Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories
science.org
science.org
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
The wild thing is he’s saying that’s not true either. He’s saying you never burned the extra calories in the first place.
The issue is the uptick in energy burn is unintuitive especially in the world energy dense high-processed food
As an ex once put "you have to run 5 miles to earn a cupcake - totally not worth it!"
We're glad you're here to poke fun at the research of at least two people with PhD's centered on this topic.
> when you start considering the extremes
When you start considering the extremes, you often find that they can't tell you much about the middle ground.
> As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs
You clearly burn extra calories when exercising, but the thesis of the article is that it doesn't matter in terms of weight loss because your body will adjust to burn the mean level of calories. The obvious exception are athletes whose energy expenditures simply can't be averaged away.
This leads to the conclusion that it's not just exercise that drives weight loss, but diet and exercise (shocking!) that makes a difference, as you have to run at a net loss over the day.
Most people who want to lose weight (aka mostly unfit/untrained) are not going to be able to exercise the amount would take to truly force a calorie deficit.
This is well known and true even if the claims made better happened to be entirely false. I’m not dismissing your point, here. I agree fully.
Exercise just doesn’t burn enough calories to really matter. Especially in the face of a poor diet. Running burns ~100 calories per mile (yes, varying based on weight and a little bit based on speed but it’s a close enough rule). A can of soda has ~150 calories. There’s just no competition. Someone trying to lose weight can skip a soda or a candy bar and it’s more effective than running an extra mile.
I think you are missing the fundamental part of the article about the calorie expenditures being adjusted based on non-fat body mass.
So, yes Michael Phelps eats a lot of calories, but him (and other pro athletes) have spent their lives building muscle and keeping fat reserves down. Michael Phelps I think is at a 5% body fat, while the average American is 18%+. He needs more calories for that extra body mass that most people the same height don't have.
No way. 5% is well below optimal for athletic performance. At 5% you’re looking at developing health problems. This is the range bodybuilders aim for on stage because they care about looking shredded more than they care about having joints that work.
Phelps was reportedly 8% when he won all those medals in Beijing.
Exercise obviously must burn calories because work is being done. The body can’t overcome physics.
The nuance, and the surprising thing, is that other parts of the body seem to adjust their energy levels to compensate. If you don’t do a lot of exercise, something else burns calories. If you do exercise, the “something else” burns less.
What is the something else? That’s the mystery that still needs to be solved. And by extension, what are the limits of the something else? After all, there are well-documented examples of extreme athletes who consume lots of calories without gaining mass.
This in particular feels really hand wavy: “After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.”
What does “barely” mean? 40km/week isn’t that much in terms of calorie burn. The 100 calories/mile rule of thumb says this would imply ~350 calories/day. And this article says a woman would have a daily calorie expenditure of 2400 already (seems high, though). So this is only 15%. But anyway, this drops after adaptation seemingly, so does “barely more” mean 50 calories/day? Or does it mean 300? Because those are very different. And to where is the difference attributable? Because someone going from sedentary to trained runner is going to get a lot more efficient at running. “Less energy on inflammation” is really hard to swallow as the primary source of adaptation, especially when this is presented as conjecture.
It’s not that much in terms of calories. It is a lot of physical activity for a modern human in a developed nation.
The real kicker is that an unchecked diet will offset virtually any amount of exercise. An unchecked diet means people will feel hungrier after exercise and thus eat more. It takes a lot of exercise to reach the point that it manages to outrun appetite and bad eating habits. There are a lot of fat people who work physically demanding jobs.
At some point, there’s just physics. Running a mile isn’t free, benching 100kg isn’t free. These things take work and we can calculate the minimum energy requirement that adaptation can’t escape. Our bodies do not adapt so far that exercise becomes pointless, it only shifts the balance a little (which might be enough to be demotivating for some people, but it’s still relatively minor.) I was under the impression that the total range of metabolic adaptivity for a given person might be on the order of 25%-30% maybe. That might be an over-estimate. I googled a little and found this paper mentioning adaptations of like 8%-15% for severe calorie restriction diets (depending on how RMR is measured).
Your fat because you consume to many caloiries for what you put out. Pretty simple.
I went week on/off vego, from being a meat eater near daily, dropped weight without adjusting anything else.
You are what you ate. You cant hide from it. If you look down and see some rolls, thats not cause you didnt exercise enough!
I went from doing gym weekly in my 20s, to my 30s where i dont touch consciously exercise at all yet im bigger, leaner, and have my abs back. My uncle, who at my ate became a fat bastard and never stopped; used to be a body builder on the roids. He had a sweet phsyic for about 1 year.
The easier way to make money in this world, is to fool fat people into thinking your product will let them have their cake, and eat it to. I say fat people the say way people refer to a drug addict. Its the same thing, cept your comfort blanket is legal and readyly accessible, 24/7/7, being pushed at you constantly whenever you look.
I say this as a child of a mother who was/is fat due to being in an abusive relationship with my father. She cheated through every diet she every did. Until she got her stomach stapled; when overnight she SHED weight, was no longer diabetic, and is currently 66yrs old and going strong (stapled around 49).
I'm not American, but in my part of the world people tend to have gradual trends to weight, not sudden swings.
I can see this happening given such behavior, as well as in the "heavier" portion of the population. definitely not a common occurrence across the population though.
When I do weight loss, I can plot it daily and it's going down on average but there are large swings on most days.
In hindsight, it’s much easier on one’s knees to adjust your diet.
"Fun" fact: they also shit themselves on the bike. When you eat that much it's inevitable you're gonna have to poop it out, and it's a race -- you can't stop.
Edit: here
"It’s related to the fact that during periods of physical stress, the body shunts blood away from organs that are not necessarily critical at that moment,” Michael Dobson, D.O., a colon and rectal surgeon with Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, tells Mental Floss.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/648541/why-marathon-runn...
I am not intending to dispute the fact that you ate more to compensate - you say you did, and I don't doubt it. Nor am I doubting that weight gain is a function of net caloric intake; it is just a suggestion of another way exercise may affect this.
FWIW most of my exercise is running, hiking or kayaking. I am not sure (or perhaps that should be 'even more doubtful') that kayaking has the same effect.
Whether any one in particular subscribed to that school of though or not, marathon running is an outlier event, and isn't what most people would consider as part of a regular, healthy, exercise regime that one might do many times a week.
But it's mostly a hand-wavy assertion too, and there's other evidence against it. There are cultures around the world (low populations, to be sure) where repeatedly traversing 26.2 miles a day would not be considered particularly abnormal.
Even marathon runners run marathons only on competitions. The chance of injury or sickness after is too high in order to make it worthy. And after, you are supposed to rest for multiple days even if not injured. Again, 26.2 miles is 8 hours of hiking and you are pretty much guaranteed to be ok after it.
And while it is not for most people (and definitely not me), there are people I know who thrive on running marathons and the training for it, while otherwise living perfectly normal lives. There is a hypothesis that cursorial / persistence / endurance hunting was a a stage in our ancestors' evolution, and that we have inherited some of the traits of that lifestyle.
There’s no doubt that appetite and everything around dieting and weight loss has a huge range of variation in behavior and what works. In addition to learning to separate exercise from food, the other thing that took me too long to learn is that weight loss is more mental exercise than physical. Figuring out how to trick myself into calorie tracking and habit forming isn’t easy, and my tricks on myself clearly don’t work for everyone.
Vegans live on average 10 year longer!
The hunger you feel the first day btw is not "real" hunger, it's just your stomach growling and you being used to eat. After you ignore hunger for 3 days, your body stops wanting food. That's if you want to do a cleanse. (I've never done one though)
I feel like a non-lethal poison like a flea killer or something would cause a 10 year lifespan drop, so it would be surprising if meat were as deadly as flea killer poison.
But better way for regular people is just do OMAD. You get used to it after first three days, which are brutal. So, strong motivation is required, but still easier than real cut for bodybuilders or fighters.
That being said 'clesnding' has been disproven scientifically so many times, I think there must be a Necromancer for bad nutritional myths out there. I just can't understand why this myth (together with others) always comes back from the grave.
Regarding vegans. Yes a primarily plant-based diet has been shown in studies to be beneficial to health. Depending on the environment of the test subjects. For practical purposes in western/northern societies that holds true.
The important word is plant based. Because without either taking extreme care of the (especially) micro nutrients as a vegan you either need to substitute or be extra cautious. And of omnivores with a primarily plant based diet also look at their nutritional balance, caloric intake and such, the difference between diets in the studied groups vanished.
So one could say if eating primarily plant based and being mindful of our diet and nutritional needs, there is no difference scientifically.
The only remaining difference is one of personal values and believes. The question of how (or if) do we want to have animals treated to firm our diet. Personally I would add to look at how do we want the humans in the food production chain treated as well and how do we want our diets to have an ecological impact.
But as said - these are existential because deeply personal value questions that can't be scientifically discussed.
Interesting if it's actually true. I doubt there are any good studies about that, though.
The result was that I wasn't superhungry when I started eating. I also tried to eat high protein, high fiber meals so I'd stay full for longer.
This is my experience as well. I also had a trainer confirm this.
I used to eat before and after a workout because I bought into the idea of the body needing fuel to power the workout and fuel to recover. I ended up eating when I wasn’t hungry and feeling heavy or sluggish.
She said the appetite suppression after a workout could last 30-120min and to only eat when I felt hungry. I felt much better after adjusting my eating habits.
It doesn't really suppress the urge to eat though. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way that I must count my calories, I have been counting them for 15+ years now and it has become part of my life.
I think moderate exercise can help with getting used to not over-eating. More strenuous exercise seems to make the body crave larger meals often negating any calories burned.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the easiest way to lose weight is to limit calorie consumption. I also know that a buffet of 1800 calories going to a bike ride helps a ton.
The details might differ some but the overall advice is the same.
If you want to lose weight, eat less.
If you want to be in better shape, exercise.
If you want to improve your health, change your diet (and probably exercise).
A big issue is that people conflate those three objectives.
Being skinny doesn't mean you're healthy and exercising doesn't mean you'll lose weight.
I exercise quite a bit and have always had an extra 10-15 lbs up until semi-recently when I put those three things together and quit eating so much. I still eat plenty of junk food and I've lost about 20 lbs and kept it off.
If you're unhappy with your weight, eat less. If that doesn't work, eat less. Some people might have an easier or harder time with that because we're all different but the advice is the same.
Also have lost a bunch of weight (or at least replaced fat with muscle) from just doing 10-15 minutes of PT exercises (strength training, stretching, and yoga) plus walking an extra mile or two per day.
For sure. But the discussion going on here (and in TFA) is the balance between weight loss via exercise and weight loss via lower calorie consumption.
In my experience I'm not so sure about that either. I can't repeat centuries day after day when I am out of shape and need to lose weight. If one can, it's very unlikely he/she needs to lose weight.
But most people cycling 50 miles are not generating 300W continuously, and most people running for 2 hours are not doing a sub-7min pace for the duration.
ps. I have run for 2 hours at a sub-7 min pace, and cycled 50 miles at about 280W.
I lost 80 pounds over the last couple years with riding average of 12 miles a day.
Thinking on it, if food is,I eat it. Any pizza is a personal pizza, if you like pizza. :)
Still. Guessing most folks that can ride fifty miles are not overweight.
I was in the best shape of my life, felt great and ate whatever I wanted without thinking about it. BUT I was spending 4 hours per day exercising.
Now I have a 6 week old baby and WFH... I manage a 30 minute Peloton a few times a week. Maybe. Even though I try to pay attention the pounds have crept on because there's so little margin for error on 1500 calories/day.
Calorie counting is no way to live, IMO. I miss the days of a long run and guilt-free cheese and beer after :)
1) You become more efficient at repeated exercise, so the calories burned number on the machine is not accurate.
2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking.
3) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can increase daytime cortisol levels and reduce resting metabolic rate.
4) Excessive cardio and reduced calories can cause muscle wasting and further reduce metabolic rate.
A better long term strategy is a strength training program with short cardio sessions. You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism and avoid the over exertion stress that can lead to decreased metabolic rate.
Of course, at the end of the day it really is calories in calories out (despite the naysayers). But, the devil is in the details, because measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7. Diet (not how much but what you eat), sleep, and stress can have a large impact on the metabolic rate, and thus drastically change the CICO calculation.
This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly constant.
I know many endurance athletes (having been one) who would report that some levels of exercise actually result in appetite suppression.
There where plenty of old jokes about lumberjack breakfasts and people eating skills tall stacks of pancakes. These guys weren’t trying to gain or lose weight just keep going for another day of hard labor, but when you start talking 6-8,000 calories per day it’s an insane amount of food.
Also, some of the feedback mechanisms involved are quiet slow and can take weeks to kick in. Your body doesn’t need to balance things every day as gaining or losing significant weight takes time.
My exercise is a game called Turf. Mostly played in Sweden where there are a lot of zones close by. I bike quite relaxed for 1-4 minuts and stand still for 20 seconds in the zone, then repeat until next zone. It's a bit harder during winter with all the snow though. I have done nothing to my diet and lost about 20 kilo the last year. The GPS says I traveled about 3500 km the last year at my slow pace.
I try to have a 500 calorie deficit. If I have more than about 500 (say 1000) Im fine that day, but the next day Im ravenous and tend to overeat.
Drank a few cans of seltzer and wound up staying up doing emails and chores until 2am. Woke up at 9am today and I'm feeling a bit hungry at 11:20am, but even if I eat something now, it will be a net negative compared to what I would have eaten last night.
If I ride a bike for 3 hours, I feel like I could eat a horse.
On my swim-days I have no problem with a late breakfast leading me to be able to skip lunch and enjoy my dinner.
But I have no other insight as my own experience.
My 2 cents theory is that it suppress the "stress induced" appetite.
And that additional eating is not a bad thing either. It is body needing supply to build muscles. For most beginners, that is a good thing.
It's easy to experience, although it can take longer for lipolysis to start if you're not used to. Of course, eating sugar during or before exercise delays it.
Instead, eat a fairly standardized diet at least on a weekly basis, so roughly the same meals (doesn't have to be exact). Eat a quantity of food such that you neither gain nor lose weight over a period of time (a couple of weeks with daily weigh ins is sufficient to ensure a flat line on a chart). Adjust intake until the line is flat if you start seeing a trend up or down. Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat (if you eat packaged foods, assume an extra 20% from the calories on the label). You should now have near exactly 1 lbs. per week weight loss. The reverse also works if you want to put on some weight. I do each of these once per year as a "mini-bulk" and a "mini-cut". I track my weigh ins on my Fitbit - it is a near perfect diagonal trend line over the 2-3 month period I do this.
NOTE: It is important to weigh in daily (at same time - I recommend first thing in morning after flushing the system) precisely because your weight fluctuates on a day to day basis by 2-3lbs. It takes a few days of weigh ins to see a trend change on the graph and you need to be able to adjust your intake if you are off.
I appreciate you are trying to be helpful. But most of what you said assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have. People working long hour jobs, or double jobs, or balancing kids/parent responsibilities. Often fast food is the only obvious option, and people aren't buying it until well into the throws of a low blood sugar event.
This coupled with metabolic/genetic differences can really muck up any given diet. What works of you doesn't just not work for everyone, it isn't even possible for everyone to follow.
That said, I know you are being helpful - my words or more to help those that might read them and be saying: "I did all that and it didn't work!"
I will say that what I said above is _relative_, so if you go out for fast food "more than you should" than that becomes your baseline. Anything can be a baseline, even if not a healthy one.
I also know at least one person who has tried it and swears up and down it just doesn't work for them.
Unless you're talking about extremes (e.g. non first-world country, homeless, or disabled people etc) I'm going to call BS on this.
Everyone eats, and everyone has 24 hours in a day.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Australia you can buy a 800g can of tomatoes for $1.50, a 185g can of tuna for $1.60 and 1kg of rice for $1.40.
You could cook that up on a stove (with just a couple portions of rice) in about 30min, giving you two nutritious meals for (I'm going to be generous) let's say about $4. That's $2 per meal. 3 meals a day gives you a total of $42 for food per week.
So are you telling me that fast food costs less than $50 per week, that 23 hours isn't enough time left in the day to do everything else, or am I missing something here?
