Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.
The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight.
Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
This doesn't even require you to be an athlete, or do extensive physical activity. Add even a half-hour jog three days a week to your otherwise-mostly-sedentary routine and you'll tend to engage in "compensatory eating" even if you don't realize it.
This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density) than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose to do so.
>that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."
After I started doing moderately long and fast bike rides (200+km/week, flat and hilly terrain, averaging 70km/ride during summer, 100+ if I have enough time), I have found that:
- compared to "not much exercise" (some periods during winter), it modulates my hunger. I do not eat more, or only proportionally.
- when the rides are longer than cca. 50km, I start losing weight (not just water, weight, sustained)
- after several days with no exercise, my hunger starts to increase again. In other words, I have to exercise to not overeat. I don't understand this effect, but it works for me, and it's been like this for many years.
People downplay how important consistency is when trying to make changes to their lifestyle. Walking is good but whatever the exercise, a sustainable plan is best.
Same reason behind having a list when you go to the grocery store and sticking to it rather then buying whatever looks good then and there.
I hate /fit/ and the bodybuilding forums so much. Stupid memes like this, SS, GOMAD, and related exist and continue to be parroted because of them. No, using a segway to move in between weight machines will not preserve your gains.
The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal. I applaud folks like Chloe Ting (a "cardio bunny" aesthetic youtuber who specialize in Calistenics) who roast these guys by challenging them (bodybuilder roid bros) to keep up with her on her exercise routines. Watching these dudes collapse again and again because they have pathetic endurance and don't do meaningful cardio reminds is delicious to say the least.
If you get your diet advice from Zyzz, Rich Piana, or the rest of the memeloards of fitness, you deserve what's coming to you. Don't skip leg day.
> The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal.
This is a very ungenerous and incorrect take.
It is their prerogative to decide what outcome they want to maximize when it comes to their own body. I don't think any bodybuilder is under the delusion that they are particularly healthy when on the bodybuilding stage - they're not trying to be healthy, they're trying to win a specific competition with specific rules around it.
You might not like their goal or think it's stupid, but they are making the correct decisions for the outcomes they care about, and there's nothing wrong with caring about different things.
> Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back down if you cease that extra activity.
About 10 years ago I started taking 45 minute daily walks with no other changes in my diet or activities and the extra weight (about 15 lbs overweight) melted away. I made absolutely no effort to eat less and didn't get any hungrier.
That depends on your pace and your previous level of activity. If the pace is average and your previous level was ~0 then yes, you're expected to benefit a lot for not much effort.
But to answer your question, walking at average pace is not extensive exercise by any means. Walking at top possible speed would be closer but would probably still not meet the bar. You'd need to incorporate running at moderate pace with a few periods of all-out sprinting into your walking routine.
Also former fat guy here. I absolutely have not had that experience. I have easily maintained being fat (or even gained) while running 15-20k a week and walking everywhere. It's only when I actively moderate my eating have I lost weight. Otherwise I'd just slam down Oreos or whatever. It's stupid easy to get unfilling high calorie food.
It's good that it worked for you, but it clearly doesn't work for everyone.
I just got a rather heavy physical job. Every shift is humbling. :P
I see a personal trainer on youtube one time who summarized all the components of weight loss so wonderfully I cant help but feel I butcher the topic whenever I talk about it.
The number one thing is sleeping. Go though the carnival of things people try to get their sleep sorted out.
The second thing is stress of both kinds. You need to be able to calm the fuck down. The body stores as much as possible in survival mode.
Then comes food. Your body need to adjust to burning fat for energy. People do this with tiny fasts and keto but (my entirely untested theory) is that you should fast for as long as it feels comfortable (no stress) then break the fast with keto. You start with something small, wait a bit then can eat quite a lot as long as there is no sugar and no carbs on the plate (keto). Then you do the next fast for as long as you can comfortably do. If you feel like complete shit eat some potatoes or even sugar and get back to the routine. Switching from carbs to fat cold turkey creates unwanted stress.
Then (if you didn't already) start mixing in a small amount of moderate physical activity. Walking for an hour per day is the goal. Keep an eye on what feels comfortable. Stay in the comfort zone. You may have to shorten the fast or eat a bit more between the fasts.
You don't have to go there but there are people who regularly fast for weeks and only have some cravings the first 1-2 days. They are obviously losing weight when they do that.
There are people who add [mild] strength training, will eat more and gain muscle weight. The good kind of weight.
If you add cardio you will also eat more but (like you said) you will feel like shit almost instantly after eating shit. From my experience I think it might actually kill you if you drain your reserves and try to replenish it with bullshit, say deep fried mars bars. You will be less capable fighting of diseases, infections or injuries when completely drained. You will quickly accumulate all the right stomach bacteria to create cravings for all the right things to eat.
Whatever you chose to do, it isn't about what you can do and accomplish today. It has to be a routine that will last 10-20 years. If you go from extensive athletic physical activity to sitting on the sofa for a few months the athletic digestive system is still there.
There was a fun study where they looked at big eaters both skinny and fat. Both ate just about everything but the skinny ones ate a lot more fat and the fat ones ate a lot more carbs. It seems to suggest that for the really lazy fat people an extra bucket of chicken to avoid eating a pizza might be worth a shot. More butter and more eggs per slice of bread. Two steaks and 1/3 the potatoes. etc
I'm not saying it will work but it would be fascinating if it did.
> Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
That sounds like more or less exactly what the title says to me.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity
Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> not really useful for personal or localised health advice
It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'm not claiming that there's zero issues with eating less, or that people shouldn't exercise, just that the arguments seem to be off base.
I'm going to push back on this a bit, though I agree with some of the sentiment.; to the average person wanting to lose weight, I think the best advice is obviously to eat less via whatever diet works for them (I personally recommend counting calories, but it's not for everyone).
That said, you write:
> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.
First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.
Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.
> It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.
> Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
Yet perhaps taking a huge time commitment during which you won't be able to eat much is exactly what is needed.
> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.
You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.
Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.
I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.
That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.
Reminds me of when I got my first job at 17...I worked at a large department/grocery store. My job primarily consisted of pushing karts from the corrals back to the store.
In an 8 hour shift, I likely walked ~15 miles, with half of that time pushing up to a dozen karts. For lunch, I'd go to the McDonald's and get a Super Size (Since this was when that still existed) Double Quarter Pounder meal with a Coke. I'd chug the whole coke and then refill it. This meal was easily 3,000 calories, and I'd eat it 3 times a week.
After about two months on the job, I'd STILL lost about 5 lbs.
Polar explorers Fienes and Stroud were eating locks of butter and still losing weight on their sled pulling expedition. It was estimated that they were buring up to 11,000 calories a day.
Your McD's meal was probably closer to 2000 calories, even with the giant Coke. For a short period I ate one meal a day, even when I thought I went over maintenance with a massive fast food treat, I'd still be 4-500 cals under if I was active that day.
Yup, we have a limit in our ability to take in and metabolize calories, although it is somewhat flexible in that if you do it enough you'll get better at it. Look at the people who do the long thru-hikes. Stuff like the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to the highest point in Maine), PCT or CDT (both run from the Mexican border to the Canadian border). They will hit saturation on the ability to take in calories, although enough time out there can increase the ability to metabolize fat (very useful in that it has about 2x the calories per pound of other food)
But you are right that it's very definitely about the balance.
You make a good point about the time investment. You were able to do your exercise while working, but very few people will spend 16-24 hours a week working out.
I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.
If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.
I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.
Sure but for the purposes of mass communication or creating helpful and memorable aphorisms "you can't out run a bad diet" is an appropriate summarization of the research.
If it's all ppl get out of it, the worst that might happen is that a handful of up & coming elite athletes might need their coaches to help them unlearn it, as opposed to the status quo where literal millions of ppl are trying & failing to outrun their diets.
Right, and that's fine. A saying that's true for 99% of people is a perfectly good saying. In the vast, vast majority of cases, "you can't outrun a bad diet" is completely true.
Your time running 85 miles a week is so outside the norm that your experience isn't even worth mentioning when evaluating that saying.
Elite endurance athletes have awful diets by any normal standard, because the only way to fuel yourself adequately for a stage of the Tour de France or an ultramarathon is with nauseating amounts of refined carbohydrates. It's not even the fun kind of junk, just a constant effort to eat as much carbohydrate as your gut can possibly tolerate.
"somewhere between 60-120g carbs/hour" and that's on the flat stages (more in the mountains) of TdF would be considered junk food anywhere outside of sport.
> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.
For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.
For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.
But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.
Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.
Powerlifting does not take as many calories as you'd think. In fact, lifting in general is surprisingly easy on the calorie requirement, so most powerlifters and bodybuilders incorporate cardio as part of their routine. You will burn a lot more calories by walking 10,000 steps a day for 1 month than you would doing an intense lifting session each day.
The reason you're probably thinking as to why lifters eat a huge amount is precisely because they're already large and muscular. Just 5% less bodyfat at the same weight results in roughly 200 more calories at maintenance for someone that is around 93kg.
A vigorous weightlifting workout for an hour will burn about 400kcal[1], which is roughly equivalent to walking 10k steps depending on your body weight. Another way to think of this is 100 minutes of brisk walking will round out to about 400kcal.
You don't really burn more calories walking, it's just easy to do and fit in around other things.
Weird hill to die on - 400 is probably the top end for a super heavy day at a higher bodyweight - maybe deadlift primary and squat secondary day? Walking for 10,000 steps will every day will certainly burn more calories.
Regardless, people who lift aren’t eating more just because they burn a couple of hundred calories 2-5 times a week.
You’re wrong about that, look up videos of strongmen and bodybuilder meals/eating routines. The 2 hour workouts at the top of these fields are very calorie intensive.
Bodybuilders eat a lot in the offseason because they're on tons of drugs and trying to maximize the amount of lean mass they can put on, and they eat more in general because when you have 100lb+ more muscle than the average person you have a significantly higher base metabolic rate. You can go on a variety of PED related forums and find IFBB pro's posting food logs, etc., and see that these crazy eating routines are limited to certain parts of the year, and even then have been falling out of favor - the 'lean bulk' for pros is more popular than ever.
Very few IFBB pros are working out in 2 hour sessions, either. Coaches understand junk volume way better now and know that a lot of the work being done previously just wasn't providing much muscle growth stimulus after a certain point. Most are spending <8 hours in the gym each week in general.
The top of the bodybuilding field is not eating a ton of food because of their lifting routines burning a bunch of calories.
I have lifted for 30+ years and something very un-intuitive with powerlifting is the optimal weight class for a height is extremely high.
If you are 5'10" you are pound for pound stronger at 240 than at 198. 198 will be dominated by someone who is shorter otherwise.
You are also much stronger the more you weigh, period. Strongman are eating so much to keep their weight up, not because they are burning so many calories while working out.
Even the most intense prowler workout that will make an untrained person puke their guts out is easy to out eat.
It is easiest to see with a contest bodybuilding diet. Even a 250lb bodybuilder who is doing a ton of working out is basically eating nothing. The body is incredibly efficient at holding on to weight. If it wasn't, humans would have starved to death a long time ago.
my anecdata aligns with yours. A year of cardio every day and resistance 6 days a week bought me no weight loss, 2 years of limiting myself to 1800 cals/day on top of that stripped me of 25% of my body weight.
Cool, but being physically active is not just to lose weight but to gain health. Your heart works more, your lungs work more, they develop a bit more, putting more oxygen in your body and the effects compound over time. So if you can, do both: control calories intake and exercise.
I did exactly that, and I thought I made that clear in my original comment but maybe I was unclear. With that being said, this article is about drivers of obesity so weight control is sort of the topic du jour itt.
All impressive numbers, but it seems like the move would be to keep doing #1 while being slightly less restrictive about #2 and just as restrictive about #3, which will eventually leave you not just lighter, but with a good level of fitness if you aren't already there. It's way easier to keep excess weight off and feel great about it if you're practicing athletics of some sort regularly
If you're drinking beer or wine it is certainly very calorie dense. You're looking at 208 kcal per pint of beer or 123 kcal for a 5oz pour of wine. A pound of fat takes about 3,500 excess calories, or 16 pints of beer. So if you drink 2 a day all else equal you could gain nearly 1 lb a week.
This is just pointless ceteris paribus because genetics are the biggest variable.
If someone has a predisposition to diabetes they can't drink alcohol and hold things ceteris paribus because of the way alcohol effects the liver and then effects insulin.
Insulin sensitivity gets worse, blood sugar is all over the place and then the person is on a rollover-coast of over consuming calories to try to stabilize blood sugar.
IMO your post is why almost all dieting advise is just complete oversimplified nonsense. Meaningless ceteris paribus linear combinations that mostly add up to a non-reality for a non-linear complex system. It is a way for people to pick and chose what they want to be true.
Another thing you can do is one day of regular calories, and one day of zero.
You still average to 1200 a day, but I think it's better for you for several reasons you can look into if interested.
I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day and do resistance training 6 days/week. I also have limited myself to 1800 cals/day and at least 130g protein. For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs which, at my height, is bordering on clinical obesity. If you could be healthy just by training and eating what you want I would have done it twice.
Oh no, I lost weight when I was on the 1800kcal. it was when I was working out what I intuitively feel like is a lot more than most people but still eating what I wanted that I didn't lose weight, which anecdotally fits with the premise of the article.
You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".
For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.
An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)
So you didn't outrun a bad diet. You counted calories and matched your diet to your exercise (or vice versa) to get the weight outcome you wanted.
I think some here are narrowly interpreting "bad diet" to mean "lots of junk food". While yes, that's not a great diet, what's really meant is a diet where calorie intake regularly exceeds expenditure, regardless of what you're eating.
Even if you eat only the healthiest of foods, if your intake is too much for what you're burning, that's still a "bad diet".
I don't think that's a reasonable way to define the phrase. If "bad diet" is defined in terms of how much exercise you do, then "you can't outrun a bad diet" is a tautology.
I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.
Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.
Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.
For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.
You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.
I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.
A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.
If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.
And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.
The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.
Pointing out that elite endurance athletes and olympic athletes can have high calorie requirements isn't helpful or the point. Yes, energy must come from somewhere, but even among the generally fit and active portion of the population, only a vanishingly small number of them exercise at the intensity and time requirements to burn so many calories as to not easily have all of that thwarted with a single meal.
> The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.
Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.
Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat.
The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.
Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance
Your examples sound like fairly short-term biological responses to intense activity, which are likely different than long-term biological response to a significant increase in daily calorie expenditure.
I've done a fair amount of wilderness backpacking. It's common to lose your appetite for the first few days due to the change in environment, schedule, activity, etc. But pretty quickly your body will realize this is going to keep happening and it's going to need to make up the extra 1000+ calories you're burning every day.
If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn more calories than your baseline.
But if you do that workout often enough, for various reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure.
This means that if you want to lose weight consistently, working out is useless in that sense. You might see benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but eventually your body adjusts.
Working out is great for a plethora of reasons. And this calorie budget rebalancing is one of them, since it means inflammation or auto-immune responses get downregulated.
Losing weight is not one of those benefits. Whereas it is often held up as such which leads to intense disappointment and relapse with overweight people, because they think "oh, if I just go for six intense two-hour jogs a week, I can keep eating sumptuously."
How exactly can your body adjust that much though? There is some minimum baseline level of calorie burn to stay alive and keep your body temp etc.
If you workout enough calories that exceeds the minimum baseline to keep you alive, the body can't adapt below that or adapt into the negative.
For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories, so that's 12,000 a week for 6 times a week.
What's the lowest a body will adapt to slow it's baseline metabolic rate? I am reading that the BMR can only reduce by like maybe 15-20% due to body adaptation.
This would put their baseline calorie burn at around 1500, and then if they are burning ~1700 a day from their jogging, they can eat 3200 a day to maintain or 3000 to even slowly lose weight over time, which is a decent amount that you can have a pretty fun "diet" of what you consume IMO.
> For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories
ogging a mile will burn around 100kcal, a bit more if you're decently overweight, let's be generous and say 150kcal. Someone who isn't in good shape and is overweight (the kind of person we're likely talking about) isn't going to be running that fast, maybe 3mph. So that's 6 miles in 2 hours. Even if I'm incredibly generous and say they'll burn 200kcal/mi, that's only 1200kcal. But in reality it's probably more like 900kcal.
But let's be real here. Your average (even above-average) overweight person with a not-so-great diet is not going to be jogging for 2 hours. Maybe they'll jog for an hour. So 450-600kcal. And maybe they'll do that 2-3 times a week.
1350-1800kcal extra burned every week is great! Except that still probably won't be what happens, exactly. Unless this person is also counting calories, or consciously working hard to keep their exact same diet, they will probably unconsciously eat more. Adding a 9mi/week jogging regimen to your life, especially if you're overweight, is going to make you more hungry than usual, so you will eat more. How much? Well, hard to say. Maybe enough so that you still end up with a calorie deficit, but in many (most, I'd guess) cases you'll still have a surplus, even if less than before.
This is all still a good thing! A 500kcal surplus per week when you're running 9 miles is much better than a 1500kcal surplus every week with no exercise. But this (hopefully) demonstrates that it's not as simple as "I'll just add some exercise and that'll get my weight under control". You need to change your diet, and take in fewer calories. It's hard. But it's the only way -- for the vast majority of people -- that this will work.
I never really found the eating more when exercising more that compelling personally. I mainly meal prep and eat the same amount whether or not I work out and how hard I work out.
I feel like saying that someone is going to eat more because they are start exercising a lot is a separate topic. But I would think that someone who has the willpower to start exercising drastically more also has the willpower to control what they physically put in their mouth. I have personally found that stopping putting things in my mouth to eat is easier than getting myself to exercise as much as I would like to, so I don't think it's a guarantee that someone choosing to exercise more will automatically eat more.
For a 200 lb man, just jogging doesn't burn 1000 kcal/hr. You have to actually run at a pace of about 8:30 min/mi. People who can sustain that for 2 hours per day every day are not overweight in the first place.
I lost between 50-70 pounds in a year, and I used a Garmin smartwatch which I wear all hours to track my calorie expenditure, which is pretty accurate. I think this effectively allows you to ignore the kind of exercise. You just keep track of your calorie burn. If your workout doesn't burn enough calories, you do more.
"A substantial proportion of obese U.S. adults who attempted to lose weight reported weight loss, at least in the short term. Obese adults were more likely to report achieving meaningful weight loss if they ate less fat, exercised more, used prescription weight loss medications, or participated in commercial weight loss programs."
Also somewhat interesting that eating diet products negatively correlated with weight loss
One could read that as exercising more or eating less both work.
Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.
Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute workout.
Not eating those chips is WAY easier than trying to burn them off after the fact.
I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.
What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?
When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.
Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.
> I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.
That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.
Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.
> You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
Not sure I agree with that. I think it's probably true that adopting even a minimal exercise regimen is easier than adjusting diet, for most people.
But actually turning that new exercise regimen into a calorie deficit is significantly harder. Not only do you have to exercise probably quite a bit per week to get you into a deficit, you have to actively work to not eat more. If you start an exercise regimen, I guarantee you're going to be hungrier, and unless you're very strict with yourself, you can easily eat enough extra to wipe out most or all of the new calorie "savings".
This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is an advocate for it, and has been for a while.
Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.
I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.
My understanding is that the research shows that a highly active hunter gathering and an inactive office worker burn roughly the same number of calories per day. But I find that hard to believe. What is the office worker's body doing to make up the difference for all the movement and muscle contraction?
Human bodies are highly efficient at certain movements, e.g. walking. There's also a complicated part of hunter gatherer life style where you don't know if you'll find something if you walk another mile, so often the response is to just... not do that.
Being able to have a life style where you're constantly expending energy, like training athletes do, really only works if you're guaranteed food, which is generally not how hunter gathering works.
Lots and lots (and lots) of small subconscious movements throughout the day. Many thousands of them. Moving your heard around, tilting it a bit, wiggling your toes, rolling your shoulders, scratching an itch, etc.
Anecdotally, I believe I have a personal example of the sort of thing that changes. I went from being ultra-sedentary to exercising 5+ days a week over the past year. My body had enough of these tics that they had long since passed over the subconscious and unnoticed level into "why the fuck do I keep bouncing my legs around all the time when sitting or in bed." Now, I never do. After years of trying, I stopped making any sort of intentional effort to stop - and even things like weighted blankets, etc., in the past did nothing.
Now, I just don't do it. I fidget less at my desk while working. I make a whole lot less 'random' movements for no discernible reason.
Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more regular exercise.
(Now, of course, exercise is hugely important for a variety of other health factors)
>Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more regular exercise.
Fidgeting will obviously burn some calories. But I find it hard to believe that fidgeting will burn the same amount of calories as sustained exersize.
I have heard some suggestion that the extra energy is being burned at a cellular level (causing inflammation). But would be office work get hot if that was the case?
I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”
This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.
That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.
In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”
Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet
Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram whatever I can into my body. It’s pretty much whatever I feel like eating, I’m going to eat".
I think the challenge with swimming is that there is thermodynamics of swimming through water to also contend with. So your body is also having to keep warm whilst losing heat to better heat conducting fluid (water vs air). But I still agree, if Phelps was running or even walking with the same effort he could eat similarly.
I don't know about possible, but I'm sure the Michael Phelps regimen is wildly impractical for everyone, including Michael Phelps.
My personal experience is that "outrunning" a poor diet is absolutely possible, and I kind of did it unintentionally. I started biking to work out of necessity. I wasn't planning to lose weight, but it happened. I had no weight loss ambitions or plans, but it was probably a good thing.
I can't take this Luka slander. The guy carried the ungrateful Mavericks team for 6 seasons averaging 35mpg. He's not out of shape. Same thing with Jokic, 10 seasons of 32mpg average. Their mpg also go up in the playoffs.
People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.
I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for one of the greatest players ever.
I'm a Luka fan, but he does look a (hehe) little chubby these past 2 seasons and it has impacted his game noticeably. Just compare the explosiveness from his first seasons to now
Doesn't matter how you look, if you can play those kind of minutes and perform like they do you're in athletic shape. Luka and Jokic don't need to be super slim like Edwards, Morant and Westbrook because they don't rely on supernatural athleticism - they rely on other facets of their game where having a bit more mass is advantageous or at the very least not detrimental.
In any case, Doncic got bullied and embarrassed by Mavs FO's comments about his weight and work ethic(complete lies to try and save face for their terrible and shady trade) so you can look forward to a slimmer Luka next season.
I feel you are precisely making the opposite point. Athletes eat more because of their energy expenditure. The same happens with people trying to lose weight. It dramatically increases your hunger making a cut that much harder.
I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work or life.
> The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.
That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.
I think if the goal is to find out what strategies help average people lose weight - who are mostly not athletes or bodybuilders - then excluding athletes is exactly the right thing to do.
>the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.
--you
>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity
--the article headline
I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.
For most people, a 1 hour moderate run is only about 1-2 cookies worth (and only half a Crumbl cookie). Even a marathon run might only burn 2000 calories . a chipotle burrito is 1600 .
In other words, for 95% of people doing activity, they shouldn't eat any surplus if their goal is to maintain or lose weight.
It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it. Loss of this sensation is a major obesity driver. A numbness for nutrients.
Eating while actually being hungry is a great sensation. That's why I stopped snacking/sugar treats, it always spoil my hunger for when it's meal time. On the other hand, when I have having my meal, no restriction on veggies/meat/fish, open bar, I eat as much as I want.
I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of calorie abundance.
I generally tend to feel annoyed when people that are hungry start treating like an emergency.
You're right that it's easy to out-eat the running you can sustain as a regularly fit person, but there's no "only" about 2000 calories
2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to compensate for that marathon
> It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it.
Not exactly my experience.
My did a exercise schedule involves climbing a mountain every week. The mountain is about 400 meters (that's ~1312 feet, or more than four American football fields laid end-to-end) tall, and the exercise was usually done during afternoon (1 or 2 hours before dinner) without eating lunch.
After two mouths of that, I've noticed:
1. My weight or belly size don't really changed much. I also notice that some people who also frequented the mountain have big bellies.
2. I got very hungry after that, which triggers me to eat more during dinner, usually salty food.
3. The delight of salt becomes craving, probably due to the lost of liquid/electrolyte through sweat (and tears, probably).
4. For comparison, I stops craving salty thing the next day.
I guess you need to actively suppress some of your inner urges to really make the "nutrition feedback sensation" work. Otherwise, exercise more only leads to consume more.
P.S. Also, doctors really can't recommend doing heavy physical activity with empty stomach, as it might increase your heat rate or something (I might be hearing it wrong). I've since changed the schedule so I can eat something before start climbing, though my belly size still remained the same, and I'm still craving for salty food if uncontrolled.
But maybe it's just because I don't know how to do it correctly.
You're mistaking active calories as the only calories you burn a day. There's a reason the caloric intake recommendation is ~2kcal/day, because your RMR (resting metabolic rate) is ~2kcal/day. Meaning if you were to literally sit in bed all day, you are "burning" ~2kcal/day. On top of that you have your incidental energy expenditure per day (TDEE), aka walking to the fridge, taking a shit, general locomotion, etc. You then have active calories burned on top of that. If you were to run a marathon, that means you would need to eat ~5kcal in one day to break even.
If someone would have eaten 3 meals for a sum of 2000 cal, with one being a 500 calorie meal, and they decide to switch that out with a 1600 calorie chipotle burrito, then the excess calories they need to burn are only 1100. Which a half marathon would more or less cover.
The situation you described only makes sense if they're eating 2000 calories worth of food during the day then adding an extra chipotle burrito.
Re: your 2nd marathon comment, if someone is eating two 800 calorie meals a day plus an extra 1600 calorie burrito, that comes out to 3200 calories. Minus the 2k resting expenditure, minus the 2k marathon expenditure, they're 800 calories short so they do need to consume more.
Is, I believe, the argument GP is making.
I don't disagree with you, I think the amount of exercise most people are capable of doing on a daily basis the extra calorie needs are insignificant. But I think your examples overstate the point.
Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means of that. The occasional “cheat” (mostly social events really) slows the process down but don’t really stop it. It’s not really a fast process though… but it strongly depends on how under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping myself between 8000 and 10’000 steps a day was sufficient.
