perhaps that should be 'even more doubtful') that kayaking has the same effect.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    some would argue that running a marathon isn't exercise and shouldn't be considered as such. Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      That's a POV, and you could marshall evidence to defend it. But it's mostly a hand-wavy assertion too, and there's other evidence against it. There are cultures around the world (low populations, to be sure) where repeatedly traversing 26.2 miles a day would not be considered particularly abnormal.
      • watwut 5y ago
        There is no culture in a world that would consider it normal to run 26.2 miles with no breaks. Walking it in a span of a day is massively different. Anyone who does hiking can do it. The same people however can not run that distance. Even marathon runners run marathons only on competitions. The chance of injury or sickness after is too high in order to make it worthy. And after, you are supposed to rest for multiple days even if not injured. Again, 26.2 miles is 8 hours of hiking and you are pretty much guaranteed to be ok after it.
• taeric 5y ago
  Yeah... I don't know that it is that simple. In the summer when I bike twenty miles a day, I am eating far more, and still losing weight. Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.
  • dahart 5y ago
    I agree, maybe you got me a little wrong. I’m more or less talking about the good ol’ adage calories in, calories out. It’s never that simple, amen, but measuring and matching output with intake is a pretty good proxy and works in practice. When calories out is higher, calories in can be higher too (and should be for big exercises). My problem was unregulated calories in, and a tendency to overcompensate a bit.
    • taeric 5y ago
      Certainly agreed that compensation for exercise is a dangerous and likely way to gain weight. Is why, in the winter, I have a tendency to gain weight... :)
    • parineum 5y ago
      > It’s never that simple The details might differ some but the overall advice is the same. If you want to lose weight, eat less. If you want to be in better shape, exercise. If you want to improve your health, change your diet (and probably exercise). A big issue is that people conflate those three objectives. Being skinny doesn't mean you're healthy and exercising doesn't mean you'll lose weight. I exercise quite a bit and have always had an extra 10-15 lbs up until semi-recently when I put those three things together and quit eating so much. I still eat plenty of junk food and I've lost about 20 lbs and kept it off. If you're unhappy with your weight, eat less. If that doesn't work, eat less. Some people might have an easier or harder time with that because we're all different but the advice is the same.
  • gameswithgo 5y ago
    its possible to work out enough that compensative eating is not possible, but very few people work out that much, and some people have amazing eating powers, such that even riding a bike 50 miles a day isn’t enough to stop them being fat unless they also count calories.
• _9omd 5y ago
  I think a big part of the issue is that popular fitness and weight loss advice has perpetuated the wrong way to exercise to loose weight. When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat, and a high calorie burn number. While the short term results may seem great based on the immediate calories burned, it's actually a terrible strategy for several reasons. 1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate. 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking. 3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate. 4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate. A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate. Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.
  • sizzle 5y ago
    Some very bold claims, would love some citations to give them more credibility. HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.
  • acchow 5y ago
    > When most people think about exercise for weight loss, they imagine long exhausting sessions on the treadmill, dripping with sweat This is a major education/communication issue. When I switched to weightlifting, I started seeing rapid and significant results. And I don't even really sweat from it (except on leg day)
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking. This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant. I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.
• geoduck14 5y ago
  >A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook. Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories. If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner (which is typically bigger than lunch) So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    A few hours on my bike can be 2,000-3,000 additional calories over base metabolic rate. That's not based on made-up calories but actual work from a power meter on the bike. "You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories. It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever. > So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise. The real takeaway is that there are no absolutes.
    • 3maj 5y ago
      Looks at wahoo kickr in corner Hello old friend, we meet again.
    • jniedrauer 5y ago
      One of the cruel aspects of endurance sports is that they suppress your appetite. You can go out and burn 6000 calories in one race, spend the whole time thinking about all the delicious food you're going to reward yourself with, and then you get there and have zero desire to eat. You sometimes can't even start refeeding until the next day.
      • impjohn 5y ago
        Feels to me like pushing your body to extremes is akin to a metabolic shock and your system rebooting in another operating mode. Probably needs another reboot to go into regular mode, so your apetite will also vary in the meantime
• Fezzik 5y ago
  The general rule I find helpful is that diet=size and exercise=shape. Being aware of this really helps me limit my food intake even when I’m exercising a ton.