Based on nutritional value (taking into account to fulfill the base needs as well as potentially overshooting on salt, fat, sugar and other things like Vitamin A just to name an example) we found that industrial food is always the more expensive solution.
Yes you can feed people on a very cheap industrial diet but they will miss essential nutrients as well as overshoot on salt, sugar, and others to detrimental health effects.
If you want a balanced diet mostly locally and seasonally produce (with added stuff like olive oil and such) cooked by yourself was way more cost efficient per nutritional value.
The problem is, that it takes time to learn this, especially to learn this from experience. Also time to relearn how food really tastes without added aroma and stuff. Time to learn how to cook efficiently and with variation. And so on. We don't learn this anymore. Not from our parents, nor otherwise. But the advertising tells us how easy it is to just open a fully ready meal, pop it in the microwave and be done in 3 minutes.
Instead of enjoying the quality of preparing food together as a family/couple. Spending time, experiencing the smell of fresh cut food, herbs and so on. We nowadays equivalent cooking to a chore.
If it were as simple as you say, then why (in Australia) is your minimum wage so high? So 2 hours of work on minimum wage can cover a week of food? And you are calling BS on what I said? Okay.
Ironically fast food often has some of the most easily available calories and macronutrient ratio. Working out the calories and macro for a home-made meal can be much more time-consuming
I wasn't sure what was causing it, so I hypothesized that I was low on muscle mass, and took up weight training. Then I gained ten pounds.
I'm not sure what the upshot is here, but my guess is that this approach indiscriminately consumes lean muscle mass if you don't pair it with muscle-building exercises.
I will say the whole time I have used this I have trained with weights extensively (5 days/week standard 3x sets per exercise body building routine). I do not know how much or little this plays into it, but definitely helps with the fat/muscle ratio (obviously).
Fat cells "remember" their metabolic environment when they were created--ie. they "remember" your weight and fight you when you try to reduce it. It's one of the problems with dieting to large weight losses.
It is somewhere around 3 years for a fat cell to die off and be replaced. You probably need to "hang out" at the plateau weight for a bit until the fat cells that remember you being heavier die off.
Sorry, medium link: https://prosetech.medium.com/what-nuclear-bombs-tell-us-abou...
> The carbon-14 fat-cell study also revealed that fat cells don’t last forever. Fat or thin, your body replaces roughly 10% of your fat cells every year. If you have more fat cells to begin with, you’ll have more fat cells to replace.
I can't seem to find the study talking about how fat cells remember the chemical environment when they are created.
On the other hand, the body also likes to get essential amino acids, if it does not get them from food, from the body's own muscle mass. This leads to a reduction of the own muscles and to a low basal metabolic rate.
I cannot judge whether one of the reasons is true, that would be the job of a good (!) nutritionist. Unfortunately, at least in Germany, the term is not protected and anyone, regardless of education, knowledge or experience may call himself so. Here there are really (especially on social networks) really many false claims.
This is really the problem with CICO - it is definitely correct in an abstract sense (weight doesn't come from thin air, and neither does food you eat magically disappear), but the factors controlling calories in and calories out are far more complex. Human behavior is far from being entirely rationally determined. Our choices (particularly in regards to food, exercise, and other basic needs) are to a great extent controlled by our metabolism, even though it often doesn't seem that way.
This probably explains why people rarely lose weight on the long term - you can allow yourself to be forced to eat less than your body thinks it needs for a while, and obviously you'll lose weight; but you will go right back up to your "normal" weight as soon as the forcing stops (program ends, willpower exhausted etc).
The deficit cant be too large, for me 500 is ok, but 1000 has me ravenous the next day.
Lots of obese people easily lose 2 pounds/week but as you get closer to a healthy weight it gets harder.
CICO was the first time I was able to actively lose weight in my entire life.
This has generally been treated as a lifestyle issue, but another possibility gaining traction is that "obesity" is a disease in itself, one that tricks your organism is seeking to maintain excessive weight, by impacting your appetite, BMR, exercise habits etc; this will of course usually make people suffering from "obesity" (for lack of a better name) over-weight, but the weight can be controlled without curing the disease. Basically losing weight doesn't cure your "obesity", just like when you suffer of diabetes, controlling your diet keeps you healthy without curing your diabetes.
The possible causes of this "obesity" disease could well be diet related, and definitely refined sugars seem to be at least a major culprit.
NOTE: Before someone points it out, this is NOT incompatible with my parent comment. Going on a 500 cal/day cut and losing say 8 lbs will not lower your caloric baseline all that much, so temporary more or less works fine. If you use the same method to dump 40 lbs, you will need to readjust your baseline when done or you absolutely will gain it back as your caloric intake needs have been meaningfully reduced.
This is a major education/communication issue. When I switched to weightlifting, I started seeing rapid and significant results. And I don't even really sweat from it (except on leg day)
Is even that sufficient? Like, would you be able to tell the difference between "oxidation done by the body to generate energy for human cells" and "oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"? Maybe you could tell by the mixture of other gases, but I suspect CO2 itself wouldn't suffice.
That would still be part of calories in.
This study[0] says that measuring CO2 is not enough, and that indirect calorimetry is the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure (EE).
"Calculated EE based on CO2 measurement was not sufficiently accurate to consider the results as an alternative to measured EE by indirect calorimetry. Therefore, EE measured by indirect calorimetry remains as the gold standard to guide nutrition therapy."
Google says "Indirect calorimetry is the method by which measurements of respiratory gas exchange (oxygen consumption, V O 2 and carbon dioxide production, V CO 2 ) are used to estimate the type and amount of substrate oxidized and the amount of energy produced by biological oxidation."
So getting back to your point, if bacteria are feasting on part of the calories and producing CO2, it seems that it would throw off the results even using indirect calorimetry. At that point though are we kinda arguing semantics? While our microbiome isn't composed of human cells, you can still argue it's a part of our functioning organism. It seems it would be nearly impossible to measure human digested calories vs bacteria digested calories, so maybe the results are close enough. Also, many beneficial bacteria release calories that we can consume, like butyric acid, which further complicates things.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5251283/
It's not semantics, because when more calories are used up by bacteria they only sustain the amount of bacteria inside you, which then die and leave your body on a relatively quick timescale.
It's like if your fat cells could only store fat for a month before it gets discarded.
So it's important to know how much is each, if they can both vary.
Thus, if Bob and Joe eat the exact same diet that has some milk products, and Bob is lactose intolerant while Joe isn't, then Bob's cells get fewer calories from that diet than Joe's. If Bob and Joe's bodies are otherwise identical and follow identical exercise routines, then I would assume that, like, if the diet is exactly enough to maintain Joe's weight, then Bob would lose weight; and if it's exactly enough to maintain Bob's weight, then Joe would gain weight. (Right? For sake of illustration, we could imagine that most of the diet's calories are from milk, and assume Bob can tolerate the nausea.) Yet "calories in" (measured as food entering stomach) are identical, and "calories out" (measured as CO2) might also be identical.
Lactose is a specific, well-understood example of some people absorbing nutrients much better than others. I think there are other examples, and I expect there's a lot of variation in absorption efficiency that's less known. When you hear about people who eat lots of food and remain thin, I suspect this is part of the explanation. And whether their bacteria get the calories instead, or whether it passes through untouched, might show up in CO2 measurements but I don't think it would be related to body fat accumulation.
In a conservation-of-energy sense, "calories in" certainly gives you an upper bound on how many observed "calories out" you can produce without losing weight. But I don't think there's a lower bound on how inefficient someone's digestive system can be (except "zero"), or a practical upper bound on how much their cells might burn energy without us noticing (without close observation). I think, if you wanted a complete accounting of calories-out that would actually match the input, you'd need to add up (a) the heat a person puts out (via contact with air and surfaces, also infrared emissions), (b) the work they do in a physics sense (e.g. lifting heavy objects), and (c) the amount of un-burned calories in their stool (or any other excreted substances).
Well, heat dissipation places a bound on that.
Yeah, the blind assertions I have seen that people basically always absorb pretty much 100% of the calories of the food is weird. We already know that some forms of calories like fiber have very low absorption rate. The Atwater indirect system of calculating calories takes that into account, but is still just an estimation, since it uses average calorie values for protein, carbs, and fat.
And so I've just noted that calories on packaging is just an approximation. An individual food may actually have more above average proteins than below average, etc, which can skew the real calorie count. For example, nuts are known to have less calories than indicated on the label, with whole almonds having 20% fewer. (https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/138.9.1741S) This is also ignoring the fact that many foods, especially those prepared by people are not always super consistent in sizing. A subway sandwich prepared correctly should on average have the calories subway claims, but we all know that some locations will follow the correct procdure more closely than others. Etc.
The other issue with just blindly going with calorie counting (which is really on tracking calories in) is that the differences in the calories one takes in will cause changes in the calories one expends. Eating fairly substancially less than your body is used to will almost certainly cause one to feel bad, and avoid doing as much, meaning fewer calories out, at least partially offsetting the the calorie reduction. But people are generally not measuring the calories expended very closely, if they bother doing it at all.
You have to get into really long cardio sessions with no carbohydrate supplements before that has any significant catabolic effect. This is not a concern for casual athletes.
Strength training is great, but it should be combined with some form of cardio in a comprehensive fitness program.
I've heard claims of 30% inaccuracy. Not sure if that applies to the absolute latest generation but I'd be happy to know if my understanding is outdated
It may be less effective for losing weight, but exercise, including and especially cardio, is a great and essential strategy for other health reasons.
HIIT workouts are great for cardiovascular fitness and melted the fat off of me that I gained from a sedentary lifestyle spanning the last 2-3 years for example.
This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.
Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so Strength training to get strong.
This is anecdotal but the difference between what I can eat working on a farm with having lots of muscle mass and sitting around on a computer with that same muscle mass was not really significant. But the difference between sitting at a desk with a lot of muscle mass and sitting at a desk with noticeably less muscle mass is night and day in how much I have to eat. With small and inconsistent amounts of strength exercise to maintain a bit more muscle mass again, my caloric expenditure went back up, far beyond what is lost from the exercise itself.
It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook.
Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories.
If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories
If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner (which is typically bigger than lunch)
So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
"You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" - literally not true for a fuckton of endurance-sport athletes for whom the challenge is eating enough calories.
It's 100% true for people who think exercising for 30 min means license to eat whatever.
> So a good diet: takes less time than exercise, reduces calories more, and can save money
Yes, but endurance exercise over an hour or two brings its own advantages health-wise.
The real takeaway is that there are no absolutes.
Hello old friend, we meet again.
While I do agree with you that sustained, high level activity requires and burns more calories, I think that the advice coming out of there, exercise is less efficient than diet for weight loss, is going to absolutely be true for the majority of gym goers who quite frankly are phoning it in whenever they work out.
Like, for example, an olympic swimmer may eat 5000-10,000 calories in a day, but they are spending around 4-6 hours a day in a cold pool training at a world class level (body needs to keep warm somehow regardless of effort.) But a normal person may only swim for 20 minutes at a much gentler pace. This person should still be eating in line with calorie guidelines and macros for age/sex.
The reality is that diet needs to be flexible based on results. Not losing weight? Eat fewer carbs or calories. Feeling tired and worn out? Eat more or exercise less based on your physique and goals.
I don't know how things are for anyone else, but it worked for me, shrug.
Attempts to loose weight by diet only all failed. To make it worst, there is also aspect of most common diet advice being plain wrong. It focuses on calories too much. It completely ignores what your body needs, so you end up in nutritional deficiency - this kind or that kind. And that will affect a lot and eventually you will stop diet and start to feel so much better and healthier after stopping it.
The calorie stuff is from both oxygen and deuterated water studies. You burn the same amount of calories and your system just shunts them around. The science on this is one of the few things in nutrition that is quite solid.
This has the effect, for example, that if you exercise a lot, this actually suppresses your immune system making you more likely to get sick.
Are you sure? 2000 kcal in 3 hours is 770 watts of power output.
Edit: Wikipedia [0] says "During a bicycle race, an elite cyclist can produce close to 400 watts of mechanical power over an hour and in short bursts over double that - 1000 to 1100 watts; modern racing bicycles have greater than 95% mechanical efficiency. An adult of good fitness is more likely to average between 50 and 150 watts for an hour of vigorous exercise."
I'm not, because the parent poster explicitly said "That's not based on made-up calories but actual work from a power meter on the bike."
Which seems absurd, hence my comment.
Rough math: 3 * 300 * 4 = 3600 calories surplus/month. A pound of adipose tissue has ~3500 calories IIRC. So you're now gaining a pound of fat a month, and you're not even indulging yourself, really.
In reality, physical activity and diet aren't so steady, so some months you maintain weight, some you lose, and some you gain a lot. But over time it averages out, and you've put on 12lbs in a year.
A stationary bike at a steady 20mph pace is about 500 calories in 30 minutes. That's really significant. An hour will erase about a third of a normal person's diet.
When I used to do heavy training (long distance running, weight training) I would eat close to 8k calories a day and I was in fantastic shape. Eating more was necessary to survive, given how much energy I was expending.
Fats are the secret to obesity, hands down. I have a remarkably small appetite and I can easily down 1000 calories of ice cream in a single sitting (a single pint of Ben and Jerry's. You can row like crazy for 30 minutes, but if you have two extra candy bars, it's meaningless.
Yes, our bodies are built to take in more calories than we can burn (thankfully!), but if you keep your eating habits constant the exercise will make a huge difference.
Measuring stationary bike workouts in terms of mph is kind of meaningless. What actually matters is the measured power output based on the resistance setting.
It took me about three months to get up to that speed, cycling every other day. I started out doing 10 miles, at 10mph.
Three months isn't all that long for an exercise program.
As a point of comparison, an average size man would have to run at a speed of at least 11 mph (18 km/h) in order to burn that many calories in 30 minutes. Not impossible, but well beyond what most of us can manage.
I cycle on and off for ~8 years (35yo) and going at 20mph in the real world for an hour or more became possible only after a few years for me.
There are certainly plenty of trained cyclists who can maintain that power output, but I've never seen anyone reach that level after only 3 months. If you really did that then you're an extreme genetic outlier with an unusually fast training response.
I did a lot of cycling in my 20s and while I'm at least a decade out of shape I'm sure I'm relying a lot on past training.
Absolute heart rate doesn't tell us much about calorie consumption because there's a huge variation between individuals. If we know the athlete's size, sex, and threshold heart rate then we can start to make some kind of estimate. But to get an accurate number it really takes a properly calibrated power meter (or more complex lab tests involving exhaled gas measurement).
What is the actual power output in watts? Has it been properly calibrated? If not then you're just fooling yourself.
These statements are rather extreme and seem impossible to support. Energy output per mile with real world cycling has enormous variance as well. Why so much concern for precision regarding one and not the other?
I don't think there's much point in continuing here.
You can get an accurate calculation of real world cycling calories with a power meter. Everyone's cycling efficiency in terms of power output per calorie burned falls within a fairly narrow range so converting from time and watts to calories is simple. A good power meter accurate to within a couple percent can be added to any bike for about $700.
Smart trainers like a Tacx Neo or Wahoo Kickr also have accurate power meters built in. Those are substantially different from typical stationary bikes.
I understand the translation between power and mph is somewhat approximated, but I think you could be more generous. It's not unreasonable to make this kind of approximation and the numbers aren't meaningless.
It is also something at most a tiny minority of the obese population can do.
That assumes a “normal person” will not compensate for the effort with a snack.
A “reward” pint of ice cream will re-add more calories than the hour of cycling. A “standard serving” will nearly match your half hour.
And that’s an hour at 20mph, which really isn’t in any way the norm.
You're also assuming the same normal person will not compensate for their healthy lunch with a snack.
Pretty sure most people shouldn't be eating 3000 calories/day.
The thing is, the 300 calories from rowing shouldn't be compared to the absolute calorific requirement (say 2500 calories) but the surplus. So Maybe I'm overweight because I need 2500 and I eat 3000. Thats 500 too much, but take out 300 and that's 60% of what I need to at least reach equilibrium. It makes a huge difference to how much I need to sacrifice out of my diet.
The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.
The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.
That really depends on the exercise you’re doing and what “shape” you’re going for. Putting tons of time into running won’t make someone look like they lift weights. Aerobic exercise is great for health but it mostly doesn’t change anyone’s “shape” except to the extent that it helps them lose weight.
