Eat (drink) 4000 calories of gasoline. wont make you fat. point is: only calories you can convert into "human fat" will make you fatter. that process can not happen without certain chemicals (hormones) in your body, like insulin mentioned above. it's not as straightforward as that which was op's point.
Are your confusing nutritional calories with physics calories? When people talk about diet, of course they are talking about calories obtained from digestion, not combustion engines.
Energy is energy, a calorie is a calorie in gasoline, food or electricity. However when talking about nutrition labels, those are generally an estimate of calories potentially extracted by humans (which I think is what you mean with nutritional calories). I'm not confusing anything. But some people seem convinced that the car analogy is exactly how the human body works - you put food into your mouth and it gets "burned" by exercise or stored (calories in, calories out) and no amount of evidence or science seems to convince them otherwise.
Have fun eating 4000 calories of carrots, cabbage, broccoli.. even eating brown rice is hard! Carrots have about 200 calories per pound, so we are talking about 20 pounds of carrots per day. Brown rice (cooked) has about 200 calories per cup, so again, 20 cups of brown rice?
Meanwhile a cup of vegetable oil has about 1900 calories.
The 7.4oz bowl of organic brown rice on the desk in front of me has 310 calories. It's roughly a cup by volume as well. I could easily eat 15 of them over the course of a day.
> It you a eat a lot of fat you will get fat too. Its all about moderation. If you eat 4000 calories of FAT everyday you will get fat
Calories-in-calories-out without considering the hormones that drive both satiety and crucially fat-storage-vs-fat-mobilization (and thus drive both how many calories are craved and how many are burned) is misguided. CICO isn't wrong, but for all practical purposes what drives CICO in real life are those hormones, which are in turn affected by the ratio of fats and carbs in diet: chiefly insulin and leptin. How those are affected by 4000kcal-of-carbs-low-fat (badly) vs 4000kcal-of-fat-no-carbs (benign/beneficially) is easy to find out.
4000kcal of fat and low carbs, if one could stomach it for years, after a few weeks of keto-adaptation? They'd be a tad little bit fatter than they'd like, and feel profusely hot and sweaty. As their leptin and insulin sensitivity gets ever-better, 4000kcal will soon become impossible to stomach, however. 4000kcal of carbs and low fat for years, just become obese and get metabolic syndrome.
> Calories-in-calories-out without considering the hormones
Your argument here boils down to: CICO is easier with a balanced diet. I don't think a reasonable person is going to argue against that.
> after a few weeks of keto-adaptation? They'd be a tad little bit fatter than they'd like
Honestly, if they could stomach it, they'd balloon up just as much as its opposite. Keto-adaptation doesn't change how your body processes fat, it just does a better job of not making a person feel ill when eating more fat in their diet.
Can confirm. Did a year long dirty-bulk on a ketogenic diet while lifting heavy weights, got fat (and didn't really put on that much extra muscle either)...
If eating fat satisfies you for longer than salty carbs, the net calories will be better. If it keeps your insulin levels steadier, it will effect calorie absorption. And so on.
Humans are not bunsen burners: we are impossibly complicated chemical systems with massive reflexivity built into them.
I have eaten 4000 calories of fat in an afternoon, mostly in cream and butter as part of a giant poundcake trifle [0]. I didn't throw up but I really regretted it all evening. This was at a time when I was very active and eating around 7000 calories a day.
Supposedly, this works if you eat fat and protein with very limited carbs, if any. For instance, I would gag if I had to eat those sticks of butter by themselves, but I can easily eat a lot of slices of cake. This all is the basis of a ketogenic diet, kind of like Atkins on steroids
>Fat is very dense in calories, so if your goal is to reduce caloric intake, reducing the fat will go a long ways towards that goal.
This thinking empowers so much over-eating in today's diet world. There's a trope with the broken low-fat wisdom that when you buy low-fat foods, you're almost always buying high-sugar high-salt foods (have to replace flavor somehow).
Even worse, upper intestinal lipids trigger a feeling of satiation, of fullness, through the gut–brain–liver axis.
If you deprive yourself of lipids, you deprive yourself of satiation -- eating a healthy mix of fats in your meals helps you feel more full and sated and eat overall less, and feel good about eating overall less.
If you buy processed foods that are advertised as fat-free or low-fat variations of foods that would typically be expected to be other than low- or non-fat, yes. A head of cabbage doesn't have sugar added to it to make some kind of low-fat cabbage.
I'm regretting commenting now. Like a bikeshed next to a nuclear plant, anybody who has ever lost any amount of weight has an opinion on how it's done.
Reducing fat reduces caloric intake. Note the word reduce (I even emphasized it), instead of remove, or replace. Yes, fats are a healthy part of a good diet. No, you should not omit them.
Of course, don't take my word for it. RTFOP, which made the recommendation in the first place.
Looks like you're doubling down. Your statement is 100% correct. The problem is, fat calories are more satisfying than non-fat calories, so you are more likely to eat less if you eat protein + fat instead of protein + carbs + less fat. That's just the wait it works.
One should eat less fat and carbs, but in doing so one will be less satisfied and be more likely to snack or eat larger portions later, negating the effect.
The problem is that while I am a good and level-headed person, my future self is a hungry bastard.
From a metabolic point of view, that is correct. What others are trying to point out is there is a mental aspect to that, involving our appetite feedback loop. The human body is a highly interdependent system, not a set of isolated microservices.
The way I view it is to maximize the enjoyment out of food. Don't just view it as fuel to be ingested as fast as possible; savor it! Appreciate the flavor of that rice, that bacon. It may sound like becoming a food snob—which it can if one has elitist tentencies—but it's more about appreciating the components that make up the food we eat, and turning it into an art.
An implied requirement for that is to slow down and take the time to eat. There's about a 20m delay for the feedback loop of satiation to occur. So eating slowly and in courses gives our bodies the time to appreciate what is coming in and for the mechanisms to provide better feedback. I'm always amazed at how some can ingest a 1800 kcal meal in 15 minutes: no feedback can happen that fast.
Indeed, but people who want to "lose weight" actually don't care how heavy they are, they care how they look and want "to be slimmer" which is the actual result we're trying for while colloquially using the term "lose weight" to describe that effect.
(this is of course a sweeping over-generalization where there are actually a number of other reasons, related to health, fatty liver etc...)
With a goal of "BEING SLIMMER" we're actually more interested in draining triglycerides from our fat cells so they shrink. (after that we can induce apoptosis and kill them off via freezing but that's another story).
Since the goal is to drain fat cells, we're actually better served by keeping our bodies in the state where they are "emptying the fuel tanks (stored fat)" as opposed to "burning the cheap stuff (carbohydrates)"
By reducing CARB intake we can keep the fat-cells open and draining. BUT in order to reduce carb intake, we have to replace it with a macronutrient which will induce satiety.
i would say that it's just extremely, extremely difficult to exercise away a bad diet. not impossible, but a strategy that is basically guaranteed to fail if you're a normal person with a normal job and life.
About half of the article deals with why attempting to use exercise to optimize the process probably won't help much with it and for some people will completely derail it. The title is exactly aligned with the article
I thought the same thing at first, but then I read this. We're talking us regular folks getting maybe an hour of exercise. If you're an athlete you're getting WAY WAY more so it makes sense that you're burning off calories like mad.
I also thought the same thing. The article didn't really address the point specifically, if you are highly active most of the day you will burn a substantial amount of calories. Some people maintain weight while consuming 4000+ calories per day, for example on long hiking trips or long distance running.
I'm not sure about the hunter gatherer example. That was interesting. Maybe they are in much better shape and can be active a large portion of the day without expending much more energy. Or simply, the activity isn't extremely high-level.
Under one heading, the do specifically call out elite athletes, "whose job is exercising" as a potential exception.
It's also true that many endurance athletes are pretty careful about what they eat. My brother, who was a pretty good high school and college runner (5ks and 10ks especially), used to say he had a high body fat for a runner because he ate ice cream. His BMI? Maybe 20, 21 at most, and he was lifting weights back then.
If you can dedicate 8-12 hours a day to exercising, sure. It takes years of training to even be fit enough to do that, though. You can't be 100lbs overweight and out of shape and expect to be able to do that without injuring yourself.
Amusingly, if you go by BMI, quite a few pro athletes are overweight, or even obese. (This is a good illustration of how idiotic BMI can be...).
For instance, Michael Jordan was slightlu overweight according to BMI. Shaquille O'Neal was past overweight and into obese. Wilt Chamberlin was overweight.
Leaving basketball for boxing, Muhammad Ali was well into overweight. Mike Tyson was obese.
How about American Football? I'm going to exclude line positions since a large part of their job is to be a wall and so we'd expect them to go for mass. Quarterbacks Dan Marino and Joe Montana: overweight. In fact, five of the last six Heisman Trophy winners (who were all quarterbacks) are overweight, and one is obese. The last four non-quarterback Heisman winners were running backs, and two were overweight and two were obese.
so true, I've never been in better shape in my life, I recently ran ultra-marathon and can easily bench press my own weight 10 times but my physician told me I am overweight and should loose 15 pounds because my BMI is over 25. I wanted to take his head off.
So that's an interesting long read, I guess all the details end up making sense. Some physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes is the best way to go. The most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully.
Don't expect to be able to exercise enough to lose much weight.
Does anyone actually still think that the extra energy consumption caused by exercise will cause you to lose weight and not just eat more?
A more contemporary discussion would include the idea that the different state of being caused by exercise causes less food intake ... which incidentally is true for me personally.
It is entirely possible that people that exercise regularly never have any trouble with their weight and thus never show up in these studies.
> Does anyone actually still think that the extra energy consumption caused by exercise will cause you to lose weight and not just eat more?
Plenty of people on HN strongly think this.
The nutrition discussion on HN is normally fucking terrible. (See this thread where someone talks about "the science" and links to the Guardian as a reference).
This article misses a key point: increased muscle mass correlates with increased calorie burn.
Not all exercise is created equal. Exercise that doesn't build muscle is indeed ineffective at burning fat. But exercise that DOES build muscle has a compounding effect on burning fat. Your muscles require more energy to maintain, so they will burn more calories just by existing.
This effect is pretty small. Like 10 calories a day for a pound of muscle (which is quite a bit of muscle to add).
It still matters, a few calories a day for a year ends up being pounds of weight, but adjusting calories out of the diet is going to be a better first strategy.
Not only that, but aerobic exercise also works better because your cells will burn energy for longer after working out - so I guess building muscle and getting it to burn more energy by running is the most efficient combination
I just spent the last several minutes reading reputable sources and they all seem to agree with you. In fact, they indicate a pound of muscle burns more like 6 calories.