That’s great progress. It comes down to inverting the normal indulgence cycle. Once you discover that under-eating can feel better than over eating – you feel immensely better.
> "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice going on in the background," Pontzer says.
I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Spikiness and variability are probably good for you. Its funny that the Bryan Johnson types who closely control every calorie in their body have such a bad reaction to any variability. I don't know if its him, but I heard someone not be able to sleep and their levels got all messed up from one sweet. And their conclusion was sweets are so bad for you, rather than you're building your body to be too fragile to shocks.
The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
That's exactly the point the grandparent comment was making though. Because they aren't chronically eating at competition levels is the reason they aren't overweight. They have a high calorie moment, followed by low calorie stretches.
> Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic.
Suggests that your metabolism is changing, as though your body becomes more or less efficient at burning calories because you're eating more or less. Instead, these guys eat a huge surplus of calories and then go into a deficit to get back to their standard weight.
Sure he cuts back his calories, but 70 hotdogs is about 21k calories. I don't think he goes into a 21k calorie deficit over the next few weeks. That's an insane deficit. That would be the equivalent of not eating for 8.5 days, which is not possible since it would mess with his training. He probably cuts it back some fraction of that, say 10k and his body's increased metabolism adjusts for the rest.
It would be interesting to know what amount of the calories from the 70 hot dogs is actually absorbed, versus how much is excreted without being absorbed.
Your body is not converting all 21k calories to fat in an event like that. There are many physiological limits to caloric conversion to fat.
I'm not exactly sure what their bodies are doing, but I guarantee you my body would get rid of that food extremely quickly before it was fully digested.
A 21K deficit over 3 weeks would be 1000 Cal/day of deficit. For comparison, this is the amount of deficit required to lose 2 pounds per week, which many people do.
> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.
Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.
Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.
Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.
In addition to food being much tastier than ever before, it’s also much cheaper. Despite current inflation and cost of living concerns, we spend far less on food than any time in history. Food in the 1960 was almost twice as expensive as it is today. Food costs used to be higher than housing costs!
Depends on the goal is. If you life is full of shocks then build for shocks. If you life is not build for shocks it makes sense to optimize for your existence. You certainly don't want to overfit the model as you are describing but you don't want to build a life around expecting shocks when none arrive. As with all things, it is a balance.
Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.
Some do this, some go on binge fast cycles. Others just eat the food. It's different for everyone. Binge fast cycles are probably the easiest way to train this though.
Diet to manage your weight. Exercise to manage your fitness.
It's real simple in theory and real difficult in practice. Super worth it, though. Your entire world starts opening up when things take less energy to do and you have more energy to give. It's very challenging to convey how important it is without living the experience.
Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently. Too many people go through theses cycles of "I'm going to cut out this, this and this to lose X pounds" and then drop it once they hit their goal or it ends up being too hard. While you might not shed pounds as quickly, if you focus on making sure you get varied, satiating, nutritious food(actually nutritious, not falling for the abundance of marketing out there), then you'll have an easier time resisting the temptation to gorge on treats and getting too many calories.
Language changes over time, and "diet" is very commonly used as shorthand for "restrictive food intake" or "caloric restriction." But a reminder that "diet" is short for "dietary intake", and is not prescriptive. "A healthy diet" is a common phrase for "permanently good eating habits."
The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food intake."
This is true to an extent and I'm very fond of the saying, but beyond a certain point you can indeed outrun a bad diet.
I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing, BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted without gaining weight.
I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back then that I am unable to today.
So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running than most people want to do!
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."
It's not that it doesn't matter, it's the asymmetry. You can eat a small chocolate bar that costs $1 (or whatever) in about 15 seconds, and it will take you 2 hours of walking to wear off the calories.
It's more complicated than this, because muscle raises your basal metabolic rate.
If you look at bodybuilders, they're buring 400 calories a day, regardless of exercise. Having an extra 100 pounds of muscle means your body just burns A LOT of calories doing absolutely nothing.
This is part of the reason why men burn more calories than woman just right out of the gate.
> men burn more calories than woman just right out of the gate
Sure, but parent's point is that the energy input from sugary snacks like chocolate roughly equates to a significant amount of exercise. (Over an hour of walking). -- Maybe the caloric equivalent amount of walking is a little longer or shorter for different bodies.
How might you take action from this understanding, though.
Gaining an extra 100 pounds of muscle is hardly an easy/tangible feat.
"Reducing intake of sugary snacks" is going to be easier than "walk for over an hour".
You don't need 100 pounds of muscle to reap the benefits.
My point is, yes eating a sugary snack takes 1 hour of walking. But it doesn't take 1 hour of weightlifting. It can take 0 hours of weightlifting, if you've already been weightlifting.
Even with walking and running, you do build muscle. When the treadmill says 100 calories, you didn't actually burn 100 calories - you burned 100 plus the increased rate from the muscle you gained.
So, if you're an athletic person, you're burning more calories regardless of if you work out. Just by existing, sleeping, whatever, you have a big head start. For some athletes, this head start is in the 1000s of calories range.
A pound of fat burns ~3 calories, while muscle is ~8 per day. Sure, it is different, but unless you are the Rock, most people do not have enough muscle mass to make a difference.
Well yeah, the sugar is also there to produce the soft squishy texture people expect from sandwich bread as well as the aiding the Maillard reaction when it's grilled. Miss me with a grilled cheese made with any other kind of loaf.
But we are talking about bread here, even in the absence of sugar and oil it's
still got plenty of calories for you. Grain St Methode's white bread, a no added sugar brand is 180 cals for two slices and Wonder Bread, famously packed with sugar, is 140 cals for two slices. It's the bread which is making you fat, the sugar isn't moving the needle in any direction as far as the obesity crisis is concerned.
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
It's a whole lot easier to hit up a drive through or grab a tub of ice cream at the grocery store when you're driving a car.
You're not wrong, though. Walking around doesn't burn a lot of calories (~100/mile), but most people become overweight by only slightly overeating on a daily basis, over a long period of time. One can of soda has 140 Calories. 140 excess daily Calories is an extra pound of fat per month.
Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30 hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's essentially a full time job.
My conclusion was that past a certain point you need to use liquid sugar (soda especially) to get your body to put on weight past a certain point.
Even with absurd amounts of fat, carbs and proteins I could not process enough food to put on the weight I wanted too. Sugar is the backbone of massive weight gain.
I once trained pretty hard for several months for a martial arts competition. I upped my calorie intake to keep up with the training and put on about ~15lb of muscle. What people don't tell you about this sort of intensive training is just much extra time you spend each week shopping, cooking, eating and taking a shit - on top of all the training!
I can confirm the same from my messenger days. On days when deliveries were sparse, we found ourselves moving from cafe to bakery, eating more pastries than a doctor would recommend. Regardless of the day's activity levels we would generally drink large amounts of beer after work and sometimes during. Maintaining weight and satisfying our appetites was always a more pressing concern.
I'm not a dietician, but when I read things like this NPR report, I wonder how much of it is motivated reasoning. "It is not your fault", is always a good come-on for a sales pitch. This report seems like something people would like to hear, especially if they haven't come to enjoy strenuous exercise.
That said, I've always had a bias against highly processed foods.
what is "processed" versus "highly processed" versus "ultra processed"?
the way these things are described feels very much like people are using a dowsing rod to find where to dig a well, or something. mumbo-jumbo.
I'm sure even "super ultra giga processed" foods are fine for you so long as you don't eat a lot of them. I'm not even sure that "processed" is bad at all. I don't want to eat raw cashews, I'll die (as will anyone else) I want those processed by cooking. Is pre-cooked food "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" or something else? all of the above; it depends on who you ask.
I don't know of any level of "processed" which is bad, I just know that if you consume 10k calories per day and only burn 3k, you're going to gain weight, level of "processed" probably doesn't matter. And I think that's all this study is saying: unless you're extremely active, you can't burn 10k calories a day, your body really limits how many calories you can burn in a day unless you are physically working enough to actually turn that amount of energy into physical work.
anyway, yeah. i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative.
I cook basically all my meals but also have no fear of "unnatural" ingredients (I have a shaker of msg right next to the stove, I have cooked mac and cheese with sodium citrate, etc) and no, this ingredient list is not like normal home cooked meals.
Some of it is typical flavoring stuff, onion powder, etc, that could easily show up on a list of spices in a home dish.
But a big part of the list is the stuff you see in highly engineered food product only: maltodextrin, dextrose monohydrate, yellow 5, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, sodium phosphate, etc.
No "home cooked meal of home grown fruits and vegetables" has a similar ingredient list to this.
You seem to have projected a fear or intent into the comment which wasn't intended or explicitly described. I mostly agree in that taste is subjective, "There's no accounting for taste". Personally, I find those things unappetizing. As I said above, this is my bias. You asked for an example of something which I would regard as a highly processed food. I provided one. I cannot satisfy your other inquiries.
Although I will say that I have suspicions around the industrial processes for food additives and dyes. Yellow 6 for example is petroleum or coal tar derived. I'm sure the relevant regulatory bodies have approved these things, but I am not convinced that it is something I would like to consume personally.
Perhaps the burden should be on the manufacturer? I'm not sure where the discussion would lead if I had to rationalize every industrial by-product I preferred not to eat?
> i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative.
Don't be afraid to use the web to dispel your confusion!
You are technically correct that processed foods are no less healthy than any other foods.
However they are engineered to be hyper palatable, meaning they taste way better than other foods and they will not satiate you even after eating and excessive amount.
Or to put it simply, it is really damn easy to eat a thousand calories of potato chips and still be hungry for "a real meal" but most people will tap out before eating a thousand calories of steak (12 to 16oz).
The big thing about processed food is that it is “purified” in a sense to strip it down to just starches, sugar, and fats. Think sweet corn vs corn syrup.
If you eat only processed foods but limit your calories, you will not become overweight. But you will not be getting enough fiber or micronutrients, and you will probably not feel full either.
Yeah. Sure, your body can adjust how much calories are burned when you're idle, but it can only do so much. If you're burning thousands of calories on daily activity, it's gotta come from somewhere.
I see fork put-downs touted by random influencers and life coach type people on the internet, but this feels like one of those things that sounds profound but isn't based on any research other than someone's individual anecdotal experience.
That is not what any of the studies I have read find, particularly not past the short term: past calorie restriction diets is one of the factors associated with developing obesity.
I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going fully remote.
I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my level of activity remained unchanged.
A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight, and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range. Again, level of activity remained unchanged.
About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) quite regularly — about 2.5 hours per week, averaging right in the middle of my target heart rate zone. Diet remained the same. Weight remained mostly unchanged (still in my ideal weight range — I’ve maybe lost 5 or so pounds, but I lost way more weight when only changing my diet).
So — for me — diet has definitely had more impact on my weight than my level of activity.
The difference in metabolic activity as you age is relatively small until you are quite old, like a single digit percentage difference. You can go look at any TDEE calculator and see this.
Having lost 40lbs in the past couple of years, diet and walking have been key. It's just so much easier to burn fat by not eating it, than it is to try to burn it off with exercise. You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity, but eating one chocolate chip muffin? You can do that and gulp down a big glass of milk in 5 minutes like it's nothing.
>You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity
That's because you are doing it on a treadmill...
Try doing a more fun activity outside in the world and in nature. Like cycling.
I can cycle for 120 miles outdoors in about 6 hours in a single day and have a positive experience and memory of doing it and that burns about 8200 calories according to a calculators for my weight.
Unfortunately I think you'll find that many people just don't actually enjoy these sorts of activities. To me, cycling 120 miles (or even just 20 miles) is not something I'm interested in doing regularly.
I've tried various things, and I've found that I can get myself to go outside running (usually 3-5 miles in one session) a few times a week, but even that feels like a chore. I've been doing hot yoga (as well as a yoga-adjacent class that I think of more as "strength training and cardio with yoga features") for the past year and a half, which I actually somewhat enjoy. But it took me double-digit years to find exercise activities that I can actually get myself to do.
Go to the gym regularly? Really hard to find the motivation, though I do my best to go if I'm traveling in a place where I can't go to my (national chain) yoga studio. Cycling? Not my cup of tea. Playing a sport? Nope. Climbing? Tried it, didn't find it interesting. Hiking? Sure, on occasion, but not regularly enough to count as regular exercise. I'm just not really interested in any of those things enough to do them multiple times per week. And I think that's the case for many people.
If I could maintain my weight, leg muscle tone, and cardiovascular health without running, I'd never run ever again. I don't get that "runner's high" that people talk about (or if I do, it's not very intense, and fades very quickly). In addition to whole-body muscle tone, the yoga gives me some nice mental benefits, so I'd probably keep that up, but if it didn't, I'd drop it immediately.
I used to do pretty much nothing outdoors. Running is actually the one I find the most boring and I don't run. I am not even sure I can comfortably run that well anymore with part of my leg and foot being permanently numb after a disc herniation, I never really tried.
But I found that I love all the rest of it. I love cycling and hiking for hours and playing all sorts of sports. In the summer I play pickleball like 3-5 days a week for usually 3 hours at a time at local parks.
I mean I can't stand cycling on a bike in a gym, but go out to local trails and I love it. I think it's the fresh air, the wind rushing past me, the sights and smells and being out in nature that make it all fun for me. Also exploring new places all the time too to hike and bike though are what seem to keep it exciting and interesting for me.
There is a psychological method that I found to be very helpful. Thinking of companies that sell packaged foods as your adversary.
They want to take your health, make you addicted to what they are selling and also take your money. Not very different from a drug dealer.
When in this mindset, avoiding these things feels like winning and taking care of myself, don’t need to worry about if sugar is really bad or if eating these things is normal. Or if I deserve a treat after working hard all day etc.
After some time I just keep winning and losing weight and don’t really have any cravings to eat bad “food”.
And fruit tends to be cheaper than packaged food too.
>"For decades we've been telling Americans that you're lazy, it's your fault, you're not moving enough, you're eating too much," Mozaffarian says. "And I think what this study shows is that there's really complicated biology happening and that our food is driving this."
The industry that invented the bliss point [0] has every reason to blame the individual and not the system they created.
One quibble: the article blames ultraprocessed foods, but that's not a category of foods with a stable definition. What we do know is that food has been engineered to be more delicious and less filling, so staying away from those foods is a better way to think about it.
Whenever the topic of weight loss comes up, I always make the same recommendation: Lift weights.
Lifting weights increases your muscle mass. Muscle burns calories, even at rest, which raises your TDEE. (A bodybuilder will burn more calories sitting on the couch than someone who doesn't lift weights).
For most folks (myself included) cardio sucks. You _could_ jog for an hour every day and burn x-hundred calories due to the increased energy expended... Or you could go lift weights a few times a week, and after a couple months, naturally burn more at rest due to increased muscle mass.
I say this as not a nutritionist nor a doctor, but I don't believe I'm off base here. Feel free to correct me on this if I am.
I'm a fan of weightlifting, and agree that there are numerous health benefits to doing so, but I think the extra calorie burning is over-hyped. From what I've read you get 6-10 calories per pound of muscle per day, at rest. Not nothing, but for folks who aren't looking to body build I'm not sure it makes much of a difference. Or maybe over a long enough time span it does, I dunno.
It does matter over a long enough time span, but otherwise I agree - don't get into resistance training for the extra potential calorie burn/metabolism boost, it's a quick way to burn out. Get into it for the numerous health benefits that resistance training brings, the effects of which get especially important as you get older.
You can lose upwards of 3% of muscle pass per year at 60+, and this process can start as early as 30-35 years old. It gets harder and harder to build muscle as you age too, so the more you can build and maintain early on in your life, the better off you'll be in old age.
Other than aesthetic goals, that's most of what got me into weightlifting. I'd prefer not to be so frail when I'm older and want to maintain my independence as long as possible. Not to mention, being strong just makes general day-to-day tasks easier.
I think there are a couple of underlooked points for weightlifting's contribution to sustainable weight loss.
- the weight that you are gaining with a surplus diet turns into muscle instead of fat. You can take diet breaks and just gain muscle faster which will help when returning to a deficit.
- the increased 100-200 calories from lifting can make a 100 calorie deficit easier to adhere to as it's a smaller proportion of your total.
- weightlifting reduces stress which is a common cause for over eating.
And that is the same amount as having 10 extra pounds of fat burns.
1kg of muscle tissue burns pretty much identical amount of calories as 1kg of fat tissue. Heart, kidneys, brain etc. tissues burn more than muscles/fat, but you can't really grow those.
Xkg person's basic energy burn rate is the same, regardless of his fat percentage.
Therefore it is definitely a myth to promote weightlifting on the merits of muscles being some kind of great energy expenditure machine.
That's assuming the extra calorie burn doesn't make you feel hungrier and cause you to eat more, even if only a little. 100 calories is a very small amount of extra food.
I used to believe this (as did many people) but no longer do. The amount of extra calories burned with a higher muscle mass is just not significant enough to make this a relevant idea.
Of course, there are many, many other reasons to lift weights. Health and longevity aside, the reason most people want to lose weight is to look better - so what they should really aim for isn't to lose weight, it's to lose fat and increase muscle mass. For that, you need both a caloric deficit and weight lifting.
This is true, but I don't think the extra calorie burn via extra muscle mass is dramatic enough to move the needle that much. Studies are a bit weak here, but a quick search suggests that a pound of muscle mass burns between 4.5 and 7 calories per day. That's... not that much. A bodybuilder that's putting on competition-worthy levels of muscle mass is going to be spending several hours every single day at the gym lifting weights, and very few people are going to sign up for that just for the hope of losing some weight.
I've been doing some strength training (arms, legs, core) for the past year and a half. Nothing too heavy, but enough that I can see nice muscle-tone changes in my body, and I notice that day-to-day physical tasks are easier. At most, I've put on about 10lbs of muscle (and honestly it's probably more like half that). So I'm burning another 45 to 70 calories per day. That's like... 4 to 7 plain potato chips of calories.
So lift if you want to look good, be generally stronger (core strength is especially good for you!), or just feel healthier. And sure, the act of lifting those weights will burn calories that you weren't otherwise burning. But the muscle mass you gain isn't going to burn a useful amount of extra calories per day.
And yes, cardio does suck! Unfortunately, doing only strength training is leaving out really important parts of your body that need to be strong and healthy: your heart and lungs. I'm in decent physical shape, but if I stop working on cardio even for a month or so, walking up the four flights of stairs in my condo building leaves me a little winded, and I don't like that feeling.
I guess my point is: do cardio and strength training to increase your general level of health and fitness. But if you want to lose weight, change your diet. Change it sustainably and permanently. If you just change it until you get to your target weight, you're going to put those pounds right back on afterward.
The weight lifting also triggers stronger hormonal responses due to the additional mechanical loading. Mechanoreceptors in your body will stimulate a chain reaction by way of the hypothalamus (HPG axis) that ultimately causes a ramp in testosterone and other hormones. Your body effectively has a built-in steroid dispenser that you can control.
The scale is really dramatic in my experience. The more the lifting sucks, the more your body will compensate. This trend can be non-linear for a good period of time before you begin to plateau. The tricky bit is not pushing too far and injuring yourself early on.
One interesting hybrid is running or walking with a weighted vest on. This requires some extra precautions - the vest should be very, very snug on your body. You don't want it slinging around and imposing weird lateral loads.
Or do both! I primarily train Muay Thai these days, but I mix in two minimalist kettlebell strength sessions per week. 20 minutes of emom double kettlebell ABCs with some sets of pull-ups at the end keeps me in zone 3-4. So I'm getting some cardio conditioning while doing my strength training. Sure, it's hard to overload at a certain point with kettlebells, but making a goal to be able to OHP double 24kg bells will get most people pretty far.
There are other advantages beyond just burning calories. Lean muscle tissue acts as glucose sink. When you eat you'll have more reserve capacity to store that energy temporarily in your muscles rather than triggering growth of adipose tissue.
Most powerlifters intentionally maintain a signficant caloric surplus in order to bulk up. Some bulkers even chug straight-up olive oil to meet their daily caloric goals.
I cut out drinks with sugar in them, eating after dinner, and in general just eating healthy meals.
I lift weights about 3 days a week, and am fairly fit strengthwise.
All this lowered my fat levels down to a reasonable level, but still left me with about 23% body fat and a bit of a belly, and that remained consistent. Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.
What I found has helped is doing a 24 hour fast once a week. This really means just eating one dinner a little earlier (4:30pm) and then skipping breakfast and lunch and drinking water with electrolytes added.
With keeping the rest of the days calorie intake the same, I have shaved off consistently 1 pound a week and 1/2" from my waistline.
This has been going for 5 weeks now, and I have gone from 23% to 19.7% based on navy body fat formula.
What is great is I have no cravings or feelings that I am depriving myself except for the last 8 hrs of the weekly fast. The rest of the week, I eat well.
My plan is to bring myself down to 15% and then continuing to measure. If I get above 15% I fast that week, if I don't then I don't fast, so it basically becomes like a controllable throttle.
> Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.
That's not a surprise. Changing diet composition can in the short-run lead to lower caloric intake than what preceeded (e.g. SAD diet), but doesn't guarantee a sustained caloric deficit, which is why controlling for macros like fat or carbs eventually hits a wall. What are you going to do when there are no more carbs to cut? If you have a lot of excess to lose, you can't "intuitively" eat your way down to your target.
The fasts work similarly owing to deficit: a fasted day lowers the average caloric intake for the week (assuming you don't overcompensate other days). As with macros, here again, what are you going to do to increase deficit further? Fast for 48 hours? If with a fast your caloric intake isn't dropping further week-to-week, weight loss will stagnate.
Whichever approach, one of the pitfalls is steep deficit followed by metabolic adaptation i.e. crashing metabolism. This is why it's helpful to keep a small caloric deficit, and incrementally change your intake target. That is only reliably achieved by tracking calories.
This reminds a little of Usain Bolt famously having chicken nuggets before his final at the Beijing Olympics. Although hardly indicative of a bad diet that he may or may not have had.
I think as well there is some difficulty with variability between people that isn't clear or maybe doesn't matter at scale. The article linked study was across 43 nations with 4213 adults. Yet there may still be individuals who can argue differently. CICO (calories in vs calories out) must apply to us all, but the composition has an affect on what the body chooses to store vs how energised or hungry/satiated we feel. A bad diet could perhaps me we feel we have less enthusiasm for running or other activities. Age, lifestyle, and even cultural factors are massive in affecting metabolism (more the foremost) and of course what we consume (the latter two).
I run a fair amount (over 2000km/1200 miles in 2025) and find that once I start doing above ~70km/43 miles in a week whatever eating habits I have are indeed outcompeted by my running and weight loss is inevitable. Even so it does slow around a BMI of 23 for me for longer than I am able to be consistent with the running to observe further effects. Still my point is that my diet isn't anything to write home about and I anecdotally I feel that as far as weightloss is concerned I can very much outrun it.
The chicken nugget thing is to avoid food poisoning though, right? It's because McDonald's food logistics results in hyper-consistent food irrespective of where you're at in the world and the last thing an Olympic competitor wants is to risk getting food poisoning from eating foreign food. I don't think Usain eats chicken nuggets on the reg.
"Food poisoning" implies contaminated food, which is as unlikely in McDonald's food as it is in the Olympic village's food. This is more to avoid upsetting their stomachs with unfamiliar food (broadly similar effect but very different cause).
I don't know the reason and think your reasoning is probably sound. Although at the same I wonder if chicken nuggets were really the only option? I'll make a grand assumption that most athletes weren't on the chicken nugget diet.
Chickens nuggets aren't necessarily that unhealthy even? They have about as much saturated fat as generic chicken thighs. Inherently food at Mcdonalds isn't that bad for you as long as you don't overeat and take a few supplements.
Salt isn't particularly bad unless you already have hypertension. There's a reason electrolyte (aka salt) dietary supplements like LMNT are becoming popular. Of course if you are already consuming lots of processed, salty foods you wouldn't need those supplements. But if you eat mostly whole foods, exercise regularly, and drink coffee you really do need to go out of your way to intake extra electrolytes.
I do bouldering and I eat fast food multiple times a week, I can definitely outclimb my poor diet... I probably helps that I don't eat breakfast though...
It's well known though that as you build muscle, your rest calorie consumption increases, so probably if you build/maintain enough muscle, then you can just outrun your intake, since you consume more without doing anything to start with...
This doesn't mean anything. Just like improving your climbing, what matters is consistency. Count your calories and macros and you'll see that your total intake is reasonable. The processed vs unprocessed argument is negligible when you're only partaking occasionally.
When I was younger, I couldn't understand why I was thinner than my friends. We'd go out to eat and I'd stuff down a huge meal with the best of them. Turns out that they were eating like that at every meal, while I was having cereal for breakfast and a less calorie-dense lunch or dinner.
as you build muscle, your rest calorie consumption increases
The difference is tiny. Yes, you can outrun or out-muscle a bad diet at the extremes, but that's like saying BMI isn't a useful metric. You're not 1970s Schwarzenegger or Phelps.
People these days are generally also significantly taller than malnourished Belgians were back in the 1840s. That skews it a bit since the formula itself is still the same.
I guess it's still a marginally useful metric in some case but now that when can accurately measure body fat, muscle weight etc. there is no point paying attention to it that much.
I don't think we're talking about "unhealthy diet" solely in the sense of eating unhealthy foods. The real issue is calorie intake. If you are taking in an unhealthy amount of calories -- regardless of the source -- you are unlikely to be able to outrun that diet.
And you're kinda agreeing with that point: you eat fast food a few times a week, but you don't eat breakfast. So perhaps your caloric intake is still at a reasonable level for your body, regardless of the source of those calories.
I agree. Also age and other activities factor in I'm sure. I suspect you carry your bouldering mat and do some walking to and from boulders.
I think it stands to reason that if we took an overweight person and trained them to eat what you or I eat and then move like you or I move, they'd end up losing weight.
For me though, I know that I can be running say 50km/31 miles a week regularly and that if there is weight loss, it is impercetible to me. But up it with just two more runs and I believe I do start outrunning my diet. Again, this is an n=1 and ignores pretty much every other factor in my life.
