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Comment by flcknzwrg | Hacker News Reader

Found the fatty ;)

Ok, seriously.... math: if you eat 3000 kcal per day and lose 1 lb per week, you're burning 3500 kcal per day. This is quite a lot. It's near impossible unless you work out a lot and are veeeery muscular... or are impossibly tall... or, well, fat. (Or a combination of those.)

Take me for comparison: I am 187cm (6'1ish) tall and weigh 75kg (165 lbs), pretty much smack in the middle of the "normal weight" range. I like running, do about 50km (30 miles) per week. I count calories and let my wrist watch measure my energy expenditure 24/7. On rest days (mostly sedentary), I burn about 2100 kcal. To get up to 3400, I have to do some sort of hard run and some lighter activity in addition, or do a long run (18km+).

Now I'm not everybody of course, but you can't be that abnormal, right? So I'm not buying your numbers.

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Running is probably the worst sport as far as caloric expenditure is concerned.

A serious endurance cyclist or swimmer will certainly go through 3000 kcal on a normal training day if not more.

I've burned an estimated 5000kcal daily on the bike for weeks. What's more is I know these numbers are very accurate as we train with power meters that record our energy expenditure with minimal error.

It's important to distinguish between serious athletes and average people who exercise. It's possible that truly competitive athletes - for instance, who run 120 miles a week to your 30 - will be much more likely to get ill from their efforts. It can take serious fitness - and a mentality acquired only by years of serious training - to push yourself to the extent that you fall ill, and maybe the recreational "athlete" described in this text can't reach that point.

Why do you think cycling would burn more calories than jogging?

Jogging is very efficient, mechanically speaking. You're not going to burn a lot of calories per hour.

Depends on how you look at it. I can bike all day without getting tired, but there's no way I can jog all day. If your definition of efficiency includes duration of effort, or distance covered, then cycling is very efficient.

You need to put more effort in 1 hour cycling session to burn the same amount of calories as in 1 hour running session. Running activates more muscles.

But cycling affects largest human muscles, which work more intensively..

I was "professional" athlete many moons ago. When we measured max heart rate, we did it on a bike first and then on a treadmill running and then bike again. My max heart rate running was +5 beats allways and I was not a single case. I just couldn't get to my max heart rate while cycling.

They are actually much more similar than most people realize. However, people usually burn more calories total on cycling because it's easier to put longer time periods into cycling than it is for running.

Put another way, an average cyclist will find a 2 hour bike ride to be an average ride but an average runner will consider a 2 hour run to be quite long.

As much as I enjoy cycling, I don't have anywhere near enough time to accommodate a bike regimen equivalent to my running regimen. To my mind, the only way cycling comes out ahead of running for most people is if (1) they have an usual amount of free time (e.g. enough to go on three hour rides every day), or (2) they're unable to run without injuring themselves.

> Running is probably the worst sport as far as caloric expenditure is concerned.

This is not correct. They are relatively close, though in fact swimming on average will burn slightly less calories than running per hour of activity for most paces of comparative effort [0].

> I've burned an estimated 5000kcal daily on the bike for weeks

This is around 3.5 to 10 hours of cycling a day depending on your weight and speed... There is individual variation of course, but there is no way you are burning this many calories without A LOT of hours on the bike.

[0]: http://www.nutristrategy.com/caloriesburned.htm

Check this out http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-calories-cyclists-bu...

"Each day participants ride, on average, about 100 miles and burn some 6,071 calories"

As a competitive, but still amateur cyclist I would do something in this ballpark almost every day. Hence 3000 - 5000 calories. And I'd often run for an hour or play soccer on top of this since I wasn't a pro.

I did spend a lot of hours on the bike, as serious athletes tend to do. Years of experience with myself and many other national caliber athletes tells me that we do in fact get sick from strenuous exercise, all the time.

> "Each day participants ride, on average, about 100 miles and burn some 6,071 calories"

This is a very bad baseline for an average athlete. You are referring to pro athletes in a race event who average 40-45km/hr speeds on a notoriously hilly race. They don't maintain this level of exertion during training season, and an average athlete is nowhere even close to it.

> As a competitive, but still amateur cyclist I would do something in this ballpark almost every day. Hence 3000 - 5000 calories.