Building muscle can burn crazy calories though. It's quite common for normal men (I'm not talking about pro athletes, just ordinary guys) on strength training programs to add 500-1000 calories/day to their diet, and not gain fat. I wish the article would have mentioned this, because it only seems to talk about cardio exercise, which indeed makes it difficult to burn a lot of calories.
Hogwash. Strength training does not increase caloric burn by 500, much less 1000 calories per day. The purpose for adding calories while strength training is to "bulk", ie gain fat + build muscle at an efficient rate. This is generally between 100-325 calories over your TDEE, or breakeven point of caloric burn.
Humans are about 25% efficient, so feel free to multiply any number with 4 to get actual expended energy.
That doesn't change the calculus, obviously. I can easily sustain 150W for an hour on a bike, I can't lift 225kg half a metre against gravity 500 times (the equivalent).
(The idea here is that you try to back up lofty claims with some science numbers.)
Don't forget to add your body weight. Lifting ~110kg 6 feet (4 times 1/2 meter) 25 times in about 3 minutes ~= 6 mintues @ 150W on a bike. Plus whatever lifting your body weight from a squat adds up to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_and_jerk
Start playing with the numbers and Weight lifters can get into crazy high energy diets.
PS: Works out to around 110kg / ~.82 ~= 135kg max lift. At 230 lb the record is 246 kg so it's not that unreasonable a goal for a fairly large guy.
Serious bodybuilders have to eat like it's their job. At a certain point, regular food fails to provide enough calories so they have to reach for liquid diets.
if you want to maximize sustained burn you need to use more muscle groups. Being limited to how much oxegen you can supply to your legs is a major limitation.
Rowing is a good example of this, but as 110kg is easily twice the power output of biking you can drop down to 50% max lift range and be limited by oxigen not mussel damage.
Or put another way top weightlifter need to eat significantly more than top bikers who top out at around 8k cal per day.
Power lifting can quickly become anaerobic, when you run out of oxygen. But, weightlifting is used for more than just peak power. Many activity's benefit from pure strength, but most people are trying to improve both power and endurance.
Longer cool down periods (3-5 min) helps build strength faster and let's each set be more anaerobic and higher weight, but short cool down periods and slightly lower weight adds endurance and strength, plus more repetition.
The other benefit of aerobic weightlifting is you can better learn to minimize anaerobic activity. Full power all the time seems great, but being dead on your feet in 30 minutes is rarely useful.
There is plenty of Oxygen to handle a single lift. Just not a rapid full set at near max weight. The specific transition point varies based on a wide range of factors,mbit simply waiting between each individual lift is enough to stay aerobic.
I'm skeptical about how aerobic weightlifting can be before it isn't really weightlifting, but also not too interested in arguing. Some weightifting protocols such as German volume training do seem like they must contain a decent aerobic proportion.
That's a naive look at losing weight and overall health though. High Intensity Interval Training(HIIT) is one of the most effective approaches to trimming.
Mental health benefits, however, are mostly achieved with endurance training, as well as cardiovascular health, mobility in old age and resilience to age-related injuries (hip fractures, mostly). Swimming probably offers the best tradeoff b/w weight loss, cardio, muscle gain & safety (if only it weren't so boring)
I'd like to see that last graph split out into "fat loss/gain" and "muscle loss/gain" - because reducing food intake can also make your body break down muscles, which is equally bad. Doing exercise to stimulate the body to make more muscles can counter that effect.
I went from 190 lbs. to 138 lbs. over 6 or 7 months. The only exercise I did was jogging for 45 min a day. What I noticed was that jogging made me feel better, which somehow got me to consistently eat better. After a days jogging I didn't want to put crap food in me and ruin what I had accomplished and by doing it everyday I felt good enough, often enough to stick with it.
So, based on my experience, I simply can not agree.
Not for me. I may have stopped working out for long periods, since then, but the 6-7 months of diet change stuck which was enough to maintain the weight loss (approximatley). 14 years now.
This is very true. Exercise has more of an effect than the calories burned. It improves your health and you feel much better than when you had a sedentary life. As always the answer is that decreasing calorie consumption with moderate exercise is key to maintaining weight loss.
Just as exercising cannot offset massive overconsumption of food, massive underconsumption of food will make one that is dieting feel terrible, and thus not as likely to continue.
In addition the amount of exercise done is never going to really offset a sedentary job. Someone walking on their feet all day vs me being at a desk is going to consume much more energy than me even if I workout after work intensely for an hour. So I am still going to need to consume less than them. But if I did not do the hour of exercise, my body would break down from not being used, and my overall feeling of health would decline.
From my experience: I didn't have a sedentary life, well at least lets just say I wasn't sitting at a computer all day. I was always out and about. My extra weight was from a mix of overconsumption and poor food choices.
I noticed there were unforseen changes in behaviour due to diet that I still find strange. Things like quitting pop. I used to grab McDonald's food more often, but since quitting pop I avoid the place. Sometimes I still grab a burger from there, like 5 times or so over the last 14 years, but I'll never get a pop and I don't have a desire to go there and still avoid it with ease.
I still think diet changes are the single most important thing, but I just don't think I could have gotten there without exercise.
I have also decided this past Jan 1 to stop Soda. And I've phased out sugar in my morning coffee. Not being a big juice drinker in the first place, I think I'm better off as a long term goal to limit the amount of sugar i "drink". I'll stick to just "eating" it, focus on cutting out more processed sugar and being smart about balanced diet in general.
I do crave it still tho, I have not found myself avoiding fast food either. With two kids under 2, it just kind of makes life easier when I make them good meals and can pick up something quick.
One trick I've learned is to not have pop in the house. My girlfriend hates me for it :). Honestly I couldn't have quit pop if I did have it there. At one point she would buy it for her, but somehow I found myself drinking it so we had to have a discussion; thankfully she accommodated me.
Ideally you and your family can get on the same page in terms of diet, but I imagine with kids that can be extremely challenging. It's worth it if you can do it.
One more tip. Finding substitutes really helps. Soda stream is awesome provided you don't add the syrups. I do 90% soda water with 10% orange juice or grape juice and I love the stuff.
I should note I spent the first month ramping up from 20 min of jogging to 45 min of jogging which is why I put 6-7 months. If anyone decides to start jogging based on what I wrote, please don't go from nothing to 45 min a day. I didn't do that.
I'm about to start something like this as I have the 'losing weight but losing it from the wrong bits' issue mentioned in another post.
I am physically active, I don't drive, I walk around 3 to 4 miles a day as part of my commute, I go up and down three or four flights of stairs quite a lot of times a day (I'm a teacher and timetabling systems seem to have a Saltationist bias as they have us jumping between lessons) and I work mostly standing up and moving around a large room. So I imagine a vaguely similar activity profile to the hunter gatherers mentioned - I'd love more detail on miles walked per day &c.
I know knowledge is power and the plan you linked is probably good advice, but for my personality type I don't think that would've worked. It's simply too much work :).
During the first month I did 5 min of stretching and then 20 min of jogging in one shot for the day. Every 3 days I would try to add 5 min. Sometimes I could, sometimes I had to back off and try a few days later. After a month I got to 45 min. I then did only 30 seconds of stretching before the jog. I did't think I needed it anymore (probably should have).
As I understand it the first 20 min of jogging doesn't really help you lose much weight, it's every minute after, for the session, that really burns fat.
As for miles walked, this was 14 years ago I didn't think or care about miles walked.
Probably not helping you, but that was my experience.
The article title is kind of clickbait-y, isn't it?
I kind of agree with the article that the diet changes are more important for the weight loss angle. However, when it comes to being healthy overall, I actually think exercise is more important. You can be overweight by BMI, physically fit, and better off overall health-wise than a thin person who is a couch potato. http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/05/can-you-be-fat-and-fit...
Anecdotally, I know someone who has gone from 300lbs to 140lbs using a combination of exercise (walking) and diet changes (Weight Watchers). I think both were equally important to her success, personally.
Some of the article to me was, er, a bit of a stretch. Take point 7: "Exercise may cause physiological changes that help us conserve energy". And the only linked citation is to a paper outlining that people with different genetic composition respond differently to exercise, and a meta study that involved both diet and exercise? "Starvation mode" to extreme diets is well documented, so where's the paper that links to just exercise causing slower metabolic change? I mean, perhaps it's possible, but it runs against the consensus I've heard, so basically, [Citation needed], because what was provided doesn't say what that paragraph said.
I do agree with the article that policy should focus on the low-quality food angle.
I've been riding my bike a lot lately, and I have lost weight. I find that exercise, for whatever reason, also makes me want to eat healthier. Sometimes it also actually takes the hungry away: I recently did a 6 hour bike ride, leaving at 1000, and getting back at around 1600, and I was not all that hungry, despite having eaten only a few energy bars during the ride.
I do agree with the feeling that doing exercise makes you feel better, and that this feelings motivates you to eat better food.
I don't see how you say you simply can not agree with the article tho.
The article stipulates that exercise itself has less effect than diet. Maybe exercise helps to keep a good diet, but exercise + keeping same crapy diet won't be as effective as what you did yourself.
I didn't set out to change my diet or even diet+excercise. I set out to excercise alone. I changed my diet long before that, but it didn't lead me to excecise and it I wasn't able to do it long enough for it to be ingrained. So my advice would be to excercise even if without a diet change because you are more likely find your diet change as a byproduct and actually be able to sustain it.
Less effect is what i have a problem with. Dieting requires less effort. Cutting portion sizes is much easier than changing your schedule to accommodate a workout.
I think you're nitpicking the article's message. You're saying that exercise caused you to eat better, but the article (and the data) are suggesting that it was eating better, not exercising, that led to the weight loss.
We can agree to disagree regarding what decision gets the credit for shedding those pounds, but in any case, congratulations on your weight loss. That's a real accomplishment.
Forgot to mention what you did, 45 mins of continuous activity will trigger endorphins. Cheapest way to feel euphoria (even in low intensity).
Just last week I walked back from the grocery store, taking random turns, with a steep hill at the end. Google Fit[1] tracking some data. 5 miles only, but I felt sweating in a good relaxing way.
[1] Google Fit is a very low barrier way to start tracking your exercises. It interprets accelerations good enough to distinguish car, foot or bike move. And you're happy when you get that notification buzz telling you did your planned distance|time.
Whenever I tried doing cardio exercises, I remember I would come back from the gym so hungry, I would eat a horse. And, I did. I couldn't stop -- I would eat whatever I could lay my hands on.