> Yet there may still be individuals who can argue differently.
Of course! There are always outliers. But I think it is fair to say, as a general statement, that to lose or maintain weight, you have to focus on your diet, and exercise is not going to cut it. Sure, 1% of people might be able to "outrun their unhealthy diet", but that's not really useful information for the staggeringly vast majority of people out there. (Making up a percentage there; I think my point is still valid at 10%.)
1200 miles per year is a lot of running. That's 23 miles a week, or let's say ~6 miles, 4 days per week. Very few people are going to be able to -- or just flat out want to -- commit to that regimen.
Perhaps a poorly picked example but generally they're not considered a healthy food item as they exist in the category of both fast and fried food. The implication being that they're more processed resulting in less good fasts and are higher in calorie per gram. Like most foods the dose determines the poison I suppose.
Anecdotal evidence: I found that it's super easy to eat way more than you should by just having some food laying around. And I don't mean just Cheetos - "healthy" food will set you back rather quickly as well. The amount of exercise doesn't matter that much - with the calorie density of common snacks, you will out-eat your exercise really fast. I don't think I'm that bad in that sense, but until I started keeping a track of what I eat and the count the calories, nothing worked. Yes it's a hassle, but I vibe-coded an app that does image analysis and tracks your calories. Shameless plug: HeartLens on app store, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heartlens-your-health-tracker/...
Totally the case for me too. I used to keep lots of different snacks stocked at home. Eliminating that (except for a few things in small quantities) has been great for weight maintenance for me. At this point there are more treats for our cats in the house than snacks for me.
I have been, rather lazily I suppose, trying to tweak my diet in such as way as to lose weight; and with little to show for it.
I'm not sure that there is much if any processed food still in my diet (maybe just the English muffin in the morning?). I stopped buying/drinking soda pop decades ago (a low-hanging fruit indeed — I lost almost 10 pounds within a month of making that dietary change alone).
And since I have tried little things like switching to peanut butter that contains only peanuts (no salt, no sugar, not palm oil — sure, I have to stir it when I open it for the first time). I've moved to whole grain bread. Other small changes like that I can't remember right now.
I still have a BMI that's too high.
The only time I have significantly lost weight was when I was prepping for intestinal surgery nearly a decade ago. I was at the time worried that eating too much would literally kill me (I was worried about bursting my intestine) that I ate very small portions for each meal.
I'm not sure why I can't change my habits such that I continue to eat those small portions (now that the fear is gone).
The first problem with people unable to lose weight is simply not counting calories and trying to "switch to healthier food and eyeball it". You have to have a kitchen scale and measure portions. Track every meal in an app. It's annoying at first, but once you get in the habit, it's just part of preparing the meal. When you do that, you will be able to tell which meals in your diet are high calorie (which, some are surprisingly calorie dense contrary to what a lot of people think), and find replacements or downsize the portions accordingly.
The second problem is people simply not being honest with their calorie tracking. You may only eat 3 meals but then when you're hungry you will eat a handful of raisins, peanuts, or something else, a lot of people will think to themselves "well, it's just a handful, so it can't be that many calories" - but repeated habit of eating those adds up, and most people don't account for that in their calorie tracking app. Similar to adding a small bit of, say, butter to your pan before making scrambled eggs. You may think, "it's only about 10 grams of butter, it's not much so why bother tracking it", but that 10 grams of butter is 75 calories, over the course of a month of preparing scrambled eggs every morning for breakfast, that's 2250 kcal, after 3 months, that's an entire KILO of bodyweight fat that you either gained or could have lost - small things add up.
Sometimes (but less frequently) it's also hormonal issues, you may want to go to a clinic to do a bloodtest (specifically thyroid hormones and diabetes markers).
Also, low intensity cardio (slow pace incline treadmill/stairmaster) can go a long way in aiding weight loss.
Yep. It's almost always either not tracking or not being honest with tracking.
It's possible to overeat anything - whether a food is "healthy" or not, while important, isn't what matters for weight loss. Burning more calories than you consume is what is important for weight loss.
Where I see folks, particularly men, fail most often is in their mid-late thirties. Sedentary lifestyle, wants to lose the "dad bod." Someone in that situation, with no physical activity, would actually have a fairly low TDEE so a 500 cal/day deficit might look like eating in a range of 1500-1700 calories/day, which if they are like the average American and used to consuming 3500+ calories/day, will be quite the shock - so they are almost immediately super hungry, and might start out with good intentions with tracking what they eat but will frequently miss all the little snacks here and there, or just haven't developed the skill of meal prepping, and properly weighing out their food.
It's a lot of work, and requires a lot of dedication. Too many articles out there that just simplify it down to "Eat less, move more" but don't do enough to actually educate folks on what that really looks like.
First, figure out your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) to figure out how much of a deficit you need to eat in to lose weight at your desired rate.
You can start off with one of those online calculators (like this one: https://tdeecalculator.net/). 1 to 2lbs/week is generally healthy and sustainable. Losing weight too fast can cause you to lose a lot of muscle as well, which is generally what you don't want (resistance training will help with this)
You log what you eat and your weight everyday, after a few weeks you should have a pretty good picture of your TDEE and know how much you need to eat for your desired weight loss. What was important for me, is that if you add in exercise, try not to eat back what you burned from the exercise - smart watches/fitbits aren't always accurate in their estimates, so just use the exercise as an opportunity to dig a little deeper of a deficit (and for the other health benefits).
As much of a pain in the ass it is, you'll want to weigh your food for a while, down to individual ingredients including cooking oil, as it's really easy to underestimate how much you consume (2 tbps of olive oil is 120 calories, for example - that adds up over the course of a week if you are using that much or more every time you cook).
The reddit r/fitness wiki has a wealth of information on diet and routines as well, I highly recommend skimming it over: https://thefitness.wiki/
If you are able I'd recommend resistance training along with diet as well. Building muscle will help boost your metabolism a bit, help with aesthetic goals, and getting stronger will only help you as you get older. No need to go crazy here, even just 2 to 3 days/week, especially for a beginner, can give you some pretty big improvements. A lot of people think they need to hit the gym 6 days/week like a body builder but it's not necessary at all.
Lastly, take progress photos and/or body measurements as well. You'll hit periods, especially if you are resistance training, where the scale isn't moving, but you could still very well be losing body fat so the photos/measurements can be helpful to keep your motivation through these periods. Expect your weight to fluctuate a lot too day to day, what's important is the average trend over time, not necessarily day to day.
How bodies related to food varies _wildly_. For example, my body has difficulty processing certain foods, so I lost a ton of weight switching from "healthy" fruits and veggies and plant-based protein to mostly pre-processed carbs and fatty meat. (Low FODMAP, for folks who are curious: be ready to learn chemistry to figure out what is safe to eat.)
That diet isn't going to have the same effect for most people, but in my case it significantly lowered my inflammation and general discomfort, which led me to lose 90lbs with no actual effort on my part.
I knew one dude who was always hungry and it turned out he just desperately needed B12. Now he snacks on B12 gummies and feels much better. Debugging our bodies is more complicated than debugging a software program, but no programmer would say "Just run the program less!" if someone complained a program was eating up all the CPU.
The one thing that is always good for humans, whether we lose weight or not, is some physical activity. Whatever we can enjoy enough to do regularly, without injury, is a great choice.
I wish the medical profession would stop focusing on diet, when it doesn't understand it and calorie restrictive diets are one of two lifestyle components we know actually do contribute to obesity.
Have you tried introducing a food scale? Not with the intent of changing your portions or anything like that - just out of idle curiosity to confirm how much you're eating?
I found that I was eating over double the amount of nut butter that I was estimating once I started weighing it. After a couple of months I was able to go back to eyeballing it while remaining accurate.
A lot of wisdom suggests being +/- 300 calories from your TDEE to cut/bulk. Three tablespoons of peanut butter is ~285 calories. So it's entirely possible that something as small as an estimation error is responsible for whether you're gaining or maintaining. Same goes for eyeballing cooking oils, seeds & nuts, and, to a lesser extent, processed carbs.
You're trying to eat clean instead of lean/volumous. Why care about palm oil or salt in peanut butter if it's still like straight fat that you're passing on your bread every day? The actual diet move would be to switch that to some fruit and low fat yogurt. Same thing with whole grain bread, you just got some more fiber and vitamins but the calories are mostly all there still, especially if it's sandwich bread.
Clean/natural/unprocessed is an independent variable from fattening. There is correlation in that processed foods are sometimes highly palatable, but there is no causation. To illustrate, you could top your toast with either honey or Mrs Butterworth's Sugar Free syrup. Honey will add like 10x more calories, but is unprocessed, while the syrup is as processed as there can be
I think it's great to try to eliminate foods that you believe aren't healthy (in any quantity) from your diet, but if you replace those foods with a quantity of other foods that keep your caloric intake more or less the same, you're not going to lose weight.
> ... I ate very small portions for each meal.
That's what does it. Decreasing the calories you eat.
> I'm not sure why I can't change my habits such that I continue to eat those small portions (now that the fear is gone).
Because, like all of us, you're only human, and human psychology, plus how our stomachs and brains signal each other, is complex and sometimes makes it really hard for us to achieve our goals. It sucks, but that's how it is. This is why the semaglutide weight loss drugs are proving so effective: they short-circuit some of that and help you just not want to eat as much food.
If drugs aren't for you, try counting calories, and use an app to help with it and help keep you honest. I experimented with it back in 2017 or so, and it actually did cause me to be more mindful about how much I ate, and made me think twice if I'd already hit my calorie budget for the day but wanted more food. I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually did lose weight. I didn't stick with it (don't remember why), but it did work for me for a time.
As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful. Commit to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself to better eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just 'eat healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of calorie content of food.
Like I straight up just don't eat nut butters anymore because they are a massive calorie bomb, and I find the loose nuts more satiating. When you track for a while you start building an instinct for optimizing the satiety/calorie ratio of your meals.
> As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful. Commit to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself to better eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just 'eat healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of calorie content of food.
Just to add to this - periodically track again as well and keep track of your weight progress and bodyfat % if you are able.
If you aren't also building muscle, as you lose weight your total energy expenditure will decrease as well so after a while what was enough of a calorie deficit for you may no longer be in a deficit as you lose weight. So if you notice you start stalling after a while, start tracking again to see if your TDEE has changed and adjust as needed.
Have you tried intermittent fasting? There's a lot of controversy around the impacts of fasting, but there's one simple fact involved: it's harder to exceed your calorie needs for a day in 1 or 2 meals than in 3 or more because at some point you are just too full to eat more. If you're focused on getting lots of veggies in your limited meals, the number of calories that "fit in your stomach" will also go down.
Assuming you don't have some metabolic disorders, you'll get used to being hungry for part of the day.
This time last year I was in Kampala for roughly 4 months. I used to cook at home and I avoided any process food. Zero to little carb. I was walking a lot though and quite regularly (the weather there is just so good).
Now, one year later I moved to Dubai and I think I gained around 10kg.
The only difference being the amount of processed food and the lack of my daily walking routines. But granted, I gained 10kg while im on one meal a day.
A good diet only helps so much. Of course with enough self control, a caloric deficit will make you lose weight, but you need to make yourself perpetually hungry. Eating clean without measuring and limiting portions is not enough for people whose appetite is naturally higher.
Ozempic was the only thing that actually solved my hunger. I would eat healthy, do exercise, but without ozempic my appetite was unstoppable and would think of food 24/7.
BTW you can still improve your diet. PB and bread are bad for weight loss. Go with high protein, low carb. But even that was not enough for me.
Yeah, lat week switched to two eggs for breakfast (now ½ an English muffin so I have something to put the eggs on).
But I wonder if Ozempic is not a bad idea. My BMI is below 30 — which is what my doctor said is her threshold for recommending something like Ozempic. So I feel like I should just keep working on the self-discipline a little harder.
Intermittent fasting keeps coming up and I have not tried it. I think that will be my experiment in the coming months.
Try a diet plan where you prep your own meals and intake a specific amount of calories. I've used Clean Simple Eats in the past. Diet only works. Diet+exercise works better, and adds all of the benefits of exercise.
I walk over 2 miles a day. My doctor suggested weight training (which I had not thought of as a way to lose weight — I don't think of it as an aerobic workout).
So I will first emphasize, try to avoid a "diet" and feeling the need to eliminate anything.
Unless you just really struggle with impulse control and you need those guard rails, for me the only way that I managed to loose about 45 lbs was by looking at things this way.
I did not cut a single thing out of my diet, what I did was make smart choices/swaps at home that still satisfied cravings most of the time so when I want to go to the store and get a candy bar I will go to the store and get a candy bar and not feel bad about it.
Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore, I have switched almost entirely to water outside of milk in my coffee. When I am out I may sometimes grab a soda but meh.
I make homemade peanut butter. I buy dry roasted unsalted peanuts, add in a small amount of salt and its great.
Trying a bunch of different apples and finding the sweetest apples I could find, and then eating that with peanut butter for some added protein.
Strawberries with chocolate humas.
I started making my own chicken stock which had more flavor and less sodium.
Making my own heartier soups that tasted great.
Also... Seasoning. More than just salt and pepper. Some really good (non American generally) seasoning will go a long way and is basically a zero calory way to really good food.
Other random small changes that are very situational for you. Look at your snacking habbits, that is where most of my issues came in.
Where I could I would choose things that would also increase my protein intake. I didn't go crazy. I never counted calories or anything and the weight just came off. Sure I could have lost a bit more had I done that, but I am at the point now that is the 10 more lbs going to make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things as I work towards gaining more muscle anyways.
I realize this may not work for everyone, but I am not on any sort of "diet" in any traditional sense of the word. What I am doing now is perfectly sustainable for the rest of my life because I can still live my life and largely eat what I want within reason. I had taco bell today and don't feel bad about it in the slightest.
I should add that during most of this weight loss I did not change my workout habbits. I was focusing on my nutrition first. I do live in a city and I walk everywhere, but that did not change in this time.
This is what I am trying to do as well. Switch out bad habits for healthy ones. But it looks like I also need to dial down the quantity — maybe drop to two meals a day.
> Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore
Yeah, no shit. As I mentioned in another comment, that was a low hanging fruit that saw me lose nearly 10 pounds when I cut that out of my diet.
I want to scream at people when I see them hanging 6-packs off the sides of their grocery carts — or seem them stacking cases of soda in the cart undercarriages.
U.S. grocery stores are depressing places when you come to recognize, as has been said, that more or less the whole store minus the end-aisles (where produce, deli, etc. are) is just processed crap.
I think it is very easy for the average person to forget or not realize how incredibly easy it is to get calories into the body and how little food is necessary to do so. Most people in the world (I know, this is not everywhere and everyone), live in an era of food abundance. It's cheap enough, extremely accessible, often easy to eat or ready to eat, and that has simply made it very convenient to get calories in, often while barely thinking about it. Mindless eating, not thinking about what you should eat, etc. All of these factors have played into why obesity is such a problem (at least in the USA).
They accounted for total EE and basal EE, but the data they've supplied in the appendix doesn't track caloric intake.
This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American football linebackers) and also having a low TEE and being skinny as a rail (by basically not eating, i.e. most fad diets).
Also, they categorize most of Africa as either horticulturalist, agropastoralist (why couldn't they say "farmers"???) or hunter-gatherer) despite the table at the bottom ranking their economies as "lowHDI", and the BEE for this cohort is N/A, which invalidates their PAL ratio (TEE/BEE).
> This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American football linebackers)
Linemen would be a better example than linebackers here. Linebackers tend (like most positions other than line, and especially offensive line, positions) to have body fat percentages at the high end of the normal range, rather than being “insanely fat”.
Something my doctor has told me on more than one occasion, be he was also quick to add a statement about the importance of exercise for overall fitness. But.. want to lose weigh, change your diet.
I find when I exercise more, I tend to eat better:
- I enjoy running, and eating poorly will affect my ability to run in the short-term, as lots of junk food makes my running experience that day poorer; and
- Recently I've started going to the gym. Best to be fairly lean to see those new muscles, though I don't take it to an extreme. I prefer a balance.
Shifting the consequences from long to short- and medium-term helps!
To add: Exercise builds strength, including cardiovascular. Just having a low bodyfat % isn't the epitome of health, there's plenty of facets to focus on.
I have a friend with a heart condition, prior to surgery he couldn't even walk 100 ft or stand for more than a minute. He put on significant weight, partially due to lifestyle changes when his heart was failing. Now he _has_ to walk a lot to strengthen his heart again, and he's working on his diet to lose weight as a whole separate component. The walking has nothing to do with weight loss for him, it's purely about strength. I think a lot of people fail to make any kind of distinction there, and they just think of exercise as a way to lose weight.
Yep. This has been pretty much common knowledge as long as I've been alive. As someone who lifts, it's been ingrained in my mind "abs are built in the kitchen, not the gym."
Sleep is also a commonly overlooked but incredibly important aspect. You could be busting your ass in the gym, have your diet on point, but not be making gains if you don't sleep or sleep poorly. For hypertrophy focused folks, muscle isn't built in the gym, it's built while you sleep - you tear it down in the gym so that it can rebuild during recovery.
More data: I once lost 80 pounds purely through dieting. I really didn't change my exercise habits at all throughout (vs before I dieted).
I was partially testing this theory, in fact. This was a decade ago, but I was aware of this line of thinking at the time. Specifically, that dieting is more important for losing weight, and exercising is more important for being healthy (losing weight alone really didn't make me noticeably healthier, btw).
Somewhat orthogonally related, I saw post on X by Nassim Taleb [1] concerning the idea that if you are very active then your heightened consumption of food may cover your nutrient bases better. So perhaps, loosely paraphrased, you could outrun and thus out-eat your nutrient imblance?
Everyone in bodybuilding or adjacent crowds already knows this.
How fat you are is entirely a function of how much you eat. If you want to put on weight, you bulk by eating more. If you want to lose weight, you cut with reduced calories.
The idea you could instead bulk by doing less cardio and cut by doing more sounds completely crazy. In reality, you do more exercise on a bulk because, duh, you can recover from more volume when eating a surplus.
If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
So running can help but you still need a calorie deficit. Eating and burning more boosts your metabolism - if you measure a body builder during a bulk they are like a furnace, burning 1-2k over baseline. They still put on fat but it's a lot less than what you'd think given the amounts they're eating.
> If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
No, you’ll lose less weight (I mean, assuming the difference in what you are burning is from exercise, if you find a way, e.g. by some chemical intervention, to kick your metabolism up to burning 4× your baseline amount without doing additional exercise, this doesn't apply), because you have the same calorie deficit and more of the weight you lose (unless you are in fairly great shape to start with, more than 100% of the weight you lose!) will be fat, and it takes a greater calorie deficit to lose a pound of fat than a pound of muscle.
OTOH, most people want to lose fat and avoid losing muscle, so this is a good thing, but its not more weight loss.
If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
Each of those is a 1,000 Calorie deficit.
if you measure a body builder during a bulk
Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.
> Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.
What. Even natural bodybuilders go through cut and bulk cycles. And plenty of enhanced bodybuilders don't use clen or DNP, even IFBB pros.
Someone new to resistance training, significantly overweight, or both, can add pounds and pounds of lean body mass while in a deficit. But that stops when those things stop. You have to be in a surplus to add muscle mass if you're no longer a novice lifter or significantly overweight. And it is basically impossible to perfectly balance your diet so that you don't gain any body fat in this situation while still being able to efficiently add muscle mass.
For a non-enhanced person that doesn't have the benefits of strong nutrient partitioning effects from AAS and HGH it is even more difficult to do so.
Lean bulks are more popular than ever but they're still bulks and they're still followed by cuts - just cycled much less frequently.
Even natural bodybuilders go through cut and bulk cycles.
Yeah, the ones who are actually prepping for competition. They sacrifice some of their gains to get as lean as possibly solely for the purpose of showing in a competition. Anyone else engaging in "bulking" and "cutting" is just wasting their time.
You have to be in a surplus to add muscle mass if you're no longer a novice lifter or significantly overweight.
This is why you eat a slight caloric surplus while hitting your macro goals.
Internet dweebs started usurping the terminology. Honestly, it's justification for undisciplined eating. It's just "dieting" with pseudo-technical justification. The ultimate form of self-delusion are the guys who "perma-bulk", like Cartman.
> Anyone else engaging in "bulking" and "cutting" is just wasting their time.
Why?
> This is why you eat a slight caloric surplus while hitting your macro goals.
As an unenhanced lifter you've not got the significant nutrient partitioning boosts that HGH/AAS/(and for some) insulin give you. If you want to maximize gains you're going to be in a big enough surplus that you're just not going to get basically exclusively muscle gains for every bit of weight you add. Eventually you're going to need to diet, even with a fairly small surplus. And what is a phased approach to eating in a surplus to gain muscle and eating in a deficit to lose fat but bulking and cutting?
I would agree that perma-bulking isn't a particularly good idea, and trying to bulk and cut with the same sort of caloric surpluses and deficits someone on gear is counter-productive for a natural lifter, but I don't see why or how you come to the conclusion that unenhanced lifters using the bulk/cut terms are dweebs or wrong in using the terminology. HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone claim that the only people who should be using bulk/cut phrasing are enhanced lifters.
Since Internet dorks started usurping terms used by chemically enhanced bodybuilders.
Why wouldn't it apply?
Because of what I just said. If you're not chemically enhanced, then you just eat a consistent, slight surplus while hitting your macro goals. Bulking and cutting makes no sense, you're literally just making things harder for yourself.
> If you're not chemically enhanced, then you just eat a consistent, slight surplus while hitting your macro goals. Bulking and cutting makes no sense, you're literally just making things harder for yourself.
If you eat a consistent slight surplus without ever having a period of deficit, then you will just get fat over time.
The whole point of bulking and cutting is to increase your training volume during a caloric surplus to pack on muscle, followed by a period of lowered training volume (due to poorer recovery while in a deficit) eating at a deficit to cut fat while retaining as much muscle as possible. This has nothing to do with steroids, it's just basic body building.
What even would be your propose for someone who wants to change their physique, especially for reducing body fat?
> We also excluded those listed as “athletes” in the database and those with TEEs greater than 25 MJ/d (all of these excluded individuals were from High HDI populations)
This study specifically excluded athletes, so its conclusions would be applicable to someone running 26km per day.
In twin studies the only things that have been associated with obesity are past calorie restrictive diets and soda consumption. All these other studies are usually picking up on either socio-economic or environmental factors, rather than actual behaviors we can control.
The reason to exercise isn't to avoid obesity: it is because the health benefits of exercise have nothing to do with weight. Careful, moderate exercising is good for our bodies, all on its own.
Whereas there is shockingly little evidence that obesity itself causes most correlated health conditions, rather than being a symptom (of stress, alienation, environmental contamination, inflammatory conditions, etc) correlated with the causes of those conditions. The weight with the lowest all-cause mortality is being "overweight".
But of course, "work less" is a lot harder to make money off of than "lose weight", so any science that can be twisted to prop up the weight loss industry will get spread far and wide.
Yes, exercise is good for you regardless of weight. We should all do it.
But the idea that there is little evidence that obesity causes health issues is absurd. There's absolutely mountains of evidence, and we have very firm understandings of the mechanisms underlying many of these issues, too. Hell, just being bigger, even if it's all muscle mass, is bad for your heart.
The all-cause mortality curve is J shaped because many more of the people at 10% bf are there because of disease and not because they're shredded from a strict diet and a consistent exercise.
I've lost roughly 100lb of fat over the past 9 months. I have gotten back to lifting 5 days a week, but even before that with just losing weight my health markers improved significantly, I've felt better, aches and pains and discomforts have all but disappeared, etc. My stress, alienation, environmental contamination, etc. conditions are all the same, and I'm working just as much, if not more.
The only time I ever got close to having a 6-pack was from 16 days trekking in the Himalayas, culminating in summitting Mera Peak (~21,000 ft). I did not reduce my calorie consumption. But it was just a temporary change.
I just lost 50 kilos in 10 months. Quit sugar, walk 10km a day and most importantly ate almost only soup. So kind of low carb vegetable oriented stuff.
The 10km per day thing is certainly great for your health, but I suspect you'd still have lost most of that weight if the only change you made was to your diet.
I personally lost some weight and am now lean by simply changing my eating habits to intermittent fasting. I got so used to it that now it's effortless to continue.
That advice is usually more for people who are already fit but don't have abs.
You can maintain a healthy level of fitness by adding some exercise into your life and being mindful of what you eat. But maintaining abs is a whole other project you practically have to center your life around. And indeed, it's mostly a matter of very strict dieting.
Okay then, how about "you can't outrun a bad diet"? Pick your favorite conventional wisdom fitness aphorism as it applies to you, but it's the same underlying principle.
Citation needed. A quick search suggests this is mainly pushed by influencers and life-coach type people. I'd be incredibly skeptical of anything pushed by people like that, unless it's backed by research... which doesn't seem to be the case here.
This was only proven by Pontzer and others with double labelled water studies when the cost of double labelled water went down enough for testing with humans to become affordable. Initially it was so expensive that only trials with a few small animal subjects were done so doing this large study was impractical until recent years. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
I know this can be a touchy subject, but honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising.
It’s just basic thermodynamics.
The energy (calories) you take in has to go somewhere. Some of it gets used for daily activity, but if you take in more than you burn, your body has to store the extra—it doesn’t have any other way to deal with it.
At the end of the day, it really is just a matter of calories in vs. calories out.
Exercise just helps burn more of your excess energy so that it doesn’t get converted into (weight) storage.
Thermodynamics only apply to closed systems. Your body can easily expel unprocessed calories/sugar in urine and feces (hence diabetics historically being diagnosed by their characteristically sweet urine).
Whether it's more likely than the average human body to do so, to process them for immediate energy, or to process them for longer term storage in conjunction with how it benchmarks your hunger and satiation signals is colloquially known as your "metabolism".
Want to tell me next how the laws of mechanical engineering conclusively prove that no one human being can be stronger than another, since we all weigh the same?