If you bike 160km a day, then you're cycling 4 - 6 hours a day. My original statement that you're not burning that many calories without ALOT of hours on the bike is correct.

> I did spend a lot of hours on the bike, as serious athletes tend to do. Years of experience with myself and many other national caliber athletes..

It's very impressive if you're able to sustain >30hrs week of exercise for weeks as you mention, but be cautious to not sound elitist.

Running is probably the worst sport as far as caloric expenditure is concerned.

Yes, running is extremely inefficient. The most efficient form of movement known is a human on a bicycle. One's choice depends on whether the goal is to burn calories, or travel efficiently.

I've burned an estimated 5000kcal daily on the bike for weeks.

Wait a minute, what? You're going to take the most efficient form of locomotion and use that as an example of how to burn calories? The only reason you burned that many calories is because you spent all day on the bike. Maybe I'm completely missing your point, but for time spent, running burns more calories.

Rate of calorie burn on a cycle is highly dependent on speed. Riding at 32km/h or higher absolutely consumes significant energy due to wind resistance.

I'm the same height as you as recently dropped 5kg to 81kg due to fasting and cutting starch from my diet. Why wife started freaking out because I was looking so skinny (I'm not remotely fat normally either). I can easily burn 4000 kcal a day. All it takes is one hour on the bike. I burn ~3000 kcal on rest days. You have an endurance optimised build, I have a sprinters build. Everyone is different. Those numbers seem perfectly normal to me.

Yeah but the OP said nothing about biking for an hour every day... OP was replying to a guy who said "We lift 2 times a week. Warm up, then do 2+ reps of a heavy set." That does not at all sound like a guy who burns 3k kcal on a rest day and burns 4k kcal on a bike a few times a week.

3500 kcal per day is nothing. One can have a basal resting metabolic rate of 2500 kcal, then do some sports and you get 3500 easily. And you seem to be a bit underweight, go build some more muscle. 75kg is featherweight for that height ;)

> And you seem to be a bit underweight, go build some more muscle. 75kg is featherweight for that height ;)

Oh you put a smiley, that makes it alright then!

> And you seem to be a bit underweight

Incorrect. My BMI is 21.4, which is almost exactly in the middle of the "healthy" range for my height. (Healthy BMI range is defined 18.5 - 25)

I think that the issue here is that we're comparing aerobic and strength sports - weightlifters usually seem to aim for BMIs around the "overweight" 25-30 range.

A couple of years ago, I took a half-day hike up a mountain called Timpanogos with my son. According to my fitness tracker, I burned over 8000 kcal on that trip. It was a bit strenuous, but not painful. The estimate of calories burned seemed reasonable to me.

EDIT: According to this chart, I probably burned around 600 kcal per hour:

http://www.nutristrategy.com/caloriesburnedwalking.htm

It took us about 8 hours, so the total was probably closer to 4800 kcal.

In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that it's easy to burn a lot more than 2000 kcal per day.

Your estimate has already gone from 8000 to 4800 and you're still relying on the unsourced data of NutriStrategy.

Who's willing to be the truth is significantly lower still?

Not even close. It's highly unlikely that you burned more than about 3300kcal (and probably less). You can check out calorie counts from hikers with similar times on Strava.

https://www.strava.com/segments/8428908

Maybe. My body is definitely less efficient than those runners. :-) According to this site, typical energy expenditure on the Timpanogos hike is 4000-5000 kcal:

https://www.bettercheaperslower.com/ways/to-the-summit-of-mt...

The people who did it in the same time as you were walking, not running. They were no more efficient.

How accurately/precisely can your wrist watch tell you what your energy expenditure is?

I have only anecdotal evidence, which is me.

Since about 3 years I've been counting calories and let various wrist watches with 24/7 heart rate trackers (fitbit, later garmin devices) estimate energy expenditure.

So I measure energy in and out (with unknown error bars). The energy balance I get as a result predicts what my body weight should do.

My control is stepping on the scale every time before I take a shower, log, and observe trends.

Result, consistent over the last three-ish years: my measured weight does almost exactly what the calorie counting and wristwatch estimating predicts. I see absolutely no systematic error in one direction or the other (measured over weeks, that is, to do away with short term fluctuations).

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