  • dpark 5y ago
    > exercise=shape That really depends on the exercise you’re doing and what “shape” you’re going for. Putting tons of time into running won’t make someone look like they lift weights. Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape” except to the extent that it helps them lose weight.
    • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
      "Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape”" This just isn't true. It generally won't take away fat, but lifting weights won't remove the fat either (it doesn't matter how strong your stomach is, you aren't seeing it if you have a layer of fat on top). But if you are already thin - or thinner in places - most of the aerobic exercise will build appropriate muscle. Walking makes for changes in the lower half of the body, for example. It still won't make you look like you lift weights, true, but there is still change.
• buzzard1 5y ago
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• alfalfasprout 5y ago
  I mean, yes... but at least for me exercise also makes me crave healthier foods. As a result I end up sometimes eating more volume but less calories. Like, when I'm cycling regularly it's hard not to lose weight.
• bena 5y ago
  Yeah. A single snickers is over 200 calories. That's 30 minutes of running. Eating is incredibly efficient.
• asiachick 5y ago
  This doesn't fit my observations entirely. I have a friend who runs several miles every morning. He says he does this so he can eat an extra 300-500 calories a day ... which he does. He's thin. I certainly get that less eating is more effective than exercise but in my head I think as long as you burn more calories than you take in you should lose weight. So if you eat 1800 calories a day, assuming you need 2000 a day, you'll lose weight (-200). If you do some exercise that uses 500 calories and eat 2300 calories you're still at (-200)
  • dahart 5y ago
    FWIW, I agree with your observations, so it’s possible I gave the wrong impression. After learning how to track my intake, it changed my view on exercise, and sometimes I also use exercise as a way to eat more. :) Like many people I consciously and unconsciously resisted the idea of tracking calories and using calories-in/calories-out (CICO) as my primary tool for both weight loss and exercise. It’s not perfect, as many people here are pointing out. However, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and there are scant alternatives that are demonstrably better. I changed my mind and now I see calorie tracking as a way to be better at both exercise and weight loss. Good exercise training, especially weight lifting, requires eating a bit more than expenditure, and good weight loss requires eating a bit less. Either way, I agree with you that exercise can play a valuable part in weight loss, and I think it has many other physical and mental health benefits.
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  > losing weight happens by eating less To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation. Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth
  • wyldfire 5y ago
    It seems to me that CICO is less of a myth and more of an "incomplete model." Having a model is an improvement over no model at all, even if it's oversimplified IMO. For very overweight people it probably doesn't matter quite as much. If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.
    • makeitdouble 5y ago
      To me the sad part is that it's way too easy to accept as a solid model. It's so simple, feels so elegant and powerful, a lot of people have a hard time seeing what could go wrong with such a beautiful model. They then take decades to realize it didn't mean anything really. Basically, it's way harder to make people accept it's complex and highly variable when they've already internalized a shiny theory of everything.
    • jvvw 5y ago
      Just been reading Why We Eat (Too Much) by Andrew Jenkinson and he is basically saying this - that CICO is true but there is also this feedback system with the 'Calories Out' part so that our body adjusts to physical activity levels (as described in the article) and also to what the 'Calories In' part it is. So while restricting calories in works short-term your body adjusts and also decreases the 'Calories Out'. His argument is that the problem for most people overweight is leptin resistance interfering with the body's feedback mechanisms and basically you need to fix that rather than try and changes either the 'Calories In' or 'Calories Out' directly.
  • thisisonthetest 5y ago
    CICO is almost as pernicious and ubiquitous. It really grinds my gears when people try to use “intuition” to understand something super complex with no data at all. People talk about “metabolism” the same way. Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
• standardUser 5y ago
  People often conflate body weight with how they want to look, and when they say they want to lose 20 pounds, what they really want is for their body to look different in some specific ways. Exercise is a very effective way to alter the appearance of our bodies, and far more versatile than diet alone.
• deleted 5y ago
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• wolverine876 5y ago
  > It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article: But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says. Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
  • rhinoceraptor 5y ago
    > People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.
    • wolverine876 5y ago
      Did the research control for that?
• ajuc 5y ago
  Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference. Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day. I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
  • dTal 5y ago
    What the heck kind of "snack" is 1000 kcal?