Yeah it's odd we needed a whole article for this. "You can't out exercise a bad diet" has always been true outside of the most extreme cases (competitive athletes).
Maybe it shouldn't be surprising, but without the knowledge, the opposite of the thing can be explained the same as the thing itself. For example, "The energy you take in has to go somewhere", but I also poop everyday, so maybe I just poop out the unnecessary calories? I know it works for water soluble vitamins for example.
Hindsight is 20/20 in this case. It's nice that the explanation is not complicated ("calories in, calories out"), but many other simple things have been thought of as true, only to be put on their head by science. I welcome the scientific confirmation, and I hold that the path to knowledge it's not straightforward at all.
Thats why I’m saying you need to run four times ;-)
But jokes aside, not doing sports and only counting calories will make you loose muscles pretty fast. This will lower your baseline of calorie consumption of your body. So when you stop counting calories you will grow even more fat than before.
If you don’t loose weight from running then most probably you are increasing your calorie intake unconsciously. This overeating happens sometimes when people do sports.
I do not have time for lots of exercise beyond the occasional walk but I hated that I was 40lb over my healthy/ideal weight I used to be. So I simply ignored all the tactics of others in my life chronically struggling to lose weight or keep it of and did the research on the Standard American Diet.
All data pointed to Americans simply consume way way too many processed foods, carbs, and artificial sugars. No one should be surprised, but no one wants to change this because shit food tastes so good. I simply dropped all high processed foods, dropped to about 100g of carbs a day, and cut out soda completely. All the extra weight fell right off over 6 months. I did nothing else. Also my dopamine response has changed and healthy food and canned sparkling water now feels as good to consume as fast food and soda used to.
Meanwhile friends with the same problem try lots of exercise and never lose any weight, and others use ozempic with no diet changes and also lose no weight. No one wants to hear they have to do something as hard as a permanent major diet change, but blame biology and terrible nutrition education. I am just the messenger.
YMMV, but my own experience certainly agrees with this study.
Commit to stop eating like an overweight American long term and you are likely to stop looking like one.
It ought to be obvious. A chocolate donut, large Frappuccino or pick your unhealthy food of choice are about equivalent to half an hour of running. Given how many people throw in a snack like that several times per day good luck burning that off with exercise.
One of the most straight forward things to lose weight is just limiting yourself to two or three actual meals, black coffee, tea, etc.
Starbucks did an impressive job of convincing people they love coffee when a lot of them actually just like morning/mid-day dessert with some trace coffee flavoring.
Nobody who is ordering a frapachino is convinced they are ordering because they like coffee, especially considering that the half of the frapachino menu is non-coffee flavors.
I make coffee at home but have noticed how fast the sugar jar needs to be refilled. I'm the only one who drinks coffee, it's surprising how much sugar i consume drinking coffee. I bet i use 2-3 tablespoons of pure sugar from my coffee consumption alone.
In other news: a group of scientists announced today the results of their recent study, where they conclude that drowning is not caused by a lack of swimming, but instead seems to be due to water. Other scientists have refuted the claim and point out defects in the study criteria. In response, US officials have pulled funding from the National Science Foundation for any further studies into the causes of drowning, calling any claim of drowning that doesn't end with the sentence "the will of God" as unpatriotic.
The title is disappointing: it implies a causal relationship. The study was an observational study.
Indeed, you can outrun a bad diet: we all know that. The study just shows that the lack of activity isn't the main reason for obesity. Both things can be true simultaneously.
Reminds me of a video I saw recently that pointed out the absurd number of calories professional athletes burn. Upshot of that video was that you almost certainly can run to lose weight. Just don't expect it to be an easy task.
At a personal level, I can also say that it is flat out hard to eat large amounts of food if you are staying active. The stereotype of wanting an after meal nap is legit.
It is also somewhat interesting to see other places try and contend with just how much food your average person in the US has at their ready disposal.
At a personal level, I can also say that it is flat out hard to eat large amounts of food if you are staying active.
I've never had that problem. When I exercise a lot, my body just starts to crave a higher proportion of calorie-dense foods - ice cream, cheese, breads. The actual volume of food might not go up all that much, but the balance changes.
Of course, "a lot" for me is 10-15 hours cardio/week plus 3-4 hours/week weight training. My baseline is 3-5 hours cardio and the same 3-4 weight training. I only ramp up to 10+ hours cardio if I have a major event planned (100 mile mtn bike race or similar).
I think it is safe to say that 10-15 hours of cardio a week is far far more than most people get. Hick, 6-10 hours of exercise a week is almost certainly multiples of what most people do. :D
But, yeah, I was meaning volume as well as certain types. As I understand it, at the elite levels, you actually have to train your body in how to consume enough to stay active for the full event. It isn't like you can just down a few cheese burgers and then head off to a race.
Ice cream remains an amusing one, to me. People are convinced it is among the worst snacks you can do, and yet I have yet to meet a very active person that doesn't love some form of ice cream on a regular basis.
I'm from a western country, but live outside the OECD. Currently on a trip back home and the food is disgusting.
Everything tastes sweet, is invariably hyper-processed, and supplied by a narrow pool of companies.
My diet in my host country isn't great, but it's so much easier to eat well. Fresh fruit and veg is more readily available, cheaper and frankly tastier. I wouldn't say people are any more or less sedentary, particularly in the capital city in which I live.
N=1 but I lost over 100 pounds in 8 months by changing to a keto diet with zero exercise (consciously going even more sedentary than I already was) and have kept it off for over eight years now. After I reached my ideal weight I restored exercise to my previous normal level (which is minimal but not absolutely sedentary). After a year I slowly transitioned from strict keto to low carb for life.
I feel great, look good and my health improved dramatically. Before changing I was on meds for pre-diabetes, high blood pressure and poor HDL/Trig along with having bad apnea and tectonic snoring. All resolved after 8 months and still off the meds today. In the prior decade I'd spent a lot of effort and money trying various diets, including medically supervised, but they were hard, stressful and none worked long term. Even though I've never been athletic or remotely a gym-rat, intentionally going sedentary was an unusual choice because I'd always heard "eat less, move more" but exercise made me hungrier. So when I got serious about doing keto hardcore, I decided to pause even the minimal token "faux exercise" like an occasional pleasure bike-ride or short walk on weekends.
Frankly, that occasional, brief exercise probably never did anything in terms of weight loss anyway but it did provide a psychological excuse to slip on diet. So eliminating that excuse and putting all my focus on diet may have been the main benefit of going zero exercise during my weight loss period. After I got below my target 'dream weight', I returned to my usual minimal exercise and since then it's increased even more because now I actually enjoy exercise. It turns out that exercise is a lot more fun when you're not obese and winded after 90 seconds! I think Keto worked for me when other diets hadn't because it's so strict but also brutally simple. I've also always liked the low carb foods like meats and cheeses.
As a significant and long-term success case, I'll share my personal "keys to keto success": 1. Commit to doing it hardcore for at least 30 days. 2. Rigorously track every molecule of food intake in a tracking app for the first month. Yep, get measuring spoons and a kitchen scale for weighing things. Think of it as a cool lab experiment and you're the rat. Get used to cooking at home and bringing lunch to work until you get the hang of the low carb lifestyle. 3. For the first week do not track calories, just limit carbs religiously. Seriously, stuff all the calories you want. Steaks drenched in butter and sour cream, a quarter pound of cheddar, whatever. Why? The first week is the hardest and this makes the transition easier. The calories will be much easier after you get control of your blood sugar by limiting carbs. 4. You MUST supplement electrolytes (sodium & potassium) for at least the first week. "Keto Flu" is real, excruciating and so easy to avoid. I didn't take all the warnings seriously and failed my first attempt at keto in utter misery after just 38 hours. 5. Start on a quiet weekend where you can just focus on this from Fri afternoon to Mon morning. 6. Absolutely, positively DO NOT CHEAT on carbs for the first 30 days. Keto is different because the first 3-ish days of transitioning off carbs are pretty hard. If you cheat, you'll keep having to redo some or all of that transition over and over. It's like crossing a wall of fire. You can get through it fine the first time with focus and planning but you definitely do not want to be wobbling back and forth through it. Keto works because strictly limiting carbs controls blood sugar which reduces hunger making cutting calories much easier. If you need to cheat, cheat on calories not on carbs.
It's not as hard as it sounds. Just get past the first month and it all gets a lot easier. The results come fast. I lost 10 pounds in 10 days and 20 pounds in 30, which provides a lot of motivation! At around six weeks I became 'fat-adapted' which is a long-term metabolic transition to primarily burning fat instead of carbs (glucose) for energy. It felt absolutely amazing in every way - physically, mentally and emotionally, like nothing I'd ever experienced before. I was mentally sharper, physically quicker and emotionally more grounded in a positive mode. Everything just felt and worked better in subtle but tangible, meaningfully real ways. It made me never want to go back to living inside a primarily carb-adapted metabolism. Of course, I hadn't physically craved carbs since the first month and by around 60 days my old habitual eating patterns and reflexes had faded. Then at around 90 days my palate shifted, meaning I even lost my taste for carbie foods. If I tried a small bite of something carb-laden that I'd loved my whole life, it didn't even taste particularly good to me anymore. I also became hyper-sensitive to sugar. Sugar-soaked foods just taste poisonously over-sweetened (which they kind of are). A normal apple now tastes as sweet as I'd ever want, like a dessert that has extra sugar-added.
For most of my life my weight was a metabolic mystery seemingly out of my control. Today, it's hard to even remember what it was like being a slave to my raging blood sugar and constant hunger. Now I feel closely attuned to my body. This makes my weight and appearance an almost trivial conscious choice. Fortunately, going low-carb is a lot easier today than when I started in 2017. There are many more delicious low-carb food choices at the grocery and everyone has heard of keto so it's not as weird. Even Wal-Mart has a selection of keto-breads and, recently, bagels! Standard disclaimer: Every metabolism is different and what worked so effectively for me may not work as well for you.
The timing of when I eat changes, if I gain weight. Eating pizza after jogging? Fat on belly.
Eating as much pizza as I want, but going to bed after on empty stomach after running, or putting the running in the morning while doing about 12 to 16 hour slots of intermitted fasting? Hello, six-pack.
Can we all please acknowledge that intermittent fasting is just a form of calories restriction? If you ate a pizza after jogging, but that was all you ate all day, your results would probably be different as well.
The main point of intermittent fasting is keeping your insulin levels low for the longest time possible, increasing insulin sensitivity, and forcing the body to use stored fat for energy.
Reduced calorie intake is the bit that makes you lose weight. Increased insulin sensitivity is a result of weight loss. "forcing the body to use stored fat for energy" is the mechanism by which weight loss happens.
But it doesn’t matter to me. One method makes me so miserably hungry 24/7 that I quit after a few weeks of agony, the other makes me forget all about food entirely.
This seems to bother people, who always tell me to do it the “right” way, which to them apparently means using willpower to endure endless suffering.
That's fine, you can live in your world of magic. I don't care for intermittent fasting, it been easier for me to calorie count, but both of our systems are CI/CO. If we can acknowledge the core concept is that weight loss is done through caloric restriction we can then expand that to more implementations, because, as you've pointed out, the "right" way is very personal.
Yes, it does. Because for somebody else, the three tiny meals might work, and intermittent fasting doesn't, and it would equally be good at the result.
That is a pretty interesting observation. I always thought it was solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned. For example, you burn ~2500 through just living, if you eat a pizza that contains 3000 calories, no matter the time at which you eat it, will you not still gain fat?
Its all anecdotal all the way down, so here's another grain of salt to add to the pile.
(Calories in - calories out) is correct enough to be the single most reliable metric, and will serve you right 99% of the time. My "one level deeper" understanding is that there are a few transfer functions applied to calories in. So of the technically available calories you eat, how much does your body absorb. Then, when the calories are biologically available, how does your body spend them?
So the idea would be, if you eat the pizza at the right time you reduce calories in. Either you will digest less calories, or your body will allocated them differently at different times of the day.
Unfortunately these things aren't really measurable so it's very hard to separate from hearsay.
>solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned.
It is, but CI\CO as advice doesn't take in to account that you aren't a machine and we aren't calculating gas mileage. The system is both adaptive and reactive. CI and CO changes based on the situation, and you have no way to accurately measure.
That's why you don't worry about Calories Out. You measure Calories In daily and then your weight at a sample rate that's long enough that it averages out most weirdness - probably weekly. If your weight is going up, reduce caloric consumption.
I’ve been thinking about writing a book on this topic: “No overweight person eats well”.
By very definition of a person is overweight, they got there by eating poorly, and are continuing to do so. They have eaten more energy than they use, this energy storage in fat.
I think there are an infinite number of true statements you could make about unhealthy or overweight people. What makes for a good book or article is finding the true statement you can say that actually sways behavior. I'm skeptical your message would succeed in this
Unsurprisingly, the title is sensationalist and not representative of the study. The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.
The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet. We know that a little weekly jog around the park doesn't mean you can eat a cheesecake every day, but anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight. The study does not conclude, at all, that you cannot outrun a bad diet. Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
Edit: My point is specifically not about running. I am merely pointing out that if you read the study you will find that it is more of a study on economic development, and not really useful for personal or localised health advice. It observes that economically developed population groups may be more sedentary, but do not expend significantly more energy - so a hunter-gatherer picking berries all day does not burn significantly more energy than an office worker (at least not enough to explain why the office worker is obese). Therefore, the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) than daily activity.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity knows that if you don't up your calorie intake that you will lose weight.
Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
This doesn't even require you to be an athlete, or do extensive physical activity. Add even a half-hour jog three days a week to your otherwise-mostly-sedentary routine and you'll tend to engage in "compensatory eating" even if you don't realize it.
This is why exercise alone often doesn't cause you to lose weight, or at least not as much as you'd expect given the extra calories you're burning: you're probably eating more (or the same amount, but foods with higher calorie density) than you were before, even if you didn't consciously choose to do so.
>that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
Correct, and the "eat less, move more" crowd will tell you, "ignore your hunger. Control yourself. You're a failure because you can't ignore one of the most basic and fundamental biological signals."
After I started doing moderately long and fast bike rides (200+km/week, flat and hilly terrain, averaging 70km/ride during summer, 100+ if I have enough time), I have found that:
- compared to "not much exercise" (some periods during winter), it modulates my hunger. I do not eat more, or only proportionally.
- when the rides are longer than cca. 50km, I start losing weight (not just water, weight, sustained)
- after several days with no exercise, my hunger starts to increase again. In other words, I have to exercise to not overeat. I don't understand this effect, but it works for me, and it's been like this for many years.
Absolutely.
This is one reason bodybuilders (the closest thing to professional dieters) will only do low intensity cardio -- walking etc -- when cutting weight.
High intensity cardio burns calories but increases appetite disproportionately. Albeit otherwise excellent for overall health.
literally get on a tredmill, angle it, and walk for an hour or two
I don't wanna sound too daring, but going outside is also an option.
This is why walkable cities are important!
> I don't wanna sound too daring, but going outside is also an option.
Sure, but a treadmill is more comfortable when it's >30C outside.
People downplay how important consistency is when trying to make changes to their lifestyle. Walking is good but whatever the exercise, a sustainable plan is best.
Same reason behind having a list when you go to the grocery store and sticking to it rather then buying whatever looks good then and there.
Can you clarify what your goal and outcomes are for that?
I hate /fit/ and the bodybuilding forums so much. Stupid memes like this, SS, GOMAD, and related exist and continue to be parroted because of them. No, using a segway to move in between weight machines will not preserve your gains.
The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal. I applaud folks like Chloe Ting (a "cardio bunny" aesthetic youtuber who specialize in Calistenics) who roast these guys by challenging them (bodybuilder roid bros) to keep up with her on her exercise routines. Watching these dudes collapse again and again because they have pathetic endurance and don't do meaningful cardio reminds is delicious to say the least.
If you get your diet advice from Zyzz, Rich Piana, or the rest of the memeloards of fitness, you deserve what's coming to you. Don't skip leg day.
> The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal.
This is a very ungenerous and incorrect take.
It is their prerogative to decide what outcome they want to maximize when it comes to their own body. I don't think any bodybuilder is under the delusion that they are particularly healthy when on the bodybuilding stage - they're not trying to be healthy, they're trying to win a specific competition with specific rules around it.
You might not like their goal or think it's stupid, but they are making the correct decisions for the outcomes they care about, and there's nothing wrong with caring about different things.
Does she keep up with them on their lifts?
> Anyone who has done extensive athletic physical activity knows that you will up your calorie intake unless you take explicit and intentional effort not to.
It also seems to be harder to dial your dietary intake back down if you cease that extra activity.
This depends on what you consider "extensive".
About 10 years ago I started taking 45 minute daily walks with no other changes in my diet or activities and the extra weight (about 15 lbs overweight) melted away. I made absolutely no effort to eat less and didn't get any hungrier.
Walking is quite special in this regard, because it doesn't seem to result in the same compensatory eating that more intense exercise does.
That depends on your pace and your previous level of activity. If the pace is average and your previous level was ~0 then yes, you're expected to benefit a lot for not much effort.
But to answer your question, walking at average pace is not extensive exercise by any means. Walking at top possible speed would be closer but would probably still not meet the bar. You'd need to incorporate running at moderate pace with a few periods of all-out sprinting into your walking routine.
One could say that your eating habits were borderline enough to maintain your current weight.
[flagged]
Also former fat guy here. I absolutely have not had that experience. I have easily maintained being fat (or even gained) while running 15-20k a week and walking everywhere. It's only when I actively moderate my eating have I lost weight. Otherwise I'd just slam down Oreos or whatever. It's stupid easy to get unfilling high calorie food.
It's good that it worked for you, but it clearly doesn't work for everyone.
Exactly.
A 5k run is barely enough to cover a slice of cheesecake. But it _feels_ like a whole fricking cheesecake and a donut.
> You're full of shit
Just FYI, that's an instant downvote on this site.
I just got a rather heavy physical job. Every shift is humbling. :P
I see a personal trainer on youtube one time who summarized all the components of weight loss so wonderfully I cant help but feel I butcher the topic whenever I talk about it.
The number one thing is sleeping. Go though the carnival of things people try to get their sleep sorted out.
The second thing is stress of both kinds. You need to be able to calm the fuck down. The body stores as much as possible in survival mode.
Then comes food. Your body need to adjust to burning fat for energy. People do this with tiny fasts and keto but (my entirely untested theory) is that you should fast for as long as it feels comfortable (no stress) then break the fast with keto. You start with something small, wait a bit then can eat quite a lot as long as there is no sugar and no carbs on the plate (keto). Then you do the next fast for as long as you can comfortably do. If you feel like complete shit eat some potatoes or even sugar and get back to the routine. Switching from carbs to fat cold turkey creates unwanted stress.
Then (if you didn't already) start mixing in a small amount of moderate physical activity. Walking for an hour per day is the goal. Keep an eye on what feels comfortable. Stay in the comfort zone. You may have to shorten the fast or eat a bit more between the fasts.
You don't have to go there but there are people who regularly fast for weeks and only have some cravings the first 1-2 days. They are obviously losing weight when they do that.
There are people who add [mild] strength training, will eat more and gain muscle weight. The good kind of weight.
If you add cardio you will also eat more but (like you said) you will feel like shit almost instantly after eating shit. From my experience I think it might actually kill you if you drain your reserves and try to replenish it with bullshit, say deep fried mars bars. You will be less capable fighting of diseases, infections or injuries when completely drained. You will quickly accumulate all the right stomach bacteria to create cravings for all the right things to eat.
Whatever you chose to do, it isn't about what you can do and accomplish today. It has to be a routine that will last 10-20 years. If you go from extensive athletic physical activity to sitting on the sofa for a few months the athletic digestive system is still there.
There was a fun study where they looked at big eaters both skinny and fat. Both ate just about everything but the skinny ones ate a lot more fat and the fat ones ate a lot more carbs. It seems to suggest that for the really lazy fat people an extra bucket of chicken to avoid eating a pizza might be worth a shot. More butter and more eggs per slice of bread. Two steaks and 1/3 the potatoes. etc
I'm not saying it will work but it would be fascinating if it did.
> Instead, it suggests "that dietary intake plays a far greater role than reduced energy expenditure in obesity related to economic development."
That sounds like more or less exactly what the title says to me.
> anyone who has done extensive 'athletic' physical activity
Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> not really useful for personal or localised health advice
It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'm not claiming that there's zero issues with eating less, or that people shouldn't exercise, just that the arguments seem to be off base.
I'm going to push back on this a bit, though I agree with some of the sentiment.; to the average person wanting to lose weight, I think the best advice is obviously to eat less via whatever diet works for them (I personally recommend counting calories, but it's not for everyone).
That said, you write:
> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.
First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.
Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.
> It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.
> Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job. You can get out of work and go play soccer for 2-3 hours every day instead of doing household chores, pursuing other hobbies, etc, but most people won't - it's a huge ask.
> Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.
Yet perhaps taking a huge time commitment during which you won't be able to eat much is exactly what is needed.
> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.
You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.
Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.
I once worked a night shift stocking job just after college. I was in phenomenal shape without hitting the gym. I was at my lowest weight with a ton of lean muscle as a result of moving heavy loads and stocking paint every night. I also did the math at one point, and given the size of the warehouse I was probably walking quickly 8 miles during my shift. It became a chore to eat enough calories every day. Somewhere around 4000 calories/day, you may still be hungry, but you are generally full. Also food sort of becomes boring, and the desire to eat just isn't as strong.
That said, it was 4-6 hours 4 nights a week. That is a lot of time to spend to burn all those calories. It is really not hard to eat an extra 100 calories per day, but it takes a lot of effort to burn an extra 100 calories. It's the asymmetry here you absolutely have to respect. Further, at least for me, there is another asymmetry in terms of satiation vs hunger. It is much easier to be slightly satiated than it is to be slightly hungry. What this means, is that there is a tendency to be driven to eat slightly more than your body needs. This is partly why the GLP-1 drugs seem so effective, is that they seem to flip this asymmetry in the other direction, which means weight loss is the default, instead of weight gain.
Reminds me of when I got my first job at 17...I worked at a large department/grocery store. My job primarily consisted of pushing karts from the corrals back to the store.
In an 8 hour shift, I likely walked ~15 miles, with half of that time pushing up to a dozen karts. For lunch, I'd go to the McDonald's and get a Super Size (Since this was when that still existed) Double Quarter Pounder meal with a Coke. I'd chug the whole coke and then refill it. This meal was easily 3,000 calories, and I'd eat it 3 times a week.
After about two months on the job, I'd STILL lost about 5 lbs.
Polar explorers Fienes and Stroud were eating locks of butter and still losing weight on their sled pulling expedition. It was estimated that they were buring up to 11,000 calories a day.
Your McD's meal was probably closer to 2000 calories, even with the giant Coke. For a short period I ate one meal a day, even when I thought I went over maintenance with a massive fast food treat, I'd still be 4-500 cals under if I was active that day.
Yup, we have a limit in our ability to take in and metabolize calories, although it is somewhat flexible in that if you do it enough you'll get better at it. Look at the people who do the long thru-hikes. Stuff like the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to the highest point in Maine), PCT or CDT (both run from the Mexican border to the Canadian border). They will hit saturation on the ability to take in calories, although enough time out there can increase the ability to metabolize fat (very useful in that it has about 2x the calories per pound of other food)
But you are right that it's very definitely about the balance.
You make a good point about the time investment. You were able to do your exercise while working, but very few people will spend 16-24 hours a week working out.
I would say that in practice 99% of people can't outrun a bad diet, but not because of any sort of physiological reason. You simply need to train so much that most people won't ever approach the level of running/cycling/lifting they would need to do so.
If you're training like an elite athlete (for me and my at the time roommate that was running 85, or in his case, 100+ miles a week with a few lift sessions) you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight. Most people can't fit that much training into their lives without making it their life's primary focus at the expense of everything else, and couldn't sustain that level of training if they did, so it becomes a practical impossibility.
I do miss that aspect of running so much mileage, though I appreciate the freedom that stepping back from competition has afforded me in other areas. To maintain weight now, I eat 1-2 meals a day, but back then? I ate whatever got put in front of me, sometimes 4 meals a day.
Sure but for the purposes of mass communication or creating helpful and memorable aphorisms "you can't out run a bad diet" is an appropriate summarization of the research.
If it's all ppl get out of it, the worst that might happen is that a handful of up & coming elite athletes might need their coaches to help them unlearn it, as opposed to the status quo where literal millions of ppl are trying & failing to outrun their diets.
Yes and I understand that. I was specifically replying to a comment about this phrase being a myth for athletes.
Right, and that's fine. A saying that's true for 99% of people is a perfectly good saying. In the vast, vast majority of cases, "you can't outrun a bad diet" is completely true.
Your time running 85 miles a week is so outside the norm that your experience isn't even worth mentioning when evaluating that saying.
> you can, and will, eat just about whatever you damn please and not gain weight
I don’t know if any athlete who can sustain themselves on a junk diet.
Elite endurance athletes have awful diets by any normal standard, because the only way to fuel yourself adequately for a stage of the Tour de France or an ultramarathon is with nauseating amounts of refined carbohydrates. It's not even the fun kind of junk, just a constant effort to eat as much carbohydrate as your gut can possibly tolerate.
"somewhere between 60-120g carbs/hour" and that's on the flat stages (more in the mountains) of TdF would be considered junk food anywhere outside of sport.
Source: https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/mango-flavour-and-120g-...
> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.
For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.
For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.
But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.
Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.
Easier to just cut carbs.
Powerlifting does not take as many calories as you'd think. In fact, lifting in general is surprisingly easy on the calorie requirement, so most powerlifters and bodybuilders incorporate cardio as part of their routine. You will burn a lot more calories by walking 10,000 steps a day for 1 month than you would doing an intense lifting session each day.
The reason you're probably thinking as to why lifters eat a huge amount is precisely because they're already large and muscular. Just 5% less bodyfat at the same weight results in roughly 200 more calories at maintenance for someone that is around 93kg.
