10 ms·

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 w

• 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.
      • namdnay 5y ago
        I’m not a big fan of sugar so I wouldn’t be able to eat a whole cinnamon roll, let alone two. But if I’m doing a big hike I’ll have no problem demolishing a whole tub of rillettes, which must be at least 1000kcal
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Maybe you're just not in a location where that sort of eating is common. Like the American south or midwest.
  • ajuc 5y ago
    In my case 2 buns with garlic butter. But any pastries will do.
  • stevetursi 5y ago
    a slightly-larger-than-normal slice of pecan pie will easily get to 1000kcal. a la mode and you don't even need a normal sized slice.
• y4mi 5y ago
  And yet the article you're commenting on says that you don't burn more calories by exercising... If it is true, it definitely changes the narrative.
  • ewindal 5y ago
    You’re reading that wrong. Of course you burn more calories through exercise. Michael Phelps couldn’t have eaten 12k cals a day if exercise didn’t burn calories.
    • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Is it certain that we absorb all of the calories we consume? I went on a backpacking trip with my friends recently and despite similar activity levels everybody was surprised when they noticed that I eat twice as much as anybody else in the group. Maybe I should bring it up with a doctor, but I feel fine, I just also spend more on food than most.
      • stormbrew 5y ago
        Yes, this. These conversations about weight loss are so rife with spherical cows and people come to ridiculous generalizations because of it. Bodies are complicated and varied. "Michael Phelps eats 12kcal a day and yet he's not fat" is just a correlation, it doesn't mean anything. He's an extreme outlier of a person in many ways.
      • ajuc 5y ago
        I was eating similarly in my 20s and 30s and in 20s I kept about 80kg but in 30s I got to 130kg :/ BTW there are diseases that reduce calories absorbed, you might want to get checked for colitis ulcerosa and crohn's disease. They have nasty side effects so better to know earlier even if you don't have the worst symptoms.
      • Geee 5y ago
        No, there's lots of calories in stool, but it depends on the type of food. For example, eating lots of fats and oils tends to "go through". On the other hand, rate of metabolism varies between people too.
• rob74 5y ago
  Congratulations! I would be happy to lose "only" 10 kg (hell, 5 kg would be good for a start), but since Covid and home office my weight has been (slowly, but steadily) going in the wrong direction. Yeah, you can and do burn calories by exercising, but it's depressing how little it is. And it's also depressing if I look at the graph that some 40 to 50 year olds seem to still have the metabolism of a toddler - I'm definitely not one of those! OTOH, you can feel superior by thinking these people would be in big trouble if there was a famine, but that's (fortunately) not the world we live in (although it's pretty fucked up if you consider that we are complaining about these first world problems while in other countries people are starving)...
  • artdigital 5y ago
    My advise: (as someone who does a lot of working out and calorie control) Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE. And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home. Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is (The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)
    • rob74 5y ago
      Of course, eating less is the ideal solution if you can muster the willpower to actually do it - but that's a big "if" for many people...
      • ajuc 5y ago
        Counting calories is still very useful, because you learn what's "worth it". For example there are protein bars that are supposedly healthy, but they have 150-250 kcal per 50g bar. On the other hand there are these watery ice creams that have about 65 kcal per piece and feel just as indulgent if not more. Other things that are very much "not worth it" on the enjoyement/kcal scale is bread and other pastries. 2 buns with ham is 500 kcal and feels like nothing. A whole pan of hot vegetables with some meat is +- the same and feels like a proper dinner.
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 I believe you meant kilocalories
  • ajuc 5y ago
    Yes, sorry. kcal not cal.
  • verytrivial 5y ago
    In the context of nutrition the word calories always means dietary calories, so the kilo- prefix is redundant unless discussing physics, or commenting on HN...Ooooh, ok.
    • hnbad 5y ago
      The practice of indicating kcals as "Calories" always seemed to be an American thing to me. I don't know how widespread this is outside the US but there are plenty of countries that use "kcal" in nutritional tables and such. People will still colloquially confuse calories and kilocalories a lot but that's largely due to bad translations (similar to mistranslating short billions).
      • saiya-jin 5y ago
        People everywhere mix those 2 regularly and nobody is confused. You don't say you go out for a run to burn some kilo calories and so on. Sometimes places like HN are needlessly pedantic
        • tremon 5y ago
          If someone explicitly writes "160 000" calories I'm going to assume they meant 160 kcal.
      • ajuc 5y ago
        In Poland you write "100 kcal" but say "100 kalorii" unless it's in scientific context.
• toolslive 5y ago
  roughly 3/4 of your energy consumption is maintenance (fe keeping body temperature). So you walking/biking might even be irrelevant. If the outdoor temperature was low, this would probably be number 1.
  • ajuc 5y ago
    Standing still in -10C/-20C is pretty uncomfortable, but walking is perfectly fine and you even get hot after a while. So I'm not sure this is true.
    • toolslive 5y ago
      it's simple thermodynamics: your body needs to keep its temperature around 37C. It needs energy for this. Heat flows from high temperature (your body) to low temperature (surroundings) via the contact surface (naked skin) or via via (clothing,...) The energy that you lose via heat transfer needs to be compensated. You burn food, fat, tissue,.... (I'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you in what order this happens) Just try to lower the heating in your house in the winter and run around in a t-shirt iso a pullover.
      • toolslive 5y ago
        If you don't believe it, just look up what the diet on a polar expedition looks like.