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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

It’s just physics, really.

A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.

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When I go hiking for a couple of weeks (with significant elevation gain each day), I eat like a pig. I mean, something like 5000 calories a day. I lose weight over that time. So it's possible to lose weight through exercise, however you really do have to spend a very significant chunk of each day doing it for it to work.

Not eating as much takes much less of your busy day.

If you are exercising on a caloric deficit, you are going to feel constantly tired and shitty. I find it way easier to just be on a caloric deficit.

this is not true; I do extended bikepacking trips nutrionally similar to the GP's experience and you feel amazing. Maybe your first time or the first day can be tough but the human body loves to move and consume. I think a good frame of mind is you're a high efficiency furnace pumping out the heat on a very cold day. but this machine actually heals & improves the more it's used!

That’s only true over a relatively short period.

Stuff you can do for a week doesn’t automatically extend to maintaining that over the next 50 years.

it's so much faster to do both at once though, and you retain more muscle mass during it and so on

so long as you can live like a monk and hit the gym every night for a few months it's pretty good. this is dependent on you being able to stand being hungry and cranky and going to bed exhausted for all that time though

In my experience the trick is just to have a small caloric deficit. Then you just feel moderately hungry from time to time, and it's very bearable. The downside is that to consistently maintain a small deficit you have to track your calorie intake quite precisely, which is a pain.

If I eat less, I feel shitty, tired and passive. I move less naturally, because it sux. When I exercise, I feel good, eat as much as I feel like and am keeping/loosing weight.

I do agree that losing weight is easier at first with just eating less, but to play the advocate role: you need a gap of about 3500 calories to lose a pound, but there's a hard daily floor of zero calories. You need to eat less over a long period of time (ideally the rest of your life) and exercise (or medication more commonly) is what keeps you going.

The calorie theory is the same theory that leads people to believe they can exercise to loose weight

"you can't outwork a bad diet"

“You can’t outrun the fork.”

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