A vigorous weightlifting workout for an hour will burn about 400kcal[1], which is roughly equivalent to walking 10k steps depending on your body weight. Another way to think of this is 100 minutes of brisk walking will round out to about 400kcal.
You don't really burn more calories walking, it's just easy to do and fit in around other things.
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...
Weird hill to die on - 400 is probably the top end for a super heavy day at a higher bodyweight - maybe deadlift primary and squat secondary day? Walking for 10,000 steps will every day will certainly burn more calories.
Regardless, people who lift aren’t eating more just because they burn a couple of hundred calories 2-5 times a week.
You’re wrong about that, look up videos of strongmen and bodybuilder meals/eating routines. The 2 hour workouts at the top of these fields are very calorie intensive.
Bodybuilders eat a lot in the offseason because they're on tons of drugs and trying to maximize the amount of lean mass they can put on, and they eat more in general because when you have 100lb+ more muscle than the average person you have a significantly higher base metabolic rate. You can go on a variety of PED related forums and find IFBB pro's posting food logs, etc., and see that these crazy eating routines are limited to certain parts of the year, and even then have been falling out of favor - the 'lean bulk' for pros is more popular than ever.
Very few IFBB pros are working out in 2 hour sessions, either. Coaches understand junk volume way better now and know that a lot of the work being done previously just wasn't providing much muscle growth stimulus after a certain point. Most are spending <8 hours in the gym each week in general.
The top of the bodybuilding field is not eating a ton of food because of their lifting routines burning a bunch of calories.
I have lifted for 30+ years and something very un-intuitive with powerlifting is the optimal weight class for a height is extremely high.
If you are 5'10" you are pound for pound stronger at 240 than at 198. 198 will be dominated by someone who is shorter otherwise.
You are also much stronger the more you weigh, period. Strongman are eating so much to keep their weight up, not because they are burning so many calories while working out.
Even the most intense prowler workout that will make an untrained person puke their guts out is easy to out eat.
It is easiest to see with a contest bodybuilding diet. Even a 250lb bodybuilder who is doing a ton of working out is basically eating nothing. The body is incredibly efficient at holding on to weight. If it wasn't, humans would have starved to death a long time ago.
My anecdata:
- a year of busting my ass on the bike almost daily: -15kg
- a year of restricting calories to ~1200/day and not doing much else: -40kg
- 2 years of sitting in my apartment being afraid of COVID and drinking too much: +50kg
Conclusion: booze is a really great way to put on a lot of weight quickly
my anecdata aligns with yours. A year of cardio every day and resistance 6 days a week bought me no weight loss, 2 years of limiting myself to 1800 cals/day on top of that stripped me of 25% of my body weight.
Cool, but being physically active is not just to lose weight but to gain health. Your heart works more, your lungs work more, they develop a bit more, putting more oxygen in your body and the effects compound over time. So if you can, do both: control calories intake and exercise.
I did exactly that, and I thought I made that clear in my original comment but maybe I was unclear. With that being said, this article is about drivers of obesity so weight control is sort of the topic du jour itt.
All impressive numbers, but it seems like the move would be to keep doing #1 while being slightly less restrictive about #2 and just as restrictive about #3, which will eventually leave you not just lighter, but with a good level of fitness if you aren't already there. It's way easier to keep excess weight off and feel great about it if you're practicing athletics of some sort regularly
If you're drinking beer or wine it is certainly very calorie dense. You're looking at 208 kcal per pint of beer or 123 kcal for a 5oz pour of wine. A pound of fat takes about 3,500 excess calories, or 16 pints of beer. So if you drink 2 a day all else equal you could gain nearly 1 lb a week.
This is just pointless ceteris paribus because genetics are the biggest variable.
If someone has a predisposition to diabetes they can't drink alcohol and hold things ceteris paribus because of the way alcohol effects the liver and then effects insulin.
Insulin sensitivity gets worse, blood sugar is all over the place and then the person is on a rollover-coast of over consuming calories to try to stabilize blood sugar.
IMO your post is why almost all dieting advise is just complete oversimplified nonsense. Meaningless ceteris paribus linear combinations that mostly add up to a non-reality for a non-linear complex system. It is a way for people to pick and chose what they want to be true.
Did you mean to reply to me? I'm simply pointing out that beer is calorie dense.
This is why you should walk to the pub instead of drinking at home...
Another thing you can do is one day of regular calories, and one day of zero. You still average to 1200 a day, but I think it's better for you for several reasons you can look into if interested.
[ throws out the protein powder ]
I'm 5'6", 165lbs, I bike 6-8 miles every day and do resistance training 6 days/week. I also have limited myself to 1800 cals/day and at least 130g protein. For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs which, at my height, is bordering on clinical obesity. If you could be healthy just by training and eating what you want I would have done it twice.
I don't understand how you wouldn't lose weight. Are you sure the 1800 kcals is accurate. Are you including what you drink?
Oh no, I lost weight when I was on the 1800kcal. it was when I was working out what I intuitively feel like is a lot more than most people but still eating what I wanted that I didn't lose weight, which anecdotally fits with the premise of the article.
Your bike ride is too short to lose weight.
it's not though, because I lost 25% of my weight
"For two years I was biking 6-8 miles every day, doing resistance training and maintaining 210lbs"
Did you pause the the jogging until in better shape, to avoid causing lasting damage?
Maybe try an elliptical, rowing erg, bike, or swimming?
You can outrun a bad diet, but the average person won't. The average American diet is 3600 cals/day (https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-calories-americans-eat..., https://archive.is/IURse). The average person needs ~=2250 cals/day to maintain a healthy weight (https://www.webmd.com/diet/calories-chart, women need 1600-2400 averaging at 2000, men need 2000-3000 averaging at 2500). Jogging a sustained 5mph burns about 600 calories/hour (https://runrepeat.com/calories-burned-running#calories-burne...). Now it's just algebra, the average person takes in 1400 calories more than they need in a day, so while you could try to outrun that diet it keeps up a pace of 5mph for about 2.5 hours EVERY DAY. So the most accurate advice is "a person can out-train a bad diet but the vast majority of people won't" but the advice that's most likely to lead the most people to the goal they're actually pursuing is "you can't out-train a bad diet".
For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.
An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)
I've lost 100 lbs twice. You absolutely can outrun a bad diet lol.
It's just a LOT of exercise and counting all of your calories. A 1600 calorie bag of chips is 4 hours of cardio :)
So you didn't outrun a bad diet. You counted calories and matched your diet to your exercise (or vice versa) to get the weight outcome you wanted.
I think some here are narrowly interpreting "bad diet" to mean "lots of junk food". While yes, that's not a great diet, what's really meant is a diet where calorie intake regularly exceeds expenditure, regardless of what you're eating.
Even if you eat only the healthiest of foods, if your intake is too much for what you're burning, that's still a "bad diet".
I don't think that's a reasonable way to define the phrase. If "bad diet" is defined in terms of how much exercise you do, then "you can't outrun a bad diet" is a tautology.
I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.
Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.
Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.
> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.
It's advice for people new to diet-and-exercise, not a law of the universe.
> it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.
Exactly the opposite: it's saying that, in terms of weight loss, that eating the junk matters a lot more than going to the gym.
For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.
>You can't outrun a bad diet.
You certainly can. If you eat Mcdonald's every day, that's a bad diet, and if you just sit around all day, you will gain weight. But the same person that eats the same exact McDonald's meal every day but also walks for an hour a day is going to be thinner. The real myth being perpetrated on this thread is that if you start walking an hour every day that somehow you will started eating more and that the only way to lose weight is to change your diet. This may be true if you eat a giant box of oreos every few hours, but it is certainly not true just because you have a "bad" diet. Eating healthier food is a good idea and I certainly recommend it, but it seems to me that the refusal of so many to accept that daily exercise in itself can lead to a healthier weight is a sign of denial by the overweight.
A Big Mac is over 500 calories.
Running, not walking, only burns around 500 calories an hour.
You can eat a Big Mac in 5 minutes and it'll take you an hour of running to burn it off.
You very much can outrun a bad diet as far as weight loss/gain goes, which is the topic at hand (not general health).
I've been cycling several thousand miles a year for many, many years, and in my experience I can certainly "outrun" a bad diet. Go for a 40 mile bike ride 5 days a week and you'll have a difficult time eating enough food.
A couple years ago I added weight lifting to my regimen and I could never eat enough. Most days of the week I'd stop by mcdonalds to pick up a couple mcdoubles as a snack. I was easily consuming 4-5 thousand calories a day (150-175 grams of protein) and I was still losing weight while gaining muscle. At one point I was sub-10% body fat whilst eating a mix of healthy food and junk food. Every visit my personal trainer was telling me to eat more.
If you're interested in losing weight while eating whatever you want I suggest doing 10-15 hours of fairly intense cardio per week, and 2-3 very intense lifting sessions per week.
And then there's Michael Phelps, living proof you can outrun (or at least outswim) just about any diet you can imagine. He's obviously an extreme, but he's not the only example.
The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.
Pointing out that elite endurance athletes and olympic athletes can have high calorie requirements isn't helpful or the point. Yes, energy must come from somewhere, but even among the generally fit and active portion of the population, only a vanishingly small number of them exercise at the intensity and time requirements to burn so many calories as to not easily have all of that thwarted with a single meal.
> The point of the saying is to get most people to understand that the biggest factor in the average person's weight loss is their diet, not their exercise levels.
Just say that then.
> You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.
People tend to vastly overestimate the caloric expenditure of activity, probably because it feels strenuous.
4 hard minutes on an assault bike will leave you gasping, but means next to nothing for energy expenditure.
An athlete can outrun a sedentary person's bad diet, actually. It's all relative, of course, but the saying has exceptions.
Not disagreeing but I think it's worth adding, "but you can outrun a slightly bad diet".
Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.
Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat.
The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.
Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance
Your examples sound like fairly short-term biological responses to intense activity, which are likely different than long-term biological response to a significant increase in daily calorie expenditure.
I've done a fair amount of wilderness backpacking. It's common to lose your appetite for the first few days due to the change in environment, schedule, activity, etc. But pretty quickly your body will realize this is going to keep happening and it's going to need to make up the extra 1000+ calories you're burning every day.
I've been doing muay thai for the best part of a decade now, the appetite suppression is always there
That's the point of the study though.
If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn more calories than your baseline.
But if you do that workout often enough, for various reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure.
This means that if you want to lose weight consistently, working out is useless in that sense. You might see benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but eventually your body adjusts.
Working out is great for a plethora of reasons. And this calorie budget rebalancing is one of them, since it means inflammation or auto-immune responses get downregulated.
Losing weight is not one of those benefits. Whereas it is often held up as such which leads to intense disappointment and relapse with overweight people, because they think "oh, if I just go for six intense two-hour jogs a week, I can keep eating sumptuously."
How exactly can your body adjust that much though? There is some minimum baseline level of calorie burn to stay alive and keep your body temp etc.
If you workout enough calories that exceeds the minimum baseline to keep you alive, the body can't adapt below that or adapt into the negative.
For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories, so that's 12,000 a week for 6 times a week.
What's the lowest a body will adapt to slow it's baseline metabolic rate? I am reading that the BMR can only reduce by like maybe 15-20% due to body adaptation.
This would put their baseline calorie burn at around 1500, and then if they are burning ~1700 a day from their jogging, they can eat 3200 a day to maintain or 3000 to even slowly lose weight over time, which is a decent amount that you can have a pretty fun "diet" of what you consume IMO.
> For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories
ogging a mile will burn around 100kcal, a bit more if you're decently overweight, let's be generous and say 150kcal. Someone who isn't in good shape and is overweight (the kind of person we're likely talking about) isn't going to be running that fast, maybe 3mph. So that's 6 miles in 2 hours. Even if I'm incredibly generous and say they'll burn 200kcal/mi, that's only 1200kcal. But in reality it's probably more like 900kcal.
But let's be real here. Your average (even above-average) overweight person with a not-so-great diet is not going to be jogging for 2 hours. Maybe they'll jog for an hour. So 450-600kcal. And maybe they'll do that 2-3 times a week.
1350-1800kcal extra burned every week is great! Except that still probably won't be what happens, exactly. Unless this person is also counting calories, or consciously working hard to keep their exact same diet, they will probably unconsciously eat more. Adding a 9mi/week jogging regimen to your life, especially if you're overweight, is going to make you more hungry than usual, so you will eat more. How much? Well, hard to say. Maybe enough so that you still end up with a calorie deficit, but in many (most, I'd guess) cases you'll still have a surplus, even if less than before.
This is all still a good thing! A 500kcal surplus per week when you're running 9 miles is much better than a 1500kcal surplus every week with no exercise. But this (hopefully) demonstrates that it's not as simple as "I'll just add some exercise and that'll get my weight under control". You need to change your diet, and take in fewer calories. It's hard. But it's the only way -- for the vast majority of people -- that this will work.
I never really found the eating more when exercising more that compelling personally. I mainly meal prep and eat the same amount whether or not I work out and how hard I work out.
I feel like saying that someone is going to eat more because they are start exercising a lot is a separate topic. But I would think that someone who has the willpower to start exercising drastically more also has the willpower to control what they physically put in their mouth. I have personally found that stopping putting things in my mouth to eat is easier than getting myself to exercise as much as I would like to, so I don't think it's a guarantee that someone choosing to exercise more will automatically eat more.
For a 200 lb man, just jogging doesn't burn 1000 kcal/hr. You have to actually run at a pace of about 8:30 min/mi. People who can sustain that for 2 hours per day every day are not overweight in the first place.
I lost between 50-70 pounds in a year, and I used a Garmin smartwatch which I wear all hours to track my calorie expenditure, which is pretty accurate. I think this effectively allows you to ignore the kind of exercise. You just keep track of your calorie burn. If your workout doesn't burn enough calories, you do more.
Totally agree with you here. The phrase "rounds to true".
Caveats for the pedantic:
If you've found yourself overweight and sedentary, you are unlikely to adopt a level of exercise needed to outrun your bad diet.
All else being equal, the person with the better diet will have a better body comp (or achieve a goal body comp easier).
I wondered how these things work out in practice, as the difficulty of adhering to a diet or exercise plan is a real factor
I found this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3339766/
TL;DR; in that study of 4k people:
"A substantial proportion of obese U.S. adults who attempted to lose weight reported weight loss, at least in the short term. Obese adults were more likely to report achieving meaningful weight loss if they ate less fat, exercised more, used prescription weight loss medications, or participated in commercial weight loss programs."
Also somewhat interesting that eating diet products negatively correlated with weight loss
One could read that as exercising more or eating less both work.
This is precisely it.
Consuming a bunch of calories is super easy and quick. That tiny snack bag of chips that you can scarf down in three bites in less than a minute? Yep, 200 calories.
Burning that 200 calories off? Basically a 30-60 minute workout.
Not eating those chips is WAY easier than trying to burn them off after the fact.
I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
Running is around 600 calories per hour [1]. A large fries from McDonald's is 480 calories. A can of Coke is 140 calories.
What's easier? Not eating the fries and drinking the Coke or running vigorously for an hour?
When you look at the group who have become morbidly obese, you see diets that reach 10, 20 or 30+ thousand calories a day. You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight. When such people decide to change, they're often put on a medical diet of ~2400 calories. There is no way they could exercise down to this kind of calorie deficit.
Peple should think of food in terms of how much exercise it is because it becomes impossible to ignore just how much easier it is to alter diet than it is to increase calorie expenditure.
[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...
> I don't think the existence of elite athletes alters the central point: it is vastly to go into calorific deficit by altering diet than increasing exercise.
You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
> You get to 600+ pounds and you actually need like 20,000 calories just to maintain that weight.
That's wildly inaccurate. It’s more like 5k than 20k. Maintenace calorie requirements are basically linear with weight given similar activity patterns.
Also, most people who need to lose weight haven't already gotten to 600+ lbs.
> You left out the key word in that sentence, which should have appeared after “vastly”. I assume you mean easier, but in fact that’s not true for a lot of people.
Not sure I agree with that. I think it's probably true that adopting even a minimal exercise regimen is easier than adjusting diet, for most people.
But actually turning that new exercise regimen into a calorie deficit is significantly harder. Not only do you have to exercise probably quite a bit per week to get you into a deficit, you have to actively work to not eat more. If you start an exercise regimen, I guarantee you're going to be hungrier, and unless you're very strict with yourself, you can easily eat enough extra to wipe out most or all of the new calorie "savings".
This isn't the first study to show that our bodies adjust to fairly set caloric expenditure - the constrained total energy expenditure model isn't new, and Ponztner and his team aren't the first to advocate for it, but we should be clear that he is an advocate for it, and has been for a while.
Obviously, energy has to come from somewhere, so enough exercise will overcome any adaptations your body makes, but the current evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of wiggle room for your body to cut energy expenditure to make up for any exercising you do. The evidence suggests this takes time, but it does also suggest that the 20 minutes on the bike daily that helped you drop some pounds at the start will not do much for your weight a year in.
I don't know if it's true or not, but when I first read one of the studies, it did make some intuitive sense to me - humans have spent much of their evolutionary history having to expend significant energy to procure food. If you had to walk 30,000 steps in a day to forage or hunt, it makes sense that limiting other movements while idle, etc., to help preserve energy stores would be beneficial.
My understanding is that the research shows that a highly active hunter gathering and an inactive office worker burn roughly the same number of calories per day. But I find that hard to believe. What is the office worker's body doing to make up the difference for all the movement and muscle contraction?
Human bodies are highly efficient at certain movements, e.g. walking. There's also a complicated part of hunter gatherer life style where you don't know if you'll find something if you walk another mile, so often the response is to just... not do that.
Being able to have a life style where you're constantly expending energy, like training athletes do, really only works if you're guaranteed food, which is generally not how hunter gathering works.
Lots and lots (and lots) of small subconscious movements throughout the day. Many thousands of them. Moving your heard around, tilting it a bit, wiggling your toes, rolling your shoulders, scratching an itch, etc.
Anecdotally, I believe I have a personal example of the sort of thing that changes. I went from being ultra-sedentary to exercising 5+ days a week over the past year. My body had enough of these tics that they had long since passed over the subconscious and unnoticed level into "why the fuck do I keep bouncing my legs around all the time when sitting or in bed." Now, I never do. After years of trying, I stopped making any sort of intentional effort to stop - and even things like weighted blankets, etc., in the past did nothing.
Now, I just don't do it. I fidget less at my desk while working. I make a whole lot less 'random' movements for no discernible reason.
Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more regular exercise.
(Now, of course, exercise is hugely important for a variety of other health factors)
Glad to hear that exercize has worked for you.
>Add up enough of all these tiny things over the course of a day, things you probably don't even realize you're doing, and each tiny fraction of a calorie expended eventually pushes you to the levels you see with more regular exercise.
Fidgeting will obviously burn some calories. But I find it hard to believe that fidgeting will burn the same amount of calories as sustained exersize.
I have heard some suggestion that the extra energy is being burned at a cellular level (causing inflammation). But would be office work get hot if that was the case?
I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”
This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.
That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.
In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”
Would you say Luka, Neymar and others are outrunning their diets? Did Shaq, too? You don't automatically get a good physique by being an athlete, you still have to earn it. People just see that all of the top athletes have earned it and take it for granted, like they don't have world class dieticians and a huge financial incentive to maintain a strict diet
Michael Phelps did outswim his diet. He famously ate a lot of junk food and pizza, and yet remained fit because of his huge daily calorie expenditure. A direct quote from an interview with him, where he states: "I just sort of try to cram whatever I can into my body. It’s pretty much whatever I feel like eating, I’m going to eat".
Sure, but I think we can still safely say you can't outrun a bad diet when only less than 1% of people who try are successful at it.
I think the challenge with swimming is that there is thermodynamics of swimming through water to also contend with. So your body is also having to keep warm whilst losing heat to better heat conducting fluid (water vs air). But I still agree, if Phelps was running or even walking with the same effort he could eat similarly.
How many hours per day was he swimming?
A lot. But a possible amount.
Clearly a possibly amount since he did it.
Would it be possible for someone who was not supporting themselves that way? I.e. for someone with a 40 hr / week job?
I don't know about possible, but I'm sure the Michael Phelps regimen is wildly impractical for everyone, including Michael Phelps.
My personal experience is that "outrunning" a poor diet is absolutely possible, and I kind of did it unintentionally. I started biking to work out of necessity. I wasn't planning to lose weight, but it happened. I had no weight loss ambitions or plans, but it was probably a good thing.
The problem is comparing the average person to one of the greatest Olympic athletes is completely pointless because of genetics.
Shaq could easily dunk a basketball weighing 300lbs. You can't infer from that then that any person can weigh 300lbs and dunk a basketball.
I'm not the one who brought up Michael Phelps. Much less extreme cases have worked too. It's probably easier than dunking a basketball.
I can't take this Luka slander. The guy carried the ungrateful Mavericks team for 6 seasons averaging 35mpg. He's not out of shape. Same thing with Jokic, 10 seasons of 32mpg average. Their mpg also go up in the playoffs.
People need to stop thinking about <10% body fat as the "athletic standard". Some players are super skinny, some players have more mass to them and use it to their advantage.
I do agree with regards to Shaq, the guy coasted in his talent later in his career and let himself go. Had he a better work ethic he could have been in the conversation for one of the greatest players ever.
I'm a Luka fan, but he does look a (hehe) little chubby these past 2 seasons and it has impacted his game noticeably. Just compare the explosiveness from his first seasons to now
Doesn't matter how you look, if you can play those kind of minutes and perform like they do you're in athletic shape. Luka and Jokic don't need to be super slim like Edwards, Morant and Westbrook because they don't rely on supernatural athleticism - they rely on other facets of their game where having a bit more mass is advantageous or at the very least not detrimental.
In any case, Doncic got bullied and embarrassed by Mavs FO's comments about his weight and work ethic(complete lies to try and save face for their terrible and shady trade) so you can look forward to a slimmer Luka next season.
When I did my first two fights in muay thai I wasn't watching my weight neither changing my diet during fight camp and came in 6kg underweight.
I was absolutely shredded and still ate stuff like katsu curry weekly
Magnus Midtbo has Kristian Blummrnfelt on his show, who is the Olympic gold medalist for triathlon.
Kristian essentially eats pasta and Nutella and bread all day.
So technically, yes, you can outrun a bad diet..
Though me thinks this article is aimed at the average person.
I feel you are precisely making the opposite point. Athletes eat more because of their energy expenditure. The same happens with people trying to lose weight. It dramatically increases your hunger making a cut that much harder.
I've found that engaging in simple activities like walking is a sweet spot for weight loss. Anything more rigorous and I just can't do it. But that is very anecdotal and may not apply to many people. I would not say I have the strongest willpower when it comes to hunger, especially when stressed due to work or life.
> The study compares energy expenditure across different economic groups i.e. western people sitting in offices versus hunter-gatherers in Africa, and found that difference in energy expenditure does not account for differences in obesity, so points to consumption as the likely reason.
That seems like a kind of large assumption to make. Obviously it seems like it has to be either diet or exercise, but if the obvious answer was always right we wouldn't need to do studies in the first place.
I think if the goal is to find out what strategies help average people lose weight - who are mostly not athletes or bodybuilders - then excluding athletes is exactly the right thing to do.
>the link between economic development and obesity is likely related to food (dietary intake) [rather] than daily activity.
--you
>Food — not lack of exercise — fuels obesity
--the article headline
I'm being genuine and not at all snarky when I say I'm having a hard time seeing daylight between these two positions. I would love for someone to help me understand better please.
Why unsurprisingly?
For most people, a 1 hour moderate run is only about 1-2 cookies worth (and only half a Crumbl cookie). Even a marathon run might only burn 2000 calories . a chipotle burrito is 1600 .
In other words, for 95% of people doing activity, they shouldn't eat any surplus if their goal is to maintain or lose weight.
It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it. Loss of this sensation is a major obesity driver. A numbness for nutrients.
Eating while actually being hungry is a great sensation. That's why I stopped snacking/sugar treats, it always spoil my hunger for when it's meal time. On the other hand, when I have having my meal, no restriction on veggies/meat/fish, open bar, I eat as much as I want.
I always welcome hunger knowing that I live in a society of calorie abundance. I generally tend to feel annoyed when people that are hungry start treating like an emergency.
Plus everything tastes ten times better. Even white rice or a slice of bread tastes divine when hungry
I still remember how amazing an unsalted boiled egg tasted the first time I did a 72 hour fast.
You're right that it's easy to out-eat the running you can sustain as a regularly fit person, but there's no "only" about 2000 calories
2000 calories is pretty near the daily calory requirement for a healthy weight human. If you are of healthy weight and eat appropriately, you pretty much have to eat twice as much to compensate for that marathon
If you burn 2k calories daily exercising you are no longer gen pop. The case still stands, statistically nobody is out-exercising a bad diet.
For fatties the benefit is even greater
> It's actually best to do most of your activity undernourished, as it helps develop true intuitive nutrition feedback sensation. You'll start to sense how every macro and salt feels when you ingest it.
Not exactly my experience.
My did a exercise schedule involves climbing a mountain every week. The mountain is about 400 meters (that's ~1312 feet, or more than four American football fields laid end-to-end) tall, and the exercise was usually done during afternoon (1 or 2 hours before dinner) without eating lunch.
After two mouths of that, I've noticed:
1. My weight or belly size don't really changed much. I also notice that some people who also frequented the mountain have big bellies.
2. I got very hungry after that, which triggers me to eat more during dinner, usually salty food.
3. The delight of salt becomes craving, probably due to the lost of liquid/electrolyte through sweat (and tears, probably).
4. For comparison, I stops craving salty thing the next day.
I guess you need to actively suppress some of your inner urges to really make the "nutrition feedback sensation" work. Otherwise, exercise more only leads to consume more.
P.S. Also, doctors really can't recommend doing heavy physical activity with empty stomach, as it might increase your heat rate or something (I might be hearing it wrong). I've since changed the schedule so I can eat something before start climbing, though my belly size still remained the same, and I'm still craving for salty food if uncontrolled.
But maybe it's just because I don't know how to do it correctly.