A couple of weeks later, my weight had in fact, increased. In my life, I have found I have been able to reduce weight only through two methods:
1. Strength training exercises + Protein (read meat) heavy diet
2. Small amount of vegetarian food three times a day
Anecdotal evidence from being a gym rat for 20 years, although I'm sure there are studies out there to prove this. Maybe :)
No doubt that diet+exercise is the way to go when it comes to long-term weight management.
The thing is, "weight loss" in and of itself is a misleading metric. You're losing weight! Great! But hold on a minute - your gut is the same size but your biceps is smaller and your strength is way down. What happened? You lost weight alright but its muscle you're losing, not fat.
So where I'm going with this is exercise is very important to make sure you don't negatively impact your body composition by losing muscle weight when dieting.
Agreed. The problem is that weighing yourself is easy, but measuring body fat is way harder. Most of the at-home measurement tools are wildly inaccurate; the accurate ones are either expensive or inconvenient.
It does seem to be tracking reasonably well - I've lost a bit of fat, but not a significant amount since then. Given what I see in the mirror, I think 16-17% is about right. There are some weird fluctuations, but we're talking 1-2% day to day. The range of the graph is about 4-5%.
The trick is to measure several times a day if you get the chance (or at the very least when you get up and when you go to bed) to smooth out any fluctuations.
Muscle requires a lot of energy to maintain, so when your calories drop your body starts shedding it to be more efficient so long as you are also inactive.
If you stay active you will lose strength on a calorie deficit but you will not lose muscle mass. That's why you can do a cut, and your lifts will go down but you still look great at the lower body fat. The muscle mass is still there.
Trained individual on a reasonable diet, taking an intelligent approach to cutting will lose 'some' strength and 'some' muscle when cutting body fat, yes.
Someone who is out of shape might actually be able to gain both muscle and strength while losing weight when starting out as long as they are lifting in addition to cleaning up their diet/reducing calories. The less fit they are the better the gains, which I guess is borderline captn obvious territory :)
I wouldn't say it's captain obvious territory. I don't think most people realize how fast muscle development drops off after a year of serious training.
This article, including the title, is a bit of a mess. Nothing in it refutes the commonly accepted principle that if you burn as many daily calories in exercise as you consume in food, you will not get fatter. The point of the article seems to be simply that the modern Western diet is so high in calories that it's difficult to do enough exercise to make up the difference. The survey study they cite talks about exercise in the range of only a couple of hundred calories a day, and even then, contrary to what the article implies, the study's conclusion clearly states that weight loss was proportional to the amount of exercise. So, sure, if you're eating 1000 calories/day more than you're burning, throwing in an extra 30-minute walk on the treadmill isn't going to do much. But try a real exercise regimen like P90X where you are burning an extra 800 calories or so a day, and you absolutely will see results even if your diet remains unchanged.
The point of the article is that the relationship between "amount of exercise you do" and "calories you burn" is probably not linear, as has traditionally been believed.
According to the scientist's theory, you get diminishing returns, where you have to do ever more and more exercise to burn the same number of calories.
But the study they cite to support that view talks about very low levels of exercise (1100 calories a week) in the long term studies. If the diet calorie surplus was comparable in both long and short term, it's not surprising that the results were disproportionately low in the long term compared to the short-term studies: with such a low level of exercise, it wouldn't be surprising if the measurement error was significant. In a longer term study, it's tough to control for what people do the rest of the time.
And in their discussion of the Hadza tribe, they admit that the Hadza could be resting enough at other times of the day to offset the increased calories they expend for food gathering. All that does is tell us that given two populations that exercise about the same amount, the one that eats less will be leaner. That says nothing about whether the Hadza could remain lean on a Western diet if they also exercised more, which is the real question. Nowhere in the article is that question actually directly addressed. The study of marathoners they cite points out that the subjects increased their intake while they trained, which unsurprisingly limited their weight loss.
If you eat the same amount but exercise significantly more, you will lose weight. If you eat significantly less with no increase in exercise, you will lose weight. Nothing in this article supports with data the conclusion that the latter approach is better than the former.
HN threads on this topic tend to be repetitive and superficial, but this article appears to be so much more substantive than the usual media pieces that we've provisionally turned off user flags on the post.
In certain Vedic traditions, physical exertion is seen as a form of meditation. The concept there is if you can discipline your body, you can discipline your mind.
That being said, I think the author of this article tries way too hard to be counterfactual. If you put an obese male or female on the treadmill with modest caloric restriction, over time they will lose weight on a log scale.
FWIW, my experience disagrees with this. I was overweight, started running (starting around 9mi/wk, when I got bored and stopped I was up around 24mi/wk), and started losing weight quickly, lost a ton of it over a year, after which I was at a very good weight for me. Now, as the piece touches on, that exercise did change my eating, but the outcome of that isn't clear to me -- I stopped eating/snacking for a few hours before a run so I wouldn't cramp. But I also started eating a lot more outside of those exercise windows, as running so much made me quite ravenous at times. Ate anything and everything I wanted and I just kept dropping weight as long as I kept running.
Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.
It's literally just calories in vs. calories out.
If 400 calories/day meets your weight loss goals, all you have to do is make sure that the calories you expend + the calories you no longer intake = 400.
The ratio of those two factors completely varies from person to person on what their motivation levels are going to be, but as long as it works for you it will result in the same amount of weight loss as any other ratio
The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong.
"Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
At the individual level, some very good research on what works for weight loss comes from the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has parsed the traits, habits, and behaviors of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of one year. They currently have more than 10,000 members enrolled in the study, and these folks respond to annual questionnaires about how they've managed to keep their weight down.
The researchers behind the study found that people who have had success losing weight share a few things in common: They weigh themselves at least once a week. They restrict their calorie intake, stay away from high-fat foods, and watch their portion sizes. They also exercise regularly.
But note: These folks use physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes. Every reliable expert I've ever spoken to on weight loss says the most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully.
In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits. "
It doesn't upend it, it basically just says "Don't count calorie expenditures as part of your caloric deficit", which has been standard advice for every resource I've used for quite some time.
The theory says that as you do additional exercise, you get diminishing returns in terms of the number of calories you burn. As your exercise level increases, you have to do ever more exercise to burn the same number of calories, because the body has various compensatory mechanisms designed to avoid weight loss.
The traditional model proposes a much simpler linear relationship: do an additional unit of exercise and you will burn X more calories, forever. He says that is incorrect and you actually get diminishing returns, where additional units of exercise burn ever fewer calories rather than just a constant.
I understand that. My point was that I've never seen a plan where people tell you to eat as much as you want as long as you do x hours of activity per day. The only plans I've seen like that are for strong men competitors or where the Rock ate like $300 worth of food every day and worked out for six hours daily.
That is exactly the nutrition advice that has been promoted in various government and school health programs for decades: eat what you like, just do X amount of exercise and you'll be fine. Calories in, calories out.
The article goes into some detail about this, mentioning that a great deal of that research was funded by companies that make sugary drinks and other high-calorie food.
Followed by a paragraph describing that it's just a hypothesis and they'll have to reconcile with studies that show that you burn more energy with exercise. I didn't say that doing 400 calories of exercise in a day was easy, or that it wouldn't make you way more hungry and prone to eating more, which are the main points of this article.
That's why I said that you have to find some compromise that works for yourself, I didn't say where that balance lay for most people.
The constrained model doesn't contradict cals in/cals out. All it says that the calories out will be sublinear in the amount of exercise added.
Furthermore, the graph of energy expenditure over time (in section 10) directly agrees with what calories in/calories out predicts. See, for example, how perfectly the "very low calorie diet" agrees with the exponential decay predicted by theory.
> The whole point of the article is that the traditional "calories in/calories out" model is wrong.
I think what they mean by this is that the "calories out" portion is what is mostly wrong (or at least, misunderstood ), not that "calories in" are probably the most significant factor when it comes to fat loss. They don't seem to dispute this.
I (despite the article) am mostly in agreement with you, but I think that calories out is a very complex subject. For example, when I calculated how many calories I was burning on my longer runs, it ended up being around 3000 calories/week. However, as I said before, my intake went up. Way up. I ate like an idiot. Donuts? Yeah. Cheeseburgers? Sometimes ordered two. Dr. Pepper? Bring the two liter! I absolutely added more than 3000 calories to my diet after I started running. And yet despite all that, I just kept dropping weight.
The human body is a very complex, non-linear thing. Discerning operating principles by looking solely at inputs and outputs is a hard problem.
It's just a bad title. The title should have been "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight without changing your diet". If you eat the same amount as you did before, assuming that was maintenance calories, you will lose weight if you begin exercising. The problem is when you're intaking 1500 more calories than necessary before you start exercising. You can't burn that off to the point of a deficit with exercise alone.
No, it's not that much. But they were very high intensity miles. My typical routine was to do a half mile walking warmup, then over the course of 5-8 minutes of running, gradually adjust my pace so my breathing was very close to my sustainable max. Then I'd continue adjusting my speed to keep my breathing there for the rest of the run. (All those running guides that say you should be able to carry on a conversation while you're running? Yeah, that wasn't me at all. I was huffing and puffing like mad the entire time.) I accumulated that mileage over 3 runs/week, no more than one hour total each time, so that distance was done in a 3 hour period.
And about the food? Umm, it wasn't even close. Before the running, my idea of a snack was a little piece of cheese or a yogurt. After I started running, a snack was a Carl's Jr. Famous Star cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd order two. I became notable among my football player brothers-in-law for my capacity, regularly demonstrated, for out-eating them. My wife still talks about a particularly memorable restaurant visit where I basically ate 3 large, complete entrees. My calorie intake was ridiiiiiculous. Eating like that was both enjoyable and entertaining, and it didn't seem to interfere with my fitness, so I did it all the time.
And still I lost weight. Crazy. The body is a strange machine.
The problem with your line of reasoning is the counterintuitive results mentioned in the article that came from examining primitive cultures that lead a much more active lifestyle. Despite engaging in activities that were far more active, they didn't burn more calories.
This is one of the many problems with the calorie in, calorie out line of reasoning that seeks to treat the human body like an automobile that uses fuel solely based on pressing the accelerator. What we're finding is that this isn't the case. For one, the body isn't 100% efficient, so a lot of calories in are lost in ways that aren't "burned." It's also likely that the body of a sedentary person is burning calories fairly inefficiently, so a change to being more active without altering diet will just cause that body to be more efficient in how it burns calories rather that burning fat or muscle reserves.
