Mice compensate for extra exercise by reducing other physical activity: study
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Like probably a lot of people here, I read the headline and said to myself "no shit, of course diet matters" but then I read the article and the conclusion is actually pretty interesting: CICO is of course still king and that's not at all what this is about; this group did a mouse study and found that when they increased the amount of exercise available to the mice (and they started to exercise more), something happened that was not fatigue related that cause them to be MORE sedentary when they were not exercising, and in fact the increase in sedentary behavior almost perfectly counteracted the increased energy consumption from the running (they still ended up slightly net negative but extremely minor).
It's a short article and worth the read. Still a garbage headline.
>These changes in how they spent their time neatly managed to almost counteract the extra calorie costs from running, says Daniel Lark, a research fellow in molecular physiology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, who led the new study.
And as this is a mouse study I make no comments on how to extrapolate that to humans. If this is behavioral and not biological then it might not translate at all.
Edit: eloff wins for simplicity and good English.
actual + 0.45 * actual = expected
1.45 actual = expected
1 actual = 0.69 expected
Some of the other folks here have commented with good ideas.
Anecdotally, I've been powerlifting for the past 2 years or so as my "exercise", and while I weigh about what I did two years ago, my body looks completely different. Weightlifting may not cause you to lose weight, but no one actually wants to lose weight, they want to lose fat.
Is this a useful comparison? Olympic marathoners are small people who are extremely weight conscious. Olympic weightlifters are also very aware of their weights as they compete in weight classes.
> The limiting factor for jogging is usually your cardiovascular system, and you stop when you feel exhausted, not when your leg muscles can't move anymore.
No offense but this is just telling me you're guessing and don't know much about distance running or jogging. Most average people who run for exercise stop because they've finished their workout not from exhaustion.
Then on top of that you are talking about men's macho/sexualized fantasies about their body shapes, not their carefully considered decisions about practical abilities to train. Most people don't actually want to look like pro sprinters in practice, but would prefer a more typical fit body shape.
There are many physical activities which will result in different development. How about dancing, rock climbing, hiking, martial arts, rowing, yoga, ...? And how about just moderate exercise/practice instead of pro-level devotion.
Virtually any form of physical activity is good for your body. If you want to be a rock climber then do that; if you want to be a distance runner than do that. And expect your body to adapt accordingly. But if your goals are centered around aesthetics and body composition then you should choose something that will lead you toward those goals, and if your ideal aesthetic is low bodyfat and high muscle mass then distance running is not likely to help you.
[0] https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/abstract/1...
There are several aphorisms about this:
1. "Abs are made in the kitchen." 2. "You can't outrun a bad diet."
Personally, I've found that carb restriction (e.g., Keto) has worked well for me for keeping my blood sugar (A1c) levels down (with an added bonus of weight loss). YMMV
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou...
Burning 15kcal per minute is a stretch for most people, and with family life and economic constraints, I doubt most people can spare more than 30 to 45 min per day for HIIT exercise. My point is its only realistic to budget burning 400 to 600 kcal due to exercise.
It's far easier to eat more than what any normal person can burn even with excercise, so without a naturally high metabolism, a proper, restricted diet is a necessity.
The mechanism at the end of the day is still caloric restriction that leads to weight loss. Keto is just a means to that end.
So keto may reduce your weight, but it's not actually reducing your fat stores, it's just reducing the amount of water in your body.
I saw one good description of what is going on: You don't ever lose fat cells just the amount of fat each one stores. When you enter ketosis your cells give up some of the water they were using as place holders for the fat they are waiting to store. Thus the periodic "whoosh" that ketorers report. Every few weeks you notice you have to pee a lot and you lose a few pounds.
E.g. insulin levels affects digestion, food high in sugars stimulates insulin secretion, which in turn leads to more fat being stored.
Foods made of refined carbohydrates can give you diabetes and yes, you can eat more calories on a Keto diet, versus a high carbs diet. I know because I tried both, with strict measurements and daily notes.
That said, I don’t think keto diets are healthy. Our body is made to eat vegetables. And we need carbs and sugars too — except that when they come from fruits and vegetables, you also get fibers, which diminishes insulin secretion, plus you get needed nutrients not found in white bread or cheesecake, so again, we’re talking of calories that aren’t equal.
1) A ketogenic diet is wasteful by nature, you excrete some percent of the calories you consume.
2) It completely ignores the effects of hormones. You need insulin to store fat and build muscle. A diet that triggers more insulin may result in storing more fat. This does not violate the first law of thermodynamics - this energy will either be burned from your fat stores, or compensated for by reducing your metabolism. I expect in reality a combination of both.
