Comment by thedz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thedz | Hacker News Reader

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> The most accurate title would be "Don't exercise in order to earn the right to eat junk food later". Which is the meager point they're actually making.

Except that's not the only point the article makes. You might disagree with the title, but the article does attempt to back it up.

Many paragraphs are dedicated to explaining why for many people, exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned and other factors (such as studies showing that the body may attempt to balance energy output in other areas).

In that sense "Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight" is precisely the thesis that the article is trying to support. You might disagree with it, but I don't really think its egregious clickbait. Even if the title is meant to be catchy and provocative. They clearly state why exercising could be detrimental to weight loss goals for some people.

Things that the article title doesn't say:

- You should never exercise to lose weight

- Exercise is bad for you

- You can only lose weight by dieting

> exercising might actually be harmful to their weight loss goals, due to how we tend to overestimate how many calories were burned

The actual number of calories burned exercising is unaffected by our mental estimates. Thinking you earned the right to eat junk food is the problem, not exercise.

Exercise makes me ravenous, I'm certainly not the only person for which that is true. Swimming is the worst offender, IME. I can be vigilant, but even knowing that I didn't burn enough calories to counterbalance that meatball sub I want to get after my workout, doesn't help all that much in keeping me from actually buying it anyway.

This is similar to the problem of calories in = calories out. Dieting isn't a chemistry equation where you just need the numbers to balance it, it's psychology and in some cases physiology (leptin levels, etc), and that part of it is tricky.

It's really important to stay hydrated, because your body often mistakes thirst for hunger. Drink water every 10m in the pool. Also, I often take a small amount of heavy protein immediately after the workout (~1/2 of one of those 33g protein bars is typical), then jump in the shower.

Between these two habits, I've killed the post-swim binge. Hope it works for you too!

> Drink water every 10m in the pool

That means you'd need 5 drinks to complete just one length of an olympic-size swimming pool! :)

You can drink as you go so it's no problem.

there are people that actually drink that water in public pools?

eww

Don't worry, any germs or other organic nastiness are completely neutralized by the vast quantities of chlorine, which is what you should actually be going "eww" about.

(I once drank a mouthful of pool water as a kid and got a really awful headache shortly thereafter. I suppose I'm lucky that's all I got.)

Seems like the m here means minutes

thank you. (i actually needed this advice, I experience this)

you can put your hunger to work for you, but you need to remind yourself that, if you carry extra pounds, hunger is what weight loss feels like. That ravenous feeling if you can keep it going, that right there is the success. celebrate it, and stop killing it.

No, it's not. Learning how to eat and hydrate properly (both in terms of what and when) with your exercise pattern so that you don't feel ravenous while maintaining a calorie deficit is success. Feeling ravenous isn't success, and generally isn't sustainable.

The feeling of hunger itself is not the thing that's causing you to want to eat more. The aversion to the sensation is what's doing that, but you have control over the aversion.

it's interesting reading the hunger vs. no hunger debate. Personally I can't imagine losing weight without feeling hungry. Of course not constantly, of course not to the point of crashing, but you have to moderate the feeling. For some people it can pass in about a week, and you adjust to just eating less, and you hopefully stop feeling hungry. But I think almost everyone goes through at least an adjustment period.

I think this is true. I've never been very overweight so I admit it was easier for me to do this than it would be if I had to do it for longer, but I dropped ten pounds primarily just by drastically cutting the amount of food I ate for lunch. This led to feeling hungry at work, but when I'm working I'm very focused and able to ignore what my body is telling me. I suspect many other people here are the same way - if you find you're able to work for long periods of time without a break and you can drop into "flow", you may be able to lose weight by just eating less during those periods.

The reason high protein / low carb diets work so well for people is it removes this feeling. The protein tricks us into thinking we're sated even under a heavy calorie deficit

My experience is that really high protein/low carb diets (e.g. Atkins initiation phase) produce, for me, an uncomfortably full feeling without satiety. But there's pretty extreme variation in response person to person.

There is "I'm hungry" and then there is "If I don't eat something, I'm going to crash." It is not success, it means something is really imbalanced in your diet, and if you have the mental power to successfully ignore it, well, isn't that just an eating disorder?

That's no more of an eating disorder than the inverse: not having the mental power to acknowledge and respond to it appropriately.

Anyways, parent comment didn't say to starve yourself. It said to learn to be okay with being a bit hungry. Instead of learning to be okay with the feeling of hunger, people learn to be okay with the equally unpleasant feeling of being stuffed.

Grand parent's comment was about feeling ravenous during swimming, not just "hungry." Diet is not as simple as eating less food, since you are eating less, you need to make an extra effort to ensure your body is still getting what it needs.

I've heard people say "I'm famished!" and I don't for a second think that they've been through a literal famine and are starving to death. Maybe GP used "ravenous" literally, or maybe it's just a figure of speech to indicate having built up a good appetite.

I've totally had points where my work out crashed because my body was out of something. It could be water, protein, or even sugar or salt. There is a huge difference between "hungry" and body is shaking, weak feeling.

I meant that I was ravenous after swimming, not typically during. I used that word because it's different than the usual "I'm a bit peckish" that happens in the morning or after a few hours of not eating. I like the comment about thirst, it could easily be that.

I did bodybuilding for ~5 years and did the whole bulk/cut cycle every 3-4 months so I had quite a few cutting session and a few times I let myself go (30-40lbs overweight) and had to lose more than 10-15lbs; in those instances I did IF (Intermittent Fasting) and ate in 6-7 hour windows (evening). The first week or so you get pretty hungry in the morning, but after that it's pretty easy.

I only say this because I want to express that I'm familiar with just being a bit hungry vs much more than that. When I was 19 I lived with a friend and we were both broke, I dropped from 180lbs to 145lbs (on my frame that was skeletal) in a few months from not eating much at all. That was pretty severe hunger, but even my ravenous after swimming isn't as bad as that was.

FWIW, and if it matters at all, I'll be 39 in a month.

No, it really isn't. I dropped 15kg with diet moderation over several months a couple of years ago, and I wasn't left feeling hungry apart from the first week (where I was adjusting to reducing the volume of my meals).

Yes.. dear lord when I was a competitive runner every post-workout made me binge eat. Of course, to be competitive that means you workout very hard 3-4 times a week.

I can't count the number of times my teammates and I would eat a party pack of tacos each afterwards. That's not healthy.

Exercise actually promotes the intake of Glucose into body cells by stimulating the opening of pumps on the cell wall, similarly to the way Insulin promotes the intake of Glucose into body cells.

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