    • artdigital 5y ago
      Cinnabon comes to mind
    • namdnay 5y ago
      A single cinnamon roll is nearly 500 calories. As soon as you’re combining fat and sugar things skyrocket
      • dTal 5y ago
        I would not class eating TWO cinnamon buns back to back as a "snack", but rather "a disgusting pig-out". Am I sheltered?
        • wccrawford 5y ago
          No, I think you have your head on right. I used to eat a lot of candy, but I never considered eating more than a handful of anything a "snack". That said, what do you call it when you eat something that isn't a meal? I don't think most people have any word other than "snack" without resorting to things that sound like insults, like "pig out". And it's really hard for most people to insult themselves.
• aidenn0 5y ago
  You can keep weight off with exercise; it's just a lot more than you would think. I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts. Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.
• soheil 5y ago
  It's even worse than that. It's about eating the same thing every day, that's how you lose weight. Most people give up because you have to know what's in different food and then track it somehow. Counting calories is a herculean task, but if you already know the same exact food has 80% of daily calorie intake then you never have to count calories and there is literally no work involved in losing weight.
  • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    It's about eating the same thing every day, that's how you lose weight This simply isn't true at all, and you don't have to count calories per se. I lost quite a bit simply changing my diet. I kept most of it off for years: I gained some back when I quit nicotine, though (Quitting smoking changed my sense of hunger, and Im still upset about that). It wasn't quick weight loss and it came in stages, but I didn't count calories nor spend too much time thinking about food. I simply focused on getting more fruits, vegetables, and legumes when I could. (I completely dropped meat outside of fish, but it isn't necessary and was losing weight before that). I also rarely eat out, even when I've had work/school (I just brought something). This meant I could pretty well eat what I wanted and would just choose lower calorie things by default. As long as I ate fairly well most of the time*, I was OK. I didn't have to suffer the PMS hunger I get either: I would just eat something. You can eat the same thing every day, mind you, and I've met a lot of folks that do. Generally, however, it is a lifestyle choice and you have to be careful to make sure you have enough vitamins and things. One of the three folks I'm thinking of made themselves sick by not including enough vegetables.
• it_does_follow 5y ago
  If you train for endurance sports you'll definitely lose weight without much attention to your diet. For example, with marathon training, once you start to hit the 6 plus mile your daily run eats up over 1,000 calories. Near the end of your training your long run days become over 2,000 calories, and even your easy runs becomes 1000+. That's essentially an entire extra meal, and you're running 5-6 days a week. If you're just going to the gym for 30-45 minutes, 3-4 days a week, diet will be essential to losing weight. But if you're running 1 hr + a day and 2+ hrs at least once a week it's hard to get enough calories.
  • lostmsu 5y ago
    This would be nice if 1hr+ a day would not be 5% of your conscious life.
    • bluecalm 5y ago
      Most people watch tv for 4-5 hours per day and it's far from the only time waster out there. Something went wrong when very moderate volume of exercise (1 hour per day) is seen as a huge time commitment.
    • brippalcharrid 5y ago
      It's time that you can use for important things like meditation and consolidating your thoughts, as well as synthesising Vitamin D if it's close to noon and you're not especially far from the equator.
• elvis10ten 5y ago
  I think we have fitness wrong in this side of the world. I grew up seeing 60 year olds that were as fit as youths in the west. They didn’t have a treadmill or did keto diets. My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle and to avoid lots of western food (sugar, processed, empty calories, I drink only water, etc). I don’t count calories and can eat twice in the morning. If I counted, both morning meals are less than 600 calories. I don’t go to a gym, but have maintained a <10% body fat (and 86kg at 190cm height) over the years (without feeling hungry all the time because I eat well). I just do body weight training and make my entire day active (even tho I’m a programmer). For me, being in shape doesn’t need to be complicated.
  • theonething 5y ago
    What kinds of things do you do to make your entire day active? As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.
    • bradgessler 5y ago
      I find that I need time to think and time do code. When I’m coding I’m obviously sitting at my desk. At some point I get tired of that or hit a wall, then stop, and have to think about that to do next. Instead of sitting at my desk thinking I’ll go for a walk, go outside and work on a project around the house, go for a swim, hike somewhere. During that time I’m mulling in the problem in my head coming up with solutions. Once I finish with that activity, I’ll set back down and try a few if the ideas I came up with while doing those activities. According to my Apple Watch, I get between 25-55 min of activity on a given day.
