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You can't outrun a bad diet, and you certainly can't outcycle it. But it keeps you fit, keeps your legs toned, and (depending on where you are) gets you from A

by elric 2y ago

You can't outrun a bad diet, and you certainly can't outcycle it. But it keeps you fit, keeps your legs toned, and (depending on where you are) gets you from A to B for nearly free.

watwut 2y ago
I hate this meme. Adding mild sport to the lifestyle consistently improves peoples health results. It improves how they feel on emotional level too. And in my experience, hunger/satiety regulation works better when I do mild sport. So, if the loosing weight thing is about more then just an aesthetics, if there is a hint of "I actually care about health too" motivation, then cycling or running or whatever sport one likes adds a lot of benefit. Certainly going to work by bike is better for weight itself then going by car.
- elric 2y ago
  > Certainly going to work by bike is better for weight itself then going by car. "Certainly"? Not really. Depends entirely on your habits. If you get to work after your bike ride and eat a Snickers because it made you peckish, and you didn't do that when going by car, you've effectively done nothing for your weight. It's true that exercise is good for you regardless. But it is orders of magnitude easier to ingest calories through food than it is to burn them through exercises.
  - watwut 2y ago
    If it made you hungry more, it is because your body needs some more nutrition as the trip was something body still needs to accustom itself to. There is nothing damaging with that. It likely means you had too small breakfast which can be composed of slow metabolizing food. If you go to work on bike regularly, your body don't even register it as something to triger you needing more food. If you are extra hungry after 30 min transport trip on bike, you are likely in very bad physical shape. 98% of diets end up failure in the long term, precisely because just skipping food does nit work in the long term. You end up miserable, tired, passive, anemic, underperfoming on the job.
bennyelv 2y ago
I agree with running but not cycling - I’d say it’s merely a question of how hard you try. Cycling is one of the very few sports (along with maybe swimming) that you can do for extreme amounts of time without acutely harming your body. The issue that does affect people is that if you started with the bad diet, you probably don’t have the fitness to produce the required output that would overcome it. If you manage to increase your fitness so that you sustain higher outputs however you absolutely can out-train your terrible diet!
- LRVNHQ 2y ago
  "You can't outrun a bad diet" is just a bad take. Even with running - especially with running - you can easily burn enormous amounts of calories. There are two problems with this saying. First, nobody knows what a bad diet is in the context of this saying. How many calories are we talking? How poorly balanced is the diet? Let's take a basic example: assume the perfect diet for a sedentary person, well balanced, exactly the right amount of calories, etc. Then on top of it, this person eats a 200g pack of Haribo 4 times a week. Surely this makes that diet insanely bad, right? Well, not really, it's only about 500 excess kcal/day which would be very easily compensated if this person had an active lifestyle. So how insanely bad does the diet need to be until the argument actually works? This saying is usually directed at people who want to lose weight, surely nobody is trying to lose weight in good faith if they drink soda daily, eat donuts left and right, and some haribos to top it off. The second problem, is that people are scarily sedentary and view what should be a completely normal amount of physical activity as impossible. So what upper bound are we putting on the "running" part of the saying? Doing 1-2 hours of sport 4 times during the work week, plus one longer physical activity on the week end (e.g., half a day hike or bike ride) is a completely normal amount of sport.
  - elric 2y ago
    4-10 hours of exercise a week, for starters, is a lot more than what most people achieve. And it burns a ridiculously low amount of calories. Maybe ~300kcal/hour of excess calories burnt. That's ~3000kcal/week. You can ruin that in one sitting at Pizza Hut in under an hour. If your goal is weight loss, and you have a choice between an extra hour of exercise, or eating one less Mars bar a week, skipping the Mars bar will be better for your weight loss.

by elric 2y ago

You can't outrun a bad diet, and you certainly can't outcycle it. But it keeps you fit, keeps your legs toned, and (depending on where you are) gets you from A to B for nearly free.

watwut 2y ago

I hate this meme. Adding mild sport to the lifestyle consistently improves peoples health results. It improves how they feel on emotional level too. And in my experience, hunger/satiety regulation works better when I do mild sport. So, if the loosing weight thing is about more then just an aesthetics, if there is a hint of "I actually care about health too" motivation, then cycling or running or whatever sport one likes adds a lot of benefit. Certainly going to work by bike is better for weight itself then going by car.

elric 2y ago
> Certainly going to work by bike is better for weight itself then going by car. "Certainly"? Not really. Depends entirely on your habits. If you get to work after your bike ride and eat a Snickers because it made you peckish, and you didn't do that when going by car, you've effectively done nothing for your weight. It's true that exercise is good for you regardless. But it is orders of magnitude easier to ingest calories through food than it is to burn them through exercises.
- watwut 2y ago
  If it made you hungry more, it is because your body needs some more nutrition as the trip was something body still needs to accustom itself to. There is nothing damaging with that. It likely means you had too small breakfast which can be composed of slow metabolizing food. If you go to work on bike regularly, your body don't even register it as something to triger you needing more food. If you are extra hungry after 30 min transport trip on bike, you are likely in very bad physical shape. 98% of diets end up failure in the long term, precisely because just skipping food does nit work in the long term. You end up miserable, tired, passive, anemic, underperfoming on the job.

bennyelv 2y ago

I agree with running but not cycling - I’d say it’s merely a question of how hard you try. Cycling is one of the very few sports (along with maybe swimming) that you can do for extreme amounts of time without acutely harming your body. The issue that does affect people is that if you started with the bad diet, you probably don’t have the fitness to produce the required output that would overcome it. If you manage to increase your fitness so that you sustain higher outputs however you absolutely can out-train your terrible diet!

LRVNHQ 2y ago
"You can't outrun a bad diet" is just a bad take. Even with running - especially with running - you can easily burn enormous amounts of calories. There are two problems with this saying. First, nobody knows what a bad diet is in the context of this saying. How many calories are we talking? How poorly balanced is the diet? Let's take a basic example: assume the perfect diet for a sedentary person, well balanced, exactly the right amount of calories, etc. Then on top of it, this person eats a 200g pack of Haribo 4 times a week. Surely this makes that diet insanely bad, right? Well, not really, it's only about 500 excess kcal/day which would be very easily compensated if this person had an active lifestyle. So how insanely bad does the diet need to be until the argument actually works? This saying is usually directed at people who want to lose weight, surely nobody is trying to lose weight in good faith if they drink soda daily, eat donuts left and right, and some haribos to top it off. The second problem, is that people are scarily sedentary and view what should be a completely normal amount of physical activity as impossible. So what upper bound are we putting on the "running" part of the saying? Doing 1-2 hours of sport 4 times during the work week, plus one longer physical activity on the week end (e.g., half a day hike or bike ride) is a completely normal amount of sport.
- elric 2y ago
  4-10 hours of exercise a week, for starters, is a lot more than what most people achieve. And it burns a ridiculously low amount of calories. Maybe ~300kcal/hour of excess calories burnt. That's ~3000kcal/week. You can ruin that in one sitting at Pizza Hut in under an hour. If your goal is weight loss, and you have a choice between an extra hour of exercise, or eating one less Mars bar a week, skipping the Mars bar will be better for your weight loss.