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Comment by vecter | Hacker News Reader

It’s all diet. I visited Nashville a couple of years ago and everything on the menu was fried or just terrible for you.

Most of weight is diet. Exercise helps a tiny amount but is more for your cardiovascular health and strength. Running for an hour burns far fewer calories than half of a muffin.

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> running for an hour burns far fewer calories than in half a muffin

As a guy who runs pretty hard and weighs over 200 lbs, I burn nearly 1000 calories in an hour of running (~11km distance). I've tried a few different models to estimate this and they all more or less agree.

A lightweight person jogging at low intensity for an hour, maybe.

A Burger King Whopper with cheese, for example, has 710 calories. You would need to run 10km. Running and exercise is worthless. Don't eat the Whopper. Cancel the gym membership. Workouts cause calorie cravings - and most Americans will just eat processed garbage [ or unless you are super healthy - then you drink the "Mocha Mojo" from jamba juice 680 calories ].

> running and exercise is worthless

A bold claim indeed.

Not everyone who exercises is trying to lose weight.

It's a discussion about weight, so in context, that statement is completely valid.

Use an elliptical and it will show you exactly how many calories per minute you can burn.

For reference, Olympic athletes only manage to burn 30 calories per minutes at their best. I would put most people’s capacity at 10 to 15 calories per minute sustained.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou...

> I burn nearly 1000 calories in an hour of running (~12km distance).

You get a lot more calories than you can physically burn in one day. A donut can be something like 500 kcal. Skipping on snacks is more much effective than exercising no matter how you look at it.

For losing weight, yes.

However AFAIK fit and moderately overweight is better for your health than unfit and skinny.

It's a thread about people being overweight. We are not talking about other benefits here.

> you get a lot more calories than you can physically burn in one day.

I don't know if I do, since my weight has been pretty constant for a few years. But I'm sure some people do. Are most people in a state of constantly increasing weight?

Exercise is certainly helpful once you start getting close to your ideal caloric intake. If at rest you'd burn ~2000 cal/day, and you're consuming ~2300 cal/day, then exercising for one hour, three days a week can certainly make a difference.

Most people that are actually overweight though, have a much higher surplus in their caloric intake. Strenuous exercise like running over 10km isn't possible for many of these folks... and even if it were, it certainly wouldn't be possible every day. Cutting out the 600cal breakfast sandwich in the morning or the 200cal soda every day at lunch will have a bigger impact for most folks and is a lot more feasible.

Yeah, eating less is probably the most important thing for people who want to lose weight. Not going to dispute that.

Just wanted to address the exaggeration/overgeneralization in GP comment.

Diet is the biggest part of it, no question, but calories are misleading. The number of calories you burn by running for an hour doesn't take into consideration the increase in metabolism that will follow for up to 48 hours or the calories that will be burned in the future by the extra muscle you build even while at rest.

Input into the system is a big factor, but to maximize fat loss you also have to induce the system into expending prioritized fuel sources before it saps into fat reserves. And exercise probably induces that during but also after exercise too.

It's always 'diet' in a first order sense. The interesting question is why all the mechanisms broke that prevent diets from looking like this at a social level.

I agree it is diet, I disagree that it "fried foods" that are the source

High Fructose based drinks like Soda, Mass produced Tea's, etc combined with decades of government "education" around the high carb diet is the main source of the Mid Wests Obesity problem

When you are drinking 1500-2000 calories a day, and eating mainly pasta / potato heavy meals that is going to kill your weight.

Fried Chicken is not the problem...

That's a good callout. The prevalence of sugar in the American diet is pretty insane.

Fried food doesn't help either ...

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