Doing more exercise won’t help you burn more calories | Hacker News Reader

Doing more exercise won’t help you burn more calories

newscientist.com

29 pointsqubitcoder32 comments

True, the simple fact is you can’t out run your mouth. Exercise is good for other health reasons not for weight loss. In fact if your severely overweight jumping on a treadmill will damage your joints.

Intermittent fasting, and eating diets like unethical vegetarian (meat sometimes) are great for weight loss.

If your going to eat junk, binge, get it out of your system. Try to limit this to rare and appropriate moments. Birthday parties, event dinners.

Don’t feel bad you enjoy food, don’t take it away, just don’t eat junk regularly.

Do low impact cardio like swimming or biking, do low joint stress strength training (yoga or resistance weight training)

Relax, don’t stress, sleep more, eat less ( when your body tells you to eat only not because of the clock).

Relearn thirst vs. hungry. Your probably not hungry, just thirsty most times.

Except for metabolic adjustment where the body spends less calories by being more efficient with exercise or slower with low calorie diet and the notorious fact that people underestimate calorie ingestion it really is not as complicated as this article makes it sound.

It is very difficult to cutivate a consistent healthy diet and exercise regimen indeed and except for very few physiological/mental reasons any recommendation that denies caloric deficit is garbage.

Right so really the headline is 'diet is more important than exercise when it comes to weight loss' which is no surprise to anyone

Maybe not in informed circles like HN, but that is very surely a surprise to a lot of people in the mainstream.

Anecdotally regular exercise eliminates my cravings for junk food. If I do indulge I feel terrible for the rest of the day.

I'm surprised this has been posted, never mind upvoted by anyone rational. Doing work consumes energy. End of discussion.

(There is an argument that it is easier to eat less than to exercise more, but that is a different debate. Ideally you do both.)

Yup it's just CICO (with some health exceptions). Now enough physical exercise and you can make a significant dent in your daily caloric requirements, but most people drastically underestimate how many calories they are actually burning while working out.

Conversely if you do have an idea how to do long distance, high endurance cardio you probably already understand how much more energy you need to intake to keep up on weight.

Are we repeating these same debunked arguments again and again?

CICO is not true because of just gut microbiome for one, obese people extract more calories from the same food compared to a normal person.

https://www.livescience.com/41954-gut-microbes-make-you-fat....

https://www.newsweek.com/weight-loss-enemy-within-414483

Also metabolism highly varies between people.

You can't make something from nothing.

Faster metabolism? Sure some people have that, eat less. Calories in.

Exercising doesn't burn many calories? Exercise more. Calories out.

CICO may as well be 1+1=2.

CICO is not debunked, stop spreading that myth. Studies such as the ones you linked only indicate that the counting is more complicated than measuring the heat generated by burning a food and slapping the result on a label.

It's how much you store that matters not how many calories in. If the body has a signal mechanism that can be triggered by certain chemicals/event then it's no longer about CICO but it's more about the storage triggers.

Cannot read the article because of the paywall but that's very simplistic.

For example, just taking DNP will burn a lot of calories and will literally cook organs from the inside from the heat. You're not really doing any active work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol

Same with caffeine.

Metabolic rates vary a lot, they found that in people with a lot of weight loss, they burnt less than normal people by about 500 to 600 calories per day.

It's certainly not the end of discussion, it's the beginning of one.

https://outline.com/sSzxbx

I tried it as well and it did not show the full article for me. It gets cutoff at the same spot.

You posted this four times without seeing that it doesn't reveal the rest of the article.

The work being done is the heat generated. "literally cook organs from the inside from the heat" requires active work to accomplish.

That's why its used for diet pills, its a way to get more calories out.

This is not how homeostasis works (at all). Metabolism is real and so is genetically determined caloric retention. Thin people don't necessarily eat less or exercise more, they sh*t more calories than fat people, who store more. It's not all this, but it is also not zero this. Regardless, it's absolutely not as simplistic as producing and consuming energy, it's a few billion years of evolved genetic diversity of retaining and eliminating calories for homeostasis.

I don't see how any of that relates to the comment you replied to. No matter how your metabolism works, exercising will burn calories, and I think that's all the above comment was getting at.

Now that that's been said, would you happen to have a reference for

>Thin people don't necessarily eat less or exercise more, they sh*t more calories than fat people, who store more.

this? I would be interested in reading about the correlation.

The person you are responding to isn't necessarily wrong about metabolism being real. I wouldn't say fat people "store more", it's just that if you see thin people eating a ton (and not moving much) and being thin the odds are good that they have a very fast metabolism (by which I mean their base metabolic rate is significantly above the average, to the tune of 4k+ kcal per day). I know this because when I was in university we did at-rest calculations with a hood over the head (to calculate oxygen usage, which we used to calculate BMR). Notoriously thin people had outrageous BMRs like I mentioned, while most people were around the average. I don't know about people who are fat, as I didn't have them in my class.

This is not how thermodynamics work and blaming homeostasis sounds a bit too much on the fat apology side rather than real science. Even the fattest person on earth will llose weight at caloric deficit, where deficit is more consumption or less ingestion.

Homeostasis is real. It's not a religion. And its not blame, it's a social observation that people seek validation or feel ashamed about something that is mostly not in their control. It takes more exercise for a genetically fat person to be thin and more food for a genetically thin person to be fat than their genetic counter parts. Proud genetically thin people who congratulate themselves is as annoying as ashamed genetically fat people beating themselves up is sad.

Can't read the article so I have to assume it's misinterpreted results or a crappy study.

https://outline.com/sSzxbx

This is the sad truth about genetics. And it leads to self elevation of the genetically thin by equating thinness with self restraint and morality.

I wonder if the full article brings up the fact that there are genetically-determined response levels to aerobic exercise. See Michael Mosley's "The Truth About Exercise" and the University of Bath study it refers to.

What about the HN users who don't have a subscription to newscientist.com?

https://outline.com/sSzxbx

This only provides what is available for free?

Exercise makes you hungry.

Non paywall anywhere?

https://outline.com/sSzxbx

This outlined version appears to end at the same point as the paywalled version. Am I missing something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com