Calories in, calories out is an attractive concept, especially to scientifically-minded people who love the simplicity of deriving the answer by applying a fundamental law of thermodynamics. But the more we dig into the subject, the more we're realizing that it's a wrong-headed approach. The body is much more complex than that. We need a much more nuanced approach to nutrition, though "carbs are bad" seems to be a pretty good approximation of it.
I'd bet there is some exercise intensity threshold step function at work.
The article says exercise is, "only around 10 to 30 percent [of total energy expenditure] depending on the person (and excluding professional athletes that workout as a job)," implying that when you are doing lots and lots of hardcore exercise almost every day, it will use up a greater percentage of calories.
I recall another study -- no idea where I'd find it now -- which did body scans of runners. They found that runners which averaged 11mi/wk had substantial interior fat deposits. Runners that averaged 17mi/wk had very little.
Our body's software is so hopelessly out of date. It's programmed to preserve fat at all cost: something quite useful, say 2 million years ago when famines were happening almost every day.
Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are barely aware of the basic mechanisms which govern our fat production, not even understanding how it works. So far, all we have is theories, hypothesis, correlations and some compelling experimentations.
Personally, I'm waiting for the iBody app to come out. iBody, will allow us to control our metabolism at a cellular level, dialing it up or down at will. We'll be able to control our appetites and hungers at the push of a button too. But, at this rate, who knows how long it will take to get this off the ground: 100s of years, thousands? Come on investors, this is a multi-trillion dollar market.
It's utterly easier to just make and advertise addictive food, completely throwing nutritional quality out the window. What if you could even claim your addictive, mostly empty junk is healthy? Therefore funding and studies with the intention of obfuscation and the control of the progress of understanding.
The world would have to look very, very different than today's for something like an iBody app to come into being. Where's the money to be made in people having that much control over themselves? The goal is to sell more (eg) donuts, not less. To defect is the norm.
Yes. Consumers are mainly to blame for this. As long as consumers keep buying the garbage (solutions that don't work/never had any chance of working) they're pumping out, businesses don't have much incentive to create anything that works. It's appalling to me, how people can continue to spend so much money on gimmicks and appetite suppressants that clearly don't work.
There is some very interesting work happening in this area. Specifically: how can we make money by preserving & building health?
This is the foundation of the whole pay-for-outcome revolution pushed by the ACA. They want to pay doctors for keeping people healthy, not for the lengths they go to fix you when you're sick.
Doing this requires more data than we have now and new market structures.
Depends on how quickly you want to lose weight, and whether that's your only goal. If, as a 150 pound male, your RMR is about 1500 kcal/day, and you eat at least 1000 kcal/day (anything less probably isn't healthy - you do need to supply your body with nutrition, and also avoid going into starvation mode) - then you are running a 500kcal/day deficit - about 3500 kcal/week, or 1 pound of weight loss. If you want to lose any more than that, eating less, outside of a metabolic lab environment, is probably not going to be effective (you either have your RMR drop as your body goes into starvation mode, or you end up binge eating as your body reacts to the massive deficit of calories).
This only allows for increased caloric output - and it's relatively simple to do 500 kcal/additional aerobic exercise/day - an hour of brisk walking, with maybe 30 minutes of stair climbing does the trick. This gets you from 1 pound of weight loss a week, to 2 pounds, and has the additional benefit of increasing your VO2 Max.
This doesn't even touch on the importance of resistance strength training exercise, and how key that is to maintaining a healthy body while dropping weight - it's all to easy to turn into a lightweight flabby weak person by just not eating/exercising.
Based on all the other comments in the thread, I wonder if we updated to language we used if our goals would be clearer.
Why not replace the phrase "lose weight" with "become slimmer"?
We're not actually concerned with losing weight, but in fact with losing a specific TYPE of weight.
It makes it a lot easier to come to terms with instructions like: "keep your insulin down and your fat cells will empty"
The scale is an imperfect measure for slimness and lose weight is the wrong phrase to describe what we're generally trying for.
Obviously these are sweeping generalizations, if you feel the need to poke holes, you're probably right. I'm going for brevity as opposed to a "think piece" - please feel free to take the comment with a grain of salt.
I've found online reaction to this article quite interesting. Normally data and study minded folks bring out the "anecdotally, this doesn't seem true" responses, and people seem think the article is attacking exercise as a concept.
It's not.
It's saying that if a person's goal is to lose weight, then adjusting to a good diet is far more important than (a reasonable amount of) exercise.
The article does not claim that exercise is harmful. In fact, it explicitly states that there are very many health reasons why exercise is important, and that exercise+diet is still better than diet alone.
It also goes into the culture surrounding exercise, and how it tends to be misleading. The education in popular culture around exercising presents it as a magic pill, as being a major driving force behind weight loss. You see this on magazine covers and on tv, "belly fat exercises", "toning exercises", all sorts of exercises that serve to reinforce the idea that weight is primarily a result of physical activity rather than (for most people) food consumption.
Ultimately though, I think the studies referenced back up the conclusion pretty well: weight loss effectiveness goes diet+exercise > diet > exercise, given standard amounts of each.
Abs are made in the kitchen, but as someone who went from 22% bodyfat to 11% they are pretty puny abs if you don't pair it with some pretty frequent exercise.
While that's true in isolation, if you do the birth control thing of success rate with average usage, I imagine diet alone will massively win out. Diet and exercise, to someone who does not enjoy the exercise, is significantly harder to do than just dieting. People who struggle to lose weight generally struggle to achieve just one of dieting or exercising, so advising them to focus on the easier and more effective option is best.
Obviously, it varies person to person - if someone enjoys a team sport enough to exercise and still combine it with good diet, great. Those people don't tend to be the ones struggling with weight loss, however.
Of course a healthy dose of exercise is not harmful and the article reiterates this point many times. However, it also says that exercising may make your body more efficient, which lowers the overall energy that's used to keep us alive, which in turn may "hurt", to a certain extent, the weight loss rate.
When I was running regularly, I could see my heart rate go down day after day when I measured it right after I woke up.
Don't exercise to lose weight. Exercise to keep healthy. If you want to lose weight, you need to keep an eye on your calorie intake more than you keep an eye on the calories you burn. Not everybody can perform a 2000-calorie workout in one go.
everything in the article is true because they use technical terms, when you consider the overall effect of exercise and the overall goal of 'weight loss' being body fat reduction and improved fitness, exercise is an excellent way to achieve that
"Why you shouldn't /rely/ on exercise to lose weight" would be a less controversial title. Instead they chose a provocative, click-baity title and tone to the article.
The most accurate title would be "Don't exercise in order to earn the right to eat junk food later". Which is the meager point they're actually making.
The article deserves all the criticism - it has been designed specifically to provoke it. Journalists love to divide ho-hum issues into polarized opposing sides.
> The most accurate title would be "Don't exercise in order to earn the right to eat junk food later". Which is the meager point they're actually making.
Except that's not the only point the article makes. You might disagree with the title, but the article does attempt to back it up.
Many paragraphs are dedicated to explaining why for many people, exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned and other factors (such as studies showing that the body may attempt to balance energy output in other areas).
In that sense "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight" is precisely the thesis that the article is trying to support. You might disagree with it, but I don't really think its egregious clickbait. Even if the title is meant to be catchy and provocative. They clearly state why exercising could be detrimental to weight loss goals for some people.
> exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned
The actual number of calories burned exercising is unaffected by our mental estimates. Thinking you earned the right to eat junk food is the problem, not exercise.
Exercise makes me ravenous, I'm certainly not the only person for which that is true. Swimming is the worst offender, IME. I can be vigilant, but even knowing that I didn't burn enough calories to counterbalance that meatball sub I want to get after my workout, doesn't help all that much in keeping me from actually buying it anyway.
This is similar to the problem of calories in = calories out. Dieting isn't a chemistry equation where you just need the numbers to balance it, it's psychology and in some cases physiology (leptin levels, etc), and that part of it is tricky.
you can put your hunger to work for you, but you need to remind yourself that, if you carry extra pounds, hunger is what weight loss feels like. That ravenous feeling if you can keep it going, that right there is the success. celebrate it, and stop killing it.
The feeling of hunger itself is not the thing that's causing you to want to eat more. The aversion to the sensation is what's doing that, but you have control over the aversion.
There is "I'm hungry" and then there is "If I don't eat something, I'm going to crash." It is not success, it means something is really imbalanced in your diet, and if you have the mental power to successfully ignore it, well, isn't that just an eating disorder?
That's no more of an eating disorder than the inverse: not having the mental power to acknowledge and respond to it appropriately.
Anyways, parent comment didn't say to starve yourself. It said to learn to be okay with being a bit hungry. Instead of learning to be okay with the feeling of hunger, people learn to be okay with the equally unpleasant feeling of being stuffed.
Grand parent's comment was about feeling ravenous during swimming, not just "hungry." Diet is not as simple as eating less food, since you are eating less, you need to make an extra effort to ensure your body is still getting what it needs.
I've heard people say "I'm famished!" and I don't for a second think that they've been through a literal famine and are starving to death. Maybe GP used "ravenous" literally, or maybe it's just a figure of speech to indicate having built up a good appetite.
I've totally had points where my work out crashed because my body was out of something. It could be water, protein, or even sugar or salt. There is a huge difference between "hungry" and body is shaking, weak feeling.
I meant that I was ravenous after swimming, not typically during. I used that word because it's different than the usual "I'm a bit peckish" that happens in the morning or after a few hours of not eating. I like the comment about thirst, it could easily be that.
I did bodybuilding for ~5 years and did the whole bulk/cut cycle every 3-4 months so I had quite a few cutting session and a few times I let myself go (30-40lbs overweight) and had to lose more than 10-15lbs; in those instances I did IF (Intermittent Fasting) and ate in 6-7 hour windows (evening). The first week or so you get pretty hungry in the morning, but after that it's pretty easy.
I only say this because I want to express that I'm familiar with just being a bit hungry vs much more than that. When I was 19 I lived with a friend and we were both broke, I dropped from 180lbs to 145lbs (on my frame that was skeletal) in a few months from not eating much at all. That was pretty severe hunger, but even my ravenous after swimming isn't as bad as that was.
FWIW, and if it matters at all, I'll be 39 in a month.
No, it's not. Learning how to eat and hydrate properly (both in terms of what and when) with your exercise pattern so that you don't feel ravenous while maintaining a calorie deficit is success. Feeling ravenous isn't success, and generally isn't sustainable.
