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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

I exercise a fair bit, and I still struggle to lose weight, I'm doing about 500 calories of movement a day, which means my maintenance diet is about 2500 calories. Trust me, it's really easy to go over that. So yes if you want to lose weight, it's just a fact that you need to look at your diet primarily.

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I'm naturally skinny and trying to gain weight (muscle mass) and also do around 500 calories a day of movement so aiming for 3000 calories.

It just goes to show what a big influence baseline appetite and food choices make because I find it really hard to eat that much and always wonder how people manage it in just three meals

The average American snacks on calorie-dense foods one or two times per day

I have no idea what your source is for this, but I'm shocked it's that low per day

I used to be naturally skinny and worked very hard to bulk up for years. At 41, I now regret that as I am heavier than I should be, though do not appear overweight. And I have osteoarthritis in my hips which the extra weight does not help.

By the way, if you are skinny (or worse, skinny + fat), you have to gain weight by eating healthy food, otherwise you will just gain more fat.

The best approach I've been able to follow has been protein shakes with body building diets.

Julian from HN has a great guide on this: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro

Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12618223

Is 500 calories of movement a lot? Googling says that is running for about 45 minutes? Or walking for 90 minutes. Doing housework would only need about 2 hours to hit that.

500 calories excess is significant. Burning 500 calories in 2 hours doing housework is only an excess of ~300 calories, since you'd burn 100 calories an hour just sitting.

I only mentioned the housework because it was listed on the google result. And I'm fairly confident most of us have far more than 2 hours of house work that needs to be done.

That's running 5 miles a day. Everyday. That takes months of training for an already fit young person to build up to.

90 minutes of extra walking is a lot of time to offset a snack that could be eaten in 1 minute.

That is just the run, though? My point in mentioning the other things is that it isn't that much, all told.

I also 100% think that your offset point is a big part of it. 90 minutes walking the dog outside is doubly beneficial because you are not snacking during the time.

To be honest I just weighed myself and I have lost weight.

I think it's a fair amount. I try hit 10000 steps a day, go to the gym, do occasional runs.

If you are getting 10k steps a day in, I'm assuming that is already 3-400 calories right there?

I should be clear. It isn't that I don't think 500 is enough to make a difference. I legit didn't know if it was a lot of extra calories to burn.

I've been walking my kids from the bus stop lately, and my exercise thing is convinced I'm getting about 600 calories in from that. (To be clear, I run to the bus stop, and then walk them back. Two trips, due to different drop off times.) I assumed I also need to do other work on top of that.

i have a very simple technique.

i don't eat one day a week when i want to lose weight. the next day i pay attention to eat slowly.

and i do moderate exercise simply to keep the fluids pumping in my body.

(precondition being that when you eat all days of the week your weight remains more or less stable, including exercise)

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