Nutritionists have promoted so many falsehoods based on faulty studies, forever damaging the image of the healthcare industry, that people now feel justified in ignoring sound medical advice and embracing alt-truth (e.g. anti-vaxers).
But I understand that mentality. I see myself as a very logical person compared to the general population, yet when my doctor tells me I need to lower my cholesterol, I ignore her. What does she know? What they taught her in Medical school, and I don't trust that at all. She doesn't have the time in our rushed 10 minute appointments to debate me on the subject, or even give me a recommended reading list.
I feel the need to do my own research on the subject by reading medical papers but I haven't had the energy or inclination yet. From what I have bumped into over the years, it seems your basic HDL and LDL numbers don't say much about risk of heart disease or stroke.
If it is swapped with a mix of protein and carbs, then you have some confounding variables of the thermic effect of the protein to account for.
From what I have seen, keto diets work due to two things: 1) Reduced caloric intake due to chopping out carbs - a major swath of foods 2) Increased adherence due to stabilizing blood sugar levels and thereby increasing satiety (the whole "stay full longer" thing)
If you have other studies that have been shown significant in an isocaloric state, I'd love to see them. I just haven't run across any that have shown good control around these areas. I personally like keto (and bacon) so I'm always looking for another excuse to do it, but I don't think that there is a ton of evidence for it doing any hormonal magic in healthy populations at the moment.
That's like saying that calling `fsync` will make your files bigger because it promotes data storage. It might store some data earlier, but the end balance is the same.
Looking around I see a lot of people giving diet advice after succeeding in losing weight, and often the people that already tried that but failed just nod politely to not antagonize the speaker. For some it’s food balance, for others it’s food volume, some started cycling, for me it was stretching.
To my eyes it seems that successful people just found a niche where the counter reaction caused by the change is weak enough to let them lose weight, and it would be a fool’s errand to pundit on how the majority of people would react to any specific change.
It was a super simple shift and wrought such a significant change to our body shape and weight that we were motivated to do the "hard" things - i.e. diet and exercise.
But surely we have oodles of data from devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches to know whether this behaviour is true for humans or not.
exercisers, whatever their species, tend to become hungrier and consume more calories after physical activity. They also may grow more sedentary outside of exercise sessions. Together or separately, these changes could compensate for the extra energy used during exercise, meaning that, over all, energy expenditure doesn’t change and a person’s or rodent’s weight remains stubbornly the same.
Looking back a few years later, I realized maybe I didn't see the big changes I was expecting since my roommate and I would hit the Burger King on the way home since we were always so hungry after working out. It dawned on me we were completely erasing all the work we just did in the matter of twenty minutes eating cheeseburgers and onion rings with several cups of pop to boot.
It's also hard to gain muscular physiques in general. You have to cut an enormous amount of body fat to obtain things like an Adonis belt but if your goal is strength it shouldn't be too hard to hit novice benchmarks.
I also doubt you were seriously burning the amount of calories you think you were working out. Unless you're a professional or Olympic athlete, someone who is training for over 6 hours a day, you will likely never burn more than 400 calories from a "moderate" gym session.
People dramatically over estimate how much they burn working out. There's a reason why people say "You can't outrun a bad diet."
Not to mention many people spend just a fraction of their time in the gym actually lifting weights. Mostly sitting at machines, resting between sets and playing with their phone.
My gym routine is "super-sets" pairs of exercises working complementary groups of muscles. So I'll do say 4 sets of lat pulldowns alternating with shoulder presses, with zero breaks. Then switch immediately to the next pair of exercises.... Net result is far higher average intensity in a shorter time.
Without accurately measuring that sort of thing, I worry most diet studies only muddle the conversation with meaningless anecdotes when it's unclear what the weight loss actually consisted of.
A high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet (ie “ketogenic”) will cause weight loss with no exercise while increasing cardiovascular health (stick to plant material if you can versus a meat heavy diet, to keep colorectal cancer at bay).
If you pick one exercise to do, lift weights, either to increase or maintain muscle mass.
Maybe it's the sceptic in me, but I'm reading this as: the calorie model is broken, or at least flawed.
When someone else reproduces this I'll give it a second chance. As it is, calorie fail aside, I get the feeling someone beat up their data and/or had an odd set of mice. That is "get different mice, we're not finding anything interesting."
Personally, I'm extremely unlikely to change my diet + exercise habits over a mouse.
You are always exercising to a certain degree, every second of every day. From sleeping to full exertion--you're always somewhere along that spectrum of physical activity.