No, it really isn't. I dropped 15kg with diet moderation over several months a couple of years ago, and I wasn't left feeling hungry apart from the first week (where I was adjusting to reducing the volume of my meals).
it's interesting reading the hunger vs. no hunger debate. Personally I can't imagine losing weight without feeling hungry. Of course not constantly, of course not to the point of crashing, but you have to moderate the feeling. For some people it can pass in about a week, and you adjust to just eating less, and you hopefully stop feeling hungry. But I think almost everyone goes through at least an adjustment period.
The reason high protein / low carb diets work so well for people is it removes this feeling. The protein tricks us into thinking we're sated even under a heavy calorie deficit
My experience is that really high protein/low carb diets (e.g. Atkins initiation phase) produce, for me, an uncomfortably full feeling without satiety. But there's pretty extreme variation in response person to person.
I think this is true. I've never been very overweight so I admit it was easier for me to do this than it would be if I had to do it for longer, but I dropped ten pounds primarily just by drastically cutting the amount of food I ate for lunch. This led to feeling hungry at work, but when I'm working I'm very focused and able to ignore what my body is telling me. I suspect many other people here are the same way - if you find you're able to work for long periods of time without a break and you can drop into "flow", you may be able to lose weight by just eating less during those periods.
Exercise actually promotes the intake of Glucose into body cells by stimulating the opening of pumps on the cell wall, similarly to the way Insulin promotes the intake of Glucose into body cells.
It's really important to stay hydrated, because your body often mistakes thirst for hunger. Drink water every 10m in the pool. Also, I often take a small amount of heavy protein immediately after the workout (~1/2 of one of those 33g protein bars is typical), then jump in the shower.
Between these two habits, I've killed the post-swim binge. Hope it works for you too!
Don't worry, any germs or other organic nastiness are completely neutralized by the vast quantities of chlorine, which is what you should actually be going "eww" about.
(I once drank a mouthful of pool water as a kid and got a really awful headache shortly thereafter. I suppose I'm lucky that's all I got.)
Yes.. dear lord when I was a competitive runner every post-workout made me binge eat. Of course, to be competitive that means you workout very hard 3-4 times a week.
I can't count the number of times my teammates and I would eat a party pack of tacos each afterwards. That's not healthy.
It's all interrelated. Exercise may (it did to me) shift your brain into seeking other kinds of food and drinks. I'm much more willing to drink simple water after a long soccer match. Exception being swimming, which makes me wanna eat all cakes in sight.
It also leads to a different lifestyle if I may say so. Being sedentary means low amount of sensation, leading to the eating for pleasure reflex, all this without a way to consume. Sport will keep you busy, probably make you feel weird, sore then not sore = good feeling. Hinting your mind that you can have good times this way.
Oh, definitely. I've lost upwards of 30 pounds over the past year and a half. Much of it is related to changes in my diet, but exercising regularly has definitely helped my diet. Personally, I'm much less likely to eat in excess after exercising because I don't want to "waste" my efforts.
I felt this way too, but often I ended up eating bad food because after a while I didn't value exercises as much (went back into a OK zone).
Also, told this already, massive health failure forced me out of sugar coated, processed food and beverage. Our life styles is way too easy onto eating to satisfy our tongues and not our body. When stuck in this corner, eating raw veggies, you'll start to notice a lot of enjoyable tastes, and drop in fat aftertaste and overall a realization that how much sugar 'drugs' your brain. It's very hard to not want to take a big bite of cake or chocolate, hamburger etc etc, and inside the comfy zone of our culture, if your health allows it, you'll never have a way to sense that.
It helps you keep your choices in perspective for sure. Also, for me, if I'm getting a lot of exercise, I actually just don't feel like I need the junk food, so I mostly just do without it.
I'm going to continue to posit that weight is a factor of genetics / epigenetics and / or body function first and foremost.
Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.
What is going on in these peoples bodies that is kept out of popular science with regard to weight loss? We know that thyroid hormone function affects weight and metabolism. In women reproductive hormones also affect weight, oestrogen is a hormone present in both males and females, so there's some crossover there. We know that adrenal function can affect weight. We know that insulin resistance can affect weight.
There has to be more to it that calories in - calories out = weigh gain or loss.
If you have an unaddressed thyroid, reproductive hormone, insulin, or adrenal issue you're going to be working hard to address your weight.
It is my suspicion that fixing the diet first improves weight control better than exercise because food is medicine. Anything you put in your body on a daily basis can be medicinal in that it can act to help your body restore homoeostasis or move further away from it.
not saying that these people don't exist, I've just never seen a controlled study to investigate whether they really can eat more and not gain weight. anecdotally I know these people as well, I just don't trust anecdotal evidence.
Indeed, I've known a few people in my life who say "I can eat as much as I want and I never seem to gain any weight". But then when I actually accompany them, it's mostly that they don't overeat. "As much as they want" is a portion that is aligned with their body.
I'm now almost 40 years old and have never been overweight a day in my life. Over the past 20 years my weight has always stayed within about a 15 pound range no matter how much/little I ate and/or exercised.
I participated in a caloric intake study at one point in time and I had a higher caloric intake than anyone in the study group. I was not trying to eat more; it was just that until I hit my mid 20s I had to consume excessive quantities of food just to keep from losing weight.
At this point (didn't know then) we already know there are some strange genetics. Over the past 10 both myself and all of my siblings have been diagnosed with various immune diseases.
Yes, healthy people gain weight on 5,000 calorie per day diets. No, they don't develop all the metabolic and psychological maladies described in the documentary.
> regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight?
If I had to choose between thermodynamics and medicine being wrong, and people not being able to accurately estimate how "much" they eat and how "little" they exercise, I'd bet all my money on the latter.
The simple reality is, people have vastly different appetites. I eat fast and am always hungry. I have two coworkers, one eats quite a bit less than me (often struggles to finish a standard portion), the other eats mich more but quite slowly.
3 different people, 3 vastly different eating habits. The reason people gain different amounts of weight most likely isn't in the differences between our bodies, but the differences between our minds.
It's not that far off. If you're not looking at calories in and calories out first, you'll be disappointed. Thermodynamics doesn't cease to operate inside the human body.
Sure, if you're tracking your food intake closely, maintaining a significant deficit, and not losing weight, talk to a doctor about your thyroid. If you're putting in hours in the gym and eating a lot and not gaining any muscle, talk to your doctor about your testosterone level. But if you're looking to hormones and whatnot first, you're probably just deluding yourself.
I never understand the thermodynamics argument in terms of weight gain. Surely you acknowledge that some solar cells and mechanical engines are more efficient than others?
Additionally, do you acknowledge that some drives are more irresistible than others? Can you hold your breath until you pass out?
Is it so hard to imagine these drives might differ from person to person? I fully acknowledge that, irrespective of your body's efficiency, if you could ignore your drive magically, you would lose weight with no problem, but that is far from a useful endpoint because the drive matters.
Some people's bodies just burn more calories in resting than others. Or their resting isn't as resting as they think - look at people who sit but their leg twitches up and down.
Ultimately it's still calories in vs out. But the out isn't just burning 500 calories running. It's what you burn doing your day to day too.
Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates.
> Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.
This is another problem that people can and have solved. You simply aren't eating as much as you think, so you take meticulous track of your caloric intake, and once you realize you eat a lot less than you thought, force yourself to eat X 100s of calories over normal intake per day. This is likely a quantity of food that causes physical discomfort initially, but it works.
Ignoring issues like Crohn's, "I can't gain weight" is just as much an excuse as "I can't lose weight", although perhaps more socially accepted due to body type voodoo.
TLDR: Blood sugar spikes above certain level are toxic, so the body responds with an emergency action of stashing the sugar wherever possible, including muscle, liver, and fat tissue. The former two are rather limited in their capacity, while the latter is unlimited. At the "hardware" level, that's all there is to obesity.
At the higher levels there are other emerging phenomena:
- This process is prone to overshooting the sugar egress, creating a "sugar crash", which has to lead to another sugar binge. This becomes an unhealthy see-saw. Note that the fat cells are consuming sugar but they can't release it back, they can only release fatty acids, hence sugar deficit must be replenished through food.
- The see-saw may end up messing the appetite and the balance of hormones that partake in regulating the metabolism. This yields the so-called "metabolic syndrome" with all its co-morbid factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome
- The hormonal imbalance changes the person's appetite, creating a vicious cycle.
Simple sugars are addictive. Just try going without to see how bad it can get - keep eating the fats, the meats, the complex carbs, just cut out the sugars, starches, and flours.
> Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.
I disagree that qualifies as an elephant. Some of those people could have some sort of known genetic defect that makes them unable to properly digest food. Some of them do not eat as much as you think that they eat. For instance, I had plenty of snacks yesterday at a neighbor's house. They were 1 peanut and two pieces of a jerky-like thing the size of my fingernail. Without that additional information, you would have thought that I ate far more.
I think you make a lot of good points but I would contend that the title of the article is click-bait. It's all well and good that the article itself is well reasoned but people read the title and hold on to that.
"The education in popular culture around exercising presents it as a magic pill, as being a major driving force behind weight loss. You see this on magazine covers and on tv, "belly fat exercises", "toning exercises""
There's def some of that going on, but there's also a fair amount of fad diets - atkins, south beach, paleo etc etc popping up here and there.
The fact that you get the 6 pack by dieting and not by doing crunches is common knowledge in the "lifting community", on the flip side - lifting when dieting is also important to maintain body comp.
And then of course there's the obvious fact that "losing weight" != "losing fat" which makes articles like this not only click-baity but also bordering on being misinformative.
Does the article say so? And your so called "fad diets" that are low on processed carbohydrates out perform other traditional diets. I doubt that staying away from processed carbohydrates will go away any time soon.
I went from 260 pounds to 199 pounds in about a year or so simply by eating less food and cutting out junk food. Only eating fast food when in a hurry and then only a small sandwich like the McDouble which only had one slice of cheese and the Double Cheeseburger had two slices of cheese.
I didn't exercise much just did some walking.
I took in less calories by eating less food for the tl:dr people.
I've noticed in some cases that exercise can actually stave off hunger pangs - both while doing it and afterward for a while (you want water more than food) - and in this manner it can act as an appetite suppressant.
As long as you ignore the body's impulse to eat more than usual when you finally do sit down for a meal, it can very much work in your favor. There's also a phenomenon people refer to as "shrinking stomach" (that I've observed first hand) where your body adapts to feeling more full on less food. I don't know if your stomach actually shrinks, but it feels like it.
If you don't sufficiently often resist the urge to eat more than you need, your body will adapt to that intake level and there will most likely be a rough patch when you try to change the trend. I believe most people can push past this uncomfortable period and stop feeling deprived after a while.