This just isn't true. It generally won't take away fat, but lifting weights won't remove the fat either (it doesn't matter how strong your stomach is, you aren't seeing it if you have a layer of fat on top). But if you are already thin - or thinner in places - most of the aerobic exercise will build appropriate muscle. Walking makes for changes in the lower half of the body, for example. It still won't make you look like you lift weights, true, but there is still change.
Eating is incredibly efficient.
I certainly get that less eating is more effective than exercise but in my head I think as long as you burn more calories than you take in you should lose weight. So if you eat 1800 calories a day, assuming you need 2000 a day, you'll lose weight (-200). If you do some exercise that uses 500 calories and eat 2300 calories you're still at (-200)
Like many people I consciously and unconsciously resisted the idea of tracking calories and using calories-in/calories-out (CICO) as my primary tool for both weight loss and exercise. It’s not perfect, as many people here are pointing out. However, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and there are scant alternatives that are demonstrably better. I changed my mind and now I see calorie tracking as a way to be better at both exercise and weight loss. Good exercise training, especially weight lifting, requires eating a bit more than expenditure, and good weight loss requires eating a bit less. Either way, I agree with you that exercise can play a valuable part in weight loss, and I think it has many other physical and mental health benefits.
To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation.
Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth
If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.
Basically, it's way harder to make people accept it's complex and highly variable when they've already internalized a shiny theory of everything.
Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
I couldn’t agree more that CICO is a super blunt instrument, but it actually does work, because the alternative we’re comparing to is not tracking input & output at all. You can be a lot wrong, and it’s still better than completely wrong, right? :P Like the amount of noise in my calories estimates is probably at a minimum 10%-15% wrong at all times, same goes for expenditure (maybe even worse) but it seems like the important part isn’t actually the number, it’s the act of establishing and sticking to a budget. For me, mentally, it was the realization that my feelings on hunger and satiety were actually mis-calibrated. This helped me get over the idea of being hungry, and helped me realize the goal wasn’t to overcome hunger, it was to get used to something closer to the correct amount of food.
We have, but most of it seriously flawed because of many issues.
For instance this pretty serious study on diets (http://www.dishlab.org/pubs/MannTomiyamaAmPsy2007.pdf) had to rely on BMI for segmenting the subjects because the whole field had standardized on BMI. Yet we know for decades that BMI based segmentation is meaningless, BMI itself being a clunky relic of the past. Then you can come down on the subject of the studies, repeatability, no possible control group most of the time etc.
We can say that's the best we can do, but we should also accept it's far from being reliable info most of the time.
> it actually does work
well, it doesn't work or not, it's just a concept, an observation like a law of physics. It's like saying gravity works, that's not the info you'd give people having difficulties to build a self balancing robot.
> it doesn’t work or not, it’s just a concept, an observation like a law of physics.
It works as a tool for weight loss. It works for exactly the reason you state, because it’s primarily an observation of physics. The only way I gain mass is via my mouth, and the only way I lose mass is via energy expenditure. If I want to control mass, therefore, tracking and controlling my input and output is more or less guaranteed to work. For sure the input output responses might not be perfectly linear, but that’s expected and not a ‘flaw’. The weight response to calories also can’t be reversed or flat, due to physics, it must be highly correlated, right?
As you say ignoring the inner workings would be fine if we had consistent, culture independent widely reproduced results. Thing is, we don’t.
For anything beyond a clinical trials on specific subjects that stay there for days/weeks to be fully studied, we might not even have valid control groups.
This is why I see comments on us having a vast body of studies to look to be more or less a “look a my library, there’s a lot of books” kind of statement that doesn’t really point at us having actual vast knowledge about the subject.
> It works as a tool for weight loss.
Does it ? to get back to the above point, do you see any consistently reproduced studies on large cohorts of people pointing at it working in the long term?
If you’re asking whether calorie counting has been studied and controlled enough to know if it works as a weight loss tool in practice, the answer is yes. You don’t need a study for this part; it’s physics. If you are maintaining weight and then stop eating you will die. If you are maintaining weight and then cut your diet in half you will lose weight. I posted a link to one survey on this somewhere in this thread that should be easy to find that demonstrates the rate of metabolic adaptation to caloric restriction (it’s about 15%). But you can Google this and find out for yourself, there are many many papers in many many languages, and you looking for your own sources will be better than being skeptical of anything I suggest. The health agencies of every developed country in the world publish caloric recommendations and have resources and research information available.
Literally millions and millions of people globally have successfully used CICO to manage weight, and the primary complaint is not that it doesn’t work, the primary complaint is that it’s difficult to implement and make habitual, it requires too much work and/or control. When most people say “it doesn’t work”, what they mean is “it doesn’t work for me because I couldn’t establish a working routine, the habit doesn’t stick easily.” There are no studies showing normal people reducing their caloric intake significantly and failing to lose weight.
This is the shortcut I am pointing at.
You're bringing in a pure assumption. I need an actual, well designed study that shows that your inntuition is in fact correct (to reiterate we're talking weight loss, and in particular stable loss, not some blimp in a three weeks trial)
Can you point to a rock solid study on it? There are countless studies on the most obvious things. Take any of what you call "physics" and you'll have large studies from reputable research labs analysing the long term impact on stricly controlled groups. CICO is not some hippy unknown strategy, the press turns around "obesity crisis" headlines year long, there is no shortage of funding for research."It's obvious so nobody tested it" isn't a valid argument.
I’m trying to understand, but I don’t yet understand your objection to the physics. Do you disagree that failing to eat enough will cause death? That’s not an assumption, right?
Here’s the study I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I have no idea if this meets your bar for size or quality. It feels like you’re trying to set the burden of proof as to be so high that you are ensuring it can’t be met.
https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/16/2/196/480196?logi...
This argument feels to me like demanding rock solid study of a large cohort of multicultural evidence for gravity. Are there countless valid long terms studies demonstrating the existence of gravity? No, not really, because nobody anywhere denies that gravity exists.
CICO isn’t a specific methodology, nor is it a belief or a surprising theory. Calories-in, calories-out is a completely generic statement about the causes of mass gain and mass loss in the human body. It doesn’t make any claims about the amount of gain or loss. It doesn’t claim that eating a pound makes you gain a pound, it’s simply an observation that eating is the sole mass input of the human body, and energy expenditure is the only controllable output, the only way mass is lost. There are no other alternatives, right? Calories are an approximate measure of what you eat & burn. This is tautological, there is practically nothing to argue there, and there is nothing to debate. A study isn’t necessary because this is an already proven fundamental truth about the human body (and incidentally all life): there are no other sources of weight gain or loss. CICO doesn’t prescribe specific actions either. The way you use this information is up to you. The scientific among us might reasonably start measuring calories first to calibrate their steady state, and then slowly make changes to their inputs and outputs to see what happens.
Anyway, I also don’t need a study personally because it worked for me and it suddenly became clear what everyone who knows this was talking about. I had resisted trying it for a looong time, perhaps on the same grounds you’re resisting the idea. Better than papers might be to experiment on yourself, if you really want to know. First hand knowledge will certainly be more valuable to you than assurances from academics.
Yes, there are. There’s actually periodic assesments of gravity at most places to get an idea of the trends and detect underground movements. An exemple of this: https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...
Surveying gravity is one of the many measures that are done pretty frequently and very seriously around the globe.
On CICO, the issue is it’s a model that is true at a very low level view of the body mechanism. You are right that it’s very generic, and in theory it makes sense. The disconnect is between that extremely low level view, and what you do with it in practice.
There was this excelent discussion on type 1 disabetes (https://maori.geek.nz/the-unreasonable-math-of-type-1-diabet...). These people have their life on the line and actually monitor their blood levels, and it’s still tough to manage a good guess of the inputs and when/how much sugar will get in the blood. Reading the labels doesn’t give enough info on what will be actually processed, and the real solution becomes real time constant monitoring of the actual blood levels, without relying on a model of how it’s supposed to work.
When you advocate counting calories for a random person on the street, they won’t monitor their blood, they actually are in a worse position as what they care about is not sugar levels but their whole body intake, which there is no way to monitor. And you also won’t be hooking CO2 masks on them everyday to monitor their out, so it’s also a random guess. At this point CI has crazy large variations, and CO is basically unknown, especially as it will change as they change their CI. This is why applying a CICO thinking for someone who’ll change their diet for the rest of their life makes no sense.
An argument I’ve often seen is to just lower CI to the ground until seeing effects. Which basically means obliterating the subjects social and professional life and ask them to keep it that way or it will be their fault if they rebound. That’s not what I call a weight loss strategy.
On the linked study:
It’s a meta study based on three prior papers, one of them is “ Decrease in fat oxidation following a meal in weight-reduced individuals: a possible mechanism for weight recidivism. ” https://europepmc.org/article/MED/8596485
From the abstract: > Twenty older (age:mean +/- SE, 61 +/- 1 years; range, 56 to 70 y) obese (body mass index > 32 kg/m2) subjects (12 women, eight men) completed an 11-week dietary restriction program in which they lost 9 +/- l kg.
So the research is on 20 “obese” people. Aside from the low number of participants, there’s not even a “healthy” control group here. They’re “obese” by their BMI but they might as well be gym trainees, who knows ? It only lasted 11-weeks, there is no mention of the social conditions of the study ([EDIT: I didn’t realize at first look that all participants where elderly. Which brings in more questions IMO, but I don’t know where to stand on that). So this study is aimed at bringing a single piece of information, but we don’t have enough context to extrapolate that info’s validity in any other context it does it apply to any population at large? are the effects permanent ? do we even get the same effect after 1 month ? was it random fluke from the limited test subjects ? who knows). The title is about weight recidivism but there is 0 follow up on the subjects outside of that 5 hour post meal check.
And that’s just the first study. We could go on and on, my point is we don’t have the “science” on the subject, just a ton of questionnable data points and random intuitive theories, everyone with their beliefs and prejudices.
Athletes have the means to control a lot better what they do, including adjusting everything to their actual body without having to care for grand theories. And many people succeed in getting healthier in many different ways, including by going to different diets that actually increase calories as counted and little change in their daily life.
That’s why I feel it’s a disservice to preach a “one true theory” when it doesn’t help much really.
I think it’s fine for us to not know much about something. We don’t have all the answers in the universe, we’re just hairless monkeys after all. I just wish more people would be accepting of a “that’s complicated, nobody really knows and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff to see what works for you specifically” approach.
To your question, I am slightly above the prescribed line in a lot of metrics and don’t really do anything special, I am lucky enough it doesn’t have any impact on my life in general.
I like the way you put it, it’s okay that we don’t know everything, and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff. That really is at the core of what I was trying and failing to say. :) We don’t actually know how gravity works, but we use it anyway. I made an analogy to PID controllers in another comment, maybe that’s a better way to describe calorie I/O; PID controllers know nothing about the thing they control other than it’s output, and yet they are an extremely useful tool.
My wife reminded me of a book that might interest you and might have pointers to some of the research you’re looking for. “The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You“ by Sylvia Tara.
It's wonderful that your physiology is aligned with your goal of doing this. But in this control pathway there are billions of neurons, trillions of bacteria, I don't know how many biochemical signals, all feeding back into each other. Reducing all of this to "controlling input" is one of the most harmful ideas in public health. For people who struggle with weight it is just setting them up to fail and blame themselves for it. Repeated over, and over, and over.
FWIW, my personal philosophy on tracking and controlling my inputs is almost completely focused on figuring out how to turn this away from a “self-control” or willpower problem into a better understanding of what I want. Personally, I think trying to willpower control over eating is absolutely doomed to fail. It’s nearly impossible to meet a budget when you’re expectation is based on being strong enough to overcome hunger. For me, solving this was a mental problem of convincing myself it’s not about willpower at all. I say that like I solved something, but in reality it’s still hard.
I was only referring to the accepted fundamental truths about all human physiology, for instance that food is necessary to live, and that exercising uses some of the food. Even for outliers who’s bodies put on pounds when they merely smell food, measuring calories in and out still works reliably. The number of calories might be abnormal for some people, but they can still reliably calibrate their maintenance input and see effects when increasing or reducing it. I don’t mean for it to sound easy to do, because it’s not easy, I only mean to clarify the goals. The high number of neurons and bacteria and signals actually make this a more stable and predictable system, generally speaking.
CICO is fundamental to human physiology in the same way that "people become indebted because they spend more money than they earn" is fundamental to economics: true, but utterly useless for actually addressing poverty or obesity. An attractive red herring and a dangerous one.
(It's even worse than that: at least we can measure income and expenses. Yet we can't measure caloric intake / expenditure properly.)
Moreover, poverty and obesity are related. Poverty is affecting people’s food choices, and the cheap food and fast food we have is a lot of high fat, high sugar, high calorie, and huge portions.
CICO is more useful for people who are stable and fine, not under the poverty line and not obese, but just a little unhappy with their weight. CICO is what bodybuilders and athletes and models use, among many others, people mostly fine-tuning. (Just like how financial budgets are mostly helpful for rich people, and people optimizing their savings, but not particularly helpful for a single parent on minimum wage who’s unable to meet basic necessities.)
For someone who’s not suffering from either poverty or obesity, the difference between money/debt and calories/weight is you can only get money from other people, where you only get calories from yourself.
It doesn’t actually matter that calorie metrics are approximate and not perfect. The reason is because CICO enables a personal science experiment, and a process that can adjust and adapt to imperfect information. What it enables you to do is to calibrate your measurement first. Then, second, either reduce caloric inputs or increase caloric outputs to lose weight while making sure the other one doesn’t change, or do both. For average non-poor and non-obese people, CICO isn’t a prescription, nor is it a dangerous red herring, it’s basic consumer information that is, some say, dangerous to not know, which is why part of the important response to the obesity crisis is to demand accurate caloric labeling on food, to enable consumers to make healthier choices long before obesity. This is only the tip of the iceberg, we need better sugar and portion control and all kinds of things, but it’s a start.
CICO is like a PID controller but even simpler than that, it’s only the wires of a P controller where you are the controller. The only thing CICO says is which input to connect to, and that’s all. A PID controller doesn’t know a thing about the system it controls, it doesn’t have to. All that matters is that the inputs affect the outputs and the outputs can be measured. As long as the system output changes over time with it’s inputs, this P controller setup works. It still works when the underlying system has defects and bugs or differences in manufacturing from other systems, as long as the underlying system is responding to changes in input.
Yeah. Calorie counting can be useful for normal weight people, like budgeting can be for financially secure people.
Looks like we are in violent agreement. :)
To nitpick, bodybuilders and athletes usually control their diet at a level where calorie counting is not relevant.
An example of that: https://youtu.be/PBfDWstg3Hc It’s interesting that the overlays always show calorie intake, but you hear the guy and at no point he mentions calories, ever.
He specifically mentions fat, proteins, vitamins, minerals, nutrients and overall quantity. He weights his food at each meal and he probably adjust all of these try and error style, looking at the results. I think calorie estimates are probably meaningless at this point.
To further nitpick, all of bodybuilding is based on a routine of bulking and cutting, where the cutting phase is intentional calorie deficit before competition. Whether or not they track calories per se, all of them are using CICO and proving that it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding#Bulking_and_cutti...
If you metabolize less or more doesn’t really matter as it gives you a hard maximum of what you could potentially ingest (both in the TDEE calculation and the restricted diet)
And you will probably either have severe health problems, either have a reduced metabolism to the point you can’t properly function on a day to day basis.
You’ll either give up, the pendulum will swing the other way and rebound your weight, and people will blame you for being too weak.
Or you’ll push through, lose your job and/or continue develop eating disorders, hopefully you’ll realize you can’t go on and give up, or you’ll get medicated, with side effects affecting your appetite and weight ingestion, might still end up rebouncing and get blamed for it.
You’ve got a snow ball’s chance in hell that you can keep your intake very low and be fine with it for the rest of your life, but then you’re probably already healthy and pretty normal weighted, because I don’t think anyone who can just stop eating extra would stay overweight for long with the pressure we apply on obese people as a society.
All of the above is really just par for the course for people who get told “just do CICO”. People for which it actually kinda works don’t usually need to be told anything in the first place.
Exercise does much more, and does have some impact on weight, according to the next paragraphs of the article:
But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.
Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
People who exercise are inherently more health conscious in the first place, so that's not surprising. That doesn't mean the exercise is responsible for that.
Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day.
I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 which is about 20 kg of fat loss, so naively the remaining 10 kg was diet. Of course you cannot divide it like that - if I wasn't counting calories I would eat the 20 kg back easily. But if I wasn't walking I wouldn't be able to restrict the calories as much. I've been eating on average 2000 kcal and had average deficit of about 500 kcal. Without exercise I would have to eat 1500 on average which for me feels much worse than 2000. Also walking helps for a lot of unrelated things.
Maybe I should bring it up with a doctor, but I feel fine, I just also spend more on food than most.
BTW there are diseases that reduce calories absorbed, you might want to get checked for colitis ulcerosa and crohn's disease. They have nasty side effects so better to know earlier even if you don't have the worst symptoms.
Also that Phelps thing is highly questionable. He says he "probably" burns 8-10k, not 12k. Not the type of statement you want to rely on to dismiss all this work.
Clearly there are some details that matter here...
I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to extreme cases like modern athletes, who explicitly push their bodies in many ways that normal fit people don't, and who have teams of doctors and coaches that can force them to keep up with exercise and diet even when their bodies are telling them to stop.
What's tricky is that in early 20s I was eating about as much and it was fine.
All else being equal, resting metabolic rate doesn't tend to slow down much as we age. The notion that people in their 20s can eat as they want without gaining weight is mostly a myth. It's more likely that you don't accurately remember what you consumed and your activity level in your early 20s.
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Given that "regular" people clearly do not burn 4650 calories per day, and it is possible to burn 4650 calories per day, there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure. I'm guessing it just doesn't happen for regular doses of exercise (including, evidently, walking 14km per day).
Perhaps the body down regulates calorie-consuming processes to a point where it's just the bare minimum, and calorie expenditure increases from there. Or perhaps we should take the opposite view and say that our bodies up regulate unwanted processes (like inflammation) to use the energy of an engine designed to keep running at a certain level?
Either way I find this incredibly interesting. And either way I'm probably also going to keep stuffing my face on a day I run 30km :).
(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)
Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy.
Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate, then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.
If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories per minute.
You don't need to be at the limit of human energy intake to see what happens to people when their energy expenditure greatly exceeds the energy available from food over a sustained time period; there is quite a lot of medical literature on the effects of such... er... malnutrition.
There are loads of videos on YouTube of what happens. You may or may not want to watch them. Spoiler alert: you vomit when you eat too much.
The vomit limit is probably higher than 4560 (which BTW has a suspicious number of significant digits), there might be a range between too many calories and vomiting where your body breaks down the food into waste without digesting any more nutrients/calories. Kinda like how if you eat too much vitamin C, you’ll just pee most of it out.
Cycling was always interesting to me in this context because it seems easier to burn energy on a bike than other forms of exercise.
I'm not sure this is true. Cycling isn't weight-bearing (you're sitting down) and only engages the large leg muscles. Running and rowing likely provide more calorie burn for a given RPE (rate of perceived exertion) over a fixed time period. Running because it's weight-bearing; rowing because it engages more muscle groups. That said, you can probably cycle for more hours total, if you have nothing else to do.
Contrast this with cycling which is pretty much all concentric contractions.
That said, at the peak of my training (12 hours/week), I can definitely consume more calories without putting on weight. Like, a giant bowl of ice cream most nights. But, if I continue that diet during recovery periods, I'll put on a few pounds. So, it's not that exercise has zero impact, but possibly quite a bit smaller an impact that one might assume.
Of course there is. The problem is that it's much easier to eat than it is to exercise. You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes, and you'd have to run or bike for hours to burn those calories off. A 30 minute jog on a treadmill won't do it.
Most people eat more calories than they need, and would have to exercise much more than they realize to burn them off. So losing weight over a reasonably short period of time almost always requires cutting calories. Few people have enough free time to do it with exercise alone.
I'm not sure how base metabolic rate relates to incidental energy expenditure. My gut feeling is that every body has its own limits on energy expenditure, and max TDEE doesn't need to correlate directly with base metabolic rate. That's why I mentioned the integral above. I tend to think of $TDEE_{max} \simeq MBR_{base} + E_{available}$ but $MBR_{base} \simeq \int_{t=-5}^0 TEE(t)$ -- and in my experience, weight loss correlates more with base metabolic rate than with caloric intake ($E_{available}$).
Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
And that's basically it, once you know what your TDEE is, eat under it to create a caloric deficit and you will lose weight. Even if you don't exercise at all and just sit at home.
Sure exercise will help putting your caloric deficit lower by burning some, but in the end it's always calories vs TDEE. Understanding that makes it very easy to go in either direction (gain weight vs lose weight), no matter what your metabolism is
(The easy solution is of course to just eat less, like skipping a meal or reducing the amount. Since your average daily food is already what dictates your current weight, reducing it means you will lose weight)
For example there are protein bars that are supposedly healthy, but they have 150-250 kcal per 50g bar.
On the other hand there are these watery ice creams that have about 65 kcal per piece and feel just as indulgent if not more.
Other things that are very much "not worth it" on the enjoyement/kcal scale is bread and other pastries.
2 buns with ham is 500 kcal and feels like nothing. A whole pan of hot vegetables with some meat is +- the same and feels like a proper dinner.
that shows why it’s easier for some than for others :)
> quality of eating habits within that period
To me this sounds like you aren't actually changing the amount of calories that you eat, just the quality of them. Eating 2000 calories of McDonalds or 2000 calories of high quality food does not matter (or barely matters) for losing/gaining weight. If 2000 calories is under your TDEE, you can eat 2000 calories of cheesecake and would still lose weight (but very unhealthy).
What I see often is people claiming stuff like "I can't lose weight" or "I have a slow metabolism", but they never actually bother counting how much they eat, and because of that have no understanding of what high-calorie and low-calorie food is. (For example if I'd ask how much calories an average hamburger or a glass of cola has, you'd likely have no idea if you haven't counted calories before).
It was the same for me, once I started counting I realized that I was not eating according to the goals I had set at that time, and that the food I ate was actually much much less in calories than I thought it was.
It’s a body recomp from an untrained person. Pretty common for new lifters.
You’re right though - if they lift better and eat better, that’ll change.
Not necessarily. It is important to remember that water weighs ~1lb/pt and there are a lot of things that affect how much water your body is carrying at any given moment. Depending on your body mass, it is not unrealistic to see 5lbs of fluctuation in a single day. On a calorie restricted diet your body will tend to retain water (because it does this for pretty much any stressor), so you may actually see a slight increase in body weight at first even though your TDEE is above your caloric intake.
A more reliable approach, in my opinion, is to do the TDEE calculation for your target weight and set that as your calorie limit.
You can of course calculate the TDEE of your target weight but like you implied, unless you know your own, based on your own metabolism and intake, the data is never going to be accurate
For example I eat much less than my bodybuilder friends. When I went with the calories that they recommended to me I gained so much fat with a very active workout schedule and noone had a explanation why. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe medicine I take, maybe something else. I now eat much less than you’d expect from a person with my height and age, but I still gain weight, because my actual calculated TDEE is comparatively low
Having that data on hand as a reference is incredibly helpful to plan my weight progress
It's too bad that we can't just live on Soylent (the actual beverage, not the thing from the book)
On the low fat halloumi vs paneer thing... We also found that low-fat soft cheese (like Philadelphia light) are amazing in soups. Simmer lentils and cubed potatoes with some spices and a can of chopped tomatoes, and just before you serve, add a large dollop of light Philadelphia and stir it all the way in. Boosts the protein content and makes for a really creamy soup. Also works great in other soups.
Making the crust very thin is also an obvious way to reduce carbs, and using whole wheat crust also help, and using Khorasan wheat or similar whole grains.
For sweets, I adopted the snob diet: raise your standards so much the average supermarket chocolate bar just doesn't appeal any more, and you are less likely to snack casually :-)
I am going to experiment with low-flour dough with extra gluten and cauliflower to bulk it out. Might need xanthan gum and an egg.
Had the same problem. Then switched to intermittent fasting. First two months, nothing happened. Then within a month dropped 10 kg, which got me back to my pre-covid weight. I'm doing 8/16 IF by the way, and eating more than I did before, so I think the CICO theory is stupid :)
How much more are you eating exactly? Have you changed your exercise routine or physical habits? The problem with calling CICO stupid is that it’s two-thirds physics. The only way to gain mass is to eat it, and the only way to lose mass is to burn it off through RMR and exercise. There’s mountains of data demonstrating that humans gain weight when eating more than they burn, and lose it when burning more than they eat. The people who seem to lose/gain weight abnormally are just people who’s bodies burn calories in unusual ways. That’s rare and statistically unlikely, but even that still follows CICO.
Others have suggested 'writing it down' - not going to argue with that. I don't 'write down' every food I eat, but I do make mental notes every day. What's helped me more though...
2 years ago I bought a fitbit - basic model, nothing fancy, but got serious about tracking my movements. It helped create some easier external documentation about what I was doing. I then moved to an Apple Watch last May, and have been following the '3 circles'. It gave me a target 'move X calories per day' target, do X minutes of 'exercise' every day (exercise seemingly defined as 'get your heart rate above Xbpm').
I've hit those targets ALMOST every day (I missed one calorie target 1 day by 13!). I'm on day ... 206 of my movement streak.
For me, the visual reminders on my wrist help keep me motivated/focused. I 'compete' against a couple of friends with the watch now and then, but just being connected and getting a thumbs up from a friend now and then is motivating.
As others said, track weight daily - I track morning and night. I put it in my iphone. I look at the graphs. I see the downward trend. THIS HELPS A LOT when it bounces back up a bit now and then. I'm up ... around 1.5 lbs from earlier this week. JUST seeing that uptick used to demotivate me. But looking at the downward trend of the last 7 months, I can see the larger direction is down, and I don't stress as much about small upticks. I'm down 25lbs (11kg) from last June, and at this pace will probably be down another 15 or so by this year.
I used to go to a gym, but ... it's a 'process'. I now often just go outside and jog around. There's a run club once per week, and weather permitting, I'll do it, but... I hit those targets every day. Even if it's just running in place, or getting on an exercise bike, or jumping rope. I tell myself "every little bit helps", and tracking every one of those 'little bits' has been the motivating factor for me. May be different for others, but keep going till you find something that works for you.
Took me years to find some 'thing' that clicked for me, but I'm closing in on one year of losing weight based on 'more movement' and 'fewer snacks' and 'better eating'. But it took weeks before there was a trendline to see a downward line.
I believe you meant kilocalories
No, you can't, you're showing hypercorrection and lack of fluency.
I used to eat a lot of candy, but I never considered eating more than a handful of anything a "snack".
That said, what do you call it when you eat something that isn't a meal? I don't think most people have any word other than "snack" without resorting to things that sound like insults, like "pig out". And it's really hard for most people to insult themselves.
Just try to lower the heating in your house in the winter and run around in a t-shirt iso a pullover.
I have a friend from high school who struggled with his weight and he hikes and runs extreme amounts to keep the weight off. As in ultra-marathons extreme amounts.
Maybe the average person's knees can't keep up with this, but it's an existence proof at least.
This simply isn't true at all, and you don't have to count calories per se. I lost quite a bit simply changing my diet. I kept most of it off for years: I gained some back when I quit nicotine, though (Quitting smoking changed my sense of hunger, and Im still upset about that). It wasn't quick weight loss and it came in stages, but I didn't count calories nor spend too much time thinking about food. I simply focused on getting more fruits, vegetables, and legumes when I could. (I completely dropped meat outside of fish, but it isn't necessary and was losing weight before that). I also rarely eat out, even when I've had work/school (I just brought something). This meant I could pretty well eat what I wanted and would just choose lower calorie things by default. As long as I ate fairly well most of the time*, I was OK. I didn't have to suffer the PMS hunger I get either: I would just eat something.
You can eat the same thing every day, mind you, and I've met a lot of folks that do. Generally, however, it is a lifestyle choice and you have to be careful to make sure you have enough vitamins and things. One of the three folks I'm thinking of made themselves sick by not including enough vegetables.
For example, with marathon training, once you start to hit the 6 plus mile your daily run eats up over 1,000 calories.
Near the end of your training your long run days become over 2,000 calories, and even your easy runs becomes 1000+.
That's essentially an entire extra meal, and you're running 5-6 days a week.
If you're just going to the gym for 30-45 minutes, 3-4 days a week, diet will be essential to losing weight. But if you're running 1 hr + a day and 2+ hrs at least once a week it's hard to get enough calories.
Something went wrong when very moderate volume of exercise (1 hour per day) is seen as a huge time commitment.
They didn’t have a treadmill or did keto diets.
My take away was fitness should be a lifestyle and to avoid lots of western food (sugar, processed, empty calories, I drink only water, etc).
I don’t count calories and can eat twice in the morning. If I counted, both morning meals are less than 600 calories.
I don’t go to a gym, but have maintained a <10% body fat (and 86kg at 190cm height) over the years (without feeling hungry all the time because I eat well). I just do body weight training and make my entire day active (even tho I’m a programmer).
For me, being in shape doesn’t need to be complicated.
As a developer my self, I find this part the hardest.
When I’m coding I’m obviously sitting at my desk. At some point I get tired of that or hit a wall, then stop, and have to think about that to do next.
Instead of sitting at my desk thinking I’ll go for a walk, go outside and work on a project around the house, go for a swim, hike somewhere. During that time I’m mulling in the problem in my head coming up with solutions.
Once I finish with that activity, I’ll set back down and try a few if the ideas I came up with while doing those activities.
According to my Apple Watch, I get between 25-55 min of activity on a given day.
Ido Portal, for all his eccentric weirdness, knows things:
> The body will become better at whatever you do, or don’t do. If you don’t move, your body will make you better at not moving. If you move, your body will allow more movement.
I’m personally thinking in terms of micro-habits that eventually form a lifestyle, and it’s all about total lifetime reps, if you will.
For example, I have a height adjustable desk, and have replaced the chair with a pilates ball. I still stand, or sit on my knees, more than sitting down on it.
I believe there’s a problem with some of the ergonomic setups we use - if you keep moving, and shift around you shouldn’t need it. If you do, you’re already “losing it” and should probably be changing things up more frequently during the days. Now this is easy to say, and for some people, probably not true.
I’m basically continuously fighting the path of least resistance. I’m in war with the comfy a* brain!
There's only one way this actually happens for a majority of the population: exercise being built into daily habits, in a way that's so natural that it almost seems unavoidable.
The Netherlands seems to have the right of it: their urban design strongly supports walking and biking, and indeed, their rates of 'active transportation' are very high.
As a bonus, walk and bike infrastructure is quite cheap to build and maintain compared to car infrastructure.
With that in mind the flat landscape of the Netherlands might be giving us a slight disadvantage ;)
Anyway, search for "blue zones" to learn more, aging healthily is an ongoing topic of research
Then a few years ago my wife was having what seemed to be some food intolerance issues. As morale support I joined her on a very strict diet. I lost over 10kg in 6 weeks. That was without much training. When I started running again I was suddenly back to setting new personal pace records, unsurprising given I was 10ths lighter.
It’s not that I’d been eating especially poorly before. The biggest change was probably a complete elimination of wheat. I definitely felt much healthier than I had in a long time. And a diet change had a much bigger impact than years of exercise in making that happen.
If your BMR is say... 1,800 calories a day and you exercise 300 calories worth... do you just get 300 calories hungrier to offset the exercise?
And to add a little color, my exercise routines have usually involved more than 300 cals of workout, probably closer to 700-1000. This is important, because when not tracking the extra food, it’s really easy to overshoot 1000 calories by 300. The exercises have varied a lot over the years, from running and biking to weight lifting and sports like soccer & ultimate frisbee. I’ve been aiming for around 3 days/week workouts for like 10-20 years. I have periods of less, and occasionally more (especially in the summer) and have managed to keep it up more or less consistently. I eat more when exercising, but never lost weight consistently until I learned the open secret, that for me monitoring intake is what makes exercise work as a weight loss tool.
Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.
That's true of course, but the problem for most people is sticking to the plan, not whether that plan would actually work.
We see athletes sticking to their plans but they are pretty special in terms of what they can get themselves to do.
