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Comment by lgeorget | Hacker News Reader

Exercising is very beneficial for your health for a lot of reasons but it cannot prevent overweight without a proper diet.

The role of exercising has been exaggerated by Coca-Cola and other junk food sellers to shift the blame away from them: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-sc....

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The idea that exercise cannot prevent obesity without a proper diet is very misleading. Yes, if someone eats 7k calories and does not train like an olympian, they are going to gain weight. However, you can consume 5k calories a day whilst exercising(properly) 5 days a week, and remain very trim and "cut" as the term goes. Proper exercise is not popular though, because if it was easy....well everyone would do it.

The idea that "you have to burn more calories exercising than you eat" is 100% false. The calories you burn while exercising make up less than half of the calories you burn because of exercising. Lean muscle mass maintenance caloric requirements exceed adipose tissue requirements by an order of magnitude. Simplified: the more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories your body will burn with zero effort to support that muscle mass.

That said, a proper diet is a great idea for a ton of reasons. I replied only to point out that proper exercise carries a lot of weight(no pun intended).

I understand your point but food is not just a sum of calories. Not all food is metabolised the same. Athletes consume a lot of calories but avoid junk food.

Edit: as I read your comment again, actually, I think we mostly agree.

That's simply not true. With intense enough exercise, a diet that would cause obesity among ordinary people will leave you extremely underweight with not enough energy to get through the day. If you look at athletes such as competitive swimmers and cyclists, you can find diets of 8,000 calories a day and more. Individuals such as Antarctica explorer had to consume massive amounts of butter, sugar, chocolate and animal fat to get through the day due to the intense amount of physical activity.

Of course, it is much easier and practical to eat fewer and healthier foods rather than exercise to such extreme amounts.

That's not my point though. It's not contradictory to say "intense exercising can cause starving if you don't eat enough" and "exercising cannot prevent overweight without a proper diet".

How is it not contradictory? That intense exercising is doing just that, preventing you from being overweight even if you are consuming tremendous amounts of calories and unhealthy foods.

You don't have to go too extreme either - take an average overweight person and put him through a certain amount of physical exercise - say, cycling multiple hours a day. He will lose weight with his original unhealthy diet, which had lead to him being initially overweight.

"cycling multiple hours a day" Well, I wasn't imagining _that_ level of exercising either. That's already sounds quite extreme to me.

My initial point was the following: just doing more sport is not going to help if you don't even know how much and how badly you eat. You need to reflect on your diet first, and then exercise, even if Coca-Cola wants you to believe that you can drink as much soda as you want without consequences, and that it's your own fault if you get fat afterwards.

Calories in, calories out.

Important note: calories are generally estimations... calorie counting apps even more so.... so if you're not careful your 3 strips of bacon (listed, 160 calories)) can easily be 250 calories.

The listed calories on many cooked foods are "average expectations" of that kind of product with "average cooking". Who defines average? No idea. But I advise people interested in loosing weight to research food labels and assume them as "ballpark" values. Failure to do so, on top of missing the extra tablespoon or 3 of coffee creamer can easily wipe out your 100-200 calorie deficit you planned.

Also, look at regulating your blood sugar (diets like keto help), or, if you like carbs, do smaller meals over the day -- this reduces the spikes in blood sugar that trigger hunger.

not so much - we know that e.g. refined carbs trigger metabolic reactions differently than e.g. pure fats. the gall bladder isn't really used when carbs are ingested, but is when fats are, so there are clearly metabolic consequences.

so while pedantically might be true, the mechanism of the calories does matter a lot.

Also, ethanol has no storage form, but it's definitely calories in. Of course most people don't drink ethanol in a fasted state without any other macronutrients, so they still get fat since the body preferentially metabolizes the ethanol and stores the other stuff.

As I've heard it: "You cannot outrun your mouth"

For example, jogging at a steady pace for an hour will burn around 700 calories (give or take some, depending on weight). If you stop at a McDonalds at the end of that run and have a Quarter Pounder with fries, you're now at a net of +70 calories from where you started.

Mm... yes and no. Exercising will trigger EPOC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_co... which will make you burn more than 700 calories overall.

But I agree with you, the calorie to volume/satisfaction of the fast food meal is a horrible deal.

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