Certainly both responses happen. I've noticed I tend to have a delayed reaction and get hungrier later, then eat a whole day's calories in a sitting without even trying. Regardless, there are all kinds of ways to help suppress appetite, and if exercise is having this affect for you, alternating with other methods can allow you to delay and/or reduce eating.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] thread#10 - eat less fat? That runs counter to science too...
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-con...
Meanwhile a cup of vegetable oil has about 1900 calories.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fylDp1VtZbA&t=2m30s
[1] http://www.muscleandfitness.com/nutrition/meal-plans/smell-w...
Though clearly this is an exceptional event, not something I could do even semi-regularly.
Calories-in-calories-out without considering the hormones that drive both satiety and crucially fat-storage-vs-fat-mobilization (and thus drive both how many calories are craved and how many are burned) is misguided. CICO isn't wrong, but for all practical purposes what drives CICO in real life are those hormones, which are in turn affected by the ratio of fats and carbs in diet: chiefly insulin and leptin. How those are affected by 4000kcal-of-carbs-low-fat (badly) vs 4000kcal-of-fat-no-carbs (benign/beneficially) is easy to find out.
4000kcal of fat and low carbs, if one could stomach it for years, after a few weeks of keto-adaptation? They'd be a tad little bit fatter than they'd like, and feel profusely hot and sweaty. As their leptin and insulin sensitivity gets ever-better, 4000kcal will soon become impossible to stomach, however. 4000kcal of carbs and low fat for years, just become obese and get metabolic syndrome.
Your argument here boils down to: CICO is easier with a balanced diet. I don't think a reasonable person is going to argue against that.
> after a few weeks of keto-adaptation? They'd be a tad little bit fatter than they'd like
Honestly, if they could stomach it, they'd balloon up just as much as its opposite. Keto-adaptation doesn't change how your body processes fat, it just does a better job of not making a person feel ill when eating more fat in their diet.
You'd be surprised.
If eating fat satisfies you for longer than salty carbs, the net calories will be better. If it keeps your insulin levels steadier, it will effect calorie absorption. And so on.
Humans are not bunsen burners: we are impossibly complicated chemical systems with massive reflexivity built into them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifle
This thinking empowers so much over-eating in today's diet world. There's a trope with the broken low-fat wisdom that when you buy low-fat foods, you're almost always buying high-sugar high-salt foods (have to replace flavor somehow).
Even worse, upper intestinal lipids trigger a feeling of satiation, of fullness, through the gut–brain–liver axis.
If you deprive yourself of lipids, you deprive yourself of satiation -- eating a healthy mix of fats in your meals helps you feel more full and sated and eat overall less, and feel good about eating overall less.
Reducing fat reduces caloric intake. Note the word reduce (I even emphasized it), instead of remove, or replace. Yes, fats are a healthy part of a good diet. No, you should not omit them.
Of course, don't take my word for it. RTFOP, which made the recommendation in the first place.
Looks like you're doubling down. Your statement is 100% correct. The problem is, fat calories are more satisfying than non-fat calories, so you are more likely to eat less if you eat protein + fat instead of protein + carbs + less fat. That's just the wait it works.
The problem is that while I am a good and level-headed person, my future self is a hungry bastard.
The way I view it is to maximize the enjoyment out of food. Don't just view it as fuel to be ingested as fast as possible; savor it! Appreciate the flavor of that rice, that bacon. It may sound like becoming a food snob—which it can if one has elitist tentencies—but it's more about appreciating the components that make up the food we eat, and turning it into an art.
An implied requirement for that is to slow down and take the time to eat. There's about a 20m delay for the feedback loop of satiation to occur. So eating slowly and in courses gives our bodies the time to appreciate what is coming in and for the mechanisms to provide better feedback. I'm always amazed at how some can ingest a 1800 kcal meal in 15 minutes: no feedback can happen that fast.
(Disclaimer: yes I'm French)
Indeed, but people who want to "lose weight" actually don't care how heavy they are, they care how they look and want "to be slimmer" which is the actual result we're trying for while colloquially using the term "lose weight" to describe that effect.
(this is of course a sweeping over-generalization where there are actually a number of other reasons, related to health, fatty liver etc...)
With a goal of "BEING SLIMMER" we're actually more interested in draining triglycerides from our fat cells so they shrink. (after that we can induce apoptosis and kill them off via freezing but that's another story).
Since the goal is to drain fat cells, we're actually better served by keeping our bodies in the state where they are "emptying the fuel tanks (stored fat)" as opposed to "burning the cheap stuff (carbohydrates)"
By reducing CARB intake we can keep the fat-cells open and draining. BUT in order to reduce carb intake, we have to replace it with a macronutrient which will induce satiety.
Dietary fat is that macronutrient.
Whereas exercise is not required to lose weight, you still can use exercise to optimize the process.
I'm not sure about the hunter gatherer example. That was interesting. Maybe they are in much better shape and can be active a large portion of the day without expending much more energy. Or simply, the activity isn't extremely high-level.
It's also true that many endurance athletes are pretty careful about what they eat. My brother, who was a pretty good high school and college runner (5ks and 10ks especially), used to say he had a high body fat for a runner because he ate ice cream. His BMI? Maybe 20, 21 at most, and he was lifting weights back then.
For instance, Michael Jordan was slightlu overweight according to BMI. Shaquille O'Neal was past overweight and into obese. Wilt Chamberlin was overweight.
Leaving basketball for boxing, Muhammad Ali was well into overweight. Mike Tyson was obese.
How about American Football? I'm going to exclude line positions since a large part of their job is to be a wall and so we'd expect them to go for mass. Quarterbacks Dan Marino and Joe Montana: overweight. In fact, five of the last six Heisman Trophy winners (who were all quarterbacks) are overweight, and one is obese. The last four non-quarterback Heisman winners were running backs, and two were overweight and two were obese.
Don't expect to be able to exercise enough to lose much weight.
A more contemporary discussion would include the idea that the different state of being caused by exercise causes less food intake ... which incidentally is true for me personally.
It is entirely possible that people that exercise regularly never have any trouble with their weight and thus never show up in these studies.
Plenty of people on HN strongly think this.
The nutrition discussion on HN is normally fucking terrible. (See this thread where someone talks about "the science" and links to the Guardian as a reference).
Healthy eating is super super important.
Not all exercise is created equal. Exercise that doesn't build muscle is indeed ineffective at burning fat. But exercise that DOES build muscle has a compounding effect on burning fat. Your muscles require more energy to maintain, so they will burn more calories just by existing.
It still matters, a few calories a day for a year ends up being pounds of weight, but adjusting calories out of the diet is going to be a better first strategy.
I find that surprisingly low, and that's even if we're talking 100% sedentary here.
http://www.builtlean.com/2013/04/16/muscle-burn-calories/
I just spent the last several minutes reading reputable sources and they all seem to agree with you. In fact, they indicate a pound of muscle burns more like 6 calories.
You win, Internet.
In fact, the muscle-building type of exercise (lifting) is hilariously bad at burning any kind of energy. Here is a rough estimate:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(30*500)kg+.5+meter+aga...
That doesn't change the calculus, obviously. I can easily sustain 150W for an hour on a bike, I can't lift 225kg half a metre against gravity 500 times (the equivalent).
(The idea here is that you try to back up lofty claims with some science numbers.)
Start playing with the numbers and Weight lifters can get into crazy high energy diets.
PS: Works out to around 110kg / ~.82 ~= 135kg max lift. At 230 lb the record is 246 kg so it's not that unreasonable a goal for a fairly large guy.
Meanwhile, you can do 150W on a bike all day, just keep adding CHO.
Rowing is a good example of this, but as 110kg is easily twice the power output of biking you can drop down to 50% max lift range and be limited by oxigen not mussel damage.
Or put another way top weightlifter need to eat significantly more than top bikers who top out at around 8k cal per day.
Longer cool down periods (3-5 min) helps build strength faster and let's each set be more anaerobic and higher weight, but short cool down periods and slightly lower weight adds endurance and strength, plus more repetition.
The other benefit of aerobic weightlifting is you can better learn to minimize anaerobic activity. Full power all the time seems great, but being dead on your feet in 30 minutes is rarely useful.
http://www.exrx.net/FatLoss/HIITvsET.html
http://www.exrx.net/WeightTraining/Toning.html
There isn't a single study here that proves this rather lofty hypothesis.
So, based on my experience, I simply can not agree.
The exercise and better diet follow pretty easily from that.
Just as exercising cannot offset massive overconsumption of food, massive underconsumption of food will make one that is dieting feel terrible, and thus not as likely to continue.
In addition the amount of exercise done is never going to really offset a sedentary job. Someone walking on their feet all day vs me being at a desk is going to consume much more energy than me even if I workout after work intensely for an hour. So I am still going to need to consume less than them. But if I did not do the hour of exercise, my body would break down from not being used, and my overall feeling of health would decline.
I noticed there were unforseen changes in behaviour due to diet that I still find strange. Things like quitting pop. I used to grab McDonald's food more often, but since quitting pop I avoid the place. Sometimes I still grab a burger from there, like 5 times or so over the last 14 years, but I'll never get a pop and I don't have a desire to go there and still avoid it with ease.
I still think diet changes are the single most important thing, but I just don't think I could have gotten there without exercise.
I do crave it still tho, I have not found myself avoiding fast food either. With two kids under 2, it just kind of makes life easier when I make them good meals and can pick up something quick.
Ideally you and your family can get on the same page in terms of diet, but I imagine with kids that can be extremely challenging. It's worth it if you can do it.
I'm about to start something like this as I have the 'losing weight but losing it from the wrong bits' issue mentioned in another post.
I am physically active, I don't drive, I walk around 3 to 4 miles a day as part of my commute, I go up and down three or four flights of stairs quite a lot of times a day (I'm a teacher and timetabling systems seem to have a Saltationist bias as they have us jumping between lessons) and I work mostly standing up and moving around a large room. So I imagine a vaguely similar activity profile to the hunter gatherers mentioned - I'd love more detail on miles walked per day &c.
Are you a biology teacher? I had to look that one up...
During the first month I did 5 min of stretching and then 20 min of jogging in one shot for the day. Every 3 days I would try to add 5 min. Sometimes I could, sometimes I had to back off and try a few days later. After a month I got to 45 min. I then did only 30 seconds of stretching before the jog. I did't think I needed it anymore (probably should have).
As I understand it the first 20 min of jogging doesn't really help you lose much weight, it's every minute after, for the session, that really burns fat.
As for miles walked, this was 14 years ago I didn't think or care about miles walked.