> it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate
Your body is actually building muscles after exercising. It is also repairing damage caused by exercising. You actually should eat more, but more of the right stuff.
I did… the problem with me (and with, I dunno, half of humanity? ;)) was I overcompensated, I ate more than I needed to build muscles and recover from exercise. So I gained weight slowly, or for long periods of time, just failed to lose the extra weigh I had through exercise alone. My problem is that exercise without calorie tracking doesn’t help me lose weight, I have to do both. And once I learned to do both, I automatically figured out at the same time how to lose weight without exercising at all. I still exercise, but now I get to use exercise as a way not just to get strong, but also to eat extra snacks. :)
Protein like cottage cheese or something like that helps a lot. Figuring out what it is your body needs helps a lot.
It’s definitely possible to lose weight and become less healthy by eating the wrong balance of macros. It’s also possible to become more healthy and/or stronger without losing weight. This is about deciding which goals you want, and figuring out how to get there. It’s easier to do one goal at a time (and all of these goals are extremely difficult to meet individually) but it’s also possible to work on several or all of them a little bit at a time too.
Reasonably tiring exercise on a bike could burn 10 Cal per minute, so maybe 600 an hour. But swallowing a few packs of crisps or a few chocolate bars could fill that right back up in a couple of minutes. If you were speed eating you could swallow it in under a minute.
Think about if your weight is steady, how long you spend eating and how long you spend using energy. It can easily be the case that you spent all your calories in 23.5 hours and were eating for just half an hour.
The time ratio is so lopsided it's hard to come up with a plan where exercise carries most of the weight loss vs just eating less.
If you think of your energy use as base rate plus exercise rate, because your base rate is sustained for the whole day you'd have to exercise like crazy for a long time to make up any difference to what you eat.
I absolutely unconsciously eat more when I exercise. I know because I measured it. And once I measured it and focused on exercising while also eating a constant amount, surprise surprise, I actually lost weight. This is well known to many many people, well studied and understood, and has a metric ton of actual data to back it up. If this article is claiming to challenge that, then this article is wrong. (But IMO it’s not actually challenging known physics, it’s just written in a misleading way.)
The public health benefits are unparalleled.
- Calories over TDEE: You gain weight
- Calories under TDEE: You lose weight
It's that simple
And that's the thing: Once you start changing your diet - the stuff you eat or the timing of your food - to do the exercise, you can't really say it is the exercise affecting your weight.
I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.
When I'm not working out regularly, I'm able to eat far less in a day and feel totally full. By not working out, I'm able to eat far fewer calories and actually lose more weight. Drinking lots of water (64 - 96 oz) a day also helps a lot.
First of all, while a 3k run isn't going to do much to burn off that slice of cake you had with lunch, if you transition from a generally inactive lifestyle to a generally active one (eg, by getting into running as a hobby), you can cumulatively burn a decent amount of calories. Cardio as a hobby is not for everyone, but I thought it wasn't for me until I gave it a shot and found I really enjoyed it.
There are also psychological advantages of incorporating exercise into a weight loss regime. I started eating better after, and partially because, I started exercising. When you work out a lot, you start to enjoy feeling healthy (or at least, thinking of yourself as a healthy person), and you start to realise that junk food is working against that.
Finally, weight loss should not be your only goal if you are interested in getting healthier. It's true that you could lose weight by being very sedentary and eating very little, but I suspect that would bring its own health problems.
But I've had no problem keeping weight off by just adjusting the amount that I eat. However, if I upped the cardio, I'd be able to (and want) to eat an extra 500-600 calories to compensate, and still lose weight.
I swear I can maintain weight eating more than what I supposedly burn while active, which could make sense if you buy into the whole "your metabolic rate can be work-hardened" concept.
It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to propel a given weight 5 miles. It's hard to tell how many calories a person burns to produce that energy. Your ratios of aerobic to anaerobic respiration are going to impact that wildly, which will depend on how much oxygen your body can absorb and how quickly you're burning through oxygen. There's a huge gap in the amount of energy cells get from each. Aerobic respiration produces up to 38 ATP per glucose, while anaerobic produces only 2 ATP per glucose.
Running form probably plays into that as well, if you've got some kind of suboptimal gait or you're swinging your arms a lot or something like that.
Yep, my form is atrocious and inefficient due to bunions and Morton's toe which has evolved into hammer toe.
I'd argue that I burn calories more efficiently, however :)
The results are unsurprising... I gained 15 pounds over the next 6 months, and am now overweight.
Exercise obviously plays a role in weight management. There's truth in the "you can't outrun your fork" meme, and it's good to remind people of the greater importance of diet for weight management to counter the widespread myths about exercise being some cure-all here. However, I do worry that overly reductive takes risk swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
Do you remember whether your diet changed at this time as well?
Some other anecdotes shared here seem to share a similar theme, that exercise helps in losing weight on a more meta-level by shifting yourself into a generally healthier mindset which, in turn, seems to help you eat "healthier" foods, which is probably a proxy for "low-calorie foods" like fruit and vegetables. Maybe when you're sedentary it's easier to reach for the bag of potato chips?
The "much" is carrying a lot of weight, so to speak, in your comment. As a reference I went from running ~25 miles a week to just walking a fraction of that as I've recovered. I did keep up my other non-cardio calisthenics throughout, though.
Some napkin math suggests I was over my calorie target by just shy of 300 calories per day over the course of this time period.
If we assume 3500 additional calories is 1 lb of fat stored on your body, then 3500/300 = 11.6 days you gained 1lb
Assuming 6 months is 180 days, then 180/11.6 = 15.5 lbs over 6 months
Because following that logic, exercise supposedly does not work if you want to lose weight. But if every study around aerobic exercise arrives at that conclusion, why aren't the majority of athletes overweight? Where are the fat runners?
Is this a survivor bias? (Fat people even with great aerobic capacity end up hurting their joints so they stop running)
Is it because the addition of exercise generates other kind of changes in the body, like less insulin resistance, and overall more signals in the body to burn fat rather than store it?
Do runners spontaneously change their diets once they get used to their new lifestyle? Maybe the food they used to eat, both in amount and in composition, makes them uncomfortable so they start making lasting changes?
Yes, it does look like running a static amount every time has diminishing results. But, overall, people who run tend to be less overweight. And a lot of overweight people who start doing exercise and stick to it, tend to lose the weight, or at least they lose fat and gain muscle.
I’m my experience people severely underestimate the effects of having more muscles mass and the changes it can cause when you lose some from lack of training.
It also bleeds into peoples thinking. People view exercise as a way to lose weight. And eating less is, rightly, a more efficient way of losing weight. But body composition really matters not just for losing weight, but just life in general.
This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"
People talk a lot about reducing caloric intake but there's little talk on how a normal person can hope to achieve that. The key Noom offers is calorie density. If you eat lots of food that has a low calorie density per unit of volume (eg cabbage, cauliflower) you can reduce your calories and still feel very full. Just go easy on the extremely high calorie density foods (eg olive oil) and you'll be more likely to hit your goals.
Also, it's really really hard to do calorie restrictions AND have intense exercise. From what I've seen in the Noom community people have a lot more success when they first focus on losing pounds then focus on building strength and fitness; many people at that point find they have to increase calories in order to continue seeing results when they're working out a lot. I suppose it takes a lot of calories to build muscle. I wonder what your body does to those injured muscles if it doesn't have the calories available to repair them?
1. From a simple sniff test, if this were true, then athletes wouldn't need a lot of calories. This obviously isn't true, eg Phelps eats 8-11K calories a day. I personally eat around 3.5K calories a day. If exercise didn't impact caloric burn I assure you I'd be a lot fatter...
2. The only plausible mechanisms for why exercise wouldn't result in more overall caloric burn is that less energy is expended in non exercising states, eg the body is trying to conserve energy and either reduces metabolism or reduces fidgeting, walking, etc. This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
3. Finally, this blog post dives into some methodological issues: https://darrendahly.github.io/post/2012-08-31-hunter-gathere...
EDIT: Increased metabolism due to muscle mass is not as big an effect as you’d think: https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
Simply having more muscle mass can burn calories too. Most people don't spend most of their time training either, so comparing to elite athletes is fairly irrelevant.
That was my first thought as well.
It's even more evident with certain types of sports. Take cycling for example. Lifting mass up a mountain is going to take quite a bit of energy; maintaining a constant speed in the face of wind resistance will take energy. That energy has to come from somewhere.
He’s incredibly far from a normal human - he’s a true specialist.
Lots more energy goes in to that, compared to losing excess fat and living a “normal” human hunter gatherer existence.
The whole system change once you go google scale, so to speak, and phelps is gmail.
In the words of Ido Portal: we’re human first, movers second and specialists last.
I see relevance in this research in the human/mover perspective.
What I got out of the article wasn't that sitting still and not thinking can somehow burn calories; just that strenuous mental activities can burn a great deal more energy in humans than in apes. This is believable to me. I'm a person who falls asleep doing math in my head every night. I got a chance, during a year of pandemic lockdown, to experiment with my own body in this way.
I only eat once per day. I don't keep fixed hours; sometimes I'll stay up for 24, sleep for 16; other times I'm regularly 8/16 sleep/wake. I don't have a set bedtime. I try to maintain 16/48 sleep/wake over any given period.
No matter what, I only eat one meal every 24 hours. I've been doing this for about 20 years.
This makes it easy to measure when I get hungry in relationship to my last meal. My body is well trained to expect about a 24 hour delay; I have no appetite and don't think about food until around 22 hours post-dinner.
Under lockdown conditions, I began to notice that I wasn't hungry as expected on days where I hadn't spent >= 6 hours working on strenuous code. If I took a day off and "couch potato'd", I might not eat at all for 48 hours. But if I focused on code for 8+ hours, I would be hungry on time or early.
I started to experiment with this. I figured out that if I took a 1 hour walk, plus 4 hours programming, it made me hungry right around where 6+ hours of code did. A 1 hour walk - to me - seems about equal to 2 hours of writing code in terms of what my body feedback gives me about my calorie burn.
I don't walk very fast, and I code very intensely.
But that's just it - this article is about solving math problems as a way to burn calories. I have a nice new M1 Mac that only ever turns its fans on or gets warm when I'm using all 10 cores. Last night my task falling asleep was to calculate randomly chosen x/128ths as percentages to five decimal places. My daytime task was harder; and now I'm hungry. And I haven't walked anywhere today.
However: Couch potato, this ain't. And the point about the body's reduced expectation of physical output is probably accurate as well.
Could be the body stress response associated with doing those activities
It's also incredibly easy, at least in America, to consume way too many calories. To meaningfully lose weight you have to drastically change your diet or drastically up your movement.
Some don't. Think about marathon runners (which would be pretty close to the tribe studied), they have a muscle ratio that is way lower than your Phelps example and their body composition if also probably more efficient than yours (I don't know you, but let's assume). I wouldn't be surprised if a pro marathon runner would have be close to your 3.5K a day when going through light training.
Think of it through different angles: mountain trekkers aren't packing 80kg of sugar to go through their trekking, their bodies are way more efficient at doing these tasks and need less calories to work than what we'd expect from a random person. It literally means doing more with less.
> This often happens to people trying extreme calorie loss diets.
This happens to everyone. From your link: "In fact, your body is hard wired to maintain energy balance within a fairly small range."
> 3.
It seems well argued but just really nitpicky. It goes into the whole energy intake vs energy spent debate to explain why they don't agree with the methodology, but don't prove why they think the conclusion is wrong. It's as if I'd nitpick your use of calorie intake measurements and explain in great details how it's approximation of an approximation and we have no way to actually know someone's actual intake calorie, without ever engaging with your actual points.
2. That is exactly his hypothesis, and he has produced evidence for this hypothesis in a recent experiment. I don't know why you are presenting this as some kind of counter-argument.
3. That blog post isn't a coherent critique. The post's two points are that the drinking solution is also used for measuring energy intake, and that the Hadza actually burn far less calories than Western people until such numbers are adjusted. This first point isn't relevant without further explanation, and the second point only serves to further support the thesis.
2. Studies in nutrition science are a dime a dozen. Like in psychology, you should apply common sense to interpret the results. In this case, the implication is that the Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human bodies.
> The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
> the implication is that the Hunter gatherer lifestyle is a chronically tired lifestyle for human bodies.
The author thinks that couch potatoes have more stress and inflammation (and probably more fidgeting, etc, too), and these things burn calories which explains the results. That's the opposite to what you say here, which is that the results suggest that being a couch potato is normal.
And if you check the article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw0341# == The reduction in TEE among RAUSA subjects can be partly attributed to marginally reduced body mass and daily mileage (table S3). Still, even after accounting for these changes, Week 20 TEE was 596 kcal/day lower (range, 400 to 923 kcal/day) than expected ==
So they did loose weight during the marathons and the metabolic compensation is less than half of what you would think reading the original article.
== ... The magnitude of metabolic response in RAUSA athletes (~600 kcal/day, ~20% TEE) is similar to the degree of adaptation reconstructed for the most physically active subjects in a recent cross-sectional study (17) and may reflect humans’ maximal capacity for metabolic compensation. ==
So if 20% percent is the maximum, it means that if you try to outrun your diet, you might have to eventually exercise 25% more. Except by then you will probably have more muscle mass that will burn more calories even when not exercising. And you will be able to exercise more in less time.
Suddenly it does not look so hopeless.
I agree and I'm in the same boat. After 10 years of running ~70km/week, I'm eating way more, have dropped 20lb, and am healthier and stronger.
> The implication of this is that somehow the sedentary lifestyle of your average couch potato is the "normal" lifestyle for a body, and the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is "overactive", and their bodies are chronically tired and trying to reduce their metabolisms. That... seems quite unlikely.
I think people underestimate what being active and excercise actually mean. Our ancestors were vastly more active than we are today. The amount of movement that was required for foraging, hunting, agriculture is hard for most modern people to imagine.
Even the act of preparing the food that was gathered/hunted/harvested was so much more manual and energy intense than what we are accustomed to today.
For most of our evolutionary history basically everything we did was powered by our bodies. Today we have machines for everything, and a high standard of comfort.
It's true that calorie restriction is easier for most people than excercise, but I think it's because.. to put it bluntly.. we've become lazy.
Ie. scientists wouldn't think that average Hadza hunter burns same calories as average sedentary guy from US ... which is the point of this new discovery ... the lifestyle is different enough that you would not think the expenditure will be similar. We always knew there is compensation happening, but we didn't think that much.
But, if Phelps burns 8k calories ... then he perhaps far far exceeds the amount of exercise the average Hadza hunter outputs ... at that point, the body can't just shift some energy expenditure around and compensate for it .. it will in fact need lot more energy to support the physical output.
The article even proposes what the ceiling of input calories (and therefore sustainable output expenditure) is. 4650 cal for 85kg man. So obviously, it doesn't claim that every human on the planet burns the same amount of calories no matter what they do. It only claims that for example energy requirement differences between somebody who outputs 200kcal or 1000kcal in exercise are nearly erased because the body compensates on the BMR. Obviously there is a hard limit on how much body can compensate and save energy by cutting it from other processes.
A linked article describing a scientist trying to rigorously find out how weight changes and energy expenditure and diet are connected, revealing the little we do know and the vast sea of what we do not know.
The discussion here: full of anecdotes and bro science berating one another "that's not how it works, it works like this", "I personally do this-and-that", "you just have to x-y-z, it's that simple".
Fat stores energy. Food adds energy. Exercise uses energy. Those aren't "myths." The article (not talking about the scientist) is very difficult to understand, but it seems to come down on the "myth" side of that dilemma. Mostly. Kind of.
Skipping meals/cutting calories is, by far, the easiest way to lose weight.
Maybe your suggestion might be a cataclysmic -1000 calories per day, either by (a) skipping a large lunch completely and not changing exercise, or (b) by doing those two hours of hard exercise and not changing diet. That person will tend to lose around two pounds a week either way over the long term. (Of course I don't really know what numbers you have in mind.)
But losing two pounds a week is insane.
So let's look at safer, more normal behavior. Call it -300 calories per day: either cutting diet by a medium order of fries each day (and keeping exercise fixed) or doing 40 minutes of moderate exercise (and keeping diet fixed). Then the person will tend to lose a pound about every 12 days over the long term. That is still rapid weight loss either way.