I was in this loop when i started cycling to work. Thinking that with 2+ hours i could eat anything during the day.
You seem self aware that’s a good starting point
I don't think a chipotle burrito is actually 1600 calories unless you do something non-standard. Probably 800-1100
Fair enough but people are eating those daily plus 2 more meals. They don’t need any additional food , even if they were running a marathon every day
You're mistaking active calories as the only calories you burn a day. There's a reason the caloric intake recommendation is ~2kcal/day, because your RMR (resting metabolic rate) is ~2kcal/day. Meaning if you were to literally sit in bed all day, you are "burning" ~2kcal/day. On top of that you have your incidental energy expenditure per day (TDEE), aka walking to the fridge, taking a shit, general locomotion, etc. You then have active calories burned on top of that. If you were to run a marathon, that means you would need to eat ~5kcal in one day to break even.
Yes I’m advocating eating less. It sounds like we agree with each other. What did I miss?
If someone would have eaten 3 meals for a sum of 2000 cal, with one being a 500 calorie meal, and they decide to switch that out with a 1600 calorie chipotle burrito, then the excess calories they need to burn are only 1100. Which a half marathon would more or less cover.
The situation you described only makes sense if they're eating 2000 calories worth of food during the day then adding an extra chipotle burrito.
Re: your 2nd marathon comment, if someone is eating two 800 calorie meals a day plus an extra 1600 calorie burrito, that comes out to 3200 calories. Minus the 2k resting expenditure, minus the 2k marathon expenditure, they're 800 calories short so they do need to consume more.
Is, I believe, the argument GP is making.
I don't disagree with you, I think the amount of exercise most people are capable of doing on a daily basis the extra calorie needs are insignificant. But I think your examples overstate the point.
we agree then that eating isn't necessary.
plus shrinkflation
+1 for undernourishment.
Discovered that as a broken uni student, and has become my goto fix to lose weight. Lost 10-11kgs over the last year by means of that. The occasional “cheat” (mostly social events really) slows the process down but don’t really stop it. It’s not really a fast process though… but it strongly depends on how under nourished you are and how active you are. For me keeping myself between 8000 and 10’000 steps a day was sufficient.
That’s great progress. It comes down to inverting the normal indulgence cycle. Once you discover that under-eating can feel better than over eating – you feel immensely better.
Strava said I burned near 4k calories on my last marathon.
And most people eat more than 2 chipotles a day , even with no marathons
> "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice going on in the background," Pontzer says.
I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Spikiness and variability are probably good for you. Its funny that the Bryan Johnson types who closely control every calorie in their body have such a bad reaction to any variability. I don't know if its him, but I heard someone not be able to sleep and their levels got all messed up from one sweet. And their conclusion was sweets are so bad for you, rather than you're building your body to be too fragile to shocks.
The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
> That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight.
Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting calories [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/SVS0ioOdfuE?t=225
That's exactly the point the grandparent comment was making though. Because they aren't chronically eating at competition levels is the reason they aren't overweight. They have a high calorie moment, followed by low calorie stretches.
That wasn't my takeaway from that comment.
> Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic.
Suggests that your metabolism is changing, as though your body becomes more or less efficient at burning calories because you're eating more or less. Instead, these guys eat a huge surplus of calories and then go into a deficit to get back to their standard weight.
Sure he cuts back his calories, but 70 hotdogs is about 21k calories. I don't think he goes into a 21k calorie deficit over the next few weeks. That's an insane deficit. That would be the equivalent of not eating for 8.5 days, which is not possible since it would mess with his training. He probably cuts it back some fraction of that, say 10k and his body's increased metabolism adjusts for the rest.
It would be interesting to know what amount of the calories from the 70 hot dogs is actually absorbed, versus how much is excreted without being absorbed.
Your body is not converting all 21k calories to fat in an event like that. There are many physiological limits to caloric conversion to fat.
I'm not exactly sure what their bodies are doing, but I guarantee you my body would get rid of that food extremely quickly before it was fully digested.
A 21K deficit over 3 weeks would be 1000 Cal/day of deficit. For comparison, this is the amount of deficit required to lose 2 pounds per week, which many people do.
Isn't there a limit to how many calories your body can store in a certain period of time? After a certain point wont there be a lot of waste?
Doesn't that beg the question of why anyone gets fat if your metabolism can just... increase to cover some arbitrary amount of calories?
It's because our bodies want to get fat, because storing calories is evolutionarily advantageous (or at least was).
> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.
Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.
Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.
Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.
Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.
---
1. From Renaissance Periodization
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value
In addition to food being much tastier than ever before, it’s also much cheaper. Despite current inflation and cost of living concerns, we spend far less on food than any time in history. Food in the 1960 was almost twice as expensive as it is today. Food costs used to be higher than housing costs!
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...
Interesting - training for spikiness/variability is a positive view, e.g. embrace the lack of occasional sleep, it trains you to be more resilient.
This is built into a lot of religions and cultural practices with fasting or restrictions. Spikiness is lindy
Depends on the goal is. If you life is full of shocks then build for shocks. If you life is not build for shocks it makes sense to optimize for your existence. You certainly don't want to overfit the model as you are describing but you don't want to build a life around expecting shocks when none arrive. As with all things, it is a balance.
Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.
Some do this, some go on binge fast cycles. Others just eat the food. It's different for everyone. Binge fast cycles are probably the easiest way to train this though.
Diet to manage your weight. Exercise to manage your fitness.
It's real simple in theory and real difficult in practice. Super worth it, though. Your entire world starts opening up when things take less energy to do and you have more energy to give. It's very challenging to convey how important it is without living the experience.
Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently. Too many people go through theses cycles of "I'm going to cut out this, this and this to lose X pounds" and then drop it once they hit their goal or it ends up being too hard. While you might not shed pounds as quickly, if you focus on making sure you get varied, satiating, nutritious food(actually nutritious, not falling for the abundance of marketing out there), then you'll have an easier time resisting the temptation to gorge on treats and getting too many calories.
Language changes over time, and "diet" is very commonly used as shorthand for "restrictive food intake" or "caloric restriction." But a reminder that "diet" is short for "dietary intake", and is not prescriptive. "A healthy diet" is a common phrase for "permanently good eating habits."
The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food intake."
I think you read "diet" and "exercise" as verbs when I was using them as nouns :) My grammar wasn't great, though, so that's on me.
> Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently.
Colloquially the former can mean the latter. But yes, anything that cannot be sustained is doomed to fail.
This is true to an extent and I'm very fond of the saying, but beyond a certain point you can indeed outrun a bad diet.
I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing, BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted without gaining weight.
I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back then that I am unable to today.
So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running than most people want to do!
Yeah, this is a scale problem.
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."
> I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
It's not that it doesn't matter, it's the asymmetry. You can eat a small chocolate bar that costs $1 (or whatever) in about 15 seconds, and it will take you 2 hours of walking to wear off the calories.
It's more complicated than this, because muscle raises your basal metabolic rate.
If you look at bodybuilders, they're buring 400 calories a day, regardless of exercise. Having an extra 100 pounds of muscle means your body just burns A LOT of calories doing absolutely nothing.
This is part of the reason why men burn more calories than woman just right out of the gate.
> men burn more calories than woman just right out of the gate
Sure, but parent's point is that the energy input from sugary snacks like chocolate roughly equates to a significant amount of exercise. (Over an hour of walking). -- Maybe the caloric equivalent amount of walking is a little longer or shorter for different bodies.
How might you take action from this understanding, though.
Gaining an extra 100 pounds of muscle is hardly an easy/tangible feat.
"Reducing intake of sugary snacks" is going to be easier than "walk for over an hour".
You don't need 100 pounds of muscle to reap the benefits.
My point is, yes eating a sugary snack takes 1 hour of walking. But it doesn't take 1 hour of weightlifting. It can take 0 hours of weightlifting, if you've already been weightlifting.
Even with walking and running, you do build muscle. When the treadmill says 100 calories, you didn't actually burn 100 calories - you burned 100 plus the increased rate from the muscle you gained.
So, if you're an athletic person, you're burning more calories regardless of if you work out. Just by existing, sleeping, whatever, you have a big head start. For some athletes, this head start is in the 1000s of calories range.
A pound of fat burns ~3 calories, while muscle is ~8 per day. Sure, it is different, but unless you are the Rock, most people do not have enough muscle mass to make a difference.
This is just not true, if you look at women and men of similar height men still burn significantly more calories.
Hormones, I'm sure, play a role too but testosterone is sticky. More weightlifitng raises your testosterone - so you should be seeing that benefit.
Well yeah, the sugar is also there to produce the soft squishy texture people expect from sandwich bread as well as the aiding the Maillard reaction when it's grilled. Miss me with a grilled cheese made with any other kind of loaf.
But we are talking about bread here, even in the absence of sugar and oil it's still got plenty of calories for you. Grain St Methode's white bread, a no added sugar brand is 180 cals for two slices and Wonder Bread, famously packed with sugar, is 140 cals for two slices. It's the bread which is making you fat, the sugar isn't moving the needle in any direction as far as the obesity crisis is concerned.
You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.
It's a whole lot easier to hit up a drive through or grab a tub of ice cream at the grocery store when you're driving a car.
You're not wrong, though. Walking around doesn't burn a lot of calories (~100/mile), but most people become overweight by only slightly overeating on a daily basis, over a long period of time. One can of soda has 140 Calories. 140 excess daily Calories is an extra pound of fat per month.
Exercise definitely helps you improve your eating patterns. In particular it helps you deal with stress which is a source of bad food habits.
Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30 hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's essentially a full time job.
I had a similar situation in my early 20s.
My conclusion was that past a certain point you need to use liquid sugar (soda especially) to get your body to put on weight past a certain point.
Even with absurd amounts of fat, carbs and proteins I could not process enough food to put on the weight I wanted too. Sugar is the backbone of massive weight gain.
I once trained pretty hard for several months for a martial arts competition. I upped my calorie intake to keep up with the training and put on about ~15lb of muscle. What people don't tell you about this sort of intensive training is just much extra time you spend each week shopping, cooking, eating and taking a shit - on top of all the training!
I can confirm the same from my messenger days. On days when deliveries were sparse, we found ourselves moving from cafe to bakery, eating more pastries than a doctor would recommend. Regardless of the day's activity levels we would generally drink large amounts of beer after work and sometimes during. Maintaining weight and satisfying our appetites was always a more pressing concern.
I'm not a dietician, but when I read things like this NPR report, I wonder how much of it is motivated reasoning. "It is not your fault", is always a good come-on for a sales pitch. This report seems like something people would like to hear, especially if they haven't come to enjoy strenuous exercise.
That said, I've always had a bias against highly processed foods.
what is "processed" versus "highly processed" versus "ultra processed"?
the way these things are described feels very much like people are using a dowsing rod to find where to dig a well, or something. mumbo-jumbo.
I'm sure even "super ultra giga processed" foods are fine for you so long as you don't eat a lot of them. I'm not even sure that "processed" is bad at all. I don't want to eat raw cashews, I'll die (as will anyone else) I want those processed by cooking. Is pre-cooked food "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" or something else? all of the above; it depends on who you ask.
I don't know of any level of "processed" which is bad, I just know that if you consume 10k calories per day and only burn 3k, you're going to gain weight, level of "processed" probably doesn't matter. And I think that's all this study is saying: unless you're extremely active, you can't burn 10k calories a day, your body really limits how many calories you can burn in a day unless you are physically working enough to actually turn that amount of energy into physical work.
anyway, yeah. i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative.
>Wise Cheez Doodles Honey Bbq Cheese Flavored Corn Snacks, Honey; Bbq; Cheese
>CORN MEAL, VEGETABLE OIL (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: CORN, COTTONSEED, SUNFLOWER, OR CANOLA OIL), SUGAR, SALT, HONEY, CORN STARCH, FRUCTOSE, WHEY, DEXTROSE MONOHYDRATE, MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE (FLAVOR ENHANCER), TOMATO POWDER, CHEDDAR CHEESE, (CULTURED MILK, SALT ENZYMES), ONION POWDER, BUTTER (CREAM, SALT), BLUE CHEESE FLAVOR, BUTTERMILK SOLIDS, MALTODEXRIN, YELLOW 5 LAKE, YELLOW 6 LAKE, GARLIC POWDER, PAPRIKA EXTRACT, NATURAL FLAVORS (CONTAINS CELERY), SOYBEAN OIL, LACTIC ACID, CITRIC ACID, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, ENZYME MODIFIED BUTTER OIL, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B1), DISODIUM GUANYLATE, DISODIUM INOSINATE
[flagged]
I cook basically all my meals but also have no fear of "unnatural" ingredients (I have a shaker of msg right next to the stove, I have cooked mac and cheese with sodium citrate, etc) and no, this ingredient list is not like normal home cooked meals.
Some of it is typical flavoring stuff, onion powder, etc, that could easily show up on a list of spices in a home dish.
But a big part of the list is the stuff you see in highly engineered food product only: maltodextrin, dextrose monohydrate, yellow 5, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, sodium phosphate, etc.
No "home cooked meal of home grown fruits and vegetables" has a similar ingredient list to this.
Nit: MSG is naturally occuring in a lot of foods.
You seem to have projected a fear or intent into the comment which wasn't intended or explicitly described. I mostly agree in that taste is subjective, "There's no accounting for taste". Personally, I find those things unappetizing. As I said above, this is my bias. You asked for an example of something which I would regard as a highly processed food. I provided one. I cannot satisfy your other inquiries.
Although I will say that I have suspicions around the industrial processes for food additives and dyes. Yellow 6 for example is petroleum or coal tar derived. I'm sure the relevant regulatory bodies have approved these things, but I am not convinced that it is something I would like to consume personally.
Perhaps the burden should be on the manufacturer? I'm not sure where the discussion would lead if I had to rationalize every industrial by-product I preferred not to eat?
Again, there's no accounting for taste.
> i immediately distrust anyone that starts mentioning "processed" or "highly processed" or "ultra processed" because I don't think those are defined. I think they're speaking entirely on vibes which are not quantitative.
Don't be afraid to use the web to dispel your confusion!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_foods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
You are technically correct that processed foods are no less healthy than any other foods.
However they are engineered to be hyper palatable, meaning they taste way better than other foods and they will not satiate you even after eating and excessive amount.
Or to put it simply, it is really damn easy to eat a thousand calories of potato chips and still be hungry for "a real meal" but most people will tap out before eating a thousand calories of steak (12 to 16oz).
I think focus on satiation & calorie density makes good sense.
"Ultra-processed" is not completely precise, not completely accurate proxy for "hyper palatable, low satiation, calorie dense".
The big thing about processed food is that it is “purified” in a sense to strip it down to just starches, sugar, and fats. Think sweet corn vs corn syrup.
If you eat only processed foods but limit your calories, you will not become overweight. But you will not be getting enough fiber or micronutrients, and you will probably not feel full either.
Yeah. Sure, your body can adjust how much calories are burned when you're idle, but it can only do so much. If you're burning thousands of calories on daily activity, it's gotta come from somewhere.
The most effective exercise for weight loss is fork put-downs.
I see fork put-downs touted by random influencers and life coach type people on the internet, but this feels like one of those things that sounds profound but isn't based on any research other than someone's individual anecdotal experience.
I'm skeptical that this actually does anything.
[citation needed]
That is not what any of the studies I have read find, particularly not past the short term: past calorie restriction diets is one of the factors associated with developing obesity.
Isn't that a bit of a truism?
A _past_ calorie restriction is associated with a _current_ calorie surplus.
Obviously if the calorie restriction were being continued, one wouldn't be developing obesity.
"Fork put downs" does not mean a crash diet or anything like that.
It means permanently adjusting your caloric intake to levels that allow you to reach and maintain a healthy body weight and body fat makeup.
If you're eating 6000 calories a day there is no way you're out-exercising that diet while working a full time job.
And plate push aways
And spoon reversals
Anecdotal counterpoint:
I have been quite sedentary for several years, since going fully remote.
I had seasons where I would gain wait and lose weight, and my level of activity remained unchanged.
A few years ago, I started paying more attention to my weight, and got to where I was consistently in my ideal weight range. Again, level of activity remained unchanged.
About a year ago, I started indoor cycling (Zwift) quite regularly — about 2.5 hours per week, averaging right in the middle of my target heart rate zone. Diet remained the same. Weight remained mostly unchanged (still in my ideal weight range — I’ve maybe lost 5 or so pounds, but I lost way more weight when only changing my diet).
So — for me — diet has definitely had more impact on my weight than my level of activity.
People tend to adjust their activity to maintain their energy expenditure without consciously thinking about it.
So a 30 minute session in the day might be followed by more time on the sofa later on.
I don’t think I could spend much more time on the sofa before I started cycling. :)
So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running than most people w̶a̶n̶t̶ have time to to do!
You were also younger.
I used to house whole pizzas for lunch. Now I only eat 2 slices and weigh the same.
The difference in metabolic activity as you age is relatively small until you are quite old, like a single digit percentage difference. You can go look at any TDEE calculator and see this.
Having lost 40lbs in the past couple of years, diet and walking have been key. It's just so much easier to burn fat by not eating it, than it is to try to burn it off with exercise. You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity, but eating one chocolate chip muffin? You can do that and gulp down a big glass of milk in 5 minutes like it's nothing.
>You'll find that burning 500 calories on a treadmill feels like an eternity
That's because you are doing it on a treadmill...
Try doing a more fun activity outside in the world and in nature. Like cycling.
I can cycle for 120 miles outdoors in about 6 hours in a single day and have a positive experience and memory of doing it and that burns about 8200 calories according to a calculators for my weight.
Unfortunately I think you'll find that many people just don't actually enjoy these sorts of activities. To me, cycling 120 miles (or even just 20 miles) is not something I'm interested in doing regularly.
I've tried various things, and I've found that I can get myself to go outside running (usually 3-5 miles in one session) a few times a week, but even that feels like a chore. I've been doing hot yoga (as well as a yoga-adjacent class that I think of more as "strength training and cardio with yoga features") for the past year and a half, which I actually somewhat enjoy. But it took me double-digit years to find exercise activities that I can actually get myself to do.
Go to the gym regularly? Really hard to find the motivation, though I do my best to go if I'm traveling in a place where I can't go to my (national chain) yoga studio. Cycling? Not my cup of tea. Playing a sport? Nope. Climbing? Tried it, didn't find it interesting. Hiking? Sure, on occasion, but not regularly enough to count as regular exercise. I'm just not really interested in any of those things enough to do them multiple times per week. And I think that's the case for many people.
If I could maintain my weight, leg muscle tone, and cardiovascular health without running, I'd never run ever again. I don't get that "runner's high" that people talk about (or if I do, it's not very intense, and fades very quickly). In addition to whole-body muscle tone, the yoga gives me some nice mental benefits, so I'd probably keep that up, but if it didn't, I'd drop it immediately.
I used to do pretty much nothing outdoors. Running is actually the one I find the most boring and I don't run. I am not even sure I can comfortably run that well anymore with part of my leg and foot being permanently numb after a disc herniation, I never really tried.
But I found that I love all the rest of it. I love cycling and hiking for hours and playing all sorts of sports. In the summer I play pickleball like 3-5 days a week for usually 3 hours at a time at local parks.
I mean I can't stand cycling on a bike in a gym, but go out to local trails and I love it. I think it's the fresh air, the wind rushing past me, the sights and smells and being out in nature that make it all fun for me. Also exploring new places all the time too to hike and bike though are what seem to keep it exciting and interesting for me.
I live in Houston. Cycling is too dangerous.
There is a psychological method that I found to be very helpful. Thinking of companies that sell packaged foods as your adversary.
They want to take your health, make you addicted to what they are selling and also take your money. Not very different from a drug dealer.
When in this mindset, avoiding these things feels like winning and taking care of myself, don’t need to worry about if sugar is really bad or if eating these things is normal. Or if I deserve a treat after working hard all day etc.
After some time I just keep winning and losing weight and don’t really have any cravings to eat bad “food”.
And fruit tends to be cheaper than packaged food too.
>"For decades we've been telling Americans that you're lazy, it's your fault, you're not moving enough, you're eating too much," Mozaffarian says. "And I think what this study shows is that there's really complicated biology happening and that our food is driving this."
The industry that invented the bliss point [0] has every reason to blame the individual and not the system they created.
One quibble: the article blames ultraprocessed foods, but that's not a category of foods with a stable definition. What we do know is that food has been engineered to be more delicious and less filling, so staying away from those foods is a better way to think about it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
Whenever the topic of weight loss comes up, I always make the same recommendation: Lift weights. Lifting weights increases your muscle mass. Muscle burns calories, even at rest, which raises your TDEE. (A bodybuilder will burn more calories sitting on the couch than someone who doesn't lift weights). For most folks (myself included) cardio sucks. You _could_ jog for an hour every day and burn x-hundred calories due to the increased energy expended... Or you could go lift weights a few times a week, and after a couple months, naturally burn more at rest due to increased muscle mass.
I say this as not a nutritionist nor a doctor, but I don't believe I'm off base here. Feel free to correct me on this if I am.
I'm a fan of weightlifting, and agree that there are numerous health benefits to doing so, but I think the extra calorie burning is over-hyped. From what I've read you get 6-10 calories per pound of muscle per day, at rest. Not nothing, but for folks who aren't looking to body build I'm not sure it makes much of a difference. Or maybe over a long enough time span it does, I dunno.
It does matter over a long enough time span, but otherwise I agree - don't get into resistance training for the extra potential calorie burn/metabolism boost, it's a quick way to burn out. Get into it for the numerous health benefits that resistance training brings, the effects of which get especially important as you get older.
You can lose upwards of 3% of muscle pass per year at 60+, and this process can start as early as 30-35 years old. It gets harder and harder to build muscle as you age too, so the more you can build and maintain early on in your life, the better off you'll be in old age.
Other than aesthetic goals, that's most of what got me into weightlifting. I'd prefer not to be so frail when I'm older and want to maintain my independence as long as possible. Not to mention, being strong just makes general day-to-day tasks easier.
I think there are a couple of underlooked points for weightlifting's contribution to sustainable weight loss.
- the weight that you are gaining with a surplus diet turns into muscle instead of fat. You can take diet breaks and just gain muscle faster which will help when returning to a deficit.
- the increased 100-200 calories from lifting can make a 100 calorie deficit easier to adhere to as it's a smaller proportion of your total.
- weightlifting reduces stress which is a common cause for over eating.
Yeah it's not terrible, but having 10 extra pounds of muscle burning almost 100 calories a day extra, thats like a pound of fat every month and a bit.
And that is the same amount as having 10 extra pounds of fat burns.
1kg of muscle tissue burns pretty much identical amount of calories as 1kg of fat tissue. Heart, kidneys, brain etc. tissues burn more than muscles/fat, but you can't really grow those.
Xkg person's basic energy burn rate is the same, regardless of his fat percentage.
Therefore it is definitely a myth to promote weightlifting on the merits of muscles being some kind of great energy expenditure machine.
That's assuming the extra calorie burn doesn't make you feel hungrier and cause you to eat more, even if only a little. 100 calories is a very small amount of extra food.
I used to believe this (as did many people) but no longer do. The amount of extra calories burned with a higher muscle mass is just not significant enough to make this a relevant idea.
Of course, there are many, many other reasons to lift weights. Health and longevity aside, the reason most people want to lose weight is to look better - so what they should really aim for isn't to lose weight, it's to lose fat and increase muscle mass. For that, you need both a caloric deficit and weight lifting.
This is true, but I don't think the extra calorie burn via extra muscle mass is dramatic enough to move the needle that much. Studies are a bit weak here, but a quick search suggests that a pound of muscle mass burns between 4.5 and 7 calories per day. That's... not that much. A bodybuilder that's putting on competition-worthy levels of muscle mass is going to be spending several hours every single day at the gym lifting weights, and very few people are going to sign up for that just for the hope of losing some weight.
I've been doing some strength training (arms, legs, core) for the past year and a half. Nothing too heavy, but enough that I can see nice muscle-tone changes in my body, and I notice that day-to-day physical tasks are easier. At most, I've put on about 10lbs of muscle (and honestly it's probably more like half that). So I'm burning another 45 to 70 calories per day. That's like... 4 to 7 plain potato chips of calories.
So lift if you want to look good, be generally stronger (core strength is especially good for you!), or just feel healthier. And sure, the act of lifting those weights will burn calories that you weren't otherwise burning. But the muscle mass you gain isn't going to burn a useful amount of extra calories per day.
And yes, cardio does suck! Unfortunately, doing only strength training is leaving out really important parts of your body that need to be strong and healthy: your heart and lungs. I'm in decent physical shape, but if I stop working on cardio even for a month or so, walking up the four flights of stairs in my condo building leaves me a little winded, and I don't like that feeling.
I guess my point is: do cardio and strength training to increase your general level of health and fitness. But if you want to lose weight, change your diet. Change it sustainably and permanently. If you just change it until you get to your target weight, you're going to put those pounds right back on afterward.
The weight lifting also triggers stronger hormonal responses due to the additional mechanical loading. Mechanoreceptors in your body will stimulate a chain reaction by way of the hypothalamus (HPG axis) that ultimately causes a ramp in testosterone and other hormones. Your body effectively has a built-in steroid dispenser that you can control.
The scale is really dramatic in my experience. The more the lifting sucks, the more your body will compensate. This trend can be non-linear for a good period of time before you begin to plateau. The tricky bit is not pushing too far and injuring yourself early on.
One interesting hybrid is running or walking with a weighted vest on. This requires some extra precautions - the vest should be very, very snug on your body. You don't want it slinging around and imposing weird lateral loads.
Or do both! I primarily train Muay Thai these days, but I mix in two minimalist kettlebell strength sessions per week. 20 minutes of emom double kettlebell ABCs with some sets of pull-ups at the end keeps me in zone 3-4. So I'm getting some cardio conditioning while doing my strength training. Sure, it's hard to overload at a certain point with kettlebells, but making a goal to be able to OHP double 24kg bells will get most people pretty far.
There are other advantages beyond just burning calories. Lean muscle tissue acts as glucose sink. When you eat you'll have more reserve capacity to store that energy temporarily in your muscles rather than triggering growth of adipose tissue.