Probably not helping you, but that was my experience.
I kind of agree with the article that the diet changes are more important for the weight loss angle. However, when it comes to being healthy overall, I actually think exercise is more important. You can be overweight by BMI, physically fit, and better off overall health-wise than a thin person who is a couch potato. http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/05/can-you-be-fat-and-fit...
Anecdotally, I know someone who has gone from 300lbs to 140lbs using a combination of exercise (walking) and diet changes (Weight Watchers). I think both were equally important to her success, personally.
Some of the article to me was, er, a bit of a stretch. Take point 7: "Exercise may cause physiological changes that help us conserve energy". And the only linked citation is to a paper outlining that people with different genetic composition respond differently to exercise, and a meta study that involved both diet and exercise? "Starvation mode" to extreme diets is well documented, so where's the paper that links to just exercise causing slower metabolic change? I mean, perhaps it's possible, but it runs against the consensus I've heard, so basically, [Citation needed], because what was provided doesn't say what that paragraph said.
I do agree with the article that policy should focus on the low-quality food angle.
http://us-store.bouncelifestyle.com/collections/balls/produc...
I don't see how you say you simply can not agree with the article tho.
The article stipulates that exercise itself has less effect than diet. Maybe exercise helps to keep a good diet, but exercise + keeping same crapy diet won't be as effective as what you did yourself.
We can agree to disagree regarding what decision gets the credit for shedding those pounds, but in any case, congratulations on your weight loss. That's a real accomplishment.
Thanks :)
Ah well. Not terribly important when faced with the end result - you lost the weight, and that's all that matters!
Forgot to mention what you did, 45 mins of continuous activity will trigger endorphins. Cheapest way to feel euphoria (even in low intensity).
Just last week I walked back from the grocery store, taking random turns, with a steep hill at the end. Google Fit[1] tracking some data. 5 miles only, but I felt sweating in a good relaxing way.
[1] Google Fit is a very low barrier way to start tracking your exercises. It interprets accelerations good enough to distinguish car, foot or bike move. And you're happy when you get that notification buzz telling you did your planned distance|time.
Whenever I tried doing cardio exercises, I remember I would come back from the gym so hungry, I would eat a horse. And, I did. I couldn't stop -- I would eat whatever I could lay my hands on.
A couple of weeks later, my weight had in fact, increased. In my life, I have found I have been able to reduce weight only through two methods:
1. Strength training exercises + Protein (read meat) heavy diet 2. Small amount of vegetarian food three times a day
No doubt that diet+exercise is the way to go when it comes to long-term weight management. The thing is, "weight loss" in and of itself is a misleading metric. You're losing weight! Great! But hold on a minute - your gut is the same size but your biceps is smaller and your strength is way down. What happened? You lost weight alright but its muscle you're losing, not fat.
So where I'm going with this is exercise is very important to make sure you don't negatively impact your body composition by losing muscle weight when dieting.
http://imgur.com/5AgKU9F
It does seem to be tracking reasonably well - I've lost a bit of fat, but not a significant amount since then. Given what I see in the mirror, I think 16-17% is about right. There are some weird fluctuations, but we're talking 1-2% day to day. The range of the graph is about 4-5%.
The trick is to measure several times a day if you get the chance (or at the very least when you get up and when you go to bed) to smooth out any fluctuations.
If you stay active you will lose strength on a calorie deficit but you will not lose muscle mass. That's why you can do a cut, and your lifts will go down but you still look great at the lower body fat. The muscle mass is still there.
http://fitnessblackbook.com/main/starvation-mode-why-you-pro...
Someone who is out of shape might actually be able to gain both muscle and strength while losing weight when starting out as long as they are lifting in addition to cleaning up their diet/reducing calories. The less fit they are the better the gains, which I guess is borderline captn obvious territory :)
That's not true. If you're on a calorie deficit you will lose muscle mass. You'll lose less if you exercise.
According to the scientist's theory, you get diminishing returns, where you have to do ever more and more exercise to burn the same number of calories.
And in their discussion of the Hadza tribe, they admit that the Hadza could be resting enough at other times of the day to offset the increased calories they expend for food gathering. All that does is tell us that given two populations that exercise about the same amount, the one that eats less will be leaner. That says nothing about whether the Hadza could remain lean on a Western diet if they also exercised more, which is the real question. Nowhere in the article is that question actually directly addressed. The study of marathoners they cite points out that the subjects increased their intake while they trained, which unsurprisingly limited their weight loss.
If you eat the same amount but exercise significantly more, you will lose weight. If you eat significantly less with no increase in exercise, you will lose weight. Nothing in this article supports with data the conclusion that the latter approach is better than the former.
That being said, I think the author of this article tries way too hard to be counterfactual. If you put an obese male or female on the treadmill with modest caloric restriction, over time they will lose weight on a log scale.
Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.
"Based on the research, Pontzer has proposed a new model that upends the the old "calories in, calories out" approach to exercise... He calls this the "constrained model" of energy expenditure, which shows that the effect of more physical activity on the human body is not linear."
"10) So what actually works for weight loss?
At the individual level, some very good research on what works for weight loss comes from the National Weight Control Registry, a study that has parsed the traits, habits, and behaviors of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a minimum of one year. They currently have more than 10,000 members enrolled in the study, and these folks respond to annual questionnaires about how they've managed to keep their weight down.
The researchers behind the study found that people who have had success losing weight share a few things in common: They weigh themselves at least once a week. They restrict their calorie intake, stay away from high-fat foods, and watch their portion sizes. They also exercise regularly.
But note: These folks use physical activity in addition to calorie counting and other behavioral changes. Every reliable expert I've ever spoken to on weight loss says the most important thing a person can do is to limit calories in a way they like and can sustain, and focus on eating more healthfully.
In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits. "
It doesn't upend it, it basically just says "Don't count calorie expenditures as part of your caloric deficit", which has been standard advice for every resource I've used for quite some time.
The traditional model proposes a much simpler linear relationship: do an additional unit of exercise and you will burn X more calories, forever. He says that is incorrect and you actually get diminishing returns, where additional units of exercise burn ever fewer calories rather than just a constant.
The article goes into some detail about this, mentioning that a great deal of that research was funded by companies that make sugary drinks and other high-calorie food.
http://health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/chapter2.aspx
That's why I said that you have to find some compromise that works for yourself, I didn't say where that balance lay for most people.
Furthermore, the graph of energy expenditure over time (in section 10) directly agrees with what calories in/calories out predicts. See, for example, how perfectly the "very low calorie diet" agrees with the exponential decay predicted by theory.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.htm...
I think what they mean by this is that the "calories out" portion is what is mostly wrong (or at least, misunderstood ), not that "calories in" are probably the most significant factor when it comes to fat loss. They don't seem to dispute this.
The human body is a very complex, non-linear thing. Discerning operating principles by looking solely at inputs and outputs is a hard problem.
24 miles a week is a decent bit, but it isn't that much. If you add 24 miles a week but eat a lot more, you will gain weight.
And about the food? Umm, it wasn't even close. Before the running, my idea of a snack was a little piece of cheese or a yogurt. After I started running, a snack was a Carl's Jr. Famous Star cheeseburger. Sometimes I'd order two. I became notable among my football player brothers-in-law for my capacity, regularly demonstrated, for out-eating them. My wife still talks about a particularly memorable restaurant visit where I basically ate 3 large, complete entrees. My calorie intake was ridiiiiiculous. Eating like that was both enjoyable and entertaining, and it didn't seem to interfere with my fitness, so I did it all the time.
And still I lost weight. Crazy. The body is a strange machine.
This is one of the many problems with the calorie in, calorie out line of reasoning that seeks to treat the human body like an automobile that uses fuel solely based on pressing the accelerator. What we're finding is that this isn't the case. For one, the body isn't 100% efficient, so a lot of calories in are lost in ways that aren't "burned." It's also likely that the body of a sedentary person is burning calories fairly inefficiently, so a change to being more active without altering diet will just cause that body to be more efficient in how it burns calories rather that burning fat or muscle reserves.
Calories in, calories out is an attractive concept, especially to scientifically-minded people who love the simplicity of deriving the answer by applying a fundamental law of thermodynamics. But the more we dig into the subject, the more we're realizing that it's a wrong-headed approach. The body is much more complex than that. We need a much more nuanced approach to nutrition, though "carbs are bad" seems to be a pretty good approximation of it.
The article says exercise is, "only around 10 to 30 percent [of total energy expenditure] depending on the person (and excluding professional athletes that workout as a job)," implying that when you are doing lots and lots of hardcore exercise almost every day, it will use up a greater percentage of calories.
I recall another study -- no idea where I'd find it now -- which did body scans of runners. They found that runners which averaged 11mi/wk had substantial interior fat deposits. Runners that averaged 17mi/wk had very little.
Actually, did a bit of Googling, looks like it might have been a study by Dr. Uwe Schütz published in 2009, found a mention of it here: http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/weight-loss/running-the-life-s...
Medical and nutritional science needs to advance more quickly in this regard. Currently, it's going at a snail's pace. I mean, we understand the entire creation of the universe, but the most advanced nutritionists in the world are barely aware of the basic mechanisms which govern our fat production, not even understanding how it works. So far, all we have is theories, hypothesis, correlations and some compelling experimentations.
Personally, I'm waiting for the iBody app to come out. iBody, will allow us to control our metabolism at a cellular level, dialing it up or down at will. We'll be able to control our appetites and hungers at the push of a button too. But, at this rate, who knows how long it will take to get this off the ground: 100s of years, thousands? Come on investors, this is a multi-trillion dollar market.
The world would have to look very, very different than today's for something like an iBody app to come into being. Where's the money to be made in people having that much control over themselves? The goal is to sell more (eg) donuts, not less. To defect is the norm.
This is the foundation of the whole pay-for-outcome revolution pushed by the ACA. They want to pay doctors for keeping people healthy, not for the lengths they go to fix you when you're sick.
Doing this requires more data than we have now and new market structures.
This only allows for increased caloric output - and it's relatively simple to do 500 kcal/additional aerobic exercise/day - an hour of brisk walking, with maybe 30 minutes of stair climbing does the trick. This gets you from 1 pound of weight loss a week, to 2 pounds, and has the additional benefit of increasing your VO2 Max.
This doesn't even touch on the importance of resistance strength training exercise, and how key that is to maintaining a healthy body while dropping weight - it's all to easy to turn into a lightweight flabby weak person by just not eating/exercising.
Why not replace the phrase "lose weight" with "become slimmer"?
We're not actually concerned with losing weight, but in fact with losing a specific TYPE of weight.