If the same person starts riding a bike 40 minutes a day but doesn't count calories, the results could be anything. They could easily put on weight. Who knows?
That's not how it works though, and the article we are discussing here is hinting at that. The mechanisms are very complex. Going for a run for 40 min that "burns" 300 calories versus not going on that run won't create a calorie deficit of 300 calories. Because "everything else equal" is never going to happen.
There could be tons of effects happening to offset this. Eating more? Eating subtly different things? Eating it in different ways that impact nutrient uptake? More efficient nutrient uptake even when eating the same things in the same way at the same time? Changing patterns of movement that now use less energy? Change in overall metabolism (body temperature, body movements, ...)? Less stress, saving energy? ...? This is a very complex topic and "calories in versus calories out" is just not cutting it. And that's what the article is about. It's an approximation, but a so coarse one that it's barely usable for anything.
That's just part of phrasing everything in catchy popular science terms. Apparently, if you don't do that, then nobody is going to read your article as it reads too boring. (I also find that sad.)
The "train yourself out of obesity" idea that one of the interviewed scientists calls "zombie idea" is not an "ordinary long-accepted fact". Maybe in bro science circles, where obese people are generally just regarded as lazy who just don't get their act together, but that's now how actual medical experts think about this.
The article is another piece in the puzzle of trying to understand how things work. It's not a "myth buster".
> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist > John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie > ideas that refuses to die.”
This sort of research is only of value in so far as it moves forward some sort of saleable treatment.
In the meantime, the more confused you are about what to eat and how to treat your body - the better. It is when people are damaged that the medical industry makes its money.
In summary, the incentives for health are in reverse (and perverse, IMO). People get paid for treating disease (and even keeping them unwell!) but not for keeping people healthy.
Much better, eh?
Also, how is it bad for people to contrast what they see in real life with what the study shows? Michael Phelps and other athletes actually eat more calories, that's a fact. So it makes sense to question why that would be the case if the conclusion we see here was true. Again, a scientific paper isn't the bible-you can actually question it, and you don't have to just accept it as truth.
The world is not so binary as you make it out to be. The article is not forming a "new truth". Of course elite athletes are eating a lot. Nobody was questioning that. Neither do anecdotes stating "I trained my butt off, it worked" negate what's in the article.
The topic is complex, too complex to be pressed into a simple slogan. The article is not "controversial" to anybody remotely knowledgeable about biology.
You can question that the world is complex, but that won't make it less complex.
I love this intro.
> His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits.
This is funny to me because my own logs reflect this going back to about 2015. I can more easily drop 10, 20, or however many pounds when not exercising than I can when exercising. That was a really weird one because it opened up a bunch of other problems.
One follow-on problem that came up quickly: How to develop skills requiring fitness during those times, or how to maintain endurance levels when you're intentionally lowering your exercise exposure so you can lose weight. That kind of situation is pretty interesting.
> Azy, a 113-kilogram (249 lb.) adult male (orangutan), for example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day ... When adjusted for body mass, (humans) burn ... 60% more than orangutans
Oh and
> “She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”
This is really curious and fascinating stuff. Thanks op for posting.
PS:
> He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
The estimate is probably off for extreme circumstances and those people probably aren’t fully digesting and using all of those calories. The accurate number would be interesting.
I too have found that cardio isn’t very good for dropping weight, but packing on some muscle does a lot to shift body composition. Maintaining more lean mass simply requires more calories.
Yeah, I'm not convinced the article passes the smell test.
Michael Phelps discussed his diet extensively, suggesting he ate 10k a day while training. Other athletes talk about similar meal sizes. This suggests that once they stop exercising (thus eventually losing lean muscle mass and requiring less calories) that they would not see a change in their weight, yet there are a lot of old fat athletes (possibly just of a certain generation) out there.
"Elite athletes can push the limits for several months, as the study of marathoners showed, but can’t sustain it indefinitely, Pontzer says."
I think a lot of these stats are myths meant to accentuate the difficulty of the task. Pontzer’s book discusses Michael Phelps and the lack of an actual source to the rumours he was eating gargantuan amounts during training.
Of course he could be off a bit, but it seems unlikely that he’s off by a factor of 2.
He lists the foods that he ate, and it definitely sounds like it was close to 10k calories. His coach also discussed his diet, and backs up his claims.
But I can speak first hand as a former athlete who has had access to NFL players and Olympians. 8-10k during peak active training happens all the time
Long term average might be 4-5k.
You have to remember that these people are often on PEDs that allow them to train all day.
Shit I was a serious powerlifter back in the day and would routinely eat 6-7k calories (weighed) during 2adays depending on how my weight was fluctuating. Add some more height, PEDs, and cardio and I'm almost there.
I think the difference between what is mentioned in the article is #1 obviously PEDs #2 body breakdown and recovery, which might be more in e.g. lifters and swimmers than long distance runners
There are a lot of people who maintain a high degree of fitness, and for them I can imagine 4000 calories is about right. But there are some types of training that are consistently pushing your physical limits. I don't have any sort of data to back this up, but it has long been my theory that the reason why elite athletes can burn so many calories is because they aren't actually burning them in the traditional sense of cells oxidizing chemical energy to create work...they've crossed over into the territory of muscle tissues being torn up and resynthesized so much that your body can no longer do so efficiently.
As an analogy, typically in manufacturing there are always efficiencies that can be extracted. But in very mature industries where there aren't any easy efficiencies to eek out of the system, you have to start making tradeoffs. One common tradeoff is throughout vs yield. You can increase your throughout, but in order to do do so, you have to cut corners on processes and subsequently increase the total amount of waste in the process.
And as a "maybe this is related" data point: 82% of marathon runners suffer from Acute Kidney Injury. Your kidneys have one job: waste disposal. It would be easy to infer that at the boundaries of human conditioning, the kidneys aren't up to the task of processing all of the waste that the body is producing.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/marathon-running-and-...
An interesting source here is the Fiennes and Stroud expedition to cross Antarctica in 1992. Stroud (a physician) actually tested how many calories they were burning each day using the doubly-labeled water method, and at one point (ascent to the polar plateau) it was up to 11k. So it is definitely possible to temporarily push the limit - as the article acknowledges - but these are exceptional circumstances.
Supposedly their calories during the expedition were primarily from butter, which they mixed into every food and even ate on its own. Apparently you get used to it.
We're taking it pretty slow and getting off trail whenever the weather turns sketchy (like last night possible thunderstorms). The real part we're concerned about is getting over the Smokies without getting stuck up there in the snow.
High altitude suppresses appetite in general and your body does not get enough oxygen to meaningfully process food above about 25,000 feet. Everest summit day via the South Col starts at about that altitude.
Plus it’s freezing cold and everything takes forever to do. I don’t think there is much eating at all on Everest summit day, let alone 20,000 calories.
In vegetable oil it would be about 4.8lbs of oil - that’s probably not at all plausible for digestion or bowel control
Major Edit: more concise example
>As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.
I see a few numbers thrown out for how many calories a pound of fat burns a day, but that direct burn is only one way additional fat would lead to energy use. A heavier person while less "active" will burn more during day to day due to carrying a heavier mass. I'm sure there's plenty more ways but I'm not going to go do a deep dive.
It raises the blood sugar levels as the body supplies the muscles with carbohydrates, and triggers a complementary response in appetite hormones.
Finally, and most importantly:
Exercise releases dopamine.
Dieting is universally a mood killer, because kilo-joule deficit equals starvation.
So whilst it does not directly impact weight loss. It still makes it (a bit) easier.
Plus there are an enormous quantity of other factors in health that are impacted by exercise.
Bodily strength is entirely responsible, for example, for stopping you getting a "bad back."
The less strength you have in your back muscles, the more strain your vertebra and ligaments are under. Hence your body falls apart quickly and more easily.
You definitely need both kilo-joule control and strengthening exercise if you want to keep your life on track.
This was one of the big surprises for me. When I'm exercising regularly, food tastes better, and yet I'm satisfied with less of it.
Not for me. I work out about 3 times a week, never felt like my appetite got smaller on workout days.
Intermittent fasting is nice however. There are pangs of hunger occasionally, but if I power through them, they go away after 1 hour usually.
Please be careful generalizing anectodal facts. Lots of people, me included, have otherwise experience.
Post exercise I will often have a sort of hunger roller coaster. Naively, imagining the body's metabolism, hunger is responding to perception of a calorie deficit in the blood : organs demanding energy and blood sugar decreasing, forcing burning of calories from stored reserves.
But what if your body is able to efficiently maintain glucose levels? in that case exercise might not induce hunger, in fact it might be that exercise stimulates alternative pathways that release energy and these stay active even after you finish exercising. This might well be much more the case for well trained athletes than regular people. Or it might depend on diet or loads of other factors.
Personally, I have found that exercise is nearly pointless any time other than right before I eat. So exercising before breakfast is perfect because the stimulated hunger response is immediately satisfied by eating breakfast. But I don't eat more breakfast than I usually would, so it's a win.
I know, for instance, Penn Teller lost his weight in the same way - he decided to just eat baked/boiled potatoes with nothing else and just chilled out for a 100 days and lost 100 lbs. That's what worked for him!
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/news/...
I practice intermittent fasting a lot and I cannot say that it affects my mood negatively. But I was very grumpy when I ate "five small meals a day".
It seems that the digestive system is more OK with being totally empty than being just half full all the time.
However, I still think that there is a lot of truth to the "you can't outrun a bad diet" statement. A lot of people who occasionally go for a run are likely to overestimate their energy expenditure and feel like they have to eat a cow to compensate. I think, however, that the statement becomes less and less true the more excessive the exercise gets. If you burn thousands of calories day in day out with exercise it seems to become harder to overcompensate this every time with excess food intake.
I think the bigger issue with exercise is a mental one. Weight loss seems to be a pretty bad motivation for exercising. Most people I know who picked up running for the sole purpose of losing weight eventually gave up or they are stuck with their 5km weekend park run, which, of course, is rather pointless for their objective. 100% of the avid runners I know (including myself) don't care about their weight. I could probably lose more weight (or improve my long term health) if I changed my diet, but it's simply something that I'm not interested in. I run because it's fun and a somewhat low body weight seems to be a by-product of that.
> I run > 100km/week pretty much all year round (most of it on extremely hillly trails) and despite my bad diet consisting mainly of pancakes, white bread, nutella, pizza, fries and burgers, I am not overweight with 78kg at 190cm.
That is not necessarily a "bad diet" for weight loss purposes. It's an unhealthy diet, but as long as you're not eating too much of all those foods, it won't make you gain weight. It's only bad because most people who are eating these kinds of foods will be eating too much of them (because they are much less filling for the amount of calories that they contain).
I had the same experience for a long time. People would see me eat Oreos, pizza, ice cream, pop tarts, etc. and they’d say, “how are you so incredibly thin if you eat all that garbage?” And I’d respond that I just eat less - I don’t eat a lot. And it was true. I’d eat garbage but I’d eat so little that I’d maintain an incredibly low weight. Now as I’m older and stress has gotten better - I’ve started eating more and gained weight due to it. It’s all due to the quantity/amount-of-calories.
I’m somewhat hard-pressed to believe the answer is diet alone. Anecdotally, when I was running 100 miles per week in college for cross country, I ate three or four giant meals per day and maintained a very low weight. Ten years later, I have an injury that makes most types of exercise difficult, and I’ve observed that I really can’t eat more than one meal per day (dinner), otherwise my weight starts to creep up.
I find it odd that Calories are used in relation to weight gain, because (kilo)calories are a unit of energy, and excess weight is due to excess fat. Is there a simple linear relationship between the extractable energy content in food (as determined by the Atwater system) and the conversion of food components into fat by the digestive system? I find that hard to believe. Shouldn’t we be using a mass balance rather than an energy balance? If you could observe digestion at the atomic level, you would simply quantify which atoms from food end up in fat stores and which leave the body via other processes. Presumably, these atoms could then be bucketed into source categories (e.g. certain types of proteins or carbohydrates). I wouldn’t be surprised if exercise somehow alters the fat accumulation process even if it doesn’t significantly affect human metabolism.
They talk about a “caloric balance sheet” so this makes sense to me.
But you’re definitely right! There’s a great Mr. Wizard-style TEDx video about it: https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE
You dont understand inflammation, inflammation is like a nuclear bomb going off, however certain chemicals found in the diet will turn that nuclear bomb into an array of guided missiles.
We are complex chemical reactions, eat the wrong stuff you get sick, eat the right stuff you get well, but you need to make the right chemical reactions take place and reduce the wrong chemical reactions.
The problem with scientific study is they generally focus on what they can test directly or indirectly this is why we now see complete reversals in some medical thinking & theories.
Sure exercise and other output will consume calories, but if you focus on just calories, you ignore the properties of the chemicals and ill health will occur.
> He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
It still doesnt look at the what the short and long term effect is, he doesnt quantify it with this person can consume 4650cal but be dead next week does he? Its just a throw away statement, it means nothing and his ego/beliefs/followers are getting him into print before a larger audience. Because we are not able to quantify his statement properly, the media could be complicit in murder/manslaughter depending on what people know and remembered at the time.
Our lifespans are limited by the traditional domesticated foods we eat, ie farm grown foods. However now that we are seening labgrown foods like fungi meat replacements and lab grown meats, the questions with those are do they contain enough of the chemicals to be good for health or not? You only need a few chemicals to grow cancer lines in a test tube for example, but cancer cells are not that functional in the scheme of things are they? They are just cells which have lost their normal function in the body.
And I'm not qualified in anything, I cant even say if my GCSE are accurate because I never got my exam papers back to check my answers again the study books!
Almost everyone should exercise. Whether you're skinny, normal weight or overweight. Exercise makes you healthy. It also tends to make skinny people eat more and overweight people eat less, though not always. Form a workout plan with fixed amounts of exercise, like 30-90 minutes per day: any extra exercise isn't bad if you want it, but it doesn't really have any more benefits.
If exercise helps you lose weight? Good. If not? Well it still has benefits. It's generally easier to lose weight through diet. If you really don't like exercise, you don't have to exercise much, and you can do workouts you like.
> exercise determines shape, diet determines size
Exercise to build muscle, eat to lose fat
This is for sure a [Citation Needed] claim.
Exercise has been shown in numerous studies to be health protective and also to be muscle maintaining.
I would love to know why you think exercising is not a net positive. I expect that greater than 99% off doctors, nutritionists, dieticians, and anyone else involved in human dietary health would agree that you should start exercising now if you are not already exercising, regardless of your diet (and absent specific contraindications).
With diet you need to find what to eat, how much, how often, so that you’re not hungry, grumpy, tired, sick, etc. and still consistently lose weight. It’s gonna take a couple of weeks for your body to adjust.
Exercise will also drastically affect your hunger, tiredness, etc. It’s gonna be harder to find new balance (or rather dysbalance with consistent weight loss) when you can’t really read which changes in your body are caused by diet and which by exercise. Higher chance of disappointment and quitting.
I’d say just change diet, find what works for you consistently, add exercise only a few weeks later, tweak diet accordingly.
I'm also skeptical of that balance theory. A exercised body would produce more reliable eating and satiation signals to aid in balance, if 'balance' is even how the new diet is calibrated.
Better eating is I think the most impacting thing you can do, exercising being the close second.
This was like one of the first few things I looked at in this body of research, I wasn't combing through everything to find an error. But it's strange. Finding an error quickly is a red flag to me.
Overall the study I'm looking at is interesting. I'm not sure they adequately demonstrated the finding of a caloric intake limit of 2.5x BMR but there appears to be a definite negative correlation of duration of sustained activity and energy expenditure (or metabolic scope, a multiple of basal metabolic rate). The numbers are very tightly clustered around the trendline, which is kind of odd, given how widely the numbers vary in other graphs. So either this is a very close correlation or something is strange with the data.
Glancing through the papers in PubMed, I think that the implications in the article are way stronger than the papers support. One paper said that perhaps 25% of the calories expended in exercise are borrowed from a reduction in BMR. The article made it seem like they were completely offset. The article referenced above apparently used two very different groups (overfeeding and endurance competition), and used the first to study the limit of energy intake and the second to study the long-term limit of energy expenditure, but people are making claims about energy intake in endurance athletes. Maybe when you're working hard, the gut is able to adapt and pull in more calories. Perhaps there is a limit to how much the gut is willing to accept when there is a calorie surplus.