I think you'd still need to adjust your diet signifiantly. Most powerlifters don't look particularly in shape.
Most powerlifters intentionally maintain a signficant caloric surplus in order to bulk up. Some bulkers even chug straight-up olive oil to meet their daily caloric goals.
I cut out drinks with sugar in them, eating after dinner, and in general just eating healthy meals.
I lift weights about 3 days a week, and am fairly fit strengthwise.
All this lowered my fat levels down to a reasonable level, but still left me with about 23% body fat and a bit of a belly, and that remained consistent. Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.
What I found has helped is doing a 24 hour fast once a week. This really means just eating one dinner a little earlier (4:30pm) and then skipping breakfast and lunch and drinking water with electrolytes added.
With keeping the rest of the days calorie intake the same, I have shaved off consistently 1 pound a week and 1/2" from my waistline.
This has been going for 5 weeks now, and I have gone from 23% to 19.7% based on navy body fat formula.
What is great is I have no cravings or feelings that I am depriving myself except for the last 8 hrs of the weekly fast. The rest of the week, I eat well.
My plan is to bring myself down to 15% and then continuing to measure. If I get above 15% I fast that week, if I don't then I don't fast, so it basically becomes like a controllable throttle.
> Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.
That's not a surprise. Changing diet composition can in the short-run lead to lower caloric intake than what preceeded (e.g. SAD diet), but doesn't guarantee a sustained caloric deficit, which is why controlling for macros like fat or carbs eventually hits a wall. What are you going to do when there are no more carbs to cut? If you have a lot of excess to lose, you can't "intuitively" eat your way down to your target.
The fasts work similarly owing to deficit: a fasted day lowers the average caloric intake for the week (assuming you don't overcompensate other days). As with macros, here again, what are you going to do to increase deficit further? Fast for 48 hours? If with a fast your caloric intake isn't dropping further week-to-week, weight loss will stagnate.
Whichever approach, one of the pitfalls is steep deficit followed by metabolic adaptation i.e. crashing metabolism. This is why it's helpful to keep a small caloric deficit, and incrementally change your intake target. That is only reliably achieved by tracking calories.
> What I found has helped is doing a 24 hour fast once a week.
Another protocol that is sustainable is 4:3, ie 4 days of normal eating and 3 of intermittent fasting.
I thought this is common knowledge.
1 Snickers bar = 30 minutes of running.
You can lose 100 pounds without getting up from the couch, but you cannot lose 100 pounds by running, if you keep eating Snickers bars.
You can lose 100 pounds either way.
This reminds a little of Usain Bolt famously having chicken nuggets before his final at the Beijing Olympics. Although hardly indicative of a bad diet that he may or may not have had.
I think as well there is some difficulty with variability between people that isn't clear or maybe doesn't matter at scale. The article linked study was across 43 nations with 4213 adults. Yet there may still be individuals who can argue differently. CICO (calories in vs calories out) must apply to us all, but the composition has an affect on what the body chooses to store vs how energised or hungry/satiated we feel. A bad diet could perhaps me we feel we have less enthusiasm for running or other activities. Age, lifestyle, and even cultural factors are massive in affecting metabolism (more the foremost) and of course what we consume (the latter two).
I run a fair amount (over 2000km/1200 miles in 2025) and find that once I start doing above ~70km/43 miles in a week whatever eating habits I have are indeed outcompeted by my running and weight loss is inevitable. Even so it does slow around a BMI of 23 for me for longer than I am able to be consistent with the running to observe further effects. Still my point is that my diet isn't anything to write home about and I anecdotally I feel that as far as weightloss is concerned I can very much outrun it.
The chicken nugget thing is to avoid food poisoning though, right? It's because McDonald's food logistics results in hyper-consistent food irrespective of where you're at in the world and the last thing an Olympic competitor wants is to risk getting food poisoning from eating foreign food. I don't think Usain eats chicken nuggets on the reg.
"Food poisoning" implies contaminated food, which is as unlikely in McDonald's food as it is in the Olympic village's food. This is more to avoid upsetting their stomachs with unfamiliar food (broadly similar effect but very different cause).
I don't know the reason and think your reasoning is probably sound. Although at the same I wonder if chicken nuggets were really the only option? I'll make a grand assumption that most athletes weren't on the chicken nugget diet.
Chickens nuggets aren't necessarily that unhealthy even? They have about as much saturated fat as generic chicken thighs. Inherently food at Mcdonalds isn't that bad for you as long as you don't overeat and take a few supplements.
Whenever I eat Mcdonalds it's the coke that makes me feel guilty, and the super salty fries, the burger or nuggets I'm usually not that fussed about.
Salt isn't particularly bad unless you already have hypertension. There's a reason electrolyte (aka salt) dietary supplements like LMNT are becoming popular. Of course if you are already consuming lots of processed, salty foods you wouldn't need those supplements. But if you eat mostly whole foods, exercise regularly, and drink coffee you really do need to go out of your way to intake extra electrolytes.
A Snickers bar might have been better strategically. Safe to eat and lots of energy.
I always found it strange McDonalds was an Olympics sponsor and seeing their ads for Big Macs, etc.
Like I wonder what the Grimace's 400 meters time is.
I do bouldering and I eat fast food multiple times a week, I can definitely outclimb my poor diet... I probably helps that I don't eat breakfast though...
It's well known though that as you build muscle, your rest calorie consumption increases, so probably if you build/maintain enough muscle, then you can just outrun your intake, since you consume more without doing anything to start with...
I eat fast food multiple times a week
This doesn't mean anything. Just like improving your climbing, what matters is consistency. Count your calories and macros and you'll see that your total intake is reasonable. The processed vs unprocessed argument is negligible when you're only partaking occasionally.
When I was younger, I couldn't understand why I was thinner than my friends. We'd go out to eat and I'd stuff down a huge meal with the best of them. Turns out that they were eating like that at every meal, while I was having cereal for breakfast and a less calorie-dense lunch or dinner.
as you build muscle, your rest calorie consumption increases
The difference is tiny. Yes, you can outrun or out-muscle a bad diet at the extremes, but that's like saying BMI isn't a useful metric. You're not 1970s Schwarzenegger or Phelps.
> BMI isn't a useful metric
People these days are generally also significantly taller than malnourished Belgians were back in the 1840s. That skews it a bit since the formula itself is still the same.
I guess it's still a marginally useful metric in some case but now that when can accurately measure body fat, muscle weight etc. there is no point paying attention to it that much.
I don't think we're talking about "unhealthy diet" solely in the sense of eating unhealthy foods. The real issue is calorie intake. If you are taking in an unhealthy amount of calories -- regardless of the source -- you are unlikely to be able to outrun that diet.
And you're kinda agreeing with that point: you eat fast food a few times a week, but you don't eat breakfast. So perhaps your caloric intake is still at a reasonable level for your body, regardless of the source of those calories.
I agree. Also age and other activities factor in I'm sure. I suspect you carry your bouldering mat and do some walking to and from boulders.
I think it stands to reason that if we took an overweight person and trained them to eat what you or I eat and then move like you or I move, they'd end up losing weight.
For me though, I know that I can be running say 50km/31 miles a week regularly and that if there is weight loss, it is impercetible to me. But up it with just two more runs and I believe I do start outrunning my diet. Again, this is an n=1 and ignores pretty much every other factor in my life.
> Yet there may still be individuals who can argue differently.
Of course! There are always outliers. But I think it is fair to say, as a general statement, that to lose or maintain weight, you have to focus on your diet, and exercise is not going to cut it. Sure, 1% of people might be able to "outrun their unhealthy diet", but that's not really useful information for the staggeringly vast majority of people out there. (Making up a percentage there; I think my point is still valid at 10%.)
1200 miles per year is a lot of running. That's 23 miles a week, or let's say ~6 miles, 4 days per week. Very few people are going to be able to -- or just flat out want to -- commit to that regimen.
What's wrong with chicken nuggets?
Perhaps a poorly picked example but generally they're not considered a healthy food item as they exist in the category of both fast and fried food. The implication being that they're more processed resulting in less good fasts and are higher in calorie per gram. Like most foods the dose determines the poison I suppose.
But nutritionally they are about the same as non lean chicken?
Chicken McNuggets Ingredients: Boneless skinless chicken breast, Water, Liquid vegetable oil shortening (canola oil, corn oil, hydrogenated soybean oil), Wheat flour, Yellow corn flour, Modified corn starch, Rice starch, Salt, Seasoning (wheat starch, yeast extract, salt, natural flavour), Spices, Baking powder, Sodium aluminum phosphate, Canola oil, Baking soda, Sugars (dextrose), Wheat starch, Corn starch. Cooked in vegetable oil (high oleic low linoleic canola oil and/or canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, citric acid, dimethylpolysiloxane).
-- https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca/product/4-chicken-mcnugge...
Yes but the macros are more or less comparable? It's chicken breast with extra saturated fat and stuff.
I think you are unfairly overly minimizing the impact of the "extra saturated fat and stuff".
This is precisely the point of the article.
Macronutrient profiles are, apparently, not the relevant axis of differentiation.
Anecdotal evidence: I found that it's super easy to eat way more than you should by just having some food laying around. And I don't mean just Cheetos - "healthy" food will set you back rather quickly as well. The amount of exercise doesn't matter that much - with the calorie density of common snacks, you will out-eat your exercise really fast. I don't think I'm that bad in that sense, but until I started keeping a track of what I eat and the count the calories, nothing worked. Yes it's a hassle, but I vibe-coded an app that does image analysis and tracks your calories. Shameless plug: HeartLens on app store, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heartlens-your-health-tracker/...
Totally the case for me too. I used to keep lots of different snacks stocked at home. Eliminating that (except for a few things in small quantities) has been great for weight maintenance for me. At this point there are more treats for our cats in the house than snacks for me.
I have been, rather lazily I suppose, trying to tweak my diet in such as way as to lose weight; and with little to show for it.
I'm not sure that there is much if any processed food still in my diet (maybe just the English muffin in the morning?). I stopped buying/drinking soda pop decades ago (a low-hanging fruit indeed — I lost almost 10 pounds within a month of making that dietary change alone).
And since I have tried little things like switching to peanut butter that contains only peanuts (no salt, no sugar, not palm oil — sure, I have to stir it when I open it for the first time). I've moved to whole grain bread. Other small changes like that I can't remember right now.
I still have a BMI that's too high.
The only time I have significantly lost weight was when I was prepping for intestinal surgery nearly a decade ago. I was at the time worried that eating too much would literally kill me (I was worried about bursting my intestine) that I ate very small portions for each meal.
I'm not sure why I can't change my habits such that I continue to eat those small portions (now that the fear is gone).
The first problem with people unable to lose weight is simply not counting calories and trying to "switch to healthier food and eyeball it". You have to have a kitchen scale and measure portions. Track every meal in an app. It's annoying at first, but once you get in the habit, it's just part of preparing the meal. When you do that, you will be able to tell which meals in your diet are high calorie (which, some are surprisingly calorie dense contrary to what a lot of people think), and find replacements or downsize the portions accordingly.
The second problem is people simply not being honest with their calorie tracking. You may only eat 3 meals but then when you're hungry you will eat a handful of raisins, peanuts, or something else, a lot of people will think to themselves "well, it's just a handful, so it can't be that many calories" - but repeated habit of eating those adds up, and most people don't account for that in their calorie tracking app. Similar to adding a small bit of, say, butter to your pan before making scrambled eggs. You may think, "it's only about 10 grams of butter, it's not much so why bother tracking it", but that 10 grams of butter is 75 calories, over the course of a month of preparing scrambled eggs every morning for breakfast, that's 2250 kcal, after 3 months, that's an entire KILO of bodyweight fat that you either gained or could have lost - small things add up.
Sometimes (but less frequently) it's also hormonal issues, you may want to go to a clinic to do a bloodtest (specifically thyroid hormones and diabetes markers).
Also, low intensity cardio (slow pace incline treadmill/stairmaster) can go a long way in aiding weight loss.
Yep. It's almost always either not tracking or not being honest with tracking.
It's possible to overeat anything - whether a food is "healthy" or not, while important, isn't what matters for weight loss. Burning more calories than you consume is what is important for weight loss.
Where I see folks, particularly men, fail most often is in their mid-late thirties. Sedentary lifestyle, wants to lose the "dad bod." Someone in that situation, with no physical activity, would actually have a fairly low TDEE so a 500 cal/day deficit might look like eating in a range of 1500-1700 calories/day, which if they are like the average American and used to consuming 3500+ calories/day, will be quite the shock - so they are almost immediately super hungry, and might start out with good intentions with tracking what they eat but will frequently miss all the little snacks here and there, or just haven't developed the skill of meal prepping, and properly weighing out their food.
It's a lot of work, and requires a lot of dedication. Too many articles out there that just simplify it down to "Eat less, move more" but don't do enough to actually educate folks on what that really looks like.
Any good resources you recommend on this? Speaking as an early forties Dad :)
First, figure out your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) to figure out how much of a deficit you need to eat in to lose weight at your desired rate.
You can start off with one of those online calculators (like this one: https://tdeecalculator.net/). 1 to 2lbs/week is generally healthy and sustainable. Losing weight too fast can cause you to lose a lot of muscle as well, which is generally what you don't want (resistance training will help with this)
I like this TDEE spreadsheet, as the formulas aren't always accurate for everyone: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7gGXXQIy4R4ejRRNkZHZHFDOW8...
You log what you eat and your weight everyday, after a few weeks you should have a pretty good picture of your TDEE and know how much you need to eat for your desired weight loss. What was important for me, is that if you add in exercise, try not to eat back what you burned from the exercise - smart watches/fitbits aren't always accurate in their estimates, so just use the exercise as an opportunity to dig a little deeper of a deficit (and for the other health benefits).
As much of a pain in the ass it is, you'll want to weigh your food for a while, down to individual ingredients including cooking oil, as it's really easy to underestimate how much you consume (2 tbps of olive oil is 120 calories, for example - that adds up over the course of a week if you are using that much or more every time you cook).
The reddit r/fitness wiki has a wealth of information on diet and routines as well, I highly recommend skimming it over: https://thefitness.wiki/
If you are able I'd recommend resistance training along with diet as well. Building muscle will help boost your metabolism a bit, help with aesthetic goals, and getting stronger will only help you as you get older. No need to go crazy here, even just 2 to 3 days/week, especially for a beginner, can give you some pretty big improvements. A lot of people think they need to hit the gym 6 days/week like a body builder but it's not necessary at all.
Lastly, take progress photos and/or body measurements as well. You'll hit periods, especially if you are resistance training, where the scale isn't moving, but you could still very well be losing body fat so the photos/measurements can be helpful to keep your motivation through these periods. Expect your weight to fluctuate a lot too day to day, what's important is the average trend over time, not necessarily day to day.
Hope that helps!
How bodies related to food varies _wildly_. For example, my body has difficulty processing certain foods, so I lost a ton of weight switching from "healthy" fruits and veggies and plant-based protein to mostly pre-processed carbs and fatty meat. (Low FODMAP, for folks who are curious: be ready to learn chemistry to figure out what is safe to eat.)
That diet isn't going to have the same effect for most people, but in my case it significantly lowered my inflammation and general discomfort, which led me to lose 90lbs with no actual effort on my part.
I knew one dude who was always hungry and it turned out he just desperately needed B12. Now he snacks on B12 gummies and feels much better. Debugging our bodies is more complicated than debugging a software program, but no programmer would say "Just run the program less!" if someone complained a program was eating up all the CPU.
The one thing that is always good for humans, whether we lose weight or not, is some physical activity. Whatever we can enjoy enough to do regularly, without injury, is a great choice.
I wish the medical profession would stop focusing on diet, when it doesn't understand it and calorie restrictive diets are one of two lifestyle components we know actually do contribute to obesity.
Have you tried introducing a food scale? Not with the intent of changing your portions or anything like that - just out of idle curiosity to confirm how much you're eating?
I found that I was eating over double the amount of nut butter that I was estimating once I started weighing it. After a couple of months I was able to go back to eyeballing it while remaining accurate.
A lot of wisdom suggests being +/- 300 calories from your TDEE to cut/bulk. Three tablespoons of peanut butter is ~285 calories. So it's entirely possible that something as small as an estimation error is responsible for whether you're gaining or maintaining. Same goes for eyeballing cooking oils, seeds & nuts, and, to a lesser extent, processed carbs.
You're trying to eat clean instead of lean/volumous. Why care about palm oil or salt in peanut butter if it's still like straight fat that you're passing on your bread every day? The actual diet move would be to switch that to some fruit and low fat yogurt. Same thing with whole grain bread, you just got some more fiber and vitamins but the calories are mostly all there still, especially if it's sandwich bread.
Clean/natural/unprocessed is an independent variable from fattening. There is correlation in that processed foods are sometimes highly palatable, but there is no causation. To illustrate, you could top your toast with either honey or Mrs Butterworth's Sugar Free syrup. Honey will add like 10x more calories, but is unprocessed, while the syrup is as processed as there can be
I think it's great to try to eliminate foods that you believe aren't healthy (in any quantity) from your diet, but if you replace those foods with a quantity of other foods that keep your caloric intake more or less the same, you're not going to lose weight.
> ... I ate very small portions for each meal.
That's what does it. Decreasing the calories you eat.
> I'm not sure why I can't change my habits such that I continue to eat those small portions (now that the fear is gone).
Because, like all of us, you're only human, and human psychology, plus how our stomachs and brains signal each other, is complex and sometimes makes it really hard for us to achieve our goals. It sucks, but that's how it is. This is why the semaglutide weight loss drugs are proving so effective: they short-circuit some of that and help you just not want to eat as much food.
If drugs aren't for you, try counting calories, and use an app to help with it and help keep you honest. I experimented with it back in 2017 or so, and it actually did cause me to be more mindful about how much I ate, and made me think twice if I'd already hit my calorie budget for the day but wanted more food. I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually did lose weight. I didn't stick with it (don't remember why), but it did work for me for a time.
As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful. Commit to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself to better eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just 'eat healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of calorie content of food.
Like I straight up just don't eat nut butters anymore because they are a massive calorie bomb, and I find the loose nuts more satiating. When you track for a while you start building an instinct for optimizing the satiety/calorie ratio of your meals.
> As much as it sucks. Tracking calories is very helpful. Commit to 1-2 months of tracking and you can train yourself to better eyeball what you're eating. It's very hard to just 'eat healthy' to lose weight if you don't have a baseline of calorie content of food.
Just to add to this - periodically track again as well and keep track of your weight progress and bodyfat % if you are able.
If you aren't also building muscle, as you lose weight your total energy expenditure will decrease as well so after a while what was enough of a calorie deficit for you may no longer be in a deficit as you lose weight. So if you notice you start stalling after a while, start tracking again to see if your TDEE has changed and adjust as needed.
Have you tried intermittent fasting? There's a lot of controversy around the impacts of fasting, but there's one simple fact involved: it's harder to exceed your calorie needs for a day in 1 or 2 meals than in 3 or more because at some point you are just too full to eat more. If you're focused on getting lots of veggies in your limited meals, the number of calories that "fit in your stomach" will also go down.
Assuming you don't have some metabolic disorders, you'll get used to being hungry for part of the day.
This time last year I was in Kampala for roughly 4 months. I used to cook at home and I avoided any process food. Zero to little carb. I was walking a lot though and quite regularly (the weather there is just so good). Now, one year later I moved to Dubai and I think I gained around 10kg.
The only difference being the amount of processed food and the lack of my daily walking routines. But granted, I gained 10kg while im on one meal a day.
A good diet only helps so much. Of course with enough self control, a caloric deficit will make you lose weight, but you need to make yourself perpetually hungry. Eating clean without measuring and limiting portions is not enough for people whose appetite is naturally higher.
Ozempic was the only thing that actually solved my hunger. I would eat healthy, do exercise, but without ozempic my appetite was unstoppable and would think of food 24/7.
BTW you can still improve your diet. PB and bread are bad for weight loss. Go with high protein, low carb. But even that was not enough for me.
Yeah, lat week switched to two eggs for breakfast (now ½ an English muffin so I have something to put the eggs on).
But I wonder if Ozempic is not a bad idea. My BMI is below 30 — which is what my doctor said is her threshold for recommending something like Ozempic. So I feel like I should just keep working on the self-discipline a little harder.
Intermittent fasting keeps coming up and I have not tried it. I think that will be my experiment in the coming months.
I was slightly under 30 too. The mental focus and not having any food noise is so worth it. It was a constant struggle that just vanished.
Aren't you worried at all about side effects from ozempic and what happens when you stop taking it?
Not the GP but I'm already on several meds that are lifelong -- one more doesn't faze me.
No. I believe the health benefits of not being overweight, both physical and self esteem, heavily outweigh the side effects.
I plan to keep taking it for life (or some equivalent drug).
What side effects? Stomach discomfort when you start on the med and titrate up?
Current recommendations on the GLP-1s is to keep using them even after goal weight.
I have heard that feelings of nausea as a side effect are almost a given.
Try a diet plan where you prep your own meals and intake a specific amount of calories. I've used Clean Simple Eats in the past. Diet only works. Diet+exercise works better, and adds all of the benefits of exercise.
I walk over 2 miles a day. My doctor suggested weight training (which I had not thought of as a way to lose weight — I don't think of it as an aerobic workout).
Two miles is almost nothing.
So I will first emphasize, try to avoid a "diet" and feeling the need to eliminate anything.
Unless you just really struggle with impulse control and you need those guard rails, for me the only way that I managed to loose about 45 lbs was by looking at things this way.
I did not cut a single thing out of my diet, what I did was make smart choices/swaps at home that still satisfied cravings most of the time so when I want to go to the store and get a candy bar I will go to the store and get a candy bar and not feel bad about it.
Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore, I have switched almost entirely to water outside of milk in my coffee. When I am out I may sometimes grab a soda but meh.
I make homemade peanut butter. I buy dry roasted unsalted peanuts, add in a small amount of salt and its great.
Trying a bunch of different apples and finding the sweetest apples I could find, and then eating that with peanut butter for some added protein.
Strawberries with chocolate humas.
I started making my own chicken stock which had more flavor and less sodium.
Making my own heartier soups that tasted great.
Also... Seasoning. More than just salt and pepper. Some really good (non American generally) seasoning will go a long way and is basically a zero calory way to really good food.
Other random small changes that are very situational for you. Look at your snacking habbits, that is where most of my issues came in.
Where I could I would choose things that would also increase my protein intake. I didn't go crazy. I never counted calories or anything and the weight just came off. Sure I could have lost a bit more had I done that, but I am at the point now that is the 10 more lbs going to make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things as I work towards gaining more muscle anyways.
I realize this may not work for everyone, but I am not on any sort of "diet" in any traditional sense of the word. What I am doing now is perfectly sustainable for the rest of my life because I can still live my life and largely eat what I want within reason. I had taco bell today and don't feel bad about it in the slightest.
I should add that during most of this weight loss I did not change my workout habbits. I was focusing on my nutrition first. I do live in a city and I walk everywhere, but that did not change in this time.
This is what I am trying to do as well. Switch out bad habits for healthy ones. But it looks like I also need to dial down the quantity — maybe drop to two meals a day.
> Easy one was not keeping soda in the house anymore
Yeah, no shit. As I mentioned in another comment, that was a low hanging fruit that saw me lose nearly 10 pounds when I cut that out of my diet.
I want to scream at people when I see them hanging 6-packs off the sides of their grocery carts — or seem them stacking cases of soda in the cart undercarriages.
U.S. grocery stores are depressing places when you come to recognize, as has been said, that more or less the whole store minus the end-aisles (where produce, deli, etc. are) is just processed crap.
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I think it is very easy for the average person to forget or not realize how incredibly easy it is to get calories into the body and how little food is necessary to do so. Most people in the world (I know, this is not everywhere and everyone), live in an era of food abundance. It's cheap enough, extremely accessible, often easy to eat or ready to eat, and that has simply made it very convenient to get calories in, often while barely thinking about it. Mindless eating, not thinking about what you should eat, etc. All of these factors have played into why obesity is such a problem (at least in the USA).
Maybe I'm reading the study wrong, but it doesn't seem like they accounted for caloric intake at all? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420902122
They accounted for total EE and basal EE, but the data they've supplied in the appendix doesn't track caloric intake.
This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American football linebackers) and also having a low TEE and being skinny as a rail (by basically not eating, i.e. most fad diets).
Also, they categorize most of Africa as either horticulturalist, agropastoralist (why couldn't they say "farmers"???) or hunter-gatherer) despite the table at the bottom ranking their economies as "lowHDI", and the BEE for this cohort is N/A, which invalidates their PAL ratio (TEE/BEE).
idk this seems like a "fat ppl bad" study to me.
> This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American football linebackers)
Linemen would be a better example than linebackers here. Linebackers tend (like most positions other than line, and especially offensive line, positions) to have body fat percentages at the high end of the normal range, rather than being “insanely fat”.
Nice clean journalistic blurb from NPR. Case close! Too much food makes you fat, not genetics. Until the next article in a month.
Too much food is not the conclusion. It's the food itself.
I think it is fairly accepted that most of the health benefits of exercise apply regardless of your weight loss.
Something my doctor has told me on more than one occasion, be he was also quick to add a statement about the importance of exercise for overall fitness. But.. want to lose weigh, change your diet.
I find when I exercise more, I tend to eat better:
- I enjoy running, and eating poorly will affect my ability to run in the short-term, as lots of junk food makes my running experience that day poorer; and
- Recently I've started going to the gym. Best to be fairly lean to see those new muscles, though I don't take it to an extreme. I prefer a balance.
Shifting the consequences from long to short- and medium-term helps!
To add: Exercise builds strength, including cardiovascular. Just having a low bodyfat % isn't the epitome of health, there's plenty of facets to focus on.
I have a friend with a heart condition, prior to surgery he couldn't even walk 100 ft or stand for more than a minute. He put on significant weight, partially due to lifestyle changes when his heart was failing. Now he _has_ to walk a lot to strengthen his heart again, and he's working on his diet to lose weight as a whole separate component. The walking has nothing to do with weight loss for him, it's purely about strength. I think a lot of people fail to make any kind of distinction there, and they just think of exercise as a way to lose weight.
