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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure daily walks (no heart rate elevation, not HIIT, no muscle being built, etc.) didn't contribute significantly to your mother's weight loss. Moving around is not a significant contributor to weight loss[1]. Diet is the most significant contributing factor to gaining or losing weight. Moving in with someone new, new environment, new dietary changes, etc. might've done significantly more.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/, from the abstract, "Based on the present literature, unless the overall volume of aerobic ET is very high, clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur. "

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Depending on fitness level (cardio, muscle strength, physical weight) walking can very much be strenuous exercise.

Direct caloric burn, long term metabolism changes, etc. for a given activity vary based on the input fitness level of the person.

Calories in is the easiest levee to pull for rapid change as exercising enough for major direct calorie burn is challenging at the beginning. The biggest short term exercise impact is from activities that increase muscle mass as muscle takes calories to maintain thus boosting metabolism.

Well, since I was there, I can say that her diet was mostly unchanged.

I will add that the walks were around an hour to two to get 10k steps and over 4 miles.

I challenge anyone to walk an extra ~25 miles a week with no diet change to see if they gain weight.

Weight loss is simply calories in - calories out. If she walked an hour a day and ate the same amount, she was burning around ~300 extra calories a day.

Pretty sure her daily walks did contribute significantly to her weight loss.

Calories in - calories out fails to explain why people consume and expend as many calories as they do. As the series discusses, many calorie sinks such as fidgeting and body temperature are subconscious or autonomic and seem to be used by our bodies to help regulate our weight. And some people clearly have very strong hunger drives.

Clearly something has changed over the past hundred years. Saying that we got richer fails to explain why the rich people of yore, while fat by the standards of their day, are not fat by modern standards. Saying we have gone down hill in terms of sticktoitiveness is not really a verifiable claim and does nothing to offer a solution. So it is absolutely worth further investigating what is going on.

Food scientist do engineer foods to make you want to eat more of it (and not feel full). It is hard to resist processed food technology.

>If she walked an hour a day and ate the same amount

If she does more activity, she gets hungrier. This will pressure more eating. Fighting that is a losing battle for majority of dieters.

Furthermore, consider that the body is a lot more complicated than "calories in, calories out". It can change your hunger level, lower the body temperature, reduce energy spent on fighting disease...

Also, women seem to lose more weight from walking than men do.

(I do apologize as my response was based on a science article that I read not too long ago but I cannot find it to substantiate my claim)

If you're sedentary, walking is going to boost your heartrate

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