Maybe I'm way off base.
I have a problem with this hard statement based on the data because:
> He realized he had to go back to basics, measuring the calories expended by humans and animals walking and running on treadmills.
> He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another team’s study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons
I've always heard that humans, due to our upright posture, are extremely efficient when it comes to walking and running and so if you want to increase you calories usage via exercise you should lift weights as we are much less efficient at this. I have also heard it will would increase your resting calorie usage as well due to repairing/reinforcing the muscle. I will note calorie management has always been heavily emphasized to me: "you can't out-run a fork"
Perhaps that is wrong and a good data based analysis would disprove these common gym tropes I've heard but from my read of this article they only "bust" the morning breakfast channel myths of burning calories.
e.g. Moderate intensity aerobic exercise burns 200-300 calories in 30 minutes. Moderate intensity weightlifting is 90-130 in the same time. You need vigorous weightlifting to get up to 250 in 30 minutes. Even taking into consideration post-exercise burn, weight lifting will at best get you too the same efficiency as aerobic exercise.
Example data from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...
Weightlifting is great but it’s not better for burning calories. It’s much better for retaining muscle while dieting, though.
May main take-away was from the article it read that they focused on running as the primarily measured exercise. So it might not provide the best full picture when looking at other exercise methods.
Calories burned from extra muscle are not as important as people like to imagine. It’s like cardio. Do enough and it has an effect, but in terms of what normal humans should expect, it’s not going to do much, because normal people are simply not going to build enough muscle to matter much. The average person isn’t going to build 40 extra pounds of lean mutant. Most of the claims about how many calories muscle will burn are also not backed up by any science so far as I can tell.
I do agree that this article doesn’t cover a lot of stuff, though. I’m doubtful about the stuff claimed even about running because it feels so have wavey. The one potentially compelling study was on women who went from sedentary to running half marathons and the claim is that they “barely” burned more calories at the end than at the beginning, but “barely” is almost meaningless. Plus they did burn more so the whole thesis is in question.
Too late to fix the typos now.
It also runs against my own experience. For the past six months I've begun exercising and changed nothing else and I've seen amazing improvement in all aspects of my life including losing fat. The type of workout I'm doing is full body and covers a range of different movements and weights. And arguably anyone serious about losing weight would do the same. If all they're doing is comparing running to dieting then I can't help but feel it's short sighted.
Weight lifting builds muscles. It does makes you more hungry. In addition, you can end up heavier then originally, because muscles weight more then fat. I mean, yes, it will be good weight, the weight composed of muscle, there is no rational reason to go out of way to avoid it. But, it is not loosing weight.
I find that I eat a lot healther when I'm not stressed out. Exercise helps with that.
If the problem is with self control, remember that torturing yourself and viewing it as a battle can be counterproductive. If you just starve yourself you will likely bounce back directly afterwards. Its about making an actual change and normalizing your eating. For that i found it helpful to first stick to my sustaining calorie level, so planing what you eat at the level you dont gain or loose weight. You can then build on that structure with cutting out the addictive stuff, eating slower and figuring out being full vs not hungry.
Personally i found a week of just boiled potatoes incredibly helpful (you will have to work really hard to gain weight with just plain potatoes) to kick the addictive stuff and break with bad habits. Its like with any other drug and abstinence wont kill you in this case.
Dont beat yourself up, its one step at a time and with better planing you can make the steps a lot easier.
Me too, and so many people do. I hope the treadmill helps, because it can.
FWIW, the article is making intentionally controversial statements and implications. Don’t let it convince you that exercise is wasted; it’s not.
Building a new habit, whether exercise or diet, is the hardest & most important port. I think it’s 90% mental, figuring out how to not give up and not let myself get depressed.
Might not work for you at all, but some tricks that helped me… I resisted counting calories for decades while I exercised a lot. Then I finally tried counting calories, and somehow managed to hold it and it worked. A coworker had lost a lot of weight and when I asked him about it in passing, without stopping to talk, he flashed his phone and mumbled “counting calories, man”, as if it was the easiest most obvious thing ever. That hit me a bit hard and stuck with me. So, it took time, many months. I set my calorie goal to my goal weight, not below. This meant it took longer than necessary to lose weight. I was interested in making sure I knew what it felt like to eat the right amount every day, forever. It helped me mentally to save room in my budget for a small treat snack at the end of the day. Starting with tracking but not restricting calories is a good way to put together your tools (e.g. a phone app) & daily workflow without worrying about being hungry. Calorie counts don’t have to be perfect, just doing it for a while and trying to be accurate, and you’ll get a very good sense for how many cals things have.
You can spend months with completely different habits, and see almost no difference. Your muscles build up from the inside, and your fat burns off from the outside. Muscle is also denser when you get on the scale.
There is a silver lining. Muscles burn calories faster than other cells in day-to-day life. If you're persistent and patient, you will get there eventually.
Alcohol also trips a lot of people up. It'll run you about 100-200 calories/drink, and it metabolizes like sugar.
When you eat carbs your body turns them to sugar because that's all it can do with it. Then your pancreas notices there is too much sugar in your body and tells it to store it in the fat cells for later use as energy. When the sugar is cleared out of your body, you become hungry again. This process only takes a couple of hours which is why people who eat carbs get hungry between meals.
Instead, eat healthy fats. They don't cause your sugar levels to spike so they don't cause you to have that sugar crash and hungry feeling. You can remain feeling full for 8 hours on fat.
Of course you also need proteins so make sure you get enough. Proteins do cause your sugar levels to go up some, but no where near as much as carbs do so they don't cause a crash either.
This video of Dr. Sarah Hallberg explains this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ
I watched some anime Netflix years ago where the main character played a board game. Eating candy to account for the energy expenditure of the mentally taxing game was in the script.
I read an article about Magnus Carlsen exercising and eating a strict diet so he could cope with the energy expenditure of high level chess for long periods.
It's weird to see it now framed as like a revolution that making this girl do rapid math problems increased her calorie expenditure.
That reminds me of someone who made a fanny-pack that tracks your walk/run progress and dispenses M&Ms.
https://hackaday.com/2021/07/30/step-n-snack-fanny-pack-moti...
> I feel like this is already known?
I'm not sure about that. I heard a lot of people say "exercise doesn't help you lose weight because you eat more", not "exercise doesn't help you lose weight, because it doesn't really burn calories.".
I think your method is cool because it tricks both the hungry and the logical part of your brain into thinking it can totally have all the food so long as it waits, but by the time 20 minutes is up, the satiation chemicals have found their way to your brain and it's no longer hungry.
In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than day 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.
Ok, that is an interesting finding. But this sounds very specific to aerobic exercise.
The article then mentions how they monitored an active indigenous population, and were "surprised" to find out that "when controlled for non-fat body mass this active population had the same TEE as western sedentary populations" (emphasis mine).
Why is this at all surprising. We've known for ages that muscle increase leads to a basal metabolic rate increase.
The article tries hard to give a visual impression that two similarly rotund people (one from fat and one from muscle) would have an equal TEE, but if you dig into the claim, it's exactly the opposite. In order to get that non-fat body mass difference, you need to exercise. Its just that this needs to be anaerobic rather than aerobic.
We also know that obese people have higher BMRs than their thinner counterparts. Now if the claim in this article is true, then it would imply that the increase in BMR in obese people is exclusively due to a parallel increase in muscle. But we know that muscle increases with obesity. So again, not very surprising.
So, the claim "exercise doesnt work" indeed lacks nuance. Particularly in not addressing aerobic vs anaerobic exercise.
> In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than day 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.
That's wild. Running a marathon will easily burn north of 2000kcals. That's a lot of "something else" the body will have to "not do" to compensate for.
I think that’s true, but have one remark: those studies all scale by fat-free body mass. Exercise can increase that, so exercise that grows your muscles, combined with maintaining the same diet should decrease the derivative of weight over time.
That doesn’t imply you’ll lose weight; if you were gaining weight fast, chances are it will just make you gain weight a bit slower. Even if you’ll lose weight, chances are it will be too slowly to motivate you to continue.
Also note that most obese people already have strong muscles (if you weigh 200kg and can walk, you’re carrying around 100kg or so) and, because of their weight, are injury prone. Becoming stronger through exercise may be very hard for them.
So if you want to lose weight, figure out first why you have a problem to begin with. Because if you don't, then you will lose for a while purely through motivation, and then gain it back when your focus changes to something else.
Of course, there are physiological inputs to the state of mind, as well, which may very well be uncontrollable and largely genetic, so even if you achieve your personal ideal it may not be the body you dream of.
Exercise and the right diet complement each other, and according to this guy it makes only sense: exercise forces the metabolism to burn calories for physical activity instead of stress response, and that means lower levels of stress hormones. The correct diet forces the metabolism to burn glucose stored in the muscle tissue first, and then slowly starts using the energy from the regions where the digestive tract is.
So after decades, the right balance between diet and exercise is still the better way to loose weight and be healthier, however this guy says that body burns calories differently than assumed, each activity burns calories, even if it's sitting on a couch all day.
The limit of 4650kcal per day doesn't sound right. A lot of endurance athletes, even amateurs, burn more than that. How much you can digest is limited (common wisdom is 60-90g of carbs per hour when exercising which is 240-360 calories). Still there are also glycogen stores for additional 1500-2000 kcal as well as your fat stores which are heavily in use during long lasting endurance effort. I assume the limit is meant for long term which would make more sense.
The fact about ultra marathoners who burnt 6200 kcal at the beginning of the race but only 4900 at the end is interesting. Assuming they weigh say 60kg then it takes around 2500kcal to run a marathon. There is a lot of other stuff going on if they burnt 6200 per day. It would be interesting to see if there aren't other information that explains the difference (like hills for example).
Metabolism, the gut flora, those are pretty complex processes. Bacterial imbalance in the gut is a good trail to follow.
Of course ceasing food intake for 1 year would make anybody lose weight, but you can't tell everyone to run 50 miles a week to lose weight. There are obviously other root causes for obesity.
What of the people who tend toward being thin or lithe? I'm 181cm and 68kg (5'11.26" and 150 pounds) at 40 years old.
I can eat and quantity of any food in perpetuity and not gain weight. Although they doesn't mean I don't feel unwell if I were to, say, eat way too much of something.
If I lift weights I gain a small amount of muscle mass, but not much.
What's the theory(ies) of what is going on in the bodies of those like this?
He also has Crohn's disease. I don't want to say that you have, too, but perhaps your digestive system isn't completely OK. That may include composition of your microbiome. Have you ever seen any change after taking probiotics?
And I’m happy to stop reading the article right here and ignore everything this quack has to say.
For myself, I think exercising somehow makes me eat better. It's just a naturally occurring thing that if I start Couch to 5k, after a couple of weeks I stop eating greasy food, chips, pizza, and I eat salads and all around healthier and smaller portions.
So I guess when I lost weight in the past, it was because of the effects of exercising. Not the exercise itself.
Wish I could solve the eating problems, but I'm 58. I get severe anxiety if anyone tries to get me to eat things I don't like. I've skipped dinner parties and other events if I think the food won't be what I like.
It’s important because all the findings seem to be based on it, but the specifics are not discussed.
It relies on the fact that carbon dioxide is transmitted from tissues to lungs in blood as carbonic acid. The carbonic acid is formed by water and carbon dioxide.
It seems extremely accurate as long as you believe the distribution of labeled water equalizes in the body. You can readily see exactly how much labeled oxygen was lost via CO2 (via the carbonic acid reaction).
As long as metabolism and blood transport works the same in all animals, seems reliable.
Yes you can lose weight or maintain weight without exercise, but you can still get diabetes or other aspects of metabolic syndrome.
Plus exercise does help burn more calories. Sure it’s not as strong of an effect, but it helps. The more metabolically healthy you are the more capable you become of managing weight from what I can tell, but obviously to a certain degree you are a victim of your genetics.
> when adjusted for fat-free body mass
The article is not cheating, but it's not underlining this bit which is essential. It's talking about aerobic exercise, which means "trying to run your way to being thin doesn't work". Which may be news for some people on HN from what I see, but is far from being new or controversial.
On the other hand, building muscle gives you a perpetual "eat more" card. It permanently increases your fat free mass, and thus your TEE. I haven't heard anything about a similar increase in appetite - if anything, bodybuilders struggle to eat enough calories. So, boys and girls, definitely hit the gym. Just stay away from the stepper and pick up some weights. Also don't forget protein intake when you do that.
So that's why I became fat as a pig since I started freelancing more than 14 years ago. Because I'm no longer stressed in corporation bullshit politics and actually enjoy working with my clients. Stress free life means less energy used, means eating will get more food transformed into fat. Also probably why I didn't exceeded a certain number, I am at current weight for like a decade now, and I still eat like a pig but I don't gain weight anymore.
Seems is time to go run for politics, increase the stress in my life /s.
https://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/where-does-fat-go/11015048
To burn fat, you need to eat less food so you tap into your fat stores, but you also need to breathe in oxygen and breathe out the carbon dioxide and water.
Exercise essentially helps to decrease your glycogen stores so you get to a fat burning state and in breathing more which will help get more oxygen for the reaction and expel the carbon dioxide and water that are produced.
Commonly in more theoretical sciences like nutritional science, psychology, and astrophysics?
In other words, is anything really truly reliable in these domains?
Check out “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn when you get the chance.
Things like continuous glucose monitors are starting to proliferate, so the measurements are going to get better and more reliable, but it will still take a lot of time to come with some good long term studies where the self-reporting factor is no longer critical.
'fitness starts in the gym, weightloss in the kitchen'
Putting aside our intellect, we our developing towards having little to no fur came with the benefit of being able to sweat, which means we could track animals further than they could persist. It allowed us to effectively outrun, or outwalk, herds of animals.
That comes with a tradeoff, which is the lack of fur means not being able to retain as much heat in the cold. Being able to store more fat is the obvious alternative.
"female farmers in western Africa used the same amount of energy daily when adjusted for fat-free body mass as women in Chicago —about 2400 kilocalories for a 75-kilogram woman. "
or
> launches into a time-honored method to boost her blood pressure: He gives her an oral math test.
Anybody else noticed this gem? I would like to see a list of topics like this - for just to be a better conversationalist.
(It reminds me of how people who don't have children (or don't understand children) when meeting a child they don't know often ask it the only thing they vaguely know about every's child life - how is school?)
Speakman thinks that limit is too low, noting that cyclists in the Tour de France in the 1980s and ’90s exceeded it. But they were injecting fat and glucose directly into their bloodstreams, a practice Pontzer thinks might have helped them bypass the physiological limits on converting food into energy."
Is this really true, that cyclists are injecting fat and glucose directly into their bloodstreams? I can't believe that. I have never heard that before.
I’ve lost 85 lbs since the beginning of May. I lost 40/85 just since the beginning of December through today.
When I exercise I clearly lose weight more quickly. Since December I’ve been running like crazy, at least 5-10km 5-6 days/week. When I lift weights I drop pounds even faster.
Edit: Makes me wonder, though, — if I walk in the morning and solve puzzles on leetcode, would I burn more calories? When I run at night if I solve random math problems in my head will I burn more calories?
Given I have always heard/read how efficient humans are at running if they didn't account for the differing exercise methods the conclusion being offered in this article may be flawed.
I think the key is in this sentence: " According to Herman, humans who are more active don’t have that much higher TEE as you’d predict". ie, you have a higher Total Energy Expenditure, but it's by less than you would calculate from just adding the energy expenditure of the added exercise.
Early 2020 I started to change my life. Exercise, healthier food, weight control. My conclusions: I got stronger, had less back pain and less fat, felt calmer. Weight went down significantly.
After restaurants opened, I started again eating more fat and drinking more wine while continuing exercising and eating healthy at home. Strength and calm stayed, weight got up.
My conclusion: exercise is good in any aspect, but weight control also needs control of calories intake.
I read you lose calories by breathing heavily, as the CO2 leaves your body, etc.
In my opinion, it's not about aerobics, but building muscle mass. Women who pack on muscle burn more calories at rest than women who don't. They may weigh the same but the fat is replaced by muscle. (Women need fat, though, so too much of this can be bad.)