Any athlete really knows this to be true. You don't lose weight running/lifting/biking, you lose it in the kitchen.
Multi-day hiking forces the issue as you have to carry the kitchen on your back.
Yep. This has been pretty much common knowledge as long as I've been alive. As someone who lifts, it's been ingrained in my mind "abs are built in the kitchen, not the gym."
Sleep is also a commonly overlooked but incredibly important aspect. You could be busting your ass in the gym, have your diet on point, but not be making gains if you don't sleep or sleep poorly. For hypertrophy focused folks, muscle isn't built in the gym, it's built while you sleep - you tear it down in the gym so that it can rebuild during recovery.
More data: I once lost 80 pounds purely through dieting. I really didn't change my exercise habits at all throughout (vs before I dieted).
I was partially testing this theory, in fact. This was a decade ago, but I was aware of this line of thinking at the time. Specifically, that dieting is more important for losing weight, and exercising is more important for being healthy (losing weight alone really didn't make me noticeably healthier, btw).
I found that, for me, this was entirely true.
The more processed foods one eats, the more one is exposed to PFAS and plasticizers with endocrine activity.
That is the smoking gun here, not the amounts of calories people are eating.
Our resting metabolic rate is pretty high. Turns out livers, and brains use a lot of calories.
But the value of exercise is that you form more capillary structure to oxygenate blood
Somewhat orthogonally related, I saw post on X by Nassim Taleb [1] concerning the idea that if you are very active then your heightened consumption of food may cover your nutrient bases better. So perhaps, loosely paraphrased, you could outrun and thus out-eat your nutrient imblance?
1: https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1684885140093206528
Everyone in bodybuilding or adjacent crowds already knows this.
How fat you are is entirely a function of how much you eat. If you want to put on weight, you bulk by eating more. If you want to lose weight, you cut with reduced calories.
The idea you could instead bulk by doing less cardio and cut by doing more sounds completely crazy. In reality, you do more exercise on a bulk because, duh, you can recover from more volume when eating a surplus.
If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
So running can help but you still need a calorie deficit. Eating and burning more boosts your metabolism - if you measure a body builder during a bulk they are like a furnace, burning 1-2k over baseline. They still put on fat but it's a lot less than what you'd think given the amounts they're eating.
> If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
No, you’ll lose less weight (I mean, assuming the difference in what you are burning is from exercise, if you find a way, e.g. by some chemical intervention, to kick your metabolism up to burning 4× your baseline amount without doing additional exercise, this doesn't apply), because you have the same calorie deficit and more of the weight you lose (unless you are in fairly great shape to start with, more than 100% of the weight you lose!) will be fat, and it takes a greater calorie deficit to lose a pound of fat than a pound of muscle.
OTOH, most people want to lose fat and avoid losing muscle, so this is a good thing, but its not more weight loss.
If you eat 4k calories but burn 5k, you'll lose a lot more weight than if you ate 1000 and burned 2000.
Each of those is a 1,000 Calorie deficit.
if you measure a body builder during a bulk
Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.
> Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids. I know that non-chemically-enhanced people have started using these terms, but it's honestly foolish. When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.
What. Even natural bodybuilders go through cut and bulk cycles. And plenty of enhanced bodybuilders don't use clen or DNP, even IFBB pros.
Someone new to resistance training, significantly overweight, or both, can add pounds and pounds of lean body mass while in a deficit. But that stops when those things stop. You have to be in a surplus to add muscle mass if you're no longer a novice lifter or significantly overweight. And it is basically impossible to perfectly balance your diet so that you don't gain any body fat in this situation while still being able to efficiently add muscle mass.
For a non-enhanced person that doesn't have the benefits of strong nutrient partitioning effects from AAS and HGH it is even more difficult to do so.
Lean bulks are more popular than ever but they're still bulks and they're still followed by cuts - just cycled much less frequently.
Even natural bodybuilders go through cut and bulk cycles.
Yeah, the ones who are actually prepping for competition. They sacrifice some of their gains to get as lean as possibly solely for the purpose of showing in a competition. Anyone else engaging in "bulking" and "cutting" is just wasting their time.
You have to be in a surplus to add muscle mass if you're no longer a novice lifter or significantly overweight.
This is why you eat a slight caloric surplus while hitting your macro goals.
Internet dweebs started usurping the terminology. Honestly, it's justification for undisciplined eating. It's just "dieting" with pseudo-technical justification. The ultimate form of self-delusion are the guys who "perma-bulk", like Cartman.
> Anyone else engaging in "bulking" and "cutting" is just wasting their time.
Why?
> This is why you eat a slight caloric surplus while hitting your macro goals.
As an unenhanced lifter you've not got the significant nutrient partitioning boosts that HGH/AAS/(and for some) insulin give you. If you want to maximize gains you're going to be in a big enough surplus that you're just not going to get basically exclusively muscle gains for every bit of weight you add. Eventually you're going to need to diet, even with a fairly small surplus. And what is a phased approach to eating in a surplus to gain muscle and eating in a deficit to lose fat but bulking and cutting?
I would agree that perma-bulking isn't a particularly good idea, and trying to bulk and cut with the same sort of caloric surpluses and deficits someone on gear is counter-productive for a natural lifter, but I don't see why or how you come to the conclusion that unenhanced lifters using the bulk/cut terms are dweebs or wrong in using the terminology. HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone claim that the only people who should be using bulk/cut phrasing are enhanced lifters.
> Incidentally, the terms "bulking" and "cutting" come from bodybuilders taking steroids.
Since when? Are you sure you don't mean 'blast' and 'cruise', which specifically has connotations of steroid usage?
> When you're not cycling anabolic steroids against metabolic stimulants like Clenbuterol, it really doesn't apply.
Why wouldn't it apply?
Since when?
Since Internet dorks started usurping terms used by chemically enhanced bodybuilders.
Why wouldn't it apply?
Because of what I just said. If you're not chemically enhanced, then you just eat a consistent, slight surplus while hitting your macro goals. Bulking and cutting makes no sense, you're literally just making things harder for yourself.
> If you're not chemically enhanced, then you just eat a consistent, slight surplus while hitting your macro goals. Bulking and cutting makes no sense, you're literally just making things harder for yourself.
If you eat a consistent slight surplus without ever having a period of deficit, then you will just get fat over time.
The whole point of bulking and cutting is to increase your training volume during a caloric surplus to pack on muscle, followed by a period of lowered training volume (due to poorer recovery while in a deficit) eating at a deficit to cut fat while retaining as much muscle as possible. This has nothing to do with steroids, it's just basic body building.
What even would be your propose for someone who wants to change their physique, especially for reducing body fat?
So you're saying your metabolism is the same when you eat 1k calories vs 4k?
Your metabolism differences are already accounted for when you talk about how much you are burning, you don't get to count metabolism twice.
At some point in my life I was eating 400g of nutella every day. I was also running 26km per day. I didn't get fat.
> We also excluded those listed as “athletes” in the database and those with TEEs greater than 25 MJ/d (all of these excluded individuals were from High HDI populations)
This study specifically excluded athletes, so its conclusions would be applicable to someone running 26km per day.
In twin studies the only things that have been associated with obesity are past calorie restrictive diets and soda consumption. All these other studies are usually picking up on either socio-economic or environmental factors, rather than actual behaviors we can control.
The reason to exercise isn't to avoid obesity: it is because the health benefits of exercise have nothing to do with weight. Careful, moderate exercising is good for our bodies, all on its own.
Whereas there is shockingly little evidence that obesity itself causes most correlated health conditions, rather than being a symptom (of stress, alienation, environmental contamination, inflammatory conditions, etc) correlated with the causes of those conditions. The weight with the lowest all-cause mortality is being "overweight".
But of course, "work less" is a lot harder to make money off of than "lose weight", so any science that can be twisted to prop up the weight loss industry will get spread far and wide.
Yes, exercise is good for you regardless of weight. We should all do it.
But the idea that there is little evidence that obesity causes health issues is absurd. There's absolutely mountains of evidence, and we have very firm understandings of the mechanisms underlying many of these issues, too. Hell, just being bigger, even if it's all muscle mass, is bad for your heart.
The all-cause mortality curve is J shaped because many more of the people at 10% bf are there because of disease and not because they're shredded from a strict diet and a consistent exercise.
I've lost roughly 100lb of fat over the past 9 months. I have gotten back to lifting 5 days a week, but even before that with just losing weight my health markers improved significantly, I've felt better, aches and pains and discomforts have all but disappeared, etc. My stress, alienation, environmental contamination, etc. conditions are all the same, and I'm working just as much, if not more.
Deja vue, but it is really a new article.
There are older studies: Epub 2015
It is time to bust the myth of physical inactivity and obesity: you cannot outrun a bad diet
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25904145/
You can, it just takes work and discipline.
For example jogging at about 7mph for 2 hours a day for a 180lb man would burn about 13,200 calories a week. I know people who jog like this.
Or I know people who cycle 250-400 miles a week which burns about 17,000-27,000 calories a week!
The only time I ever got close to having a 6-pack was from 16 days trekking in the Himalayas, culminating in summitting Mera Peak (~21,000 ft). I did not reduce my calorie consumption. But it was just a temporary change.
I just lost 50 kilos in 10 months. Quit sugar, walk 10km a day and most importantly ate almost only soup. So kind of low carb vegetable oriented stuff.
The 10km per day thing is certainly great for your health, but I suspect you'd still have lost most of that weight if the only change you made was to your diet.
This is not a new finding
I personally lost some weight and am now lean by simply changing my eating habits to intermittent fasting. I got so used to it that now it's effortless to continue.
Neither good diet can solely help avoiding to be skinny-fat
edit: grammar
We already know that in "thin countries", it's not that way because of everyone exercising like mad.
Abs are made in the kitchen, as they say.
That advice is usually more for people who are already fit but don't have abs.
You can maintain a healthy level of fitness by adding some exercise into your life and being mindful of what you eat. But maintaining abs is a whole other project you practically have to center your life around. And indeed, it's mostly a matter of very strict dieting.
Okay then, how about "you can't outrun a bad diet"? Pick your favorite conventional wisdom fitness aphorism as it applies to you, but it's the same underlying principle.
I think that would be more appropriate, but yes I am aware I'm being a pedant!
It wouldn't be HN without some pedantry ;)
I worked a physically active job from 2003-2015 and was still obese.
There is a simple and very low-impact exercise which affects obesity: the fork put-down.
Citation needed. A quick search suggests this is mainly pushed by influencers and life-coach type people. I'd be incredibly skeptical of anything pushed by people like that, unless it's backed by research... which doesn't seem to be the case here.
This has been known for a very long time and is definitely not news worthy
This was only proven by Pontzer and others with double labelled water studies when the cost of double labelled water went down enough for testing with humans to become affordable. Initially it was so expensive that only trials with a few small animal subjects were done so doing this large study was impractical until recent years. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
I know this can be a touchy subject, but honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising.
It’s just basic thermodynamics.
The energy (calories) you take in has to go somewhere. Some of it gets used for daily activity, but if you take in more than you burn, your body has to store the extra—it doesn’t have any other way to deal with it.
At the end of the day, it really is just a matter of calories in vs. calories out.
Exercise just helps burn more of your excess energy so that it doesn’t get converted into (weight) storage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
Thermodynamics only apply to closed systems. Your body can easily expel unprocessed calories/sugar in urine and feces (hence diabetics historically being diagnosed by their characteristically sweet urine).
Whether it's more likely than the average human body to do so, to process them for immediate energy, or to process them for longer term storage in conjunction with how it benchmarks your hunger and satiation signals is colloquially known as your "metabolism".
Want to tell me next how the laws of mechanical engineering conclusively prove that no one human being can be stronger than another, since we all weigh the same?
Yeah it's odd we needed a whole article for this. "You can't out exercise a bad diet" has always been true outside of the most extreme cases (competitive athletes).
Maybe it shouldn't be surprising, but without the knowledge, the opposite of the thing can be explained the same as the thing itself. For example, "The energy you take in has to go somewhere", but I also poop everyday, so maybe I just poop out the unnecessary calories? I know it works for water soluble vitamins for example.
Hindsight is 20/20 in this case. It's nice that the explanation is not complicated ("calories in, calories out"), but many other simple things have been thought of as true, only to be put on their head by science. I welcome the scientific confirmation, and I hold that the path to knowledge it's not straightforward at all.
Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight. Try it or your money back!
>Run 10 km 4 times a week and you will loose weight.
No.
I ran 10km three times a week and didn't lose a pound. <https://np.reddit.com/r/running/comments/1vq3k1/should_i_do_...> Every bit of my weight loss has always come from counting calories.
Thats why I’m saying you need to run four times ;-)
But jokes aside, not doing sports and only counting calories will make you loose muscles pretty fast. This will lower your baseline of calorie consumption of your body. So when you stop counting calories you will grow even more fat than before.
If you don’t loose weight from running then most probably you are increasing your calorie intake unconsciously. This overeating happens sometimes when people do sports.
Good luck getting an obese person to do that
I do not have time for lots of exercise beyond the occasional walk but I hated that I was 40lb over my healthy/ideal weight I used to be. So I simply ignored all the tactics of others in my life chronically struggling to lose weight or keep it of and did the research on the Standard American Diet.
All data pointed to Americans simply consume way way too many processed foods, carbs, and artificial sugars. No one should be surprised, but no one wants to change this because shit food tastes so good. I simply dropped all high processed foods, dropped to about 100g of carbs a day, and cut out soda completely. All the extra weight fell right off over 6 months. I did nothing else. Also my dopamine response has changed and healthy food and canned sparkling water now feels as good to consume as fast food and soda used to.
Meanwhile friends with the same problem try lots of exercise and never lose any weight, and others use ozempic with no diet changes and also lose no weight. No one wants to hear they have to do something as hard as a permanent major diet change, but blame biology and terrible nutrition education. I am just the messenger.
YMMV, but my own experience certainly agrees with this study.
Commit to stop eating like an overweight American long term and you are likely to stop looking like one.
It's dead simple.
Calories deficit makes weight loss, everything else is laziness
It ought to be obvious. A chocolate donut, large Frappuccino or pick your unhealthy food of choice are about equivalent to half an hour of running. Given how many people throw in a snack like that several times per day good luck burning that off with exercise.
One of the most straight forward things to lose weight is just limiting yourself to two or three actual meals, black coffee, tea, etc.
Starbucks did an impressive job of convincing people they love coffee when a lot of them actually just like morning/mid-day dessert with some trace coffee flavoring.
Nobody who is ordering a frapachino is convinced they are ordering because they like coffee, especially considering that the half of the frapachino menu is non-coffee flavors.
I make coffee at home but have noticed how fast the sugar jar needs to be refilled. I'm the only one who drinks coffee, it's surprising how much sugar i consume drinking coffee. I bet i use 2-3 tablespoons of pure sugar from my coffee consumption alone.
I used to have sugar in my tea. I gradually reduced it to zero and now I don't miss it at all.
Calories in vs Calories out. Just stop eating so much.
In other news: a group of scientists announced today the results of their recent study, where they conclude that drowning is not caused by a lack of swimming, but instead seems to be due to water. Other scientists have refuted the claim and point out defects in the study criteria. In response, US officials have pulled funding from the National Science Foundation for any further studies into the causes of drowning, calling any claim of drowning that doesn't end with the sentence "the will of God" as unpatriotic.
Calories in, calories out: the pareto-optimized answer to weight loss
The title is disappointing: it implies a causal relationship. The study was an observational study.
Indeed, you can outrun a bad diet: we all know that. The study just shows that the lack of activity isn't the main reason for obesity. Both things can be true simultaneously.
"Running is a statistically ineffective means of weight reduction" doesn't make for a catchy headline. This can suffice.
I agree. A good title could be "You can outrun a bad diet. You just won't".
Calories in vs calories out. This isn’t news.
Reminds me of a video I saw recently that pointed out the absurd number of calories professional athletes burn. Upshot of that video was that you almost certainly can run to lose weight. Just don't expect it to be an easy task.
At a personal level, I can also say that it is flat out hard to eat large amounts of food if you are staying active. The stereotype of wanting an after meal nap is legit.
It is also somewhat interesting to see other places try and contend with just how much food your average person in the US has at their ready disposal.
At a personal level, I can also say that it is flat out hard to eat large amounts of food if you are staying active.
I've never had that problem. When I exercise a lot, my body just starts to crave a higher proportion of calorie-dense foods - ice cream, cheese, breads. The actual volume of food might not go up all that much, but the balance changes.
Of course, "a lot" for me is 10-15 hours cardio/week plus 3-4 hours/week weight training. My baseline is 3-5 hours cardio and the same 3-4 weight training. I only ramp up to 10+ hours cardio if I have a major event planned (100 mile mtn bike race or similar).
I think it is safe to say that 10-15 hours of cardio a week is far far more than most people get. Hick, 6-10 hours of exercise a week is almost certainly multiples of what most people do. :D
But, yeah, I was meaning volume as well as certain types. As I understand it, at the elite levels, you actually have to train your body in how to consume enough to stay active for the full event. It isn't like you can just down a few cheese burgers and then head off to a race.
Ice cream remains an amusing one, to me. People are convinced it is among the worst snacks you can do, and yet I have yet to meet a very active person that doesn't love some form of ice cream on a regular basis.
I'm from a western country, but live outside the OECD. Currently on a trip back home and the food is disgusting.
Everything tastes sweet, is invariably hyper-processed, and supplied by a narrow pool of companies.
My diet in my host country isn't great, but it's so much easier to eat well. Fresh fruit and veg is more readily available, cheaper and frankly tastier. I wouldn't say people are any more or less sedentary, particularly in the capital city in which I live.
The study is supported by my limited experience.
N=1 but I lost over 100 pounds in 8 months by changing to a keto diet with zero exercise (consciously going even more sedentary than I already was) and have kept it off for over eight years now. After I reached my ideal weight I restored exercise to my previous normal level (which is minimal but not absolutely sedentary). After a year I slowly transitioned from strict keto to low carb for life.
I feel great, look good and my health improved dramatically. Before changing I was on meds for pre-diabetes, high blood pressure and poor HDL/Trig along with having bad apnea and tectonic snoring. All resolved after 8 months and still off the meds today. In the prior decade I'd spent a lot of effort and money trying various diets, including medically supervised, but they were hard, stressful and none worked long term. Even though I've never been athletic or remotely a gym-rat, intentionally going sedentary was an unusual choice because I'd always heard "eat less, move more" but exercise made me hungrier. So when I got serious about doing keto hardcore, I decided to pause even the minimal token "faux exercise" like an occasional pleasure bike-ride or short walk on weekends.
Frankly, that occasional, brief exercise probably never did anything in terms of weight loss anyway but it did provide a psychological excuse to slip on diet. So eliminating that excuse and putting all my focus on diet may have been the main benefit of going zero exercise during my weight loss period. After I got below my target 'dream weight', I returned to my usual minimal exercise and since then it's increased even more because now I actually enjoy exercise. It turns out that exercise is a lot more fun when you're not obese and winded after 90 seconds! I think Keto worked for me when other diets hadn't because it's so strict but also brutally simple. I've also always liked the low carb foods like meats and cheeses.
As a significant and long-term success case, I'll share my personal "keys to keto success": 1. Commit to doing it hardcore for at least 30 days. 2. Rigorously track every molecule of food intake in a tracking app for the first month. Yep, get measuring spoons and a kitchen scale for weighing things. Think of it as a cool lab experiment and you're the rat. Get used to cooking at home and bringing lunch to work until you get the hang of the low carb lifestyle. 3. For the first week do not track calories, just limit carbs religiously. Seriously, stuff all the calories you want. Steaks drenched in butter and sour cream, a quarter pound of cheddar, whatever. Why? The first week is the hardest and this makes the transition easier. The calories will be much easier after you get control of your blood sugar by limiting carbs. 4. You MUST supplement electrolytes (sodium & potassium) for at least the first week. "Keto Flu" is real, excruciating and so easy to avoid. I didn't take all the warnings seriously and failed my first attempt at keto in utter misery after just 38 hours. 5. Start on a quiet weekend where you can just focus on this from Fri afternoon to Mon morning. 6. Absolutely, positively DO NOT CHEAT on carbs for the first 30 days. Keto is different because the first 3-ish days of transitioning off carbs are pretty hard. If you cheat, you'll keep having to redo some or all of that transition over and over. It's like crossing a wall of fire. You can get through it fine the first time with focus and planning but you definitely do not want to be wobbling back and forth through it. Keto works because strictly limiting carbs controls blood sugar which reduces hunger making cutting calories much easier. If you need to cheat, cheat on calories not on carbs.
It's not as hard as it sounds. Just get past the first month and it all gets a lot easier. The results come fast. I lost 10 pounds in 10 days and 20 pounds in 30, which provides a lot of motivation! At around six weeks I became 'fat-adapted' which is a long-term metabolic transition to primarily burning fat instead of carbs (glucose) for energy. It felt absolutely amazing in every way - physically, mentally and emotionally, like nothing I'd ever experienced before. I was mentally sharper, physically quicker and emotionally more grounded in a positive mode. Everything just felt and worked better in subtle but tangible, meaningfully real ways. It made me never want to go back to living inside a primarily carb-adapted metabolism. Of course, I hadn't physically craved carbs since the first month and by around 60 days my old habitual eating patterns and reflexes had faded. Then at around 90 days my palate shifted, meaning I even lost my taste for carbie foods. If I tried a small bite of something carb-laden that I'd loved my whole life, it didn't even taste particularly good to me anymore. I also became hyper-sensitive to sugar. Sugar-soaked foods just taste poisonously over-sweetened (which they kind of are). A normal apple now tastes as sweet as I'd ever want, like a dessert that has extra sugar-added.
For most of my life my weight was a metabolic mystery seemingly out of my control. Today, it's hard to even remember what it was like being a slave to my raging blood sugar and constant hunger. Now I feel closely attuned to my body. This makes my weight and appearance an almost trivial conscious choice. Fortunately, going low-carb is a lot easier today than when I started in 2017. There are many more delicious low-carb food choices at the grocery and everyone has heard of keto so it's not as weird. Even Wal-Mart has a selection of keto-breads and, recently, bagels! Standard disclaimer: Every metabolism is different and what worked so effectively for me may not work as well for you.
The timing of when I eat changes, if I gain weight. Eating pizza after jogging? Fat on belly.
Eating as much pizza as I want, but going to bed after on empty stomach after running, or putting the running in the morning while doing about 12 to 16 hour slots of intermitted fasting? Hello, six-pack.
Can we all please acknowledge that intermittent fasting is just a form of calories restriction? If you ate a pizza after jogging, but that was all you ate all day, your results would probably be different as well.
Reduced calorie intake is just an added benefit.
The main point of intermittent fasting is keeping your insulin levels low for the longest time possible, increasing insulin sensitivity, and forcing the body to use stored fat for energy.
Reduced calorie intake is the bit that makes you lose weight. Increased insulin sensitivity is a result of weight loss. "forcing the body to use stored fat for energy" is the mechanism by which weight loss happens.
Does it matter? Intermittent fasting is a form of calorie restriction I can be successful at, eating 3 tiny meals a day is one I fail at.
It does because you framed it as a matter of timing.
The timing makes me lose weight. The mechanism by which it does so is a black box.
But this black box has "you eat less calories" written in whiteout across it.
But it doesn’t matter to me. One method makes me so miserably hungry 24/7 that I quit after a few weeks of agony, the other makes me forget all about food entirely.
This seems to bother people, who always tell me to do it the “right” way, which to them apparently means using willpower to endure endless suffering.
That's fine, you can live in your world of magic. I don't care for intermittent fasting, it been easier for me to calorie count, but both of our systems are CI/CO. If we can acknowledge the core concept is that weight loss is done through caloric restriction we can then expand that to more implementations, because, as you've pointed out, the "right" way is very personal.
No one in this thread cares about this being the "right" way, they care about being accurate in what we're discussing.
Intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore, sugar diet, etc., all work when they work because it is caloric restriction.
Yes, it does. Because for somebody else, the three tiny meals might work, and intermittent fasting doesn't, and it would equally be good at the result.
That is a pretty interesting observation. I always thought it was solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned. For example, you burn ~2500 through just living, if you eat a pizza that contains 3000 calories, no matter the time at which you eat it, will you not still gain fat?
Calorie counting works, but "use this one weird trick to target belly fat and achieve six pack" sells books.
Its all anecdotal all the way down, so here's another grain of salt to add to the pile.
(Calories in - calories out) is correct enough to be the single most reliable metric, and will serve you right 99% of the time. My "one level deeper" understanding is that there are a few transfer functions applied to calories in. So of the technically available calories you eat, how much does your body absorb. Then, when the calories are biologically available, how does your body spend them?
So the idea would be, if you eat the pizza at the right time you reduce calories in. Either you will digest less calories, or your body will allocated them differently at different times of the day.
Unfortunately these things aren't really measurable so it's very hard to separate from hearsay.
>solely on the amount of calories consumed vs burned.
It is, but CI\CO as advice doesn't take in to account that you aren't a machine and we aren't calculating gas mileage. The system is both adaptive and reactive. CI and CO changes based on the situation, and you have no way to accurately measure.
That's why you don't worry about Calories Out. You measure Calories In daily and then your weight at a sample rate that's long enough that it averages out most weirdness - probably weekly. If your weight is going up, reduce caloric consumption.
I’ve been thinking about writing a book on this topic: “No overweight person eats well”.
By very definition of a person is overweight, they got there by eating poorly, and are continuing to do so. They have eaten more energy than they use, this energy storage in fat.
I think there are an infinite number of true statements you could make about unhealthy or overweight people. What makes for a good book or article is finding the true statement you can say that actually sways behavior. I'm skeptical your message would succeed in this
> They have eaten...
Notice the past tense there?
And / or continue to eat. Present tense.
If they were currently eating well, they would lose weight and not be overweight