    • jordanbeiber 5y ago
      I think a good way is to take any chance to move around. Ido Portal, for all his eccentric weirdness, knows things: > The body will become better at whatever you do, or don’t do. If you don’t move, your body will make you better at not moving. If you move, your body will allow more movement. I’m personally thinking in terms of micro-habits that eventually form a lifestyle, and it’s all about total lifetime reps, if you will. For example, I have a height adjustable desk, and have replaced the chair with a pilates ball. I still stand, or sit on my knees, more than sitting down on it. I believe there’s a problem with some of the ergonomic setups we use - if you keep moving, and shift around you shouldn’t need it. If you do, you’re already “losing it” and should probably be changing things up more frequently during the days. Now this is easy to say, and for some people, probably not true. I’m basically continuously fighting the path of least resistance. I’m in war with the comfy a* brain!
• glenngillen 5y ago
  I’m not so sure it is understating, at the risk of projecting out from a sample size of 1 (my personal experience). I’ve been quite active for a couple of decades with a semi-regular gym routine and multiple marathons (and all of the running required in between). Holidays and other things would interrupt schedules from time to time, I might lapse for an extended period, but for the better part of 20 years I’ve weighed 76kgs +/- 3kgs. Stop running and eat bad for a few months I hit the top end of that range. But I revert back very quickly. Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter. It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.
• MuffinFlavored 5y ago
  > losing weight happens by eating less If your BMR is say... 1,800 calories a day and you exercise 300 calories worth... do you just get 300 calories hungrier to offset the exercise?
  • dahart 5y ago
    Yeah more or less exactly right. It’s maybe not hungrier per se, but I was eating until I felt “full”. I found out there are a couple of different problems with that. Waiting until “full” means I’m not stopping early and not able to put myself into calorie deficit, which is a longer-winded way of saying yeah I just got 300 calories hungrier. But I also have discovered that I’m a little miscalibrated on what “full” should feel like. I was eating a little past full and into a deeper level of satiated. Meaning, in short, slightly overeating. And to add a little color, my exercise routines have usually involved more than 300 cals of workout, probably closer to 700-1000. This is important, because when not tracking the extra food, it’s really easy to overshoot 1000 calories by 300. The exercises have varied a lot over the years, from running and biking to weight lifting and sports like soccer & ultimate frisbee. I’ve been aiming for around 3 days/week workouts for like 10-20 years. I have periods of less, and occasionally more (especially in the summer) and have managed to keep it up more or less consistently. I eat more when exercising, but never lost weight consistently until I learned the open secret, that for me monitoring intake is what makes exercise work as a weight loss tool.
• soperj 5y ago
  It's not true though. If you exercise enough you will be in a calorie deficit regardless of what you eat. I knew rowers that couldn't keep weight on during the season no matter what they ate, and they ate a lot. The exercise is what is causing the calorie deficit, not watching what they ate.
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    But you can eat the calories you spend in just a few minutes. If you have a pile of Mars bars, that will supply enough energy to compensate an hour on the treadmill. Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.
    • zmmmmm 5y ago
      But that goes to the other part of the fallacy, because even if you eat a pile of 10 Mars bars, a large amount of that will just get excreted. Meanwhile you'll start to feel physically sick and probably your body will then reject food for a while. CICO does more harm than good in IMHO because you're talking about a complex system.
      • lordnacho 5y ago
        IMO CICO is right but not useful. It's like saying that if you just read math books and did the exercises, you'd get a math degree easily. That's true of course, but the problem for most people is sticking to the plan, not whether that plan would actually work. We see athletes sticking to their plans but they are pretty special in terms of what they can get themselves to do.
    • soperj 5y ago
      My buddy on the rowing team would regularly eat 12 eggs + bacon + sausage & toast for breakfast after rowing. They were eating to excess to try to keep on weight and couldn't actually do it.
  • vl 5y ago
    It is an exception though. Very few people exercise to this level. Similarly you can eat as much as you can if you nicking across Antarctic, but this is not exactly a typical activity.
• vl 5y ago
  OMAD works wonders. First three days are brutal, and then you get used to it.
• irrational 5y ago
  I once saw a data tables with lots of diets. There was a column with the name of the diet, what you typically ate on the diet, etc. But the final column was "How does this diet work?" Every single row said the same thing, something like: "By eating a caloric deficit".
