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I’d heard this for years and was quite the skeptic. I’d hit the gym pretty consistently in my late teens and cycled a lot and kept a pretty consistent weight ir

I’d heard this for years and was quite the skeptic. I’d hit the gym pretty consistently in my late teens and cycled a lot and kept a pretty consistent weight irrespective of what I ate. Over the better part of 20 years the only real fluctuations were during extended travel periods where both diet was bad and exercise non-existent. But multiple marathons, extended focus on weight training, picking up various sports again, and I’d oscillate in about a 3kg range. And then my wife had to go on an extended elimination diet to deal with gastrointestinal issues and I joined as moral support. In the space of a month, with absolutely no exercise happening, I dropped 10kgs. And I don’t think I’d ever felt healthier. As soon as I got back to running I was as quick as I’d ever been, no great surprise I guess given how much lighter I was. Turns out the biggest impact I could have on my health was being more conscious of what I was eating. I couldn’t out run what I was putting in my mouth, no matter the distances I was putting in.

joshu 4y ago
my trainer says “you can’t outrun a cheesburger.” i should probably stop showing up with mcdonalds
- bennyelv 4y ago
  Anecdata warning - you actually can! The problem with trying to outrun a cheeseburger is that you probably need to be quite fit to do it. It works like this: If you're unfit, your capacity for output during exercise is less. If you're fitter, your capacity for output during exercise is higher. An unfit person doing exercise, will therefore burn significantly fewer calories than someone who is fit if they exercise for the same duration at the same perceived effort. If I go for a hard 1 hour bike ride, I burn 3 cheeseburgers. An unfit person will struggle to burn much more than 1 despite working as hard as they can.
  - count 4y ago
    This seems to run counter to what I see in data based on heart rate at least. As you get more fit, your cardio conditioning level goes up, which means you are substantially more efficient in exercise. When you're not efficient, you'll burn more calories doing the same work.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      The key here is at equal perceived effort. An unfit vs. fit person putting in 100% for an hour is a very different story.
    - bennyelv 4y ago
      That’s true if you keep exercising at the same absolute output, but that’s not what you’ll naturally do. Your speedometer is how hard it feels. What getting fitter enables you to do is increase the output without it feeling harder, either through increased duration or increased speed/power/etc. Be wary of using heart rate as an indicator of this - it varies massively between people, and approximating energy output from it is not much better than using math.rand(). If you’re training to the same heart rate but your speed is going up, you can say you’re improving, but you can’t apply an absolute measure to it with any accuracy.
  - joshu 4y ago
    perhaps, but the joke isn't as funny

joshu 4y ago

my trainer says “you can’t outrun a cheesburger.” i should probably stop showing up with mcdonalds

bennyelv 4y ago
Anecdata warning - you actually can! The problem with trying to outrun a cheeseburger is that you probably need to be quite fit to do it. It works like this: If you're unfit, your capacity for output during exercise is less. If you're fitter, your capacity for output during exercise is higher. An unfit person doing exercise, will therefore burn significantly fewer calories than someone who is fit if they exercise for the same duration at the same perceived effort. If I go for a hard 1 hour bike ride, I burn 3 cheeseburgers. An unfit person will struggle to burn much more than 1 despite working as hard as they can.
- count 4y ago
  This seems to run counter to what I see in data based on heart rate at least. As you get more fit, your cardio conditioning level goes up, which means you are substantially more efficient in exercise. When you're not efficient, you'll burn more calories doing the same work.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    The key here is at equal perceived effort. An unfit vs. fit person putting in 100% for an hour is a very different story.
  - bennyelv 4y ago
    That’s true if you keep exercising at the same absolute output, but that’s not what you’ll naturally do. Your speedometer is how hard it feels. What getting fitter enables you to do is increase the output without it feeling harder, either through increased duration or increased speed/power/etc. Be wary of using heart rate as an indicator of this - it varies massively between people, and approximating energy output from it is not much better than using math.rand(). If you’re training to the same heart rate but your speed is going up, you can say you’re improving, but you can’t apply an absolute measure to it with any accuracy.
- joshu 4y ago
  perhaps, but the joke isn't as funny