Also some people can eat and eat, whatever they want, and not gain a lot of weight. Genetics has to be part of it.
You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.?
Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that give context and explain not just the research but the people behind it. Let people enjoy things.
science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.
Arxiv needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because much of the content is not peer-reviewed.
At best it should be seen as a warning for possible biases in the science due to the person's background or upbringing, or random life anecdote.
I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too.
I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.
Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing
No, it's written that way to turn the person into a) a character, b) a relatable character.
Regular people like stories, not dry facts piled up.
If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.
I have read that book multiple times, first when I was 10. It left a huge impression on me. I heartily recommend it.
Bill Bryson in general is a great author. One of my favorites.
The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster, lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body greater burden to carry.
If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.
You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians" who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay" or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of the day and they get media exposure.
Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.
Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries.
There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and takes less time than going for a 5 mile run.
> body optimizes for energy expenditure
No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance. Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat, we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and you'll do great.
When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).
So if every day you train for an hour so that your breathing is 3 times faster, then you have additional two hours of burning in a day. 23 usual hours plus one worth 3. So you have 26 instead of 24 hours in a day.
It's way easier to put 15% less on your plate every day than to intensly train for an hour each day while keeping portions the same.
That's estimated and probably impossible.
1000 kcal is 4184000 joules, divided by 3600 it gives you around 1100W
Human at rest burns about 100W. Pro-cyclist can do additional 400W. There's no way you can burn energy at the rate of 1.1kW consistently for an hour unless you literally set yourself on fire.
EDIT:
I was wrong.
Apparently 700kcal burned per hour of cycling is a pretty realistic number. https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-convert...
Also resting kcal burn might be around 1800 per day. So 40% increase in of calories burned by hour of cycling per day every day is achievable.
The question is how can you breathe out additional ~10h of CO2 within an hour?
3 times deeper breathes 3 times faster? Because that carbon has to go somewhere.
https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2020/05/14/how-to-convert...
Also resting kcal burn might be around 1800 per day. So 40% increase in of calories burned by hour of cycling per day every day is achievable.
The question is how can you breathe out additional ~10h of CO2 within an hour?
3 times deeper breathes 3 times faster? Because that carbon has to go somewhere.
You don't necessarily need to exchange 10 times the volume of air to deal with the additional CO2.
So it looks like it could be 25% difference at most.
If there's already 4% of CO2 in the air around you it's an immediate danger. While you can spend 10 minutes in 3%. If your body could bump up CO2 in exhaled air from 4% to 8% then you'd probably have bo problem surviving in air thay contains 4%.
But you'll need to get energy eventually from normal beathing to recycle lactic acid back into glucose in the liver.
So probably after an hour of intense exercise you'll be breathing out more CO2 in the following hours as your body clears up lactic acid.
What's interesting is you get 2ATP from making lactate, but you need 6ATP to recycle lactate back into glucose.
Would that mean that for burning more calories you should have as much of anerobic excercises as possible because it's really ineficient use of glucose?
And to that question as said I am nonexpert. Imho sport after a certain (1h or so) time is a mix of both and should burn most calories in a healthy way. As far as I know there was a downside to having too much lactat. And burning calories aint synonym with burning body fat. Short intensity anerobic training is not atacking bodyfat in my opinion. It only uses the reserv in carbs we have anyway ( around 2000kcal) Biking is the best exercise for bodyfatburning in my opinion. If it is more than 2h.
> They averaged 91 g of carbs every hour across all of the stages.
That's nearly 400 calories worth of sugar simply while riding the bike. In fact, I would say cycling is a clear counterproof of this article. Their equations are literally (calories in)*efficiency = power and they know exactly how much to feed. I don't disagree that 99% of people are better served eating less, but doing cardio for 2 hours a day + diet management will lead to very quick weight loss. "Very quick" here is 2lbs/week but people have some insane expectations.
[1] - https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2021/07/01/how-much-do-th...
@1_player said: > Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.
Lungs can't put in more CO2 in breathed out air.
If you breath only slightly faster when you are running than when you are sitting that must mean you ran quite a lot and optimized your stride so that you don't burn much more calories running than sitting.
But more likely explanation is that you are not aware how fast exactly you are breathing when sitting and running. Try to measure it. Also take into account that you might be taking shallower breaths when you are sitting.
Just blow up a balloon when you are sitting and when you are running with your normal exhaled breath for few seconds to test it.
Again, more speculation, but i would imagine that metabolic disorders involve digestive regulation issues, not just lack of exercise and overeating.
When I was at my heaviest weight, I could only do a normal-speed walk, which burned relatively little calories.
At my lightest, I was also having to go out of my way to eat extra calories, as I was cycling so much, and a fast 90 minute cycle would leave me light-headed if I didn't eat some extra calories.
Bullshit. My body goes through 1600-ish kcal on an idle day.
If I go out on a 4h steady bicycle ride (= 100km), I go through 2000 kcal on ride alone. That’s much more than my body burns just being there.
Cutting empty calories is the easiest to remove calories from daily total.
Exercise further decreases the ratio of calories in calories out.
Bottom line is: calories in - calories out.
There are caveats there for sure, like increasing muscle mass increases idle caloric burn. Different types of food have different effect promoting or impeding metabolism.
For an extreme example compare 100 calories of glucose to 100 calories of fibre, both are types of sugar. The fibre contains an extra electron that acts like a shell, and the body has to expend energy breaking that bond to make it digestible. So most fibre passes through you without affecting your weight.
The most useful measure of food is the Glycemic Load. Not Glycemic Index which is a measure of the net glucose in the food. Glycemic Load is a measure of how the body responds to the food. E.g. cold potatoes have the same calories and GI as hot potatoes, but their measured GL is actually lower, so cold potatoes are better for controlling weight.
Not really, it's just that calories-in is worst-case that's what's on the foods box, you cannot magically produce more energy but it's well known that not everything can be processed by the metabolism with the same efficiency.
So with extremes like your example the difference is naturally huge, but that doesn't matter in practice if one balances their consumption just somewhat it averages out and approaches something between upper (100%) and lower (0%) of efficiency, and in reality it rather close to the upper bound (averaged) as our metabolisms are quite efficient with the food most humans actually put into them.
Your glycemic index rule holds does not violate the calories in calories out rule, it's just more precise regarding the actual upper bound.
I dont have the link to hand, but there is a GL database maintained by Harvard, I think, that demonstrates this. I will look it up later for you.
Likewise "calories out" is not literally calculated by adding up your movement & exercise. We know that things like hormonal levels, etc can all impact how much energy your body is expending.
No, it wasn't. It's the generally accepted model of human weight gain. It's what most scientists who study this topic believe to be true. (And really, it's the only model that makes any sense, and is incredibly easy to test)
They only people who disagree with this model are considered to be outside the mainstream of science. They might be right (I don't think so though) - but it's certainly not debunked.
I'm not a nutritional expert, but...this sounds like bro science. Do you have a source for this, or can someone who knows this better speak to it?
Also, various workouts have a lot of other important effects. Increasing bone strength, improving body resistance to inflammatory processes, developing micro vascular system… simply managing calorie in/out ratio won’t get you any of this. And dropping weight in a dumb way may do more harm than good.
tl;dr: your body burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of exercise. However, it allocates those calories differently: if you don't spend them on exercise then it will spend them on stress (and presumably other stuff).
Which totally makes sense as to why my depression & anxiety fade if I run or work hard.
And yes, it allocates calories towards building fat. Which is a weeeee different from burning them.
Can you explain how this makes sense?
Different physical activities (running vs. sitting, for example) require different amounts of energy to perform. Calories are a unit of measurement for this energy. It sounds like you (via referencing the article) are claiming that a human will expend the same amount of energy in a given period of time regardless of their physical activity.
Yes, that's exactly what the article is saying. If you burn calories doing exercise, the body will spend less on stress response. But if you burn less (or none) on exercise, then it will spend more on other things, eventually coming to roughly the same calorie expenditure (as they measured). Which is why exercise helps with depression - your brain has less calories available to spend on stress responses and generally messing with your mood.
You really should read the article.
What do you mean 'on that ride alone', are you doing more than 4 hours of excersise a day, every day? Because that's like 0.1% of the population, most can't even fit that in their diary, let alone have the stamina/etc.
Average bloke goes to the gym for an hour couple times a week, at that level you calorie consumption is basically unchanged - its withing an error margin of natural variability of food you eat.
From what I observed myself, cutting calories is very difficult and result is miniscule. Adding some cardio (2h/week? 5h/week?) helps so much more and allows more flexibility with food. Also cutting calories does not help to increased overall immunity. Cutting calories is hard on mood (as in, no sugar high and tasty foods are limited) yet exercising allows to keep tasty foods AND gives runner's high. Win-win...
As for tight schedule, I don't believe in gyms. People waste so much time driving to/from favourite/affordable gyms... Running right out home and doing body-weight exercises at home would be both more beneficial to one's health and cheaper.
P.S. I mean regular non-exercise day is 1600kcal. 4 hours ride would be 2000kcal. So exercise day would be ~ 3400. Obviously it long-ride is weekend affair. Then one or two run 10k runs or quick 1h ride (another 1k kcal each). So ideally it adds +500kcal/day. And a lot of cardiovascular health. Well, it was 2 years ago before kid was born... Now it has a loooooot of variation.
This example is kind of bad :-)
You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general.
And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting weights, your example is precisely how you <<would>> lose weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio routine.
Instead of increasing the weight, you'd increase the reps or the motion you use for lifting weights.
It wont make you loose weight however. It will likely make you gain weight as your muscles will grow. Which is explicit goal of many guys who start lifting weights.
When the gyms closed for the pandemic, I lost 5 kg of muscle. After coming back, I started doing fewer sets and have not regained the muscle mass. But my strength (the amount of weight I can lift) is now very close to pre-pandemic levels.
Most "standard adults" (e.g no injuries, obesity or illnesses) would not consider 20 lbs "difficult", to start with. And especially not after 6 months of regular practice.
But as far as I know it's wrong.
A one hour session of strength training will involve some amount of work, and a lot of rest. Compared to doing cardio, where an hour of work is an entire hour of elevated energy expenditure, you're effectively burning a lot less during strength training.
In addition, the "after burn" effect is very minor (in the extra tens of calories only range).
I don't understand, your body optimizes, and uses 20% less energy. However, you are still using the 80% which is more than not doing anything at all don't you?
I think this is quite the claim, maybe you should provide some evidence. I think it sounds reasonable to assume that those that lack the scientific basis will use storytelling to convince, because they have nothing else. But I'm not sure about the reverse.
Here we have storytelling, but the story is peppered with some data from experiments that support the claim. So how does storytelling imply lack of evidence?
If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.
It's not even hard to do, you mostly have to count token frequencies which is hardly machine learning. Although you could also do it with BERT.
Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
"Look how bad I am at reading people."
"I'm worse than you at..."
"I'm so bad that..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
> Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)?
I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example -- it’s increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these days.
Titles matter. A title like “A Short History of Nearly Everything” pretty clearly tells you that there’s going to be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title like “Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories”, you ought to deliver on those promised myth-busting new facts!
I think it’s interesting to consider a) is this a real change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by technology? (i.e. by ads)
At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have article minimum word requirements to account for the second part.
I doubt what colour dog they had and their preference for cornflakes instead of oatmeal at buffets is going to let you enter their scientific mind as such.
I have developed a habit of skipping to the end of the whole page, and reading towards the beginning, paragraph-by-paragraph. Works..sometimes :D
I would say "live and let live". There is enough written content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.
The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer’s past decade or so of work (and I do find the work to be really interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can probably try reading the original papers.
This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer. But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and hard to read.
It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this makes the story better...
I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait and switch.
You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-reading instincts.
How about summarizing the main points at the top for those who are interested in real information instead of the height and weight of the scientist?
The only way is to eat less.and to eat less we need to eat less manufactured food designed to be addictive
Say you are overweight on a 3000kcal diet and start exercising. It is physically impossible to not lose weight if you exercise for more than 3000kcal. You might not lose weight if you exercise a more modest 1000kcal or even just 500 - but the statement that you cannot outrun your diet is trivially false. It might just be much harder than one might naively assume.
The biggest thing is showing how much mental stress plays into calorie burning, enough where an average western lifestyle can have the same calorie burned as a hunter gatherer.
CICO, Calories in/Calories out also doesn't work like that in the human body, because the human body is not a closed system.
... calories are obviously the measure of how much heat you get from burning something, not the heat itself that you're "burning"
I think that's exactly the point: calories can only measure how much we're burning, but what we're burning matters just as much, if not more. If your gas service was cut off, you would (I hope) not pump crude oil into your furnace instead. It might be accurate (as far as it goes) to say that a furnace is a machine for turning hydrocarbon fluids into heat, but you probably respect your furnace and its requirements too much to do something like that. Most people, including too many exercise and nutrition "experts", are all too happy to make oversimplifications nearly as silly when thinking about our own bodies.
no phD needed
Abstract bullshit considered as an overturn of a simple experimental evidence even a freshman could set up and measure.
Has anyone managed to get through this who could post here: what is the conclusion about humans burning calories?
The pandemic starts, I had surgery a month before the working from home mandates, I stopped smoking (5 cigarettes a day, we know they tend to suppress appetite, but it not like meth, there are plenty of fat smokers) and I quickly, say in two months, put on around 10 kg (90 to 100 kg+), and for the first time since I was an early teenager, I had a belly.
I was exercising less, not counting calories at all, I was not spending calories going outside (work, errands, nights out all got cancelled), and I was hungry all the time despite eating more than usual. All factors that can explain my weight gain.
This unfortunate situation goes on for one year more or less, then I started losing some weight by simply eating less and going out more, at least that was my explanation. But I noticed a visible change in body shape and composition after a two-week vacation in which my diet was McDonald's at nights and a huge breakfast in the morning with all calorie-dense food, basically.
Fast forward a few months, some improvement here and there, but I am still not at my pre-pandemic fitness level, still a bit fat, muscles not as visible as I like. I then go to NYC for a couple of weeks and my diet is McDonald's, ice cream and nothing of the healthy sort. Sure, humidity, heat, walking much more, they can all contribute to non-trivial increase in energy expenditure. But I come back looking like a million bucks, pre-pandemic fitness level if not better.
I keep in shape, then I get covid and I pretty quickly put some weight on (again...), say 5-10 pounds (sure, these swings are also water stored in glycogen, some of the weight quickly gained also goes away pretty quickly). I then go on a long-weekend vacation, walk much more than usual but no exercise (gym, running, combat sports), eat and drink more than usual, and, again, I observe a visible change in my body composition. I am leaner, I lost weight, I see (some) abs.
Someone could say, you are simply exercising more via walking and other non-exercise related energy expenditure, and MCDonald's two times a day can be at < 2k calories, which is plenty deficit for my body to lose weight. But as someone who has been tracking calories for a long time and has exercised for decades, I don't think it explains what I am seeing.
I have problems now accepting that our metabolism and our physiology is not a lot more malleable than I (and science) thought it was. I now start to believe that our "state of mind" (conscious or unconscious) can have a much bigger effect on our physiology, including metabolism, than expected according to "settled science". I am talking about our "mind" perceiving a new state of world (vacation for example) and very quickly adapting to the new perceived "stress" by changing my physiology, it could be different nutrient partitioning (decrease insulin resistance?) or simply higher metabolic rate. Or it could be the opposite, such as perceived "normal life" as stressful thus increasing, say, insulin resistance, and vacation as "relaxed mode", decreasing cortisol and insulin resistance etc. We all know we can "think" ourselves sick, but we "think" ourselves leaner?
Still not great as a tl;dr though.
Maybe the book summary on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Research-Really-Calories-Healthy...
Our bodies self-correct to maintain a constant calorie expenditure. Marathoners and lean-mean bush people were found to burn as many calories daily as a middle aged woman from Chicago. Takeaway: eat less if you want to lose weight.
Fasting really isn't all that difficult once you train your brain around it.
You simply can't gain weight if you are consuming less. You don't need a triple PhD to understand the law of conservation of mass.
If you want to read something fairly extreme I suggest the following.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/
Now this isn't a guide on how to lose weight, but it should give everyone some insight into what the human metabolism is capable of.