• watwut 5y ago
  I dont know ... this one is often repeated. Including in context when completely sedentary people want to improve health (as opposed to "I want loose weight for aesthetic reasons"). > it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate Your body is actually building muscles after exercising. It is also repairing damage caused by exercising. You actually should eat more, but more of the right stuff.
  • dahart 5y ago
    > You actually should eat more I did… the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of humanity? ;)) was I overcompensated, I ate more than I needed to build muscles and recover from exercise. So I gained weight slowly, or for long periods of time, just failed to lose the extra weigh I had through exercise alone. My problem is that exercise without calorie tracking doesn’t help me lose weight, I have to do both. And once I learned to do both, I automatically figured out at the same time how to lose weight without exercising at all. I still exercise, but now I get to use exercise as a way not just to get strong, but also to eat extra snacks. :)
    • watwut 5y ago
      I think that one problém with calories focus is that it leads to exactly that. You do need to eat more, but not just more in terms of calories. If you will get soon of sugar or skice of bacon after exercising, it will provide calories but still leave you hungry needing more. Protein like cottage cheese or something like that helps a lot. Figuring out what it is your body needs helps a lot.
      • dahart 5y ago
        Totally agreed. In the same way that I learned late in life that strength and weight are mostly separate, it become more clear that other things we tend to conflate are also separate. Being healthy, being attractive, being strong, and being skinny are all mostly separate things, and working on those things involves different tools and techniques. It’s definitely possible to lose weight and become less healthy by eating the wrong balance of macros. It’s also possible to become more healthy and/or stronger without losing weight. This is about deciding which goals you want, and figuring out how to get there. It’s easier to do one goal at a time (and all of these goals are extremely difficult to meet individually) but it’s also possible to work on several or all of them a little bit at a time too.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  Just a simple scan of some foods and some exercise calorie amounts and times should show it. Reasonably tiring exercise on a bike could burn 10 Cal per minute, so maybe 600 an hour. But swallowing a few packs of crisps or a few chocolate bars could fill that right back up in a couple of minutes. If you were speed eating you could swallow it in under a minute. Think about if your weight is steady, how long you spend eating and how long you spend using energy. It can easily be the case that you spent all your calories in 23.5 hours and were eating for just half an hour. The time ratio is so lopsided it's hard to come up with a plan where exercise carries most of the weight loss vs just eating less. If you think of your energy use as base rate plus exercise rate, because your base rate is sustained for the whole day you'd have to exercise like crazy for a long time to make up any difference to what you eat.
• xanaxagoras 5y ago
  In my (extensive) experience, losing weight is predicated on accurate calorie counting. The trick is to use exercise to lighten the perceived difficulty of your caloric deficit. For example if you're trying to lose a pound a week, it's a lot easier to eat 250 cal below your TDEE and walk for 2.5 miles than it is to eat 500 cal below your TDEE.
• csee 5y ago
  This misses the point of the article, it isn't that you unconsciouly eat more when you exercise, it's that moderate exercise simply doesn't burn that many calories (if any) once your body is accustomed to it.
  • dahart 5y ago
    Yeah, that’s not really true, because physics. The article’s “myth busting” is overstating the evidence. Human metabolic systems do have some adaptation. It slows down a bit when we’re not eating enough to maintain status quo, and it speeds up a bit when we’re exercising more. But it doesn’t come anywhere close to compensating for all of the effort. If you read more carefully, you will find that the article is talking about compensating behaviors, in fact quite similar to what happens to me when I overeat. The other compensating behavior mentioned in the article is becoming more sedentary after exercise, this has some of the same effect as eating, however it’s far easier to accidentally over-compensate by eating than by following exercise with couch time. I absolutely unconsciously eat more when I exercise. I know because I measured it. And once I measured it and focused on exercising while also eating a constant amount, surprise surprise, I actually lost weight. This is well known to many many people, well studied and understood, and has a metric ton of actual data to back it up. If this article is claiming to challenge that, then this article is wrong. (But IMO it’s not actually challenging known physics, it’s just written in a misleading way.)
• jdrc 5y ago
  that s terrible. I thought it would be common knowledge by now, the mixed really does a disservice to people who genuinely want to lose weight. I think the myth is perpetuated by sports goodS marketing
• netfortius 5y ago
  Thank you for the TL;DR! I started this extraordinary life history article and after the first "n" paragraphs I forgot why I was reading it ...