It makes it a lot easier to come to terms with instructions like: "keep your insulin down and your fat cells will empty"
The scale is an imperfect measure for slimness and lose weight is the wrong phrase to describe what we're generally trying for.
Obviously these are sweeping generalizations, if you feel the need to poke holes, you're probably right. I'm going for brevity as opposed to a "think piece" - please feel free to take the comment with a grain of salt.
It's not.
It's saying that if a person's goal is to lose weight, then adjusting to a good diet is far more important than (a reasonable amount of) exercise.
The article does not claim that exercise is harmful. In fact, it explicitly states that there are very many health reasons why exercise is important, and that exercise+diet is still better than diet alone.
It also goes into the culture surrounding exercise, and how it tends to be misleading. The education in popular culture around exercising presents it as a magic pill, as being a major driving force behind weight loss. You see this on magazine covers and on tv, "belly fat exercises", "toning exercises", all sorts of exercises that serve to reinforce the idea that weight is primarily a result of physical activity rather than (for most people) food consumption.
Ultimately though, I think the studies referenced back up the conclusion pretty well: weight loss effectiveness goes diet+exercise > diet > exercise, given standard amounts of each.
diet & exercise >> diet >>>>>>>> exercise
I like this quote: "You work hard on that machine for an hour, and that work can be erased with five minutes of eating afterward"
weight comes from your mouth, not from the gym
abs are made in the kitchen
80% diet, 20% training
Obviously, it varies person to person - if someone enjoys a team sport enough to exercise and still combine it with good diet, great. Those people don't tend to be the ones struggling with weight loss, however.
When I was running regularly, I could see my heart rate go down day after day when I measured it right after I woke up.
Don't exercise to lose weight. Exercise to keep healthy. If you want to lose weight, you need to keep an eye on your calorie intake more than you keep an eye on the calories you burn. Not everybody can perform a 2000-calorie workout in one go.
The most accurate title would be "Don't exercise in order to earn the right to eat junk food later". Which is the meager point they're actually making.
The article deserves all the criticism - it has been designed specifically to provoke it. Journalists love to divide ho-hum issues into polarized opposing sides.
Except that's not the only point the article makes. You might disagree with the title, but the article does attempt to back it up.
Many paragraphs are dedicated to explaining why for many people, exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned and other factors (such as studies showing that the body may attempt to balance energy output in other areas).
In that sense "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight" is precisely the thesis that the article is trying to support. You might disagree with it, but I don't really think its egregious clickbait. Even if the title is meant to be catchy and provocative. They clearly state why exercising could be detrimental to weight loss goals for some people.
Things that the article title doesn't say:
- You should never exercise to lose weight
- Exercise is bad for you
- You can only lose weight by dieting
The actual number of calories burned exercising is unaffected by our mental estimates. Thinking you earned the right to eat junk food is the problem, not exercise.
This is similar to the problem of calories in = calories out. Dieting isn't a chemistry equation where you just need the numbers to balance it, it's psychology and in some cases physiology (leptin levels, etc), and that part of it is tricky.
Anyways, parent comment didn't say to starve yourself. It said to learn to be okay with being a bit hungry. Instead of learning to be okay with the feeling of hunger, people learn to be okay with the equally unpleasant feeling of being stuffed.
I did bodybuilding for ~5 years and did the whole bulk/cut cycle every 3-4 months so I had quite a few cutting session and a few times I let myself go (30-40lbs overweight) and had to lose more than 10-15lbs; in those instances I did IF (Intermittent Fasting) and ate in 6-7 hour windows (evening). The first week or so you get pretty hungry in the morning, but after that it's pretty easy.
I only say this because I want to express that I'm familiar with just being a bit hungry vs much more than that. When I was 19 I lived with a friend and we were both broke, I dropped from 180lbs to 145lbs (on my frame that was skeletal) in a few months from not eating much at all. That was pretty severe hunger, but even my ravenous after swimming isn't as bad as that was.
FWIW, and if it matters at all, I'll be 39 in a month.
Between these two habits, I've killed the post-swim binge. Hope it works for you too!
That means you'd need 5 drinks to complete just one length of an olympic-size swimming pool! :)
eww
(I once drank a mouthful of pool water as a kid and got a really awful headache shortly thereafter. I suppose I'm lucky that's all I got.)
I can't count the number of times my teammates and I would eat a party pack of tacos each afterwards. That's not healthy.
It also leads to a different lifestyle if I may say so. Being sedentary means low amount of sensation, leading to the eating for pleasure reflex, all this without a way to consume. Sport will keep you busy, probably make you feel weird, sore then not sore = good feeling. Hinting your mind that you can have good times this way.
Also, told this already, massive health failure forced me out of sugar coated, processed food and beverage. Our life styles is way too easy onto eating to satisfy our tongues and not our body. When stuck in this corner, eating raw veggies, you'll start to notice a lot of enjoyable tastes, and drop in fat aftertaste and overall a realization that how much sugar 'drugs' your brain. It's very hard to not want to take a big bite of cake or chocolate, hamburger etc etc, and inside the comfy zone of our culture, if your health allows it, you'll never have a way to sense that.
Why is it that some people, regardless of how much they eat and how little they exercise, never put on weight? That, to me, is the elephant in the room.
What is going on in these peoples bodies that is kept out of popular science with regard to weight loss? We know that thyroid hormone function affects weight and metabolism. In women reproductive hormones also affect weight, oestrogen is a hormone present in both males and females, so there's some crossover there. We know that adrenal function can affect weight. We know that insulin resistance can affect weight.
There has to be more to it that calories in - calories out = weigh gain or loss.
If you have an unaddressed thyroid, reproductive hormone, insulin, or adrenal issue you're going to be working hard to address your weight.
It is my suspicion that fixing the diet first improves weight control better than exercise because food is medicine. Anything you put in your body on a daily basis can be medicinal in that it can act to help your body restore homoeostasis or move further away from it.
I'm now almost 40 years old and have never been overweight a day in my life. Over the past 20 years my weight has always stayed within about a 15 pound range no matter how much/little I ate and/or exercised.
I participated in a caloric intake study at one point in time and I had a higher caloric intake than anyone in the study group. I was not trying to eat more; it was just that until I hit my mid 20s I had to consume excessive quantities of food just to keep from losing weight.
Yes, healthy people gain weight on 5,000 calorie per day diets. No, they don't develop all the metabolic and psychological maladies described in the documentary.
If I had to choose between thermodynamics and medicine being wrong, and people not being able to accurately estimate how "much" they eat and how "little" they exercise, I'd bet all my money on the latter.
The simple reality is, people have vastly different appetites. I eat fast and am always hungry. I have two coworkers, one eats quite a bit less than me (often struggles to finish a standard portion), the other eats mich more but quite slowly.
3 different people, 3 vastly different eating habits. The reason people gain different amounts of weight most likely isn't in the differences between our bodies, but the differences between our minds.
Sure, if you're tracking your food intake closely, maintaining a significant deficit, and not losing weight, talk to a doctor about your thyroid. If you're putting in hours in the gym and eating a lot and not gaining any muscle, talk to your doctor about your testosterone level. But if you're looking to hormones and whatnot first, you're probably just deluding yourself.
Additionally, do you acknowledge that some drives are more irresistible than others? Can you hold your breath until you pass out?
Is it so hard to imagine these drives might differ from person to person? I fully acknowledge that, irrespective of your body's efficiency, if you could ignore your drive magically, you would lose weight with no problem, but that is far from a useful endpoint because the drive matters.
Ultimately it's still calories in vs out. But the out isn't just burning 500 calories running. It's what you burn doing your day to day too.
https://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peo...
Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates.
This is another problem that people can and have solved. You simply aren't eating as much as you think, so you take meticulous track of your caloric intake, and once you realize you eat a lot less than you thought, force yourself to eat X 100s of calories over normal intake per day. This is likely a quantity of food that causes physical discomfort initially, but it works.
Ignoring issues like Crohn's, "I can't gain weight" is just as much an excuse as "I can't lose weight", although perhaps more socially accepted due to body type voodoo.
There is. Read the "physiology" chapter at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipose_tissue
TLDR: Blood sugar spikes above certain level are toxic, so the body responds with an emergency action of stashing the sugar wherever possible, including muscle, liver, and fat tissue. The former two are rather limited in their capacity, while the latter is unlimited. At the "hardware" level, that's all there is to obesity.
At the higher levels there are other emerging phenomena:
- This process is prone to overshooting the sugar egress, creating a "sugar crash", which has to lead to another sugar binge. This becomes an unhealthy see-saw. Note that the fat cells are consuming sugar but they can't release it back, they can only release fatty acids, hence sugar deficit must be replenished through food.
- The see-saw may end up messing the appetite and the balance of hormones that partake in regulating the metabolism. This yields the so-called "metabolic syndrome" with all its co-morbid factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome
- The hormonal imbalance changes the person's appetite, creating a vicious cycle.
Simple sugars are addictive. Just try going without to see how bad it can get - keep eating the fats, the meats, the complex carbs, just cut out the sugars, starches, and flours.
I disagree that qualifies as an elephant. Some of those people could have some sort of known genetic defect that makes them unable to properly digest food. Some of them do not eat as much as you think that they eat. For instance, I had plenty of snacks yesterday at a neighbor's house. They were 1 peanut and two pieces of a jerky-like thing the size of my fingernail. Without that additional information, you would have thought that I ate far more.
There's def some of that going on, but there's also a fair amount of fad diets - atkins, south beach, paleo etc etc popping up here and there.
The fact that you get the 6 pack by dieting and not by doing crunches is common knowledge in the "lifting community", on the flip side - lifting when dieting is also important to maintain body comp.
And then of course there's the obvious fact that "losing weight" != "losing fat" which makes articles like this not only click-baity but also bordering on being misinformative.
Does the article say so? And your so called "fad diets" that are low on processed carbohydrates out perform other traditional diets. I doubt that staying away from processed carbohydrates will go away any time soon.
I didn't exercise much just did some walking.
I took in less calories by eating less food for the tl:dr people.
As long as you ignore the body's impulse to eat more than usual when you finally do sit down for a meal, it can very much work in your favor. There's also a phenomenon people refer to as "shrinking stomach" (that I've observed first hand) where your body adapts to feeling more full on less food. I don't know if your stomach actually shrinks, but it feels like it.
If you don't sufficiently often resist the urge to eat more than you need, your body will adapt to that intake level and there will most likely be a rough patch when you try to change the trend. I believe most people can push past this uncomfortable period and stop feeling deprived after a while.