Exercise is super important in maintaining good cardiovascular health, a good mental state, and does help with weight loss.
What's so hard to understand about that..? Maybe I am missing the point. Is this just to gather more evidence to prove caloric deficits are the correct way?
CICO is empirically vacuous.
If you think obesity is due to the difference between 80 calories or so, you have other drastic immediate concerns (the terrible mental model being one). People aren't becoming obese because their body isn't "processing" fat calories compared to carb calories, they are obese because people eat obscene amounts of food daily.
Countries like France and Italy eat massive amounts of carbs in their diets and they don't have obesity issues on the scale of the United States.
The biggest factor is nutrition.
Yes!
> The point of these is body positivity basically. You are fat and it isn't your fault.
I didn't see this at all in there. If anything, this is written to people who think they can outwork a bad diet, which is rarely the case for anyone over 16. Nothing in there was about body positivity or anything. It just showed that even when we run and "burn 300 calories" that you are possibly holding that back somewhere else to stay at caloric balance.
However, the "calories out" portion of that equation is actually quite complicated. In recent years many studies have indicated that the body does not process all calories in the same way. So "calories out" depends on a lot of things, including:
- metabolism, which can be increased by exercise and muscle mass
- what specific kind of "calories in" you're getting, and how your body processes these
- calories burned directly by exercise
To highlight one specific example of this, a calorie of fructose may be processed by the body very differently than a calorie of, say, vegetable fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
I'm not sure what chemically needs to happen, fat is transported from the bowel to the bloodstream in a relatively complex process, but once it's in the blood, it's in the same form as in storage, as triglycerides.
In fact, the triglyceride content of a person's fat stores will reflect their diet, which is a strong indication it comes directly from the food without processing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4072956
I think of this as the "calories in" portion. There was never any reason to assume the means by which we measure the caloric content of food truly represented the caloric energy available to the body.
The "calories in" part is more complicated than people like to admit too, and probably more important for weight loss. The way our body handles hunger and its relative primacy in our mental state makes it unnecessarily difficult to calorie restrict and then maintain, when eating certain diets. It's like telling an alcoholic "just stop drinking, duh" or an insomniac "just relax and sleep, simple as that". Just because something is in our brain doesn't mean we have full control over it, and I'm not sure why food is treated like something that everyone magically has complete self-control over, in contrast to _literally everything else_.
I'm really really fortunate to have grown up in a good food culture, and worked on it a little more in college. Meeting CICO goals and losing weight when I want to is really not that difficult for me, but I don't think this has much to do with self-control or my genetics. The way I eat just makes hunger less of a factor in my life: I rarely get hungry, skipping meals is never a problem, I get satiated quickly, etc etc.
That's not at all true.
CICO is a straightforward restatement of a law of thermodynamics, and I'm not disputing that at all.
But from a weight-loss perspective, understanding CICO isn't necessarily that helpful, and certainly not "the key". The difficult question is how any particular individual can make CO > CI. (Well, actually, the goal is to balance CO with CI at a healthy weight, but of course that's step 2 for a lot of people.)
There are many millions of people for whom the answer to that question is not known.
I suspect it's because Human metabolism is complicated, with numerous overlapping and interacting mechanisms and system, where the parameters for how they interact vary by individual... hormones, habits, social network, culture, taste, access to food options, physical health, your job, etc., can all be significant factors, depending on the individual. Meanwhile, food producers of various sorts are often acting at cross-purposes, since their goal is to make as much money as possible, not necessarily help people lose weight.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems only. Show me the ecosystem where food consumed and a human body is a perfectly closed system with no other inputs/outputs and I'll show you how that does not resemble the real world and you are making underlying assumptions you cannot prove.
The real criticism, however is that you cannot just assume that CICO is a restatement of the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, because it relies on the spurious assumption that "nutritional calories" are sufficient approximations for the entirety of energy in the system.
There's been a ton of work in chemistry and physics to untangle the mistakes of phlogiston theory, and caloric theory [1]. The SI unit of energy is now the Joule to absolutely distance from the problematic "calorie", and the confusion between what nutrition studies call a calorie and what Physics calls a calorie and what Joules are is an amazing mess.
Nutrition "science" seems to me like the last bastion of some middle ground between phlogiston and caloric theory, and CICO the battle cry of its devout believers.
The average american eats 3600 calories per day. Fat ones eat more; perhaps 4000 to 8000. This is far beyond amounts recommended to lose weight effectively: 1500 or less.
There are lots of variables in human nutrition and metabolism, but the biggest by far is the fact that people are eating 3-5x the amount of food they should.