• machinelearning 5y ago
  Counting and estimating calories is a skill that should be taught in schools. The public health benefits are unparalleled.
• pawelmurias 5y ago
  You can totally loose weight by exercising, it's just regular people don't exercise hard enough. If you do pro athlete levels of exercise it will start affecting your weight a lot.
  • artdigital 5y ago
    Well you can, but only if the exercise is putting your calories under your TDEE. Sure there are slight body changes ongoing if you exercise enough (recomp) while staying on your normal intake, but basically - Calories over TDEE: You gain weight - Calories under TDEE: You lose weight It's that simple
  • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    I've never met someone doing pro-athlete levels of exercise that doesn't stick to some sort of regimented diet. Have you? And even if you do meet those folks, chances are they simply don't eat as much as before due to spending more time, well, exercising, and it makes for a caloric deficit, albeit accidental. And that's the thing: Once you start changing your diet - the stuff you eat or the timing of your food - to do the exercise, you can't really say it is the exercise affecting your weight.
    • pawelmurias 5y ago
      Myself when I was doing pro-level amount of brazillian jiu jitsu without really having any regimented diet on days where I wasn't eating candy and ice cream and training for 3+ hours I was could literally see the weight loss in the mirror on the next day.
• petercooper 5y ago
  Exercise is portrayed as virtuous in our society, whereas counting calories and portions isn't. I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.
• bern4444 5y ago
  From my own experience, if I'm lifting weights and working out, my hunger shoots up and I start wanting to eat everything in sight. When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.
• uhtred 5y ago
  You need exercise and a healthy diet to lose weight. Sure you could sit on the couch all day and eat very little and you'd probably lose weight, but you'd have to eat so little that it probably wouldn't be possible without developing an eating disorder. However, if your diet is really bad, eating way too much sugary food, then yes, exercise alone won't really help much.
• NoboruWataya 5y ago
  It's definitely true that eating less/healthier is the most important part of weight loss. However, perhaps because exercise played a big role in my own weight loss journey, I do feel like people go too far in dismissing it as a weight loss aid. First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it. There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that. Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
  • mmmpop 5y ago
    I get the impression that cardio affects some people differently. I'm taking some time off from my 30+ miles a week running habit to let my foot heal up. I'm now at about 10 miles + cycling and nordic skiing when I can but overall probably 1/2 to 2/3 the cardio than I've been used to for the past 4 or 5 years. But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight. I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
    • everforward 5y ago
      Those "calories burned" calculators are also not very good, so you may just be in the margin of error. It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to propel a given weight 5 miles. It's hard to tell how many calories a person burns to produce that energy. Your ratios of aerobic to anaerobic respiration are going to impact that wildly, which will depend on how much oxygen your body can absorb and how quickly you're burning through oxygen. There's a huge gap in the amount of energy cells get from each. Aerobic respiration produces up to 38 ATP per glucose, while anaerobic produces only 2 ATP per glucose. Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  Yes, many people are selectively deaf to the phrase "combined with a sensible diet" when it comes to weight loss, or other health advice. I'd venture that it's subconscious desires to keep the food intake that invoke mental filters to just not hear that part; or, to rationalize that your food intake is ok.
• everdrive 5y ago
  I had a friend who wanted to lose weight, and so he’d walk about one mile to a local restaurant, where he’d proceed to eat a 1,200 calorie meal. It’s not as if he didn’t burn calories while walking, but he severely overestimated how many calories he had burned.
• wilbo 5y ago
  I'm not affiliated with Noom [1] in any way but want to plug them because I've seen the incredible results from following their recommendations. People talk a lot about reducing caloric intake but there's little talk on how a normal person can hope to achieve that. The key Noom offers is calorie density. If you eat lots of food that has a low calorie density per unit of volume (eg cabbage, cauliflower) you can reduce your calories and still feel very full. Just go easy on the extremely high calorie density foods (eg olive oil) and you'll be more likely to hit your goals. Also, it's really really hard to do calorie restrictions AND have intense exercise. From what I've seen in the Noom community people have a lot more success when they first focus on losing pounds then focus on building strength and fitness; many people at that point find they have to increase calories in order to continue seeing results when they're working out a lot. I suppose it takes a lot of calories to build muscle. I wonder what your body does to those injured muscles if it doesn't have the calories available to repair them? https://www.noom.com/ https://www.noom.com/